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Title: Stones of Venice [introductions]
Author: John Ruskin
Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9804]
First Posted: October 19, 2003
Last Updated: February 12, 2019
Language: English
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STONES OF VENICE
By John Ruskin
CONTENTS
THE STONES OF VENICE:
PREFACE.
THE STONES OF VENICE
CHAPTER I. — THE QUARRY.
CHAPTER II. — THE THRONE.
CHAPTER III. — TORCELLO.
CHAPTER IV. — ST. MARK'S.
CHAPTER V. — THE DUCAL PALACE.
NOTE.
THE STONES OF VENICE:
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS AND LOCAL INDICES
(PRINTED SEPARATELY)
FOR THE USE OF TRAVELLERS WHILE STAYING IN VENICE AND VERONA.
PREFACE.
This volume is the first of a series designed by the Author with the
purpose of placing in the hands of the public, in more serviceable form,
those portions of his earlier works which he thinks deserving of a
permanent place in the system of his general teaching. They were at first
intended to be accompanied by photographic reductions of the principal
plates in the larger volumes; but this design has been modified by the
Author's increasing desire to gather his past and present writings into a
consistent body, illustrated by one series of plates, purchasable in
separate parts, and numbered consecutively. Of other prefatory matter,
once intended,—apologetic mostly,—the reader shall be spared
the cumber: and a clear prospectus issued by the publisher of the new
series of plates, as soon as they are in a state of forwardness.
The second volume of this edition will contain the most useful matter out
of the third volume of the old one, closed by its topical index, abridged
and corrected.
BRANTWOOD,
3rd May, 1879.
THE STONES OF VENICE
CHAPTER I. — THE QUARRY.
[FIRST OF THE OLD EDITION.]
SECTION I. Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean,
three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands:
the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great
powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which
inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through
prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.
The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for
us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets of
Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a lovely
song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning: for the very
depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we forget, as
we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and the sea, that
they were once "as in Eden, the garden of God."
Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance
of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her
decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak—so quiet,—so
bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched
her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and
which the Shadow.
I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever
lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be
uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing
bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.
SECTION II. It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons
which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this
strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of
countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,—barred
with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where
the surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in
which we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their
results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear
upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind than that
usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may, perhaps, in the
outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to form a clearer idea
of the importance of every existing expression of Venetian character
through Venetian art, and of the breadth of interest which the true
history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have gleaned from the
current fables of her mystery or magnificence.
SECTION III. Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so
during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including
the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing
severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the
change in the form of her government, or altogether as assuredly in great
part, to changes, in the character of the persons of whom it was composed.
The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years, from
the first establishment of a consular government on the island of the
Rialto, [Footnote: Appendix I., "Foundations of Venice."] to the moment
when the General-in-chief of the French army of Italy pronounced the
Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of this period, Two Hundred and
Seventy-six years [Footnote: Appendix II., "Power of the Doges."] were
passed in a nominal subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially to
Padua, and in an agitated form of democracy, of which the executive
appears to have been entrusted to tribunes, [Footnote: Sismondi, Hist. des
Rép. Ital., vol. i. ch. v.] chosen, one by the inhabitants of each of the
principal islands. For six hundred years, [Footnote: Appendix III.,
"Serrar del Consiglio."] during which the power of Venice was continually
on the increase, her government was an elective monarchy, her King or doge
possessing, in early times at least, as much independent authority as any
other European sovereign, but an authority gradually subjected to
limitation, and shortened almost daily of its prerogatives, while it
increased in a spectral and incapable magnificence. The final government
of the nobles, under the image of a king, lasted for five hundred years,
during which Venice reaped the fruits of her former energies, consumed
them,—and expired.
SECTION IV. Let the reader therefore conceive the existence of the
Venetian state as broadly divided into two periods: the first of nine
hundred, the second of five hundred years, the separation being marked by
what was called the "Serrar del Consiglio;" that is to say, the final and
absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty, and the
establishment of the government in their hands to the exclusion alike of
the influence of the people on the one side, and the authority of the doge
on the other.
Then the first period, of nine hundred years, presents us with the most
interesting spectacle of a people struggling out of anarchy into order and
power; and then governed, for the most part, by the worthiest and noblest
man whom they could find among them, [Footnote:﹃Ha saputo trovar modo che
non uno, non pochi, non molti, signoreggiano, ma molti buoni, pochi
migliori, e insiememente, un ottimo solo.﹄(Sansovino,) Ah,
well done, Venice! Wisdom this, indeed.] called their Doge or Leader, with
an aristocracy gradually and resolutely forming itself around him, out of
which, and at last by which, he was chosen; an aristocracy owing its
origin to the accidental numbers, influence, and wealth of some among the
families of the fugitives from the older Venetia, and gradually organizing
itself, by its unity and heroism, into a separate body.
This first period includes the rise of Venice, her noblest achievements,
and the circumstances which determined her character and position among
European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated, we
find the names of all her hero princes,—of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo
Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.
SECTION V. The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the
most eventful in the career of Venice—the central struggle of her
life—stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara—disturbed
by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of Falier—oppressed
by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza—and distinguished by the
glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this period the heroism of her
citizens replaces that of her monarchs), Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno.
I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo
Zeno, 8th May, 1418; [Footnote: Daru, liv. xii. ch. xii.] the visible
commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the
Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari
followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large
acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in
Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the
battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio. In 1454,
Venice, the first of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the
Turk in the same year was established the Inquisition of State, [Footnote:
Daru, liv. xvi. cap. xx. We owe to this historian the discovery of the
statutes of the tribunal and date of its establishment.] and from this
period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious form under which
it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish invasion spread terror
to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508 the league of Cambrai marks the
period usually assigned as the commencement of the decline of the Venetian
power; [Footnote: Ominously signified by their humiliation to the Papal
power (as before to the Turkish) in 1509, and their abandonment of their
right of appointing the clergy of their territories.] the commercial
prosperity of Venice in the close of the fifteenth century blinding her
historians to the previous evidence of the diminution of her internal
strength.
SECTION VI. Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between
the establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the
diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question
at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or
determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple
question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of
individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation, of the
Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the oligarchy
itself be not the sign and evidence, rather than the cause, of national
enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of Venice
might not be written almost without reference to the construction of her
senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the history of a people
eminently at unity in itself, descendants of Roman race, long disciplined
by adversity, and compelled by its position either to live nobly or to
perish:—for a thousand years they fought for life; for three hundred
they invited death: their battle was rewarded, and their call was heard.
SECTION VII. Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and, at
many periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism; and
the man who exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her king,
sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter, nor to her: the
real question is, not so much what names they bore, or with what powers
they were entrusted, as how they were trained; how they were made masters
of themselves, servants of their country, patient of distress, impatient
of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the change from the time when
she could find saviours among those whom she had cast into prison, to that
when the voices of her own children commanded her to sign covenant with
Death. [Footnote: The senate voted the abdication of their authority by a
majority of 512 to 14. (Alison, ch. xxiii.)]
SECTION VIII. On this collateral question I wish the reader's mind to be
fixed throughout all our subsequent inquiries. It will give double
interest to every detail: nor will the interest be profitless; for the
evidence which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be
both frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of her political
prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual
religion.
I say domestic and individual; for—and this is the second point
which I wish the reader to keep in mind—the most curious phenomenon
in all Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and
its deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or
fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to
last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only
aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial
interest,—this the one motive of all her important political acts,
or enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor,
but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her
conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their facility.
The fame of success remains; when the motives of attempt are forgotten;
and the casual reader of her history may perhaps be surprised to be
reminded, that the expedition which was commanded by the noblest of her
princes, and whose results added most to her military glory, was one in
which while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its devotion,
she first calculated the highest price she could exact from its piety for
the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement of her own
private interests, at once broke her faith [Footnote: By directing the
arms of the Crusaders against a Christian prince. (Daru, liv. iv. ch. iv.
viii.)] and betrayed her religion.
SECTION IX. And yet, in the midst of this national criminality, we shall
be struck again and again by the evidences of the most noble individual
feeling. The tears of Dandolo were not shed in hypocrisy, though they
could not blind him to the importance of the conquest of Zara. The habit
of assigning to religion a direct influence over all his own
actions, and all the affairs of his own daily life, is remarkable
in every great Venetian during the times of the prosperity of the state;
nor are instances wanting in which the private feeling of the citizens
reaches the sphere of their policy, and even becomes the guide of its
course where the scales of expediency are doubtfully balanced. I sincerely
trust that the inquirer would be disappointed who should endeavor to trace
any more immediate reasons for their adoption of the cause of Alexander
III. against Barbarossa, than the piety which was excited by the character
of their suppliant, and the noble pride which was provoked by the
insolence of the emperor. But the heart of Venice is shown only in her
hastiest councils; her worldly spirit recovers the ascendency whenever she
has time to calculate the probabilities of advantage, or when they are
sufficiently distinct to need no calculation; and the entire subjection of
private piety to national policy is not only remarkable throughout the
almost endless series of treacheries and tyrannies by which her empire was
enlarged and maintained, but symbolized by a very singular circumstance in
the building of the city itself. I am aware of no other city of Europe in
which its cathedral was not the principal feature. But the principal
church in Venice was the chapel attached to the palace of her prince, and
called the "Chiesa Ducale." The patriarchal church, [Footnote: Appendix 4,
"San Pietro di Castello."] inconsiderable in size and mean in decoration,
stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian group, and its name, as well
as its site, is probably unknown to the greater number of travellers
passing hastily through the city. Nor is it less worthy of remark, that
the two most important temples of Venice, next to the ducal chapel, owe
their size and magnificence, not to national effort, but to the energy of
the Franciscan and Dominican monks, supported by the vast organization of
those great societies on the mainland of Italy, and countenanced by the
most pious, and perhaps also, in his generation, the most wise, of all the
princes of Venice, [Footnote: Tomaso Mocenigo, above named, Section V.]
who now rests beneath the roof of one of those very temples, and whose
life is not satirized by the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor
has placed around his tomb.
SECTION X. There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which
we have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo
Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep, and constant tone of individual
religion characterizing the lives of the citizens of Venice in her
greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and
immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct even
of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a simplicity
of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which a man of the
world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that religious
feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his conduct. And we
find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy serenity of mind
and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and a habit of heroism
which never fails them, even when the immediate motive of action ceases to
be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this spirit the prosperity of the
state is exactly correspondent, and with its failure her decline, and that
with a closeness and precision which it will be one of the collateral
objects of the following essay to demonstrate from such accidental
evidence as the field of its inquiry presents. And, thus far, all is
natural and simple. But the stopping short of this religious faith when it
appears likely to influence national action, correspondent as it is, and
that most strikingly, with several characteristics of the temper of our
present English legislature, is a subject, morally and politically, of the
most curious interest and complicated difficulty; one, however, which the
range of my present inquiry will not permit me to approach, and for the
treatment of which I must be content to furnish materials in the light I
may be able to throw upon the private tendencies of the Venetian
character.
SECTION XI. There is, however, another most interesting feature in the
policy of Venice which will be often brought before us; and which a
Romanist would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely,
the magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the
temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid
survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama
to which I have already alluded, closed by that ever memorable scene in
the portico of St. Mark's, [Footnote:
"In that temple porch,
(The brass is gone, the porphyry remains,)
Did BARBAROSSA fling his mantle off,
And kneeling, on his neck receive the foot
Of the proud Pontiff—thus at last consoled
For flight, disguise, and many an aguish shake
On his stony pillow."
I need hardly say whence the lines are taken: Rogers' "Italy" has, I
believe, now a place in the best beloved compartment of all libraries, and
will never be removed from it. There is more true expression of the spirit
of Venice in the passages devoted to her in that poem, than in all else
that has been written of her.] the central expression in most men's
thoughts of the unendurable elevation of the pontifical power; it is true
that the proudest thoughts of Venice, as well as the insignia of her
prince, and the form of her chief festival, recorded the service thus
rendered to the Roman Church. But the enduring sentiment of years more
than balanced the enthusiasm of a moment; and the bull of Clement V.,
which excommunicated the Venetians and their doge, likening them to
Dathan, Abiram, Absalom, and Lucifer, is a stronger evidence of the great
tendencies of the Venetian government than the umbrella of the doge or the
ring of the Adriatic. The humiliation of Francesco Dandolo blotted out the
shame of Barbarossa, and the total exclusion of ecclesiastics from all
share in the councils of Venice became an enduring mark of her knowledge
of the spirit of the Church of Rome, and of her defiance of it.
To this exclusion of Papal influence from her councils, the Romanist will
attribute their irreligion, and the Protestant their success. [Footnote:
At least, such success as they had. Vide Appendix 5, "The Papal Power in
Venice."]
The first may be silenced by a reference to the character of the policy of
the Vatican itself; and the second by his own shame, when he reflects that
the English legislature sacrificed their principles to expose themselves
to the very danger which the Venetian senate sacrificed theirs to avoid.
SECTION XII. One more circumstance remains to be noted respecting the
Venetian government, the singular unity of the families composing it,—unity
far from sincere or perfect, but still admirable when contrasted with the
fiery feuds, the almost daily revolutions, the restless successions of
families and parties in power, which fill the annals of the other states
of Italy. That rivalship should sometimes be ended by the dagger, or
enmity conducted to its ends under the mask of law, could not but be
anticipated where the fierce Italian spirit was subjected to so severe a
restraint: it is much that jealousy appears usually unmingled with
illegitimate ambition, and that, for every instance in which private
passion sought its gratification through public danger, there are a
thousand in which it was sacrificed to the public advantage. Venice may
well call upon us to note with reverence, that of all the towers which are
still seen rising like a branchless forest from her islands, there is but
one whose office was other than that of summoning to prayer, and that one
was a watch-tower only [Footnote: Thus literally was fulfilled the promise
to St. Mark,—Pax e.] from first to last, while the palaces of the
other cities of Italy were lifted into sullen fortitudes of rampart, and
fringed with forked battlements for the javelin and the bow, the sands of
Venice never sank under the weight of a war tower, and her roof terraces
were wreathed with Arabian imagery, of golden globes suspended on the
leaves of lilies. [Footnote: The inconsiderable fortifications of the
arsenal are no exception to this statement, as far as it regards the city
itself. They are little more than a semblance of precaution against the
attack of a foreign enemy.]
SECTION XIII. These, then, appear to me to be the points of chief
general interest in the character and fate of the Venetian people. I would
next endeavor to give the reader some idea of the manner in which the
testimony of Art bears upon these questions, and of the aspect which the
arts themselves assume when they are regarded in their true connection
with the history of the state.
1st. Receive the witness of Painting.
It will be remembered that I put the commencement of the Fall of Venice as
far back as 1418.
Now, John Bellini was born in 1423, and Titian in 1480. John Bellini, and
his brother Gentile, two years older than he, close the line of the sacred
painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of religious faith animates
their works to the last. There is no religion in any work of Titian's:
there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or sympathies
either in himself, or in those for whom he painted. His larger sacred
subjects are merely themes for the exhibition of pictorial rhetoric,—composition
and color. His minor works are generally made subordinate to purposes of
portraiture. The Madonna in the church of the Frari is a mere lay figure,
introduced to form a link of connection between the portraits of various
members of the Pesaro family who surround her.
Now this is not merely because John Bellini was a religious man and Titian
was not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the school of
painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their artistic
feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own natural
characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up in faith;
Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the vital religion
of Venice had expired.
SECTION XIV. The vital religion, observe, not the formal. Outward
observance was as strict as ever; and doge and senator still were painted,
in almost every important instance, kneeling before the Madonna or St.
Mark; a confession of faith made universal by the pure gold of the
Venetian sequin. But observe the great picture of Titian's in the ducal
palace, of the Doge Antonio Grimani kneeling before Faith: there is a
curious lesson in it. The figure of Faith is a coarse portrait of one of
Titian's least graceful female models: Faith had become carnal. The eye is
first caught by the flash of the Doge's armor. The heart of Venice was in
her wars, not in her worship.
The mind of Tintoret, incomparably more deep and serious than that of
Titian, casts the solemnity of its own tone over the sacred subjects which
it approaches, and sometimes forgets itself into devotion; but the
principle of treatment is altogether the same as Titian's: absolute
subordination of the religious subject to purposes of decoration or
portraiture.
The evidence might be accumulated a thousandfold from the works of
Veronese, and of every succeeding painter,—that the fifteenth
century had taken away the religious heart of Venice.
SECTION XV. Such is the evidence of Painting. To collect that of
Architecture will be our task through many a page to come; but I must here
give a general idea of its heads.
Philippe de Commynes, writing of his entry into Venice in 1495, says,—
﹃Chascun me feit seoir au meillieu de ces deux ambassadeurs qui est
l'honneur d'Italie que d'estre au meillieu; et me menerent au long de la
grant rue, qu'ilz appellent le Canal Grant, et est bien large. Les gallees
y passent à travers et y ay veu navire de quatre cens tonneaux ou plus
pres des maisons: et est la plus belle rue que je croy qui soit en tout le
monde, et la mieulx maisonnee, et va le long de la ville. Les maisons sont
fort grandes et haultes, et de bonne pierre, et les anciennes toutes
painctes; les aul tres faictes depuis cent ans: toutes ont le devant de
marbre blanc, qui leur vient d'Istrie, à cent mils de la, et encores
maincte grant piece de porphire et de sarpentine sur le devant.... C'est
la plus triumphante cité que j'aye jamais veue et qui plus faict d'honneur
à ambassadeurs et estrangiers, et qui plus saigement se gouverne, et où le
service de Dieu est le plus sollennellement faict: et encores qu'il y
peust bien avoir d'aultres faultes, si croy je que Dieu les a en ayde pour
la reverence qu'ilz portent au service de l'Eglise.﹄[Footnote: Mémoires
de Commynes, liv. vii. ch. xviii.]
SECTION XVI. This passage is of peculiar interest, for two reasons.
Observe, first, the impression of Commynes respecting the religion of
Venice: of which, as I have above said, the forms still remained with some
glimmering of life in them, and were the evidence of what the real life
had been in former times. But observe, secondly, the impression instantly
made on Commynes' mind by the distinction between the elder palaces and
those built "within this last hundred years; which all have their fronts
of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away, and besides,
many a large piece of porphyry and serpentine upon their fronts."
On the opposite page I have given two of the ornaments of the palaces
which so struck the French ambassador. [Footnote: Appendix 6, "Renaissance
Ornaments."] He was right in his notice of the distinction. There had
indeed come a change over Venetian architecture in the fifteenth century;
and a change of some importance to us moderns: we English owe to it our
St. Paul's Cathedral, and Europe in general owes to it the utter
degradation or destruction of her schools of architecture, never since
revived. But that the reader may understand this, it is necessary that he
should have some general idea of the connection of the architecture of
Venice with that of the rest of Europe, from its origin forwards.
SECTION XVII. All European architecture, bad and good, old and new, is
derived from Greece through Rome, and colored and perfected from the East.
The history of architecture is nothing but the tracing of the various
modes and directions of this derivation. Understand this, once for all: if
you hold fast this great connecting clue, you may string all the types of
successive architectural invention upon it like so many beads. The Doric
and the Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all Romanesque,
massy-capitaled buildings—Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and what else
you can name of the kind; and the Corinthian of all Gothic, Early English,
French, German, and Tuscan. Now observe: those old Greeks gave the shaft;
Rome gave the arch; the Arabs pointed and foliated the arch. The shaft and
arch, the frame-work and strength of architecture, are from the race of
Japheth: the spirituality and sanctity of it from Ismael, Abraham, and
Shem.
SECTION XVIII. There is high probability that the Greek received his
shaft system from Egypt; but I do not care to keep this earlier derivation
in the mind of the reader. It is only necessary that he should be able to
refer to a fixed point of origin, when the form of the shaft was first
perfected. But it may be incidently observed, that if the Greeks did
indeed receive their Doric from Egypt, then the three families of the
earth have each contributed their part to its noblest architecture: and
Ham, the servant of the others, furnishes the sustaining or bearing
member, the shaft; Japheth the arch; Shem the spiritualization of both.
SECTION XIX. I have said that the two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are
the roots of all European architecture. You have, perhaps, heard of five
orders; but there are only two real orders, and there never can be any
more until doomsday. On one of these orders the ornament is convex: those
are Doric, Norman, and what else you recollect of the kind. On the other
the ornament is concave: those are Corinthian, Early English, Decorated,
and what else you recollect of that kind. The transitional form, in which
the ornamental line is straight, is the centre or root of both. All other
orders are varieties of those, or phantasms and grotesques altogether
indefinite in number and species. [Footnote: Appendix 7, "Varieties of the
Orders."]
SECTION XX. This Greek architecture, then, with its two orders, was
clumsily copied and varied by the Romans with no particular result, until
they begun to bring the arch into extensive practical service; except only
that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it, and the
Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often very
beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came Christianity: seized
upon the arch as her own; decorated it, and delighted in it; invented a
new Doric capital to replace the spoiled Roman one: and all over the Roman
empire set to work, with such materials as were nearest at hand, to
express and adorn herself as best she could. This Roman Christian
architecture is the exact expression of the Christianity of the time, very
fervid and beautiful—but very imperfect; in many respects ignorant,
and yet radiant with a strong, childlike light of imagination, which
flames up under Constantine, illumines all the shores of the Bosphorus and
the Aegean and the Adriatic Sea, and then gradually, as the people give
themselves up to idolatry, becomes Corpse-light. The architecture sinks
into a settled form—a strange, gilded, and embalmed repose: it, with
the religion it expressed; and so would have remained for ever,—sodoes remain, where its languor has been undisturbed. [Footnote: The
reader will find the weak points of Byzantine architecture shrewdly
seized, and exquisitely sketched, in the opening chapter of the most
delightful book of travels I ever opened,— Curzon's "Monasteries of
the Levant."] But rough wakening was ordained.
SECTION XXI. This Christian art of the declining empire is divided into
two great branches, western and eastern; one centred at Rome, the other at
Byzantium, of which the one is the early Christian Romanesque, properly so
called, and the other, carried to higher imaginative perfection by Greek
workmen, is distinguished from it as Byzantine. But I wish the reader, for
the present, to class these two branches of art together in his mind, they
being, in points of main importance, the same; that is to say, both of
them a true continuance and sequence of the art of old Rome itself,
flowing uninterruptedly down from the fountain-head, and entrusted always
to the best workmen who could be found—Latins in Italy and Greeks in
Greece; and thus both branches may be ranged under the general term of
Christian Romanesque, an architecture which had lost the refinement of
Pagan art in the degradation of the empire, but which was elevated by
Christianity to higher aims, and by the fancy of the Greek workmen endowed
with brighter forms. And this art the reader may conceive as extending in
its various branches over all the central provinces of the empire, taking
aspects more or less refined, according to its proximity to the seats of
government; dependent for all its power on the vigor and freshness of the
religion which animated it; and as that vigor and purity departed, losing
its own vitality, and sinking into nerveless rest, not deprived of its
beauty, but benumbed and incapable of advance or change.
SECTION XXII. Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While
in Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate
influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its
refinement, an impure form of it—a patois of Romanesque—was
carried by inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder
imitations of this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the
skirts of the empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of
their youth; and while, in the centre of Europe, a refined and purely
descended art was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a
barbarous and borrowed art was organizing itself into strength and
consistency. The reader must therefore consider the history of the work of
the period as broadly divided into two great heads: the one embracing the
elaborately languid succession of the Christian art of Rome; and the
other, the imitations of it executed by nations in every conceivable phase
of early organization, on the edges of the empire, or included in its now
merely nominal extent.
SECTION XXIII. Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not
susceptible of this influence; and when they burst over the Alps, appear,
like the Huns, as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with the
enervated Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with which they
mingle, without materially affecting its intellectual character. But
others, both south and north of the empire, had felt its influence, back
to the beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to the ice creeks of
the North Sea on the other. On the north and west the influence was of the
Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two nations, pre-eminent
above all the rest, represent to us the force of derived mind on either
side. As the central power is eclipsed, the orbs of reflected light gather
into their fulness; and when sensuality and idolatry had done their work,
and the religion of the empire was laid asleep in a glittering sepulchre,
the living light rose upon both horizons, and the fierce swords of the
Lombard and Arab were shaken over its golden paralysis.
SECTION XXIV. The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system
to the enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the Arab
was to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of worship. The
Lombard covered every church which he built with the sculptured
representations of bodily exercises—hunting and war. [Footnote:
Appendix 8, "The Northern Energy."] The Arab banished all imagination of
creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from their minarets,﹃There
is no god but God.﹄Opposite in their character and mission, alike in
their magnificence of energy, they came from the North, and from the
South, the glacier torrent and the lava stream: they met and contended
over the wreck of the Roman empire; and the very centre of the struggle,
the point of pause of both, the dead water of the opposite eddies, charged
with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck, is VENICE.
The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal
proportions—the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building
of the world.
SECTION XXV. The reader will now begin to understand something of the
importance of the study of the edifices of a city which includes, within
the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between the
three pre-eminent architectures of the world:—each architecture
expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet
necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.
SECTION XXVI. It will be part of my endeavor, in the following work, to
mark the various modes in which the northern and southern architectures
were developed from the Roman: here I must pause only to name the
distinguishing characteristics of the great families. The Christian Roman
and Byzantine work is round-arched, with single and well-proportioned
shafts; capitals imitated from classical Roman; mouldings more or less so;
and large surfaces of walls entirely covered with imagery, mosaic, and
paintings, whether of scripture history or of sacred symbols.
The Arab school is at first the same in its principal features, the
Byzantine workmen being employed by the caliphs; but the Arab rapidly
introduces characters half Persepolitan, half Egyptian, into the shafts
and capitals: in his intense love of excitement he points the arch and
writhes it into extravagant foliations; he banishes the animal imagery,
and invents an ornamentation of his own (called Arabesque) to replace it:
this not being adapted for covering large surfaces, he concentrates it on
features of interest, and bars his surfaces with horizontal lines of
color, the expression of the level of the Desert. He retains the dome, and
adds the minaret. All is done with exquisite refinement.
SECTION XXVII. The changes effected by the Lombard are more curious
still, for they are in the anatomy of the building, more than its
decoration. The Lombard architecture represents, as I said, the whole of
that of the northern barbaric nations. And this I believe was, at first,
an imitation in wood of the Christian Roman churches or basilicas. Without
staying to examine the whole structure of a basilica, the reader will
easily understand thus much of it: that it had a nave and two aisles, the
nave much higher than the aisles; that the nave was separated from the
aisles by rows of shafts, which supported, above, large spaces of flat or
dead wall, rising above the aisles, and forming the upper part of the
nave, now called the clerestory, which had a gabled wooden roof.
These high dead walls were, in Roman work, built of stone; but in the
wooden work of the North, they must necessarily have been made of
horizontal boards or timbers attached to uprights on the top of the nave
pillars, which were themselves also of wood. [Footnote: Appendix 9,
"Wooden Churches of the North."] Now, these uprights were necessarily
thicker than the rest of the timbers, and formed vertical square pilasters
above the nave piers. As Christianity extended and civilization increased,
these wooden structures were changed into stone; but they were literally
petrified, retaining the form which had been made necessary by their being
of wood. The upright pilaster above the nave pier remains in the stone
edifice, and is the first form of the great distinctive feature of
Northern architecture—the vaulting shaft. In that form the Lombards
brought it into Italy, in the seventh century, and it remains to this day
in St. Ambrogio of Milan, and St. Michele of Pavia.
SECTION XXVIII. When the vaulting shaft was introduced in the clerestory
walls, additional members were added for its support to the nave piers.
Perhaps two or three pine trunks, used for a single pillar, gave the first
idea of the grouped shaft. Be that as it may, the arrangement of the nave
pier in the form of a cross accompanies the superimposition of the
vaulting shaft; together with corresponding grouping of minor shafts in
doorways and apertures of windows. Thus, the whole body of the Northern
architecture, represented by that of the Lombards, may be described as
rough but majestic work, round-arched, with grouped shafts, added vaulting
shafts, and endless imagery of active life and fantastic superstitions.
SECTION XXIX. The glacier stream of the Lombards, and the following one
of the Normans, left their erratic blocks, wherever they had flowed; but
without influencing, I think, the Southern nations beyond the sphere of
their own presence. But the lava stream of the Arab, even after it ceased
to flow, warmed the whole of the Northern air; and the history of Gothic
architecture is the history of the refinement and spiritualization of
Northern work under its influence. The noblest buildings of the world, the
Pisan-Romanesque, Tuscan (Giottesque) Gothic, and Veronese Gothic, are
those of the Lombard schools themselves, under its close and direct
influence; the various Gothics of the North are the original forms of the
architecture which the Lombards brought into Italy, changing under the
less direct influence of the Arab.
SECTION XXX. Understanding thus much of the formation of the great
European styles, we shall have no difficulty in tracing the succession of
architectures in Venice herself. From what I said of the central character
of Venetian art, the reader is not, of course, to conclude that the Roman,
Northern, and Arabian elements met together and contended for the mastery
at the same period. The earliest element was the pure Christian Roman; but
few, if any, remains of this art exist at Venice; for the present city was
in the earliest times only one of many settlements formed on the chain of
marshy islands which extend from the mouths of the Isonzo to those of the
Adige, and it was not until the beginning of the ninth century that it
became the seat of government; while the cathedral of Torcello, though
Christian Roman in general form, was rebuilt in the eleventh century, and
shows evidence of Byzantine workmanship in many of its details. This
cathedral, however, with the church of Santa Fosca at Torcello, San
Giacomo di Rialto at Venice, and the crypt of St. Mark's, forms a distinct
group of buildings, in which the Byzantine influence is exceedingly
slight; and which is probably very sufficiently representative of the
earliest architecture on the islands.
SECTION XXXI. The Ducal residence was removed to Venice in 809, and the
body of St. Mark was brought from Alexandria twenty years later. The first
church of St. Mark's was, doubtless, built in imitation of that destroyed
at Alexandria, and from which the relics of the saint had been obtained.
During the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the architecture of
Venice seems to have been formed on the same model, and is almost
identical with that of Cairo under the caliphs, [Footnote: Appendix 10,
"Church of Alexandria."] it being quite immaterial whether the reader
chooses to call both Byzantine or both Arabic; the workmen being certainly
Byzantine, but forced to the invention of new forms by their Arabian
masters, and bringing these forms into use in whatever other parts of the
world they were employed.
To this first manner of Venetian architecture, together with such vestiges
as remain of the Christian Roman, I shall devote the first division of the
following inquiry. The examples remaining of it consist of three noble
churches (those of Torcello, Murano, and the greater part of St. Mark's),
and about ten or twelve fragments of palaces.
SECTION XXXII. To this style succeeds a transitional one, of a character
much more distinctly Arabian: the shafts become more slender, and the
arches consistently pointed, instead of round; certain other changes, not
to be enumerated in a sentence, taking place in the capitals and
mouldings. This style is almost exclusively secular. It was natural for
the Venetians to imitate the beautiful details of the Arabian
dwelling-house, while they would with reluctance adopt those of the mosque
for Christian churches.
I have not succeeded in fixing limiting dates for this style. It appears
in part contemporary with the Byzantine manner, but outlives it. Its
position is, however, fixed by the central date, 1180, that of the
elevation of the granite shafts of the Piazetta, whose capitals are the
two most important pieces of detail in this transitional style in Venice.
Examples of its application to domestic buildings exist in almost every
street of the city, and will form the subject of the second division of
the following essay.
SECTION XXXIII. The Venetians were always ready to receive lessons in
art from their enemies (else had there been no Arab work in Venice). But
their especial dread and hatred of the Lombards appears to have long
prevented them from receiving the influence of the art which that people
had introduced on the mainland of Italy. Nevertheless, during the practice
of the two styles above distinguished, a peculiar and very primitive
condition of pointed Gothic had arisen in ecclesiastical architecture. It
appears to be a feeble reflection of the Lombard-Arab forms, which were
attaining perfection upon the continent, and would probably, if left to
itself, have been soon merged in the Venetian-Arab school, with which it
had from the first so close a fellowship, that it will be found difficult
to distinguish the Arabian ogives from those which seem to have been built
under this early Gothic influence. The churches of San Giacopo dell' Orio,
San Giovanni in Bragora, the Carmine, and one or two more, furnish the
only important examples of it. But, in the thirteenth century, the
Franciscans and Dominicans introduced from the continent their morality
and their architecture, already a distinct Gothic, curiously developed
from Lombardic and Northern (German?) forms; and the influence of the
principles exhibited in the vast churches of St. Paul and the Frari began
rapidly to affect the Venetian-Arab school. Still the two systems never
became united; the Venetian policy repressed the power of the church, and
the Venetian artists resisted its example; and thenceforward the
architecture of the city becomes divided into ecclesiastical and civil:
the one an ungraceful yet powerful form of the Western Gothic, common to
the whole peninsula, and only showing Venetian sympathies in the adoption
of certain characteristic mouldings; the other a rich, luxuriant, and
entirely original Gothic, formed from the Venetian-Arab by the influence
of the Dominican and Franciscan architecture, and especially by the
engrafting upon the Arab forms of the most novel feature of the Franciscan
work, its traceries. These various forms of Gothic, the distinctive
architecture of Venice, chiefly represented by the churches of St. John
and Paul, the Frari, and San Stefano, on the ecclesiastical side, and by
the Ducal palace, and the other principal Gothic palaces, on the secular
side, will be the subject of the third division of the essay.
SECTION XXXIV. Now observe. The transitional (or especially Arabic)
style of the Venetian work is centralized by the date 1180, and is
transformed gradually into the Gothic, which extends in its purity from
the middle of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century;
that is to say, over the precise period which I have described as the
central epoch of the life of Venice. I dated her decline from the year
1418; Foscari became doge five years later, and in his reign the first
marked signs appear in architecture of that mighty change which Philippe
de Commynes notices as above, the change to which London owes St. Paul's,
Rome St. Peter's, Venice and Vicenza the edifices commonly supposed to be
their noblest, and Europe in general the degradation of every art she has
since practised.
SECTION XXXV. This change appears first in a loss of truth and vitality
in existing architecture all over the world. (Compare "Seven Lamps," chap.
ii.)
All the Gothics in existence, southern or northern, were corrupted at
once: the German and French lost themselves in every species of
extravagance; the English Gothic was confined, in its insanity, by a
strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian effloresced on the
main land into the meaningless ornamentation of the Certosa of Pavia and
the Cathedral of Como, (a style sometimes ignorantly called Italian
Gothic), and at Venice into the insipid confusion of the Porta della Carta
and wild crockets of St. Mark's. This corruption of all architecture,
especially ecclesiastical, corresponded with, and marked the state of
religion over all Europe,—the peculiar degradation of the Romanist
superstition, and of public morality in consequence, which brought about
the Reformation.
SECTION XXXVI. Against the corrupted papacy arose two great divisions of
adversaries, Protestants in Germany and England, Rationalists in France
and Italy; the one requiring the purification of religion, the other its
destruction. The Protestant kept the religion, but cast aside the heresies
of Rome, and with them her arts, by which last rejection he injured his
own character, cramped his intellect in refusing to it one of its noblest
exercises, and materially diminished his influence. It may be a serious
question how far the Pausing of the Reformation has been a consequence of
this error.
The Rationalist kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This
rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a
return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for
Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In
Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in Architecture
by Sansovino and Palladio.
SECTION XXXVII. Instant degradation followed in every direction,—a
flood of folly and hypocrisy. Mythologies ill understood at first, then
perverted into feeble sensualities, take the place of the representations
of Christian subjects, which had become blasphemous under the treatment of
men like the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity, nymphs
without innocence, men without humanity, gather into idiot groups upon the
polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets with
preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused
intellect; the base school of landscape [Footnote: Appendix II,
"Renaissance Landscape."] gradually usurps the place of the historical
painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,—the Alsatian
sublimities of Salvator, the confectionery idealities of Claude, the dull
manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps, and on the north
the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs,
fat cattle and ditchwater. And thus Christianity and morality, courage,
and intellect, and art all crumbling together into one wreck, we are
hurried on to the fall of Italy, the revolution in France, and the
condition of art in England (saved by her Protestantism from severer
penalty) in the time of George II.
SECTION XXXVIII. I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done
anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape
painting. But the harm which has been done by Claude and the Poussins is
as nothing when compared to the mischief effected by Palladio, Scamozzi,
and Sansovino. Claude and the Poussins were weak men, and have had no
serious influence on the general mind. There is little harm in their works
being purchased at high prices: their real influence is very slight, and
they may be left without grave indignation to their poor mission of
furnishing drawing-rooms and assisting stranded conversation. Not so the
Renaissance architecture. Raised at once into all the magnificence of
which it was capable by Michael Angelo, then taken up by men of real
intellect and imagination, such as Scamozzi, Sansovino, Inigo Jones, and
Wren, it is impossible to estimate the extent of its influence on the
European mind; and that the more, because few persons are concerned with
painting, and, of those few, the larger number regard it with slight
attention; but all men are concerned with architecture, and have at some
time of their lives serious business with it. It does not much matter that
an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture,
but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred
thousand in raising a ridiculous building. Nor is it merely wasted wealth
or distempered conception which we have to regret in this Renaissance
architecture: but we shall find in it partly the root, partly the
expression, of certain dominant evils of modern times—over-sophistication
and ignorant classicalism; the one destroying the healthfulness of general
society, the other rendering our schools and universities useless to a
large number of the men who pass through them.
Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most
corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the centre of
the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline the
source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of the
palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in the
eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation, and
graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in
her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the grave.
SECTION XXXIX. It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only that
effectual blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance.
Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere
else. This, therefore, will be the final purpose of the following essay. I
shall not devote a fourth section to Palladio, nor weary the reader with
successive chapters of vituperation; but I shall, in my account of the
earlier architecture, compare the forms of all its leading features with
those into which they were corrupted by the Classicalists; and pause, in
the close, on the edge of the precipice of decline, so soon as I have made
its depths discernible. In doing this I shall depend upon two distinct
kinds of evidence:—the first, the testimony borne by particular
incidents and facts to a want of thought or of feeling in the builders;
from which we may conclude that their architecture must be bad:—the
second, the sense, which I doubt not I shall be able to excite in the
reader, of a systematic ugliness in the architecture itself. Of the first
kind of testimony I shall here give two instances, which may be
immediately useful in fixing in the reader's mind the epoch above
indicated for the commencement of decline.
SECTION XL. I must again refer to the importance which I have above
attached to the death of Carlo Zeno and the doge Tomaso Mocenigo. The tomb
of that doge is, as I said, wrought by a Florentine; but it is of the same
general type and feeling as all the Venetian tombs of the period, and it
is one of the last which retains it. The classical element enters largely
into its details, but the feeling of the whole is as yet unaffected. Like
all the lovely tombs of Venice and Verona, it is a sarcophagus with a
recumbent figure above, and this figure is a faithful but tender portrait,
wrought as far as it can be without painfulness, of the doge as he lay in
death. He wears his ducal robe and bonnet—his head is laid slightly
aside upon his pillow—his hands are simply crossed as they fall. The
face is emaciated, the features large, but so pure and lordly in their
natural chiselling, that they must have looked like marble even in their
animation. They are deeply worn away by thought and death; the veins on
the temples branched and starting; the skin gathered in sharp folds; the
brow high-arched and shaggy; the eye-ball magnificently large; the curve
of the lips just veiled by the light mustache at the side; the beard
short, double, and sharp-pointed: all noble and quiet; the white
sepulchral dust marking like light the stern angles of the cheek and brow.
This tomb was sculptured in 1424, and is thus described by one of the most
intelligent of the recent writers who represent the popular feeling
respecting Venetian art.
『Of the Italian school is also the rich but ugly (ricco ma non
bel) sarcophagus in which repose the ashes of Tomaso Mocenigo.
It may be called one of the last links which connect the
declining art of the Middle Ages with that of the Renaissance,
which was in its rise. We will not stay to particularize the
defects of each of the seven figures of the front and sides,
which represent the cardinal and theological virtues; nor will
we make any remarks upon those which stand in the niches above
the pavilion, because we consider them unworthy both of the age
and reputation of the Florentine school, which was then with
reason considered the most notable in Italy.』[Footnote:
Selvatico, "Architettura di Venezia," p. 147.]
It is well, indeed, not to pause over these defects; but it might have
been better to have paused a moment beside that noble image of a king's
mortality.
SECTION XLI. In the choir of the same church, St. Giov. and Paolo, is
another tomb, that of the Doge Andrea Vendramin. This doge died in 1478,
after a short reign of two years, the most disastrous in the annals of
Venice. He died of a pestilence which followed the ravage of the Turks,
carried to the shores of the lagoons. He died, leaving Venice disgraced by
sea and land, with the smoke of hostile devastation rising in the blue
distances of Friuli; and there was raised to him the most costly tomb ever
bestowed on her monarchs.
SECTION XLII. If the writer above quoted was cold beside the statue of
one of the fathers of his country, he atones for it by his eloquence
beside the tomb of the Vendramin. I must not spoil the force of Italian
superlative by translation.
"Quando si guarda a quella corretta eleganza di profili e di
proporzioni, a quella squisitezza d'ornamenti, a quel certo
sapore antico che senza ombra d' imitazione traspareda tutta l'
opera"—&c. "Sopra ornatissimo zoccolo fornito di squisiti
intagli s' alza uno stylobate"—&c. "Sotto le colonne, il
predetto stilobate si muta leggiadramente in piedistallo, poi
con bella novita di pensiero e di effetto va coronato da un
fregio il piu gentile che veder si possa"—&c.『Non puossi
lasciar senza un cenno l' arca dove sta chiuso il doge;
capo lavoro di pensiero e di esecuzione,』etc.
There are two pages and a half of closely printed praise, of which the
above specimens may suffice; but there is not a word of the statue of the
dead from beginning to end. I am myself in the habit of considering this
rather an important part of a tomb, and I was especially interested in it
here, because Selvatico only echoes the praise of thousands. It is
unanimously declared the chef d'oeuvre of Renaissance sepulchral work, and
pronounced by Cicognara (also quoted by Selvatico).
"Il vertice a cui l'arti Veneziane si spinsero col ministero del
scalpello,"—"The very culminating point to which the Venetian
arts attained by ministry of the chisel."
To this culminating point, therefore, covered with dust and cobwebs, I
attained, as I did to every tomb of importance in Venice, by the ministry
of such ancient ladders as were to be found in the sacristan's keeping. I
was struck at first by the excessive awkwardness and want of feeling in
the fall of the hand towards the spectator, for it is thrown off the
middle of the body in order to show its fine cutting. Now the Mocenigo
hand, severe and even stiff in its articulations, has its veins finely
drawn, its sculptor having justly felt that the delicacy of the veining
expresses alike dignity and age and birth. The Vendramin hand is far more
laboriously cut, but its blunt and clumsy contour at once makes us feel
that all the care has been thrown away, and well it may be, for it has
been entirely bestowed in cutting gouty wrinkles about the joints. Such as
the hand is, I looked for its fellow. At first I thought it had been
broken off, but, on clearing away the dust, I saw the wretched effigy had
only one hand, and was a mere block on the inner side. The face,
heavy and disagreeable in its features, is made monstrous by its
semi-sculpture. One side of the forehead is wrinkled elaborately, the
other left smooth; one side only of the doge's cap is chased; one cheek
only is finished, and the other blocked out and distorted besides;
finally, the ermine robe, which is elaborately imitated to its utmost lock
of hair and of ground hair on the one side, is blocked out only on the
other: it having been supposed throughout the work that the effigy was
only to be seen from below, and from one side.
SECTION XLIII. It was indeed to be seen by nearly every one; and I do
not blame—I should, on the contrary, have praised—the sculptor
for regulating his treatment of it by its position; if that treatment had
not involved, first, dishonesty, in giving only half a face, a monstrous
mask, when we demanded true portraiture of the dead; and, secondly, such
utter coldness of feeling, as could only consist with an extreme of
intellectual and moral degradation: Who, with a heart in his breast, could
have stayed his hand as he drew the dim lines of the old man's countenance—unmajestic
once, indeed, but at least sanctified by the solemnities of death—could
have stayed his hand, as he reached the bend of the grey forehead, and
measured out the last veins of it at so much the zecchin.
I do not think the reader, if he has feeling, will expect that much talent
should be shown in the rest of his work, by the sculptor of this base and
senseless lie. The whole monument is one wearisome aggregation of that
species of ornamental flourish, which, when it is done with a pen, is
called penmanship, and when done with a chisel, should be called
chiselmanship; the subject of it being chiefly fat-limbed boys sprawling
on dolphins, dolphins incapable of swimming, and dragged along the sea by
expanded pocket-handkerchiefs.
But now, reader, comes the very gist and point of the whole matter. This
lying monument to a dishonored doge, this culminating pride of the
Renaissance art of Venice, is at least veracious, if in nothing else, in
its testimony to the character of its sculptor. He was banished from
Venice for forgery in 1487. [Footnote: Selvatico, p. 221.]
SECTION XLIV. I have more to say about this convict's work hereafter;
but I pass at present, to the second, slighter, but yet more interesting
piece of evidence, which I promised.
The ducal palace has two principal façades; one towards the sea, the other
towards the Piazzetta. The seaward side, and, as far as the seventh main
arch inclusive, the Piazzetta side, is work of the early part of the
fourteenth century, some of it perhaps even earlier; while the rest of the
Piazzetta side is of the fifteenth. The difference in age has been gravely
disputed by the Venetian antiquaries, who have examined many documents on
the subject, and quoted some which they never examined. I have myself
collated most of the written documents, and one document more, to which
the Venetian antiquaries never thought of referring,—the masonry of
the palace itself.
SECTION XLV. That masonry changes at the centre of the eighth arch from
the sea angle on the Piazzetta side. It has been of comparatively small
stones up to that point; the fifteenth century work instantly begins with
larger stones, "brought from Istria, a hundred miles away." [Footnote: The
older work is of Istrian stone also, but of different quality.] The ninth
shaft from the sea in the lower arcade, and the seventeenth, which is
above it, in the upper arcade, commence the series of fifteenth century
shafts. These two are somewhat thicker than the others, and carry the
party-wall of the Sala del Scrutinio. Now observe, reader. The face of the
palace, from this point to the Porta della Carta, was built at the
instance of that noble Doge Mocenigo beside whose tomb you have been
standing; at his instance, and in the beginning of the reign of his
successor, Foscari; that is to say, circa 1424. This is not disputed; it
is only disputed that the sea façade is earlier; of which, however, the
proofs are as simple as they are incontrovertible: for not only the
masonry, but the sculpture, changes at the ninth lower shaft, and that in
the capitals of the shafts both of the upper and lower arcade: the
costumes of the figures introduced in the sea façade being purely
Giottesque, correspondent with Giotto's work in the Arena Chapel at Padua,
while the costume on the other capitals is Renaissance-Classic: and the
lions' heads between the arches change at the same point. And there are a
multitude of other evidences in the statues of the angels, with which I
shall not at present trouble the reader.
SECTION XLVI. Now, the architect who built under Foscari, in 1424
(remember my date for the decline of Venice, 1418), was obliged to follow
the principal forms of the older palace. But he had not the wit to invent
new capitals in the same style; he therefore clumsily copied the old ones.
The palace has seventeen main arches on the sea façade, eighteen on the
Piazzetta side, which in all are of course carried by thirty-six pillars;
and these pillars I shall always number from right to left, from the angle
of the palace at the Ponte della Paglia to that next the Porta della
Carta. I number them in this succession, because I thus have the earliest
shafts first numbered. So counted, the 1st, the 18th, and the 36th, are
the great supports of the angles of the palace; and the first of the
fifteenth century series, being, as above stated, the 9th from the sea on
the Piazzetta side, is the 26th of the entire series, and will always in
future be so numbered, so that all numbers above twenty-six indicate
fifteenth century work, and all below it, fourteenth century, with some
exceptional cases of restoration.
Then the copied capitals are: the 28th, copied from the 7th; the 29th,
from the 9th; the 30th, from the 10th; the 31st, from the 8th; the 33d,
from the 12th; and the 34th, from the 11th; the others being dull
inventions of the 15th century, except the 36th; which is very nobly
designed.
SECTION XLVII. The capitals thus selected from the earlier portion of
the palace for imitation, together with the rest, will be accurately
described hereafter; the point I have here to notice is in the copy of the
ninth capital, which was decorated (being, like the rest, octagonal) with
figures of the eight Virtues:—Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice,
Temperance, Prudence, Humility (the Venetian antiquaries call it
Humanity!), and Fortitude. The Virtues of the fourteenth century are
somewhat hard-featured; with vivid and living expression, and plain
every-day clothes of the time. Charity has her lap full of apples (perhaps
loaves), and is giving one to a little child, who stretches his arm for it
across a gap in the leafage of the capital. Fortitude tears open a lion's
jaws; Faith lays her hand on her breast, as she beholds the Cross; and
Hope is praying, while above her a hand is seen emerging from sunbeams—the
hand of God (according to that of Revelations, "The Lord God giveth them
light"); and the inscription above is, "Spes optima in Deo."
SECTION XLVIII. This design, then, is, rudely and with imperfect
chiselling, imitated by the fifteenth century workmen: the Virtues have
lost their hard features and living expression; they have now all got
Roman noses, and have had their hair curled. Their actions and emblems
are, however, preserved until we come to Hope: she is still praying, but
she is praying to the sun only: The hand of God is gone.
Is not this a curious and striking type of the spirit which had then
become dominant in the world, forgetting to see God's hand in the light He
gave; so that in the issue, when the light opened into the Reformation on
the one side, and into full knowledge of ancient literature on the other,
the one was arrested and the other perverted?
SECTION XLIX. Such is the nature of the accidental evidence on which I
shall depend for the proof of the inferiority of character in the
Renaissance workmen. But the proof of the inferiority of the work itself
is not so easy, for in this I have to appeal to judgments which the
Renaissance work has itself distorted. I felt this difficulty very
forcibly as I read a slight review of my former work, "The Seven Lamps,"
in "The Architect:" the writer noticed my constant praise of St. Mark's:
"Mr. Ruskin thinks it a very beautiful building! We," said the Architect,
"think it a very ugly building." I was not surprised at the difference of
opinion, but at the thing being considered so completely a subject of
opinion. My opponents in matters of painting always assume that there is
such a thing as a law of right, and that I do not understand it: but my
architectural adversaries appeal to no law, they simply set their opinion
against mine; and indeed there is no law at present to which either they
or I can appeal. No man can speak with rational decision of the merits or
demerits of buildings: he may with obstinacy; he may with resolved
adherence to previous prejudices; but never as if the matter could be
otherwise decided than by a majority of votes, or pertinacity of
partisanship. I had always, however, a clear conviction that there was
a law in this matter: that good architecture might be indisputably
discerned and divided from the bad; that the opposition in their very
nature and essence was clearly visible; and that we were all of us just as
unwise in disputing about the matter without reference to principle, as we
should be for debating about the genuineness of a coin, without ringing
it. I felt also assured that this law must be universal if it were
conclusive; that it must enable us to reject all foolish and base work,
and to accept all noble and wise work, without reference to style or
national feeling; that it must sanction the design of all truly great
nations and times, Gothic or Greek or Arab; that it must cast off and
reprobate the design of all foolish nations and times, Chinese or Mexican,
or modern European: and that it must be easily applicable to all possible
architectural inventions of human mind. I set myself, therefore, to
establish such a law, in full belief that men are intended, without
excessive difficulty, and by use of their general common sense, to know
good things from bad; and that it is only because they will not be at the
pains required for the discernment, that the world is so widely encumbered
with forgeries and basenesses. I found the work simpler than I had hoped;
the reasonable things ranged themselves in the order I required, and the
foolish things fell aside, and took themselves away so soon as they were
looked in the face. I had then, with respect to Venetian architecture, the
choice, either to establish each division of law in a separate form, as I
came to the features with which it was concerned, or else to ask the
reader's patience, while I followed out the general inquiry first, and
determined with him a code of right and wrong, to which we might together
make retrospective appeal. I thought this the best, though perhaps the
dullest way; and in these first following pages I have therefore
endeavored to arrange those foundations of criticism, on which I shall
rest in my account of Venetian architecture, in a form clear and simple
enough to be intelligible even to those who never thought of architecture
before. To those who have, much of what is stated in them will be well
known or self-evident; but they must not be indignant at a simplicity on
which the whole argument depends for its usefulness. From that which
appears a mere truism when first stated, they will find very singular
consequences sometimes following,—consequences altogether
unexpected, and of considerable importance; I will not pause here to dwell
on their importance, nor on that of the thing itself to be done; for I
believe most readers will at once admit the value of a criterion of right
and wrong in so practical and costly an art as architecture, and will be
apt rather to doubt the possibility of its attainment than dispute its
usefulness if attained. I invite them, therefore, to a fair trial, being
certain that even if I should fail in my main purpose, and be unable to
induce in my reader the confidence of judgment I desire, I shall at least
receive his thanks for the suggestion of consistent reasons, which may
determine hesitating choice, or justify involuntary preference. And if I
should succeed, as I hope, in making the Stones of Venice touchstones, and
detecting, by the mouldering of her marble, poison more subtle than ever
was betrayed by the rending of her crystal; and if thus I am enabled to
show the baseness of the schools of architecture and nearly every other
art, which have for three centuries been predominant in Europe, I believe
the result of the inquiry may be serviceable for proof of a more vital
truth than any at which I have hitherto hinted. For observe: I said the
Protestant had despised the arts, and the Rationalist corrupted them. But
what has the Romanist done meanwhile? He boasts that it was the papacy
which raised the arts; why could it not support them when it was left to
its own strength? How came it to yield to Classicalism which was based on
infidelity, and to oppose no barrier to innovations, which have reduced
the once faithfully conceived imagery of its worship to stage decoration?
[Footnote: Appendix XII., "Romanist Modern Art."] Shall we not rather find
that Romanism, instead of being a promoter of the arts, has never shown
itself capable of a single great conception since the separation of
Protestantism from its side? [Footnote: Perfectly true: but the whole
vital value of the truth was lost by my sectarian ignorance. Protestantism
(so far as it was still Christianity, and did not consist merely in
maintaining one's own opinion for gospel) could not separate itself from
the Catholic Church. The so-called Catholics became themselves sectarians
and heretics in casting them out; and Europe was turned into a mere
cockpit, of the theft and fury of unchristian men of both parties; while
innocent and silent on the hills and fields, God's people in neglected
peace, everywhere and for ever Catholics, lived and died.] So long as,
corrupt though it might be, no clear witness had been borne against it, so
that it still included in its ranks a vast number of faithful Christians,
so long its arts were noble. But the witness was borne—the error
made apparent; and Rome, refusing to hear the testimony or forsake the
falsehood, has been struck from that instant with an intellectual palsy,
which has not only incapacitated her from any further use of the arts
which once were her ministers, but has made her worship the shame of its
own shrines, and her worshippers their destroyers. Come, then, if truths
such as these are worth our thoughts; come, and let us know, before we
enter the streets of the Sea city, whether we are indeed to submit
ourselves to their undistinguished enchantment, and to look upon the last
changes which were wrought on the lifted forms of her palaces, as we
should on the capricious towering of summer clouds in the sunset, ere they
sank into the deep of night; or, whether, rather, we shall not behold in
the brightness of their accumulated marble, pages on which the sentence of
her luxury was to be written until the waves should efface it, as they
fulfilled—"God has numbered thy kingdom, and finished it."
CHAPTER II. — THE THRONE.
[FIRST OF SECOND VOLUME IN OLD EDITION.]
SECTION I. In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in
which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the
countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of
the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he had surmounted,
the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered
among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for
turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time,
the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the
railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent,—in
those days, I say, when there was something more to be anticipated and
remembered in the first aspect of each successive halting-place, than a
new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder, there were few moments
of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveller than
that which, as I endeavored to describe in the close of the last chapter,
brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open
lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the city
itself was generally the source of some slight disappointment, for, seen
in this direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of
the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised
by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls
and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was
impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the
shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of
rippling lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets
bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the
masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of
heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to
be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not
such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or
sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power
of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and
changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun
declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named
"St. George of the Seaweed." As the boat drew nearer to the city, the
coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long,
low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but,
at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark
cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon;
two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about
their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above
Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north—a
wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a
wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of
Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck
opposite upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up
behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the
crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to
rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great
city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent
pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls
were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not
through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two
rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveller's sight
opened the long ranges of columned palaces,—each with its black boat
moored at the portal,—each with its image cast down, beneath its
feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies
of rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista,
the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the
palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine,
strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first,
before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry,﹃Ah!
Stali,﹄[Footnote: Appendix I, "The Gondolier's Cry."] struck sharp upon
the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met
over the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and
loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side, and when at last that
boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front
of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy
dome of Our Lady of Salvation, [Footnote: Appendix II, "Our Lady of
Salvation."] it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced
by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to
forget the darker truths of its history and its being. Well might it seem
that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the
enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters which encircled
her had been chosen for the mirror of her state, rather than the shelter
of her nakedness; and that all which in nature was wild or merciless,—Time
and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests,—had been won to adorn
her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that
beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the
hour-glass as well as of the sea.
SECTION II. And although the last few eventful years, fraught with
change to the face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their
influence on Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the
noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only
by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and
though many of her palaces are for ever defaced, and many in desecrated
ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried
traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has
been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin, and
to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are
little to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities of the
imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the
importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is ignoble, and
disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so
surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the imagination there must
be no permission during the task which is before us. The impotent feeling
of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild,
but never save the remains of those mightier ages to which they are
attached like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from the
magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their own
strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they are fond, are in
Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of discerning, the
objects of which they ought to have been attached. The Venice of modern
fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay,
a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No
prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved
sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs," which is the centre of the
Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto
under which the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue
which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors was
erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's
death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely
altered in the course of the last three centuries, that if Henry Dandolo
or Francis Foscari could be summoned from their tombs, and stood each on
the deck of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that renowned
entrance, the painter's favorite subject, the novelist's favorite scene,
where the water first narrows by the steps of the Church of La Salute,—the
mighty Doges would not know in what spot of the world they stood, would
literally not recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and
by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been brought down with
bitterness to the grave. The remains of their Venice lie hidden
behind the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its
dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and
lightless canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for
five hundred years, and must soon prevail over them for ever. It must be
our task to glean and gather them forth, and restore out of them some
faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous a thousand-fold than that
which now exists, yet not created in the day-dream of the prince, nor by
the ostentation of the noble, but built by iron hands and patient hearts,
contending against the adversity of nature and the fury of man, so that
its wonderfulness cannot be grasped by the indolence of imagination, but
only after frank inquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary
scene, whose restless tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the
birth of the city, but long denied her dominion.
SECTION III. When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no
feature by which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange
sweeping loop formed by the junction of the Alps and the Apennines, and
enclosing the great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain
upon itself causes a vast difference in the character of the distribution
of its débris on its opposite sides. The rock fragments and sediment which
the torrents on the north side of the Alps bear into the plains are
distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here and there
lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm substrata to
appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which descend from the
southern side of the High Alps, and from the northern slope of the
Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or mountain bay which the two
ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks out of their
battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer rain washes from
their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of the Lombardic
plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky barriers as a cup
fills with wine, but for two contrary influences which continually
depress, or disperse from its surface, the accumulation of the ruins of
ages.
SECTION IV. I will not tax the reader's faith in modern science by
insisting on the singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which
appears for many centuries to have taken place steadily and continually;
the main fact with which we have to do is the gradual transport, by the Po
and its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of the finer sediment to
the sea. The character of the Lombardic plains is most strikingly
expressed by the ancient walls of its cities, composed for the most part
of large rounded Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses of brick;
and was curiously illustrated in 1848, by the ramparts of these same
pebbles thrown up four or five feet high round every field, to check the
Austrian cavalry in the battle under the walls of Verona. The finer dust
among which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by the rivers, fed
into continual strength by the Alpine snow, so that, however pure their
waters may be when they issue from the lakes at the foot of the great
chain, they become of the color and opacity of clay before they reach the
Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once thrown down as they
enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low land along the eastern coast of
Italy. The powerful stream of the Po of course builds forward the fastest;
on each side of it, north and south, there is a tract of marsh, fed by
more feeble streams, and less liable to rapid change than the delta of the
central river. In one of these tracts is built RAVENNA, and in the other
VENICE.
SECTION V. What circumstances directed the peculiar arrangement of this
great belt of sediment in the earliest times, it is not here the place to
inquire. It is enough for us to know that from the mouths of the Adige to
those of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of from three
to five miles from the actual shore, a bank of sand, divided into long
islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this bank and the
true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and other
rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighborhood of
Venice, by the sea at high water, to the depth in most places of a foot or
a foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at low tide, but divided
by an intricate network of narrow and winding channels, from which the sea
never retires. In some places, according to the run of the currents, the
land has risen into marshy islets, consolidated, some by art, and some by
time, into ground firm enough to be built upon, or fruitful enough to be
cultivated: in others, on the contrary, it has not reached the sea-level;
so that, at the average low water, shallow lakelets glitter among its
irregularly exposed fields of seaweed. In the midst of the largest of
these, increased in importance by the confluence of several large river
channels towards one of the openings in the sea bank, the city of Venice
itself is built, on a clouded cluster of islands; the various plots of
higher ground which appear to the north and south of this central cluster,
have at different periods been also thickly inhabited, and now bear,
according to their size, the remains of cities, villages, or isolated
convents and churches, scattered among spaces of open ground, partly waste
and encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the
metropolis.
SECTION VI. The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet
(varying considerably with the seasons; [Footnote: Appendix III, "Tides of
Venice."]) but this fall, on so flat a shore, is enough to cause continual
movement in the waters, and in the main canals to produce a reflux which
frequently runs like a mill stream. At high water no land is visible for
many miles to the north or south of Venice, except in the form of small
islands crowned with towers or gleaming with villages: there is a channel,
some three miles wide, between the city and the mainland, and some mile
and a half wide between it and the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which
divides the lagoon from the Adriatic, but which is so low as hardly to
disturb the impression of the city's having been built in the midst of the
ocean, although the secret of its true position is partly, yet not
painfully, betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deep-water
channels, which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs
of huge sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and crowded
waves that flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the unlifted
level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely different at low tide. A
fall of eighteen or twenty inches is enough to show ground over the
greater part of the lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is seen
standing in the midst of a dark plain of seaweed, of gloomy green, except
only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams
converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain
the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more
than four or five feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the
heavier keels furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen
through the clear sea water like the ruts upon a. wintry road, and the oar
leaves blue gashes upon the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among
the thick weed that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves,
leaning to and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted tide. The
scene is often profoundly oppressive, even at this day, when every plot of
higher ground bears some fragment of fair building: but, in order to know
what it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at evening the
windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of the melancholy
plain; let him remove, in his imagination, the brightness of the great
city that still extends itself in the distance, and the walls and towers
from the islands that are near; and so wait, until the bright investiture
and, sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the waters, and the
black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night,
pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence,
except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools, or the
seabirds flit from their margins with a questioning cry; and he will be
enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart with which this
solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation. They little
thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and strewed the ocean
reeds for their rest, that their children were to be the princes of that
ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the great natural laws
that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be remembered what strange
preparation had been made for the things which no human imagination could
have foretold, and how the whole existence and fortune of the Venetian
nation were anticipated or compelled, by the setting of those bars and
doors to the rivers and the sea. Had deeper currents divided their
islands, hostile navies would again and again have reduced the rising city
into servitude; had stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness
and refinement of the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for
the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary sea-port. Had there been no tide, as
in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would
have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had
the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the
water-access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible: even
as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing
without setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps: and the highest
tides sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow the entrance halls.
Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood and ebb
would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a
treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of
water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily
intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city would
have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the peculiar
character of the place and the people destroyed.
SECTION VII. The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast
between this faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the
romantic conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he
have felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the
instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the wisdom
of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been permitted to
watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the
polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the
lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have
understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the
void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand!
How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most
distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the
mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how little
imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy margins
of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among their
shallows, there was indeed a preparation, and the only preparation
possible, for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden
clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white
scrolls of the sea-surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to gather
and give forth, in world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the
East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendor.
CHAPTER III. — TORCELLO.
[SECOND OF SECOND VOLUME IN OLD EDITION.]
SECTION I. Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which
near the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher
level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here
and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea.
One of the feeblest of these inlets, after winding for some time among
buried fragments of masonry, and knots of sunburnt weeds whitened with
webs of fucus, stays itself in an utterly stagnant pool beside a plot of
greener grass covered with ground ivy and violets. On this mound is built
a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic type, which if we
ascend towards evening (and there are none to hinder us, the door of its
ruinous staircase swinging idly on its hinges), we may command from it one
of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours. Far as the eye can
reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen gray; not like our
northern moors with their jet-black pools and purple heath, but lifeless,
the color of sackcloth, with the corrupted sea-water soaking through the
roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its
snaky channels. No gathering of fantastic mists, nor coursing of clouds
across it; but melancholy clearness of space in the warm sunset,
oppressive, reaching to the horizon of its level gloom. To the very
horizon, on the north-east; but, to the north and west, there is a blue
line of higher land along the border of it, and above this, but farther
back, a misty band of mountains, touched with snow. To the east, the
paleness and roar of the Adriatic, louder at momentary intervals as the
surf breaks on the bars of sand; to the south, the widening branches of
the calm lagoon, alternately purple and pale green, as they reflect the
evening clouds or twilight sky; and almost beneath our feet, on the same
field which sustains the tower we gaze from, a group of four buildings,
two of them little larger than cottages (though built of stone, and one
adorned by a quaint belfry), the third an octagonal chapel, of which we
can see but little more than the flat red roof with its rayed tiling, the
fourth, a considerable church with nave and aisles, but of which, in like
manner, we can see little but the long central ridge and lateral slopes of
roof, which the sunlight separates in one glowing mass from the green
field beneath and gray moor beyond. There are no living creatures near the
buildings, nor any vestige of village or city round about them. They lie
like a little company of ships becalmed on a far-away sea.
SECTION II. Then look farther to the south. Beyond the widening branches
of the lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather,
there are a multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set
shapes of clustered palaces, a long and irregular line fretting the
southern sky.
Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood,—TORCELLO
and VENICE.
Thirteen hundred years ago, the gray moorland looked as it does this day,
and the purple mountains stood as radiantly in the deep distances of
evening; but on the line of the horizon, there were strange fires mixed
with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human voices mixed with
the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand. The flames rose from
the ruins of Altinum; the lament from the multitude of its people,
seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the paths of the
sea.
The cattle are feeding and resting upon the site of the city that they
left; the mower's scythe swept this day at dawn over the chief street of
the city that they built, and the swathes of soft grass are now sending up
their scent into the night air, the only incense that fills the temple of
their ancient worship. Let us go down into that little space of meadow
land.
SECTION III. The inlet which runs nearest to the base of the campanile
is not that by which Torcello is commonly approached. Another, somewhat
broader, and overhung by alder copse, winds out of the main channel of the
lagoon up to the very edge of the little meadow which was once the Piazza
of the city, and there, stayed by a few grey stones which present some
semblance of a quay, forms its boundary at one extremity. Hardly larger
than an ordinary English farmyard, and roughly enclosed on each side by
broken palings and hedges of honeysuckle and briar, the narrow field
retires from the water's edge, traversed by a scarcely traceable footpath,
for some forty or fifty paces, and then expanding into the form of a small
square, with buildings on three sides of it, the fourth being that which
opens to the water. Two of these, that on our left and that in front of us
as we approach from the canal, are so small that they might well be taken
for the out-houses of the farm, though the first is a conventual building,
and the other aspires to the title of the "Palazzo publico," both dating
as far back as the beginning of the fourteenth century; the third, the
octagonal church of Santa Fosca, is far more ancient than either, yet
hardly on a larger scale. Though the pillars of the portico which
surrounds it are of pure Greek marble, and their capitals are enriched
with delicate sculpture, they, and the arches they sustain, together only
raise the roof to the height of a cattle-shed; and the first strong
impression which the spectator receives from the whole scene is, that
whatever sin it may have been which has on this spot been visited with so
utter a desolation, it could not at least have been ambition. Nor will
this impression be diminished as we approach, or enter, the larger church
to which the whole group of building is subordinate. It has evidently been
built by men in flight and distress, [Footnote: Appendix IV, "Date of the
Duomo of Torcello."] who sought in the hurried erection of their Island
church such a shelter for their earnest and sorrowful worship as, on the
one hand, could not attract the eyes of their enemies by its splendor, and
yet, on the other, might not awaken too bitter feelings by its contrast
with the churches which they had seen destroyed.
There is visible everywhere a simple and tender effort to recover some of
the form of the temples which they had loved, and to do honor to God by
that which they were erecting, while distress and humiliation prevented
the desire, and prudence precluded the admission, either of luxury of
ornament or magnificence of plan. The exterior is absolutely devoid of
decoration, with the exception only of the western entrance and the
lateral door, of which the former has carved sideposts and architrave, and
the latter, crosses of rich sculpture; while the massy stone shutters of
the windows, turning on huge rings of stone, which answer the double
purpose of stanchions and brackets, cause the whole building rather to
resemble a refuge from Alpine storm than the cathedral of a populous city;
and, internally, the two solemn mosaics of the eastern and western
extremities,—one representing the Last Judgment, the other the
Madonna, her tears falling as her hands are raised to bless,—and the
noble range of pillars which enclose the space between, terminated by the
high throne for the pastor and the semicircular raised seats for the
superior clergy, are expressive at once of the deep sorrow and the sacred
courage of men who had no home left them upon earth, but who looked for
one to come, of men "persecuted but not forsaken, cast down but not
destroyed."
SECTION IV. For observe this choice of subjects. It is indeed possible
that the walls of the nave and aisles, which are now whitewashed, may have
been covered with fresco or mosaic, and thus have supplied a series of
subjects, on the choice of which we cannot speculate. I do not, however,
find record of the destruction of any such works; and I am rather inclined
to believe that at any rate the central division of the building was
originally, decorated, as it is now, simply by mosaics representing
Christ, the Virgin, and the apostles, at one extremity, and Christ coming
to judgment at the other. And if so, I repeat, observe the significance of
this choice. Most other early churches are covered with imagery
sufficiently suggestive of the vivid interest of the builders in the
history and occupations of the world. Symbols or representations of
political events, portraits of living persons, and sculptures of
satirical, grotesque, or trivial subjects are of constant occurrence,
mingled with the more strictly appointed representations of scriptural or
ecclesiastical history; but at Torcello even these usual, and one should
have thought almost necessary, successions of Bible events do not appear.
The mind of the worshipper was fixed entirely upon two great facts, to him
the most precious of all facts,—the present mercy of Christ to His
Church, and His future coming to judge the world. That Christ's mercy was,
at this period, supposed chiefly to be attainable through the pleading of
the Virgin, and that therefore beneath the figure of the Redeemer is seen
that of the weeping Madonna in the act of intercession, may indeed be
matter of sorrow to the Protestant beholder, but ought not to blind him to
the earnestness and singleness of the faith with which these men sought
their sea-solitudes; not in hope of founding new dynasties, or entering
upon new epochs of prosperity, but only to humble themselves before God,
and to pray that in His infinite mercy He would hasten the time when the
sea should give up the dead which were in it, and Death and Hell give up
the dead which were in them, and when they might enter into the better
kingdom, "where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at
rest."
SECTION V. Nor were the strength and elasticity of their minds, even in
the least matters, diminished by thus looking forward to the close of all
things. On the contrary, nothing is more remarkable than the finish and
beauty of all the portions of the building, which seem to have been
actually executed for the place they occupy in the present structure. The
rudest are those which they brought with them from the mainland; the best
and most beautiful, those which appear to have been carved for their
island church: of these, the new capitals already noticed, and the
exquisite panel ornaments of the chancel screen, are the most conspicuous;
the latter form a low wall across the church between the six small shafts
whose places are seen in the plan, and serve to enclose a space raised two
steps above the level of the nave, destined for the singers, and indicated
also in the plan by an open line a b c d. The bas-reliefs on this
low screen are groups of peacocks and lions, two face to face on each
panel, rich and fantastic beyond description, though not expressive of
very accurate knowledge either of leonine or pavonine forms. And it is not
until we pass to the back of the stair of the pulpit, which is connected
with the northern extremity of this screen, that we find evidence of the
haste with which the church was constructed.
SECTION VI. The pulpit, however, is not among the least noticeable of
its features. It is sustained on the four small detached shafts marked at
pin the plan, between the two pillars at the north side of the
screen; both pillars and pulpit studiously plain, while the staircase
which ascends to it is a compact mass of masonry (shaded in the plan),
faced by carved slabs of marble; the parapet of the staircase being also
formed of solid blocks like paving-stones, lightened by rich, but not
deep, exterior carving. Now these blocks, or at least those which adorn
the staircase towards the aisle, have been brought from the mainland; and,
being of size and shape not easily to be adjusted to the proportions of
the stair, the architect has cut out of them pieces of the size he needed,
utterly regardless of the subject or symmetry of the original design. The
pulpit is not the only place where this rough procedure has been
permitted: at the lateral door of the church are two crosses, cut out of
slabs of marble, formerly covered with rich sculpture over their whole
surfaces, of which portions are left on the surface of the crosses; the
lines of the original design being, of course, just as arbitrarily cut by
the incisions between the arms, as the patterns upon a piece of silk which
has been shaped anew. The fact is, that in all early Romanesque work,
large surfaces are covered with sculpture for the sake of enrichment only;
sculpture which indeed had always meaning, because it was easier for the
sculptor to work with some chain of thought to guide his chisel, than
without any; but it was not always intended, or at least not always hoped,
that this chain of thought might be traced by the spectator. All that was
proposed appears to have been the enrichment of surface, so as to make it
delightful to the eye; and this being once understood, a decorated piece
of marble became to the architect just what a piece of lace or embroidery
is to a dressmaker, who takes of it such portions as she may require, with
little regard to the places where the patterns are divided. And though it
may appear, at first sight, that the procedure is indicative of bluntness
and rudeness of feeling,—we may perceive, upon reflection, that it
may also indicate the redundance of power which sets little price upon its
own exertion. When a barbarous nation builds its fortress-walls out of
fragments of the refined architecture it has overthrown, we can read
nothing but its savageness in the vestiges of art which may thus chance to
have been preserved; but when the new work is equal, if not superior, in
execution, to the pieces of the older art which are associated with it, we
may justly conclude that the rough treatment to which the latter have been
subjected is rather a sign of the hope of doing better things, than of
want of feeling for those already accomplished. And, in general, this
careless fitting of ornament is, in very truth, an evidence of life in the
school of builders, and of their making a due distinction between work
which is to be used for architectural effect, and work which is to possess
an abstract perfection; and it commonly shows also that the exertion of
design is so easy to them, and their fertility so inexhaustible, that they
feel no remorse in using somewhat injuriously what they can replace with
so slight an effort.
SECTION VII. It appears however questionable in the present instance,
whether, if the marbles had not been carved to his hand, the architect
would have taken the trouble to enrich them. For the execution of the rest
of the pulpit is studiously simple, and it is in this respect that its
design possesses, it seems to me, an interest to the religious spectator
greater than he will take in any other portion of the building. It is
supported, as I said, on a group of four slender shafts; itself of a
slightly oval form, extending nearly from one pillar of the nave to the
next, so as to give the preacher free room for the action of the entire
person, which always gives an unaffected impressiveness to the eloquence
of the southern nations. In the centre of its curved front, a small
bracket and detached shaft sustain the projection of a narrow marble desk
(occupying the place of a cushion in a modern pulpit), which is hollowed
out into a shallow curve on the upper surface, leaving a ledge at the
bottom of the slab, so that a book laid upon it, or rather into it,
settles itself there, opening as if by instinct, but without the least
chance of slipping to the side, or in any way moving beneath the
preacher's hands. Six balls, or rather almonds, of purple marble veined
with white are set round the edge of the pulpit, and form its only
decoration. Perfectly graceful, but severe and almost cold in its
simplicity, built for permanence and service, so that no single member, no
stone of it, could be spared, and yet all are firm and uninjured as when
they were first set together, it stands in venerable contrast both with
the fantastic pulpits of mediaeval cathedrals and with the rich furniture
of those of our modern churches. It is worth while pausing for a moment to
consider how far the manner of decorating a pulpit may have influence on
the efficiency of its service, and whether our modern treatment of this,
to us all-important, feature of a church be the best possible. [Footnote:
Appendix V., "Modern Pulpits."]
SECTION VIII. When the sermon is good we need not much concern ourselves
about the form of the pulpit. But sermons cannot always be good; and I
believe that the temper in which the congregation set themselves to listen
may be in some degree modified by their perception of fitness or
unfitness, impressiveness or vulgarity, in the disposition of the place
appointed for the speaker,—not to the same degree, but somewhat in
the same way, that they may be influenced by his own gestures or
expression, irrespective of the sense of what he says. I believe,
therefore, in the first place, that pulpits ought never to be highly
decorated; the speaker is apt to look mean or diminutive if the pulpit is
either on a very large scale or covered with splendid ornament, and if the
interest of the sermon should flag the mind is instantly tempted to
wander. I have observed that in almost all cathedrals, when the pulpits
are peculiarly magnificent, sermons are not often preached from them; but
rather, and especially if for any important purpose, from some temporary
erection in other parts of the building:—and though this may often
be done because the architect has consulted the effect upon the eye more
than the convenience of the ear in the placing of his larger pulpit, I
think it also proceeds in some measure from a natural dislike in the
preacher to match himself with the magnificence of the rostrum, lest the
sermon should not be thought worthy of the place. Yet this will rather
hold of the colossal sculptures, and pyramids of fantastic tracery which
encumber the pulpits of Flemish and German churches, than of the delicate
mosaics and ivory-like carving of the Romanesque basilicas, for when the
form is kept simple, much loveliness of color and costliness of work may
be introduced, and yet the speaker not be thrown into the shade by them.
SECTION IX. But, in the second place, whatever ornaments we admit ought
clearly to be of a chaste, grave, and noble kind; and what furniture we
employ, evidently more for the honoring of God's word than for the ease of
the preacher. For there are two ways of regarding a sermon, either as a
human composition, or a Divine message. If we look upon it entirely as the
first, and require our clergymen to finish it with their utmost care and
learning, for our better delight whether of ear or intellect, we shall
necessarily be led to expect much formality and stateliness in its
delivery, and to think that all is not well if the pulpit have not a
golden fringe round it, and a goodly cushion in front of it, and if the
sermon be not fairly written in a black book, to be smoothed upon the
cushion in a majestic manner before beginning; all this we shall duly come
to expect: but we shall at the same time consider the treatise thus
prepared as something to which it is our duty to listen without
restlessness for half an hour or three quarters, but which, when that duty
has been decorously performed, we may dismiss from our minds in happy
confidence of being provided with another when next it shall be necessary.
But if once we begin to regard the preacher, whatever his faults, as a man
sent with a message to us, which it is a matter of life or death whether
we hear or refuse; if we look upon him as set in charge over many spirits
in danger of ruin, and having allowed to him but an hour or two in the
seven days to speak to them; if we make some endeavor to conceive how
precious these hours ought to be to him, a small vantage on the side of
God after his flock have been exposed for six days together to the full
weight of the world's temptation, and he has been forced to watch the
thorn and the thistle springing in their hearts, and to see what wheat had
been scattered there snatched from the wayside by this wild bird and the
other, and at last, when breathless and weary with the week's labor they
give him this interval of imperfect and languid hearing, he has but thirty
minutes to get at the separate hearts of a thousand men, to convince them
of all their weaknesses, to shame them for all their sins, to warn them of
all their dangers, to try by this way and that to stir the hard fastenings
of those doors where the Master himself has stood and knocked yet none
opened, and to call at the openings of those dark streets where Wisdom
herself hath stretched forth her hands and no man regarded,—thirty
minutes to raise the dead in,—let us but once understand and feel
this, and we shall look with changed eyes upon that frippery of gay
furniture about the place from which the message of judgment must be
delivered, which either breathes upon the dry bones that they may live,
or, if ineffectual, remains recorded in condemnation, perhaps against the
utterer and listener alike, but assuredly against one of them. We shall
not so easily bear with the silk and gold upon the seat of judgment, nor
with ornament of oratory in the mouth of the messenger: we shall wish that
his words may be simple, even when they are sweetest, and the place from
which he speaks like a marble rock in the desert, about which the people
have gathered in their thirst.
SECTION X. But the severity which is so marked in the pulpit at Torcello
is still more striking in the raised seats and episcopal throne which
occupy the curve of the apse. The arrangement at first somewhat recalls to
the mind that of the Roman amphitheatres; the flight of steps which lead
up to the central throne divides the curve of the continuous steps or
seats (it appears in the first three ranges questionable which were
intended, for they seem too high for the one, and too low and close for
the other), exactly as in an amphitheatre the stairs for access intersect
the sweeping ranges of seats. But in the very rudeness of this
arrangement, and especially in the want of all appliances of comfort (for
the whole is of marble, and the arms of the central throne are not for
convenience, but for distinction, and to separate it more conspicuously
from the undivided seats), there is a dignity which no furniture of stalls
nor carving of canopies ever could attain, and well worth the
contemplation of the Protestant, both as sternly significative of an
episcopal authority which in the early days of the Church was never
disputed, and as dependent for all its impressiveness on the utter absence
of any expression either of pride or self-indulgence.
SECTION XI. But there is one more circumstance which we ought to
remember as giving peculiar significance to the position which the
episcopal throne occupies in this island church, namely, that in the minds
of all early Christians the Church itself was most frequently symbolized
under the image of a ship, of which the bishop was the pilot. Consider the
force which this symbol would assume in the imaginations of men to whom
the spiritual Church had become an ark of refuge in the midst of a
destruction hardly less terrible than that from which the eight souls were
saved of old, a destruction in which the wrath of man had become as broad
as the earth and as merciless as the sea, and who saw the actual and
literal edifice of the Church raked up, itself like an ark in the midst of
the waters. No marvel if with the surf of the Adriatic rolling between
them and the shores of their birth, from which they were separated for
ever, they should have looked upon each other as the disciples did when
the storm came down on the Tiberias Lake, and have yielded ready and
loving obedience to those who ruled them in His name, who had there
rebuked the winds and commanded stillness to the sea. And if the stranger
would yet learn in what spirit it was that the dominion of Venice was
begun, and in what strength she went forth conquering and to conquer, let
him not seek to estimate the wealth of her arsenals or number of her
armies, nor look upon the pageantry of her palaces, nor enter into the
secrets of her councils; but let him ascend the highest tier of the stern
ledges that sweep round the altar of Torcello, and then, looking as the
pilot did of old along the marble ribs of the goodly temple-ship, let him
repeople its veined deck with the shadows of its dead mariners, and strive
to feel in himself the strength of heart that was kindled within them,
when first, after the pillars of it had settled in the sand, and the roof
of it had been closed against the angry sky that was still reddened by the
fires of their homesteads,—first, within the shelter of its knitted
walls, amidst the murmur of the waste of waves and the beating of the
wings of the sea-birds round the rock that was strange to them,—rose
that ancient hymn, in the power of their gathered voices:
THE SEA IS HIS, AND HE MADE IT,
AND HIS HANDS PREPARED THE DRY LAND.
CHAPTER IV. — ST. MARK'S.
SECTION I. "And so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus." If as
the shores of Asia lessened upon his sight, the spirit of prophecy had
entered into the heart of the weak disciple who had turned back when his
hand was on the plough, and who had been judged, by the chiefest of
Christ's captains, unworthy thenceforward to go forth with him to the
work, [Footnote: Acts, xiii. 13; xv. 38, 39.] how wonderful would he have
thought it, that by the lion symbol in future ages he was to be
represented among men! how woful, that the war-cry of his name should so
often reanimate the rage of the soldier, on those very plains where he
himself had failed in the courage of the Christian, and so often dye with
fruitless blood that very Cypriot Sea, over whose waves, in repentance and
shame, he was following the Son of Consolation!
SECTION II. That the Venetians possessed themselves of his body in the
ninth century, there appears no sufficient reason to doubt, nor that it
was principally in consequence of their having done so, that they chose
him for their patron saint. There exists, however, a tradition that before
he went into Egypt he had founded the Church at Aquileia, and was thus, in
some sort, the first bishop of the Venetian isles and people. I believe
that this tradition stands on nearly as good grounds as that of St. Peter
having been the first bishop of Rome; [Footnote: The reader who desires to
investigate it may consult Galliciolli, "Delle Memorie Venete" (Venice,
1795), tom. ii. p. 332, and the authorities quoted by him.] but, as usual,
it is enriched by various later additions and embellishments, much
resembling the stories told respecting the church of Murano. Thus we find
it recorded by the Santo Padre who compiled the﹃Vite de' Santi spettanti
alle Chiese di Venezia,﹄[Footnote: Venice, 1761, tom. i. p. 126.] that
﹃St. Mark having seen the people of Aquileia well grounded in religion,
and being called to Rome by St. Peter, before setting off took with him
the holy bishop Hermagoras, and went in a small boat to the marshes of
Venice. There were at that period some houses built upon a certain high
bank called Rialto, and the boat being driven by the wind was anchored in
a marshy place, when St. Mark, snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of
an angel saying to him: 'Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body
rest.'﹄The angel goes on to foretell the building of﹃una stupenda, ne
più veduta Città;﹄but the fable is hardly ingenious enough to deserve
farther relation.
SECTION III. But whether St. Mark was first bishop of Aquileia or not,
St. Theodore was the first patron of the city; nor can he yet be
considered as having entirely abdicated his early right, as his statue,
standing on a crocodile, still companions the winged lion on the opposing
pillar of the piazzetta. A church erected to this Saint is said to have
occupied, before the ninth century, the site of St. Mark's; and the
traveller, dazzled by the brilliancy of the great square, ought not to
leave it without endeavoring to imagine its aspect in that early time,
when it was a green field cloister-like and quiet, [Footnote: St. Mark's
Place,﹃partly covered by turf, and planted with a few trees; and on
account of its pleasant aspect called Brollo or Broglio, that is to say,
Garden.﹄The canal passed through it, over which is built the bridge of
the Malpassi. Galliciolli, lib. I, cap. viii.] divided by a small canal,
with a line of trees on each side; and extending between the two churches
of St. Theodore and St. Geminian, as the little piazza, of Torcello lies
between its "palazzo" and cathedral.
SECTION IV. But in the year 813, when the seat of government was finally
removed to the Rialto, a Ducal Palace, built on the spot where the present
one stands, with a Ducal Chapel beside it, [Footnote: My authorities for
this statement are given below, in the chapter on the Ducal Palace.] gave
a very different character to the Square of St. Mark; and fifteen years
later, the acquisition of the body of the Saint, and its deposition in the
Ducal Chapel, perhaps not yet completed, occasioned the investiture of
that chapel with all possible splendor. St. Theodore was deposed from his
patronship, and his church destroyed, to make room for the aggrandizement
of the one attached to the Ducal Palace, and thenceforward known as﹃St.
Mark's.﹄[Footnote: In the Chronicles, "Sancti Marci Ducalis Cappella."]
SECTION V. This first church was however destroyed by fire, when the
Ducal Palace was burned in the revolt against Candiano, in 976. It was
partly rebuilt by his successor, Pietro Orseolo, on a larger scale; and
with the assistance of Byzantine architects, the fabric was carried on
under successive Doges for nearly a hundred years; the main building being
completed in 1071, but its incrustation with marble not till considerably
later. It was consecrated on the 8th of October, 1085, [Footnote: "To God
the Lord, the glorious Virgin Annunciate, and the Protector St. Mark."—Corner,
p. 14. It is needless to trouble the reader with the various authorities
for the above statements: I have consulted the best. The previous
inscription once existing on the church itself:
"Anno milleno transacto bisque trigeno
Desuper undecimo fuit facta primo,"
is no longer to be seen, and is conjectured by Corner, with much
probability, to have perished "in qualche ristauro."] according to
Sansovino and the author of the "Chiesa Ducale di S. Marco," in 1094
according to Lazari, but certainly between 1084 and 1096, those years
being the limits of the reign of Vital Falier; I incline to the
supposition that it was soon after his accession to the throne in 1085,
though Sansovino writes, by mistake, Ordelafo instead of Vital Falier.
But, at all events, before the close of the eleventh century the great
consecration of the church took place. It was again injured by fire in
1106, but repaired; and from that time to the fall of Venice there was
probably no Doge who did not in some slight degree embellish or alter the
fabric, so that few parts of it can be pronounced boldly to be of any
given date. Two periods of interference are, however, notable above the
rest: the first, that in which the Gothic school had superseded the
Byzantine towards the close of the fourteenth century, when the pinnacles,
upper archivolts, and window traceries were added to the exterior, and the
great screen, with various chapels and tabernacle-work, to the interior;
the second, when the Renaissance school superseded the Gothic, and the
pupils of Titian and Tintoret substituted, over one half of the church,
their own compositions for the Greek mosaics with which it was originally
decorated; [Footnote: Signed Bartolomeus Bozza, 1634, 1647, 1656, etc.]
happily, though with no good will, having left enough to enable us to
imagine and lament what they destroyed. Of this irreparable loss we shall
have more to say hereafter; meantime, I wish only to fix in the reader's
mind the succession of periods of alteration as firmly and simply as
possible.
SECTION VI. We have seen that the main body of the church may be broadly
stated to be of the eleventh century, the Gothic additions of the
fourteenth, and the restored mosaics of the seventeenth. There is no
difficulty in distinguishing at a glance the Gothic portions from the
Byzantine; but there is considerable difficulty in ascertaining how long,
during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, additions were
made to the Byzantine church, which cannot be easily distinguished from
the work of the eleventh century, being purposely executed in the same
manner. Two of the most important pieces of evidence on this point are, a
mosaic in the south transept, and another over the northern door of the
façade; the first representing the interior, the second the exterior, of
the ancient church.
SECTION VII. It has just been stated that the existing building was
consecrated by the Doge Vital Falier. A peculiar solemnity was given to
that of consecration, in the minds of the Venetian people, by what appears
to have been one of the best arranged and most successful impostures ever
attempted by the clergy of the Romish church. The body of St. Mark had,
without doubt, perished in the conflagration of 976; but the revenues of
the church depended too much upon the devotion excited by these relics to
permit the confession of their loss. The following is the account given by
Corner, and believed to this day by the Venetians, of the pretended
miracle by which it was concealed.
"After the repairs undertaken by the Doge Orseolo, the place in which the
body of the holy Evangelist rested had been altogether forgotten, so that
the Doge Vital Falier was entirely ignorant of the place of the venerable
deposit. This was no light affliction, not only to the pious Doge, but to
all the citizens and people; so that at last, moved by confidence in the
Divine mercy, they determined to implore, with prayer and fasting, the
manifestation of so great a treasure, which did not now depend upon any
human effort. A general fast being therefore proclaimed, and a solemn
procession appointed for the 25th day of June, while the people assembled
in the church interceded with God in fervent prayers for the desired boon,
they beheld, with as much amazement as joy, a slight shaking in the
marbles of a pillar (near the place where the altar of the Cross is now),
which, presently falling to the earth, exposed to the view of the
rejoicing people the chest of bronze in which the body of the Evangelist
was laid."
SECTION VIII. Of the main facts of this tale there is no doubt. They
were embellished afterwards, as usual, by many fanciful traditions; as,
for instance, that, when the sarcophagus was discovered, St. Mark extended
his hand out of it, with a gold ring on one of the fingers, which he
permitted a noble of the Dolfin family to remove; and a quaint and
delightful story was further invented of this ring, which I shall not
repeat here, as it is now as well known as any tale of the Arabian Nights.
But the fast and the discovery of the coffin, by whatever means effected,
are facts; and they are recorded in one of the best-preserved mosaics of
the north transept, executed very certainly not long after the event had
taken place, closely resembling in its treatment that of the Bayeux
tapestry, and showing, in a conventional manner, the interior of the
church, as it then was, filled by the people, first in prayer, then in
thanksgiving, the pillar standing open before them, and the Doge, in the
midst of them, distinguished by his crimson bonnet embroidered with gold,
but more unmistakably by the inscription "Dux" over his head, as uniformly
is the case in the Bayeux tapestry, and most other pictorial works of the
period. The church is, of course, rudely represented, and the two upper
stories of it reduced to a small scale in order to form a background to
the figures; one of those bold pieces of picture history which we in our
pride of perspective, and a thousand things besides, never dare attempt.
We should have put in a column or two of the real or perspective size, and
subdued it into a vague background: the old workman crushed the church
together that he might get it all in, up to the cupolas; and has,
therefore, left us some useful notes of its ancient form, though any one
who is familiar with the method of drawing employed at the period will not
push the evidence too far. The two pulpits are there, however, as they are
at this day, and the fringe of mosaic flowerwork which then encompassed
the whole church, but which modern restorers have destroyed, all but one
fragment still left in the south aisle. There is no attempt to represent
the other mosaics on the roof, the scale being too small to admit of their
being represented with any success; but some at least of those mosaics had
been executed at that period, and their absence in the representation of
the entire church is especially to be observed, in order to show that we
must not trust to any negative evidence in such works. M. Lazari has
rashly concluded that the central archivolt of St. Mark's must be
posterior to the year 1205, because it does not appear in the
representation of the exterior of the church over the northern door;
[Footnote: Guida di Venezia, p. 6. (He is right, however.)] but he justly
observes that this mosaic (which is the other piece of evidence we possess
respecting the ancient form of the building) cannot itself be earlier than
1205, since it represents the bronze horses which were brought from
Constantinople in that year. And this one fact renders it very difficult
to speak with confidence respecting the date of any part of the exterior
of St. Mark's; for we have above seen that it was consecrated in the
eleventh century, and yet here is one of the most important exterior
decorations assuredly retouched, if not entirely added, in the thirteenth,
although its style would have led us to suppose it had been an original
part of the fabric. However, for all our purposes, it will be enough for
the reader to remember that the earliest parts of the building belong to
the eleventh, twelfth, and first part of the thirteenth century; the
Gothic portions to the fourteenth; some of the altars and embellishments
to the fifteenth and sixteenth; and the modern portion of the mosaics to
the seventeenth.
SECTION IX. This, however, I only wish him to recollect in order that I
may speak generally of the Byzantine architecture of St. Mark's, without
leading him to suppose the whole church to have been built and decorated
by Greek artists. Its later portions, with the single exception of the
seventeenth century mosaics, have been so dexterously accommodated to the
original fabric that the general effect is still that of a Byzantine
building; and I shall not, except when it is absolutely necessary, direct
attention to the discordant points, or weary the reader with anatomical
criticism. Whatever in St. Mark's arrests the eye, or affects the
feelings, is either Byzantine, or has been modified by Byzantine
influence; and our inquiry into its architectural merits need not
therefore be disturbed by the anxieties of antiquarianism, or arrested by
the obscurities of chronology.
SECTION X. And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St.
Mark's Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English
cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral. Let
us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we can see
the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low gray gateway,
with its battlemented top and small latticed window in the centre, into
the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing goes in but the
carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the chapter, and where
there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by neat rails, before
old-fashioned groups of somewhat diminutive and excessively trim houses,
with little oriel and bay windows jutting out here and there, and deep
wooden cornices and eaves painted cream color and white, and small porches
to their doors in the shape of cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick,
indescribable wooden gables warped a little on one side; and so forward
till we come to larger houses, also old-fashioned, but of red brick, and
with gardens behind them, and fruit walls, which show here and there,
among the nectarines, the vestiges of an old cloister arch or shaft, and
looking in front on the cathedral square itself, laid out in rigid
divisions of smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not uncheerful, especially
on the sunny side where the canons' children are walking with their
nurserymaids. And so, taking care not to tread on the grass, we will go
along the straight walk to the west front, and there stand for a time,
looking up at its deep-pointed porches and the dark places between their
pillars where there were statues once, and where the fragments, here and
there, of a stately figure are still left, which has in it the likeness of
a king, perhaps indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king long ago in
heaven; and so higher and higher up to the great mouldering wall of rugged
sculpture and confused arcades, shattered, and gray, and grisly with heads
of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into
yet unseemlier shape, and colored on their stony scales by the deep
russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the bleak
towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the bosses of their
traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only sees like a drift of
eddying black points, now closing, now scattering, and now settling
suddenly into invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of
restless birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangor of
theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing, like the cries of birds on a
solitary coast between the cliffs and sea.
SECTION XI. Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of
all its small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its
secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense and
steady performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by the
cathedral clock; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on all who
have passed through the lonely square at their feet for centuries, and on
all who have seen them rising far away over the wooded plain, or catching
on their square masses the last rays of the sunset, when the city at their
feet was indicated only by the mist at the bend of the river. And then let
us quickly recollect that we are in Venice, and land at the extremity of
the Calle Lunga San Moisè, which may be considered as there answering to
the secluded street that led us to our English cathedral gateway.
SECTION XII. We find ourselves in a paved alley, some seven feet wide
where it is widest, full of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant
salesmen,—a shriek in their beginning, and dying away into a kind of
brazen ringing, all the worse for its confinement between the high houses
of the passage along which we have to make our way. Over head an
inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies and chimney
flues pushed out on brackets to save room, and arched windows with
projecting sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves here and
there where a fig-tree branch escapes over a lower wall from some inner
cortile, leading the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky high over
all. On each side, a row of shops, as densely set as may be, occupying, in
fact, intervals between the square stone shafts, about eight feet high,
which carry the first floors: intervals of which one is narrow and serves
as a door; the other is, in the more respectable shops, wainscoted to the
height of the counter and glazed above, but in those of the poorer
tradesmen left open to the ground, and the wares laid on benches and
tables in the open air, the light in all cases entering at the front only,—and
fading away in a few feet from the threshold into a gloom which the eye
from without cannot penetrate, but which is generally broken by a ray or
two from a feeble lamp at the back of the shop, suspended before a print
of the Virgin. The less pious shop-keeper sometimes leaves his lamp
unlighted, and is contented with a penny print; the more religious one has
his print colored and set in a little shrine with a gilded or figured
fringe, with perhaps a faded flower or two on each side, and his lamp
burning brilliantly. Here at the fruiterer's, where the dark-green
watermelons are heaped upon the counter like cannon balls, the Madonna has
a tabernacle of fresh laurel leaves; but the pewterer next door has let
his lamp out, and there is nothing to be seen in his shop but the dull
gleam of the studded patterns on the copper pans, hanging from his roof in
the darkness. Next comes a "Vendita Frittole e Liquori," where the Virgin,
enthroned in a very humble manner beside a tallow candle on a back shelf,
presides over certain ambrosial morsels of a nature too ambiguous to be
denned or enumerated. But a few steps farther on, at the regular wineshop
of the calle, where we are offered "Vino Nostrani a Soldi 28'32," the
Madonna is in great glory, enthroned above ten or a dozen large red casks
of three-year-old vintage, and flanked by goodly ranks of bottles of
Maraschino, and two crimson lamps; and for the evening, when the
gondoliers will come to drink out, under her auspices, the money they have
gained during the day, she will have a whole chandelier.
SECTION XIII. A yard or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black
Eagle, and, glancing as we pass through the square door of marble, deeply
moulded, in the outer wall, we see the shadows of its pergola of vines
resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its side; and
so presently emerge on the bridge and Campo San Moisè, whence to the
entrance into St. Mark's Place, called the Bocca di Piazza, (mouth of the
square), the Venetian character is nearly destroyed, first by the
frightful façade of San Moisè, which we will pause at another time to
examine, and then by the modernizing of the shops as they near the piazza,
and the mingling with the lower Venetian populace of lounging groups of
English and Austrians. We will push fast through them into the shadow of
the pillars at the end of the "Bocca di Piazza," and then we forget them
all; for between those pillars there opens a great light, and, in the
midst of it, as we advance slowly, the vast tower of St. Mark seems to
lift itself visibly forth from the level field of chequered stones; and,
on each side, the countless arches prolong themselves into ranged
symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular houses that pressed together
above us in the dark alley had been struck back into sudden obedience and
lovely order, and all their rude casements and broken walls had been
transformed into arches charged with goodly sculpture, and fluted shafts
of delicate stone.
SECTION XIV. And well may they fall back, for 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, 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 sculpture
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, sceptred, and robed to the feet,
and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures 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 these, another range of glittering
pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers,—a
confusion of delight, amidst 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.
Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval! There
is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for, instead of the
restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak
upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle among the
marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living plumes,
changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have
stood unchanged for seven hundred years.
SECTION XV. And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath
it? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of
St. Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance
brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and poor,
pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of the porches, the
meanest tradesmen of the city push their counters; nay, the foundations of
its pillars are themselves the seats—not "of them that sell doves"
for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and caricatures. Round the whole
square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line of cafes,
where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge, and read empty
journals; in its centre the Austrian bands play during the time of
vespers, their martial music jarring with the organ notes,—the march
drowning the miserere, and the sullen crowd thickening round them,—a
crowd, which, if it had its will, would stiletto every soldier that pipes
to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of
the lowest classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like
lizards; and unregarded children,—every heavy glance of their young
eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse
with cursing,—gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after
hour, clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble ledges of the
church porch. And the images of Christ and His angels look down upon it
continually.
That we may not enter the church out of the midst of the horror of this,
let us turn aside under the portico which looks towards the sea, and
passing round within the two massive pillars brought from St. Jean d'Acre,
we shall find the gate of the Baptistery; let us enter there. The heavy
door closes behind us instantly, and the light, and the turbulence of the
Piazzetta, are together shut out by it.
SECTION XVI. We are in a low vaulted room; vaulted, not with arches, but
with small cupolas starred with gold, and chequered with gloomy figures:
in the centre is a bronze font charged with rich bas-reliefs, a small
figure of the Baptist standing above it in a single ray of light that
glances across the narrow room, dying as it falls from a window high in
the wall, and the first thing that it strikes, and the only thing that it
strikes brightly, is a tomb. We hardly know if it be a tomb indeed; for it
is like a narrow couch set beside the window, low-roofed and curtained, so
that it might seem, but that it has some height above the pavement, to
have been drawn towards the window, that the sleeper might be wakened
early;—only there are two angels who have drawn the curtain back,
and are looking down upon him. Let us look also and thank that gentle
light that rests upon his forehead for ever, and dies away upon his
breast.
The face is of a man in middle life, but there are two deep furrows right
across the forehead, dividing it like the foundations of a tower: the
height of it above is bound by the fillet of the ducal cap. The rest of
the features are singularly small and delicate, the lips sharp, perhaps
the sharpness of death being added to that of the natural lines; but there
is a sweet smile upon them, and a deep serenity upon the whole
countenance. The roof of the canopy above has been blue, filled with
stars; beneath, in the centre of the tomb on which the figure rests, is a
seated figure of the Virgin, and the border of it all around is of flowers
and soft leaves, growing rich and deep, as if in a field in summer.
It is the Doge Andrea Dandolo, a man early great among the great of
Venice; and early lost. She chose him for her king in his 36th year; he
died ten years later, leaving behind him that history to which we owe half
of what we know of her former fortunes.
SECTION XVII. Look round at the room in which he lies. The floor of it
is of rich mosaic, encompassed by a low seat of red marble, and its walls
are of alabaster, but worn and shattered, and darkly stained with age,
almost a ruin,—in places the slabs of marble have fallen away
altogether, and the rugged brickwork is seen through the rents, but all
beautiful; the ravaging fissures fretting their way among the islands and
channelled zones of the alabaster, and the time-stains on its translucent
masses darkened into fields of rich golden brown, like the color of
seaweed when the sun strikes on it through deep sea. The light fades away
into the recess of the chamber towards the altar, and the eye can hardly
trace the lines of the bas-relief behind it of the baptism of Christ: but
on the vaulting of the roof the figures are distinct, and there are seen
upon it two great circles, one surrounded by the﹃Principalities and
powers in heavenly places,﹄of which Milton has expressed the ancient
division in the single massy line,
"Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,"
and around the other, the Apostles; Christ the centre of both; and upon
the walls, again and again repeated, the gaunt figure of the Baptist, in
every circumstance of his life and death; and the streams of the Jordan
running down between their cloven rocks; the axe laid to the root of a
fruitless tree that springs upon their shore.﹃Every tree that bringeth
not forth good fruit shall be hewn down, and cast into the fire.﹄Yes,
verily: to be baptized with fire, or to be cast therein; it is the choice
set before all men. The march-notes still murmur through the grated
window, and mingle with the sounding in our ears of the sentence of
judgment, which the old Greek has written on that Baptistery wall. Venice
has made her choice.
SECTION XVIII. He who lies under that stony canopy would have taught her
another choice, in his day, if she would have listened to him; but he and
his counsels have long been forgotten by her, the dust lies upon his lips.
Through the heavy door whose bronze network closes the place of his rest,
let us enter the church itself. It is lost in still deeper twilight, to
which the eye must be accustomed for some moments before the form of the
building can be traced; and then there opens before us a vast cave, hewn
out into the form of a Cross, and divided into shadowy aisles by many
pillars. Round the domes of its roof the light enters only through narrow
apertures like large stars; and here and there a ray or two from some far
away casement wanders into the darkness, and casts a narrow phosphoric
stream upon the waves of marble that heave and fall in a thousand colors
along the floor. What else there is of light is from torches, or silver
lamps, burning ceaselessly in the recesses of the chapels; the roof
sheeted with gold, and the polished walls covered with alabaster, give
back at every curve and angle some feeble gleaming to the flames; and the
glories round the heads of the sculptured saints flash out upon us as we
pass them, and sink again into the gloom. Under foot and over head, a
continual succession of crowded imagery, one picture passing into another,
as in a dream; forms beautiful and terrible mixed together; dragons and
serpents, and ravening beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the
midst of them drink from running fountains and feed from vases of crystal;
the passions and the pleasures of human life symbolized together, and the
mystery of its redemption; for the mazes of interwoven lines and changeful
pictures lead always at last to the Cross, lifted and carved in every
place and upon every stonel sometimes with the serpent of eternity wrapt
round it, sometimes with doves beneath its arms, and sweet herbage growing
forth from its feet; but conspicuous most of all on the great rood that
crosses the church before the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the
shadow of the apse. And although in the recesses of the aisles and
chapels, when the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see
continually a figure traced in faint lines upon their marble, a woman
standing with her eyes raised to heaven, and the inscription above her,
"Mother of God," she is not here the presiding deity. It is the Cross that
is first seen, and always, burning in the centre of the temple; and every
dome and hollow of its roof has the figure of Christ in the utmost height
of it, raised in power, or returning in judgment.
SECTION XIX. Nor is this interior without effect on the minds of the
people. At every hour of the day there are groups collected before the
various shrines, and solitary worshippers scattered through the dark
places of the church, evidently in prayer both deep and reverent, and, for
the most part, profoundly sorrowful. The devotees at the greater number of
the renowned shrines of Romanism may be seen murmuring their appointed
prayers with wandering eyes and unengaged gestures; but the step of the
stranger does not disturb those who kneel on the pavement of St. Mark's;
and hardly a moment passes, from early morning to sunset, in which we may
not see some half-veiled figure enter beneath the Arabian porch, cast
itself into long abasement on the floor of the temple, and then rising
slowly with more confirmed step, and with a passionate kiss and clasp of
the arms given to the feet of the crucifix, by which the lamps burn always
in the northern aisle, leave the church, as if comforted.
SECTION XX. But we must not hastily conclude from this that the nobler
characters of the building have at present any influence in fostering a
devotional spirit. There is distress enough in Venice to bring many to
their knees, without excitement from external imagery; and whatever there
may be in the temper of the worship offered in St. Mark's more than can be
accounted for by reference to the unhappy circumstances of the city, is
assuredly not owing either to the beauty of its architecture or to the
impressiveness of the Scripture histories embodied in its mosaics. That it
has a peculiar effect, however slight, on the popular mind, may perhaps be
safely conjectured from the number of worshippers which it attracts, while
the churches of St. Paul and the Frari, larger in size and more central in
position, are left comparatively empty. [Footnote: The mere warmth of St.
Mark's in winter, which is much greater than that of the other two
churches above named, must, however, be taken into consideration, as one
of the most efficient causes of its being then more frequented.] But this
effect is altogether to be ascribed to its richer assemblage of those
sources of influence which address themselves to the commonest instincts
of the human mind, and which, in all ages and countries, have been more or
less employed in the support of superstition. Darkness and mystery;
confused recesses of building; artificial light employed in small
quantity, but maintained with a constancy which seems to give it a kind of
sacredness; preciousness of material easily comprehended by the vulgar
eye; close air loaded with a sweet and peculiar odor associated only with
religious services, solemn music, and tangible idols or images having
popular legends attached to them,—these, the stage properties of
superstition, which have been from the beginning of the world, and must be
to the end of it, employed by all nations, whether openly savage or
nominally civilized, to produce a false awe in minds incapable of
apprehending the true nature of the Deity, are assembled in St. Mark's to
a degree, as far as I know, unexampled in any other European church. The
arts of the Magus and the Brahmin are exhausted in the animation of a
paralyzed Christianity; and the popular sentiment which these arts excite
is to be regarded by us with no more respect than we should have
considered ourselves justified in rendering to the devotion of the
worshippers at Eleusis, Ellora, or Edfou. [Footnote: I said above that the
larger number of the devotees entered by the "Arabian" porch; the porch,
that is to say, on the north side of the church, remarkable for its rich
Arabian archivolt, and through which access is gained immediately to the
northern transept. The reason is, that in that transept is the chapel of
the Madonna, which has a greater attraction for the Venetians than all the
rest of the church besides. The old builders kept their images of the
Virgin subordinate to those of Christ; but modern Romanism has retrograded
from theirs, and the most glittering portions of the whole church are the
two recesses behind this lateral altar, covered with silver hearts
dedicated to the Virgin.]
SECTION XXI. Indeed, these inferior means of exciting religious emotion
were employed in the ancient Church as they are at this day, but not
employed alone. Torchlight there was, as there is now; but the torchlight
illumined Scripture histories on the walls, which every eye traced and
every heart comprehended, but which, during my whole residence in Venice,
I never saw one Venetian regard for an instant. I never heard from any one
the most languid expression of interest in any feature of the church, or
perceived the slightest evidence of their understanding the meaning of its
architecture; and while, therefore, the English cathedral, though no
longer dedicated to the kind of services for which it was intended by its
builders, and much at variance in many of its characters with the temper
of the people by whom it is now surrounded, retains yet so much of its
religious influence that no prominent feature of its architecture can be
said to exist altogether in vain, we have in St. Mark's a building
apparently still employed in the ceremonies for which it was designed, and
yet of which the impressive attributes have altogether ceased to be
comprehended by its votaries. The beauty which it possesses is unfelt, the
language it uses is forgotten; and in the midst of the city to whose
service it has so long been consecrated, and still filled by crowds of the
descendants of those to whom it owes its magnificence; it stands, in
reality, more desolate than the ruins through which the sheep-walk passes
unbroken in our English valleys; and the writing on its marble walls is
less regarded and less powerful for the teaching of men, than the letters
which the shepherd follows with his finger, where the moss is lightest on
the tombs in the desecrated cloister.
SECTION XXII. It must therefore be altogether without reference to its
present usefulness, that we pursue our inquiry into the merits and meaning
of the architecture of this marvellous building; and it can only be after
we have terminated that inquiry, conducting it carefully on abstract
grounds, that we can pronounce with any certainty how far the present
neglect of St. Mark's is significative of the decline of the Venetian
character, or how far this church is to be considered as the relic of a
barbarous age, incapable of attracting the admiration, or influencing the
feelings of a civilized community.
The inquiry before us is twofold. Throughout the first volume, I carefully
kept the study of expression distinct from that of abstract
architectural perfection; telling the reader that in every building we
should afterwards examine, he would have first to form a judgment of its
construction and decorative merit, considering it merely as a work of art;
and then to examine farther, in what degree it fulfilled its expressional
purposes. Accordingly, we have first to judge of St. Mark's merely as a
piece of architecture, not as a church; secondly, to estimate its fitness
for its special duty as a place of worship, and the relation in which it
stands, as such, to those northern cathedrals that still retain so much of
the power over the human heart, which the Byzantine domes appear to have
lost for ever.
SECTION XXIII. In the two succeeding sections of this work, devoted
respectively to the examination of the Gothic and Renaissance buildings in
Venice, I have endeavored to analyze and state, as briefly as possible,
the true nature of each school,—first in Spirit, then in Form. I
wished to have given a similar analysis, in this section, of the nature of
Byzantine architecture; but could not make my statements general, because
I have never seen this kind of building on its native soil. Nevertheless,
in the following sketch of the principles exemplified in St. Mark's, I
believe that most of the leading features and motives of the style will be
found clearly enough distinguished to enable the reader to judge of it
with tolerable fairness, as compared with the better known systems of
European architecture in the middle ages.
SECTION XXIV. Now the first broad characteristic of the building, and
the root nearly of every other important peculiarity in it, is its
confessed incrustation. It is the purest example in Italy of the
great school of architecture in which the ruling principle is the
incrustation of brick with more precious materials; and it is necessary
before we proceed to criticise any one of its arrangements, that the
reader should carefully consider the principles which are likely to have
influenced, or might legitimately influence, the architects of such a
school, as distinguished from those whose designs are to be executed in
massive materials.
It is true, that among different nations, and at different times, we may
find examples of every sort and degree of incrustation, from the mere
setting of the larger and more compact stones by preference at the outside
of the wall, to the miserable construction of that modern brick cornice,
with its coating of cement, which, but the other day, in London, killed
its unhappy workmen in its fall. [Footnote: Vide "Builder," for October,
1851.] But just as it is perfectly possible to have a clear idea of the
opposing characteristics of two different species of plants or animals,
though between the two there are varieties which it is difficult to assign
either to the one or the other, so the reader may fix decisively in his
mind the legitimate characteristics of the incrusted and the massive
styles, though between the two there are varieties which confessedly unite
the attributes of both. For instance, in many Roman remains, built of
blocks of tufa and incrusted with marble, we have a style, which, though
truly solid, possesses some of the attributes of incrustation; and in the
Cathedral of Florence, built of brick and coated with marble, the marble
facing is so firmly and exquisitely set, that the building, though in
reality incrusted, assumes the attributes of solidity. But these
intermediate examples need not in the least confuse our generally distinct
ideas of the two families of buildings: the one in which the substance is
alike throughout, and the forms and conditions of the ornament assume or
prove that it is so, as in the best Greek buildings, and for the most part
in our early Norman and Gothic; and the other, in which the substance is
of two kinds, one internal, the other external, and the system of
decoration is founded on this duplicity, as pre-eminently in St. Mark's.
SECTION XXV. I have used the word duplicity in no depreciatory sense. In
chapter ii. of the "Seven Lamps," Section 18, I especially guarded this
incrusted school from the imputation of insincerity, and I must do so now
at greater length. It appears insincere at first to a Northern builder,
because, accustomed to build with solid blocks of freestone, he is in the
habit of supposing the external superficies of a piece of masonry to be
some criterion of its thickness. But, as soon as he gets acquainted with
the incrusted style, he will find that the Southern builders had no
intention to deceive him. He will see that every slab of facial marble is
fastened to the next by a confessed rivet, and that the joints of
the armor are so visibly and openly accommodated to the contours of the
substance within, that he has no more right to complain of treachery than
a savage would have, who, for the first time in his life seeing a man in
armor, had supposed him to be made of solid steel. Acquaint him with the
customs of chivalry, and with the uses of the coat of mail, and he ceases
to accuse of dishonesty either the panoply or the knight.
These laws and customs of the St. Mark's architectural chivalry it must be
our business to develop.
SECTION XXVI. First, consider the natural circumstances which give rise
to such a style. Suppose a nation of builders, placed far from any
quarries of available stone, and having precarious access to the mainland
where they exist; compelled therefore either to build entirely with brick,
or to import whatever stone they use from great distances, in ships of
small tonnage, and for the most part dependent for speed on the oar rather
than the sail. The labor and cost of carriage are just as great, whether
they import common or precious stone, and therefore the natural tendency
would always be to make each shipload as valuable as possible. But in
proportion to the preciousness of the stone, is the limitation of its
possible supply; limitation not determined merely by cost, but by the
physical conditions of the material, for of many marbles, pieces above a
certain size are not to be had for money. There would also be a tendency
in such circumstances to import as much stone as possible ready
sculptured, in order to save weight; and therefore, if the traffic of
their merchants led them to places where there were ruins of ancient
edifices, to ship the available fragments of them home. Out of this supply
of marble, partly composed of pieces of so precious a quality that only a
few tons of them could be on any terms obtained, and partly of shafts,
capitals, and other portions of foreign buildings, the island architect
has to fashion, as best he may, the anatomy of his edifice. It is at his
choice either to lodge his few blocks of precious marble here and there
among his masses of brick, and to cut out of the sculptured fragments such
new forms as may be necessary for the observance of fixed proportions in
the new building; or else to cut the colored stones into thin pieces, of
extent sufficient to face the whole surface of the walls, and to adopt a
method of construction irregular enough to admit the insertion of
fragmentary sculptures; rather with a view of displaying their intrinsic
beauty, than of setting them to any regular service in the support of the
building.
An architect who cared only to display his own skill, and had no respect
for the works of others, would assuredly have chosen the former
alternative, and would have sawn the old marbles into fragments in order
to prevent all interference with his own designs. But an architect who
cared for the preservation of noble work, whether his own or others', and
more regarded the beauty of his building than his own fame, would have
done what those old builders of St. Mark's did for us, and saved every
relic with which he was entrusted.
SECTION XXVII. But these were not the only motives which influenced the
Venetians in the adoption of their method of architecture. It might, under
all the circumstances above stated, have been a question with other
builders, whether to import one shipload of costly jaspers, or twenty of
chalk flints; and whether to build a small church faced with porphyry and
paved with agate, or to raise a vast cathedral in freestone. But with the
Venetians it could not be a question for an instant; they were exiles from
ancient and beautiful cities, and had been accustomed to build with their
ruins, not less in affection than in admiration: they had thus not only
grown familiar with the practice of inserting older fragments in modern
buildings, but they owed to that practice a great part of the splendor of
their city, and whatever charm of association might aid its change from a
Refuge into a Home. The practice which began in the affections of a
fugitive nation, was prolonged in the pride of a conquering one; and
beside the memorials of departed happiness, were elevated the trophies of
returning victory. The ship of war brought home more marble in triumph
than 'the merchant vessel in speculation; and the front of St. Mark's
became rather a shrine at which to dedicate the splendor of miscellaneous
spoil, than the organized expression of any fixed architectural law, or
religious emotion.
SECTION XXVIII. Thus far, however, the justification of the style of
this church depends on circumstances peculiar to the time of its erection,
and to the spot where it arose. The merit of its method, considered in the
abstract, rests on far broader grounds.
In the fifth chapter of the "Seven Lamps," Section 14, the reader will
find the opinion of a modern architect of some reputation, Mr. Wood, that
the chief thing remarkable in this church "is its extreme ugliness;" and
he will find this opinion associated with another, namely, that the works
of the Caracci are far preferable to those of the Venetian painters. This
second statement of feeling reveals to us one of the principal causes of
the first; namely, that Mr. Wood had not any perception of color, or
delight in it. The perception of color is a gift just as definitely
granted to one person, and denied to another, as an ear for music; and the
very first requisite for true judgment of St. Mark's, is the perfection of
that color-faculty which few people ever set themselves seriously to find
out whether they possess or not. For it is on its value as a piece of
perfect and unchangeable coloring, that the claims of this edifice to our
respect are finally rested; and a deaf man might as well pretend to
pronounce judgment on the merits of a full orchestra, as an architect
trained in the composition of form only, to discern the beauty of St.
Mark's. It possesses the charm of color in common with the greater part of
the architecture, as well as of the manufactures, of the East; but the
Venetians deserve especial note as the only European people who appear to
have sympathized to the full with the great instinct of the Eastern races.
They indeed were compelled to bring artists from Constantinople to design
the mosaics of the vaults of St. Mark's, and to group the colors of its
porches; but they rapidly took up and developed, under more masculine
conditions, the system of which the Greeks had shown them the example:
while the burghers and barons of the North were building their dark
streets and grisly castles of oak and sandstone, the merchants of Venice
were covering their palaces with porphyry and gold; and at last, when her
mighty painters had created for her a color more priceless than gold or
porphyry, even this, the richest of her treasures, she lavished upon walls
whose foundations were beaten by the sea; and the strong tide, as it runs
beneath the Rialto, is reddened to this day by the reflection of the
frescoes of Giorgione.
SECTION XXIX. If, therefore, the reader does not care for color, I must
protest against his endeavor to form any judgment whatever of this church
of St. Mark's. But, if he both cares for and loves it, let him remember
that the school of incrusted architecture is the only one in which
perfect and permanent chromatic decoration is possible; and let him
look upon every piece of jasper and alabaster given to the architect as a
cake of very hard color, of which a certain portion is to be ground down
or cut off, to paint the walls with. Once understand this thoroughly, and
accept the condition that the body and availing strength of the edifice
are to be in brick, and that this under muscular power of brickwork is to
be clothed with the defence and the brightness of the marble, as the body
of an animal is protected and adorned by its scales or its skin, and all
the consequent fitnesses and laws of the structure will be easily
discernible. These I shall state in their natural order.
SECTION XXX. LAW I. That the plinths and cornices used for binding
the armor are to be light and delicate. A certain thickness, at least
two or three inches, must be required in the covering pieces (even when
composed of the strongest stone, and set on the least exposed parts), in
order to prevent the chance of fracture, and to allow for the wear of
time. And the weight of this armor must not be trusted to cement; the
pieces must not be merely glued to the rough brick surface, but connected
with the mass which they protect by binding cornices and string courses;
and with each other, so as to secure mutual support, aided by the
rivetings, but by no means dependent upon them. And, for the full honesty
and straightforwardness of the work, it is necessary that these string
courses and binding plinths should not be of such proportions as would fit
them for taking any important part in the hard work of the inner
structure, or render them liable to be mistaken for the great cornices and
plinths already explained as essential parts of the best solid building.
They must be delicate, slight, and visibly incapable of severer work than
that assigned to them.
SECTION XXXI. LAW II. Science of inner structure is to be abandoned.
As the body of the structure is confessedly of inferior, and comparatively
incoherent materials, it would be absurd to attempt in it any expression
of the higher refinements of construction. It will be enough that by its
mass we are assured of its sufficiency and strength; and there is the less
reason for endeavoring to diminish the extent of its surface by delicacy
of adjustment, because on the breadth of that surface we are to depend for
the better display of the color, which is to be the chief source of our
pleasure in the building. The main body of the work, therefore, will be
composed of solid walls and massive piers; and whatever expression of
finer structural science we may require, will be thrown either into
subordinate portions of it, or entirely directed to the support of the
external mail, where in arches or vaults it might otherwise appear
dangerously independent of the material within.
SECTION XXXII. LAW III. All shafts are to be solid. Wherever, by
the smallness of the parts, we may be driven to abandon the incrusted
structure at all, it must be abandoned altogether. The eye must never be
left in the least doubt as to what is solid and what is coated. Whatever
appears probably solid, must be assuredly so, and therefore
it becomes an inviolable law that no shaft shall ever be incrusted. Not
only does the whole virtue of a shaft depend on its consolidation, but the
labor of cutting and adjusting an incrusted coat to it would be greater
than the saving of material is worth. Therefore the shaft, of whatever
size, is always to be solid; and because the incrusted character of the
rest of the building renders it more difficult for the shafts to clear
themselves from suspicion, they must not, in this incrusted style, be in
any place jointed. No shaft must ever be used but of one block; and this
the more, because the permission given to the builder to have his walls
and piers as ponderous as he likes, renders it quite unnecessary for him
to use shafts of any fixed size. In our Norman and Gothic, where definite
support is required at a definite point, it becomes lawful to build up a
tower of small stones in the shape of a shaft. But the Byzantine is
allowed to have as much support as he wants from the walls in every
direction, and he has no right to ask for further license in the structure
of his shafts. Let him, by generosity in the substance of his pillars,
repay us for the permission we have given him to be superficial in his
walls. The builder in the chalk valleys of France and England may be
blameless in kneading his clumsy pier out of broken flint and calcined
lime; but the Venetian, who has access to the riches of Asia and the
quarries of Egypt, must frame at least his shafts out of flawless stone.
SECTION XXXIII. And this for another reason yet. Although, as we have
said, it is impossible to cover the walls of a large building with color,
except on the condition of dividing the stone into plates, there is always
a certain appearance of meanness and niggardliness in the procedure. It is
necessary that the builder should justify himself from this suspicion; and
prove that it is not in mere economy or poverty, but in the real
impossibility of doing otherwise, that he has sheeted his walls so thinly
with the precious film. Now the shaft is exactly the portion of the
edifice in which it is fittest to recover his honor in this respect. For
if blocks of jasper or porphyry be inserted in the walls, the spectator
cannot tell their thickness, and cannot judge of the costliness of the
sacrifice. But the shaft he can measure with his eye in an instant, and
estimate the quantity of treasure both in the mass of its existing
substance, and in that which has been hewn away to bring it into its
perfect and symmetrical form. And thus the shafts of all buildings of this
kind are justly regarded as an expression of their wealth, and a form of
treasure, just as much as the jewels or gold in the sacred vessels; they
are, in fact, nothing else than large jewels, [Footnote: "Quivi presso si
vedi una colonna di tanta bellezza e finezza che e riputato piutosto
gioia che pietra,"—Sansovino, of the verd-antique pillar in San
Jacomo dell' Orio. A remarkable piece of natural history and moral
philosophy, connected with this subject, will be found in the second
chapter of our third volume, quoted from the work of a Florentine
architect of the fifteenth century.] the block of precious serpentine or
jasper being valued according to its size and brilliancy of color, like a
large emerald or ruby; only the bulk required to bestow value on the one
is to be measured in feet and tons, and on the other in lines and carats.
The shafts must therefore be, without exception, of one block in all
buildings of this kind; for the attempt in any place to incrust or joint
them would be a deception like that of introducing a false stone among
jewellery (for a number of joints of any precious stone are of course not
equal in value to a single piece of equal weight), and would put an end at
once to the spectator's confidence in the expression of wealth in any
portion of the structure, or of the spirit of sacrifice in those who
raised it.
SECTION XXXIV. LAW IV. The shafts may sometimes be independent of the
construction. Exactly in proportion to the importance which the shaft
assumes as a large jewel, is the diminution of its importance as a
sustaining member; for the delight which we receive in its abstract bulk,
and beauty of color, is altogether independent of any perception of its
adaptation to mechanical necessities. Like other beautiful things in this
world, its end is to bebeautiful; and, in proportion to its
beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not blame
emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers.
Nay, so far from our admiration of the jewel shaft being dependent on its
doing work for us, it is very possible that a chief part of its
preciousness may consist in a delicacy, fragility, and tenderness of
material, which must render it utterly unfit for hard work; and therefore
that we shall admire it the more, because we perceive that if we were to
put much weight upon it, it would be crushed. But, at all events, it is
very clear that the primal object in the placing of such shafts must be
the display of their beauty to the best advantage, and that therefore all
imbedding of them in walls, or crowding of them into groups, in any
position in which either their real size or any portion of their surface
would be concealed, is either inadmissible together, or objectionable in
proportion to their value; that no symmetrical or scientific arrangements
of pillars are therefore ever to be expected in buildings of this kind,
and that all such are even to be looked upon as positive errors and
misapplications of materials: but that, on the contrary, we must be
constantly prepared to see, and to see with admiration, shafts of great
size and importance set in places where their real service is little more
than nominal, and where the chief end of their existence is to catch the
sunshine upon their polished sides, and lead the eye into delighted
wandering among the mazes of their azure veins.
SECTION XXXV. LAW V. The shafts may be of variable size. Since
the value of each shaft depends upon its bulk, and diminishes with the
diminution of its mass, in a greater ratio than the size itself
diminishes, as in the case of all other jewellery, it is evident that we
must not in general expect perfect symmetry and equality among the series
of shafts, any more than definiteness of application; but that, on the
contrary, an accurately observed symmetry ought to give us a kind of pain,
as proving that considerable and useless loss has been sustained by some
of the shafts, in being cut down to match with the rest. It is true that
symmetry is generally sought for in works of smaller jewellery; but, even
there, not a perfect symmetry, and obtained under circumstances quite
different from those which affect the placing of shafts in architecture.
First: the symmetry is usually imperfect. The stones that seem to match
each other in a ring or necklace, appear to do so only because they are so
small that their differences are not easily measured by the eye; but there
is almost always such difference between them as would be strikingly
apparent if it existed in the same proportion between two shafts nine or
ten feet in height. Secondly: the quantity of stones which pass through a
jeweller's hands, and the facility of exchange of such small objects,
enable the tradesman to select any number of stones of approximate size; a
selection, however, often requiring so much time, that perfect symmetry in
a group of very fine stones adds enormously to their value. But the
architect has neither the time nor the facilities of exchange. He cannot
lay aside one column in a corner of his church till, in the course of
traffic, he obtain another that will match it; he has not hundreds of
shafts fastened up in bundles, out of which he can match sizes at his
ease; he cannot send to a brother-tradesman and exchange the useless
stones for available ones, to the convenience of both. His blocks of
stone, or his ready hewn shafts, have been brought to him in limited
number, from immense distances; no others are to be had; and for those
which he does not bring into use, there is no demand elsewhere. His only
means of obtaining symmetry will therefore be, in cutting down the finer
masses to equality with the inferior ones; and this we ought not to desire
him often to do. And therefore, while sometimes in a Baldacchino, or an
important chapel or shrine, this costly symmetry may be necessary, and
admirable in proportion to its probable cost, in the general fabric we
must expect to see shafts introduced of size and proportion continually
varying, and such symmetry as may be obtained among them never altogether
perfect, and dependent for its charm frequently on strange complexities
and unexpected rising and falling of weight and accent in its marble
syllables; bearing the same relation to a rigidly chiselled and
proportioned architecture that the wild lyric rhythm of Aeschylus or
Pindar bears to the finished measures of Pope.
SECTION XXXVI. The application of the principles of jewellery to the
smaller as well as the larger blocks, will suggest to us another reason
for the method of incrustation adopted in the walls. It often happens that
the beauty of the veining in some varieties of alabaster is so great, that
it becomes desirable to exhibit it by dividing the stone, not merely to
economize its substance, but to display the changes in the disposition of
its fantastic lines. By reversing one of two thin plates successively
taken from the stone, and placing their corresponding edges in contact, a
perfectly symmetrical figure may be obtained, which will enable the eye to
comprehend more thoroughly the position of the veins. And this is actually
the method in which, for the most part, the alabasters of St. Mark are
employed; thus accomplishing a double good,—directing the spectator,
in the first place, to close observation of the nature of the stone
employed, and in the second, giving him a farther proof of the honesty of
intention in the builder: for wherever similar veining is discovered in
two pieces, the fact is declared that they have been cut from the same
stone. It would have been easy to disguise the similarity by using them in
different parts of the building; but on the contrary they are set edge to
edge, so that the whole system of the architecture may be discovered at a
glance by any one acquainted with the nature of the stones employed. Nay,
but, it is perhaps answered me, not by an ordinary observer; a person
ignorant of the nature of alabaster might perhaps fancy all these
symmetrical patterns to have been found in the stone itself, and thus be
doubly deceived, supposing blocks to be solid and symmetrical which were
in reality subdivided and irregular. I grant it; but be it remembered,
that in all things, ignorance is liable to be deceived, and has no right
to accuse anything but itself as the source of the deception. The style
and the words are dishonest, not which are liable to be misunderstood if
subjected to no inquiry, but which are deliberately calculated to lead
inquiry astray. There are perhaps no great or noble truths, from those of
religion downwards, which present no mistakable aspect to casual or
ignorant contemplation. Both the truth and the lie agree in hiding
themselves at first, but the lie continues to hide itself with effort, as
we approach to examine it; and leads us, if undiscovered, into deeper
lies; the truth reveals itself in proportion to our patience and
knowledge, discovers itself kindly to our pleading, and leads us, as it is
discovered, into deeper truths.
SECTION XXXVII. LAW VI. The decoration must be shallow in cutting.
The method of construction being thus systematized, it is evident that a
certain style of decoration must arise out of it, based on the primal
condition that over the greater part of the edifice there can be no
deep cutting. The thin sheets of covering stones do not admit of it;
we must not cut them through to the bricks; and whatever ornaments we
engrave upon them cannot, therefore, be more than an inch deep at the
utmost. Consider for an instant the enormous differences which this single
condition compels between the sculptural decoration of the incrusted
style, and that of the solid stones of the North, which may be hacked and
hewn into whatever cavernous hollows and black recesses we choose; struck
into grim darknesses and grotesque projections, and rugged ploughings up
of sinuous furrows, in which any form or thought may be wrought out on any
scale,—mighty statues with robes of rock and crowned foreheads
burning in the sun, or venomous goblins and stealthy dragons shrunk into
lurking-places of untraceable shade: think of this, and of the play and
freedom given to the sculptor's hand and temper, to smite out and in,
hither and thither, as he will; and then consider what must be the
different spirit of the design which is to be wrought on the smooth
surface of a film of marble, where every line and shadow must be drawn
with the most tender pencilling and cautious reserve of resource,—where
even the chisel must not strike hard, lest it break through the delicate
stone, nor the mind be permitted in any impetuosity of conception
inconsistent with the fine discipline of the hand. Consider that whatever
animal or human form is to be suggested, must be projected on a flat
surface; that all the features of the countenance, the folds of the
drapery, the involutions of the limbs, must be so reduced and subdued that
the whole work becomes rather a piece of fine drawing than of sculpture;
and then follow out, until you begin to perceive their endlessness, the
resulting differences of character which will be necessitated in every
part of the ornamental designs of these incrusted churches, as compared
with that of the Northern schools. I shall endeavor to trace a few of them
only.
SECTION XXXVIII. The first would of course be a diminution of the
builder's dependence upon human form as a source of ornament: since
exactly in proportion to the dignity of the form itself is the loss which
it must sustain in being reduced to a shallow and linear bas-relief, as
well as the difficulty of expressing it at all under such conditions.
Wherever sculpture can be solid, the nobler characters of the human form
at once lead the artist to aim at its representation, rather than at that
of inferior organisms; but when all is to be reduced to outline, the forms
of flowers and lower animals are always more intelligible, and are felt to
approach much more to a satisfactory rendering of the objects intended,
than the outlines of the human body. This inducement to seek for resources
of ornament in the lower fields of creation was powerless in the minds of
the great Pagan nations, Ninevite, Greek, or Egyptian: first, because
their thoughts were so concentrated on their own capacities and fates,
that they preferred the rudest suggestion of human form to the best of an
inferior organism; secondly, because their constant practice in solid
sculpture, often colossal, enabled them to bring a vast amount of science
into the treatment of the lines, whether of the low relief, the monochrome
vase, or shallow hieroglyphic.
SECTION XXXIX. But when various ideas adverse to the representation of
animal, and especially of human, form, originating with the Arabs and
iconoclast Greeks, had begun at any rate to direct the builders' minds to
seek for decorative materials in inferior types, and when diminished
practice in solid sculpture had rendered it more difficult to find artists
capable of satisfactorily reducing the high organisms to their elementary
outlines, the choice of subject for surface sculpture would be more and
more uninterruptedly directed to floral organisms, and human and animal
form would become diminished in size, frequency, and general importance.
So that, while in the Northern solid architecture we constantly find the
effect of its noblest features dependent on ranges of statues, often
colossal, and full of abstract interest, independent of their
architectural service, in the Southern incrusted style we must expect to
find the human form for the most part subordinate and diminutive, and
involved among designs of foliage and flowers, in the manner of which
endless examples had been furnished by the fantastic ornamentation of the
Romans, from which the incrusted style had been directly derived.
SECTION XL. Farther. In proportion to the degree in which his subject
must be reduced to abstract outline will be the tendency in the sculptor
to abandon naturalism of representation, and subordinate every form to
architectural service. Where the flower or animal can be hewn into bold
relief, there will always be a temptation to render the representation of
it more complete than is necessary, or even to introduce details and
intricacies inconsistent with simplicity of distant effect. Very often a
worse fault than this is committed; and in the endeavor to give vitality
to the stone, the original ornamental purpose of the design is sacrificed
or forgotten. But when nothing of this kind can be attempted, and a slight
outline is all that the sculptor can command, we may anticipate that this
outline will be composed with exquisite grace; and that the richness of
its ornamental arrangement will atone for the feebleness of its power of
portraiture. On the porch of a Northern cathedral we may seek for the
images of the flowers that grow in the neighboring fields, and as we watch
with wonder the gray stones that fret themselves into thorns, and soften
into blossoms, we may care little that these knots of ornament, as we
retire from them to contemplate the whole building, appear unconsidered or
confused. On the incrusted building we must expect no such deception of
the eye or thoughts. It may sometimes be difficult to determine, from the
involutions of its linear sculpture, what were the natural forms which
originally suggested them: but we may confidently expect that the grace of
their arrangement will always be complete; that there will not be a line
in them which could be taken away without injury, nor one wanting which
could be added with advantage.
SECTION XLI. Farther. While the sculptures of the incrusted school will
thus be generally distinguished by care and purity rather than force, and
will be, for the most part, utterly wanting in depth of shadow, there will
be one means of obtaining darkness peculiarly simple and obvious, and
often in the sculptor's power. Wherever he can, without danger, leave a
hollow behind his covering slabs, or use them, like glass, to fill an
aperture in the wall, he can, by piercing them with holes, obtain points
or spaces of intense blackness to contrast with the light tracing of the
rest of his design. And we may expect to find this artifice used the more
extensively, because, while it will be an effective means of ornamentation
on the exterior of the building, it will be also the safest way of
admitting light to the interior, still totally excluding both rain and
wind. And it will naturally follow that the architect, thus familiarized
with the effect of black and sudden points of shadow, will often seek to
carry the same principle into other portions of his ornamentation, and by
deep drill-holes, or perhaps inlaid portions of black color, to refresh
the eye where it may be wearied by the lightness of the general handling.
SECTION XLII. Farther. Exactly in proportion to the degree in which the
force of sculpture is subdued, will be the importance attached to color as
a means of effect or constituent of beauty. I have above stated that the
incrusted style was the only one in which perfect or permanent color
decoration was possible. It is also the only one in which a true
system of color decoration was ever likely to be invented. In order to
understand this, the reader must permit me to review with some care the
nature of the principles of coloring adopted by the Northern and Southern
nations.
SECTION XLIII. I believe that from the beginning of the world there has
never been a true or fine school of art in which color was despised. It
has often been imperfectly attained and injudiciously applied, but I
believe it to be one of the essential signs of life in a school of art,
that it loves color; and I know it to be one of the first signs of death
in the Renaissance schools, that they despised color.
Observe, it is not now the question whether our Northern cathedrals are
better with color or without. Perhaps the great monotone gray of Nature
and of Time is a better color than any that the human hand can give; but
that is nothing to our present business. The simple fact is, that the
builders of those cathedrals laid upon them the brightest colors they
could obtain, and that there is not, as far as I am aware, in Europe, any
monument of a truly noble school which has not been either painted all
over, or vigorously touched with paint, mosaic, and gilding in its
prominent parts. Thus far Egyptians, Greeks, Goths, Arabs, and mediaeval
Christians all agree: none of them, when in their right senses, ever think
of doing without paint; and, therefore, when I said above that the
Venetians were the only people who had thoroughly sympathized with the
Arabs in this respect, I referred, first, to their intense love of color,
which led them to lavish the most expensive decorations on ordinary
dwelling-houses; and, secondly, to that perfection of the color-instinct
in them, which enabled them to render whatever they did, in this kind, as
just in principle as it was gorgeous in appliance. It is this principle of
theirs, as distinguished from that of the Northern builders, which we have
finally to examine.
SECTION XLIV. In the second chapter of the first volume, it was noticed
that the architect of Bourges Cathedral liked hawthorn, and that the porch
of his cathedral was therefore decorated with a rich wreath of it; but
another of the predilections of that architect was there unnoticed,
namely, that he did not at all like gray hawthorn, but preferred it
green, and he painted it green accordingly, as bright as he could. The
color is still left in every sheltered interstice of the foliage. He had,
in fact, hardly the choice of any other color; he might have gilded the
thorns, by way of allegorizing human life, but if they were to be painted
at all, they could hardly be painted anything but green, and green all
over. People would have been apt to object to any pursuit of abstract
harmonies of color, which might have induced him to paint his hawthorn
blue.
SECTION XLV. In the same way, whenever the subject of the sculpture was
definite, its color was of necessity definite also; and, in the hands of
the Northern builders, it often became, in consequence, rather the means
of explaining and animating the stories of their stone-work, than a matter
of abstract decorative science. Flowers were painted red, trees green, and
faces flesh-color; the result of the whole being often far more
entertaining than beautiful. And also, though in the lines of the
mouldings and the decorations of shafts or vaults, a richer and more
abstract method of coloring was adopted (aided by the rapid development of
the best principles of color in early glass-painting), the vigorous depths
of shadow in the Northern sculpture confused the architect's eye,
compelling him to use violent colors in the recesses, if these were to be
seen as color at all, and thus injured his perception of more delicate
color harmonies; so that in innumerable instances it becomes very
disputable whether monuments even of the best times were improved by the
color bestowed upon them, or the contrary. But, in the South, the flatness
and comparatively vague forms of the sculpture, while they appeared to
call for color in order to enhance their interest, presented exactly the
conditions which would set it off to the greatest advantage; breadth or
surface displaying even the most delicate tints in the lights, and
faintness of shadow joining with the most delicate and pearly grays of
color harmony; while the subject of the design being in nearly all cases
reduced to mere intricacy of ornamental line, might be colored in any way
the architect chose without any loss of rationality. Where oak-leaves and
roses were carved into fresh relief and perfect bloom, it was necessary to
paint the one green and the other red; but in portions of ornamentation
where there was nothing which could be definitely construed into either an
oak-leaf or a rose, but a mere labyrinth of beautiful lines, becoming here
something like a leaf, and there something like a flower, the whole
tracery of the sculpture might be left white, and grounded with gold or
blue, or treated in any other manner best harmonizing with the colors
around it. And as the necessarily feeble character of the sculpture called
for and was ready to display the best arrangements of color, so the
precious marbles in the architect's hands give him at once the best
examples and the best means of color. The best examples, for the tints of
all natural stones are as exquisite in quality as endless in change; and
the best means, for they are all permanent.
SECTION XLVI. Every motive thus concurred in urging him to the study of
chromatic decoration, and every advantage was given him in the pursuit of
it; and this at the very moment when, as presently to be noticed, the naïveté
of barbaric Christianity could only be forcibly appealed to by the help of
colored pictures: so that, both externally and internally, the
architectural construction became partly merged in pictorial effect; and
the whole edifice is to be regarded less as a temple wherein to pray, than
as itself a Book of Common Prayer, a vast illuminated missal, bound with
alabaster instead of parchment, studded with porphyry pillars instead of
jewels, and written within and without in letters of enamel and gold.
SECTION XLVII. LAW VII. That the impression of the architecture is
not to be dependent on size. And now there is but one final
consequence to be deduced. The reader understands, I trust, by this time,
that the claims of these several parts of the building upon his attention
will depend upon their delicacy of design, their perfection of color,
their preciousness of material, and their legendary interest. All these
qualities are independent of size, and partly even inconsistent with it.
Neither delicacy of surface sculpture, nor subtle gradations of color, can
be appreciated by the eye at a distance; and since we have seen that our
sculpture is generally to be only an inch or two in depth, and that our
coloring is in great part to be produced with the soft tints and veins of
natural stones, it will follow necessarily that none of the parts of the
building can be removed far from the eye, and therefore that the whole
mass of it cannot be large. It is not even desirable that it should be so;
for the temper in which the mind addresses itself to contemplate minute
and beautiful details is altogether different from that in which it
submits itself to vague impressions of space and size. And therefore we
must not be disappointed, but grateful, when we find all the best work of
the building concentrated within a space comparatively small; and that,
for the great cliff-like buttresses and mighty piers of the North,
shooting up into indiscernible height, we have here low walls spread
before us like the pages of a book, and shafts whose capitals we may touch
with our hand.
SECTION XLVIII. The due consideration of the principles above stated
will enable the traveller to judge with more candor and justice of the
architecture of St. Mark's than usually it would have been possible for
him to do while under the influence of the prejudices necessitated by
familiarity with the very different schools of Northern art. I wish it
were in my power to lay also before the general reader some
exemplification of the manner in which these strange principles are
developed in the lovely building. But exactly in proportion to the
nobility of any work, is the difficulty of conveying a just impression of
it: and wherever I have occasion to bestow high praise, there it is
exactly most dangerous for me to endeavor to illustrate my meaning, except
by reference to the work itself. And, in fact, the principal reason why
architectural criticism is at this day so far behind all other, is the
impossibility of illustrating the best architecture faithfully. Of the
various schools of painting, examples are accessible to every one, and
reference to the works themselves is found sufficient for all purposes of
criticism; but there is nothing like St. Mark's or the Ducal Palace to be
referred to in the National Gallery, and no faithful illustration of them
is possible on the scale of such a volume as this. And it is exceedingly
difficult on any scale. Nothing is so rare in art, as far as my own
experience goes, as a fair illustration of architecture; perfect
illustration of it does not exist. For all good architecture depends upon
the adaptation of its chiselling to the effect at a certain distance from
the eye; and to render the peculiar confusion in the midst of order, and
uncertainty in the midst of decision, and mystery in the midst of
trenchant lines, which are the result of distance, together with perfect
expression of the peculiarities of the design, requires the skill of the
most admirable artist, devoted to the work with the most severe
conscientiousness, neither the skill nor the determination having as yet
been given to the subject. And in the illustration of details, every
building of any pretensions to high architectural rank would require a
volume of plates, and those finished with extraordinary care. With respect
to the two buildings which are the principal subjects of the present
volume, St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace, I have found it quite impossible
to do them the slightest justice by any kind of portraiture; and I
abandoned the endeavor in the case of the latter with less regret, because
in the new Crystal Palace (as the poetical public insist upon calling it,
though it is neither a palace, nor of crystal) there will be placed, I
believe, a noble cast of one of its angles. As for St. Mark's, the effort
was hopeless from the beginning. For its effect depends not only upon the
most delicate sculpture in every part, out, as we have just stated,
eminently on its color also, and that the most subtle, variable,
inexpressible color in the world,—the color of glass, of transparent
alabaster, of polished marble, and lustrous gold. It would be easier to
illustrate a crest of Scottish mountain, with its purple heather and pale
harebells at their fullest and fairest, or a glade of Jura forest, with
its floor of anemone and moss, than a single portico of St. Mark's. The
fragment of one of its archivolts, given at the bottom of the opposite
Plate, is not to illustrate the thing itself, but to illustrate the
impossibility of illustration.
SECTION XLIX. It is left a fragment, in order to get it on a larger
scale; and yet even on this scale it is too small to show the sharp folds
and points of the marble vine-leaves with sufficient clearness. The ground
of it is gold, the sculpture in the spandrils is not more than an inch and
a half deep, rarely so much. It is in fact nothing more than an exquisite
sketching of outlines in marble, to about the same depth as in the Elgin
frieze; the draperies, however, being filled with close folds, in the
manner of the Byzantine pictures, folds especially necessary here, as
large masses could not be expressed in the shallow sculpture without
becoming insipid; but the disposition of these folds is always most
beautiful, and often opposed by broad and simple spaces, like that
obtained by the scroll in the hand of the prophet seen in the Plate.
The balls in the archivolt project considerably, and the interstices
between their interwoven bands of marble are filled with colors like the
illuminations of a manuscript; violet, crimson, blue, gold, and green
alternately: but no green is ever used without an intermixture of blue
pieces in the mosaic, nor any blue without a little centre of pale green;
sometimes only a single piece of glass a quarter of an inch square, so
subtle was the feeling for color which was thus to be satisfied.
[Footnote: The fact is, that no two tesserae of the glass are exactly of
the same tint, the greens being all varied with blues, the blues of
different depths, the reds of different clearness, so that the effect of
each mass of color is full of variety, like the stippled color of a fruit
piece.] The intermediate circles have golden stars set on an azure ground,
varied in the same manner; and the small crosses seen in the intervals are
alternately blue and subdued scarlet, with two small circles of white set
in the golden ground above and beneath them, each only about half an inch
across (this work, remember, being on the outside of the building, and
twenty feet above the eye), while the blue crosses have each a pale green
centre. Of all this exquisitely mingled hue, no plate, however large or
expensive, could give any adequate conception; but, if the reader will
supply in imagination to the engraving what he supplies to a common
woodcut of a group of flowers, the decision of the respective merits of
modern and of Byzantine architecture may be allowed to rest on this
fragment of St. Mark's alone.
From the vine-leaves of that archivolt, though there is no direct
imitation of nature in them, but on the contrary a studious subjection to
architectural purpose more particularly to be noticed hereafter, we may
yet receive the same kind of pleasure which we have in seeing true
vine-leaves and wreathed branches traced upon golden light; its stars upon
their azure ground ought to make us remember, as its builder remembered,
the stars that ascend and fall in the great arch of the sky: and I believe
that stars, and boughs, and leaves, and bright colors are everlastingly
lovely, and to be by all men beloved; and, moreover, that church walls
grimly seared with squared lines, are not better nor nobler things than
these. I believe the man who designed and the men who delighted in that
archivolt to have been wise, happy, and holy. Let the reader look back to
the archivolt I have already given out of the streets of London (Plate
XIII. Vol. I., Stones of Venice), and see what there is in it to make us
any of the three. Let him remember that the men who design such work as
that call St. Mark's a barbaric monstrosity, and let him judge between us.
SECTION L. Some farther details of the St. Mark's architecture, and
especially a general account of Byzantine capitals, and of the principal
ones at the angles of the church, will be found in the following chapter.
[Footnote: Some illustration, also, of what was said in SECTION XXXIII
above, respecting the value of the shafts of St. Mark's as large jewels,
will be found in Appendix 9, "Shafts of St. Mark's."] Here I must pass on
to the second part of our immediate subject, namely, the inquiry how far
the exquisite and varied ornament of St. Mark's fits it, as a Temple, for
its sacred purpose, and would be applicable in the churches of modern
times. We have here evidently two questions: the first, that wide and
continually agitated one, whether richness of ornament be right in
churches at all; the second, whether the ornament of St. Mark's be of a
truly ecclesiastical and Christian character.
SECTION LI. In the first chapter of the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" I
endeavored to lay before the reader some reasons why churches ought to be
richly adorned, as being the only places in which the desire of offering a
portion of all precious things to God could be legitimately expressed. But
I left wholly untouched the question: whether the church, as such, stood
in need of adornment, or would be better fitted for its purposes by
possessing it. This question I would now ask the reader to deal with
briefly and candidly.
The chief difficulty in deciding it has arisen from its being always
presented to us in an unfair form. It is asked of us, or we ask of
ourselves, whether the sensation which we now feel in passing from our own
modern dwelling-house, through a newly built street, into a cathedral of
the thirteenth century, be safe or desirable as a preparation for public
worship. But we never ask whether that sensation was at all calculated
upon by the builders of the cathedral.
SECTION LII. Now I do not say that the contrast of the ancient with the
modern building, and the strangeness with which the earlier architectural
forms fall upon the eye, are at this day disadvantageous. But I do say,
that their effect, whatever it may be, was entirely uncalculated upon by
the old builder. He endeavored to make his work beautiful, but never
expected it to be strange. And we incapacitate ourselves altogether from
fair judgment of its intention, if we forget that, when it was built, it
rose in the midst of other work fanciful and beautiful as itself; that
every dwelling-house in the middle ages was rich with the same ornaments
and quaint with the same grotesques which fretted the porches or animated
the gargoyles of the cathedral; that what we now regard with doubt and
wonder, as well as with delight, was then the natural continuation, into
the principal edifice of the city, of a style which was familiar to every
eye throughout all its lanes and streets; and that the architect had often
no more idea of producing a peculiarly devotional impression by the
richest color and the most elaborate carving, than the builder of a modern
meetinghouse has by his white-washed walls and square-cut casements.
[Footnote: See the farther notice of this subject in Vol. III., Chap. IV.
Stones of Venice.]
SECTION LIII. Let the reader fix this great fact well in his mind, and
then follow out its important corollaries. We attach, in modern days, a
kind of sacredness to the pointed arch and the groined roof, because,
while we look habitually out of square windows and live under flat
ceilings, we meet with the more beautiful forms in the ruins of our
abbeys. But when those abbeys were built, the pointed arch was used for
every shop door, as well as for that of the cloister, and the feudal baron
and freebooter feasted, as the monk sang, under vaulted roofs; not because
the vaulting was thought especially appropriate to either the revel or
psalm, but because it was then the form in which a strong roof was easiest
built. We have destroyed the goodly architecture of our cities; we have
substituted one wholly devoid of beauty or meaning; and then we reason
respecting the strange effect upon our minds of the fragments which,
fortunately, we have left in our churches, as if those churches had always
been designed to stand out in strong relief from all the buildings around
them, and Gothic architecture had always been, what it is now, a religious
language, like Monkish Latin. Most readers know, if they would arouse
their knowledge, that this was not so; but they take no pains to reason
the matter out: they abandon themselves drowsily to the impression that
Gothic is a peculiarly ecclesiastical style; and sometimes, even, that
richness in church ornament is a condition or furtherance of the Romish
religion. Undoubtedly it has become so in modern times: for there being no
beauty in our recent architecture, and much in the remains of the past,
and these remains being almost exclusively ecclesiastical, the High Church
and Romanist parties have not been slow in availing themselves of the
natural instincts which were deprived of all food except from this source;
and have willingly promulgated the theory, that because all the good
architecture that is now left is expressive of High Church or Romanist
doctrines, all good architecture ever has been and must be so,—a
piece of absurdity from which, though here and there a country clergyman
may innocently believe it, I hope the common sense of the nation will soon
manfully quit itself. It needs but little inquiry into the spirit of the
past, to ascertain what, once for all, I would desire here clearly and
forcibly to assert, that wherever Christian church architecture has been
good and lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the common
dwelling-house architecture of the period; that when the pointed arch was
used in the street, it was used in the church; when the round arch was
used in the street, it was used in the church; when the pinnacle was set
over the garret window, it was set over the belfry tower; when the flat
roof was used for the drawing-room, it was used for the nave. There is no
sacredness in round arches, nor in pointed; none in pinnacles, nor in
buttresses; none in pillars, nor traceries. Churches were larger than in
most other buildings, because they had to hold more people; they were more
adorned than most other buildings, because they were safer from violence,
and were the fitting subjects of devotional offering: but they were never
built in any separate, mystical, and religious style; they were built in
the manner that was common and familiar to everybody at the time. The
flamboyant traceries that adorn the façade of Rouen Cathedral had once
their fellows in every window of every house in the market place; the
sculptures that adorn the porches of St. Mark's had once their match on
the walls, of every palace on the Grand Canal; and the only difference
between the church and the dwelling-house was, that there existed a
symbolical meaning in the distribution of the parts of all buildings meant
for worship, and that the painting or sculpture was, in the one case, less
frequently of profane subject than in the other. A more severe distinction
cannot be drawn: for secular history was constantly introduced into church
architecture; and sacred history or allusion generally formed at least one
half of the ornament of the dwelling-house.
SECTION LIV. This fact is so important, and so little considered, that I
must be pardoned for dwelling upon it at some length, and accurately
marking the limits of the assertion I have made. I do not mean that every
dwelling-house of mediaeval cities was as richly adorned and as exquisite
in composition as the fronts of their cathedrals, but that they presented
features of the same kind, often in parts quite as beautiful; and that the
churches were not separated by any change of style from the buildings
round them, as they are now, but were merely more finished and full
examples of a universal style, rising out of the confused streets of the
city as an oak tree does out of an oak copse, not differing in leafage,
but in size and symmetry. Of course the quainter and smaller forms of
turret and window necessary for domestic service, the inferior materials,
often wood instead of stone, and the fancy of the inhabitants, which had
free play in the design, introduced oddnesses, vulgarities, and variations
into house architecture, which were prevented by the traditions, the
wealth, and the skill of the monks and freemasons; while, on the other
hand, conditions of vaulting, buttressing, and arch and tower building,
were necessitated by the mere size of the cathedral, of which it would be
difficult to find examples elsewhere. But there was nothing more in these
features than the adaptation of mechanical skill to vaster requirements;
there was nothing intended to be, or felt to be, especially ecclesiastical
in any of the forms so developed; and the inhabitants of every village and
city, when they furnished funds for the decoration of their church,
desired merely to adorn the house of God as they adorned their own, only a
little more richly, and with a somewhat graver temper in the subjects of
the carving. Even this last difference is not always clearly discernible:
all manner of ribaldry occurs in the details of the ecclesiastical
buildings of the North, and at the time when the best of them were built,
every man's house was a kind of temple; a figure of the Madonna, or of
Christ, almost always occupied a niche over the principal door, and the
Old Testament histories were curiously interpolated amidst the grotesques
of the brackets and the gables.
SECTION LV. And the reader will now perceive that the question
respecting fitness of church decoration rests in reality on totally
different grounds from those commonly made foundations of argument. So
long as our streets are walled with barren brick, and our eyes rest
continually, in our daily life, on objects utterly ugly, or of
inconsistent and meaningless design, it may be a doubtful question whether
the faculties of eye and mind which are capable of perceiving beauty,
having been left without food during the whole of our active life, should
be suddenly feasted upon entering a place of worship; and color, and
music, and sculpture should delight the senses, and stir the curiosity of
men unaccustomed to such appeal, at the moment when they are required to
compose themselves for acts of devotion;—this, I say, may be a
doubtful question: but it cannot be a question at all, that if once
familiarized with beautiful form and color, and accustomed to see in
whatever human hands have executed for us, even for the lowest services,
evidence of noble thought and admirable skill, we shall desire to see this
evidence also in whatever is built or labored for the house of prayer;
that the absence of the accustomed loveliness would disturb instead of
assisting devotion; and that we should feel it as vain to ask whether,
with our own house full of goodly craftsmanship, we should worship God in
a house destitute of it, as to ask whether a pilgrim whose day's journey
had led him through fair woods and by sweet waters, must at evening turn
aside into some barren place to pray.
SECTION LVI. Then the second question submitted to us, whether the
ornament of St. Mark's be truly ecclesiastical and Christian, is evidently
determined together with the first; for, if not only the permission of
ornament at all, but the beautiful execution of it, be dependent on our
being familiar with it in daily life, it will follow that no style of
noble architecture can be exclusively ecclesiastical. It must be practised
in the dwelling before it be perfected in the church, and it is the test
of a noble style that it shall be applicable to both; for if essentially
false and ignoble, it may be made to fit the dwelling-house, but never can
be made to fit the church: and just as there are many principles which
will bear the light of the world's opinion, yet will not bear the light of
God's word, while all principles which will bear the test of Scripture
will also bear that of practice, so in architecture there are many forms
which expediency and convenience may apparently justify, or at least
render endurable, in daily use, which will yet be found offensive the
moment they are used for church service; but there are none good for
church service, which cannot bear daily use. Thus the Renaissance manner
of building is a convenient style for dwelling-houses, but the natural
sense of all religious men causes them to turn from it with pain when it
has been used in churches; and this has given rise to the popular idea
that the Roman style is good for houses and the Gothic for churches. This
is not so; the Roman style is essentially base, and we can bear with it
only so long as it gives us convenient windows and spacious rooms; the
moment the question of convenience is set aside, and the expression or
beauty of the style it tried by its being used in a church, we find it
fails. But because the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for churches
they are not therefore less fit for dwellings. They are in the highest
sense fit and good for both, nor were they ever brought to perfection
except where they were used for both.
SECTION LVII. But there is one character of Byzantine work which,
according to the time at which it was employed, may be considered as
either fitting or unfitting it for distinctly ecclesiastical purposes; I
mean the essentially pictorial character of its decoration. We have
already seen what large surfaces it leaves void of bold architectural
features, to be rendered interesting merely by surface ornament or
sculpture. In this respect Byzantine work differs essentially from pure
Gothic styles, which are capable of filling every vacant space by features
purely architectural, and may be rendered, if we please, altogether
independent of pictorial aid. A Gothic church may be rendered impressive
by mere successions of arches, accumulations of niches, and entanglements
of tracery. But a Byzantine church requires expression and interesting
decoration over vast plane surfaces,—decoration which becomes noble
only by becoming pictorial; that is to say, by representing natural
objects,—men, animals, or flowers. And, therefore, the question
whether the Byzantine style be fit for church service in modern days,
becomes involved in the inquiry, what effect upon religion has been or may
yet be produced by pictorial art, and especially by the art of the
mosaicist?
SECTION LVIII. The more I have examined the subject the more dangerous I
have found it to dogmatize respecting the character of the art which is
likely, at a given period, to be most useful to the cause of religion. One
great fact first meets me. I cannot answer for the experience of others,
but I never yet met with a Christian whose heart was thoroughly set upon
the world to come, and, so far as human judgment could pronounce, perfect
and right before God, who cared about art at all. I have known several
very noble Christian men who loved it intensely, but in them there was
always traceable some entanglement of the thoughts with the matters of
this world, causing them to fall into strange distresses and doubts, and
often leading them into what they themselves would confess to be errors in
understanding, or even failures in duty. I do not say that these men may
not, many of them, be in very deed nobler than those whose conduct is more
consistent; they may be more tender in the tone of all their feelings, and
farther-sighted in soul, and for that very reason exposed to greater
trials and fears, than those whose hardier frame and naturally narrower
vision enable them with less effort to give their hands to God and walk
with Him. But still, the general fact is indeed so, that I have never
known a man who seemed altogether right and calm in faith, who seriously
cared about art; and when casually moved by it, it is quite impossible to
say beforehand by what class of art this impression will on such men be
made. Very often it is by a theatrical commonplace, more frequently still
by false sentiment. I believe that the four painters who have had, and
still have, the most influence, such as it is, on the ordinary Protestant
Christian mind, are Carlo Dolci, Guercino, Benjamin West, and John Martin.
Raphael, much as he is talked about, is, I believe in very fact, rarely
looked at by religious people; much less his master, or any of the truly
great religious men of old. But a smooth Magdalen of Carlo Dolci with a
tear on each cheek, or a Guercino Christ or St. John, or a Scripture
illustration of West's, or a black cloud with a flash of lightning in it
of Martin's, rarely rails of being verily, often deeply, felt for the
time.
SECTION LIX. There are indeed many very evident reasons for this; the
chief one being that, as all truly great religious painters have been
hearty Romanists, there are none of their works which do not embody, in
some portions of them, definitely Romanist doctrines. The Protestant mind
is instantly struck by these, and offended by them, so as to be incapable
of entering, or at least rendered indisposed to enter, farther into the
heart of the work, or to the discovering those deeper characters of it,
which are not Romanist, but Christian, in the everlasting sense and power
of Christianity. Thus most Protestants, entering for the first time a
Paradise of Angelico, would be irrevocably offended by finding that the
first person the painter wished them to speak to was St. Dominic; and
would retire from such a heaven as speedily as possible,—not giving
themselves time to discover, that whether dressed in black, or white, or
gray, and by whatever name in the calendar they might be called, the
figures that filled that Angelico heaven were indeed more, saintly, and
pure, and full of love in every feature, than any that the human hand ever
traced before or since. And thus Protestantism, having foolishly sought
for the little help it requires at the hand of painting from the men who
embodied no Catholic doctrine, has been reduced to receive it from those
who believed neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, but who read the Bible
in search of the picturesque. We thus refuse to regard the painters who
passed their lives in prayer, but are perfectly ready to be taught by
those who spent them in debauchery. There is perhaps no more popular
Protestant picture than Salvator's "Witch of Endor," of which the subject
was chosen by the painter simply because, under the names of Saul and the
Sorceress, he could paint a captain of banditti, and a Neapolitan hag.
SECTION LX. The fact seems to be that strength of religious feeling is
capable of supplying for itself whatever is wanting in the rudest
suggestions of art, and will either, on the one hand, purify what is
coarse into inoffensiveness, or, on the other, raise what is feeble into
impressiveness. Probably all art, as such, is unsatisfactory to it; and
the effort which it makes to supply the void will be induced rather by
association and accident than by the real merit of the work submitted to
it. The likeness to a beloved friend, the correspondence with a habitual
conception, the freedom from any strange or offensive particularity, and,
above all, an interesting choice of incident, will win admiration for a
picture when the noblest efforts of religious imagination would otherwise
fail of power. How much more, when to the quick capacity of emotion is
joined a childish trust that the picture does indeed represent a fact! It
matters little whether the fact be well or ill told; the moment we believe
the picture to be true, we complain little of its being ill-painted. Let
it be considered for a moment, whether the child, with its colored print,
inquiring eagerly and gravely which is Joseph, and which is Benjamin, is
not more capable of receiving a strong, even a sublime, impression from
the rude symbol which it invests with reality by its own effort, than the
connoisseur who admires the grouping of the three figures in Raphael's
"Telling of the Dreams;" and whether also, when the human mind is in right
religious tone, it has not always this childish power—I speak
advisedly, this power—a noble one, and possessed more in youth than
at any period of after life, but always, I think, restored in a measure by
religion—of raising into sublimity and reality the rudest symbol
which is given to it of accredited truth.
SECTION LXI. Ever since the period of the Renaissance, however, the
truth has not been accredited; the painter of religious subject is no
longer regarded as the narrator of a fact, but as the inventor of an idea.
[Footnote: I do not mean that modern Christians believe less in the facts
than ancient Christians, but they do not believe in the representation of
the facts as true. We look upon the picture as this or that painter's
conception; the elder Christians looked upon it as this or that, painter's
description of what had actually taken place. And in the Greek Church all
painting is, to this day, strictly a branch of tradition. See M. Dideron's
admirably written introduction to his Iconographie Chrétienne, p. 7:—"Un
de mes compagnons s'étonnait de re trouver à la Panagia de St. Luc, le
saint Jean Chrysostome qu'il avait dessiné dans le baptistère de St. Marc,
à Venise. Le costume des personnages est partout et en tout temps le même,
non-seulement pour la forme, mais pour la couleur, mais pour le dessin,
mais jusque pour le nombre et l'épaisseur des plis."] We do not severely
criticise the manner in which a true history is told, but we become harsh
investigators of the faults of an invention; so that in the modern
religious mind, the capacity of emotion, which renders judgment uncertain,
is joined with an incredulity which renders it severe; and this ignorant
emotion, joined with ignorant observance of faults, is the worst possible
temper in which any art can be regarded, but more especially sacred art.
For as religious faith renders emotion facile, so also it generally
renders expression simple; that is to say a truly religious painter will
very often be ruder, quainter, simpler, and more faulty in his manner of
working, than a great irreligious one. And it was in this artless
utterance, and simple acceptance, on the part of both the workman and the
beholder, that all noble schools of art have been cradled; it is in them
that they must be cradled to the end of time. It is impossible to
calculate the enormous loss of power in modern days, owing to the
imperative requirement that art shall be methodical and learned: for as
long as the constitution of this world remains unaltered, there will be
more intellect in it than there can be education; there will be many men
capable of just sensation and vivid invention, who never will have time to
cultivate or polish their natural powers. And all unpolished power is in
the present state of society lost; in other things as well as in the arts,
but in the arts especially: nay, in nine cases out of ten, people mistake
the polish for the power. Until a man has passed through a course of
academy studentship, and can draw in an approved manner with French chalk,
and knows foreshortening, and perspective, and something of anatomy, we do
not think he can possibly be an artist; what is worse, we are very apt to
think that we can make him an artist by teaching him anatomy, and
how to draw with French chalk; whereas the real gift in him is utterly
independent of all such accomplishments: and I believe there are many
peasants on every estate, and laborers in every town of Europe, who have
imaginative powers of a high order, which nevertheless cannot be used for
our good, because we do not choose to look at anything but what is
expressed in a legal and scientific way. I believe there is many a village
mason who, set to carve a series of Scripture or any other histories,
would find many a strange and noble fancy in his head, and set it down,
roughly enough indeed, but in a way well worth our having. But we are too
grand to let him do this, or to set up his clumsy work when it is done;
and accordingly the poor stone-mason is kept hewing stones smooth at the
corners, and we build our church of the smooth square stones, and consider
ourselves wise.
SECTION LXII. I shall pursue this subject farther in another place; but
I allude to it here in order to meet the objections of those persons who
suppose the mosaics of St. Mark's, and others of the period, to be utterly
barbarous as representations of religious history. Let it be granted that
they are so; we are not for that reason to suppose they were ineffective
in religious teaching. I have above spoken of the whole church as a great
Book of Common Prayer; the mosaics were its illuminations, and the common
people of the time were taught their Scripture history by means of them,
more impressively perhaps, though far less fully, than ours are now by
Scripture reading. They had no other Bible, and—Protestants do not
often enough consider this—could have no other. We find it
somewhat difficult to furnish our poor with printed Bibles; consider what
the difficulty must have been when they could be given only in manuscript.
The walls of the church necessarily became the poor man's Bible, and a
picture was more easily read upon the walls than a chapter. Under this
view, and considering them merely as the Bible pictures of a great nation
in its youth, I shall finally invite the reader to examine the connection
and subjects of these mosaics; but in the meantime I have to deprecate the
idea of their execution being in any sense barbarous. I have conceded too
much to modern prejudice, in permitting them to be rated as mere childish
efforts at colored portraiture: they have characters in them of a very
noble kind; nor are they by any means devoid of the remains of the science
of the later Roman empire. The character of the features is almost always
fine, the expression stern and quiet, and very solemn, the attitudes and
draperies always majestic in the single figures, and in those of the
groups which are not in violent action; [Footnote: All the effects of
Byzantine art to represent violent action are inadequate, most of them
ludicrously so, even when the sculptural art is in other respects far
advanced. The early Gothic sculptors, on the other hand, fail in all
points of refinement, but hardly ever in expression of action. This
distinction is of course one of the necessary consequences of the
difference in all respects between the repose of the Eastern, and activity
of the Western mind, which we shall have to trace out completely in the
inquiry into the nature of Gothic.] while the bright coloring and
disregard of chiaroscuro cannot be regarded as imperfections, since they
are the only means by which the figures could be rendered clearly
intelligible in the distance and darkness of the vaulting. So far am I
from considering them barbarous, that I believe of all works of religious
art whatsoever, these, and such as these, have been the most effective.
They stand exactly midway between the debased manufacture of wooden and
waxen images which is the support of Romanist idolatry all over the world,
and the great art which leads the mind away from the religious subject to
the art itself. Respecting neither of these branches of human skill is
there, nor can there be, any question. The manufacture of puppets, however
influential on the Romanist mind of Europe, is certainly not deserving of
consideration as one of the fine arts. It matters literally nothing to a
Romanist what the image he worships is like. Take the vilest doll that is
screwed together in a cheap toy-shop, trust it to the keeping of a large
family of children, let it be beaten about the house by them till it is
reduced to a shapeless block, then dress it in a satin frock and declare
it to have fallen from heaven, and it will satisfactorily answer all
Romanist purposes. Idolatry, [Footnote: Appendix X, "Proper Sense of the
word Idolatry."] it cannot be too often repeated, is no encourager of the
fine arts. But, on the other hand, the highest branches of the fine arts
are no encouragers either of idolatry or of religion. No picture of
Leonardo's or Raphael's, no statue of Michael Angelo's, has ever been
worshipped, except by accident. Carelessly regarded, and by ignorant
persons, there is less to attract in them than in commoner works.
Carefully regarded, and by intelligent persons, they instantly divert the
mind from their subject to their art, so that admiration takes the place
of devotion. I do not say that the Madonna di S. Sisto, the Madonna del
Cardellino, and such others, have not had considerable religious influence
on certain minds, but I say that on the mass of the people of Europe they
have had none whatever, while by far the greater number of the most
celebrated statues and pictures are never regarded with any other feelings
than those of admiration of human beauty, or reverence for human skill.
Effective religious art, therefore, has always lain, and I believe must
always lie, between the two extremes—of barbarous idol-fashioning on
one side, and magnificent craftsmanship on the other. It consists partly
in missal-painting, and such book-illustrations as, since the invention of
printing, have taken its place; partly in glass-painting; partly in rude
sculpture on the outsides of buildings; partly in mosaics; and partly in
the frescoes and tempera pictures which, in the fourteenth century, formed
the link between this powerful, because imperfect, religious art, and the
impotent perfection which succeeded it.
SECTION LXIII. But of all these branches the most important are the
inlaying and mosaic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represented
in a central manner by these mosaics of St. Mark's. Missal-painting could
not, from its minuteness, produce the same sublime impressions, and
frequently merged itself in mere ornamentation of the page. Modern
book-illustration has been so little skillful as hardly to be worth
naming. Sculpture, though in some positions it becomes of great
importance, has always a tendency to lose itself in architectural effect;
and was probably seldom deciphered, in all its parts, by the common
people, still less the traditions annealed in the purple burning of the
painted window. Finally, tempera pictures and frescoes were often of
limited size or of feeble color. But the great mosaics of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries covered the walls and roofs of the churches with
inevitable lustre; they could not be ignored or escaped from; their size
rendered them majestic, their distance mysterious, their color attractive.
They did not pass into confused or inferior decorations; neither were they
adorned with any evidences of skill or science, such as might withdraw the
attention from their subjects. They were before the eyes of the devotee at
every interval of his worship; vast shadowings forth of scenes to whose
realization he looked forward, or of spirits whose presence he invoked.
And the man must be little capable of receiving a religious impression of
any kind, who, to this day, does not acknowledge some feeling of awe, as
he looks up at the pale countenances and ghastly forms which haunt the
dark roofs of the Baptisteries of Parma and Florence, or remains
altogether untouched by the majesty of the colossal images of apostles,
and of Him who sent apostles, that look down from the darkening gold of
the domes of Venice and Pisa.
SECTION LXIV. I shall, in a future portion of this work, endeavor to
discover what probabilities there are of our being able to use this kind
of art in modern churches; but at present it remains for us to follow out
the connection of the subjects represented in St. Mark's so as to fulfil
our immediate object, and form an adequate conception of the feelings of
its builders, and of its uses to those for whom it was built.
Now, there is one circumstance to which I must, in the outset, direct the
reader's special attention, as forming a notable distinction between
ancient and modern days. Our eyes are now familiar and weaned with
writing; and if an inscription is put upon a building, unless it be large
and clear, it is ten to one whether we ever trouble ourselves to decipher
it. But the old architect was sure of readers. He knew that every one
would be glad to decipher all that he wrote; that they would rejoice in
possessing the vaulted leaves of his stone manuscript; and that the more
he gave them, the more grateful would the people be. We must take some
pains, therefore, when we enter St. Mark's, to read all that is inscribed,
or we shall not penetrate into the feeling either of the builder or of his
times.
SECTION LXV. A large atrium or portico is attached to two sides of the
church, a space which was especially reserved for unbaptized persons and
new converts. It was thought right that, before their baptism, these
persons should be led to contemplate the great facts of the Old Testament
history; the history of the Fall of Man, and of the lives of Patriarchs up
to the period of the Covenant by Moses: the order of the subjects in this
series being very nearly the same as in many Northern churches, but
significantly closing with the Fall of the Manna, in order to mark to the
catechumen the insufficiency of the Mosaic covenant for salvation,—"Our
fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead,"—and to turn
his thoughts to the true Bread of which the manna was the type.
SECTION LXVI. Then, when after his baptism he was permitted to enter the
church, over its main entrance he saw, on looking back, a mosaic of Christ
enthroned, with the Virgin on one side and St. Mark on the other, in
attitudes of adoration. Christ is represented as holding a book open upon
his knee, on which is written:﹃I AM THE DOOR; BY ME IF ANY MAN ENTER IN,
HE SHALL BE SAVED.﹄On the red marble moulding which surrounds the mosaic
is written: "I AM THE GATE OF LIFE; LET THOSE WHO ARE MINE, ENTER BY ME."
Above, on the red marble fillet which forms the cornice of the west end of
the church, is written, with reference to the figure of Christ below: "WHO
HE WAS, AND FROM WHOM HE CAME, AND AT WHAT PRICE HE REDEEMED THEE, AND WHY
HE MADE THEE, AND GAVE THEE ALL THINGS, DO THOU CONSIDER."
Now observe, this was not to be seen and read only by the catechumen when
he first entered the church; every one who at any time entered, was
supposed to look back and to read this writing; their daily entrance into
the church was thus made a daily memorial of their first entrance into the
spiritual Church; and we shall find that the rest of the book which was
opened for them upon its walls continually led them in the same manner to
regard the visible temple as in every part a type of the invisible Church
of God.
SECTION LXVII. Therefore the mosaic of the first dome, which is over the
head of the spectator as soon as he has entered by the great door (that
door being the type of baptism), represents the effusion of the Holy
Spirit, as the first consequence and seal of the entrance into the Church
of God. In the centre of the cupola is the Dove, enthroned in the Greek
manner, as the Lamb is enthroned, when the Divinity of the Second and
Third Persons is to be insisted upon together with their peculiar offices.
From the central symbol of the Holy Spirit twelve streams of fire descend
upon the heads of the twelve apostles, who are represented standing around
the dome; and below them, between the windows which are pierced in its
walls, are represented, by groups of two figures for each separate people,
the various nations who heard the apostles speak, at Pentecost, every man
in his own tongue. Finally, on the vaults, at the four angles which
support the cupola, are pictured four angels, each bearing a tablet upon
the end of a rod in his hand: on each of the tablets of the three first
angels is inscribed the word "Holy;" on that of the fourth is written
"Lord;" and the beginning of the hymn being thus put into the mouths of
the four angels, the words of it are continued around the border of the
dome, uniting praise to God for the gift of the Spirit, with welcome to
the redeemed soul received into His Church:
"HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, LORD GOD OF SABAOTH:
HEAVEN AND EARTH ARE FULL OF THY GLORY.
HOSANNA IN THE HIGHEST:
BLESSED IS HE THAT COMETH IN THE NAME OF THE LORD."
And observe in this writing that the convert is required to regard the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit especially as a work of sanctification.
It is the holiness of God manifested in the giving of His Spirit to
sanctify those who had become His children, which the four angels
celebrate in their ceaseless praise; and it is on account of this holiness
that the heaven and earth are said to be full of His glory.
SECTION LXVIII. After thus hearing praise rendered to God by the angels
for the salvation of the newly-entered soul, it was thought fittest that
the worshipper should be led to contemplate, in the most comprehensive
forms possible, the past evidence and the future hopes of Christianity, as
summed up in three facts without assurance of which all faith is vain;
namely that Christ died, that He rose again, and that He ascended into
heaven, there to prepare a place for His elect. On the vault between the
first and second cupolas are represented the crucifixion and resurrection
of Christ, with the usual series of intermediate scenes,—the treason
of Judas, the judgment of Pilate, the crowning with thorns, the descent
into Hades, the visit of the women to the sepulchre, and the apparition to
Mary Magdalene. The second cupola itself, which is the central and
principal one of the church, is entirely occupied by the subject of the
Ascension. At the highest point of it Christ is represented as rising into
the blue heaven, borne up by four angels, and throned upon a rainbow, the
type of reconciliation. Beneath him, the twelve apostles are seen upon the
Mount of Olives, with the Madonna, and, in the midst of them, the two men
in white apparel who appeared at the moment of the Ascension, above whom,
as uttered by them, are inscribed the words, "Ye men of Galilee, why stand
ye gazing up into heaven? This Christ, the Son of God, as He is taken from
you, shall so come, the arbiter of the earth, trusted to do judgment and
justice."
SECTION LXIX. Beneath the circle of the apostles, between the windows of
the cupola, are represented the Christian virtues, as sequent upon the
crucifixion of the flesh, and the spiritual ascension together with
Christ. Beneath them, on the vaults which support the angles of the
cupola, are placed the four Evangelists, because on their evidence our
assurance of the fact of the ascension rests; and, finally, beneath their
feet, as symbols of the sweetness and fulness of the Gospel which they
declared, are represented the four rivers of Paradise, Pison, Gihon,
Tigris, and Euphrates.
SECTION LXX. The third cupola, that over the altar, represents the
witness of the Old Testament to Christ; showing him enthroned in its
centre, and surrounded by the patriarchs and prophets. But this dome was
little seen by the people; [Footnote: It is also of inferior workmanship,
and perhaps later than the rest. Vide Lord Lindsay, vol. i, p. 124, note.]
their contemplation was intended to be chiefly drawn to that of the centre
of the church, and thus the mind of the worshipper was at once fixed on
the main groundwork and hope of Christianity,—"Christ is risen," and
"Christ shall come." If he had time to explore the minor lateral chapels
and cupolas, he could find in them the whole series of New Testament
history, the events of the Life of Christ, and the Apostolic miracles in
their order, and finally the scenery of the Book of Revelation; [Footnote:
The old mosaics from the Revelation have perished, and have been replaced
by miserable work of the seventeenth century.] but if he only entered, as
often the common people do to this hour, snatching a few moments before
beginning the labor of the day to offer up an ejaculatory prayer, and
advanced but from the main entrance as far as the altar screen, all the
splendor of the glittering nave and variegated dome, if they smote upon
his heart, as they might often, in strange contrast with his reed cabin
among the shallows of the lagoon, smote upon it only that they might
proclaim the two great messages—"Christ is risen," and﹃Christ shall
come.﹄Daily, as the white cupolas rose like wreaths of sea-foam in the
dawn, while the shadowy campanile and frowning palace were still withdrawn
into the night, they rose with the Easter Voice of Triumph,—"Christ
is risen;" and daily, as they looked down upon the tumult of the people,
deepening and eddying in the wide square that opened from their feet to
the sea, they uttered above them the sentence of warning,—"Christ
shall come."
SECTION LXXI. And this thought may surely dispose the reader to look
with some change of temper upon the gorgeous building and wild blazonry of
that shrine of St. Mark's. He now perceives that it was in the hearts of
the old Venetian people far more than a place of worship. It was at once a
type of the Redeemed Church of God, and a scroll for the written word of
God. It was to be to them, both an image of the Bride, all glorious
within, her clothing of wrought gold; and the actual Table of the Law and
the Testimony, written within and without. And whether honored as the
Church or as the Bible, was it not fitting that neither the gold nor the
crystal should be spared in the adornment of it; that, as the symbol of
the Bride, the building of the wall thereof should be of jasper,
[Footnote: Rev. xxi. 18.] and the foundations of it garnished with all
manner of precious stones; and that, as the channel of the World, that
triumphant utterance of the Psalmist should be true of it,—"I have
rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies, as much as in all riches"? And
shall we not look with changed temper down the long perspective of St.
Mark's Place towards the sevenfold gates and glowing domes of its temple,
when we know with what solemn purpose the shafts of it were lifted above
the pavement of the populous square? Men met there from all countries of
the earth, for traffic or for pleasure; but, above the crowd swaying for
ever to and fro in the restlessness of avarice or thirst of delight, was
seen perpetually the glory of the temple, attesting to them, whether they
would hear or whether they would forbear, that there was one treasure
which the merchantmen might buy without a price, and one delight better
than all others, in the word and the statutes of God. Not in the
wantonness of wealth, not in vain ministry to the desire of the eyes or
the pride of life, were those marbles hewn into transparent strength, and
those arches arrayed in the colors of the iris. There is a message written
in the dyes of them, that once was written in blood; and a sound in the
echoes of their vaults, that one day shall fill the vault of heaven,—"He
shall return, to do judgment and justice." The strength of Venice was
given her, so long as she remembered this: her destruction found her when
she had forgotten this; and it found her irrevocably, because she forgot
it without excuse. Never had city a more glorious Bible. Among the nations
of the North, a rude and shadowy sculpture filled their temples with
confused and hardly legible imagery; but, for her, the skill and the
treasures of the East had gilded every letter, and illumined every page,
till the Book-Temple shone from afar off like the star of the Magi. In
other cities, the meetings of the people were often in places withdrawn
from religious association, subject to violence and to change; and on the
grass of the dangerous rampart, and in the dust of the troubled street,
there were deeds done and counsels taken, which, if we cannot justify, we
may sometimes forgive. But the sins of Venice, whether in her palace or in
her piazza, were done with the Bible at her right hand. The walls on which
its testimony was written were separated but by a few inches of marble
from those which guarded the secrets of her councils, or confined the
victims of her policy. And when in her last hours she threw off all shame
and all restraint, and the great square of the city became filled with the
madness of the whole earth, be it remembered how much her sin was greater,
because it was done in the face of the House of God, burning with the
letters of His Law. Mountebank and masker laughed their laugh, and went
their way; and a silence has followed them, not unforetold; for amidst
them all, through century after century of gathering vanity and festering
guilt, that white dome of St. Mark's had uttered in the dead ear of
Venice, "Know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into
judgment."
CHAPTER V. — THE DUCAL PALACE.
SECTION I. It was stated in the commencement of the preceding chapter
that the Gothic art of Venice was separated by the building of the Ducal
Palace into two distinct periods; and that in all the domestic edifices
which were raised for half a century after its completion, their
characteristic and chiefly effective portions were more or less directly
copied from it. The fact is, that the Ducal Palace was the great work of
Venice at this period, itself the principal effort of her imagination,
employing her best architects in its masonry, and her best painters in its
decoration, for a long series of years; and we must receive it as a
remarkable testimony to the influence which it possessed over the minds of
those who saw it in its progress, that, while in the other cities of Italy
every palace and church was rising in some original and daily more daring
form, the majesty of this single building was able to give pause to the
Gothic imagination in its full career; stayed the restlessness of
innovation in an instant, and forbade the powers which had created it
thenceforth to exert themselves in new directions, or endeavor to summon
an image more attractive.
SECTION II. The reader will hardly believe that while the architectural
invention of the Venetians was thus lost, Narcissus-like, in
self-contemplation, the various accounts of the progress of the building
thus admired and beloved are so confused as frequently to leave it
doubtful to what portion of the palace they refer; and that there is
actually, at the time being, a dispute between the best Venetian
antiquaries, whether the main façade of the palace be of the fourteenth or
fifteenth century. The determination of this question is of course
necessary before we proceed to draw any conclusions from the style of the
work; and it cannot be determined without a careful review of the entire
history of the palace, and of all the documents relating to it. I trust
that this review may not be found tedious,—assuredly it will not be
fruitless,—bringing many facts before us, singularly illustrative of
the Venetian character.
SECTION III. Before, however, the reader can enter upon any inquiry into
the history of this building, it is necessary that he should be thoroughly
familiar with the arrangement and names of its principal parts, as it at
present stands; otherwise he cannot comprehend so much as a single
sentence of any of the documents referring to it. I must do what I can, by
the help of a rough plan and bird's-eye view, to give him the necessary
topographical knowledge:
Opposite is a rude ground plan of the buildings round St. Mark's Place;
and the following references will clearly explain their relative
positions:
A. St. Mark's Place.
B. Piazzetta.
P. V. Procuratie Vecchie.
P. N. (opposite) Procuratie Nuove.
P. L. Libreria Vecchia.
I. Piazzetta de' Leoni.
T. Tower of St. Mark.
F F. Great Façade of St. Mark's Church.
M. St. Mark's. (It is so united with the Ducal Palace, that the
separation cannot be indicated in the plan, unless all the walls had
been marked, which would have confused the whole.)
D D D. Ducal Palace. g s. Giant's stair.
C. Court of Ducal Palace. J. Judgement angle.
c. Porta della Carta. a. Fig-tree angle.
p p. Ponte della Paglia (Bridge of Straw).
S. Ponte de' Sospiri (Bridge of Sighs).
R R. Riva de' Schiavoni.
The reader will observe that the Ducal Palace is arranged somewhat in the
form of a hollow square, of which one side faces the Piazzetta, B, and
another the quay called the Riva de' Schiavoni, R R; the third is on the
dark canal called the "Rio del Palazzo," and the fourth joins the Church
of St. Mark.
Of this fourth side, therefore, nothing can be seen. Of the other three
sides we shall have to speak constantly; and they will be respectively
called, that towards the Piazzetta, the﹃Piazzetta Façade;﹄that towards
the Riva de' Schiavoni, the﹃Sea Façade;﹄and that towards the Rio del
Palazzo, the﹃Rio Façade.﹄This Rio, or canal, is usually looked upon by
the traveller with great respect, or even horror, because it passes under
the Bridge of Sighs. It is, however, one of the principal thoroughfares of
the city; and the bridge and its canal together occupy, in the mind of a
Venetian, very much the position of Fleet Street and Temple Bar in that of
a Londoner,—at least, at the time when Temple Bar was occasionally
decorated with human heads. The two buildings closely resemble each other
in form.
SECTION IV. We must now proceed to obtain some rough idea of the
appearance and distribution of the palace itself; but its arrangement will
be better understood by supposing ourselves raised some hundred and fifty
feet above the point in the lagoon in front of it, so as to get a general
view of the Sea Façade and Rio Façade (the latter in very steep
perspective), and to look down into its interior court. Fig. II. roughly
represents such a view, omitting all details on the roofs, in order to
avoid confusion. In this drawing we have merely to notice that, of the two
bridges seen on the right, the uppermost, above the black canal, is the
Bridge of Sighs; the lower one is the Ponte della Paglia, the regular
thoroughfare from quay to quay, and, I believe, called the Bridge of
Straw, because the boats which brought straw from the mainland used to
sell it at this place. The corner of the palace, rising above this bridge,
and formed by the meeting of the Sea Façade and Rio Façade, will always be
called the Vine angle, because it is decorated by a sculpture of the
drunkenness of Noah. The angle opposite will be called the Fig-tree angle,
because it is decorated by a sculpture of the Fall of Man. The long and
narrow range of building, of which the roof is seen in perspective behind
this angle, is the part of the palace fronting the Piazzetta; and the
angle under the pinnacle most to the left of the two which terminate it
will be called, for a reason presently to be stated, the Judgment angle.
Within the square formed by the building is seen its interior court (with
one of its wells), terminated by small and fantastic buildings of the
Renaissance period, which face the Giant's Stair, of which the extremity
is seen sloping down on the left.
SECTION V. The great façade which fronts the spectator looks southward.
Hence the two traceried windows lower than the rest, and to the right of
the spectator, may be conveniently distinguished as the "Eastern Windows."
There are two others like them, filled with tracery, and at the same
level, which look upon the narrow canal between the Ponte della Paglia and
the Bridge of Sighs: these we may conveniently call the "Canal Windows."
The reader will observe a vertical line in this dark side of the palace,
separating its nearer and plainer wall from a long four-storied range of
rich architecture. This more distant range is entirely Renaissance: its
extremity is not indicated, because I have no accurate sketch of the small
buildings and bridges beyond it, and we shall have nothing whatever to do
with this part of the palace in our present inquiry. The nearer and
undecorated wall is part of the older palace, though much defaced by
modern opening of common windows, refittings of the brickwork, etc.
SECTION VI. It will be observed that the façade is composed of a smooth
mass of wall, sustained on two tiers of pillars, one above the other. The
manner in which these support the whole fabric will be understood at once
by the rough section, Fig. III., which is supposed to be taken right
through the palace to the interior court, from near the middle of the Sea
Façade. Here aand dare the rows of shafts, both in the
inner court and on the Façade, which carry the main walls; b, c
are solid walls variously strengthened with pilasters. A, B, C are the
three stories of the interior of the palace.
The reader sees that it is impossible for any plan to be more simple, and
that if the inner floors and walls of the stories A, B were removed, there
would be left merely the form of a basilica,—two high walls, carried
on ranges of shafts, and roofed by a low gable.
The stories A, B are entirely modernized, and divided into confused ranges
of small apartments, among which what vestiges remain of ancient masonry
are entirely undecipherable, except by investigations such as I have had
neither the time nor, as in most cases they would involve the removal of
modern plastering, the opportunity, to make. With the subdivisions of this
story, therefore, I shall not trouble the reader; but those of the great
upper story, C, are highly important.
SECTION VII. In the bird's-eye view above, Fig. II., it will be noticed
that the two windows on the right are lower than the other four of the
façade. In this arrangement there is one of the most remarkable instances
I know of the daring sacrifice of symmetry to convenience, which was
noticed in Chap. VII. as one of the chief noblenesses of the Gothic
schools.
The part of the palace in which the two lower windows occur, we shall
find, was first built, and arranged in four stories in order to obtain the
necessary number of apartments. Owing to circumstances, of which we shall
presently give an account, it became necessary, in the beginning of the
fourteenth century, to provide another large and magnificent chamber for
the meeting of the senate. That chamber was added at the side of the older
building; but, as only one room was wanted, there was no need to divide
the added portion into two stories. The entire height was given to the
single chamber, being indeed not too great for just harmony with its
enormous length and breadth. And then came the question how to place the
windows, whether on a line with the two others, or above them.
The ceiling of the new room was to be adorned by the paintings of the best
masters in Venice, and it became of great importance to raise the light
near that gorgeous roof, as well as to keep the tone of illumination in
the Council Chamber serene; and therefore to introduce light rather in
simple masses than in many broken streams. A modern architect, terrified
at the idea of violating external symmetry, would have sacrificed both the
pictures and the peace of the council. He would have placed the larger
windows at the same level with the other two, and have introduced above
them smaller windows, like those of the upper story in the older building,
as if that upper story had been continued along the façade. But the old
Venetian thought of the honor of the paintings, and the comfort of the
senate, before his own reputation. He unhesitatingly raised the large
windows to their proper position with reference to the interior of the
chamber, and suffered the external appearance to take care of itself. And
I believe the whole pile rather gains than loses in effect by the
variation thus obtained in the spaces of wall above and below the windows.
SECTION VIII. On the party wall, between the second and third windows,
which faces the eastern extremity of the Great Council Chamber, is painted
the Paradise of Tintoret; and this wall will therefore be hereafter called
the "Wall of the Paradise."
In nearly the centre of the Sea Façade, and between the first and second
windows of the Great Council Chamber, is a large window to the ground,
opening on a balcony, which is one of the chief ornaments of the palace,
and will be called in future the "Sea Balcony."
The façade which looks on the Piazzetta is very nearly like this to the
Sea, but the greater part of it was built in the fifteenth century, when
people had become studious of their symmetries. Its side windows are all
on the same level. Two light the west end of the Great Council Chamber,
one lights a small room anciently called the Quarantia Civil Nuova; the
other three, and the central one, with a balcony like that to the Sea,
light another large chamber, called Sala del Scrutinio, or﹃Hall of
Enquiry,﹄which extends to the extremity of the palace above the Porta
della Carta.
SECTION IX. The reader is now well enough acquainted with the topography
of the existing building, to be able to follow the accounts of its
history.
We have seen above, that there were three principal styles of Venetian
architecture; Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance.
The Ducal Palace, which was the great work of Venice, was built
successively in the three styles. There was a Byzantine Ducal Palace, a
Gothic Ducal Palace, and a Renaissance Ducal Palace. The second superseded
the first totally; a few stones of it (if indeed so much) are all that is
left. But the third superseded the second in part only, and the existing
building is formed by the union of the two.
We shall review the history of each in succession. [Footnote: The reader
will find it convenient to note the following editions of the printed
books which have been principally consulted in the following inquiry. The
numbers of the manuscripts referred to in the Marcian Library are given
with the quotations.
Sansovino. Venetia Descritta. 410, Venice, 1663.
Sansovino. Lettera intorno al Palazzo Ducale, 8vo, Venice, 1829.
Temanza. Antica Pianta di Venezia, with text. Venice, 1780.
Cadorin. Pareri di XV. Architetti. Svo, Venice,1838.
Filiasi. Memorie storiche. 8vo, Padua, 1811.
Bettio. Lettera discorsiva del Palazzo Ducale, 8vo, Venice, 1837.
Selvatico. Architettura di Venezia. 8vo, Venice, 1847.]
1st. The BYZANTINE PALACE.
In the year of the death of Charlemagne, 813, the Venetians determined to
make the island of Rialto the seat of the government and capital of their
state. [Footnote: The year commonly given is 810, as in the Savina
Chronicle (Cod. Marcianus), p. 13.﹃Del 810 fece principiar el pallazzo
Ducal nel luogo ditto Brucio in confin di S. Moise, et fece riedificar la
isola di Eraclia.﹄The Sagornin Chronicle gives 804; and Filiasi, vol. vi.
chap. I, corrects this date to 813.] Their Doge, Angelo or Agnello
Participazio, instantly took vigorous means for the enlargement of the
small group of buildings which were to be the nucleus of the future
Venice. He appointed persons to superintend the raising of the banks of
sand, so as to form more secure foundations, and to build wooden bridges
over the canals. For the offices of religion, he built the Church of St.
Mark; and on, or near, the spot where the Ducal Palace now stands, he
built a palace for the administration of the government. [Footnote:
"Ampliò la città, fornilla di casamenti, e per il culto d' Iddio e l'
amministrazione della giustizia eresse la capella di S. Marco, e il
palazzo di sua residenza."—Pareri, p. 120. Observe, that piety
towards God, and justice towards man, have been at least the nominal
purposes of every act and institution of ancient Venice. Compare also
Temanza, p. 24. "Quello che abbiamo di certo si è che il suddetto Agnello
lo incomminciò da fondamenti, e cosi pure la capella ducale di S. Marco."]
The history of the Ducal Palace therefore begins with the birth of Venice,
and to what remains of it, at this day, is entrusted the last
representation of her power.
SECTION X. Of the exact position and form of this palace of Participazio
little is ascertained. Sansovino says that it was﹃built near the Ponte
della Paglia, and answeringly on the Grand Canal,﹄towards San Giorgio;
that is to say, in the place now occupied by the Sea Façade; but this was
merely the popular report of his day. [Footnote: What I call the Sea, was
called "the Grand Canal" by the Venetians, as well as the great water
street of the city; but I prefer calling it "the Sea," in order to
distinguish between that street and the broad water in front of the Ducal
Palace, which, interrupted only by the island of San Giorgio, stretches
for many miles to the south, and for more than two to the boundary of the
Lido. It was the deeper channel, just in front of the Ducal Palace,
continuing the line of the great water street itself which the Venetians
spoke of as "the Grand Canal." The words of Sansovino are:﹃Fu cominciato
dove si vede, vicino al ponte della paglia, et rispondente sul canal
grande.﹄Filiasi says simply: "The palace was built where it now is." "Il
palazio fu fatto dove ora pure esiste."—Vol. iii. chap. 27. The
Savina Chronicle, already quoted, says: "in the place called the Bruolo
(or Broglio), that is to say on the Piazzetta."]
We know, however, positively, that it was somewhere upon the site of the
existing palace; and that it had an important front towards the Piazzetta,
with which, as we shall see hereafter, the present palace at one period
was incorporated. We know, also, that it was a pile of some magnificence,
from the account given by Sagornino of the visit paid by the Emperor Otho
the Great, to the Doge Pietro Orseolo II. The chronicler says that the
Emperor "beheld carefully all the beauty of the palace;" [Footnote: "Omni
decoritate illius perlustrata."—Sagornino, quoted by Cadorin and
Temanza.] and the Venetian historians express pride in the buildings being
worthy of an emperor's examination. This was after the palace had been
much injured by fire in the revolt against Candiano IV., [Footnote: There
is an interesting account of this revolt in Monaci, p. 68. Some historians
speak of the palace as having been destroyed entirely; but, that it did
not even need important restorations, appears from Sagornino's expression,
quoted by Cadorin and Temanza. Speaking of the Doge Participazio, he says:
"Qui Palatii hucusque manentis fuerit fabricator." The reparations of the
palace are usually attributed to the successor of Candiano, Pietro Orseolo
I.; but the legend, under the picture of that Doge in the Council Chamber,
speaks only of his rebuilding St. Mark's, and "performing many miracles."
His whole mind seems to have been occupied with ecclesiastical affairs;
and his piety was finally manifested in a way somewhat startling to the
state, by absconding with a French priest to St. Michael's in Gascony, and
there becoming a monk. What repairs, therefore, were necessary to the
Ducal Palace, were left to be undertaken by his son, Orseolo II., above
named.] and just repaired, and richly adorned by Orseolo himself, who is
spoken of by Sagornino as having also﹃adorned the chapel of the Ducal
Palace﹄(St. Mark's) with ornaments of marble and gold. [Footnote: "Quam
non modo marmoreo, verum aureo compsit ornamento."—Temanza]
There can be no doubt whatever that the palace at this period resembled
and impressed the other Byzantine edifices of the city, such as the
Fondaco de Turchi, &c., whose remains have been already described; and
that, like them, it was covered with sculpture, and richly adorned with
gold and color.
SECTION XI. In the year 1106, it was for the second time injured by
fire, [Footnote: "L'anno 1106, uscito fuoco d'una casa privata, arse parte
del palazzo."—Sansovino. Of the beneficial effect of these
fires, vide Cadorin.] but repaired before 1116, when it received another
emperor, Henry V. (of Germany), and was again honored by imperial praise.
[Footnote: "Urbis situm, aedificiorum decorem, et regiminis sequitatem
multipliciter commendavit."—Cronaca Dandolo, quoted by
Cadorin.]
Between 1173 and the close of the century, it seems to have been again
repaired and much enlarged by the Doge Sebastian Ziani. Sansovino says
that this Doge not only repaired it, but "enlarged it in every direction;"
[Footnote: "Non solamente rinovo il palazzo, ma lo aggrandi per ogni
verso."—Sansovino. Zanotto quotes the Altinat Chronicle for
account of these repairs.] and, after this enlargement, the palace seems
to have remained untouched for a hundred years, until, in the commencement
of the fourteenth century, the works of the Gothic Palace were begun. As,
therefore, the old Byzantine building was, at the time when those works
first interfered with it, in the form given to it by Ziani, I shall
hereafter always speak of it as the Ziani Palace; and this the
rather, because the only chronicler whose words are perfectly clear
respecting the existence of part of this palace so late as the year 1422,
speaks of it as built by Ziani. The old﹃palace of which half remains to
this day, was built, as we now see it, by Sebastian Ziani.﹄[Footnote: "El
palazzo che anco di mezzo se vede vecchio, per M. Sebastian Ziani fu fatto
compir, come el se vede."—Chronicle of Pietro Dolfino, Cod.
Ven. p. 47. This Chronicle is spoken of by Sansovino as "molto
particolare, e distinta."—Sansovino, Venezia descritta, p.
593.—It terminates in the year 1422.]
So far, then, of the Byzantine Palace.
SECTION XII. 2nd. The GOTHIC PALACE. The reader, doubtless, recollects
that the important change in the Venetian government which gave stability
to the aristocratic power took place about the year 1297, [Footnote: See
Vol. I. Appendix 3, Stones of Venice.] under the Doge Pietro Gradenigo, a
man thus characterized by Sansovino:—"A prompt and prudent man, of
unconquerable determination and great eloquence, who laid, so to speak,
the foundations of the eternity of this republic, by the admirable
regulations which he introduced into the government."
We may now, with some reason, doubt of their admirableness; but their
importance, and the vigorous will and intellect of the Doge, are not to be
disputed. Venice was in the zenith of her strength, and the heroism of her
citizens was displaying itself in every quarter of the world. [Footnote:
Vide Sansovino's enumeration of those who flourished in the reign of
Gradenigo, p. 564.] The acquiescence in the secure establishment of the
aristocratic power was an expression, by the people, of respect for the
families which had been chiefly instrumental in raising the commonwealth
to such a height of prosperity.
The Serrar del Consiglio fixed the numbers of the Senate within certain
limits, and it conferred upon them a dignity greater than they had ever
before possessed. It was natural that the alteration in the character of
the assembly should be attended by some change in the size, arrangement,
or decoration of the chamber in which they sat.
We accordingly find it recorded by Sansovino, that "in 1301 another saloon
was begun on the Rio del Palazzo, under the Doge Gradenigo, and
finished in 1309, in which year the Grand Council first sat in it."
[Footnote: Sansovino, 324, I.] In the first year, therefore, of the
fourteenth century, the Gothic Ducal Palace of Venice was begun; and as
the Byzantine Palace was, in its foundation, coeval with that of the
state, so the Gothic Palace was, in its foundation, coeval with that of
the aristocratic power. Considered as the principal representation of the
Venetian school of architecture, the Ducal Palace is the Parthenon of
Venice, and Gradenigo its Pericles.
SECTION XIII. Sansovino, with a caution very frequent among Venetian
historians, when alluding to events connected with the Serrar del
Consiglio, does not specially mention the cause for the requirement of the
new chamber; but the Sivos Chronicle is a little more distinct in
expression.﹃In 1301, it was determined to build a great saloon for the
assembling of the Great Council, and the room was built which is now
called the Sala del Scrutinio.﹄[Footnote: "1301 fu presa parte di fare
una sala grande per la riduzione del gran consiglio, e fu fatta quella che
ora si chiama dello Scrutinio."—Cronaca Sivos, quoted by
Cadorin. There is another most interesting entry in the Chronicle of
Magno, relating to this event; but the passage is so ill written, that I
am not sure if I have deciphered it correctly:—"Del 1301 fu preso de
fabrichar la sala fo ruina e fu fata (fatta) quella se adoperava a far e
pregadi e fu adopera per far el Gran Consegio fin 1423, che fu anni 122."
This last sentence, which is of great importance, is luckily unmistakable:—"The
room was used for the meetings of the Great Council until 1423, that is to
say, for 122 years."—Cod. Ven. tom. i. p. 126. The Chronicle
extends from 1253 to 1454.
Abstract 1301 to 1309; Gradenigo's room—1340-42, page 295-1419. New
proposals, p. 298.] Now, that is to say, at the time when the Sivos
Chronicle was written; the room has long ago been destroyed, and its name
given to another chamber on the opposite side of the palace: but I wish
the reader to remember the date 1301, as marking the commencement of a
great architectural epoch, in which took place the first appliance of the
energy of the aristocratic power, and of the Gothic style, to the works of
the Ducal Palace. The operations then begun were continued, with hardly an
interruption, during the whole period of the prosperity of Venice. We
shall see the new buildings consume, and take the place of, the Ziani
Palace, piece by piece: and when the Ziani Palace was destroyed, they fed
upon themselves; being continued round the square, until, in the sixteenth
century, they reached the point where they had been begun in the
fourteenth, and pursued the track they had then followed some distance
beyond the junction; destroying or hiding their own commencement, as the
serpent, which is the type of eternity, conceals its tail in its jaws.
SECTION XIV. We cannot, therefore, see the extremity, wherein lay
the sting and force of the whole creature,—the chamber, namely,
built by the Doge Gradenigo; but the reader must keep that commencement
and the date of it carefully in his mind. The body of the Palace Serpent
will soon become visible to us.
The Gradenigo Chamber was somewhere on the Rio Façade, behind the present
position of the Bridge of Sighs; i.e. about the point marked on the roof
by the dotted lines in the woodcut; it is not known whether low or high,
but probably on a first story. The great façade of the Ziani Palace being,
as above mentioned, on the Piazzetta, this chamber was as far back and out
of the way as possible; secrecy and security being obviously the points
first considered.
SECTION XV. But the newly constituted Senate had need of other additions
to the ancient palace besides the Council Chamber. A short, but most
significant, sentence is added to Sansovino's account of the construction
of that room. "There were, near it," he says, "the Cancellaria, and
the GhebaorGabbia, afterwards called the Little Tower."
[Footnote: "Vi era appresso la Cancellarla, e la Gheba o Gabbia, iniamata
poi Torresella,"—-P. 324. A small square tower is seen above the
Vine angle in the view of Venice dated 1500, and attributed to Albert
Durer. It appears about 25 feet square, and is very probably the
Torresella in question.]
Gabbia means a "cage;" and there can be no question that certain
apartments were at this time added at the top of the palace and on the Rio
Façade, which were to be used as prisons. Whether any portion of the old
Torresella still remains is a doubtful question; but the apartments at the
top of the palace, in its fourth story, were still used for prisons as
late as the beginning of the seventeenth century. [Footnote: Vide Bettio,
Lettera, p. 23.] I wish the reader especially to notice that a separate
tower or range of apartments was built for this purpose, in order to clear
the government of the accusations so constantly made against them, by
ignorant or partial historians, of wanton cruelty to prisoners. The
stories commonly told respecting the "piombi" of the Ducal Palace are
utterly false. Instead of being, as usually reported, small furnaces under
the leads of the palace, they were comfortable rooms, with good flat roofs
of larch, and carefully ventilated. [Footnote: Bettio, Lettera, p. 20.
"Those who wrote without having seen them described them as covered with
lead; and those who have seen them know that, between their flat timber
roofs and the sloping leaden roof of the palace the interval is five
metres where it is least, and nine where it is greatest."] The new
chamber, then, and the prisons, being built, the Great Council first sat
in their retired chamber on the Rio in the year 1309.
SECTION XVI. Now, observe the significant progress of events. They had
no sooner thus established themselves in power than they were disturbed by
the conspiracy of the Tiepolos, in the year 1310. In consequence of that
conspiracy the Council of Ten was created, still under the Doge Gradenigo;
who, having finished his work and left the aristocracy of Venice armed
with this terrible power, died in the year 1312, some say by poison. He
was succeeded by the Doge Marino Giorgio, who reigned only one year; and
then followed the prosperous government of John Soranzo. There is no
mention of any additions to the Ducal Palace during his reign, but he was
succeeded by that Francesco Dandolo, the sculptures on whose tomb, still
existing in the cloisters of the Salute, may be compared by any traveller
with those of the Ducal Palace. Of him it is recorded in the Savina
Chronicle:﹃This Doge also had the great gate built which is at the entry
of the palace, above which is his statue kneeling, with the gonfalon in
hand, before the feet of the Lion of St. Mark's.﹄[Footnote: "Questo Dose
anche fese far la porta granda che se al intrar del Pallazzo, in su la
qual vi e la sua statua che sta in zenocchioni con lo confalon in man,
davanti li pie de lo Lion S. Marco."—Savin Chronicle, Cod.
Ven. p. 120.]
SECTION XVII. It appears, then, that after the Senate had completed
their Council Chamber and the prisons, they required a nobler door than
that of the old Ziani Palace for their Magnificences to enter by. This
door is twice spoken of in the government accounts of expenses, which are
fortunately preserved, [Footnote: These documents I have not examined
myself, being satisfied of the accuracy of Cadorin, from whom I take the
passages quoted.] in the following terms:—
"1335, June 1. We, Andrew Dandolo and Mark Loredano, procurators of St.
Mark's, have paid to Martin the stone-cutter and his associates....
[Footnote: "Libras tres, soldeos 15 grossorum."—Cadorin, 189, I.]
for a stone of which the lion is made which is put over the gate of the
palace."
"1344, November 4. We have paid thirty-five golden ducats for making gold
leaf, to gild the lion which is over the door of the palace stairs."
The position of this door is disputed, and is of no consequence to the
reader, the door itself having long ago disappeared, and been replaced by
the Porta della Carta.
SECTION XVIII. But before it was finished, occasion had been discovered
for farther improvements. The Senate found their new Council Chamber
inconveniently small, and, about thirty years after its completion, began
to consider where a larger and more magnificent one might be built. The
government was now thoroughly established, and it was probably felt that
there was some meanness in the retired position, as well as insufficiency
in the size, of the Council Chamber on the Rio. The first definite account
which I find of their proceedings, under these circumstances, is in the
Caroldo Chronicle: [Footnote: Cod. Ven., No. CXLI. p. 365.]
"1340. On the 28th of December, in the preceding year, Master Marco
Erizzo, Nicolo Soranzo, and Thomas Gradenigo, were chosen to examine where
a new saloon might be built in order to assemble therein the Greater
Council.... On the 3rd of June, 1341, the Great Council elected two
procurators of the work of this saloon, with a salary of eighty ducats a
year."
It appears from the entry still preserved in the Archivio, and quoted by
Cadorin, that it was on the 28th of December, 1340, that the commissioners
appointed to decide on this important matter gave in their report to the
Grand Council, and that the decree passed thereupon for the commencement
of a new Council Chamber on the Grand Canal. [Footnote: Sansovino is more
explicit than usual in his reference to this decree:﹃For it having
appeared that the place (the first Council Chamber) is not capacious
enough, the saloon on the Grand Canal was ordered.﹄"Per cio parendo che
il luogo non fosse capace, fu ordinata la Sala sul Canal Grande."—P.
324.]
The room then begun is the one now in existence, and its building
involved the building of all that is best and most beautiful in the
present Ducal Palace, the rich arcades of the lower stories being all
prepared for sustaining this Sala del Gran Consiglio.
SECTION XIX. In saying that it is the same now in existence, I do not
mean that it has undergone no alterations; as we shall see hereafter, it
has been refitted again and again, and some portions of its walls rebuilt;
but in the place and form in which it first stood, it still stands; and by
a glance at the position which its windows occupy, as shown in Figure II.
above, the reader will see at once that whatever can be known respecting
the design of the Sea Façade, must be gleaned out of the entries which
refer to the building of this Great Council Chamber.
Cadorin quotes two of great importance, to which we shall return in due
time, made during the progress of the work in 1342 and 1344; then one of
1349, resolving that the works at the Ducal Palace, which had been
discontinued during the plague, should be resumed; and finally one in
1362, which speaks of the Great Council Chamber as having been neglected
and suffered to fall into "great desolation," and resolves that it shall
be forthwith completed. [Footnote: Cadorin, 185, 2. The decree of 1342 is
falsely given as of 1345 by the Sivos Chronicle, and by Magno; while
Sanuto gives the decree to its right year, 1342, but speaks of the Council
Chamber as only begun in 1345.]
The interruption had not been caused by the plague only, but by the
conspiracy of Faliero, and the violent death of the master builder.
[Footnote: Calendario. See Appendix I., Vol. III.] The work was resumed in
1362, and completed within the next three years, at least so far as that
Guariento was enabled to paint his Paradise on the walls; [Footnote: "II
primo che vi colorisse fu Guariento il quale l'anno 1365 vi fece il
Paradiso in testa della sala."—Sansovino.] so that the
building must, at any rate, have been roofed by this time. Its decorations
and fittings, however, were long in completion; the paintings on the roof
being only executed in 1400. [Footnote: "L'an poi 1400 vi fece il ciclo
compartita a quadretti d'oro, ripieni di stelle, ch'era la insegna del
Doge Steno."—Sansovino, lib. viii.] They represented the
heavens covered with stars, [Footnote: "In questi tempi si messe in oro il
ciclo della sala del Gran Consiglio et si fece il pergole del finestra
grande chi guarda sul canale, adornato l'uno e l'altro di stelle, eh'
erano la insegne del Doge."—Sansovino, lib. xiii. Compare
also Pareri, p. 129.] this being, says Sansovino, the bearings of the Doge
Steno. Almost all ceilings and vaults were at this time in Venice covered
with stars, without any reference to armorial bearings; but Steno claims,
under his noble title of Stellifer, an important share in completing the
chamber, in an inscription upon two square tablets, now inlaid in the
walls on each side of the great window towards the sea:
"MILLE QUADRINGENTI CURREBANT QUATUOR ANNI
HOC OPUS ILLUSTRIS MICHAEL DUX STELLIFER AUXIT."
And in fact it is to this Doge that we owe the beautiful balcony of that
window, though the work above it is partly of more recent date; and I
think the tablets bearing this important inscription have been taken out
and reinserted in the newer masonry. The labor of these final decorations
occupied a total period of sixty years. The Grand Council sat in the
finished chamber for the first time in 1423. In that year the Gothic Ducal
Palace of Venice was completed. It had taken, to build it, the energies of
the entire period which I have above described as the central one of her
life.
SECTION XX. 3rd. The RENAISSANCE PALACE. I must go back a step or two,
in order to be certain that the reader understands clearly the state of
the palace in 1423. The works of addition or renovation had now been
proceeding, at intervals, during a space of a hundred and twenty-three
years. Three generations at least had been accustomed to witness the
gradual advancement of the form of the Ducal Palace into more stately
symmetry, and to contrast the Works of sculpture and painting with which
it was decorated,—full of the life, knowledge, and hope of the
fourteenth century,—with the rude Byzantine chiselling of the palace
of the Doge Ziani. The magnificent fabric just completed, of which the new
Council Chamber was the nucleus, was now habitually known in Venice as the
"Palazzo Nuovo;" and the old Byzantine edifice, now ruinous, and more
manifest in its decay by its contrast with the goodly stones of the
building which had been raised at its side, was of course known as the
"Palazzo Vecchio." [Footnote: Baseggio (Pareri, p. 127) is called the
Proto of the New Palace. Farther notes will be found in Appendix
I., Vol. III.] That fabric, however, still occupied the principal position
in Venice. The new Council Chamber had been erected by the side of it
towards the Sea; but there was not then the wide quay in front, the Riva
dei Schiavoni, which now renders the Sea Façade as important as that to
the Piazzetta. There was only a narrow walk between the pillars and the
water; and the old palace of Ziani still faced the Piazzetta, and
interrupted, by its decrepitude, the magnificence of the square where the
nobles daily met. Every increase of the beauty of the new palace rendered
the discrepancy between it and the companion building more painful; and
then began to arise in the minds of all men a vague idea of the necessity
of destroying the old palace, and completing the front of the Piazzetta
with the same splendor as the Sea Façade. But no such sweeping measure of
renovation had been Contemplated by the Senate when they first formed the
plan of their new Council Chamber. First a single additional room, then a
gateway, then a larger room; but all considered merely as necessary
additions to the palace, not as involving the entire reconstruction of the
ancient edifice. The exhaustion of the treasury, and the shadows upon the
political horizon, rendered it more than imprudent to incur the vast
additional expense which such a project involved; and the Senate, fearful
of itself, and desirous to guard against the weakness of its own
enthusiasm, passed a decree, like the effort of a man fearful of some
strong temptation to keep his thoughts averted from the point of danger.
It was a decree, not merely that the old palace should not be rebuilt, but
that no one should propose rebuilding it. The feeling of the
desirableness of doing so was, too strong to permit fair discussion, and
the Senate knew that to bring forward such a motion was to carry it.
SECTION XXI. The decree, thus passed in order to guard against their own
weakness, forbade any one to speak of rebuilding the old palace under the
penalty of a thousand ducats. But they had rated their own enthusiasm too
low: there was a man among them whom the loss of a thousand ducats could
not deter from proposing what he believed to be for the good of the state.
Some excuse was given him for bringing forward the motion, by a fire which
occurred in 1419, and which injured both the church of St. Mark's, and
part of the old palace fronting the Piazzetta. What followed, I shall
relate in the words of Sanuto. [Footnote: Cronaca Sanudo, No. cxxv. in the
Marcian Library, p. 568.]
SECTION XXII.﹃Therefore they set themselves with all diligence and care
to repair and adorn sumptuously, first God's house; but in the Prince's
house things went on more slowly, for it did not please the Doge
[Footnote: Tomaso Mocenigo.] to restore it in the form in which it was
before; and they could not rebuild it altogether in a better manner,
so great was the parsimony of these old fathers; because it was forbidden
by laws, which condemned in a penalty of a thousand ducats any one who
should propose to throw down the old palace, and to rebuild it more
richly and with greater expense. But the Doge, who was magnanimous, and
who desired above all things what was honorable to the city, had the
thousand ducats carried into the Senate Chamber, and then proposed that
the palace should be rebuilt; saying: that, 'since the late fire had
ruined in great part the Ducal habitation (not only his own private
palace, but all the places used for public business) this occasion was to
be taken for an admonishment sent from God, that they ought to rebuild the
palace more nobly, and in a way more befitting the greatness to which, by
God's grace, their dominions had reached; and that his motive in proposing
this was neither ambition, nor selfish interest: that, as for ambition,
they might have seen in the whole course of his life, through so many
years, that he had never done anything for ambition, either in the city,
or in foreign business; but in all his actions had kept justice first in
his thoughts, and then the advantage of the state, and the honor of the
Venetian name: and that, as far as regarded his private interest, if it
had not been for this accident of the fire, he would never have thought of
changing anything in the palace into either a more sumptuous or a more
honorable form; and that during the many years in which he had lived in
it, he had never endeavored to make any change, but had always been
content with it, as his predecessors had left it; and that he knew well
that, if they took in hand to build it as he exhorted and besought them,
being now very old, and broken down with many toils, God would call him to
another life before the walls were raised a pace from the ground. And that
therefore they might perceive that he did not advise them to raise this
building for his own convenience, but only for the honor of the city and
its Dukedom; and that the good of it would never be felt by him, but by
his successors.' Then he said, that 'in order, as he had always done, to
observe the laws,... he had brought with him the thousand ducats which had
been appointed as the penalty for proposing such a measure, so that he
might prove openly to all men that it was not his own advantage that he
sought, but the dignity of the state.'﹄There was no one (Sanuto goes on
to tell us) who ventured, or desired, to oppose the wishes of the Doge;
and the thousand ducats were unanimously devoted to the expenses of the
work. "And they set themselves with much diligence to the work; and the
palace was begun in the form and manner in which it is at present seen;
but, as Mocenigo had prophesied, not long after, he ended his life, and
not only did not see the work brought to a close, but hardly even begun."
SECTION XXIII. There are one or two expressions in the above extracts
which if they stood alone, might lead the reader to suppose that the whole
palace had been thrown down and rebuilt. We must however remember, that,
at this time, the new Council Chamber, which had been one hundred years in
building, was actually unfinished, the council had not yet sat in it; and
it was just as likely that the Doge should then propose to destroy and
rebuild it, as in this year, 1853, it is that any one should propose in
our House of Commons to throw down the new Houses of Parliament, under the
title of the "old palace," and rebuild them.
SECTION XXIV. The manner in which Sanuto expresses himself will at once
be seen to be perfectly natural, when it is remembered that although we
now speak of the whole building as the "Ducal Palace," it consisted, in
the minds of the old Venetians, of four distinct buildings. There were in
it the palace, the state prisons, the senate-house, and the offices of
public business; in other words, it was Buckingham Palace, the Tower of
olden days, the Houses of Parliament, and Downing Street, all in one; and
any of these four portions might be spoken of, without involving an
allusion to any other. "Il Palazzo" was the Ducal residence, which, with
most of the public offices, Mocenigo did propose to pull down and
rebuild, and which was actually pulled down and rebuilt. But the new
Council Chamber, of which the whole façade to the Sea consisted, never
entered into either his or Sanuto's mind for an instant, as necessarily
connected with the Ducal residence.
I said that the new Council Chamber, at the time when Mocenigo brought
forward his measure, had never yet been used. It was in the year 1422
[Footnote: Vide notes in Appendix.] that the decree passed to rebuild the
palace: Mocenigo died in the following year, and Francesco Foscari was
elected in his room. [Footnote: On the 4th of April, 1423, according to
the copy of the Zancarol Chronicle in the Marcian Library, but previously,
according to the Caroldo Chronicle, which makes Foscari enter the Senate
as Doge on the 3rd of April.] The Great Council Chamber was used for the
first time on the day when Foscari entered the Senate as Doge,—the
3rd of April, 1423, according to the Caroldo Chronicle; [Footnote: "Nella
quale (the Sala del Gran Consiglio) non si fece Gran Consiglio salvo nell'
anno 1423, alli 3, April, et fu il primo giorno che il Duce Foscari
venisse in Gran Consiglio dopo la sua creatione."—Copy in Marcian
Library, p. 365.] the 23rd, which is probably correct, by an anonymous
MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum; [Footnote:﹃E a di 23 April (1423, by
the context) sequente fo fatto Gran Conscio in la salla nuovo dovi avanti
non esta piu fatto Gran Conscio si che el primo Gran Conscio dopo la sua
(Foscari's) creation fo fatto in la sala nuova, nel qual conscio fu el
Marchese di Mantoa,﹄&c., p. 426.]—and, the following year, on
the 27th of March, the first hammer was lifted up against the old palace
of Ziani. [Footnote: Compare Appendix I. Vol. III.]
SECTION XXV. That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly
called the "Renaissance" It was the knell of the architecture of Venice,—and
of Venice herself.
The central epoch of her life was past; the decay had already begun: I
dated its commencement above (Ch. I., Vol. I.) from the death of Mocenigo.
A year had not yet elapsed since that great Doge had been called to his
account: his patriotism, always sincere, had been in this instance
mistaken; in his zeal for the honor of future Venice, he had forgotten
what was due to the Venice of long ago. A thousand palaces might be built
upon her burdened islands, but none of them could take the place, or
recall the memory, of that which was first built upon her unfrequented
shore. It fell; and, as if it had been the talisman of her fortunes, the
city never flourished again.
SECTION XXVI. I have no intention of following out, in their intricate
details, the operations which were begun under Foscari and continued under
succeeding Doges till the palace assumed its present form, for I am not in
this work concerned, except by occasional reference, with the architecture
of the fifteenth century: but the main facts are the following. The palace
of Ziani was destroyed; the existing façade to the Piazzetta built, so as
both to continue and to resemble, in most particulars, the work of the
Great Council Chamber. It was carried back from the Sea as far as the
Judgment angle; beyond which is the Porta della Carta, begun in 1439, and
finished in two years, under the Doge Foscari; [Footnote: "Tutte queste
fatture si compirono sotto il dogade del Foscari, nel 1441."—Pareri,
p. 131.] the interior buildings connected with it were added by the Doge
Christopher Moro, (the Othello of Shakspeare) [Footnote: This
identification has been accomplished, and I think conclusively, by my
friend Mr. Rawdon Brown, who has devoted all the leisure which, during the
last twenty years his manifold office of kindness to almost every English
visitant of Venice have left him, in discovering and translating the
passages of the Venetian records which bear upon English history and
literature. I shall have occasion to take advantage hereafter of a portion
of his labors, which I trust will shortly be made public.] in 1462.
SECTION XXVII. By reference to the figure the reader will see that we
have now gone the round of the palace, and that the new work of 1462 was
close upon the first piece of the Gothic palace, the new Council
Chamber of 1301. Some remnants of the Ziani Palace were perhaps still left
between the two extremities of the Gothic Palace; or as is more probable,
the last stones of it may have been swept away after the fire of 1419, and
replaced by new apartments for the Doge. But whatever buildings, old or
new, stood on this spot at the time of the completion of the Porta della
Carta were destroyed by another great fire in 1479, together with so much
of the palace on the Rio that, though the saloon of Gradenigo, then known
as the Sala de' Pregadi, was not destroyed, it became necessary to
reconstruct the entire façades of the portion of the palace behind the
Bridge of Sighs, both towards the court and canal. This work was entrusted
to the best Renaissance architects of the close of the fifteenth and
opening of the sixteenth centuries; Antonio Ricci executing the Giant's
staircase, and on his absconding with a large sum of the public money,
Pietro Lombardo taking his place. The whole work must have been completed
towards the middle of the sixteenth century. The architects of the palace,
advancing round the square and led by fire, had more than reached the
point from which they had set out; and the work of 1560 was joined to the
work of 1301-1340, at the point marked by the conspicuous vertical line in
Figure II on the Rio Façade.
SECTION XVIII. But the palace was not long permitted to remain in this
finished form. Another terrific fire, commonly called the great fire,
burst out in 1574, and destroyed the inner fittings and all the precious
pictures of the Great Council Chamber, and of all the upper rooms on the
Sea Façade, and most of those on the Rio Façade, leaving the building a
mere shell, shaken and blasted by the flames. It was debated in the Great
Council whether the ruin should not be thrown down, and an entirely new
palace built in its stead. The opinions of all the leading architects of
Venice were taken, respecting the safety of the walls, or the possibility
of repairing them as they stood. These opinions, given in writing, have
been preserved, and published by the Abbé Cadorin, in the work already so
often referred to; and they form one of the most important series of
documents connected with the Ducal Palace.
I cannot help feeling some childish pleasure in the accidental resemblance
to my own name in that of the architect whose opinion was first given in
favor of the ancient fabric, Giovanni Rusconi. Others, especially
Palladio, wanted to pull down the old palace, and execute designs of their
own; but the best architects in Venice, and to his immortal honor, chiefly
Francesco Sansovino, energetically pleaded for the Gothic pile, and
prevailed. It was successfully repaired, and Tintoret painted his noblest
picture on the wall from which the Paradise of Guariento had withered
before the flames.
SECTION XXIX. The repairs necessarily undertaken at this time were
however extensive, and interfered in many directions with the earlier work
of the palace: still the only serious alteration in its form was the
transposition of the prisons, formerly at the top of the palace to the
other side of the Rio del Palazzo; and the building of the Bridge of
Sighs, to connect them with the palace, by Antonio da Ponte. The
completion of this work brought the whole edifice into its present form;
with the exception of alterations indoors, partitions, and staircases
among the inner apartments, not worth noticing, and such barbarisms and
defacements as have been suffered within the last fifty years, by, I
suppose nearly every building of importance in Italy.
SECTION XXX. Now, therefore, we are at liberty to examine some of the
details of the Ducal Palace, without any doubt about their dates. I shall
not however, give any elaborate illustrations of them here, because I
could not do them justice on the scale of the page of this volume, or by
means of line engraving. I believe a new era is opening to us in the art
of illustration, [Footnote: See the last chapter of the third volume,
Stones of Venice.] and that I shall be able to give large figures of the
details of the Ducal Palace at a price which will enable every person who
is interested in the subject to possess them; so that the cost and labor
of multiplying illustrations here would be altogether wasted. I shall
therefore direct the reader's attention only to such points of interest as
can be explained in the text.
SECTION XXXI. First, then, looking back to the woodcut at the beginning
of this chapter, the reader will observe that, as the building was very
nearly square on the ground plan, a peculiar prominence and importance
were given to its angles, which rendered it necessary that they should be
enriched and softened by sculpture. I do not suppose that the fitness of
this arrangement will be questioned; but if the reader will take the pains
to glance over any series of engravings of church towers or other
four-square buildings in which great refinement of form has been attained,
he will at once observe how their effect depends on some modification of
the sharpness of the angle, either by groups of buttresses, or by turrets
and niches rich in sculpture. It is to be noted also that this principle
of breaking the angle is peculiarly Gothic, arising partly out of the
necessity of strengthening the flanks of enormous buildings, where
composed of imperfect materials, by buttresses or pinnacles; partly out of
the conditions of Gothic warfare, which generally required a tower at the
angle; partly out of the natural dislike of the meagreness of effect in
buildings which admitted large surfaces of wall, if the angle were
entirely unrelieved. The Ducal Palace, in its acknowledgment of this
principle, makes a more definite concession to the Gothic spirit than any
of the previous architecture of Venice. No angle, up to the time of its
erection, had been otherwise decorated than by a narrow fluted pilaster of
red marble, and the sculpture was reserved always, as in Greek and Roman
work, for the plane surfaces of the building, with, as far as I recollect,
two exceptions only, both in St. Mark's; namely, the bold and grotesque
gargoyle on its north-west angle, and the angels which project from the
four inner angles under the main cupola; both of these arrangements being
plainly made under Lombardic influence. And if any other instances occur,
which I may have at present forgotten, I am very sure the Northern
influence will always be distinctly traceable in them.
SECTION XXXII. The Ducal Palace, however, accepts the principle in its
completeness, and throws the main decoration upon its angles. The central
window, which looks rich and important in the woodcut, was entirely
restored in the Renaissance time, as we have seen, under the Doge Steno;
so that we have no traces of its early treatment; and the principal
interest of the older palace is concentrated in the angle sculpture, which
is arranged in the following manner. The pillars of the two bearing
arcades are much enlarged in thickness at the angles, and their capitals
increased in depth, breadth, and fulness of subject; above each capital,
on the angle of the wall, a sculptural subject is introduced, consisting,
in the great lower arcade, of two or more figures of the size of life; in
the upper arcade, of a single angel holding a scroll: above these angels
rise the twisted pillars with their crowning niches, already noticed in
the account of parapets in the seventh chapter; thus forming an unbroken
line of decoration from the ground to the top of the angle.
SECTION XXXIII. It was before noticed that one of the corners of the
palace joins the irregular outer buildings connected with St. Mark's, and
is not generally seen. There remain, therefore, to be decorated, only the
three angles, above distinguished as the Vine angle, the Fig-tree angle,
and the Judgment angle; and at these we have, according to the arrangement
just explained,—
First, Three great bearing capitals (lower arcade).
Secondly, Three figure subjects of sculpture above them (lower arcade).
Thirdly, Three smaller bearing capitals (upper arcade).
Fourthly, Three angels above them (upper arcade).
Fifthly, Three spiral, shafts with niches.
SECTION XXXIV. I shall describe the bearing capitals hereafter, in their
order, with the others of the arcade; for the first point to which the
reader's attention ought to be directed is the choice of subject in the
great figure sculptures above them. These, observe, are the very corner
stones of the edifice, and in them we may expect to find the most
important evidences of the feeling, as well as the skill, of the builder.
If he has anything to say to us of the purpose with which he built the
palace, it is sure to be said here; if there was any lesson which he
wished principally to teach to those for whom he built, here it is sure to
be inculcated; if there was any sentiment which they themselves desired to
have expressed in the principal edifice of their city, this is the place
in which we may be secure of finding it legibly inscribed.
SECTION XXXV. Now the first two angles, of the Vine and Fig-tree, belong
to the old, or true Gothic, Palace; the third angle belongs to the
Renaissance imitation of it: therefore, at the first two angles, it is the
Gothic spirit which is going to speak to us; and, at the third, the
Renaissance spirit.
The reader remembers, I trust, that the most characteristic sentiment of
all that we traced in the working of the Gothic heart, was the frank
confession of its own weakness; and I must anticipate, for a moment, the
results of our inquiry in subsequent chapters, so far as to state that the
principal element in the Renaissance spirit, is its firm confidence in its
own wisdom.
Hear, then, the two spirits speak for themselves.
The first main sculpture of the Gothic Palace is on what I have called the
angle of the Fig-tree:
Its subject is the FALL OF MAN.
The second sculpture is on the angle of the Vine:
Its subject is the DRUNKENNESS OF NOAH.
The Renaissance sculpture is on the Judgment angle:
Its subject is the JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON.
It is impossible to overstate, or to regard with too much admiration, the
significance of this single fact. It is as if the palace had been built at
various epochs, and preserved uninjured to this day, for the sole purpose
of teaching us the difference in the temper of the two schools.
SECTION XXXVI. I have called the sculpture on the Fig-tree angle the
principal one; because it is at the central bend of the palace, where it
turns to the Piazetta (the façade upon the Piazetta being, as we saw
above, the more important one in ancient times). The great capital, which
sustains this Fig-tree angle, is also by far more elaborate than the head
of the pilaster under the Vine angle, marking the preëminence of the
former in the architect's mind. It is impossible to say which was first
executed, but that of the Fig-tree angle is somewhat rougher in execution,
and more stiff in the design of the figures, so that I rather suppose it
to have been the earliest completed.
SECTION XXXVII. In both the subjects, of the Fall and the Drunkenness,
the tree, which forms the chiefly decorative portion of the sculpture,—fig
in the one case, vine in the other,—was a necessary adjunct. Its
trunk, in both sculptures, forms the true outer angle of the palace;
boldly cut separate from the stonework behind, and branching out above the
figures so as to enwrap each side of the angle, for several feet, with its
deep foliage. Nothing can be more masterly or superb than the sweep of
this foliage on the Fig-tree angle; the broad leaves lapping round the
budding fruit, and sheltering from sight, beneath their shadows, birds of
the most graceful form and delicate plumage. The branches are, however, so
strong, and the masses of stone hewn into leafage so large, that,
notwithstanding the depth of the undercutting, the work remains nearly
uninjured; not so at the Vine angle, where the natural delicacy of the
vine-leaf and tendril having tempted the sculptor to greater effort, he
has passed the proper limits of his art, and cut the upper stems so
delicately that half of them have been broken away by the casualties to
which the situation of the sculpture necessarily exposes it. What remains
is, however, so interesting in its extreme refinement, that I have chosen
it for the subject of the first illustration [Footnote: See note at end of
this chapter.] rather than the nobler masses of the fig-tree, which ought
to be rendered on a larger scale. Although half of the beauty of the
composition is destroyed by the breaking away of its central masses, there
is still enough in the distribution of the variously bending leaves, and
in the placing of the birds on the lighter branches, to prove to us the
power of the designer. I have already referred to this Plate as a
remarkable instance of the Gothic Naturalism; and, indeed, it is almost
impossible for the copying of nature to be carried farther than in the
fibres of the marble branches, and the careful finishing of the tendrils:
note especially the peculiar expression of the knotty joints of the vine
in the light branch which rises highest. Yet only half the finish of the
work can be seen in the Plate: for, in several cases, the sculptor has
shown the under sides of the leaves turned boldly to the light, and has
literally carved every rib and vein upon them, in relief; not
merely the main ribs which sustain the lobes of the leaf, and actually
project in nature, but the irregular and sinuous veins which chequer the
membranous tissues between them, and which the sculptor has represented
conventionally as relieved like the others, in order to give the vine leaf
its peculiar tessellated effect upon the eye.
SECTION XXXVIII. As must always be the case in early sculpture, the
figures are much inferior to the leafage; yet so skilful in many respects,
that it was a long time before I could persuade myself that they had
indeed been wrought in the first half of the fourteenth century.
Fortunately, the date is inscribed upon a monument in the Church of San
Simeon Grande, bearing a recumbent statue of the saint, of far finer
workmanship, in every respect, than those figures of the Ducal Palace, yet
so like them, that I think there can be no question that the head of Noah
was wrought by the sculptor of the palace in emulation of that of the
statue of St. Simeon. In this latter sculpture, the face is represented in
death; the mouth partly open, the lips thin and sharp, the teeth carefully
sculptured beneath; the face full of quietness and majesty, though very
ghastly; the hair and beard flowing in luxuriant wreaths, disposed with
the most masterly freedom, yet severity, of design, far down upon the
shoulders; the hands crossed upon the body, carefully studied, and the
veins and sinews perfectly and easily expressed, yet without any attempt
at extreme finish or display of technical skill. This monument bears date
1317, [Footnote:﹃IN XRI—NOIE AMEN ANNINCARNATIONIS MCCCXVII.
INESETBR.﹄"In the name of Christ, Amen, in the year of the incarnation,
1317, in the month of September," &c.] and its sculptor was justly
proud of it; thus recording his name:
"CELAVIT MARCUS OPUS HOC INSIGNE ROMANIS,
LAUDIBUS NON PARCUS EST SUA DIGNA MANUS."
SECTION XXXIX. The head of the Noah on the Ducal Palace, evidently
worked in emulation of this statue, has the same profusion of flowing hair
and beard, but wrought in smaller and harder curls; and the veins on the
arms and breast are more sharply drawn, the sculptor being evidently more
practised in keen and fine lines of vegetation than in those of the
figure; so that, which is most remarkable in a workman of this early
period, he has failed in telling his story plainly, regret and wonder
being so equally marked on the features of all the three brothers that it
is impossible to say which is intended for Ham. Two of the heads of the
brothers are seen in the Plate; the third figure is not with the rest of
the group, but set at a distance of about twelve feet, on the other side
of the arch which springs from the angle capital.
SECTION XL. It may be observed, as a farther evidence of the date of the
group, that, in the figures of all the three youths, the feet are
protected simply by a bandage arranged in crossed folds round the ankle
and lower part of the limb; a feature of dress which will be found in
nearly every piece of figure sculpture in Venice, from the year 1300 to
1380, and of which the traveller may see an example within three hundred
yards of this very group, in the bas-reliefs on the tomb of the Doge
Andrea Dandolo (in St. Mark's), who died in 1354.
SECTION XLI. The figures of Adam and Eve, sculptured on each side of the
Fig-tree angle, are more stiff than those of Noah and his sons, but are
better fitted for their architectural service; and the trunk of the tree,
with the angular body of the serpent writhed around it, is more nobly
treated as a terminal group of lines than that of the vine.
The Renaissance sculptor of the figures of the Judgment of Solomon has
very nearly copied the fig-tree from this angle, placing its trunk between
the executioner and the mother, who leans forward to stay his hand. But,
though the whole group is much more free in design than those of the
earlier palace, and in many ways excellent in itself, so that it always
strikes the eye of a careless observer more than the others, it is of
immeasurably inferior spirit in the workmanship; the leaves of the tree,
though far more studiously varied in flow than those of the fig-tree from
which they are partially copied, have none of its truth to nature; they
are ill set on the steins, bluntly defined on the edges, and their curves
are not those of growing leaves, but of wrinkled drapery.
SECTION XLII. Above these three sculptures are set, in the upper arcade,
the statues of the archangels Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel: their
positions will be understood by reference to the lowest figure in Plate
XVII., where that of Raphael above the Vine angle is seen on the right. A
diminutive figure of Tobit follows at his feet, and he bears in his hand a
scroll with this inscription:
EFICE Q
SOFRE
TUR AFA
EL REVE
RENDE
QUIETU
i.e. Effice (quseso?) fretum, Raphael reverende, quietum. [Footnote:﹃Oh,
venerable Raphael, make thou the gulf calm, we beseech thee.﹄The peculiar
office of the angel Raphael is, in general, according to tradition, the
restraining the harmful influences of evil spirits. Sir Charles Eastlake
told me, that sometimes in this office he is represented bearing the gall
of the fish caught by Tobit; and reminded me of the peculiar superstitions
of the Venetians respecting the raising of storms by fiends, as embodied
in the well known tale of the Fisherman and St. Mark's ring.] I could not
decipher the inscription on the scroll borne by the angel Michael; and the
figure of Gabriel, which is by much the most beautiful feature of the
Renaissance portion of the palace, has only in its hand the Annunciation
lily.
SECTION XLIII. Such are the subjects of the main sculptures decorating
the angles of the palace; notable, observe, for their simple expression of
two feelings, the consciousness of human frailty, and the dependence upon
Divine guidance and protection: this being, of course, the general purpose
of the introduction of the figures of the angels; and, I imagine, intended
to be more particularly conveyed by the manner in which the small figure
of Tobit follows the steps of Raphael, just touching the hem of his
garment. We have next to examine the course of divinity and of natural
history embodied by the old sculpture in the great series of capitals
which support the lower arcade of the palace; and which, being at a height
of little more than eight feet above the eye, might be read, like the
pages of a book, by those (the noblest men in Venice) who habitually
walked beneath the shadow of this great arcade at the time of their first
meeting each other for morning converse.
SECTION XLIV. We will now take the pillars of the Ducal Palace in their
order. It has already been mentioned (Vol. I. Chap. I. Section XLVI.) that
there are, in all, thirty-six great pillars supporting the lower story;
and that these are to be counted from right to left, because then the more
ancient of them come first: and that, thus arranged, the first, which is
not a shaft, but a pilaster, will be the support of the Vine angle; the
eighteenth will be the great shaft of the Fig-tree angle; and the
thirty-sixth, that of the Judgment angle.
SECTION XLV. All their capitals, except that of the first, are
octagonal, and are decorated by sixteen leaves, differently enriched in
every capital, but arranged in the same way; eight of them rising to the
angles, and there forming volutes; the eight others set between them, on
the sides, rising half-way up the bell of the capital; there nodding
forward, and showing above them, rising out of their luxuriance, the
groups or single figures which we have to examine. [Footnote: I have given
one of these capitals carefully already in my folio work, and hope to give
most of the others in due time. It was of no use to draw them here, as the
scale would have been too small to allow me to show the expression of the
figures.] In some instances, the intermediate or lower leaves are reduced
to eight sprays of foliage; and the capital is left dependent for its
effect on the bold position of the figures. In referring to the figures on
the octagonal capitals, I shall call the outer side, fronting either the
Sea or the Piazzetta, the first side; and so count round from left to
right; the fourth side being thus, of course, the innermost. As, however,
the first five arches were walled up after the great fire, only three
sides of their capitals are left visible, which we may describe as the
front and the eastern and western sides of each.
SECTION XLVI. FIRST CAPITAL: i.e. of the pilaster at the Vine angle.
In front, towards the Sea. A child holding a bird before him, with its
wings expanded, covering his breast.
On its eastern side. Children's heads among leaves.
On its western side. A child carrying in one hand a comb; in the other, a
pair of scissors.
It appears curious, that this, the principal pilaster of the façade,
should have been decorated only by these graceful grotesques, for I can
hardly suppose them anything more. There may be meaning in them, but I
will not venture to conjecture any, except the very plain and practical
meaning conveyed by the last figure to all Venetian children, which it
would be well if they would act upon. For the rest, I have seen the comb
introduced in grotesque work as early as the thirteenth century, but
generally for the purpose of ridiculing too great care in dressing the
hair, which assuredly is not its purpose here. The children's heads are
very sweet and full of life, but the eyes sharp and small.
SECTION XLVII. SECOND CAPITAL. Only three sides of the original work are
left unburied by the mass of added wall. Each side has a bird, one
web-footed, with a fish, one clawed, with a serpent, which opens its jaws,
and darts its tongue at the bird's breast; the third pluming itself, with
a feather between the mandibles of its bill. It is by far the most
beautiful of the three capitals decorated with birds.
THIRD CAPITAL. Also has three sides only left. They have three heads,
large, and very ill cut; one female, and crowned.
FOURTH CAPITAL. Has three children. The eastern one is defaced: the one in
front holds a small bird, whose plumage is beautifully indicated, in its
right hand; and with its left holds up half a walnut, showing the nut
inside: the third holds a fresh fig, cut through, showing the seeds.
The hair of all the three children is differently worked: the first has
luxuriant flowing hair, and a double chin; the second, light flowing hair
falling in pointed locks on the forehead; the third, crisp curling hair,
deep cut with drill holes.
This capital has been copied on the Renaissance side of the palace, only
with such changes in the ideal of the children as the workman thought
expedient and natural. It is highly interesting to compare the child of
the fourteenth with the child of the fifteenth century. The early heads
are full of youthful life, playful, humane, affectionate, beaming with
sensation and vivacity, but with much manliness and firmness, also, not a
little cunning, and some cruelty perhaps, beneath all; the features small
and hard, and the eyes keen. There is the making of rough and great men in
them. But the children of the fifteenth century are dull smooth-faced
dunces, without a single meaning line in the fatness of their stolid
cheeks; and, although, in the vulgar sense, as handsome as the other
children are ugly, capable of becoming nothing but perfumed coxcombs.
FIFTH CAPITAL. Still three sides only left, bearing three half-length
statues of kings; this is the first capital which bears any inscription.
In front, a king with a sword in his right hand points to a handkerchief
embroidered and fringed, with a head on it, carved on the cavetto of the
abacus. His name is written above, "TITUS VESPASIAN IMPERATOR" (contracted
IPAT.).
On eastern side, "TRAJANUS IMPERATOR." Crowned, a sword in right hand, and
sceptre in left.
On western, "(OCT)AVIANUS AUGUSTUS IMPERATOR." The "OCT" is broken away.
He bears a globe in his right hand, with "MUNDUS PACIS" upon it; a sceptre
in his left, which I think has terminated in a human figure. He has a
flowing beard, and a singularly high crown; the face is much injured, but
has once been very noble in expression.
SIXTH CAPITAL. Has large male and female heads, very coarsely cut, hard,
and bad.
SECTION XLVIII. SEVENTH CAPITAL. This is the first of the series which
is complete; the first open arch of the lower arcade being between it and
the sixth. It begins the representation of the Virtues.
First side. Largitas, or Liberality: always distinguished from the
higher Charity. A male figure, with his lap full of money, which he pours
out of his hand. The coins are plain, circular, and smooth; there is no
attempt to mark device upon them. The inscription above is, "LARGITAS ME
ONORAT."
In the copy of this design on the twenty-fifth capital, instead of
showering out the gold from his open hand, the figure holds it in a plate
or salver, introduced for the sake of disguising the direct imitation. The
changes thus made in the Renaissance pillars are always injuries.
This virtue is the proper opponent of Avarice; though it does not occur in
the systems of Orcagna or Giotto, being included in Charity. It was a
leading virtue with Aristotle and the other ancients.
SECTION XLIX. Second side. Constancy; not very characteristic. An
armed man with a sword in his hand, inscribed, "CONSTANTIA SUM, NIL
TIMENS."
This virtue is one of the forms of fortitude, and Giotto therefore sets as
the vice opponent to Fortitude, "Inconstantia," represented as a woman in
loose drapery, falling from a rolling globe. The vision seen in the
interpreter's house in the Pilgrim's Progress, of the man with a very bold
countenance, who says to him who has the writer's ink-horn by his side,
"Set down my name," is the best personification of the Venetian
"Constantia" of which I am aware in literature. It would be well for us
all to consider whether we have yet given the order to the man with the
ink-horn, "Set down my name."
SECTION L. Third side. Discord; holding up her finger, but
needing the inscription above to assure us of her meaning,﹃DISCORDIA SUM,
DISCORDIANS.﹄In the Renaissance copy she is a meek and nun-like person
with a veil.
She is the Atë of Spencer; "mother of debate," thus described in the
fourth book:
"Her face most fowle and filthy was to see,
With squinted eyes contrarie wayes intended;
And loathly mouth, unmeete a mouth to bee,
That nought but gall and venim comprehended,
And wicked wordes that God and man offended:
Her lying tongue was in two parts divided,
And both the parts did speake, and both contended;
And as her tongue, so was her hart discided,
That never thoght one thing, but doubly stil was guided."
Note the fine old meaning of "discided," cut in two; it is a great pity we
have lost this powerful expression. We might keep "determined" for the
other sense of the word.
SECTION LI. Fourth side. Patience. A female figure, very
expressive and lovely, in a hood, with her right hand on her breast, the
left extended, inscribed "PATIENTIA MANET MECUM."
She is one of the principal virtues in all the Christian systems: a
masculine virtue in Spenser, and beautifully placed as the PHYSICIAN
in the House of Holinesse. The opponent vice, Impatience, is one of the
hags who attend the Captain of the Lusts of the Flesh; the other being
Impotence. In like manner, in the "Pilgrim's Progress," the opposite of
Patience is Passion; but Spenser's thought is farther carried. His two
hags, Impatience and Impotence, as attendant upon the evil spirit of
Passion, embrace all the phenomena of human conduct, down even to the
smallest matters, according to the adage, "More haste, worse speed."
SECTION LII. Fifth side. Despair. A female figure thrusting a
dagger into her throat, and tearing her long hair, which flows down among
the leaves of the capital below her knees. One of the finest figures of
the series; inscribed﹃DESPERACIO MÔS (mortis?) CRUDELIS.﹄In the
Renaissance copy she is totally devoid of expression, and appears, instead
of tearing her hair, to be dividing it into long curls on each side.
This vice is the proper opposite of Hope. By Giotto she is represented as
a woman hanging herself, a fiend coming for her soul. Spenser's vision of
Despair is well known, it being indeed currently reported that this part
of the Faerie Queen was the first which drew to it the attention of Sir
Philip Sidney.
SECTION LIII. Sixth side. Obedience: with her arms folded; meek,
but rude and commonplace, looking at a little dog standing on its hind
legs and begging, with a collar round its neck. Inscribed "OBEDIENTI * *;"
the rest of the sentence is much defaced, but looks like "A'ONOEXIBEO."
I suppose the note of contraction above the final A has disappeared and
that the inscription was "Obedientiam domino exhibeo."
This virtue is, of course, a principal one in the monkish systems;
represented by Giotto at Assisi as﹃an angel robed in black, placing the
finger of his left hand on his mouth, and passing the yoke over the head
of a Franciscan monk kneeling at his feet.﹄[Footnote: Lord Lindsay, vol.
ii. p. 226.]
Obedience holds a less principal place in Spenser. We have seen her above
associated with the other peculiar virtues of womanhood.
SECTION LIV. Seventh side. Infidelity. A man in a turban, with a
small image in his hand, or the image of a child. Of the inscription
nothing but "INFIDELITATE * * *" and some fragmentary letters,﹃ILI,
CERO,﹄remain.
By Giotto Infidelity is most nobly symbolized as a woman helmeted, the
helmet having a broad rim which keeps the light from her eyes. She is
covered with heavy drapery, stands infirmly as if about to fall, is
bound by a cord round her neck to an image which she carries in her
hand, and has flames bursting forth at her feet.
In Spenser, Infidelity is the Saracen knight Sans Foy,—
"Full large of limbe and every joint
He was, and cared not for God or man a point."
For the part which he sustains in the contest with Godly Fear, or the
Red-cross knight, see Appendix 2, Vol. III.
SECTION LV. Eighth side. Modesty; bearing a pitcher. (In the
Renaissance copy, a vase like a coffeepot.) Inscribed "MODESTIA
ROBUOBTINEO."
I do not find this virtue in any of the Italian series, except that of
Venice. In Spenser she is of course one of those attendant on Womanhood,
but occurs as one of the tenants of the Heart of Man, thus portrayed in
the second book:
"Straunge was her tyre, and all her garment blew,
Close rownd about her tuckt with many a plight:
Upon her fist the bird which shonneth vew.
And ever and anone with rosy red
The bashfull blood her snowy cheekes did dye,
That her became, as polisht yvory
Which cunning craftesman hand hath overlayd
With fayre vermilion or pure castory."
SECTION LVI. EIGHTH CAPITAL. It has no inscriptions, and its subjects
are not, by themselves, intelligible; but they appear to be typical of the
degradation of human instincts.
First side. A caricature of Arion on his dolphin; he wears a cap
ending in a long proboscis-like horn, and plays a violin with a curious
twitch of the bow and wag of the head, very graphically expressed, but
still without anything approaching to the power of Northern grotesque. His
dolphin has a goodly row of teeth, and the waves beat over his back.
Second side. A human figure, with curly hair and the legs of a
bear; the paws laid, with great sculptural skill, upon the foliage. It
plays a violin, shaped like a guitar, with a bent double-stringed bow.
Third side. A figure with a serpent's tail and a monstrous head,
founded on a Negro type, hollow-cheeked, large-lipped, and wearing a cap
made of a serpent's skin, holding a fir-cone in its hand.
Fourth side. A monstrous figure, terminating below in a tortoise.
It is devouring a gourd, which it grasps greedily with both hands; it
wears a cap ending in a hoofed leg.
Fifth side. A centaur wearing a crested helmet, and holding a
curved sword.
Sixth side. A knight, riding a headless horse, and wearing a chain
armor, with a triangular shield flung behind his back, and a two-edged
sword.
Seventh side. A figure like that on the fifth, wearing a round
helmet, and with the legs and tail of a horse. He bears a long mace with a
top like a fir-cone.
Eighth side. A figure with curly hair, and an acorn in its hand,
ending below in a fish.
SECTION LVII. NINTH CAPITAL. First side. Faith. She has her left
hand on her breast, and the cross on her right. Inscribed﹃FIDES OPTIMA IN
DEO.﹄The Faith of Giotto holds the cross in her right hand; in her left,
a scroll with the Apostles' Creed. She treads upon cabalistic books, and
has a key suspended to her waist. Spenser's Faith (Fidelia) is still more
spiritual and noble:
"She was araied all in lilly white,
And in her right hand bore a cup of gold,
With wine and water fild up to the hight,
In which a serpent did himselfe enfold,
That horrour made to all that did behold;
But she no whitt did chaunge her constant mood:
And in her other hand she fast did hold
A booke, that was both signd and seald with blood;
Wherein darke things were writt, hard to be understood."
SECTION LVIII. Second side. Fortitude. A long-bearded man
[Samson?] tearing open a lion's jaw. The inscription is illegible, and the
somewhat vulgar personification appears to belong rather to Courage than
Fortitude. On the Renaissance copy it is inscribed﹃FORTITUDO SUM
VIRILIS.﹄The Latin word has, perhaps, been received by the sculptor as
merely signifying "Strength," the rest of the perfect idea of this virtue
having been given in "Constantia" previously. But both these Venetian
symbols together do not at all approach the idea of Fortitude as given
generally by Giotto and the Pisan sculptors; clothed with a lion's skin,
knotted about her neck, and falling to her feet in deep folds; drawing
back her right hand, with the sword pointed towards her enemy; and
slightly retired behind her immovable shield, which, with Giotto, is
square, and rested on the ground like a tower, covering her up to above
her shoulders; bearing on it a lion, and with broken heads of javelins
deeply infixed.
Among the Greeks, this is, of course, one of the principal virtues; apt,
however, in their ordinary conception of it to degenerate into mere
manliness or courage.
SECTION LIX. Third side. Temperance; bearing a pitcher of water
and a cup. Inscription, illegible here, and on the Renaissance copy nearly
so, "TEMPERANTIA SUM" (INOM' L'S)? Only left. In this somewhat vulgar and
most frequent conception of this virtue (afterwards continually repeated,
as by Sir Joshua in his window at New-College) temperance is confused with
mere abstinence, the opposite of Gula, or gluttony; whereas the Greek
Temperance, a truly cardinal virtue, is the moderator of all the
passions, and so represented by Giotto, who has placed a bridle upon her
lips, and a sword in her hand, the hilt of which she is binding to the
scabbard. In his system, she is opposed among the vices, not by Gula or
Gluttony, but by Ira, Anger. So also the Temperance of Spenser, or Sir
Guyon, but with mingling of much sternness:
"A goodly knight, all armd in harnesse meete,
That from his head no place appeared to his feete,
His carriage was full comely and upright;
His countenance demure and temperate;
But yett so sterne and terrible in sight,
That cheard his friendes, and did his foes amate."
The Temperance of the Greeks, [Greek: sophrosunae] involves the idea of
Prudence, and is a most noble virtue, yet properly marked by Plato as
inferior to sacred enthusiasm, though necessary for its government. He
opposes it, under the name "Mortal Temperance" or﹃the Temperance which is
of men,﹄to divine madness, [Greek: mania,] or inspiration; but he most
justly and nobly expresses the general idea of it under the term [Greek:
ubris], which, in the "Phaedrus," is divided into various intemperances
with respect to various objects, and set forth under the image of a black,
vicious, diseased and furious horse, yoked by the side of Prudence or
Wisdom (set forth under the figure of a white horse with a crested and
noble head, like that which we have among the Elgin Marbles) to the
chariot of the Soul. The system of Aristotle, as above stated, is
throughout a mere complicated blunder, supported by sophistry, the
laboriously developed mistake of Temperance for the essence of the virtues
which it guides. Temperance in the mediaeval systems is generally opposed
by Anger, or by Folly, or Gluttony: but her proper opposite is Spenser's
Acrasia, the principal enemy of Sir Guyon, at whose gates we find the
subordinate vice "Excesse," as the introduction to Intemperance; a
graceful and feminine image, necessary to illustrate the more dangerous
forms of subtle intemperance, as opposed to the brutal "Gluttony" in the
first book. She presses grapes into a cup, because of the words of St.
Paul, "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess;" but always delicately,
"Into her cup she scruzd with daintie breach
Of her fine fingers, without fowle empeach,
That so faire winepresse made the wine more sweet."
The reader will, I trust, pardon these frequent extracts from Spenser, for
it is nearly as necessary to point out the profound divinity and
philosophy of our great English poet, as the beauty of the Ducal Palace.
SECTION LX. Fourth side. Humility; with a veil upon her head,
carrying a lamp in her lap. Inscribed in the copy, "HUMILITAS HABITAT IN
ME."
This virtue is of course a peculiarly Christian one, hardly recognized in
the Pagan systems, though carefully impressed upon the Greeks in early
life in a manner which at this day it would be well if we were to imitate,
and, together with an almost feminine modesty, giving an exquisite grace
to the conduct and bearing of the well-educated Greek youth. It is, of
course, one of the leading virtues in all the monkish systems, but I have
not any notes of the manner of its representation.
SECTION LXI. Fifth side. Charity. A woman with her lap full of
loaves (?), giving one to a child, who stretches his arm out for it across
a broad gap in the leafage of the capital.
Again very far inferior to the Giottesque rendering of this virtue. In the
Arena Chapel she is distinguished from all the other virtues by having a
circular glory round her head, and a cross of fire; she is crowned with
flowers, presents with her right hand a vase of corn and fruit, and with
her left receives treasure from Christ, who appears above her, to provide
her with the means of continual offices of beneficence, while she tramples
under foot the treasures of the earth.
The peculiar beauty of most of the Italian conceptions of Charity, is in
the subjection of mere munificence to the glowing of her love, always
represented by flames; here in the form of a cross round her head; in
Orcagna's shrine at Florence, issuing from a censer in her hand; and, with
Dante, inflaming her whole form, so that, in a furnace of clear fire, she
could not have been discerned.
Spenser represents her as a mother surrounded by happy children, an idea
afterwards grievously hackneyed and vulgarized by English painters and
sculptors.
SECTION LXII. Sixth side. Justice. Crowned, and with sword.
Inscribed in the copy, "REX SUM JUSTICIE."
This idea was afterwards much amplified and adorned in the only good
capital of the Renaissance series, under the Judgment angle. Giotto has
also given his whole strength to the painting of this virtue, representing
her as enthroned under a noble Gothic canopy, holding scales, not by the
beam, but one in each hand; a beautiful idea, showing that the equality of
the scales of Justice is not owing to natural laws, but to her own
immediate weighing the opposed causes in her own hands. In one scale is an
executioner beheading a criminal; in the other an angel crowning a man who
seems (in Selvatico's plate) to have been working at a desk or table.
Beneath her feet is a small predella, representing various persons riding
securely in the woods, and others dancing to the sound of music.
Spenser's Justice, Sir Artegall, is the hero of an entire book, and the
betrothed knight of Britomart, or chastity.
SECTION LXIII. Seventh side. Prudence. A man with a book and a
pair of compasses, wearing the noble cap, hanging down towards the
shoulder, and bound in a fillet round the brow, which occurs so frequently
during the fourteenth century in Italy in the portraits of men occupied in
any civil capacity.
This virtue is, as we have seen, conceived under very different degrees of
dignity, from mere worldly prudence up to heavenly wisdom, being opposed
sometimes by Stultitia, sometimes by Ignorantia. I do not find, in any of
the representations of her, that her truly distinctive character, namely,
forethought, is enough insisted upon: Giotto expresses her
vigilance and just measurement or estimate of all things by painting her
as Janus-headed, and gazing into a convex mirror, with compasses in her
right hand; the convex mirror showing her power of looking at many things
in small compass. But forethought or anticipation, by which, independently
of greater or less natural capacities, one man becomes more prudent
than another, is never enough considered or symbolized.
The idea of this virtue oscillates, in the Greek systems, between
Temperance and Heavenly Wisdom.
SECTION LXIV. Eighth side. Hope. A figure full of devotional
expression, holding up its hands as in prayer, and looking to a hand which
is extended towards it out of sunbeams. In the Renaissance copy this hand
does not appear.
Of all the virtues, this is the most distinctively Christian (it could
not, of course, enter definitely into any Pagan scheme); and above all
others, it seems to me the testing virtue,—that by the
possession of which we may most certainly determine whether we are
Christians or not; for many men have charity, that is to say, general
kindness of heart, or even a kind of faith, who have not any habitual hope
of, or longing for, heaven. The Hope of Giotto is represented as winged,
rising in the air, while an angel holds a crown before her. I do not know
if Spenser was the first to introduce our marine virtue, leaning on an
anchor, a symbol as inaccurate as it is vulgar: for, in the first place,
anchors are not for men, but for ships; and in the second, anchorage is
the characteristic not of Hope, but of Faith. Faith is dependent, but Hope
is aspirant. Spenser, however, introduces Hope twice,—the first time
as the Virtue with the anchor; but afterwards fallacious Hope, far more
beautifully, in the Masque of Cupid:
"She always smyld, and in her hand did hold
An holy-water sprinckle, dipt in deowe."
SECTION LXV. TENTH CAPITAL. First side. Luxury (the opposite of
chastity, as above explained). A woman with a jewelled chain across her
forehead, smiling as she looks into a mirror, exposing her breast by
drawing down her dress with one hand. Inscribed "LUXURIA SUM IMENSA."
These subordinate forms of vice are not met with so frequently in art as
those of the opposite virtues, but in Spenser we find them all. His Luxury
rides upon a goat:
"In a greene gowne he clothed was full faire,
Which underneath did hide his filthinesse,
And in his hand a burning heart he bare."
But, in fact, the proper and comprehensive expression of this vice is the
Cupid of the ancients; and there is not any minor circumstance more
indicative of the intense difference between the mediaeval and the
Renaissance spirit, than the mode in which this god is represented.
I have above said, that all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth
century; and it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about
which we may consider the energy of the middle ages to be gathered; a kind
of focus of time which, by what is to my mind a most touching and
impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest
writer of the middle ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year
1300, the "mezzo del cammin" of the life of Dante. Now, therefore, to
Giotto, the contemporary of Dante, and who drew Dante's still existing
portrait in this very year, 1300, we may always look for the central
mediaeval idea in any subject: and observe how he represents Cupid; as one
of three, a terrible trinity, his companions being Satan and Death; and he
himself﹃a lean scarecrow, with bow, quiver, and fillet, and feet ending
in claws,﹄[Footnote: Lord Lindsay, vol. ii. letter iv.] thrust down into
Hell by Penance, from the presence of Purity and Fortitude. Spenser, who
has been so often noticed as furnishing the exactly intermediate type of
conception between the mediaeval and the Renaissance, indeed represents
Cupid under the form of a beautiful winged god, and riding on a lion, but
still no plaything of the Graces, but full of terror:
"With that the darts which his right hand did straine
Full dreadfully he shooke, that all did quake,
And clapt on hye his coloured winges twaine,
That all his many it afraide did make."
His many, that is to say, his company; and observe what a company it is.
Before him go Fancy, Desire, Doubt, Danger, Fear, Fallacious Hope,
Dissemblance, Suspicion, Grief, Fury, Displeasure, Despite, and Cruelty.
After him, Reproach, Repentance, Shame,
"Unquiet Care, and fond Unthriftyhead,
Lewd Losse of Time, and Sorrow seeming dead,
Inconstant Chaunge, and false Disloyalty,
Consuming Riotise, and guilty Dread
Of heavenly vengeaunce; faint Infirmity,
Vile Poverty, and lastly Death with infamy."
Compare these two pictures of Cupid with the Love-god of the Renaissance,
as he is represented to this day, confused with angels, in every faded
form of ornament and allegory, in our furniture, our literature, and our
minds.
SECTION LXVI. Second side. Gluttony. A woman in a turban, with a
jewelled cup in her right hand. In her left, the clawed limb of a bird,
which she is gnawing. Inscribed "GULA SINE ORDINE SUM."
Spenser's Gluttony is more than usually fine:
"His belly was upblownt with luxury,
And eke with fatnesse swollen were his eyne,
And like a crane his necke was long and fyne,
Wherewith he swallowed up excessive feast,
For want whereof poore people oft did pyne."
He rides upon a swine, and is clad in vine-leaves, with a garland of ivy.
Compare the account of Excesse, above, as opposed to Temperance.
SECTION LXVII. Third side. Pride. A knight, with a heavy and
stupid face, holding a sword with three edges: his armor covered with
ornaments in the form of roses, and with two ears attached to his helmet.
The inscription indecipherable, all but "SUPERBIA."
Spenser has analyzed this vice with great care. He first represents it as
the Pride of life; that is to say, the pride which runs in a deep
under-current through all the thoughts and acts of men. As such, it is a
feminine vice, directly opposed to Holiness, and mistress of a castle
called the House of Pryde, and her chariot is driven by Satan, with a team
of beasts, ridden by the mortal sins. In the throne chamber of her palace
she is thus described:
"So proud she shyned in her princely state,
Looking to Heaven, for Earth she did disdayne;
And sitting high, for lowly she did hate:
Lo, underneath her scornefull feete was layne
A dreadfull dragon with an hideous trayne;
And in her hand she held a mirrhour bright,
Wherein her face she often vewed fayne."
The giant Orgoglio is a baser species of pride, born of the Earth and
Eolus; that is to say, of sensual and vain conceits. His foster-father and
the keeper of his castle is Ignorance. (Book I. canto viii.)
Finally, Disdain is introduced, in other places, as the form of pride
which vents itself in insult to others.
SECTION LXVIII. Fourth side. Anger. A woman tearing her dress
open at her breast. Inscription here undecipherable; but in the
Renaissance Copy it IS "IRA CRUDELIS EST IN ME."
Giotto represents this vice under the same symbol; but it is the weakest
of all the figures in the Arena Chapel. The "Wrath" of Spenser rides upon
a lion, brandishing a firebrand, his garments stained with blood. Rage, or
Furor, occurs subordinately in other places. It appears to me very strange
that neither Giotto nor Spenser should have given any representation of
the restrained Anger, which is infinitely the most terrible; both
of them make him violent.
SECTION LXIX. Fifth side. Avarice. An old woman with a veil over
her forehead, and a bag of money in each hand. A figure very marvellous
for power of expression. The throat is all made up of sinews with skinny
channels deep between them, strained as by anxiety, and wasted by famine;
the features hunger-bitten, the eyes hollow, the look glaring and intense,
yet without the slightest caricature. Inscribed in the Renaissance copy,
"AVARITIA IMPLETOR."
Spenser's Avarice (the vice) is much feebler than this; but the god Mammon
and his kingdom have been described by him with his usual power. Note the
position of the house of Richesse:
"Betwixt them both was but a little stride,
That did the House of Richesse from Hell-mouth divide."
It is curious that most moralists confuse avarice with covetousness,
although they are vices totally different in their operation on the human
heart, and on the frame of society. The love of money, the sin of Judas
and Ananias, is indeed the root of all evil in the hardening of the heart;
but "covetousness, which is idolatry," the sin of Ahab, that is, the
inordinate desire of some seen or recognized good,—thus destroying
peace of mind,—is probably productive of much more misery in heart,
and error in conduct, than avarice itself, only covetousness is not so
inconsistent with Christianity: for covetousness may partly proceed from
vividness of the affections and hopes, as in David, and be consistent with
much charity; not so avarice.
SECTION LXX. Sixth side. Idleness. Accidia. A figure much broken
away, having had its arms round two branches of trees.
I do not know why Idleness should be represented as among trees, unless,
in the Italy of the fourteenth century, forest country was considered as
desert, and therefore the domain of Idleness. Spenser fastens this vice
especially upon the clergy,—
"Upon a slouthfull asse he chose to ryde,
Arayd in habit blacke, and amis thin,
Like to an holy monck, the service to begin.
And in his hand his portesse still he bare,
That much was worne, but therein little redd."
And he properly makes him the leader of the train of the vices:
"May seem the wayne was very evil ledd,
When such an one had guiding of the way."
Observe that subtle touch of truth in the "wearing" of the portesse,
indicating the abuse of books by idle readers, so thoroughly
characteristic of unwilling studentship from the schoolboy upwards.
SECTION LXXI. Seventh side. Vanity. She is smiling complacently
as she looks into a mirror in her lap. Her robe is embroidered with roses,
and roses form her crown. Undecipherable.
There is some confusion in the expression of this vice, between pride in
the personal appearance and lightness of purpose. The word Vanitas
generally, I think, bears, in the mediaeval period, the sense given it in
Scripture.﹃Let not him that is deceived trust in Vanity, for Vanity shall
be his recompense.﹄"Vanity of Vanities."﹃The Lord knoweth the thoughts
of the wise, that they are vain.﹄It is difficult to find this sin,—which,
after Pride, is the most universal, perhaps the most fatal, of all,
fretting the whole depth of our humanity into storm "to waft a feather or
to drown a fly,"—definitely expressed in art. Even Spenser, I think,
has only partially expressed it under the figure of Phaedria, more
properly Idle Mirth, in the second book. The idea is, however, entirely
worked out in the Vanity Fair of the "Pilgrim's Progress."
SECTION LXXII. Eighth side. Envy. One of the noblest pieces of
expression in the series. She is pointing malignantly with her finger; a
serpent is wreathed about her head like a cap, another forms the girdle of
her waist, and a dragon rests in her lap.
Giotto has, however, represented her, with still greater subtlety, as
having her fingers terminating in claws, and raising her right hand with
an expression partly of impotent regret, partly of involuntary grasping; a
serpent, issuing from her mouth, is about to bite her between the eyes;
she has long membranous ears, horns on her head, and flames consuming her
body. The Envy of Spenser is only inferior to that of Giotto, because the
idea of folly and quickness of hearing is not suggested by the size of the
ear: in other respects it is even finer, joining the idea of fury, in the
wolf on which he rides, with that of corruption on his lips, and of
discoloration or distortion in the whole mind:
"Malicious Envy rode
Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw
Between his cankred teeth avenemous tode
That all the poison ran about his jaw.
And in a kirtle of discolourd say
He clothed was, ypaynted full of eies,
And in his bosome secretly there lay
An hatefull snake, the which his taile uptyes
In many folds, and mortali sting implyes."
He has developed the idea in more detail, and still more loathsomely, in
the twelfth canto of the fifth book.
SECTION LXXIII. ELEVENTH CAPITAL. Its decoration is composed of eight
birds, arranged as shown in Plate V. of the "Seven Lamps," which, however,
was sketched from the Renaissance copy. These birds are all varied in form
and action, but not so as to require special description.
SECTION LXXIV. TWELFTH CAPITAL. This has been very interesting, but is
grievously defaced, four of its figures being entirely broken away, and
the character of two others quite undecipherable. It is fortunate that it
has been copied in the thirty-third capital of the Renaissance series,
from which we are able to identify the lost figures.
First side. Misery. A man with a wan face, seemingly pleading with
a child who has its hands crossed on its breast. There is a buckle at his
own breast in the shape of a cloven heart. Inscribed "MISERIA."
The intention of this figure is not altogether apparent, as it is by no
means treated as a vice; the distress seeming real, and like that of a
parent in poverty mourning over his child. Yet it seems placed here as in
direct opposition to the virtue of Cheerfulness, which follows next in
order; rather, however, I believe, with the intention of illustrating
human life, than the character of the vice which, as we have seen, Dante
placed in the circle of hell. The word in that case would, I think, have
been "Tristitia," the "unholy Griefe" of Spenser—
"All in sable sorrowfully clad,
Downe hanging his dull head with heavy chere:
A pair of pincers in his hand he had,
With which he pinched people to the heart."
He has farther amplified the idea under another figure in the fifth canto
of the fourth book:
"His name was Care; a blacksmith by his trade,
That neither day nor night from working spared;
But to small purpose yron wedges made:
Those be unquiet thoughts that carefull minds invade.
Rude was his garment, and to rags all rent,
Ne better had he, ne for better cared;
With blistered hands among the cinders brent."
It is to be noticed, however, that in the Renaissance copy this figure is
stated to be, not Miseria, but "Misericordia." The contraction is a very
moderate one, Misericordia being in old MS. written always as "Mia." If
this reading be right, the figure is placed here rather as the companion,
than the opposite, of Cheerfulness; unless, indeed, it is intended to
unite the idea of Mercy and Compassion with that of Sacred Sorrow.
SECTION LXXV. Second side. Cheerfulness. A woman with long
flowing hair, crowned with roses, playing on a tambourine, and with open
lips, as singing. Inscribed "ALACRITAS."
We have already met with this virtue among those especially set by Spenser
to attend on Womanhood. It is inscribed in the Renaissance Copy,
"ALACHRITAS CHANIT MECUM." Note the gutturals of the rich and fully
developed Venetian dialect now affecting the Latin, which is free from
them in the earlier capitals.
SECTION LXXVI. Third side. Destroyed; but, from the copy, we find
it has been Stultitia, Folly; and it is there represented simply as a man
riding, a sculpture worth the consideration of the English
residents who bring their horses to Venice. Giotto gives Stultitia a
feather, cap, and club. In early manuscripts he is always eating with one
hand, and striking with the other; in later ones he has a cap and bells,
or cap crested with a cock's head, whence the word "coxcomb."
SECTION LXXVII. Fourth side. Destroyed, all but a book, which
identifies it with the "Celestial Chastity" of the Renaissance copy; there
represented as a woman pointing to a book (connecting the convent life
with the pursuit of literature?).
Spenser's Chastity, Britomart, is the most exquisitely wrought of all his
characters; but, as before noticed, she is not the Chastity of the
convent, but of wedded life.
SECTION LXXVIII. Fifth side. Only a scroll is left; but, from the
copy, we find it has been Honesty or Truth. Inscribed "HONESTATEM DILIGO."
It is very curious, that among all the Christian systems of the virtues
which we have examined, we should find this one in Venice only.
The Truth of Spenser, Una, is, after Chastity, the most exquisite
character in the "Faerie Queen."
SECTION LXXIX. Sixth side. Falsehood. An old woman leaning on a
crutch; and inscribed in the copy, "FALSITAS IN ME SEMPER EST." The
Fidessa of Spenser, the great enemy of Una, or Truth, is far more subtly
conceived, probably not without special reference to the Papal deceits. In
her true form she is a loathsome hag, but in her outward aspect,
"A goodly lady, clad in scarlet red,
Purfled with gold and pearle;...
Her wanton palfrey all was overspred.
With tinsell trappings, woven like a wave,
Whose bridle rung with golden bels and bosses brave."
Dante's Fraud, Geryon, is the finest personification of all, but the
description (Inferno, canto XVII.) is too long to be quoted.
SECTION LXXX. Seventh side. Injustice. An armed figure holding a
halbert; so also in the copy. The figure used by Giotto with the
particular intention of representing unjust government, is represented at
the gate of an embattled castle in a forest, between rocks, while various
deeds of violence are committed at his feet. Spenser's "Adicia" is a
furious hag, at last transformed into a tiger.
Eighth side. A man with a dagger looking sorrowfully at a child,
who turns its back to him. I cannot understand this figure. It is
inscribed in the copy, "ASTINECIA (Abstinentia?) OPITIMA?"
SECTION LXXXI. THIRTEENTH CAPITAL. It has lions' heads all round,
coarsely cut.
FOURTEENTH CAPITAL. It has various animals, each sitting on its haunches.
Three dogs, One a greyhound, one long-haired, one short-haired with bells
about its neck; two monkeys, one with fan-shaped hair projecting on each
side of its face; a noble boar, with its tusks, hoofs, and bristles
sharply cut; and a lion and lioness.
SECTION LXXXII. FIFTEENTH CAPITAL. The pillar to which it belongs is
thicker than the rest, as well as the one over it in the upper arcade.
The sculpture of this capital is also much coarser, and seems to me later
than that of the rest; and it has no inscription, which is embarrassing,
as its subjects have had much meaning; but I believe Selvatico is right in
supposing it to have been intended for a general illustration of Idleness.
First side. A woman with a distaff; her girdle richly decorated,
and fastened by a buckle.
Second side. A youth in a long mantle, with a rose in his hand.
Third side. A woman in a turban stroking a puppy, which she holds
by the haunches.
Fourth side. A man with a parrot.
Fifth side. A woman in very rich costume, with braided hair, and
dress thrown into minute folds, holding a rosary (?) in her left hand, her
right on her breast.
Sixth side. A man with a very thoughtful face, laying his hand upon
the leaves of the capital.
Seventh side. A crowned lady, with a rose in her hand.
Eighth side. A boy with a ball in his left hand, and his right laid
on his breast.
SECTION LXXXIII. SIXTEENTH CAPITAL. It is decorated with eight large
heads, partly intended to be grotesque, [Footnote: Selvatico states that
these are intended to be representative of eight nations, Latins, Tartars,
Turks, Hungarians, Greeks, Goths, Egyptians, and Persians. Either the
inscriptions are now defaced or I have carelessly omitted to note them.]
and very coarse and bad, except only that in the sixth side, which is
totally different from all the rest, and looks like a portrait. It is
thin, thoughtful, and dignified; thoroughly fine in every way. It wears a
cap surmounted by two winged lions; and, therefore, I think Selvatico must
have inaccurately written the list given in the note, for this head is
certainly meant to express the superiority of the Venetian character over
that of other nations. Nothing is more remarkable in all early sculpture,
than its appreciation of the signs of dignity of character in the
features, and the way in which it can exalt the principal figure in any
subject by a few touches.
SECTION LXXXIV. SEVENTEENTH CAPITAL. This has been so destroyed by the
sea wind, which sweeps at this point of the arcade round the angle of the
palace, that its inscriptions are no longer legible, and great part of its
figures are gone. Selvatico states them as follows: Solomon, the wise;
Priscian, the grammarian; Aristotle, the logician; Tully, the orator;
Pythagoras, the philosopher; Archimedes, the mechanic; Orpheus, the
musician; Ptolemy, the astronomer. The fragments actually remaining are
the following:
First side. A figure with two books, in a robe richly decorated
with circles of roses. Inscribed "SALOMON (SAP) IENS."
Second side. A man with one book, poring over it: he has had a long
stick or reed in his hand. Of inscription only the letters "GRAMMATIC"
remain.
Third side. "ARISTOTLE:" so inscribed. He has a peaked double beard
and a flat cap, from under which his long hair falls down his back.
Fourth side. Destroyed.
Fifth side. Destroyed, all but a board with, three (counters?) on
it.
Sixth side. A figure with compasses. Inscribed "GEOMET * *"
Seventh side. Nothing is left but a guitar with its handle wrought
into a lion's head.
Eighth side. Destroyed.
SECTION LXXXV. We have now arrived at the EIGHTEENTH CAPITAL, the most
interesting and beautiful of the palace. It represents the planets, and
the sun and moon, in those divisions of the zodiac known to astrologers as
their "houses;" and perhaps indicates, by the position in which they are
placed, the period of the year at which this great corner-stone was laid.
The inscriptions above have been in quaint Latin rhyme, but are now
decipherable only in fragments, and that with the more difficulty because
the rusty iron bar that binds the abacus has broken away, in its
expansion, nearly all the upper portions of the stone, and with them the
signs of contraction, which are of great importance. I shall give the
fragments of them that I could decipher; first as the letters actually
stand (putting those of which I am doubtful in brackets, with a note of
interrogation), and then as I would read them.
SECTION LXXXVI. It should be premised that, in modern astrology, the
houses of the planets are thus arranged:
The house of the Sun, is Leo.
" Moon, 『 Cancer.
』 Mars, 『 Aries and Scorpio.
』 Venus, 『 Taurus and Libra.
』 Mercury, 『 Gemini and Virgo.
』 Jupiter, 『 Sagittarius and Pisces.
』 Saturn, 『 Capricorn.
』 Herschel, " Aquarius.
The Herschel planet being of course unknown to the old astrologers, we
have only the other six planetary powers, together with the sun; and
Aquarius is assigned to Saturn as his house. I could not find Capricorn at
all; but this sign may have been broken away, as the whole capital is
grievously defaced. The eighth side of the capital, which the Herschel
planet would now have occupied, bears a sculpture of the Creation of Man:
it is the most conspicuous side, the one set diagonally across the angle;
or the eighth in our usual mode of reading the capitals, from which I
shall not depart.
SECTION LXXXVII. The first side, then, or that towards the Sea,
has Aquarius, as the house of Saturn, represented as a seated figure
beautifully draped, pouring a stream of water out of an amphora over the
leaves of the capital. His inscription is:
"ET SATURNE DOMUS (ECLOCERUNT?) I'S 7BRE."
SECTION LXXXVIII. Second side. Jupiter, in his houses Sagittarius
and Pisces, represented throned, with an upper dress disposed in radiating
folds about his neck, and hanging down upon his breast, ornamented by
small pendent trefoiled studs or bosses. He wears the drooping bonnet and
long gloves; but the folds about the neck, shot forth to express the rays
of the star, are the most remarkable characteristic of the figure. He
raises his sceptre in his left hand over Sagittarius, represented as the
centaur Chiron; and holds two thunnies in his right. Something rough, like
a third fish, has been broken away below them; the more easily because
this part of the group is entirely undercut, and the two fish glitter in
the light, relieved on the deep gloom below the leaves. The inscription
is:
"INDE JOVI' DONA PISES SIMUL ATQ' CIRONA." [Footnote: The comma in these
inscriptions stands for a small cuneiform mark, I believe of contraction,
and the small for a zigzag mark of the same kind. The dots or periods are
similarly marked on the stone.]
Or,
"Inde Jovis dona
Pisces simul atque Chirona."
Domus is, I suppose, to be understood before Jovis: "Then the house of
Jupiter gives (or governs?) the fishes and Chiron."
SECTION LXXXIX. Third side. Mars, in his houses Aries and
Scorpio. Represented as a very ugly knight in chain mail, seated sideways
on the ram, whose horns are broken away, and having a large scorpion in
his left hand, whose tail is broken also, to the infinite injury of the
group, for it seems to have curled across to the angle leaf, and formed a
bright line of light, like the fish in the hand of Jupiter. The knight
carries a shield, on which fire and water are sculptured, and bears a
banner upon his lance, with the word "DEFEROSUM," which puzzled me for
some time. It should be read, I believe, "De ferro sum;" which would be
good Venetian Latin for "I am of iron."
SECTION XC. Fourth side. The Sun, in his house Leo. Represented
under the figure of Apollo, sitting on the Lion, with rays shooting from
his head, and the world in his hand. The inscription:
"TU ES DOMU' SOLIS (QUO?) SIGNE LEONI."
I believe the first phrase is, "Tune est Domus solis;" but there is a
letter gone after the "quo," and I have no idea what case of signum
"signe" stands for.
SECTION XCI. Fifth side. Venus, in her houses Taurus and Libra.
The most beautiful figure of the series. She sits upon the bull, who is
deep in the dewlap, and better cut than most of the animals, holding a
mirror in her right hand, and the scales in her left. Her breast is very
nobly and tenderly indicated under the folds of her drapery, which is
exquisitely studied in its fall. What is left of the inscription, runs:
"LIBRA CUM TAURO DOMUS * * * PURIOR AUR*."
SECTION XCII. Sixth side. Mercury, represented as wearing a
pendent cap, and holding a book: he is supported by three children in
reclining attitudes, representing his houses Gemini and Virgo. But I
cannot understand the inscription, though more than usually legible.
"OCCUPAT ERIGONE STIBONS GEMINUQ' LAGONE."
SECTION XCIII. Seventh side. The Moon, in her house Cancer. This
sculpture, which is turned towards the Piazzetta, is the most picturesque
of the series. The moon is represented as a woman in a boat, upon the sea,
who raises the crescent in her right hand, and with her left draws a crab
out of the waves, up the boat's side. The moon was, I believe, represented
in Egyptian sculptures as in a boat; but I rather think the Venetian was
not aware of this, and that he meant to express the peculiar sweetness of
the moonlight at Venice, as seen across the lagoons. Whether this was
intended by putting the planet in the boat, may be questionable, but
assuredly the idea was meant to be conveyed by the dress of the figure.
For all the draperies of the other figures on this capital, as well as on
the rest of the façade, are disposed in severe but full folds, showing
little of the forms beneath them; but the moon's drapery ripples
down to her feet, so as exactly to suggest the trembling of the moonlight
on the waves. This beautiful idea is highly characteristic of the
thoughtfulness of the early sculptors: five hundred men may be now found
who could have cut the drapery, as such, far better, for one who would
have disposed its folds with this intention. The inscription is:
"LUNE CANCER DOMU T. PBET IORBE SIGNORU."
SECTION XCIV. Eighth side. God creating Man. Represented as a
throned figure, with a glory round the head, laying his left hand on the
head of a naked youth, and sustaining him with his right hand. The
inscription puzzled me for a long time; but except the lost r and m of
"formavit," and a letter quite undefaced, but to me unintelligble, before
the word Eva, in the shape of a figure of 7, I have safely ascertained the
rest.
"DELIMO DSADA DECO STAFO * * AVIT7EVA."
Or
"De limo Dominus Adam, de costa fo(rm) avit Evam;"
From the dust the Lord made Adam, and from the rib Eve.
I imagine the whole of this capital, therefore—the principal one of
the old palace,—to have been intended to signify, first, the
formation of the planets for the service of man upon the earth; secondly,
the entire subjection of the fates and fortune of man to the will of God,
as determined from the time when the earth and stars were made, and, in
fact, written in the volume of the stars themselves.
Thus interpreted, the doctrines of judicial astrology were not only
consistent with, but an aid to, the most spiritual and humble
Christianity.
In the workmanship and grouping of its foliage, this capital is, on the
whole, the finest I know in Europe. The Sculptor has put his whole
strength into it. I trust that it will appear among the other Venetian
casts lately taken for the Crystal Palace; but if not, I have myself cast
all its figures, and two of its leaves, and I intend to give drawings of
them on a large scale in my folio work.
SECTION XCV. NINETEENTH CAPITAL. This is, of course, the second counting
from the Sea, on the Piazzetta side of the palace, calling that of the
Fig-tree angle the first.
It is the most important capital, as a piece of evidence in point of
dates, in the whole palace. Great pains have been taken with it, and in
some portion of the accompanying furniture or ornaments of each of its
figures a small piece of colored marble has been inlaid, with peculiar
significance: for the capital represents the arts of sculpture and
architecture; and the inlaying of the colored stones (which are far
too small to be effective at a distance, and are found in this one capital
only of the whole series) is merely an expression of the architect's
feeling of the essential importance of this art of inlaying, and of the
value of color generally in his own art.
SECTION XCVI. First side. "ST. SIMPLICIUS": so inscribed. A
figure working with a pointed chisel on a small oblong block of green
serpentine, about four inches long by one wide, inlaid in the capital. The
chisel is, of course, in the left hand, but the right is held up open,
with the palm outwards.
Second side. A crowned figure, carving the image of a child on a
small statue, with a ground of red marble. The sculptured figure is highly
finished, and is in type of head much like the Ham or Japheth at the Vine
angle. Inscription effaced.
Third side. An old man, uncrowned, but with curling hair, at work
on a small column, with its capital complete, and a little shaft of dark
red marble, spotted with paler red. The capital is precisely of the form
of that found in the palace of the Tiepolos and the other thirteenth
century work of Venice. This one figure would be quite enough, without any
other evidence whatever, to determine the date of this flank of the Ducal
Palace as not later, at all events, than the first half of the fourteenth
century. Its inscription is broken away, all but "DISIPULO."
Fourth side. A crowned figure; but the object on which it has been
working is broken away, and all the inscription except "ST. E(N?)AS."
Fifth side. A man with a turban, and a sharp chisel, at work on a
kind of panel or niche, the back of which is of red marble.
Sixth side. A crowned figure, with hammer and chisel, employed on
a little range of windows of the fifth order, having roses set,
instead of orbicular ornaments, between the spandrils with a rich cornice,
and a band of marble inserted above. This sculpture assures us of the date
of the fifth order window, which it shows to have been universal in the
early fourteenth century.
There are also five arches in the block on which the sculptor is working,
marking the frequency of the number five in the window groups of the time.
Seventh side. A figure at work on a pilaster, with Lombardic
thirteenth century capital (for account of the series of forms in Venetian
capitals, see the final Appendix of the next volume), the shaft of dark
red spotted marble.
Eighth side. A figure with a rich open crown, working on a delicate
recumbent statue, the head of which is laid on a pillow covered with a
rich chequer pattern; the whole supported on a block of dark red marble.
Inscription broken away, all but "ST. SYM. (Symmachus?) TV * * ANVS."
There appear, therefore, altogether to have been five saints, two of them
popes, if Simplicius is the pope of that name (three in front, two on the
fourth and sixth sides), alternating with the three uncrowned workmen in
the manual labor of sculpture. I did not, therefore, insult our present
architects in saying above that they﹃ought to work in the mason's yard
with their men.﹄It would be difficult to find a more interesting
expression of the devotional spirit in which all great work was undertaken
at this time.
SECTION XCVII. TWENTIETH CAPITAL. It is adorned with heads of animals,
and is the finest of the whole series in the broad massiveness of its
effect; so simply characteristic, indeed, of the grandeur of style in the
entire building, that I chose it for the first Plate in my folio work. In
spite of the sternness of its plan, however, it is wrought with great care
in surface detail; and the ornamental value of the minute chasing obtained
by the delicate plumage of the birds, and the clustered bees on the
honeycomb in the bear's mouth, opposed to the strong simplicity of its
general form, cannot be too much admired. There are also more grace, life,
and variety in the sprays of foliage on each side of it, and under the
heads, than in any other capital of the series, though the earliness of
the workmanship is marked by considerable hardness and coldness in the
larger heads. A Northern Gothic workman, better acquainted with bears and
wolves than it was possible to become in St. Mark's Place, would have put
far more life into these heads, but he could not have composed them more
skilfully.
SECTION XCVIII. First side. A lion with a stag's haunch in his
mouth. Those readers who have the folio plate, should observe the peculiar
way in which the ear is cut into the shape of a ring, jagged or furrowed
on the edge; an archaic mode of treatment peculiar, in the Ducal Palace,
to the lion's heads of the fourteenth century. The moment we reach the
Renaissance work, the lion's ears are smooth. Inscribed simply, "LEO."
Second side. A wolf with a dead bird in his mouth, its body
wonderfully true in expression of the passiveness of death. The feathers
are each wrought with a central quill and radiating filaments. Inscribed
"LUPUS."
Third side. A fox, not at all like one, with a dead cock in his
mouth, its comb and pendent neck admirably designed so as to fall across
the great angle leaf of the capital, its tail hanging down on the other
side, its long straight feathers exquisitely cut. Inscribed ("VULP?)IS."
Fourth side. Entirely broken away.
Fifth side. "APER." Well tusked, with a head of maize in his mouth;
at least I suppose it to be maize, though shaped like a pine-cone.
Sixth side. "CHANIS." With a bone, very ill cut; and a bald-headed
species of dog, with ugly flap ears.
Seventh side. "MUSCIPULUS." With a rat (?) in his mouth.
Eighth side. "URSUS." With a honeycomb, covered with large bees.
SECTION XCIX. TWENTY-FIRST CAPITAL. Represents the principal inferior
professions.
First side. An old man, with his brow deeply wrinkled, and very
expressive features, beating in a kind of mortar with a hammer. Inscribed
"LAPICIDA SUM."
Second side. I believe, a goldsmith; he is striking a small flat
bowl or patera, on a pointed anvil, with a light hammer. The inscription
is gone.
Third side. A shoemaker with a shoe in his hand, and an instrument
for cutting leather suspended beside him. Inscription undecipherable.
Fourth side. Much broken. A carpenter planing a beam resting on two
horizontal logs. Inscribed "CARPENTARIUS SUM."
Fifth side. A figure shovelling fruit into a tub; the latter very
carefully carved from what appears to have been an excellent piece of
cooperage. Two thin laths cross each other over the top of it. The
inscription, now lost, was, according to Selvatico, "MENSURATOR"?
Sixth side. A man, with a large hoe, breaking the ground, which
lies in irregular furrows and clods before him. Now undecipherable, but
according to Selvatico, "AGRICHOLA."
Seventh side. A man, in a pendent cap, writing on a large scroll
which falls over his knee. Inscribed "NOTARIUS SUM."
Eighth side. A man forging a sword, or scythe-blade: he wears a
large skull-cap; beats with a large hammer on a solid anvil; and is
inscribed "FABER SUM."
SECTION C. TWENTY-SECOND CAPITAL. The Ages of Man; and the influence of
the planets on human life.
First side. The moon, governing infancy for four years, according
to Selvatico. I have no note of this side, having, I suppose, been
prevented from raising the ladder against it by some fruit-stall or other
impediment in the regular course of my examination; and then forgotten to
return to it.
Second side. A child with a tablet, and an alphabet inscribed on
it. The legend above is
"MECUREU' DNT. PUERICIE PAN. X."
Or, "Mercurius dominatur puerilite per annos X." (Selvatico reads VII.)
"Mercury governs boyhood for ten (or seven) years."
Third side. An older youth, with another tablet, but broken.
Inscribed
"ADOLOSCENCIE * * * P. AN. VII."
Selvatico misses this side altogether, as I did the first, so that the
lost planet is irrecoverable, as the inscription is now defaced. Note the
o for e in adolescentia; so also we constantly find u for o; showing,
together with much other incontestable evidence of the same kind, how full
and deep the old pronunciation of Latin always remained, and how
ridiculous our English mincing of the vowels would have sounded to a Roman
ear.
Fourth side. A youth with a hawk on his fist.
"IUVENTUTI DNT. SOL. P. AN. XIX." The sue governs youth for nineteen
years.
Fifth side. A man sitting, helmed, with a sword over his shoulder.
Inscribed
"SENECTUTI DNT MARS. P. AN. XV." Mars governs manhood for fifteen years.
Sixth side. A very graceful and serene figure, in the pendent cap,
reading.
"SENICIE DNT JUPITER, P. ANN. XII." Jupiter governs age for twelve years.
Seventh side. An old man in a skull-cap, praying.
"DECREPITE DNT SATN UQ' ADMOTE." (Saturnus usque ad mortem.) Saturn
governs decrepitude until death.
Eighth side. The dead body lying on a mattress.
"ULTIMA EST MORS PENA PECCATI." Last comes death, the penalty of sin.
SECTION CI. Shakespeare's Seven Ages are of course merely the expression
of this early and well-known system. He has deprived the dotage of its
devotion; but I think wisely, as the Italian system would imply that
devotion was, or should be, always delayed until dotage.
TWENTY-THIRD CAPITAL. I agree with Selvatico in thinking this has been
restored. It is decorated with large and vulgar heads.
SECTION CII. TWENTY-FOURTH CAPITAL. This belongs to the large shaft
which sustains the great party wall of the Sala del Gran Consiglio. The
shaft is thicker than the rest; but the capital, though ancient, is coarse
and somewhat inferior in design to the others of the series. It represents
the history of marriage: the lover first seeing his mistress at a window,
then addressing her, bringing her presents; then the bridal, the birth and
the death of a child. But I have not been able to examine these sculptures
properly, because the pillar is encumbered by the railing which surrounds
the two guns set before the Austrian guard-house.
SECTION CIII. TWENTY-FIFTH CAPITAL. We have here the employments of the
months, with which we are already tolerably acquainted. There are,
however, one or two varieties worth noticing in this series.
First side. March. Sitting triumphantly in a rich dress, as the
beginning of the year.
Second side. April and May. April with a lamb: May with a feather
fan in her hand.
Third side. June. Carrying cherries in a basket.
I did not give this series with the others in the previous chapter,
because this representation of June is peculiarly Venetian. It is called
"the month of cherries," mese delle ceriese, in the popular rhyme on the
conspiracy of Tiepolo, quoted above, Vol. I.
The cherries principally grown near Venice are of a deep red color, and
large, but not of high flavor, though refreshing. They are carved upon the
pillar with great care, all their stalks undercut.
Fourth side. July and August. The first reaping; the leaves of the
straw being given, shooting out from the tubular stalk. August, opposite,
beats (the grain?) in a basket.
Fifth side. September. A woman standing in a wine-tub, and holding
a branch of vine. Very beautiful.
Sixth side. October and November. I could not make out their
occupation; they seem to be roasting or boiling some root over a fire.
Seventh side. December. Killing pigs, as usual.
Eighth side. January warming his feet, and February frying fish.
This last employment is again as characteristic of the Venetian winter as
the cherries are of the Venetian summer.
The inscriptions are undecipherable, except a few letters here and there,
and the words MARCIUS, APRILIS, and FEBRUARIUS.
This is the last of the capitals of the early palace; the next, or
twenty-sixth capital, is the first of those executed in the fifteenth
century under Foscari; and hence to the Judgment angle the traveller has
nothing to do but to compare the base copies of the earlier work with
their originals, or to observe the total want of invention in the
Renaissance sculptor, wherever he has depended on his own resources. This,
however, always with the exception of the twenty-seventh and of the last
capital, which are both fine.
I shall merely enumerate the subjects and point out the plagiarisms of
these capitals, as they are not worth description.
SECTION CIV. TWENTY-SIXTH CAPITAL. Copied from the fifteenth, merely
changing the succession of the figures.
TWENTY-SEVENTH CAPITAL. I think it possible that this may be part of the
old work displaced in joining the new palace with the old; at all events,
it is well designed, though a little coarse. It represents eight different
kinds of fruit, each in a basket; the characters well given, and groups
well arranged, but without much care or finish. The names are inscribed
above, though somewhat unnecessarily, and with certainly as much
disrespect to the beholder's intelligence as the sculptor's art, namely,
ZEREXIS, PIRI, CHUCUMERIS, PERSICI, ZUCHE, MOLONI, FICI, HUVA. Zerexis
(cherries) and Zuche (gourds) both begin with the same letter, whether
meant for z, s, or c I am not sure. The Zuche are the common gourds,
divided into two protuberances, one larger than the other, like a bottle
compressed near the neck; and the Moloni are the long water-melons, which,
roasted, form a staple food of the Venetians to this day.
SECTION CV. TWENTY-EIGHTH CAPITAL. Copied from the seventh.
TWENTY-NINTH CAPITAL. Copied from the ninth.
THIRTIETH CAPITAL. Copied from the tenth. The "Accidia" is noticeable as
having the inscription complete, "ACCIDIA ME STRINGIT;" and the "Luxuria"
for its utter want of expression, having a severe and calm face, a robe up
to the neck, and her hand upon her breast. The inscription is also
different: "LUXURIA SUM STERC'S (?) INFERI"(?).
THIRTY-FIRST CAPITAL. Copied from the eighth.
THIRTY-SECOND CAPITAL. Has no inscription, only fully robed figures laying
their hands, without any meaning, on their own shoulders, heads, or chins,
or on the leaves around them.
THIRTY-THIRD CAPITAL. Copied from the twelfth.
THIRTY-FOURTH CAPITAL. Copied from the eleventh.
THIRTY-FIFTH CAPITAL. Has children, with birds or fruit, pretty in
features, and utterly inexpressive, like the cherubs of the eighteenth
century.
SECTION CVI. THIRTY-SIXTH CAPITAL. This is the last of the Piazzetta
façade, the elaborate one under the Judgment angle. Its foliage is copied
from the eighteenth at the opposite side, with an endeavor on the part of
the Renaissance sculptor to refine upon it, by which he has merely lost
some of its truth and force. This capital will, however, be always
thought, at first, the most beautiful of the whole series: and indeed it
is very noble; its groups of figures most carefully studied, very
graceful, and much more pleasing than those of the earlier work, though
with less real power in them; and its foliage is only inferior to that of
the magnificent Fig-tree angle. It represents, on its front or first side,
Justice enthroned, seated on two lions; and on the seven other sides
examples of acts of justice or good government, or figures of lawgivers,
in the following order:
Second side. Aristotle, with two pupils, giving laws. Inscribed:
"ARISTOT * * CHE DIE LEGE." Aristotle who declares laws.
Third side. I have mislaid my note of this side: Selvatico and
Lazari call it "Isidore" (?). [Footnote: Can they have mistaken the
ISIPIONE of the fifth side for the word Isidore?]
Fourth side. Solon with his pupils. Inscribed:
"SAL'O UNO DEI SETE SAVI DI GRECIA CHE DIE LEGE." Solon, one of the seven
sages of Greece, who declares laws.
Note, by the by, the pure Venetian dialect used in this capital, instead
of the Latin in the more ancient ones. One of the seated pupils in this
sculpture is remarkably beautiful in the sweep of his flowing drapery.
Fifth side. The chastity of Scipio. Inscribed:
"ISIPIONE A CHASTITA CH * * * E LA FIA (e la figlia?) * * ARE."
A soldier in a plumed bonnet presents a kneeling maiden to the seated
Scipio, who turns thoughtfully away.
Sixth side. Numa Pompilius building churches.
"NUMA POMPILIO IMPERADOR EDIFICHADOR DI TEMPI E CHIESE."
Numa, in a kind of hat with a crown above it, directing a soldier in Roman
armor (note this, as contrasted with the mail of the earlier capitals).
They point to a tower of three stories filled with tracery.
Seventh side. Moses receiving the law. Inscribed:
"QUANDO MOSE RECEVE LA LECE I SUL MONTE."
Moses kneels on a rock, whence springs a beautifully fancied tree, with
clusters of three berries in the centre of the three leaves, sharp and
quaint, like fine Northern Gothic. The half figure of the Deity comes out
of the abacus, the arm meeting that of Moses, both at full stretch, with
the stone tablets between.
Eighth side. Trajan doing justice to the Widow.
"TRAJANO IMPERADOR CHE FA JUSTITIA A LA VEDOVA."
He is riding spiritedly, his mantle blown out behind; the widow kneeling
before his horse.
SECTION CVII. The reader will observe that this capital is of peculiar
interest in its relation to the much disputed question of the character of
the later government of Venice. It is the assertion by that government of
its belief that Justice only could be the foundation of its stability; as
these stones of Justice and Judgment are the foundation of its halls of
council. And this profession of their faith may be interpreted in two
ways. Most modern historians would call it, in common with the continual
reference to the principles of justice in the political and judicial
language of the period, [Footnote: Compare the speech of the Doge
Mocenigo, above,—"first justice, and then the interests of
the state:" and see Vol. III. Chap. II Section LIX.] nothing more than a
cloak for consummate violence and guilt; and it may easily be proved to
have been so in myriads of instances. But in the main, I believe the
expression of feeling to be genuine. I do not believe, of the majority of
the leading Venetians of this period whose portraits have come down to us,
that they were deliberately and everlastingly hypocrites. I see no
hypocrisy in their countenances. Much capacity of it, much subtlety, much
natural and acquired reserve; but no meanness. On the contrary, infinite
grandeur, repose, courage, and the peculiar unity and tranquillity of
expression which come of sincerity or wholeness of heart, and which
it would take much demonstration to make me believe could by any
possibility be seen on the countenance of an insincere man. I trust,
therefore, that these Venetian nobles of the fifteenth century did, in the
main, desire to do judgment and justice to all men; but, as the whole
system of morality had been by this time undermined by the teaching of the
Romish Church, the idea of justice had become separated from that of
truth, so that dissimulation in the interest of the state assumed the
aspect of duty. We had, perhaps, better consider, with some carefulness,
the mode in which our own government is carried on, and the occasional
difference between parliamentary and private morality, before we judge
mercilessly of the Venetians in this respect. The secrecy with which their
political and criminal trials were conducted, appears to modern eyes like
a confession of sinister intentions; but may it not also be considered,
and with more probability, as the result of an endeavor to do justice in
an age of violence?—the only means by which Law could establish its
footing in the midst of feudalism. Might not Irish juries at this day
justifiably desire to conduct their proceedings with some greater
approximation to the judicial principles of the Council of Ten? Finally,
if we examine, with critical accuracy, the evidence on which our present
impressions of Venetian government are founded, we shall discover, in the
first place, that two-thirds of the traditions of its cruelties are
romantic fables: in the second, that the crimes of which it can be proved
to have been guilty, differ only from those committed by the other Italian
powers in being done less wantonly, and under profounder conviction of
their political expediency: and lastly, that the final degradation of the
Venetian power appears owing not so much to the principles of its
government, as to their being forgotten in the pursuit of pleasure.
SECTION CVIII. We have now examined the portions of the palace which
contain the principal evidence of the feeling of its builders. The
capitals of the, upper arcade are exceedingly various in their character;
their design is formed, as in the lower series, of eight leaves, thrown
into volutes at the angles, and sustaining figures at the flanks; but
these figures have no inscriptions, and though evidently not without
meaning, cannot be interpreted without more knowledge than I possess of
ancient symbolism. Many of the capitals toward the Sea appear to have been
restored, and to be rude copies of the ancient ones; others, though
apparently original, have been somewhat carelessly wrought; but those of
them, which are both genuine and carefully treated, are even finer in
composition than any, except the eighteenth, in the lower arcade. The
traveller in Venice ought to ascend into the corridor, and examine with
great care the series of capitals which extend on the Piazzetta side from
the Fig-tree angle to the pilaster which carries the party wall of the
Sala del Gran Consiglio. As examples of graceful composition in massy
capitals meant for hard service and distant effect, these are among the
finest things I know in Gothic art; and that above the fig-tree is
remarkable for its sculpture of the four winds; each on the side turned
towards the wind represented. Levante, the east wind; a figure with rays
round its head, to show that it is always clear weather when that wind
blows, raising the sun out of the sea: Hotro, the south wind; crowned,
holding the sun in its right hand: Ponente, the west wind; plunging the
sun into the sea: and Tramontana, the north wind; looking up at the north
star. This capital should be carefully examined, if for no other reason
than to attach greater distinctness of idea to the magnificent verbiage of
Milton:
"Thwart of these, as fierce,
Forth rush the Levant and the Ponent winds,
Eurus, and Zephyr; with their lateral noise,
Sirocco and Libecchio."
I may also especially point out the bird feeding its three young ones on
the seventh pillar on the Piazzetta side; but there is no end to the
fantasy of these sculptures; and the traveller ought to observe them all
carefully, until he comes to the great Pilaster or complicated pier which
sustains the party wall of the Sala del Consiglio; that is to say, the
forty-seventh capital of the whole series, counting from the pilaster of
the Vine angle inclusive, as in the series of the lower arcade. The
forty-eighth, forty-ninth, and fiftieth are bad work, but they are old;
the fifty-first is the first Renaissance capital of the upper arcade: the
first new lion's head with smooth ears, cut in the time of Foscari, is
over the fiftieth capital; and that capital, with its shaft, stands on the
apex of the eighth arch from the Sea, on the Piazzetta side, of which one
spandril is masonry of the fourteenth and the other of the fifteenth
century.
SECTION CIX. The reader who is not able to examine the building on the
spot may be surprised at the definiteness with which the point of junction
is ascertainable; but a glance at the lowest range of leaves in the
opposite Plate (XX.) will enable him to judge of the grounds on which the
above statement is made. Fig. 12 is a cluster of leaves from the capital
of the Four Winds; early work of the finest time. Fig. 13 is a leaf from
the great Renaissance capital at the Judgment angle, worked in imitation
of the older leafage. Fig. 14 is a leaf from one of the Renaissance
capitals of the upper arcade, which are all worked in the natural manner
of the period. It will be seen that it requires no great ingenuity to
distinguish between such design as that of fig. 12 and that of fig. 14.
SECTION CX. It is very possible that the reader may at first like fig.
14 best. I shall endeavor, in the next chapter, to show why he should not;
but it must also be noted, that fig. 12 has lost, and fig. 14 gained, both
largely, under the hands of the engraver. All the bluntness and coarseness
of feeling in the workmanship of fig. 14 have disappeared on this small
scale, and all the subtle refinements in the broad masses of fig. 12 have
vanished. They could not, indeed, be rendered in line engraving, unless by
the hand of Albert Durer; and I have, therefore, abandoned, for the
present, all endeavor to represent any more important mass of the early
sculpture of the Ducal Palace: but I trust that, in a few months, casts of
many portions will be within the reach of the inhabitants of London, and
that they will be able to judge for themselves of their perfect, pure,
unlabored naturalism; the freshness, elasticity, and softness of their
leafage, united with the most noble symmetry and severe reserve,—no
running to waste, no loose or experimental lines, no extravagance, and no
weakness. Their design is always sternly architectural; there is none of
the wildness or redundance of natural vegetation, but there is all the
strength, freedom, and tossing flow of the breathing leaves, and all the
undulation of their surfaces, rippled, as they grew, by the summer winds,
as the sands are by the sea.
SECTION CXI. This early sculpture of the Ducal Palace, then, represents
the state of Gothic work in Venice at its central and proudest period, i.
e. circa 1350. After this time, all is decline,—of what nature and
by what steps, we shall inquire in the ensuing chapter; for as this
investigation, though still referring to Gothic architecture, introduces
us to the first symptoms of the Renaissance influence, I have considered
it as properly belonging to the third division of our subject.
SECTION CXII. And as, under the shadow of these nodding leaves, we bid
farewell to the great Gothic spirit, here also we may cease our
examination of the details of the Ducal Palace; for above its upper arcade
there are only the four traceried windows, and one or two of the third
order on the Rio Façade, which can be depended upon as exhibiting the
original workmanship of the older palace. [Footnote: Some further details
respecting these portions, as well as some necessary confirmations of my
statements of dates, are, however, given in Appendix I., Vol. III. I
feared wearying the general reader by introducing them into the text.] I
examined the capitals of the four other windows on the façade, and of
those on the Piazzetta, one by one, with great care, and I found them all
to be of far inferior workmanship to those which retain their traceries: I
believe the stone framework of these windows must have been so cracked and
injured by the flames of the great fire, as to render it necessary to
replace it by new traceries; and that the present mouldings and capitals
are base imitations of the original ones. The traceries were at first,
however, restored in their complete form, as the holes for the bolts which
fastened the bases of their shafts are still to be seen in the
window-sills, as well as the marks of the inner mouldings on the soffits.
How much the stone facing of the façade, the parapets, and the shafts and
niches of the angles, retain of their original masonry, it is also
impossible to determine; but there is nothing in the workmanship of any of
them demanding especial notice; still less in the large central windows on
each façade which are entirely of Renaissance execution. All that is
admirable in these portions of the building is the disposition of their
various parts and masses, which is without doubt the same as in the
original fabric, and calculated, when seen from a distance, to produce the
same impression.
SECTION CXIII. Not so in the interior. All vestige of the earlier modes
of decoration was here, of course, destroyed by the fires; and the severe
and religious work of Guariento and Bellini has been replaced by the
wildness of Tintoret and the luxury of Veronese. But in this case, though
widely different in temper, the art of the renewal was at least
intellectually as great as that which had perished: and though the halls
of the Ducal Palace are no more representative of the character of the men
by whom it was built, each of them is still a colossal casket of priceless
treasure; a treasure whose safety has till now depended on its being
despised, and which at this moment, and as I write, is piece by piece
being destroyed for ever.
SECTION CXIV. The reader will forgive my quitting our more immediate
subject, in order briefly to explain the causes and the nature of this
destruction; for the matter is simply the most important of all that can
be brought under our present consideration respecting the state of art in
Europe.
The fact is, that the greater number of persons or societies throughout
Europe, whom wealth, or chance, or inheritance has put in possession of
valuable pictures, do not know a good picture from a bad one, and have no
idea in what the value of a picture really consists. [Footnote: Many
persons, capable of quickly sympathizing with any excellence, when once
pointed out to them, easily deceive themselves into the supposition that
they are judges of art. There is only one real test of such power of
judgment. Can they, at a glance, discover a good picture obscured by the
filth, and confused among the rubbish, of the pawnbroker's or dealer's
garret?] The reputation of certain work is raised partly by accident,
partly by the just testimony of artists, partly by the various and
generally bad taste of the public (no picture, that I know of, has ever,
in modern times, attained popularity, in the full sense of the term,
without having some exceedingly bad qualities mingled with its good ones),
and when this reputation has once been completely established, it little
matters to what state the picture may be reduced: few minds are so
completely devoid of imagination as to be unable to invest it with the
beauties which they have heard attributed to it.
SECTION CXV. This being so, the pictures that are most valued are for
the most part those by masters of established renown, which are highly or
neatly finished, and of a size small enough to admit of their being placed
in galleries or saloons, so as to be made subjects of ostentation, and to
be easily seen by a crowd. For the support of the fame and value of such
pictures, little more is necessary than that they should be kept bright,
partly by cleaning, which is incipient destruction, and partly by what is
called "restoring," that is, painting over, which is of course total
destruction. Nearly all the gallery pictures in modern Europe have been
more or less destroyed by one or other of these operations, generally
exactly in proportion to the estimation in which they are held; and as,
originally, the smaller and more highly finished works of any great master
are usually his worst, the contents of many of our most celebrated
galleries are by this time, in reality, of very small value indeed.
SECTION CXVI. On the other hand, the most precious works of any noble
painter are usually those which have been done quickly, and in the heat of
the first thought, on a large scale, for places where there was little
likelihood of their being well seen, or for patrons from whom there was
little prospect of rich remuneration. In general, the best things are done
in this way, or else in the enthusiasm and pride of accomplishing some
great purpose, such as painting a cathedral or a camposanto from one end
to the other, especially when the time has been short, and circumstances
disadvantageous.
SECTION CXVII. Works thus executed are of course despised, on account of
their quantity, as well as their frequent slightness, in the places where
they exist; and they are too large to be portable, and too vast and
comprehensive to be read on the spot, in the hasty temper of the present
age. They are, therefore, almost universally neglected, whitewashed by
custodes, shot at by soldiers, suffered to drop from the walls, piecemeal
in powder and rags by society in general; but, which is an advantage more
than counterbalancing all this evil, they are not often "restored." What
is left of them, however fragmentary, however ruinous, however obscured
and defiled, is almost always the real thing; there are no fresh
readings: and therefore the greatest treasures of art which Europe at this
moment possesses are pieces of old plaster on ruinous brick walls, where
the lizards burrow and bask, and which few other living creatures ever
approach; and torn sheets of dim canvas, in waste corners of churches; and
mildewed stains, in the shape of human figures, on the walls of dark
chambers, which now and then an exploring traveller causes to be unlocked
by their tottering custode, looks hastily round, and retreats from in a
weary satisfaction at his accomplished duty.
SECTION CXVIII. Many of the pictures on the ceilings and walls of the
Ducal Palace, by Paul Veronese and Tintoret, have been more or less
reduced, by neglect, to this condition. Unfortunately they are not
altogether without reputation, and their state has drawn the attention of
the Venetian authorities and academicians. It constantly happens, that
public bodies who will not pay five pounds to preserve a picture, will pay
fifty to repaint it; [Footnote: This is easily explained. There are, of
course, in every place and at all periods, bad painters who
conscientiously believe that they can improve every picture they touch;
and these men are generally, in their presumption, the most influential
over the innocence, whether of monarchs or municipalities. The carpenter
and slater have little influence in recommending the repairs of the roof;
but the bad painter has great influence, as well as interest, in
recommending those of the picture.] and when I was at Venice in 1846,
there were two remedial operations carrying on, at one and the same time,
in the two buildings which contain the pictures of greatest value in the
city (as pieces of color, of greatest value in the world), curiously
illustrative of this peculiarity in human nature. Buckets were set on the
floor of the Scuola di San Rocco, in every shower, to catch the rain which
came through the pictures of Tintoret on the ceiling; while in the Ducal
Palace, those of Paul Veronese were themselves laid on the floor to be
repainted; and I was myself present at the re-illumination of the breast
of a white horse, with a brush, at the end of a stick five feet long,
luxuriously dipped in a common house-painter's vessel of paint.
This was, of course, a large picture. The process has already been
continued in an equally destructive, though somewhat more delicate manner,
over the whole of the humbler canvases on the ceiling of the Sala del Gran
Consiglio; and I heard it threatened when I was last in Venice (1851-2) to
the "Paradise" at its extremity, which is yet in tolerable condition,—the
largest work of Tintoret, and the most wonderful piece of pure, manly, and
masterly oil-painting in the world.
SECTION CXIX. I leave these facts to the consideration of the European
patrons of art. Twenty years hence they will be acknowledged and
regretted; at present, I am well aware, that it is of little use to bring
them forward, except only to explain the present impossibility of stating
what pictures are, and what were, in the interior of the
Ducal Palace. I can only say, that in the winter of 1851, the "Paradise"
of Tintoret was still comparatively uninjured, and that the Camera di
Collegio, and its antechamber, and the Sala de' Pregadi were full of
pictures by Veronese and Tintoret, that made their walls as precious as so
many kingdoms; so precious indeed, and so full of majesty, that sometimes
when walking at evening on the Lido, whence the great chain of the Alps,
crested with silver clouds, might be seen rising above the front of the
Ducal Palace, I used to feel as much awe in gazing on the building as on
the hills, and could believe that God had done a greater work in breathing
into the narrowness of dust the mighty spirits by whom its haughty walls
had been raised, and its burning legends written, than in lifting the
rocks of granite higher than the clouds of heaven, and veiling them with
their various mantle of purple flower and shadowy pine.
NOTE.
I have printed the chapter on the Ducal Palace, quite one of the most
important pieces of work done in my life, without alteration of its
references to the plates of the first edition, because I hope both to
republish some of those plates, and together with them, a few permanent
photographs (both from the sculpture of the Palace itself, and from my own
drawings of its detail), which may be purchased by the possessors of this
smaller edition to bind with the book or not, as they please. This
separate publication I can now soon set in hand; and I believe it will
cause much less confusion to leave for the present the references to the
old plates untouched. The wood-blocks used for the first three figures in
this chapter, are the original ones: that of the Ducal Palace façade was
drawn on the wood by my own hand, and cost me more trouble than it is
worth, being merely given for division and proportion. The greater part of
the first volume, omitted in this edition after "the Quarry," will be
republished in the series of my reprinted works, with its original
wood-blocks.
But my mind is mainly set now on getting some worthy illustration of the
St. Mark's mosaics, and of such remains of the old capitals (now for ever
removed, in process of the Palace restoration, from their life in sea wind
and sunlight, and their ancient duty, to a museum-grave) as I have useful
record of, drawn in their native light. The series, both of these and of
the earlier mosaics, of which the sequence is sketched in the preceding
volume, and farther explained in the third number of "St. Mark's Rest,"
become to me every hour of my life more precious both for their art and
their meaning; and if any of my readers care to help me, in my old age, to
fulfil my life's work rightly, let them send what pence they can spare for
these objects to my publisher, Mr. Allen, Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent.
Since writing the first part of this note, I have received a letter from
Mr. Burne Jones, assuring me of his earnest sympathy in its object, and
giving me hope even of his superintendence of the drawings, which I have
already desired to be undertaken. But I am no longer able to continue work
of this kind at my own cost; and the fulfilment of my purpose must
entirely depend on the money-help given me by my readers.
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