Finally, on this matter of painting, there are very few direct representations of sea-scenery in Venetian art. I have said that Titian painted the woods, rocks, and mountains of his native Cadore. Once only, if I remember rightly, he drew the lagoon and the plain below the Alps, and Antelao above the mist, soaring as if it would pierce the very rampart of heaven. Every day and evening he saw, from his garden at Casa Grande, the lagoon near San Michele filled with joyous gondolas and alive with light and colour, but it never occurred to him to paint it. The mountain valleys, their groves and torrents were his home. They did not permit him, in their jealousy, to perceive the sea.
Only one among the greater Venetian painters seems to have cared at all, and that very little, for the sea in the lagoons—and he lived all his life in Venice. This was Tintoret. Sometimes, as in one of the Halls of the Ducal Palace, the background of his picture is made by the green waves of the lagoon beating on its scattered islands, or in another picture by the glittering surface of its water with the boats crimson in the sunlight. The green sea of the lagoon, prankt with flitting azures, soft, and shot with changing hues, is painted by him with a rapturous pleasure in his picture of Bacchus and Ariadne. A sea-going ship with its sails set is making its way, behind the figures, out to Malamocco. There is a picture of his in Santa Maria Zobenigo where St. Justina and Augustine are kneeling on the seashore, and the gray-blue lagoon, in short leaping waves, is enriched by the scarlet sail of a Venetian bark. The sea in the St. George in the National Gallery breaks in low waves of bluish green, edged with foam, gloomy under a dark sky, upon a desolate coast. It is as like the water of the lagoon when storm is drawing near as it can be painted. Then he painted on the ceiling of the great hall in the Ducal Palace, Venice enthroned as the Queen of the Sea. A huge, globed surge of oceanic power and mass rises at her feet, and on it are afloat the sea-gods and goddesses, Tritons and monsters of the deep who bring the gifts of the sea to the feet of the Sea-Queen. It might be an illustration of the subject of this Essay, and it proves that the subject was not unconceived by Tintoret.
Indeed, if the soaring figure, which in the picture of the Paradise at the Ducal Palace, rises with uplifted arms and face from the angle above the Chair of the Doge as he sat in council, towards the figure of Christ at the summit of the canvass, be in truth, as some have conjectured, the Angel of the Sea, whose nursling was Venice—Tintoret, setting this incarnation of the history of the city above its senate in council, among the saintly host, and aspiring to the throne of God, did most nobly and religiously conceive the sea as the mother and guard and glory of Venice.
But more remarkable than these few reminiscences of the sea were the skies which Tintoret painted from those he saw over the sea and the lagoon. Sometimes the sky is pure, but the blue is full of white light, such as the sea mists make when they rise into the heaven. Sometimes his sky is full of dark gray cloud, threatening ruin or heavy sorrow. When Christ descends through the sky to welcome his martyrs or answer the prayers of Venice, he bursts through the clouds as through a sea, and they ripple away from Him in rosy concentric circles. It is an effect he may have seen from a seashore, but not on land. But, chiefly, with his stormy and stern nature, Tintoret—who had seen the skies of Venice when the tempest had come in from the sea—filled his heaven, especially when he paints the tragedies of earth, with the heavy bars of purple, mingled with angry gold which I have often seen after a thunderstorm at Venice, descending like stairs from the zenith to the horizon. And once at least, below the clouds, he has painted the lagoon, black and tortured by the wind.
I have said nothing of Canaletto or of Guardi. They seem to belong to another world than that of the great Venetians. But it would be uncourteous to omit them. Canaletto, or Il Canale, was really fond of the waters of Venice, much fonder of them than his predecessors were; and when he painted the long reaches of the Grand Canal, he managed to represent one aspect at least of that wonderful sea-street, when under a faint wind it trembles into multitudinous small curving ripples that annihilate all reflections. He does not often vary from this, and when he varies he does not succeed so well. But he painted the buildings with a real desire to impress us with their nobility and largeness of design, with no special care for accuracy of detail, but with great care to give fully a sense of their splendour of situation and of architecture. And he drew over the scene—and this he did excellently—a clear, pure, luminous, tenderly gradated, but rather hard atmosphere, in which the buildings were frankly visible, and the waters almost austere. The pictures are so decorative that many of them tend to weary the eyes, and we turn with some relief to those other pictures of his in which the sky is dark, and a more grave and homelier representation is made of the Venice of his time. I have not seen any pictures by him of the lagoons. But I have seen a set of drawings of the islands in the lagoon done in Indian ink, which in their slight and careless drawing pleased me because he seemed to love what he was doing, and to feel delicately the magical reflectiveness and charm of the waters of the lagoon.
Guardi cares more than Il Canale for the waters of Venice. He did his best to represent their lovely trembling in the light, and the images they made in their mirror of the buildings above them and of the life which moves upon them. It is easy, when one does not require the best, to admire, even to have a special liking for, his pictures. As to what the moderns have done for the Venetian waters, what the sea-charm of the city has impelled on their canvas—it would require an essay as long as this to tell the tale of it.
These things, with regard to Venetian painting, are part of the charm which the sea exercised on the artists. One other charm is also derived from the sea. The sea and its life have largely made the character of the Venetian people. That is too great a matter to discuss fully, but if those who visit Venice will make friends with the fisher people, they will soon discover the historical character of the Venetian people as distinguished from the upper classes. It is salted with the nature of the sea. A wild, free, open, dashing, quiet and tempestuous character, too much the sport of circumstance and impulse, yet capable of a steady exercise of power when it loves or desires greatly—it is the human image of the sea on which they live. It is one of the pleasantest charms of Venice to know it, and be friends with it.
It is always a romantic character, and the sea has always fathered its romance. The history of the city, legendary and actual, is steeped in the romance of the sea. Wherever we wander through the town, in the churches, by the monuments, squares, bridges and quays, among the islands in the lagoon, on the sea-beaten sand of the Lido, when we hear the beat of the hammers in the Arsenal, in the very names of the streets—we meet the sea, and stories of the sea, and have all the pleasure and charm a boy has when he reads of ocean adventure, and feels on his cheek the salt wind from the sea. I will only take one well-known example. Walking in the neighbourhood of the Church of Santa Maria Formosa, I happened to look up to the name of the street. It was called after the guild of workers who made the bridal chests and jewel boxes for the Venetian maidens. It was here they lived and wrought. But they were not only workmen, but sailors trained for war. And as I saw the name, I remembered the story of the brides of Venice, twelve of whom were each year, on the Feast of the Purification, dowered by the State. It happened one year that pirates from Trieste, knowing this custom, stole in at night to the Island of San Pietro di Castello, and hid in the low bushes near the water. When the brides, carrying their boxes of gems and money, were among the peaceful throng in the Church, these bold bad men seized them and bore them away to the port of Caorle, and there, landing with the spoil, lit their fires and took to feasting. All Venice rose to pursue them, but the Chest and Box-Makers were the first, with that fierce swiftness which belonged to Venetian war, to take to their boats and pursue the ravishers; and outsailing all the rest, rescued the damsels and slew the villains as they were drinking round their fires. Returning with the rest, the Doge Candiano asked them what reward they would have from the State—and they answered: “Only that the Doge should visit in procession their Church of Santa Maria Formosa on the anniversary of the Day of the Brides.” Everywhere in the city such romantic stories spring up from church and square, palace and bridge; and their historical charm is born of the sea.
In conclusion, I may write a little word on the sensational charm of Venice seated in the hearing of the sea waves, and adorned for worship by the beauty of her water-world. The word sensational here brings no reproach; it only means that the vivid impressions made on the senses are more numerous, varied, and intense in Venice than elsewhere. Each of them is accompanied with a spiritual passion as intense as the sensible impression. The imagination is incessantly kindled into creation by what it sees.