Even now, as I write, I see the Tower and the paved square, and the gardens behind, and recall a favourite picture in the church which, amid the desolation of the island, is like a lovely maid in a deserted wood. It is said to be by Basaiti, and pictures St. George and the Dragon. It is arched at the top, and the arch is filled with a pale evening sky of rosy light, soft as a dream, and faintly barred with lines of vaporous blue. Into this tender sky rises on the left a mountain, broad and alone, and below the mountain a ranging hill, and below the hill the walls, towers and gates of a city, and below the city a two-arched bridge, and below the bridge a flowing river, and on the bank of the river St. George on his horse, his head bent down to his horse’s neck with the couching of his spear, and on the spear the formless dragon, and above the dragon on the right, Sabra, clinging in lingering flight to the trunk of a great fig tree that flings into the rosy sky three long branches sparsely clothed with leaves. They hang, as if to crown the victor, over the head of St. George, whose face, young, yet full of veteran experience and holiness, is of the same grave tenderness as the sky. This is Basaiti in his noblest vein and manner, and the picture has on the whole escaped the restorers.
I left the square, with this noble painting in my mind, and rowed on to the Sacca della Misericordia beyond the Canal, which leads to the Church of SS. John and Paul. This is a great square piece of the lagoon, surrounded on three sides by sheds and houses, where all the wood used for building in Venice is brought from the mainland, and left floating on the water. The place has always fascinated me, I scarcely know why—for the view of San Michele and Murano and the Alps beyond is seen as well from other points—but I think it partly is that the great trunks and beams, and the sawn planks seasoning in the water, bring back to me the mountain valleys, torrents and knolls of rock where the trees were hewn down, and fill the sea-city with images of the wild landscape of the land; and partly that one seems to see in the waiting wood all that human hands will make of it—houses, roofs, furniture, bridges, gondolas, barks that will meet the beating of the Adriatic waves, piles that will build foundations for new buildings. The coming human activity moves like a spirit over the floating masses in this tract of water.
Then I rowed on till, crossing the southern entrance of the Grand Canal, I touched on the low wall of the little grassy campo in front of the Church of San Andrea. It looked over the lagoon, the water of which lapped its sea-wall, to the mainland. Opposite it was the Island of San Giorgio in Aliga, its dark tower black against the pale pearl and rose of the late afternoon sky; on its left, seeming to lie on the water, the violet range of the volcanic Euganeans, so far, so delicate, so ethereal, that they appeared to be made of the evening sky. The rest of the heaven was cloudy, but the sweetness of solitude, and the peace of this deserted place, and the spirit of the coming evening, were so full of grace that I landed, dismissed my gondola, and stood under the porch of the late Gothic church, enjoying the silence. There is a carving over the door, so simple and childlike in feeling that it is hard to believe it is Renaissance work. It is of St. Peter walking on the water and of St. Andrew close at hand in his boat, with a gondolier’s oar floating in the water, and beyond a piece of broken landscape. This little invention into which the sculptor had put his soul suited the quiet square, not larger than a large room. Thought and imagination seemed to be limited by the narrow space, but only seemed, for in front opened out to the south the broad lagoon and the wide plain of the mainland, and I knew that to the north rose into an infinite sky the peaks of the Alps, aspiring to reach the celestial City. I lingered long, hoping that the clouds would clear away, but it was not then I had that revelation. Afterwards, when walking somewhere near San Sebastiano, I came to a small bridge and there I beheld what seemed to be the gates of Paradise. The clouds had lifted to the north and the south-west. They rolled away like a folding scroll, and what I saw was the clear light of the setting sun on one side, and on the other the whole range of the Julian Alps, with the rose of the sunset on their freshly fallen snows. I crossed a muddy canal and found myself with an unimpeded view on the grassy and deserted ground of the Campo Marte. It ran out then into the lagoon, and I stood on its wild beach looking out upon the waters. Sea-marsh and lonely piles and flitting sea birds and a solitary fishing boat on the rippling surface, growing gold and crimson, led my eyes to the black tower of San Giorgio and to the hills of Padua, and then to the purple bases of the Alps rising into tender gray and shadowy blue; and above, tossed and recessed and fretted into a thousand traceries, the great waves of the snow peaks, all suffused with a divine rose. Slowly the evanescent tenderness departed, but with ceaseless change of rose and violet and gray. Only above the engrailed summits the pale azure was steadfast, the clear shining after rain. I watched the sun go down, I listened to the roar of the Adriatic as it came to me, a low murmur over the solitary field; I heard the Ave Maria peal sweetly from all the bells of Venice, and I thought of the Mother and the Child who saved the world. And then I went away, having seen a vision.[1]
I visited then a garden and friends I knew and when night fell rowed home down the Grand Canal. The moon had risen, and her light, in a sky now clear save of flying clouds, was intensely brilliant. The great sea-river, strangely quiet, almost magical in its stillness and in the flood of white luminousness that seemed poured upon it in streams, shimmered like liquid cornelian, a milky expanse among ghostly palaces on either hand. The mighty masses of the Renaissance palaces which, in losing all their irritating and confusing ornaments in the dim and melting moonlight, reveal their noble and beautiful proportions, supplanted the smaller palaces of Byzantine and Gothic form which depend so much for the impression they make on their lovely ornament and colour, both of which disappear in the moonlight. Above me, as I rowed, the glorious blue of the sky, across which darted now and then a shooting star, appeared to watch over its beloved city. The moon seemed racing in it, so swift in the fresh sea-wind was the motion of the white clouds across her disk. Each as it crossed took rainbow colours, and threw a mystic shadow on the world below. Only one gondola passed me by, a lantern burning on its prow, and its rower, silent as his boat, looked like a spirit in the moonlight. Then the deep shadow of the Rialto hid the moon, and I found my lodging.
It is time now to turn to a different matter—What was the influence, towards the power to charm, of this water-life of the sea on the arts in Venice?
First, architecture was made different by it from all that it was in other Italian towns. The commerce and the wars of Venice in the East caused her nobles and merchant princes to study the buildings of the East. Rome did not influence them so much as Constantinople, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land. It was long before the northern Gothic, chiefly Franciscan, had any power in Venice, and when it had, it was apart from the spirit of the city. The Church of St. Mark is an Eastern not a Western Church. Many of the palaces along the Grand Canal were built in imitation of palaces the merchants had seen when they anchored in Orient ports. Often, as one wanders in the narrow streets, a window, a door-head, a disc in the wall, will remember us of the Byzantine Empire. There is a disc near San Polo where the Emperor of Eastern Rome sits in full imperial robes and crown, just as Justinian is represented in the mosaic at San Vitale in Ravenna. At Ravenna, we are still closer to the architecture of that Empire, but here, and this is characteristic of early Venetian architecture, there is a greater liberty, a more individual choice and treatment of buildings than there is at Ravenna. It is scarcely imitation which we see, but Eastern ideas of architecture freely modified and recreated into new forms by the architects. It is as if the free life of the sea itself had instilled its wild originality, variety and beauty into the imagination of the builders.
The continual change of the sea and its novelty entered not only into public but domestic architecture. All along the canals, the private houses built by the earlier architects of Venice change incessantly their form. In every house the ornament is individual. Moreover, in the work itself, there is a finish, a delicate delight in perfection of minute carving, a lavish invention which belongs to the best Oriental work. Its finish was always precious; and this ideal of finish entered also into the first buildings of the Renaissance in Venice, and made their sculpture and decoration more lively and more exquisite than elsewhere in Italy. This charm in ornament belonged to Venice, because it was the Queen of the Mediterranean Sea, the mistress of the East. The Orient brought over the sea the subtlety, the delicate finish, and the golden beauty of its art to Venice.
From the East also—and learnt because Venice was a sea-power—came the extraordinary love of colour which must have made mediaeval Venice like a city built of rainbows. It passed, as I have said, into the fishing boats and their sails. It belonged to the poorest houses on the distant islands. It made the Venetian painters the first masters of colour. We have some notion of it from the exterior of St. Mark’s, which even by moonlight blazes like a breast-plate of jewels; from its interior, which, subdued into dark but glowing sanctities of colour, solemnizes the spirit. But in ancient days the colour-glory of St. Mark’s was extended over the whole city. It shone with gold and crimson, with azure and burning green, with deep purple and the blue of the sea waves. The sailors and merchants of the East when they visited Venice saw in her architecture colour as brilliant as that of their own cities, and felt themselves at home. The architects, lavishing colour everywhere, made a water street in Venice as decorative as the title-page of a Missal.
Again, that element of charm arising from the double life of all things through reflection in still water, entered, I believe, into the soul of every architect in Venice, and modified his work. He knew, or unconsciously felt as he built, that each palace, church, tower, and dwelling house would often have, in unconscious nearness, each its own image and a second heaven in a mirrored beauty; that each would be in the centre of another fair world of its own in the water beneath it. He was inspired to greater excellence than in a city on the land, by the knowledge that all his work, reflected by the sea, would be seen for ever in a twofold loveliness.