Sanudo gives a list of nineteen great annual pageants, and after his time others were added. Besides these official festivals great patrician weddings or the visits of foreign potentates were the occasions of stately pomp and joyous revels. At the anniversaries of the greater scuole, each guild vied with the other to excel in splendour. Never before nor since was such magnificence. The greatest artists of the day were commissioned to execute the decorations. The Bucintoro was carved by the best sculptors. Palladio, Titian and Tintoretto designed and decorated triumphal arches.
The loan of the Bucintoro and a subsidy of five hundred ducats were voted to the Calza to entertain the Duke of Milan in 1530. On this occasion a bellissima colazion (luncheon) was prepared, says Sanudo, but so ill-arranged that the Milanese nobles got nothing, while some Venetian Senators filled the sleeves of their robes with sweetmeats to the shame of those who saw it.
Venice surpassed herself in the reception given to Henry III. of France in 1574. The young king was met at Malghera—the modern traveller will pass a fort erected there as he nears the railway bridge—by sixty Senators in gondolas covered with velvet, oriental carpets and cloth of gold, and was ferried to Murano, where he passed the night in one of the rich palaces with delicious gardens for which the island was then noted. Sixty halberdiers clothed in silk of azure and gold were his bodyguard: forty noble youths of the Calza were his attendants. On the morrow amid salvos of artillery he embarked for Venice in a great galley manned by four hundred Sclavonians clothed in yellow and turquoise taffety, followed by an immense train of galleys and gondolas decorated with carpets and tapestry, with banners and flags waving in the breeze. The procession of the trade guilds, formed of a hundred and seventy boats resplendent with crimson and silver and gold, was a dazzling pageant. The glass-workers excelled in splendour and invention. A marine monster, in whose body could be seen a furnace, and craftsmen making most beautiful crystal vases, led their section, breathing flames from his mouth. Then followed a boat in the shape of a great dolphin bestridden by Neptune; on the poop stood two winged angels to waft it along. Four river gods personifying the Brenta, the Adige, the Po and the Piove plied the oars. At S. Nicolo del Lido, Palladio had constructed a triumphal arch adorned with statues of Victory, Peace, Faith and Justice, and with ten paintings by Titian and Tintoretto portraying events in the King’s life. His Majesty lodged in the Palazzo Foscari from which an opening was made into the Palazzo Giustiniani to accommodate his suite, the whole being furnished with oriental magnificence. At a State ball given in the hall of the Great Council, two hundred gorgeously attired ladies were present glittering with jewels and precious stones. The Sala dello Scrutinio was made into a supper-room where twelve hundred and sixty plates of sweetmeats in the forms of griffins, ships, nymphs, deities, etc., tempted the palates of the guests. Regattas, serenades and jousts made the whole visit seem a dream of enchantment to the King. As trade languished and the population diminished, public shows increased in splendour. The sum expended at the election and coronation of the last Doge—forty-seven thousand, two hundred and ninety-eight ducats, was beyond all precedent. Venice was still the temple of pleasure. All the arts subservient to the luxury and vices of the rich flourished in rankest exuberance despite the efforts of the Ten to cleanse public morals and to enforce sumptuary laws. The excessive importance too of the stage and of its tinselled heroes and tawdry queens, was an infallible symptom of a decadent nation. The time came in the eighteenth century when the State was torn by the petty jealousies and vanities of a playwright and an actress, and when public appointments were controlled by the subtle influence of the boudoir and the drawing-room, and an ambitious and beautiful society lady was the central figure of Venetian life. It was the time of the fatuous masquerades and futile pomposities portrayed for us by Longhi, when the card table, the coffee house and the play were the absorbing interest of Venetian minds. But before she sinks into the deep night of subjection to Austria to rise again as a province of a free and united Italy,[61] a faint hue of naval splendour lights up the horizon. Soon after Goethe’s arrival in Venice in 1786 he ascended St Mark’s tower and under the bright noon-day sun saw a fleet of galleys and frigates lying off Lido. They were reinforcements for Tunis, where the last of the great Venetians, Angelo Emo, was fighting the Algerian pirates. Emo humbled the Bey of Tunis, cleared the seas, and died at Malta in 1792. Five years later Napoleon marched his battalions towards the lagoons and before the mere breath of his coming the Republic of Venice crumbled into dust. On May 16, 1797, for the first time in a thousand years the Realtine islands were trodden by the foot of a conqueror, and the hundred and twentieth Doge of Venice, handing his biretta to an attendant, said: “Take it away, we shall not want it again.”
CHAPTER XII
THE FINE ARTS AT VENICE
Masons—Painters—Glass-workers—Printers
Some prefer the pure design:
Give me my gorge of colour, glut of gold
In a glory round the Virgin made for me!
Titian’s the man, not monk Angelico
Who traces you some timid chalky ghost
That turns the church into a charnel.
—Browning.
OWING to the absorption of her energies in commerce and the eastern trend of her interests and activities Venice lagged behind the Tuscan masters in the practice of the finer arts. Her earliest craftsmen were Byzantines, and St Mark’s was modelled on the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople and adorned by mosaicists from the same city. They were artists, rich in invention, and endowed with a perfect sense of beauty in design. The reliefs imbedded in the façades of St Mark’s and in scores of houses about the city of Venice bear ample testimony to their greatness. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Byzantine art had become degenerate, and traces of native Venetian sculpture as early as the twelfth century have been argued from the rude carvings on the pillars which support the tabernacle of the high altar of St Mark’s. But it is not till we reach the masters of the characteristic Gothic, Transitional, and early Renaissance styles, that the important place due to Venice in the history of the mason’s craft is made clear. It is doubtful whether any of the Pisani actually worked at Venice, though their influence is beyond dispute. But Nicolo Lamberti, a Tuscan sculptor, worked on the decorations of the main archivolt of St Mark’s, Florentine artists carved some of the best figures and capitals in the façades of the Ducal Palace, and wrought one of the finest tombs in S. Zanipolo; Michelozzo is said to have built the Medici library at the monastery of St Giorgio Maggiore; and the design so often met with in monumental sculpture in Venice, two angels, one at either end of the tomb drawing aside a curtain to display the recumbent effigy of the dead was invented by a Florentine, Arnolfo di Cambio. Of the earliest Venetian masters it may be truly said that their works live after them, for little beyond their works is known of the Massegne and the Buoni who reached a comparatively higher stage of excellence in sculpture than their contemporaries did in painting. Jacobello and Piero delle Massegne (dei Macigni[62]), thus called because of their craft, were working in Venice towards the close of the fourteenth century. The statues of the apostles, the Virgin, and St Mark over the choir-screen, and others in the choir chapels of St Mark’s, the main portal of S. Stefano, the beautiful lunette over the Friar’s door at the Frari, and the tomb of Simone Dandolo in the same church are excellent examples of the style of these great artists. How much of the sculpture on the façades of the Ducal Palace was due to the Buoni it is difficult to say. The Buoni seem to have been Giovanni, the father, his son, Bartolomeo, and a certain Pantaleone Buon, once believed to be another son, but actually of no kinship with him. To Bartolomeo, sometimes known as Bartolomeo della Madonna dell’Orto, is ascribed the Porta della Carta of the Ducal Palace (1439) on the strength of an inscription opera Bartholomei. The reliefs of the Lion and of Doge Foscari are modern reproductions, but the original head of Foscari, preserved in the palace still, bears witness to the genius of this great craftsman.[63] He must not be confounded with another Bartolomeo Buon, known as Master Bartolomeo of Bergamo, also claimed as a native of Venice, who in 1493 superintended the painters in the Ducal Palace, and in 1500 presided over the works designed by Pietro Lombardo for the Procuratie Vecchie.
Certain craftsmen dubbed Riccio or Rizzo (Curly pate) now claim attention. Their identity is much canvassed by Italian authorities. Before the use of surnames became common it was the custom to refer to contemporaries by their Christian or nicknames to the confusion of biographers and critics. We meet with three Ricci who are stated to have worked at Venice, (1) Andrea Riccio of Padua living about 1400, who is said by Vasari to have executed the statues of Adam and Eve to be referred to presently. (2) Antonio Riccio or Rizzo, sometimes called Briosco, of Verona, who, according to Zanotto[64] was employed by the Republic to assist Antonio Loredan at the siege of Scutari.[65] He returned, after most effective service, covered with wounds, and the grateful Senate voted him and his sons in 1483 a pension for twenty years, and appointed him architect of the Ducal Palace after the fire in the same year, authorising him to draw for funds on the salt office. To him, and not to Andrea, are ascribed by Zanotto the masterly statues of Adam and Eve in the niches opposite the Scala dei Giganti, the Scala itself and the adjoining façade in the cortile and the rio façade. These on Francesco Sansovino’s authority are more commonly attributed to Antonio Bregno (also called Il Riccio or Rizzo). He is said to have been a contemporary of Scarpagnino (Antonio Scarpagni), who, in 1514, submitted designs for the new stone Rialto Bridge, and succeeded Sante Lombardo in the erection of the Scuola di S. Rocco. Bregno, however, is a mysterious figure who, so Zanotto declares, either never existed or was none other than Riccio the Veronese. It is clear, however, from the annals of Malipiero that in 1498, one Antonio Riccio or Rizzo, architect of the Ducal Palace, after spending 80,000 ducats left the work not half done, that he had by forged vouchers defrauded the Salt Office to the extent of 12,000 ducats, and bolted to Foligno, where he soon died.[66] To the family of Venetian masters (or, according to some authorities, Lombard immigrants from Carona on Lake Lugano), known as the Lombardi, are due the most beautiful and original of the early renaissance architecture and sculpture in Venice. Pietro Lombardo, said to have been the son of a mason named Martino, was working in Venice in 1462. In 1481 his design for the Church of the Miracoli was chosen, and the building was erected under his superintendence. When Ant. Riccio fled from Venice, Pietro succeeded him at the Ducal Palace, with a salary of 120 ducats, and for twelve years was the official architect of the Republic. Among his works in Venice are the fine statues of St Anthony and three other saints in S. Stefano. The altars of St James and St Paul in St Mark’s are also attributed to him. He is probably best known as the sculptor of the Dante Memorial at Ravenna. Antonio Lombardi, born before 1453, assisted his father at the Miracoli and on the tomb of Doge Pietro Mocenigo at S. Zanipolo. He collaborated with Aless. Leopardi on the bronze work in the Cappella Zen at St Mark’s. The statue of St Thomas Aquinas in S. Zanipolo is attributed to him. Martino Lombardo, whose relationship is unknown, was architect of the Scuola di San Marco after 1485, and was believed by Temanza to have built S. Zaccaria.[67] Moro Lombardo, probably a son of Martino, assisted his father in the Scuola di S. Marco. In 1524-7, Giulio Lombardo, probably son of Pietro, was acting in an advisory capacity to Sante or Zante Lombardo, a son of Pietro, born 1504, in the works at the Scuola di S. Rocco. The Church of S. Giorgio dei Greci ascribed to Sansovino is now attributed to Sante and one named Chiona.
Tullio Lombardi (1453-1537) was the son of Pietro, and the best sculptor of the family. Beside his work in the interior of the Miracoli, he executed the reliefs on the façade of the Scuola di S. Marco and the monument to Giov. Mocenigo in S. Zanipolo. He also collaborated with Leopardi on the Vendramin tomb in the same church. To the Lombardi school we owe the beautiful Cappella Giustiniano at S. Francesco della Vigna, and a fine relief in S. Giov. Grisostomo (Coronation of the Virgin and the Twelve Apostles).
Aless. Leopardi (1450-1521) raised Venetian sculpture to its highest plane of technical perfection. The Venetian artist was peculiarly privileged. Unlike the Pisani and other Tuscans who drew their inspiration from Roman antiques, he was able to draw from the fountain-head. The lands of Hellas were subject to the Republic, and, doubtless, many a young apprentice spent his Wanderjahre there. Enthusiasm gave insight, and both in technique and design we seem to trace in Tullio Lombardo and Aless. Leopardi the influence of Greek originals. To Leopardi are due the Vendramin tomb in S. Zanipolo, the finest of renaissance sepulchral monuments, and the completion of the Colleoni statue. He modelled the Six Virtues and the Madonna Della Scarpa in the Cappella Zen. The three magnificent bronze bases for the flagstaffs in front of St Mark’s were wrought by him. But soon aversion from the study of nature, and the growing pomp of private and public life reacted on the renaissance artists; their work became mannered and feeble; they lost individuality and character. They found in Venice a rich field for exploitation. She was not only the wealthiest, she was the most tranquil of European states. Imperial in policy, oligarchical in government, she sought by the splendour of the arts and by magnificent pageantry to feed the pride of her nobles, and lay any spirit of political freedom that might have survived in her people.