The Grand Canal is to Venice what the Strand is to London, the Rue Saint-Honoré to Paris, and the Alcala to Madrid,—the principal artery for the circulation of the whole city. Its form is that of a double S, reversed, the sweep of which bounds the city around St. Mark’s while the upper point borders upon the isle of Santa-Chiara, and the lower point at the Custom-House, near the canal of the Giudecca. This S is cut about the middle by the bridge of the Rialto.
THE FOSCARI PALACE, ITALY.
The Grand Canal of Venice is the most marvellous thing in the world. No other city can present so beautiful, so bizarre and so fairy-like a spectacle: perhaps you may find elsewhere remarkable specimens of architecture, but never placed in such picturesque conditions. Here, every palace has a mirror in which to admire her own beauty, just like a feminine coquette. The superb reality is repeated in a charming reflection. The water lovingly caresses the feet of those beautiful façades whose brows are kissed by a clear light and are rocked in two skies. The little boats and the large barks which can come up close to them seem moored on purpose to produce effective dark spots, or foregrounds for the convenience of scene-painters and water-colourists.
In drifting along by the Custom-House, which, with the Palace Giustiniani (to-day the Hôtel de l’Europe) marks the entrance of the Grand Canal, throw a glance at those skeleton-like heads of horses sculptured in the square and dumpy cornice which supports the globe of Fortune. Does this peculiar ornament mean that the horse was useless in Venice (you get rid of him at the Custom-House) or rather is it not a pure caprice of ornamentation? This explanation seems to me the best, for I do not wish to fall into the symbolical exaggeration with which I have been reproaching others. I have already described the Salute, which I can see from my window and which does not require any attention after having seen Canaletto’s picture, which is, perhaps, the painter’s masterpiece. But here I experience embarrassment. The Grand Canal is the true Golden Book in which all the Venetian nobility has signed its name upon the monumental façades.
Each stone of the walls has a story to tell; each house is a palace; each palace, a masterpiece with a legend: at each stroke of the oar, the gondolier mentions a name which was as well-known at the time of the Crusades as it is to-day; and this on the right and left for a length of more than half a league.
I have written a list of these palaces, not quite all but the most remarkable of them, and I dare not insert it on account of its length. It takes up five or six pages: Pietro Lombardo, Scamozzi, Vittoria, Longhena, Andrea Tremignan, Giorgio Massari, Sansovino, Sebastiano Mazzoni, Sammichelli, the great architect of Verona, Selva, Domenico Rossi, and Visentini designed and superintended the construction of these princely dwellings,—without counting the marvellous unknown artists of the Middle Ages who erected the most picturesque and romantic ones, those that gave to Venice her distinction and originality.
Upon these two banks, façades, all charming and variously beautiful, succeed each other without interruption. After a specimen of Renaissance architecture, with its columns and superimposed orders comes a mediæval palace of the Gothic-Arabian style, of which the Ducal palace is the prototype, with its open-work, balconies, its ogives, its trefoils and its lace-like acrotera. A little farther is a façade encased in coloured marbles, ornamented with medalions and consoles; then comes a great rose-coloured wall, where a large window with little columns is cut out. Every style is found here: Byzantine, Saracen, Lombard, Gothic, Roman, Greek, and even Rococo; the column and the small column, the ogive and the cincture and the capricious capital filled with birds and flowers that has come from Acre or Jaffa; the Greek capital found amidst Athenian ruins, the mosaic and the bas-relief; the classic severity and the elegant fantasy of the Renaissance. It is an immense gallery in the open air, where one can study from his gondola the art of seven or eight centuries. What genius, talent and money have been expended in this space that can be traversed in less than an hour! What wonderful artists! But also what intelligent and magnificent lords! What a pity that the patricians who knew how to have such beautiful things made should exist no longer save in the canvasses of Titian, Tintoretto and Il Moro!
Just before arriving at the Rialto, you have to the left, in ascending the Canal, the Dario Palace, Gothic style; the Venier Palace, which reveals itself by one corner with its ornaments, its precious marbles and its medalions, Lombard style; the Fine-Arts, classic façade by the side of the ancient School of Charity and surmounted by a figure of Venice riding on a lion; the Contarini Palace, of Scamozzi’s architecture; the Rezzonico Palace, with three orders superimposed; the triple Giustiniani Palace, in the taste of the Middle Ages, inhabited by Signor Natale Schiavoni, a descendant of the celebrated painter Schiavoni, who has a picture-gallery and a beautiful daughter, the living reproduction of a picture painted by her ancestor; the Foscari Palace, recognizable by its lower door, its two rows of little columns supporting the ogives and the trefoils, where formerly lived those sovereigns who visited Venice, and now abandoned; the Balbi Palace, from the balcony of which the princes leaned to watch the regatta which took place on the Grand Canal with so much pomp and brilliancy during the heyday of the Republic; the Pisani Palace, in the German style of the beginning of the Fifteenth Century; and the Tiepolo Palace, quite smart and relatively modern, with its two elegant pyramids. To the right, very near the European Hotel, there stands between two large buildings a delicious little palace, composed of a window and a balcony; but what a window and what a balcony! a lace-work of stone: scrolls, guilloches, and open-work that one would not believe it possible to execute except by a cutting-machine and a piece of paper. I regretted that I did not have 25,000 francs about me to buy it, for that is all they asked.
A little farther, still ascending, you find the Palace Corner della Cà Grande, which dates from 1532, one of Sansovino’s best; Grassi, to-day the Emperor’s inn, the marble stairway of which is garnished with handsome orange trees in pots; Corner-Spinelli, whose marble base is surrounded by a double fretwork of fine effect and which is to-day the Post Office; and Farsetti, with its columned peristyle and its long gallery with little columns occupying all the façade, where the municipality is lodged. We could say, as Don Ruy-Gomez da Silva says to Charles V. in Hernani, when he shows him the portraits of his ancestors: “J’en passe, et des meilleurs.” We ask, however, attention for the Loredan Palace and the ancient dwelling of Enrico Dandolo, the conqueror of Constantinople. Between these palaces there are some worthy houses, whose chimneys in the form of turbans, towers, and vases of flowers, break the great lines of architecture very appropriately.