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Bells over the water, the lap of waves, the smell of seaweed. How soft and elevated and ethereal voices sound at this time. An Italian sailor, sitting on the grass looking out over it all, has his arms about his girl.
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It would be easy to give an order for ten thousand lovely views of Venice, and get them.
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CHAPTER XLI
VENICE
Aside from the cathedral of St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace and the Academy or Venetian gallery of old masters, I could find little of artistic significance in Venice—little aside from the wonderful spectacle of the city as a whole. As a spectacle, viewed across the open space of water, known as the Lagoon, the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Santa Maria della Salute with their domes and campaniles strangely transfigured by light and air, are beautiful. Close at hand, for me, they lost much romance which distance gave them, though the mere space of their interiors was impressive. The art, according to my judgment, was bad and in the main I noticed that my guide books agreed with me—spiritless religious representations which, after the Sistine Chapel in Rome and such pictures as those of Michelangelo’s “Holy Family” and Botticelli’s “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi at Florence, were without import. I preferred to speculate on the fear of the plague which had produced the Salute and the discovery of the body of St. Stephen, the martyr, which had given rise to San Giorgio, for it was interesting to think, with these facts before me, how art and spectacle in life so often take their rise from silly, almost pointless causes and a plain lie is more often the foundation of a great institution than a truth. Santa Maria didn’t save the citizens of Venice from the plague in 1630, and in 1110 the Doge Ordelafo Faliero did not bring back the true body of St. Stephen from Palestine, although he may have thought he did,—at least there are other “true bodies.” But the old, silly progress of illusion, vanity, politics and the like has produced these and other institutions throughout the world and will continue to do so, no doubt, until time shall be no more. It was interesting to me to see the once large and really beautiful Dominican monastery surrounding San Giorgio turned into barracks and offices for government officials. I do not see why these churches should not be turned into libraries or galleries. Their religious import is quite gone.
In Venice it was, I think, that I got a little sick of churches and second- and third-rate art. The city itself is so beautiful, exteriorly speaking, that only the greatest art could be tolerated here, yet aside from the Academy, which is crowded with canvases by Bellini, Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese and others of the Venetian school, and the Ducal Palace, largely decorated by Tintoretto and Veronese, there is nothing, save of course St. Mark’s. Outside of that and the churches of the Salute and San Giorgio,—both bad, artistically, I think,—there are thirty-three or thirty-four other churches all with bits of something which gets them into the catalogues, a Titian, a Tintoretto, a Giorgione or a Paolo Veronese, until the soul wearies and you say to yourself—“Well, I’ve had about enough of this—what is the use?”
There is no use. Unless you are tracing the rise of religious art, or trying to visit the tombs of semi-celebrated persons, or following out the work of some one man or group of men to the last fragment you might as well desist. There is nothing in it. I sought church after church, entering dark, pleasant, but not often imposing, interiors only to find a single religious representation of one kind or another hardly worth the trouble. In the Frari I found Titian’s famous Madonna of the Pescaro family and a pretentious mausoleum commemorating Canova, and in Santa Maria Formosa Palma Vecchio’s St. Barbara and four other saints, which appealed to me very much, but in the main I was disappointed and made dreary. After St. Peter’s, the Vatican, St. Paul’s Without the Walls in Rome, the cathedrals at Pisa and elsewhere, and the great galleries of Florence, Venice seemed to me artistically dull. I preferred always to get out into the streets again to see the small shops, to encounter the winding canals, to cross the little bridges and to feel that here was something new and different, far different and more artistic than anything which any church or museum could show.