by Grant Allen
X. VENICE
Its early days — The Grand Canal and its palaces — Piazza of St. Mark — A Venetian funeral — The long line of islands — Venetian glass — Torcello, the ancient Altinum — Its two unique churches.
So long as Venice is unvisited a new sensation is among the possibilities of life. There is no town like it in Europe. Amsterdam has its canals, but Venice is all canals; Genoa has its palaces, but in Venice they are more numerous and more beautiful. Its situation is unique, on a group of islands in the calm lagoon. But the Venice of to-day is not the Venice of thirty years ago. Even then a little of the old romance had gone, for a long railway viaduct had linked it to the mainland. In earlier days it could be reached only by a boat, for a couple of miles of salt water lay between the city and the marshy border of the Paduan delta. Now Venice is still more changed, and for the worse. The people seem more poverty-stricken and pauperized. Its buildings generally, especially the ordinary houses, look more dingy and dilapidated. The paint seems more chipped, the plaster more peeled, the brickwork more rotten; everything seems to tell of decadence, commercial and moral, rather than of regeneration. In the case of the more important structures, indeed, the effects of time have often been more than repaired. Here a restoration, not seldom needless and ill-judged, has marred some venerable relic of olden days with crude patches of color, due to modern reproductions of the ancient and original work: the building has suffered, as it must be admitted not a few of our own most precious heirlooms have suffered, from the results of zeal untempered by discretion, and the destroyer has worked his will under the guise of the restorer.
The mosquito flourishes still in Venice as it did of yore. It would be too much to expect that the winged representative of the genus should thrive less in Italian freedom than under Austrian bondage, but something might have been done to extirpate the two-legged species. He is present in force in most towns south of the Alps, but he is nowhere so abundant or so exasperating as in Venice. If there is one place in one town in Europe where the visitor might fairly desire to possess his soul in peace and to gaze in thoughtful wonder, it is in the great piazza, in front of the façade, strange and beautiful as a dream, of the duomo of St. Mark. Halt there and try to feast on its marvels, to worship in silence and in peace. Vain illusion. There is no crowd of hurrying vehicles or throng of hurrying men to interfere of necessity with your visions (there are often more pigeons than people in the piazza), but up crawls a beggar, in garments vermin-haunted, whining for “charity”; down swoop would-be guides, volunteering useless suggestions in broken and barely intelligible English; from this side and from that throng vendors of rubbish, shell-ornaments, lace, paltry trinkets, and long ribands of photographic “souvenirs,” appalling in their ugliness. He who can stand five minutes before San Marco and retain a catholic love of mankind must indeed be blessed with a temper of much more than average amiability.
The death of Rome was indirectly the birth of Venice. Here in the great days of the Empire there was not, so far as we know, even a village. Invaders came, the Adriatic littoral was wrecked; its salvage is to be found among the islands of the lagoons. Aquileia went up in flames, the cities of the Paduan delta trembled before the hordes of savage Huns, but the islands of its coast held out a hope of safety. What in those days these camps of refuge must have been can be inferred from the islands which now border the mainland, low, marshy, overgrown by thickets, and fringed by reeds; they were unhealthy, but only accessible by intricate and difficult channels, and with little to tempt the spoiler. It was better to risk fever in the lagoons than to be murdered or driven off into slavery on the mainland. It was some time before Venice took the lead among these scattered settlements. It became the center of government in the year 810, but it was well-nigh two centuries before the Venetian State attained to any real eminence. Towards this, the first and perhaps the most important step was crushing the Istrian and Dalmatian pirates. This enabled the Republic to become a great “Adriatic and Oriental Company,” and to get into their hands the carrying trade to the East. The men of Venice were both brave and shrewd, something like our Elizabethan forefathers, mighty on sea and land, but men of understanding also in the arts of peace. She did battle with Genoa for commercial supremacy, with the Turk for existence. She was too strong for the former, but the latter at last wore her out, and Lepanto was one of her latest and least fruitful triumphs. Still, it was not till the end of the sixteenth century that a watchful eye could detect the symptoms of senile decay. Then Venice tottered gradually to its grave. Its slow disintegration occupied more than a century and a half; but the French Revolution indirectly caused the collapse of Venice, for its last doge abdicated, and the city was occupied by Napoleon in 1797. After his downfall Venetia was handed over to Austria, and found in the Hapsburg a harsh and unsympathetic master. It made a vain struggle for freedom in 1848, but was at last ceded to Italy after the Austro-Prussian war in 1866.
The city is built upon a group of islands; its houses are founded on piles, for there is no really solid ground. How far the present canals correspond with the original channels between small islands, how far they are artificial, it is difficult to say; but whether the original islets were few or many, there can be no doubt that they were formerly divided by the largest, or the Grand Canal, the Rio Alto or Deep Stream. This takes an S-like course, and parts the city roughly into two halves. The side canals, which are very numerous, for the town is said to occupy one hundred and fourteen islands, are seldom wider, often rather narrower than a by-street in the City of London. In Venice, as has often been remarked, not a cart or a carriage, not even a coster’s donkey-cart, can be used. Streets enough there are, but they are narrow and twisting, very like the courts in the heart of London. The carriage, the cab, and the omnibus are replaced by the gondolas. These it is needless to describe, for who does not know them? One consequence of this substitution of canals for streets is that the youthful Venetian takes to the water like a young duck to a pond, and does not stand much on ceremony, in the matter of taking off his clothes. Turn into a side canal on a summer’s day, and one may see the younger members of a family all bathing from their own doorstep, the smallest one, perhaps, to prevent accidents, being tied by a cord to a convenient ring; nay, sometimes as we are wandering through one of the narrow calle (alleys) we hear a soft patter of feet, something damp brushes past, and a little Venetian lad, lithe and black-eyed, bare-legged, bare-backed, and all but bare-breeched, shoots past as he makes a short cut to his clothes across a block of buildings, round which he cannot yet manage to swim.
In such a city as Venice it is hard to praise one view above another. There is the noble sweep of the Grand Canal, with its palaces; there are many groups of buildings on a less imposing scale, but yet more picturesque, on the smaller canals, often almost every turn brings some fresh surprise; but there are two views which always rise up in my mind before all others whenever my thoughts turn to Venice, more especially as it used to be. One is the view of the façade of San Marco from the Piazza. I shall make no apology for quoting words which describe more perfectly than my powers permit the impressions awakened by this dream-like architectural conception. “Beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away: a multitude of pillars and white domes clustered into a long, low pyramid of colored light, a treasure-heap, as it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic and beset with sculptures of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory; sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm-leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes, and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptered and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their features indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground
through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine, spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, ‘their bluest veins to kiss,’ the shadow as it steals back from them revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand: their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs all beginning and ending in the Cross: and above them in the broad archivolts a continuous chain of language and of life, angels and the signs of heaven and the labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above them another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers, a confusion of delight, among which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark’s lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst.”
This is San Marco as it was. Eight centuries had harmed it little; they had but touched the building with a gentle hand and had mellowed its tints into tender harmony; now its new masters, cruel in their kindness, have restored the mosaics and scraped the marbles; now raw blotches and patches of crude color glare out in violent contrast with those parts which, owing to the intricacy of the carved work, or some other reason, it has been found impossible to touch. To look at St. Mark’s now is like listening to some symphony by a master of harmony which is played on instruments all out of tune.
Photographs, pictures, illustrations of all kinds, have made St. Mark’s so familiar to all the world that it is needless to attempt to give any description of its details.
It may suffice to say that the cathedral stands on the site of a smaller and older building, in which the relics of St. Mark, the tutelary saint of Venice, had been already enshrined. The present structure was begun about the year 976, and occupied very nearly a century in building. But it is adorned with the spoils of many a classic structure: with columns and slabs of marble and of porphyry and of serpentine, which were hewn from quarries in Greece and Syria, in Egypt and Libya, by the hands of Roman slaves, and decked the palaces and the baths, the temples and the theaters of Roman cities.
The inside of St. Mark’s is not less strange and impressive, but hardly so attractive as the exterior. It is plain in outline and almost heavy in design, a Greek cross in plan, with a vaulted dome above the center and each arm. Much as the exterior of St. Mark’s owes to marble, porphyry, and mosaic, it would be beautiful if constructed only of grey limestone. This could hardly be said of the interior: take away the choice stones from columns and dado and pavement, strip away the crust of mosaic, those richly robed figures on ground of gold, from wall and from vault (for the whole interior is veneered with marbles or mosaics), and only a rather dark, massive building would remain, which would seem rather lower and rather smaller than one had been led to expect.
The other view in Venice which seems to combine best its peculiar character with its picturesque beauty may be obtained at a very short distance from St. Mark’s. Leave the façade of which we have just spoken, the three great masts, with their richly ornamented sockets of bronze, from which, in the proud days of Venice, floated the banners of Candia, Cyprus, and the Morea; turn from the Piazza into the Piazzetta; leave on the one hand the huge Campanile, more huge than beautiful (if one may venture to whisper a criticism), on the other the sumptuous portico of the Ducal Palace; pass on beneath the imposing façade of the palace itself, with its grand colonnade; on between the famous columns, brought more than seven centuries since from some Syrian ruins, which bear the lion of St. Mark and the statue of St. Theodore, the other patron of the Republic; and then, standing on the Molo at the head of the Riva degli Schiavoni, look around; or better still, step down into one of the gondolas which are in waiting at the steps, and push off a few dozen yards from the land: then look back on the façade of the Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, along the busy quays of the Riva, towards the green trees of the Giardini Publici, look up the Piazzetta, between the twin columns, to the glimpses of St. Mark’s and the towering height of the Campanile, along the façade of the Royal Palace, with the fringe of shrubbery below contrasting pleasantly with all these masses of masonry, up the broad entrance to the Grand Canal, between its rows of palaces, across it to the great dome of Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana della Mare, with its statue of Fortune (appropriate to the past rather than to the present) gazing out from its seaward angle. Beyond this, yet farther away, lies the Isola San Giorgio, a group of plain buildings only, a church, with a dome simple in outline and a brick campanile almost without adornment, yet the one thing in Venice, after the great group of St. Mark; this is a silent witness to its triumphs in presses itself on the mind. From this point of view Venice rises before our eyes in its grandeur and in its simplicity, in its patrician and its plebeian aspects, as “a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean, throned on her hundred isles ... a ruler of the waters and their powers.”
But to leave Venice without a visit to the Grand Canal would be to leave the city with half the tale untold. Its great historic memories are gathered around the Piazza of St. Mark; this is a silent witness to its triumphs in peace and in war, to the deeds noble and brave, of its rulers. But the Grand Canal is the center of its life, commercial and domestic; it leads from its quays to its Exchange, from the Riva degli Schiavoni and the Dogana della Mare to the Rialto. It is bordered by the palaces of the great historic families who were the rulers and princes of Venice, who made the State by their bravery and prudence, who destroyed it by their jealousies and self-seeking. The Grand Canal is a genealogy of Venice, illustrated and engraved on stone. As one glides along in a gondola, century after century in the history of domestic architecture, from the twelfth to the eighteenth, slowly unrolls itself before us. There are palaces which still remain much as they were of old, but here and there some modern structure, tasteless and ugly, has elbowed for itself a place among them; not a few, also, have been converted into places of business, and are emblazoned with prominent placards proclaiming the trade of their new masters, worthy representatives of an age that is not ashamed to daub the cliffs of the St. Gothard with the advertisements of hotels and to paint its boulders for the benefit of vendors of chocolate!
But in the present era one must be thankful for anything that is spared by the greed of wealth and the vulgarity of a “democracy.” Much of old Venice still remains, though little steamers splutter up and down the Grand Canal, and ugly iron bridges span its waters, both, it must be admitted, convenient, though hideous; still the gondolas survive; still one hears at every corner the boatman’s strange cry of warning, sometimes the only sound except the knock of the oar that breaks the silence of the liquid street. Every turn reveals something quaint and old-world. Now it is a market-boat, with its wicker panniers hanging outside, loaded with fish or piled with vegetables from one of the more distant islets; now some little bridge, now some choice architectural fragment, a doorway, a turret, an oriel, or a row of richly ornate windows, now a tiny piazzetta leading up to the façade and campanile of a more than half-hidden church; now the marble enclosure of a well. Still the water-carriers go about with buckets of hammered copper hung at each end of a curved pole; still, though more rarely, some quaint costume may be seen in the calle; still the dark shops in the narrow passages are full of goods strange to the eye, and bright in their season with the flowers and fruits of an Italian summer; still the purple pigeons gather in scores at the wonted hour to be fed on the Piazza of St. Mark, and, fearless of danger
, convert the distributor of a pennyworth of maize into a walking dovecot.
Still Venice is delightful to the eyes (unhappily not always so to the nose in many a nook and corner) notwithstanding the pressure of poverty and the wantonness of restorers. Perchance it may revive and yet see better days (its commerce is said to have increased since 1866); but if so, unless a change comes over the spirit of the age, the result will be the more complete destruction of all that made its charm and its wonder; so this chapter may appropriately be closed by a brief sketch of one scene which seems in harmony with the memories of its departed greatness, a Venetian funeral. The dead no longer rest among the living beneath the pavement of the churches: the gondola takes the Venetian “about the streets” to the daily business of life; it bears him away from his home to the island cemetery. From some narrow alley, muffled by the enclosing masonry, comes the sound of a funeral march; a procession emerges on to the piazzetta by the water-side; the coffin is carried by long-veiled acolytes and mourners with lighted torches, accompanied by a brass band with clanging cymbals. A large gondola, ornamented with black and silver, is in waiting at the nearest landing place; the band and most of the attendants halt by the water-side; the coffin is placed in the boat, the torches are extinguished; a wilder wail of melancholy music, a more resonant clang of the cymbals, sounds the last farewell to home and its pleasures and its work; the oars are dipped in the water, and another child of Venice is taken from the city of the living to the city of the dead.
