by Jan Morris
One winter morning, when the Doge’s Palace was empty of tourists, and the custodians of the Great Council Chamber were elsewhere, I stealthily removed my shoes and mounted the steps to the Doge’s Throne; and sitting there in that portentous seat, and looking at the great painted ceiling above me, I realized how carefully considered were the perspective distortions of Venetian art. All those gigantic images and symbolisms, those Goddesses and Victories and Virtues, now seemed to be performing privately for me. I could look Venezia straight in the eye, without cricking my neck. I could receive the Tribute of the Conquered Provinces without moving my head. It was as though Veronese, Tintoretto, Bassano and Palma Giovane were themselves standing before me, bowing low and awaiting my approval. This experience had an elevating effect upon me. When I had tiptoed down the steps again, and replaced my shoes, and assumed an air of innocent scholarly interest, I looked behind me to find that the footprints of my stockinged feet on the polished wooden steps of the throne were, if not twice as large as normal, at least twice as confident.
Venetian Baroque is sometimes gloriously eccentric. The façade of San Moisè usually stops the tourists in their tracks, it is so laughably elaborate; and inside is a gigantic altar piece, built of shiny granite blocks, which reproduces, almost life-size, Jehovah, Moses, the Tablets, Mount Sinai and all. Another splendid altar is in the church of San Marziale (a divine whose legend, if I have got the right one, is described in my dictionary of saints as ‘an extravagant forgery’): it seems to represent a holy hermit inside his cave, for beneath its slab there crouches, his halo just fitting in, a single forlorn and lonely sage, rather as children of artistic bent are sometimes to be seen huddled beneath grand pianos.
The façade of Santa Maria Zobenigo is notorious because not one item of its convoluted design has any religious significance whatsoever. The church was built by the Zobenigo family, but was reconstructed by the Barbaras, and its frontage is entirely devoted to their glorification. Looking from top to bottom, you will see a figure of Venice crowned, between Justice and Temperance; a double-headed eagle, the Barbaro emblem, wearing a copper crown; a vast effigy of an armoured Barbaro above the door; four Romanized Barbaros in niches; two piles of military trophies, trumpets, guns, banners, drums; and six finely sculptured plans, in stone relief, of places that figured largely in the Barbaro annals – Zara, Candia, Padua, Rome, Corfu and Spalato. (When I looked at these plans one spring evening, they were all in mint condition, but when I went back the next day I discovered that a large chunk of Spalato had been broken away in the night, leaving a pale stone scar behind it: it is odd to experience so directly the decay of a civilization.)
The Venetian artists often had a taste for whimsy and caprice, and loved private jokes, hidden allusions, undeclared self-portraits. In Veronese’s famous Feast at the House of Levi, at the Accademia, Veronese himself is the suave major-domo figure in the left centre. He has also painted himself in the allegorical picture Glory, in the Doge’s Palace, and in his Marriage at Cana, which is now in the Louvre, he not only appears himself, playing the viola, but is accompanied by his brother, Tintoretto, the Sultan Soliman, the Emperor Charles V, the Marchese del Guasto and the Marchesa di Pescara. In Gentile Bellini’s Miracle of the True Cross at San Lorenzo, the artist’s entire family kneels in smug parade on the right-hand edge of the miracle, and the Queen of Cyprus stands with her ladies on the left. In Domenico Tiepolo’s odd picture The New World, in the Caʼ Rezzonico, the artist himself is looking through a magnifying glass in the right-hand corner of the painting, with his father beside him. There is a picture of the naval battle of Lepanto, in the Sala dello Scrutinio of the Doge’s Palace, in which, if you look hard enough among the carnage and the corpses, you will see a tidy little gentleman, neatly bearded, lace-collared, and perfectly calm, up to his neck in the Mediterranean: it is the artist Vicentino, undeterred by his subject.
In the adjacent picture, another naval battle, Pietro Liberi has portrayed himself as a very fat naked slave, bang in the front of the composition, brandishing a dagger. Near by is Palma Giovane’s Last Judgement, which is supposed to contain portraits of the artist’s mistress in two of her varying moods – bottom left, agonized in Hell, top right, blissful in Paradise. Next door, Tintoretto’s daughter sits at the feet of St Christopher in the gigantic picture of Paradise in the Great Council Chamber. In the church of Madonna dell’Orto Tintoretto himself is seen helping to support the Golden Calf in preparation for a ritual – he has a big black beard and a complacently pagan bearing, and near by is his wife, all in blue. Palma Vecchio’s celebrated Saint Barbara, in Santa Maria Formosa, described as ‘the ultimate representation of Venetian beauty’, is in fact the artist’s daughter Violante (‘an almost unique representation of a hero-woman’, George Eliot once wrote of the picture, ‘standing in calm preparation for martyrdom, without the slightest air of pietism, yet with the expression of a mind filled with serious conviction’).
The Madonna in Titian’s great Pesaro altar piece in the Frari is his own wife Celia, soon afterwards to die in childbirth. The neighbouring tomb of Canova, with its pyramidical super-structure and its suggestive half-open door, was designed by Canova – not for himself, but for Titian, who had his own plans for a truly Titianesque tomb, but died too soon to build it (he is buried in the Frari anyway in the grandest mausoleum of all, erected 300 years after his death by the Emperor of Austria, and surrounded by reliefs from his own works). In the same church, the fine statue of St Jerome by Alessandro Vittoria, with its beautifully modelled veins and muscles, really portrays Titian in his old age: and the bust of Vittoria himself in San Zaccaria, representing him in dignified thought among an audience of respectful allegories, is a self-portrait. In the Scuola di San Rocco, the wooden caricature of an artist by the irrepressible Francesco Pianta mischievously lampoons Tintoretto, whose overwhelming canvases stand all around it. Five heads on Sansovino’s sacristy door, behind the high altar of the Basilica, represent less than ethereal personages: they are Sansovino himself, Palladio, Veronese, Titian, and Aretino, who once endeared himself to all professional hacks by remarking that he earned his living ‘by the sweat of his ink’, and who is said to have died of laughing too much at an obscene joke about his own sister.
In the church of San Salvatore the fine organ-shutters were painted by Titian’s brother, Francesco Vecellio: they are among his last professional works, for he presently abandoned art altogether, and became a soldier. In three Venetian buildings you may see sets of pictures that were entries in a competition, now hanging together in perpetual truce: the twelve martyrs of San Stae, the twenty-one on the ceiling of the Marciana Library, the twenty-four, all concerned with the affairs of the Carmelites, that give a cluttered but powerful distinction to the nave of the Carmini. (The stations of the Cross in Santa Maria Zobenigo were also painted by several different artists, each doing two.)
Tintoretto’s last work is the picture of the titular saint in San Marziale. Titian’s last is his Deposition in the Accademia, intended for his tomb: it was finished by Palma Giovane, who wrote beneath it, as you will see: ‘What Titian left unfinished, Palma has reverently completed, and he dedicates the work to God.’ Verocchio’s last is the equestrian statue of Colleoni. Longhena’s last is the Palazzo Pesaro on the Grand Canal, which he never lived to finish. Giovanni Bellini’s last is his altar piece in San Giovanni Crisostomo, near the Rialto. Mantegna’s last is thought to be his glorious San Sebastiano, in the Ca’ d’Oro: it was found in his studio after his death, and at the foot of the picture, beside a smoking candle-wick, is the resigned inscription: ‘Nil Nisi Divinum Stabile Est, Caetera Fumus’ – ‘Nothing But God Endures, The Rest Is Smoke.’
Then there are the curiosities of politics and diplomacy. In the floor of the Basilica atrium there is a small lozenge-shaped stone which marks the point of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s abasement before the Pope Alexander III in 1177. The Pope, in flight from the Emperor’s armies, came to Venice in
disguise, not sure whether the Republic was his friend or his enemy: but the Venetians, sensing opportunities of advancement, arranged a reconciliation between the two monarchs, and thus established the Republic’s position as a political deus ex machina. The Venetian legends say that the Emperor, facing Alexander on this very spot, agreed to apologize to St Peter, but not to the Pope, and that Alexander replied sternly: ‘To Peter and the Pope.’ Such versions of the event have Frederick flat out on the ground kissing the papal feet, and the loyal Venetian artists have pictured the occasion in a great series of paintings in the Doge’s Palace, including several scenes of Venetian triumph that are utterly apocryphal.
Many legends, too, illustrate Alexander’s arrival in Venice, destitute and friendless, and several churches claim the honour of having sheltered him in their porches on his first night in the city. Near the Campo Sant’ Aponal you will see, engraved above a small shrine at the entrance to a narrow courtyard, the following inscription: ‘Alexander the Third, Supreme Pontiff, flying from the armies of Frederick the Emperor, coming to Venice, here reposed the first night; and then conceded a perpetual plenary indulgence to whoever shall say a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria in this place. Let it not be heavy for thee to say Hail Mother. The year is 1177 and by the charity of the devout it is lighted day and night, as is seen.’ Whether this was really the Pope’s first refuge, nobody knows: but it is perfectly true that, after some centuries of neglect and squalor, the lights do burn there night and day, and perhaps a few passing Venetians still claim their indulgences.
There are many mementoes of Napoleon in Venice, from the Public Gardens to the present shape of the Piazza. Beside the church of San Pietro di Castello, in the eastern part of the city, you may see the rambling and uncomfortable building which was, until he decreed otherwise, the palace of the Patriarch: it now provides married quarters for petty officers of the Italian Navy. If you stand with your back to the Basilica and look at the western end of the Piazza, you will see a row of twelve statues on the façade of the Ala Napoleonica: they represent great emperors of the past, and in the middle of them is a gap in which it was intended to erect a gigantic statue of Napoleon himself. In the meantime an enormous semi-naked effigy of him was erected in the southern Piazzetta: this was later removed to the monastery of San Giorgio, then a barracks, and it now stands in the water-entrance of the Palazzo Mocenigo at San Samuele, on the Grand Canal, where Byron once lived.
The internal politics of Venice, too, have their many peculiar memorials: the bocche dei leoni, the Tiepolo stone in Campo Sant’ Agostin, the old crone and her mortar in the Merceria, the absent doge among the portraits in the Doge’s Palace. The church of San Trovaso is a memento in itself. It lies directly on the border-line between the territories of the two ancient Venetian factions, the Nicolotti and the Castellani, and it has a door on each side of the church, one opening into Nicolotti country, the other into Castellani. If there was ever a wedding between a Castellani bride and a Nicolotti bridegroom, the wedding pair left together by the central door of the church, but their relatives stalked resolutely out in opposite directions.
But the most bizarre of all Venice’s historical allusions comes from distant places and far more ancient times. Outside the main gates of the Arsenal, among a pride of peers, there stands a tall marble lion, gangling but severe. This beast was brought from Athens in 1687 by the fighting Doge Francesco Morosini (chiefly eminent in universal history because a gunner under his command blew up the Turkish powder magazine that happened to be inside the Parthenon). The lion used to guard the gateway into the Piraeus, and was so celebrated among the ancients that the port itself was known as the Port of the Lion: but when it arrived at the Arsenal, booty of war, the Venetians were puzzled to discover that engraved upon its shoulders and haunches were some peculiar inscriptions, not at all Greek in style, in characters that seemed, to the eyes of a people accustomed to the exquisite calligraphies of Arabic, rudely and brusquely chiselled.
For several centuries nobody knew what these letters were: until one nineteenth-century day a visiting Danish scholar inspected them, raised his arms in exultation, and pronounced them to be Norse runes. They were carved on the lion in the eleventh century by order of Harold the Tall, a Norwegian mercenary who fought several campaigns in the Mediterranean, conquering Athens and once dethroning the Emperor in. Constantinople, only to die in 1066 as King of Norway, fighting Harold the Saxon at Stamford Bridge, Yorkshire. The inscription on the lion’s left shoulder says: ‘Haakon, combined with Ulf, with Asmud and with Orn, conquered this port. These men and Harold the Tall imposed large fines, on account of the revolt of the Greek people. Dalk has been detained in distant lands. Egil was waging war, together with Ragnar, in Roumania and Armenia.’ And on the right haunch of this queer animal is inscribed, in the runic: ‘Asmund engraved these runes in combination with Asgeir, Thorleif, Thord and Ivar, by desire of Harold the Tall, although the Greeks on reflection opposed it.’
What all this means, only the lion knows: but modern scholars have interpreted its general sense as implying that Kilroy, with friends, was there.
Other nooks of Venetian oddity are almost out of range of the guide books. Behind the Basilica there is a Lapidarium, a courtyard haphazardly studded with diverse stones and pieces of sculpture: two headless pigeons, a noseless warrior, a very old Adam in a clump of bushes, a pair of disembodied hands which have been plastered to the walls, and reach out from it creepily in perpetual distress, clutching stone rods. (As you stand before these strange objects, you may be momentarily disturbed to hear a muffled subterranean thumping, below your feet: but do not be alarmed – it is only the workmen restoring the crypt of the Basilica.)
The Palazzo Mastelli, near Madonna dell’ Orto, is a house of equally esoteric quality. On its façade is a peculiar dromedary which we have already, with an unkind snigger, examined: but the inner courtyard of this place, approached around the corner, is lavishly stuccoed with souvenirs and fragments of loot, columns built high into the structure, a small Madonna in a shrine, irrelevant arches, well-heads, grilles. It is a magpie-nest of a house, secretively sheltered behind a high brick wall, and camouflaged with foliage. As you walk befuddled and enchanted from its purlieus you will not be surprised to learn that the four enigmatical Moors of the Campo dei Mori, as odd a quartet as ever stared blankly from a crumbling wall, are sometimes supposed to have been among its ancient residents.
On the ground floor of the Fondaco dei Turchi, which is now the Natural History Museum (and has Faliero’s coffin in its loggia), there is a courtyard that is part boat-house, part menagerie, part Pantheon. Around its walls are affixed a series of portrait statues, once kept in the Doge’s Palace: there are admirals, painters, scholars, poets, architects, Sebastian Cabot, Marco Polo, Galileo and Admiral Emo, with Dante thrown in for respect and affection. These mouldering images, now unvisited from one year to the next, gaze down thoughtfully upon the boats and apparatus of the chief collector of the Museum, who spends half his time gathering specimens in the reedy wastes of the lagoon, and half the time stuffing and mounting them upstairs. Four or five black sandoli lie there on the flagstones, with oars and planks and an outboard motor: and here and there among the jumble you may find little living creatures, recently plucked from their nests or burrows, and now kept in doomed but kindly confinement until they are the right age to be, as the American taxidermists say, eternalized.
A pair of baby seagulls, perhaps, lives beneath the poop of one boat, stamping angrily about on their infinitesimal webbed feet, and sometimes plodding across to the courtyard fountain for a dignified circuit of its pool – four times round precisely, no more, no less, before returning to their nest beneath the protruding eyes of one of the lesser-known philosophers. A young duck inhabits a nearby sarcophagus. In a wire cage in the shadow of Titian two green snakes are moodily coiled, and huddled beneath the earth of a wooden box are three leathery salamanders. Upstairs the Museum of Natural History, impeccably
organized, breathes the spirit of rational inquiry: but there is something delightfully hare-brained to the courtyard below.
The naval museum at the Arsenal is similarly intriguing, with its bits of ships, banners, figure-heads, lions galore and remains of the Bucintoro; so is the Scuola di San Giovanni, with a beautiful Renaissance courtyard and staircase, and a main hall that is half museum and half carpenter’s shop; so is the tiny Oratory of the Annunciation, twenty feet square, in the Campo Santʼ Angelo; and the carved stone girl on the Zattere who has tied her long hair beneath her chin, like a muffler; and the boatyards of the city, and its innumerable cloistered courtyards, its unsuspected churches, its quirks and idiosyncrasies of architecture, its topsy-turvy street plan.
There is a column-head among the arcades of the Doge’s Palace that tells, for no apparent reason, the sad life story of a child – love at first sight between its mooning parents, courtship, conception (in a double bed), birth, childhood, early death, tears. In any other city this sequence of images might strike you as perfectly inexplicable, bearing as it does no relation to anything else in the palace, containing no apparent historical or religious allusion, and conveying no recognizable moral. Here, though, it does not seem untoward: for when you have wandered around this city for a time, and examined a few of its crooked displays, and inspected some of its paradoxes and perplexities, you will realize that much the most curious thing in Venice is Venice herself.
21
To the Prodigies
If you imagine Venice as an oil painting, then the basis of its colour is provided by this twisted gnarled ambience of the city, crowded, aged, nonconformist. Before the highlights of the place are grandly daubed upon it, there is a gentler layer of fine tinting, giving richness, variety and strength to the composition. This is provided by a multitude of modest but wonderful monuments in the city, well known but not world-renowned, which are as essential to its flavour as are the picture postcard marvels.
