But following close upon this magnificence—which was reflected in nearly all the palaces that were built toward the close of the fourteenth century—came the inevitable reaction toward a less ornate style, the Early Renaissance. Compared with the Ca' d'Oro one writer has described the sixteenth century palaces, which followed Early Renaissance and Classic models, as "dull and scholastic." They certainly must have been a restful change.
So much for the architecture of Venice—
White swan of cities, slumbering in her nest
So wonderfully built among the reeds
Of the lagoon.
But the visitor to the Venice of today finds his interest in her buildings doubled from the fact that upon the walls of many of them are to be found the works of some of the greatest painters the Occident has known. When we reflect that in the sixteenth century Venice possessed a school of art that for power, technical perfection, and gorgeous interpretation of color, stood pre-eminent in its own day and has not been surpassed in ours, little more need be said. Palma Vecchio, Giorgione, the great portraitist Lorenzo Lotto, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and—Titian! What a galaxy! Surely nothing more need be said upon the art of Venice. As in everything else, the impossible seemed not the exceptional but the mediocre.
In short, to give one the outline of only a few of the activities of the people of this City of Destiny is to drown oneself in superlatives. Her history is as fraught with heroism, with simple dauntless courage, as that of the Dutch Republic; it is as colored with romance as that of Palmyra or Thebes. Karma is the only key to an understanding of the strange destiny which brought to flower such transcendant energy in so seemingly sterile a soil. Reincarnation is the only theory which can hope to throw light upon the quality of effort that marked her citizens as a body of people apart, who must have worked together in the past as they unquestionably will in the future.
Not that Venice was perfect; her citizens made their mistakes; there were the jealous and the covetous, and there were conspiracies within her borders as well as without. Her doges were not all, like Caesar's wife, "above suspicion," her counsellors were not all like Fra Paolo nor all her scholars like Aldo. But there was no apathy and there was a nucleus of impersonal, united effort sufficiently vitalized to hold back the agencies of disintegration during century after century of steady upward effort. And then the Wheel of Destiny turned and the Venice of Sarpi passed.
But the days to dawn will again see Venice whirled upward into the light on the rim of this mighty Wheel. This is inevitable. It is Theosophical teaching. The old clans will gather—and there—and they will work again and aspire again and build again; and in the light of the lessons learned through the failures and successes of the past will rise again to greater heights.
Doge and counsellor, artist and craftsman, scientist and scholar, statesman, philosopher, and poet—as the "whirling wheel of spiritual will and power" brought to you great opportunities in the past, so will it bring them to you again and yet again, in the future.