Part 4

I visited then a garden and friends I knew and when night fell rowed home down the Grand Canal. The moon had risen, and her light, in a sky now clear save of flying clouds, was intensely brilliant. The great sea-river, strangely quiet, almost magical in its stillness and in the flood of white luminousness that seemed poured upon it in streams, shimmered like liquid cornelian, a milky expanse among ghostly palaces on either hand. The mighty masses of the Renaissance palaces which, in losing all their irritating and confusing ornaments in the dim and melting moonlight, reveal their noble and beautiful proportions, supplanted the smaller palaces of Byzantine and Gothic form which depend so much for the impression they make on their lovely ornament and colour, both of which disappear in the moonlight. Above me, as I rowed, the glorious blue of the sky, across which darted now and then a shooting star, appeared to watch over its beloved city. The moon seemed racing in it, so swift in the fresh sea-wind was the motion of the white clouds across her disk. Each as it crossed took rainbow colours, and threw a mystic shadow on the world below. Only one gondola passed me by, a lantern burning on its prow, and its rower, silent as his boat, looked like a spirit in the moonlight. Then the deep shadow of the Rialto hid the moon, and I found my lodging.

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It is time now to turn to a different matter--What was the influence, towards the power to charm, of this water-life of the sea on the arts in Venice?

First, architecture was made different by it from all that it was in other Italian towns. The commerce and the wars of Venice in the East caused her nobles and merchant princes to study the buildings of the East. Rome did not influence them so much as Constantinople, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land. It was long before the northern Gothic, chiefly Franciscan, had any power in Venice, and when it had, it was apart from the spirit of the city. The Church of St. Mark is an Eastern not a Western Church. Many of the palaces along the Grand Canal were built in imitation of palaces the merchants had seen when they anchored in Orient ports. Often, as one wanders in the narrow streets, a window, a door-head, a disc in the wall, will remember us of the Byzantine Empire. There is a disc near San Polo where the Emperor of Eastern Rome sits in full imperial robes and crown, just as Justinian is represented in the mosaic at San Vitale in Ravenna. At Ravenna, we are still closer to the architecture of that Empire, but here, and this is characteristic of early Venetian architecture, there is a greater liberty, a more individual choice and treatment of buildings than there is at Ravenna. It is scarcely imitation which we see, but Eastern ideas of architecture freely modified and recreated into new forms by the architects. It is as if the free life of the sea itself had instilled its wild originality, variety and beauty into the imagination of the builders.

The continual change of the sea and its novelty entered not only into public but domestic architecture. All along the canals, the private houses built by the earlier architects of Venice change incessantly their form. In every house the ornament is individual. Moreover, in the work itself, there is a finish, a delicate delight in perfection of minute carving, a lavish invention which belongs to the best Oriental work. Its finish was always precious; and this ideal of finish entered also into the first buildings of the Renaissance in Venice, and made their sculpture and decoration more lively and more exquisite than elsewhere in Italy. This charm in ornament belonged to Venice, because it was the Queen of the Mediterranean Sea, the mistress of the East. The Orient brought over the sea the subtlety, the delicate finish, and the golden beauty of its art to Venice.

From the East also--and learnt because Venice was a sea-power--came the extraordinary love of colour which must have made mediaeval Venice like a city built of rainbows. It passed, as I have said, into the fishing boats and their sails. It belonged to the poorest houses on the distant islands. It made the Venetian painters the first masters of colour. We have some notion of it from the exterior of St. Mark’s, which even by moonlight blazes like a breast-plate of jewels; from its interior, which, subdued into dark but glowing sanctities of colour, solemnizes the spirit. But in ancient days the colour-glory of St. Mark’s was extended over the whole city. It shone with gold and crimson, with azure and burning green, with deep purple and the blue of the sea waves. The sailors and merchants of the East when they visited Venice saw in her architecture colour as brilliant as that of their own cities, and felt themselves at home. The architects, lavishing colour everywhere, made a water street in Venice as decorative as the title-page of a Missal.

Again, that element of charm arising from the double life of all things through reflection in still water, entered, I believe, into the soul of every architect in Venice, and modified his work. He knew, or unconsciously felt as he built, that each palace, church, tower, and dwelling house would often have, in unconscious nearness, each its own image and a second heaven in a mirrored beauty; that each would be in the centre of another fair world of its own in the water beneath it. He was inspired to greater excellence than in a city on the land, by the knowledge that all his work, reflected by the sea, would be seen for ever in a twofold loveliness.

Two other peculiarities, not found in the other cities of Italy, give a distinct charm to the architecture of Venice; and they are both caused by her position in the sea. The first of these is that all her important buildings are covered from cornice to foundation with precious and lovely marbles. The foundations were laid with mighty blocks of Istrian marble, brought from the mainland; but it was impossible to bring from so far enough of solid stone to build the palaces, churches, and dwellings of Venice. With rare exceptions, then, the walls were of brick; but, for beauty’s sake, the brick was overlaid, outside and inside, with thin slabs of veined and various marbles, with alabaster, with discs of porphyry, with mosaic, or with frescoes. The oversheeting marbles were brought from across the sea. The frescoes were done by the Venetian artists. Imagination, flying high, can scarcely represent to itself the glorious aspect of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, as seen from the Rialto, covered from top to bottom with frescoes by Titian and Giorgione. These have perished, but the inlaid and marble covered walls of the Venetian palaces remain, and they are like a lovely mosaic of rich colour. On their marble and alabaster the sea-winds and the sunlight have so acted that the surface has a sheen of flying and evasive colour, and a patina which I have not seen elsewhere, even in Genoa. Those accursed restorers have taken the trouble, notably in St. Mark’s, of scraping this away. It is like cleaning the patina away from a Greek bronze. Nature--sea and sun and wind--had adopted the buildings for her own, and given centuries of work to enhance the beauty of their original colour. Italy has despised and destroyed this labour of Nature. But in many places the charm remains, and it is the work, directly and indirectly, of the sea.

There is a second thing to say of the influence of the sea position of Venice on her architecture, and of the charm of it. In the mediaeval towns of the Italian mainland, the palaces of the nobles and merchants, even the ordinary houses, present to the street lofty and blind walls of enormous strength, especially along the lower story. They have the aspect of prisons, and they were made in this fashion for the sake of defence in the incessant quarrels waged by the opponent families and parties in the city. There is no openness, no story of hospitable receptions, no brightness of life, no sense of peace, impressed on us by the great buildings of the inland towns of Italy. Even when we visit a little hill town like San Gimignano, we see that the common houses, as well as those of the nobles, wear the appearance of fortresses. It is quite different in Venice. The main entrance of the houses, of rich and poor, was on the seaside, on the canal. A wide door, leading to a long hall, opened by steps on the water. The glancing of the water plays on the roof of the hall which goes back to a small garden. The great staircase mounts to the first story from this hall, and that story has wide, open-hearted windows with a deep balcony. Everything suggests peace, fearlessness, and the welcome of humanity. The steps seem made for the reception of crowds of guests. Tall piles, coloured in bands of red, white, and blue, tell what hosts of warless gondolas were moored there by the visitors. The whole of the lower story was often an arcade. The palace seems to throw itself open to the air, the light, and the populace. Its aspect is the aspect of friendship and hospitality, of a city whose citizens were at peace one with another.

This makes the appearance of Venice quite different from that of any other Italian town, and its charm is great. Nothing indeed can be prettier or more full of the delight of changing sunshine and shade, and of pleasant human life doing its work and having its joys in the sun, than to row through the narrower canals, and look into these wide open doors, and see in the glint and glimmer of the light reflected from the water the shadowy spaces full of men and women at work, of boys and girls playing, of tiny fishermen and tiny bathers making the bright waters that lap their open doors their playing and their working place. The freshness, the breadth, the joyous movement of the sea, fill their dwelling, regulate their life, mould their character, and set the seal of the witchery of the sea on all they feel and all they do.

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This is the charm which the Architecture of Venice derives from the sea. How far Venetian Painting was influenced by the position of Venice on the sea, what charm it derived from the life of the sea, and how far the sea was the subject of the artists, is now the question. It is not easy to answer it, for the influence of the sea position was not direct but indirect. It did not make the painters of Venice desire to paint the sea or to care for it as our modern temper does, but it created, I think, a certain spiritual or imaginative influence in their soul, other than that produced by the landscape of the land, which, it may be quite unconsciously, entered into their art-work and had power over it.

The landscape that Cima, Basaiti, Giovanni Bellini, Catena, loved and painted, that Giorgione, Bonifazio, and Veronese placed in the distance of their pictures, was that of the mainland, of the spurs of the hills as they dipped into the Lombard plain, of the lovely network of rock and plain, river and woodland, of scattered castles and of white towns on the hilltops, which one sees from the heights of Verona. On the other hand, Titian painted the landscape of his native land, where the torrent comes down through the massive chestnuts of Cadore; where the gray limestone peaks leap upwards thousands of feet, and follow one another, like the waves of the sea in the tempest; and the huge boulders, ablaze with coloured lichen lie like resting beasts on the short sweet grass in the green shade of walnut trees, and the rude farmhouses stand beside the groves of oak and beech. These were his delight, but the sea is not in his work nor in that of his fellows.

What does touch the sea in their pictures are the skies they painted above this inland landscape. Their freedom, their diffused softness, their lofty arch, their bright and vast expanse, their lucid atmosphere, their silver subtlety, and their involved and mighty storm-clouds, are the creation of the wide and moving sea. Carpaccio and Catena paint the pale and trembling azure above the afternoon on the seacoast. Giorgione has recorded the dark purple thunder-clouds which climb with eager speed from the horizon of the sea to threaten the works of men. Cima of Conegliano paints the clustered flocks of white cloudlets in a clear pale sky which are common in the Venetian heavens, and which are born of the sea. Veronese paints the pure, cloudless, deep blue sky swept clean by the sea-wind, and under which the sea is radiant. In other pictures he paints a sky often seen over the Adriatic. It is indeed a seaside sky--blue with flat white stratus across the blue, calm, and trembling with reflections cast up from the sea. But Titian stands apart. His skies are of his own mountain valley. The splendours of the mountain rain, the whirling of the mountain-clouds belong to him alone.

The “softness and freedom,” so characteristic of the art of the great Venetian colourists that the phrase has almost passed into a proverb, did not belong to the earlier schools of Venice. These qualities came into her art with the advent of the New Learning, which reached Venice even earlier than it reached Florence, though it was less developed there than in Florence. As to freedom, the Spirit of the Renaissance set free the imagination of the artists, and kindled in them a more vivid interest in humanity, even in natural scenery. The intellectual freedom it brought belonged to every city which it touched. It belonged above all to Venice. The spirit of a sea-people is by nature more free than the spirit of the people of the plains. It is as free as the spirit of a mountain folk. And such a spirit entered into the painting of the artists of Venice, as it did into the life of its citizens. They painted with more boldness, originality and fire than the inland schools. The passion of the various, even of the reckless, sea was in their heart. And this passion was in tune with the intellectual freedom the New Learning brought to Venice.

As to the softness which distinguished the Venetians, it was chiefly shown in a passion for various, noble, and harmonized colour, suffused, even to its darkest shadow, with soft and glowing light. And Venice was already, from its eastern associations, the lover of rich colour, softly gradated, in buildings, boats, and dress. And then, beyond this, the colour of its seas and skies, as indeed always near the southern coasts, was tender, subtle, delicate alike when it was strong or evanescent, soft as a child’s cheek in slumber, but always glowing. Day by day, this warm softness of colour was instilled into the artists and nourished by the sea-nature of the place. It was a spirit in their pallet and their pencil.

The capacity for receiving such an impression was strengthened by the circumstances under which it was received. There is no place where the reception of the elements of beauty derived from Nature is so easy, undistracted, and uninterrupted as in Venice. Gliding in a gondola is very different from riding, driving, or walking. It ministers to receptivity.

Then there is the deep silence of the lagoon, in which the spirit of Nature most speaks to man, not only by night but by day. We may be as quiet on the Venetian lagoons--with all the sense of sight open to receive, with the soul undisturbed by the challenge of human sounds--as we should be in the heart of a Highland glen. All that Nature displays of colour, form, or fancy; her mystery, her wild or mocking charm, her solemn silence fraught with thought--sinks deep into the heart when sunrise or sunset or starlight find us far out on the lagoon. A whole boatful of gay people are hushed as by a spell. This ease, then, in the reception of impressions on the senses, the quietude in which they are received, the soft magic in the quietude, the freedom of the waters, filled the soul of the Venetian artists, and made, as it were, the atmosphere which their art breathed, and the inner spirit of their pictures. It was one of the forces which made their work not only softer and freer, but more vivid and passionate than that of any other school in Italy.

Again, every one knows that the Venetian painters brought colour to a greater perfection than it attained elsewhere. It came to them from the lavish colouring of the city of which I have already written, from the gorgeousness of the pageants, but chiefly from the natural scenery of their home. It is true, they painted man rather than Nature. But they felt her loveliness, and the deepest impression they received from her daily work was of the glory and ravishment, glow and depth of colour, varied from the most delicate to the most sombre hues in sea and sky and along the distant range of Alpine summits. In the city itself, from canal to canal, all the shadows are transfused with a glimmer of blue light, or full of crimson and green fire. It is the presence and power of the water which produces this. Over the sea, the blue of the waters is like that of the sapphire throne Ezekiel saw above the terrible crystal of the firmament. It is not terrible here, but deep and tender; and, when storm is at hand, of a purple so solemn that Tintoret often uses it for the garments of those in tragic sorrow. But it was chiefly on the lagoon that the artists saw the richest and softest colour. In subdued sunlight, such as is frequent in the haze of the sea, the soft silvery, pearly grays vary infinitely over the smooth waters. In fresher and brighter days when the wind brings the flying clouds, the colour is that which is native to a sea-atmosphere, often clear, often thrilling through veils of ruby, sapphire, and emerald vapour, steeped always in the diffused light which is felt, like joy, over wide spaces of water, and under a vast expanse of sky. To these constant impressions we owe in part the extraordinary luminousness, glow, interfusion, subtlety, tenderness, splendour in height and depth of colour in the pictures of the great Venetians.

Another characteristic of Venetian painting is also derived from the charming of the sea. It is the intense glow of the flesh colour. The deep warmth and ruddy light which seem to come from within the body to the skin in the figures of these painters, were studied direct from Nature. It is the colour of the naked body of the Venetian fishers to this day. And nothing that I know of produces it but the influence of the sea-winds combined with sunlight, and of the sunlight reflected from the waters in a soft and gracious climate. We may see something like this colour, in its coarse extreme, in the faces and hands of the boatmen on our coasts. Sea and sun have there worked with a fierce and racking climate to produce the colour, but to destroy its beauty by destroying the texture of the skin. But, at Venice, these natural forces work in a climate which does not injure the skin; and they overlay its surface with a glow of red and golden colour which is one of the loveliest hues in the world, and has the special qualities of depth and life, even of a certain passion.

There is more opportunity in Venice for its formation than in other southern sea-ports. All through the summer and autumn the Venetian youths of the people spend their time all but naked in the water. They walk, ankle-deep, over the shallows of the lagoons, fishing for sea-plunder. The men work on the embankments only in their shirts. Half their life they are practically naked;--and to look at one of these young Venetian fishers, standing in the blaze of the sun, with the greenish water glistening round him, its reflections playing on his glowing limbs, and all his body flaming soft as from an inward fire--is to see the very thing which Giorgione painted on the walls of palaces, which Bellini and Giorgione handed on to their followers, which Titian and Tintoret laid on their canvas and emblazoned in their fresco. They worked into their painting of the human body what they saw every day, and other schools of art did not attain the glory of flesh-colour Venice attained, because they did not see it.

The naked body of the Bacchus of Tintoret, who comes wading through the lagoon water to meet Ariadne, is differently, but as richly and nobly, coloured as that of the Bacchus of Titian in the National Gallery. Reflections from the water glow and quiver on his limbs. He is truly a creature of dew and fire. There is a young and naked St. Sebastian by Titian at the Salute which might stand for one of the fishers of the lagoon. His long wet hair streams dark on his shoulders. In his face is all the freedom of the sea, and the soft warm rich glow of his body and limbs is indescribable. He is not St. Sebastian, but one of the gods of the peaceful sea.

When Giovanni Bellini painted the naked body, there is nothing better in colour in the whole world. In San Grisostomo the Saint sits in front of the bending stem of a great fig tree, on which he rests his book. His white beard flows down over his breast. Bellini’s certainty, firmness, enduringness of colour, are here at their very best. The glow and subdued flaming of the flesh, varied from point to point with an exquisite joy in the work, is beautiful beyond all praise. The glow of Giorgione’s flesh-colour is as deep, but thrilled through with a greater softness. In Tintoret’s hands the flesh-colour became more sombre, and in the faces of his many portraits had a curious dignity, as if, I have often thought, the royalty of the Sun had entered into it.