THE COLOUR OF VENICE
Venice is a delightful place for a man sick or well.... No noise, no flies, no dust. An air so gentle that it could scarce be called a breeze. A sun that warms and rarely burns: a light, veiled white and soft, and lets one read without glare-made fatigue; a climate which asks no man to do anything, and is answered affirmatively by all. So we, too, should have been content not to do.
The more so that in Venice there is no monotony. Of all places on earth it is the most variable in its moods. The changes in its colour are as great from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour, as in more northern climes from month to month, or even from season to season. This variableness, the despair of her studious student, is the joy of her loitering lover. The painter finds a lovely subject, indeed they are all around him, and goes from his first day’s work, and perhaps his second, content that he has caught the tone that charmed him. Even as he says so a change comes on that makes him doubtful of that work. The golden light has become silver, the cool blue shadows are swimming in a cinque cento richness. He must alter his whole scheme of colour or go home. The next day it may be worse, and he may wait for weeks for the effect that he had not quite time to render. Thus it is that finished studio-painted pictures of Venice so rarely tell of Venice to the man who knows it, whilst the quick sketches made by the artist who can see, and is possessed of the hand that can render, faithful to his eye and taste, are so very lovely.
To the idle man this change of mood and colour is, or should be, perfection. He should never tire, and rarely does so, of his fickle mistress. He is floating to-day where he floated yesterday. The lagoon, the island, the buildings are all the same, but how different. The Euganean Hills, or perhaps the Alps, that spoke to him of Shelley, or of snow, the distant line of terra-firma that held, as in a fine cut frame, the steely lagoon waters, are now hidden in a mist of light. The Ducal Palace, the Salute’s dome, that yesterday appeared clear and earthly, the grand campanile of San Marco—alas! that it has fallen a victim to its own weight and Time’s corrosion—the scarcely less beautiful campanile of San Giorgio, whose clean outlines stood out so sharply in the atmosphere of vivid blue, to-day all swim ethereal in a golden haze. ’Tis all there, but a dream rather than a reality, a spirit picture more than a motive for a sketch.
F. EDEN.
THE GLORY OF COLOUR IN ITALY
You learn for the first time in this Italian climate what colours really are. No wonder it produces painters. An English artist of any enthusiasm might shed tears of vexation to think of the dull medium through which blue and red come to him in his own atmosphere, compared with this. One day we saw a boat pass us, which instantly reminded us of Titian, and accounted for him: and yet it contained nothing but an old boatman in a red cap, and some women with him in other colours, one of them in a bright yellow petticoat. But a red cap in Italy goes by you, not like a mere cap, much less anything vulgar or butcher-like, but like what it is, an intense specimen of the colour of red. It is like a scarlet bud in the blue atmosphere. The old boatman, with his brown hue, his white shirt, and his red cap, made a complete picture; and so did the woman and the yellow petticoat. I have seen pieces of orange-coloured silk hanging out against a wall at a dyer’s, which gave the eye a pleasure truly sensual. Some of these boatmen are very fine men. I was rowed to shore one day by a man the very image of Kemble. It was really grand to see the mixed power and peacefulness with which all his limbs came into play as he pulled the oars, occasionally turning his heroic profile to give a glance behind him at other boats.
LEIGH HUNT.
VENICE THE UNFALLEN
The barge of the ambassador met them at Fusina, and when Venetia beheld the towers and cupolas of Venice, suffused with a golden light and rising out of the bright blue waters, for a moment her spirit seemed to lighten. It is indeed a spectacle as beautiful as rare, and one to which the world offers few, if any, rivals. Gliding over the great lagoon, the buildings, with which the pictures at Cherbury had already made her familiar, gradually rose up before her; the mosque-like Church of St. Marc, the tall Campanile red in the sun, the Moresco Palace of the Doges, the deadly Bridge of Sighs, and the dark structure to which it leads.