The view from my windows.
Why cannot I lock myself up in this town which harmonizes so well with my destiny, in this city of poets, where Dante, Petrarch, Byron passed! Why cannot I finish writing my Memoirs by the light of the sun that falls upon these pages! At this moment the luminary is still burning my Floridan savannahs and is setting here at the end of the Grand Canal. I can no longer see it; but, through an opening in this wilderness of palaces, its rays strike the ball of the Dogana, the lateen-sails of the boats, the yards of the ships and the porch of the convent of San Giorgio Maggiore. The tower of the monastery, changed into a rosy column, is reflected in the waves; the white front of the church is so brightly lighted that I can pick out the smallest details of the chisel. The outlines of the shops of the Giudecca are painted with a Titian light; the gondolas on the canal and the harbour are swimming in the same light. Venice is there, seated on the shore, like a beautiful woman about to die away with the day-light: the evening breeze lifts up her balmy tresses; she dies saluted by all the graces and all the smiles of nature.
Venice, September 1833.
In Venice, in 1806, there was a young Signor Armani, the Italian translator or a friend of the translator of the Génie du Christianisme. His sister, as he said, was a nun: monaca. There was also a Jew, on his way to the farce of Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrim[93], who had his eyes on my purse; then M. Lagarde, the chief of the French spies, who gave me dinner: my translator, his sister, the Jew of the Sanhedrim are either dead or no longer live in Venice. At that time, I was staying at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, near the Rialto; that hotel has changed its position. Almost opposite my old inn is the Palazzo Foscari, which is falling. Back, all that old lumber of my life! I should go mad with ruins: let us speak of the present.
I have tried to depict the general effect of the architecture of Venice; in order to receive an impression of the details, I have been up and down and again up the Grand Canal, I have visited and revisited the Piazza San Marco. It would need volumes to exhaust that subject. Count Cicognara's[94] Fabbriche più conspicue di Venezia supply the features of the monuments; but the exposition is not clear. I will content myself with noting down two or three of the most frequently recurring arrangements.
From the capital of a Corinthian column is described a semicircle, the point of which descends upon the capital of another Corinthian column: exactly in the middle of those shafts rises a third, of the same dimensions and the same order; from the capital of that central column two epicycles spring to right and left, the ends of which also come to lie upon the capitals of other columns. The result of this design is that the arches, in crossing each other, give birth to ogives at their point of intersection[95], so that a charming admixture is formed of two architectural styles, the full Roman arch and the ogive of Arab-Gothic or "Mediæval" origin; but it is certain that the latter exists in the so-called Cyclopean monuments; I have seen very pure specimens of it in the tombs of Argos[96].
The Ducal Palace presents twines reproduced in some other palaces, particularly in the Palazzo Foscari: the columns support pointed arches; those arches leave voids between them: between those voids the architect has placed two roses. The rose depresses the extremity of the two ellipses. Those roses, which meet at a point of their circumference in the fore front of the building, become a kind of row of wheels upon which the rest of the edifice is carried.
In every structure, the base is commonly broad; the monument diminishes in thickness as it encroaches on the sky. The Ducal Palace is the exact opposite of that natural scheme of architecture: the base, pierced by light porticoes surmounted by a gallery of arabesques indented with four-leaved open trefoils, supports an almost bare square mass: one would say it was a fortress built upon pillars, or rather an inverted building planted on its light coping with its thick root in the air.
Remarkable in the Venetian monuments are the architectural masks and heads. In the Palazzo Pesaro, the entablature of the first storey, of the Doric order, is decorated with heads of giants; the Ionic order of the second storey is bound by heads of knights which stretch horizontally from the wall, with their faces looking towards the water: some are wrapped in a chin-piece, others have their visors half-lowered; all wear helmets whose plumes bend round into ornaments under the cornice. Lastly, on the third storey, of the Corinthian order, we see heads of female statues with their hair differently knotted.