The interior of St. Mark’s is full of interest, but not of beauty: it is dark and heavy, and ill-suited to the Catholic worship, for the massive piers that obstruct the view everywhere shut out the sight of ceremony and procession, as we witnessed at our leisure on the day of the great procession of Corpus Christi. But everywhere there are relics of gone-by art to be studied, from mosaics of the Greeks to mosaics of later artists than the Zuccati; old marble statues, embrowned like a meerschaum pipe; amazing sculptures in wood; Sansovino doors, ambitious to rival Ghiberti’s; transparent alabaster columns; an ancient Madonna, hung with jewels, transported from St. Sophia, in Constantinople; and everywhere the venerable pavement, once beautiful with its starry patterns in rich marble, now deadened and sunk to unevenness like the mud floor of a cabin.
Then outside, on the archway of the principal door, there are sculptures of a variety that makes one renounce the study of them in despair at the shortness of one’s time—blended fruits and foliage, and human groups and animal forms of all kinds. On our first morning we ascended the great tower, and looked around on the island-city and the distant mountains and the distant Adriatic. And on the same day we went to see the Pisani Palace—one of the grand old palaces that are going to decay.... After this we saw the Church of San Sebastiano, where Paul Veronese is buried, with his own paintings around, mingling their colour with the light that falls on his tombstone. There is one remarkably fine painting of his here: it represents, I think, some Saints going to martyrdom, but apart from that explanation, is a composition full of vigorous, spirited figures....
Santa Maria della Salute, built as an ex voto by the Republic on the cessation of the plague, is one of the most conspicuous churches in Venice, lifting its white cupolas close on the Grand Canal, where it widens out towards the Giudecca. Here there are various Tintorettos, but the only one which is not blackened so as to be unintelligible is the Cena, which is represented as a bustling supper-party, with attendants and sideboard accessories, in thoroughly Dutch fashion!... But of all Tintoretto’s paintings, the best preserved, and perhaps the most complete in execution, is the Miracle of St. Mark at the Accademia. We saw it the oftener because we were attracted to the Accademia again and again by Titian’s Assumption, which we placed next to Peter the Martyr among the pictures at Venice. For a thoroughly rapt expression I never saw anything equal to the Virgin in this picture; and the expression is the more remarkable because it is not assisted by the usual devices to express spiritual ecstasy, such as delicacy of feature and temperament or pale meagreness. Then what cherubs and angelic heads bathed in light! The lower part of the picture has no interest; the attitudes are theatrical; and the Almighty above is as unbeseeming as painted Almighties usually are: but the middle group falls short only of the Sistine Madonna.
Among the Venetian painters Giovanni Bellini shines with a mild, serious light that gives one an affectionate respect towards him. In the Church of the Scalzi there is an exquisite Madonna by him—probably his chef-d’œuvre—comparable to Raphael’s for sweetness.
And Palma Vecchio, too, must be held in grateful reverence for his Santa Barbara, standing in calm, grand beauty above an altar in the Church of Santa Maria Formosa. It is an almost unique presentation of a hero-woman, standing in calm preparation for martyrdom, without the slightest air of pietism, yet with the expression of a mind filled with serious conviction.
We made the journey to Chioggia.... Of all dreamy delights, that of floating in a gondola along the canals and out on the lagoon is surely the greatest. We were out one night on the lagoon when the sun was setting, and the wide waters were flushed with the reddened light. I should have liked it to last for hours: it is the sort of scene in which I could most readily forget my own existence, and feel melted into the general life.
Another charm of evening time was to walk up and down the Piazza of San Marco as the stars were brightening and look at the grand dim buildings, and the flock of pigeons flitting about them; or to walk on to the Bridge of La Paglia and look along the dark canal that runs under the Bridge of Sighs—its blackness lit up by a gaslight here and there, and the plash of the oar of blackest gondola slowly advancing....
Farewell, lovely Venice! and away to Verona, across the green plains of Lombardy, which can hardly look tempting to an eye still filled with the dreamy beauty it has left behind.
GEORGE ELIOT’S LIFE AS RELATED IN HER
LETTERS AND JOURNALS.