It is not by accident that the chief buildings of Venice stand where they do, for this part of the Rialtine islands, called il Morso, offered a soil harder[81] and more tenacious than any other. In early ages the Piazza was a grass-grown field, called the Broglio or Garden, scarce a third of its present area, and a large elder tree flourished on the site of the Campanile. It was bounded on the W. by a rio which ran from N. to S. a few yards beyond the Campanile and discharged into the Grand Canal to the W. of the present Zecca (mint). On the W. bank of the rio, facing the basilica of St Mark, stood the old church of S. Giminiano. In 1176 Doge Ziani filled up the rio, razed the fortifications and extended and paved the Piazza, to its present boundary westward. The church of S. Giminiano was rebuilt at the W. end. It was again rebuilt by Sansovino in 1556 and finally demolished by Napoleon I. to extend the Royal Palace. Houses on the S. abutted on the Campanile. The Piazza was enclosed by stately mansions with columns and arcades on the first floor, “where one walked round as in a theatre.”[82] When Scamozzi built the Procuratie Nuove in 1584, the houses on the S. were demolished and the Piazza set back to its present line. If we would restore its aspect in the fulness of Venetian prosperity, we must imagine a scene brilliant with colour. The archivolts, capitals, friezes and sculptures generally of St Mark’s and the Ducal Palace were richly decorated with gold and vermilion and blue. The Porta della Carta glowed so with gold that it was known as the Porta dorata (the gilded portal). The bronze horses were gilded; so was St Mark’s Lion and St Theodore in the Piazzetta. From Leopardi’s beautiful bronze sockets three tall masts upheld the standards symbolising dominion over Greece, Cyprus and Crete.
A throng of merchants and strangers from all the corners of the earth, an ever-changing pageant of quaint and gorgeous costumes, passed and repassed. So many strange tongues would you hear, says an old writer,[83] that the Piazza might not inaptly be called the forum orbis non urbis—not the market-place of a city but of the world. Strange tongues are still heard in the Piazza, but of those who come for the pleasure, not for the business of the world: the heart of commerce no longer beats at Venice. The Piazza is, however, a scene of much animation on public holidays when the band is playing. We will sit outside Florian’s coffee-house, as a good Venetian should, and observe the women of the people passing, with their graceful carriage and simple costume, their wealth of hair so charmingly treated; the gondolier, lithe of body and superb in gait; the signore and signorine with their more modern finery; the fashionable youth, dressed, as he fondly imagines, all’ inglese; rich and poor, borghese and popolano, bearing themselves with that ease of manner, vivacity of spirit and social equality so characteristic of the Venetians. In the height of summer, when the rich merchants of Milan and other cities of North Italy with their women folk come to Venice for the Italian season, the Piazza after dinner and far into the night becomes one vast open-air salon, crowded with visitors in the most chic of costumes, many of the ladies promenading in evening dress. As one sits in the Piazza at setting sun, the atmosphere, exquisitely delicate and clear, changes from pale blue to amethyst, pink, turquoise, dark blue and indigo; and the night is lovelier than the day.
SECTION II
The Basilica of St Mark
FEW things in the history of art are more remarkable than the revulsion of taste that has taken place with regard to the architecture of Venice. In the early part of the nineteenth century, before Ruskin wrote “The Stones of Venice,” an English architect,[84] giving expression to the professional judgment of the age, speaks of “the lumpy form of the Cathedral which surprises you by the extreme ugliness of its exterior; of the lower part built in the degraded Roman we call Norman; of the gouty columns and ill-made capitals, all in bad taste.” “The Ducal Palace is even more ugly than anything previously mentioned,” vastly inferior to Palladio’s churches of S. Giorgio and the Redentore. Disraeli echoes in “Contarini Fleming” the conventional lay praise of Palladio, and writes of the “barbarous although picturesque buildings called the Ducal Palace.” Even to-day the stranger fresh from the North with memories of the massive towers and lofty spires of his own architecture will hardly escape a sense of disappointment as he stands before St Mark’s. The fabric will seem to lack majesty and to be even less imposing than the Ducal Palace. It must, however, be remembered that the raising of the level of the Piazza has somewhat detracted from the elevation of both the basilica and the Palace. Fynes Moryson notes in his Itinerary (1617) that “there were stairs of old to mount out of the market-place into the church till the waters of the channel increasing they were forced to raise the height of the market-place.”
Whether there were any such intention in the minds of the builders is doubtful, but in all communities where the sense of municipal liberty or of secular independence is strong, the dominant civic power is actualised in architecture. In Flemish towns the Hôtel de Ville and not the cathedral is often the more important structure; even so in Venice the subordinate position of the church is marked by the accessory character of the ecclesiastical building, which in its origin indeed was but the official chapel of the Doge, and only became the Cathedral in 1807, when Napoleon transferred the patriarchate from S. Pietro in Castello—itself a poor thing architecturally—to St Mark’s.
Joseph Woods gave a shrewd criticism of Venetian architecture when he characterised it as showing riches and power rather than just proportions. St Mark’s was erected by a merchant folk, with all the merchant’s love of display of wealth. Their taste was for costly material rather than for nobility and grandeur of design. For centuries the East was ransacked for precious stones to adorn the sanctuary of their patron saint, and the captain of every ship that traded in the Levant was ordered to bring home marbles or fine stones for the builders. St Mark’s is a jewelled casket wrought to preserve the Palladium of the Venetian people.
The fabric dates from the early eleventh to the late fourteenth centuries. Its core is of brick, of which most Venetian churches are built, and it is veneered with marble[85] and decorated with mosaic and sculpture. When the eye turns from the whole to examine details, the façade is seen to be composed of two tiers of arches—the lower of seven, the upper of five spans. Of the seven, two form the N. and S. porticos; five the western doors, whose recesses are enriched with rows of columns wanting in unity of design, but of exceeding richness and variety of material. They are mainly the spoils of Eastern churches, and, if closely scrutinised, will be found to be incised with Eastern crosses and curious inscriptions in Greek and oriental characters. The capitals flanking the main portal, with carving of leaves blown by the wind, are probably from the East, their prototype being at the Church of St Sophia in Thessalonica, built in the later years of Justinian’s reign. The main portal is spanned by an inner triple archivolt and an outer main one. The under side of the inner arc of the former, over the relief of St Mark and the Angel, is wrought with sculptures, whose subjects are symbolical, and will be met with again and again in early Venetian decoration: a naked man and woman seated on dragons; a child in the open jaws of a lion; an eagle pecking at a lamb; a lion devouring a stag; camels and other animals, wild and tame, in various groups. On the outer face are similar carvings of boys fighting and robbing birds’ nests; men shooting birds with bows and arrows, and hunting wild beasts. The work is exceedingly quaint, and affords a fruitful theme for interpretation.
