The sea-charm of Venice

When Attila came storming into Europe, his conquests may be said to have given rise to two great sea-powers. His rush on the north along the Baltic shores probably caused so much pressure on the continental English, that many of them, all the Engle especially, left their lands, found another country in Britain, and gave it the name of England. It is now, and has been for some centuries, the mistress of the seas, both in commerce and in war. But when Attila drove his war-plough southward, he crossed the Alps, and descended on the cities of the plain between Trieste and the Po. When he reached [Pg 2] Altinum, Aquileia, and the other towns bordering on the lagoon, the Roman nobles, many of whom might be called merchant princes, and their dependants fled to Torcello, to Rialto, and to other islands where, before the conqueror came, they had established depôts for their trading, where the fishermen and boatmen were already in their pay. When the Goths followed the invading track of Attila, the emigration of the Roman inhabitants of the mainland to the lagoon continued year after year; and out of this emigrant flight grew Venice, the Queen of the Sea.

England was Teutonic, Venice was Roman; and as in England the Teuton destroyed the influence of Rome, so the Teutonic invasion of Italy, with all its new elements, never touched Venice. The Gothic influence left her uninfluenced. She alone in Italy was pure Roman. The English race was mixed with the Celtic race, but the Teutonic elements prevailed. But Venice [Pg 3] was unmixed. She was always singularly Roman right down to the dreadful days of her final conquest, so that it may well be said that Manin was ultimus Romanorum . In constitution, in laws, in traditions, in the temper of her citizens, in manners, in her greatness, her splendour, even in her unbridled luxury and her decay, she was Roman to the end. Italy was transmuted by the Goth, but not Venice.

But owing to her origin she was Rome at Sea ; and being on the edge of a sea which naturally carried her war and trade to the East, she was more of eastern than of western Rome. Byzantium, not the Italian Rome, was her nursing mother, and poured into her the milk of her art, her commerce, and her customs. By this, also, she remained outside of Italy, and her position, anchored in the sea off the Italian coast, is, as it were, a symbol of her double relation to Western and Eastern Rome. Whatever change took place in her Roman nature was [Pg 4] made by the spirit of the sea on which she had made her home. Commerce was forced upon her, and it was not difficult for her to take it up, for the Roman senators and patricians of Altinum, Padua, Concordia, and Aquileia who took refuge on the islands, had been traders before they founded Venice, and only developed more fully in Venice that commerce which they had practised on the mainland. Aquileia had been for years before the barbaric invasion the emporium of a trade with Byzantium and the Danube. The trade was transferred to Venice. It did not, then, arise in Venice, but it was so greatly increased during the centuries that the new city held the east in fee. From every port on the Mediterranean, and from lands and seas beyond that inland lake, the trade of east and west poured into Venice. To protect her commerce she became a sea-power. Her struggle for centuries with the pirates formed her navy and her seamen, both [Pg 5] Venetians and mercenaries, into the mighty instrument of naval war they became when the strife with the pirates closed in victory. But her captains, her senators, the great dukes who led the navy into battle, led it for the sake of her commerce, and were themselves, as Shakespeare made Antonio, “royal merchants,” such as they had been of old in Padua, Altinum, and Aquileia; and always Romans. Wherever then we touch Venice we touch the sea out of which she was born, by which she was nursed, and which when she reached her full age, she wedded and commanded.

To realize the origins of the city, and this sea-spirit in her history and her life, to recall in memory the centuries she lasted, and to feel the sentiment of the splendid sorrow, strife and glory of the tale, it is well to row to Torcello, to climb to the top of the cathedral tower, and to look out from the low-arched windows, north and south, east and west. The door used always [Pg 6] to be open, and it was easy to reach the upper chamber among the bells. Thence, as the voyager gazes to the north and west, he sees the high dim peaks of the Alpine chain from whose passes the Hun and the Goth descended. Below him stretches to the sea the misty plain where the cities of the old Venetia lay, which Attila advancing from the east gave up to fire and to slaughter, which Theodoric and Alboin afterwards ruined more completely. From these and from all the villages of the plain, the Roman nobles with their dependants fled to the islands of the lagoon which our voyager sees spreading north and south at his feet for many miles of blue and silver water. Below the tower are the deep-grassed meadows and dreary shores of Torcello which the people of Altinum, a third part of whom took flight from Attila, covered as the years went on with noble palaces, streets, bridges, and gardens. The cathedral they built was built with the very marbles which [Pg 7] had adorned, and the stones which had raised, the churches and houses of Altinum. Pillars, capitals, the pulpits, the chair of the bishop, the marble screen of the choir, the font, the pavement, belonged to their church on the land. They were still Venetians. As they increased, and as the emigration from other cities continued, the dwellers in the older Venetia colonized Mazzorbo, Burano, Murano, and Malamocco. The islands lie before our eyes as we look from the southern windows of the tower. And noblest of all, at the end of the long slow curving line of the deep channel among the marshes, is Rivo Alto on whose islands the Venetians fixed their capital at last.

There, tremulous in the sea-mist is the shining expanse of water before the Ducal Palace, and the towers of the great city, in whose splendour and power ended the misery and the struggle of the flight. No view makes a deeper impression on the historian. [Pg 8] But when that impression has been realized, there will steal into his mind, if he have with him the spirit of imagination, another impression; one of curious charm, a charm half of nature and half of humanity, a charm not of the land, but of the sea. In that charm there is the breath of the salt winds and the life of the dark blue waves which beyond Venice he sees from Torcello breaking in flashing foam on the Lido which defends the lagoon and shelters the city. It is a charm that rises to his heart, not only from the gay tossing of the Adriatic, but from the quiet, glittering, silver-gray expanse of the tidal lagoon in which the islands sleep like cattle on the meadows of the land. And of this charm and all it means and has made Venice, I shall attempt to write.

To write on Venice when many have written so well on her; to describe her, when she has been described from the Angel that, so short a time ago, watched [Pg 9] over her on the Campanile to the islands on the far lagoon, seems almost an impertinence. But I have loved Venice for many years, and the record of any individual impressions received from her may have the interest which belongs to personal feeling. Moreover, in this little essay I shall limit myself to one subject—to the charm and the life which are added to Venice by the presence of the sea, to the influence which the sea has had on her beauty, on the character of her art, and on the imagination of those who visit her. What influence the sea had on her history—that immense subject—does not come within the scope of this essay. It is only concerned with her beauty, her charm, as they are bound up with the sea; it is not, save incidentally, concerned with her history.

In her constitution, in her history, in her people, in her position, in her art, and in her sea-power and commerce, Venice, among Italian towns, stands alone. She [Pg 10] only is built, not by the sea, but in the sea, born not on the beach of ocean, but like Aphrodité, from beneath her heart. It is this difference which, entering into all her lesser charms, gives them their distinction, their wild, remote, and natural grace. Other great towns belong to humanity and art; even when they are sea-ports they are of the land, and are the creation of the land. But Venice, full of her own humanity, wrought into beauty by the art of her children, raised from the waves by the labour of those who loved her, belongs only to the sea, and seems to be the creation, not only of man, but of great Nature herself. Her streets are streams of the sea, and were planned by the will of the sea. The great path which, curling like a serpent, divides her city; by which her palaces of business, pleasure, and government were built; on which her history displayed itself for centuries in thanksgiving or sorrow, in pomp or in decay; is a sea-river ebbing and [Pg 11] flowing, and brings day by day, into her midst, the winds of ocean for her life, the fruits of ocean for her food, the mystery of ocean for her beauty. This presence and power of the living sea, running through Venice like blood through a man, makes her distinctive charm. It is the charm of the life of Nature herself, added to the life of her art and the life of her humanity.

There are times when this impression is profound. To stand in the dawn, before the city is awake, on the quay of the Schiavoni, when the East beyond the Lido is flushing like a bride, and the morning star grows dim above the sea, is to forget that the stones on which we stand, the palaces and churches, bridges and towers, were built by man’s wit or set up for his business and his pleasure. They rose, we think, out of the will and creative passion of the Sea. The sky and the clouds descended to bestow on them other light and colour than those of the sea; the winds, in their [Pg 12] playing, flung the bridges over the channels of the tide and the sunlight knit them into strength; but these were only the artists that adorned, it was the sea that built, the city.

Lest we should lose the power of this dream, we will not watch the buildings grow solid in the growing light, but keep our eyes on the broad expanse of the lagoon, shimmering in silver-gray out to the Port of Lido, where the silver meets the leaping blue of the Adriatic. The whole water-surface is alive, though it seem asleep, with the swift rushing of the tide. Around the angles of the quay, over the marble steps, all along the smooth stones of the wall, up the narrow canals, looping past the piles, swirling against the boats, the musical water ripples; and in every motion, change, and whirl, as in the main movement of the whole lagoon, the life of Nature in this her kingdom of the sea, full of force, pleasure, and joy in her own loveliness, is overwhelming. [Pg 13] It masters the spirit of the gazer, and he becomes himself part of her sea-passion, living in the stream of her sea-being. There is silence everywhere. The quay is deserted, and if a belated sailor pass by, the sound of his footstep seems to mingle with the crying of the sea birds and the plash of the water. And in the silence, the impression that Nature alone exists, that the city is her work and that man is nothing, is deepened for the moment into an unforgettable reality.

A similar impression is made on the voyager who rows at the dead of night, when the sky is full of stars, out into the lagoon half way between Venice and the Lido. The city, with its scattered lights, has no clear outlines; it rises like an exhalation from the sea. The campaniles are white ghosts that appeal to the dark blue heavens. Below them, the crowd of buildings wavers in the sea-mist like a shaken curtain. The city, seen thus in the tremulous starlight, [Pg 14] is, we think, a dream-conception which, in high imagination, the God of the sea, resting far below on his couch of pearl, has thrown into such form as his wandering will desires. No human art has made its wonder.

Nearer to our eyes the islands lie outstretched like sea-creatures, risen from the depths to behold the stars and to rest from their labours. The boats which lie at anchor against the tide do not belong to man, but are the chariots of Amphitrite and her crew. And in the profound silence we hear the deep breathing of the sea, a marvellous, soft, universal sound; and perceive, half awed and half delighted, the rise and fall of her restless and pregnant breast. And then man and his work no longer fill the voyager’s imagination. He is absorbed into Nature. The starry sky above, the living sea below, are all he knows; and the sea is the greatest, for it takes into its depths the trembling of every star, and the white [Pg 15] wavering of palace and tower, church and bridge, and marble quay.

This impression, received in twilight or at night, rules the thousand impressions made in daylight by the art and life of Venice. The “mighty Being” of the sea, with its eternal mystery, penetrates and pervades, and is mistress of the humanity of the city. The ancient life of Venice was in harmony with this, and what remains of that life is still lovely and inspiring. The modern life of Venice tends day by day to be out of tune with this, and has violated its beauty with amazing recklessness. No reverence, no tenderness for the spirit of the place has prevented a hundred desecrations, which might have been avoided if men had cared for beauty as well as for commerce, if the men had even known what beauty was, if they had even for an hour realized the spirit of the place or the spirit of the sea.

In days before the railway and its bridge [Pg 16] had done away with the island apartness of Venice, it seemed like a dream of Young Romance to drop through the narrow canal from Mestre on the mainland and come upon the far-spread shimmer of the silvery lagoon; and, rowing slowly, see, through veils of morning mist, the distant towers, walls, churches, palaces, rise slowly one after another, out of the breast of the waters—silver and rose and gold out of sapphire, azure, and pale gray—a jewelled crown of architecture on the head of slumbering ocean. We forgot that fairyland had been driven from the earth, and saw, or dreamed we saw, the city of Morgan le Fay, or the palaces of the Happy Isles where the Ever-young found refuge in the sea—so lovely and so dim the city climbed out of the deep.

That vision is gone, but even now there are few visions more startling in their charm than that which befalls the weary traveller when coming out of the dark station he finds himself suddenly upon the marble quay, with [Pg 17] a river of glittering water before his eyes, fringed with churches, palaces, and gardens; the broad stream alive with black gondolas, shouts in his ears like the shouting of seamen; and, lower in note and cry, but heard more distinctly than all other sounds, the lapping of the water on the steps of stone, the rushing of the tide against the boats. Midst all the wonders of the city, this it is which first seizes on his heart. It is the first note of the full melody of charm which the sea in Venice will play upon his imagination for many a happy day.

The waters that make her unique are in themselves beautiful. Were they like those of many lagoons, they might be stagnant, and lose the loveliness of vital movement. But they are tidal waters, and though the ordinary tide does not rise much more than a foot or two, yet its living rush is great, and passes twice a day through the lagoons and streets of Venice. It streams in at the openings in the lidi , at the ports of Malamocco, [Pg 18] Chioggia, Lido and Tre Porti, with the force and swiftness of an impetuous river, and these four water-systems, in their meetings and retreats, fill the lagoon with incessant movement, with clashing, swirling, and sweeping currents. Then, the tide does not always keep at this low level. When the attractions of the sun and moon combine, it rises higher and floods and washes out the canals, and when the angry south, blowing fiercely up Adria, has piled up the waters at the head of the gulf, they block in the falling tide. It cannot escape from the lagoon, and it races from the Public Gardens to the Dogana. There it divides to fill the Giudecca and the Grand Canal to the height of seven or eight feet. The canals rise, the calli are flooded and the squares, and the Piazza is a lake, and the Piazzetta. Gondolas ply up to the doors of Saint Mark’s and to the Ducal Palace. The water falls as swiftly as it rises. There is no lack of life in the Venetian lagoon. [Pg 19] Freshness, incessant change and joy minister to the beauty of these waters.

They are of the sea, but the temper of the sea in them is distinctive. The sea, uncircumscribed, at the mercy of its own wild nature, is beautiful or terrible, but it is too vast, too noisy, too desirous of destruction, even in calm too suggestive of anger, to awaken that peculiar charm in which temperance, quietude, a certain obedience or sacrifice for use, are always elements. But Venice lies in a gentle sea which loves to give itself away. Her sea is guarded by long banks of sand, pierced here and there by those openings through which the tide arrives. Within these is the wide lagoon, lying in a sheltered place, dotted with islands sleeping on silver sheets of shining water. And in the midst is the city with all its towers. It is thus penetrated and encompassed by the life and beauty of the sea; but it is the sea tamed to a love of rest; made temperate, even in furious wind, by the barriers its own force [Pg 20] has built to shield its favoured daughter; keeping its natural freedom and love of movement, but obedient to the laws of help, and sacrificing its reckless and destroying will in order to do the work that rivers do for men; preserving thus, along with its own wild charm, the charm also of the great streams that bless the earth. The sea, then which makes Venice unique, has lost its recklessness and terror. But it has not lost its beauty. And its beauty has become as it were spiritual, for it has subdued itself to be more beautiful through service. It was then not only in pride, but also in gratitude and love, that the Doge wedded the sea, and cast into her breast his ring, and cried, “We espouse thee, sea, in token of true and perpetual dominion.”

This gentle manner of the sea, in its service through the narrow streets of the city, in the narrow lanes of the lagoon, and over its shallow banks, forced the boat the Venetians built up into the shape of the gondola, [Pg 21] and compelled the mode of rowing it. And both these, being the work of Nature as well as of man, are beautiful. This long, subtly-curved boat, with its uptossed stem and stern, rigid in reality, but seeming to be (so swift it is to answer the slightest touch of the oar) as lithe and undulating as a serpent, leaning somewhat to one side, so that it wavers a little as it moves as if it were a wave of the sea, and gliding on its flattened bottom over shallow waters in silent speed, seems like some creature of the sea herself. Coloured black, it is brightened with polished brass and steel. The ferro da prova is the beak of polished steel which looks out from the bows of the boat, with a blade at the top like a hatchet, and below it six teeth, like those of the bone of the saw-fish. It flashes over the water and flashes in the water. It is a sea-ornament, descended from the rostrum of a Roman warship. Then the brass ornaments of the arm-rests are most frequently sea-beasts—dolphins, [Pg 22] and the sea-horses of Venice. Everywhere the boat has been the child of the sea.

Yet it is human; it grew like a child, a youth, modified from year to year into its shape, its character, till it reached its manhood; absolutely fitted for the work it had to do, for the circumstances of the city through the narrow water-ways of which it had to move, and for the wants of all classes of its citizens. The circumstances were peculiar; the needs of the citizens were most various. It fits them all. The natural, therefore, and the human mingle in it more harmoniously than in any other boat. It is distinctive as Venice is distinctive; it has its own sentiment, its own charm; but it seems also to share in the sentiment and beauty of the sea. The cries of its rowers are like the cries of seamen. In its movement is the softness, ease, and grace of the subdued obedient waters over which it glides.

Then there is the way of rowing it, on one side, by a single rower. When there are two rowers half the charm is lost. The second rower labouring at his oar in front of the sitter removes the pleasant, psychical illusion that the boat moves by its own will. There is almost an intellectual pleasure in the rowing and steering of a gondola by the single oar behind. If the gondolier be a master of his craft, he will make his boat move through a crowded canal, or glide round the angles of a narrow water lane, as swiftly, as softly as a serpent through the branches of a tree. He will pass within an inch of a corner without touching it, as he turns the boat round within its own length. He will stop it at full speed in a few seconds. It obeys him so magically that the voyager in it, who does not see the rower, often dreams that the boat moves of itself according to a spirit in it, like the bark which bore Ogier the Dane, flying over the sea by its own desire, to Morgana. This beauty of the [Pg 24] boat, its ways and manners, are the result of the sea-situation, and have the charm of the sea.

Then, again, this strange, soft sea, so tempered into gentlehood, brings through its quietude another element of charm into Venice. It reflects all things with a wonderful perfection. Whatever loveliness is by its side it makes more lovely. Shallow itself, it seems deep; and the towers and palaces of Venice in all their colours descend and shine among other clouds and in another sky below. All outlines of sculpture and architecture, of embossment, in wall and window; all play of sunshine and shade; all the human life in balcony, bridge or quay, on barge or boat, are in the waters as in a silent dream—revealed in every line and colour, but with an exquisite difference in softness and purity. All Nature’s doings in the sky are also repeated with a tender fidelity in the mirror of the lagoon—morning light, noonday silver, purple thunder cloud in the [Pg 25] afternoon, sunset vapours, the moon and stars of night—and not only on the surface, but also, it seems, in an immeasurable depth. To look over the side of the boat into the water is to cry, “I see infinite space.”

That is part of this charm of the reflecting water. But this only belongs to Nature and the feeling her beauty awakens. There is another charm in this work of the water. Whatever pleasure the living and varied movement of a great town, whatever interest its activities, bring to men, is doubled, so far as charm is concerned, in Venice. For they are exercised on water as well as on land, and their movements and methods are different on each. The sights of life are doubly varied. The land has its own way with them; the water has another way with them.

Moreover, the water itself, being always in motion, always reflecting or taking shadows, always harmonizing itself with its [Pg 26] comrades in land or sky, always making a subtle music in answer to human action upon it—adds these romantic and lovely elements to the business and pleasure of the town. Below, in the water, the clumsiest barge is accompanied by its soft ideal; and the lovers, leaning over the balcony, see their happiness smile on them from the water.

The same thing, some aver, may be said of a Dutch town full of canals. Partly, that is true; but the canals only carry the heavy business of these towns, and in Venice all human life, in its gaiety and beauty as well as its work, is on the water. Moreover, the water itself, not half stagnant like the canals of Holland, is always thrilling with its own ebbing and flowing, has its own fine spirit, and takes, as I have often thought, its own share and pleasure in all that is done upon it. Life answers there to life—living Nature to living man.

Not apart from this element of charm [Pg 27] are other forms of it. The mystery and music of moving water, the sense of unknown depths and its wonder, the impression of the infinite which gathers into us from the sea, are all brought by the tides in Venice into the midst of a bustling city, vividly concerned with the material, the finite, and the practical. We feel the wonder and secret of Nature playing round our business. In a moment we are touched into imaginative worlds. We may pass with ease from buying and selling into poetry, from materialism into mystery. This has its surprising charm.

The element of noiselessness increases this impression of poetic mystery. The Venetians themselves make noise enough. They are a gay and passionate people on the surface, and their open-air life makes them open in speech. The air is full of shouting, but the rattle and shattering and trampling of wheels and horses over stony roads which wears out life so rapidly in [Pg 28] towns on land, is never heard in Venice. And there are numberless lanes of quiet water where the crowd of gondolas never comes, and where the only sound is the wash of water on the stones and the murmur of the acacias above our head. The quiet sea has stolen into the streets, and all that is beautiful in their architecture, their history, and their daily life, creeps into the study of our imagination with more impressive grace because of the peace. As to the quiet of the lagoon it is like the solemn quiet of the desert. In ten minutes from the quay we are in the midst of a silence deeper even than that of the lonely hills. The silence listens to itself, and we can scarcely believe in the turmoil of the world or the battle in our own heart. This has its healing charm.

Then, also, the nearness and universal presence of the waters makes man more alive to the beauty of the few things which belong to the land in Venice. There are no [Pg 29] woods, no parks, no great gardens, no wealth of foliage or grass, but what there is of flowers and trees and grassy spaces is more lovingly observed than on the land. The great fig trees which drop their broad foliage over the walls, the little groves of soft acacia which stand beside some of the churches, the tiny plots of green verdure in the squares, the tall oleanders ablaze with white and ruddy flowers, the climbing vines that twine amongst the carved stone work, the rare small gardens with their black cypresses, white lilies, golden fruit; the one stone pine dark against the sky, the scarlet flash of the pomegranate, the tumbled wealth of a single rose tree, might all be thought little of in an Italian town. They are common there and multitudinous. But here, at Venice, in the midst of the waters they are strange; they surprise and enchant. They are always observed; all their beauty is felt.

Amid all this water-world, and the human [Pg 30] life which uses it and loves it, there is one place where it is fairest and most used by man. It is the great expanse of water at the entrance of the Grand Canal, opposite the Ducal Palace, in whose surface is reflected the Campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore on its island, the dome of the Church of Our Lady of Safety, and the tower of the Dogana. From the Dogana runs out to the south the broad canal which divides Venice from the islands of the Giudecca. In the opposite direction the glittering surface spreads away to the port of the Lido, where between the Lido and San Andrea the lagoon opens into the main sea. On these waters, in the past and present, have collected, and still collect, the ships and barks that have carried on the wars, the commerce, and the fishing life of Venice.

I do not describe the scene, but the glancing, dazzling water, the blue expanse, seem as if they had been designed by Nature to harmonize with the swiftness and [Pg 31] dash of the warlike spirit and warwork of ancient Venice, with the splendour of her commerce and the merchandise it brought, with the magnificence of her religion and the dignity of her government, whose noblest observances and pageants were displayed on these shining waters.

It is one of the enchantments of Venice that it is so easy for imaginative knowledge, impelled and kindled to its work by this glistening and splendid water-world, to recreate upon it the vivid life of the past; to see the long war-galleys pass out into the Adriatic, beating the water into foam; to watch the ships from all the Orient disembark their costly goods and men from the tribes of the East on the quays; to picture the many hued and stately processions from the sea to the palace of the Duke, from San Marco to the sea. A splendid vision! A little reading, some careful study of the pictures in the Accademia, and the voyager can crowd, as he stands on the Piazzetta, [Pg 32] that gleaming mirror of sea with a hundred scenes of glory, beauty, use and charm in war and peace.

Little now remains of that wonderful sea-glory, and the beauty of its ships is departed. Some merchant boats lie stern to stern along the quays of the Giudecca, black and built like boxes. Steamboats carrying heavy goods, now and then a great liner, scream and hiss in the lagoon. The war-galleys of Venice are replaced by ironclads. All the outward romance of this great sheet of water is gone. It cannot be helped, and we must put our regret by, lest we should spoil or under-rate the present; but some reverence, some care might be given to the memory of the glorious past, and this scene at least might have been saved from desecration. It was possible a few years ago for imagination still to create the glory of the past upon these waters; it was only the steamers that forced us to remember the present, and when they did not scream they [Pg 33] were not offensive. But not long ago, and right between the Lido and the public gardens, blocking the most beautiful view of Venice from the Lido, an iron foundry, with tall chimneys outpouring black smoke, was established on the Island of Santa Elena. I have already referred to this contemptuous destruction of loveliness. It is a miserable comfort that the foundry has failed. But the mischief done is irreparable.

One part, however, of that past is still existing on Venetian waters. The fishing boats—the Bragozzi—are much the same as they were in the days when the city held “the East in fee and was the safeguard of the West.” They carry us back even to remoter times when only a few huts had been built on the sandbanks, and the dwellers in the little group of islands lived by fishing. They have been comrades of the whole history of Venice.

These barks are still beautiful, and make more beautiful the waters on which they sail. [Pg 34] Their bow still keeps that noble, subtle, and audacious curve which every artist loves. It is painted on either side with various designs fitted to carry the eye forward with the rush of the boat through the waters—angels blowing trumpets, the virgin leaning forward in impassioned listening—and these, in many colours, glimmer from far on the sight, and are often seen shining in the wave below. On the dark sails, of which there are two, the sun, the stars, angel heads, St. George and the Dragon, St. Anthony, the Virgin in glory, symbolic designs, a radiant sun, geometrical patterns, are painted in orange, blue and pale sea-green on the dark body of the sail, which is generally of deep red. The orange is most often introduced in bands or patterns among the red: and when the fishermen take pleasure in their coloured patterns, the blue, green, and white are added to the orange.

It is a wonderful sight to see these fishing barks drawn up along the great quay [Pg 35] from the public gardens to the Ducal Palace, with all their sails hoisted after a stormy day, to dry in the gay sunlight. From end to end the long line burns with the colours of which the Venetian painters were so enamoured. It is as delightful to stand on the sea-wall on the Lido, near the Church of San Nicolo di Bari, where the lagoon opens into the Adriatic, and watch these barks coming in from the sea, one by one; glowing in the lovely light, changing the waters below into orange, red, and black, edged with gold. Sometimes, grouped into a mass, they cluster together in the deep places of the canals, or lie in a changing crowd together near the mouth of the Piave, nets, mast and sails one glow of shifting colour. Sometimes, when fine weather comes after the storm which has driven home the whole fleet, they all go out together, and the whole lagoon seems full of their glory, as pushing through the water-lanes, they cross one another and interweave a dance of colour [Pg 36] and of freedom. Sometimes, as the sun sets, one of them, anchored alone, takes into the hollow of its sail the whole blaze of the globe of fire as it sinks over the Euganean hills.

These pictures are taken out of the realm of mere artistic pleasure by thoughts of the hard labour and the rough struggle of the fishers’ toil for wife and children as they sail on stormy Adria. Indeed, they are as full of humanity as of beauty. They have also the charm of historical sentiment. The first fugitives to Rialto saw these barks much as we see them. The builders of the city, its early merchants and warriors, its voyagers and artists, the Dukes that fought the son of Charles the Great, or harried the nests of the Dalmatian pirates, or subdued the Orient; the ambassadors who sued or defied the Senate, visitors from every quarter of the globe, the luxurious wretches who degraded, and the cowardly crew who sold Venice; the patriots who defended her; [Pg 37] those who mourned under the yoke of Austria, those who rejoiced in the great deliverance—one and all have looked with many a thought that charmed their heart upon the fishing boats of Venice. With them Venice began; by them she has been fed from the beginning even until now. They are a vital part of her sea charm.

The live lagoon itself is of endless interest. It has quite a little population of its own. Boys and men, clothed only in a loose shirt, and with the glowing skin the sun and sea create, move to and fro over the shallow spaces fishing for sea-spoil, sometimes white against the purple arch of the stormy sky, sometimes like a pillar of rose in the setting sun; and their slow, unremitting labour, which means for them no more than an escape from starvation, makes one ashamed to think so much of beauty, unless we bind it up with the trouble of the world.

A livelier, more comfortable population is that of the birds. I have only seen gulls [Pg 38] in the lagoon, but they fly, in great delight and with less talk than in the north, about the cluster of islands near Torcello, and feed in flocks over the shallows when the tide leaves the sea-grasses bare; animating, enlivening the desolate shores, and gossiping so gaily that for the moment of our notice of them, it is hard to believe that a thousand years of the rise, the glory and the decay of a great people have been represented on the waters and the islands they make their pasture and their playground.

The islands in the lagoon are full of charm. I do not speak of Torcello or Burano, the first of which is famous in the pages of Ruskin, and the other inhabited by a crowd of fisher-folk and lace-makers; or of those closely knit to Venice itself, such as Murano, San Giorgio, or those of the Giudecca; nor even of San Michele, where the dead of Venice lie washing in the water; though it was once a place I visited every week when the small blue butterfly was born. [Pg 39] The old wall was still there and its decayed brickwork, and I used to fancy that the souls of the dead were in the azure insects that never ceased to flit in whirling, silent flight among the wild grass and over the tombstones of that solitary place—souls so small, so courteous to one another, so beautiful in colour and in movement that I thought the charm of the sea had entered into their nature, that they desired to charm, but were unconscious of their charm.

Among the islands, though perhaps it cannot justly be called an island, The Lido claims the greater interest. It extends, right opposite to Venice, for five miles—a long low ridge of heaped-up sand, a quarter of a mile broad—from San Nicolo to Malamocco. It is the chief guard of Venice from the Adriatic. At each end is a passage to the open sea whose dark blue waves break on the white, brown, and yellow sand of its sea-ward side; on the other, the ripples of the lagoon lap the low wall which looks out [Pg 40] on Venice across the quiet water. At the northern end stands the Church of San Nicolo di Bari, one of the patron Saints of the city; in its apse the Venetians lodged the bones of the saint they had stolen with all the cleverness of Ulysses. His spirit watched for their welfare and defended the great port of their town. At a short distance from the Church we come to the very point of the Lido. Opposite is the Fort of San Andrea and the long island of San Erasmo, the first of a succession of Lidi curving inwards like a bow to the mainland near the mouth of the Piave, and sheltering Torcello, Burano and other islands in the northern lagoon. In days gone by, this succession of low-lying shores was clothed with pines—as the coral islands of the Pacific are with palms—a dark, green, narrow, flower-haunted wood, which, rising as it were out of the breast of the sea, must have charmed the mind with a hundred fantasies. Not a tree of it is left, though the soil is rich and [Pg 41] fertile. Between San Erasmo and the Lido the deep sea-channel opens out to Adria—an historic strait of waters—through which a thousand thousand ships have gone out for war and trade and pleasure in all the splendour of the past, and returned with music, victory and treasure. It was through this opening that the Doge, attended by all the warriors, ecclesiastics, counsellors, statesmen and great merchants of Venice, in his gorgeous galley, moved by some hundred oars, and surrounded by all the boats of Venice, with music, and shouting and triumph, went forth to wed the sea, and dropped along with holy-water his ring over the stern with equal humility and pride. It was here that on a night of furious storm the three great saints who cared for the safety of the Republic, St. Mark, St. George, and St. Nicolas, delivered Venice from the demon-ship which was bringing from the sea pestilence and destruction on the faithful city. Everyone knows the legend, and a [Pg 42] noble picture in the Accademia tells the story of how the fisherman—whose boat St. Mark had hired to take him at dead of night through a roaring gale to San Giorgio Maggiore and then to San Nicolo—brought to the Doge in the morning the ring St. Mark, before he embarked on this expedition, had taken from the treasury of his Church. “Give that,” he said, as returning, he landed on the Piazzetta, “to the Doge, and bid him send it back to my Church.” And the Doge, knowing the ring, believed the story of the night. Nor is this the only record in art of the legend. There is an unfinished picture attributed to Giorgione of the three Saints in their fishing boat meeting at the mouth of the Lido the ship of hell, and repelling it with the Cross. The sea is tossed into violent surges, huge masses edged with fiery foam, over which the deep-bellied purple clouds are driven by the tempest. The demons man the racing ship that seems to shiver as it [Pg 43] is suddenly stayed in the very entrance of the port. Clouds and sea in raging storm, lit by the flashing of the lightning in the collied night, are represented in so modern a manner, and with so modern a feeling for nature, that it seems as if Turner’s spirit had entered into the pencil of Giorgione.

So wild a sea is rarely seen breaking on the Lido. On the whole, the long low shore, save when the Scirocco drives the sand in a river through the air, is peaceful enough; and there are few chords of colour stranger or more strangely attractive than the dark sapphire sea leaping in joy and with the sound of trampling horses on the pale yellow belt of sand fringed with the green meadows, with acacia, maize, and fig trees, with the pale leaves of the Canne, and with the low plants, sea-holly, dry reeds, and thistles which grow on the edge of the sand where the last breath of the foam-drift plays upon them—blue, yellow, and various green, mingling together, for [Pg 44] so it often seemed to me, into a mystic harmony.

The meadows near San Nicolo, dotted with low acacia shrub, are lovely—a place of beloved repose and beauty. Between them and the landing stage at Sant’ Elisabetta was once the rude neglected Jewish Cemetery. The grave-stones are all collected now and placed within an ugly walled-space with a small chapel, and an iron-railed gate. No history, no sentiment can collect round this hideous enclosure. It was but right and reverent to redeem the tombstones from careless neglect; but it might have been done with some feeling for beauty. When first I knew Venice, the grave-stones lay entangled and overgrown with tall lush grasses, dwarf acacias white with blossom, and wild-flowers. In spring the daffodils were gay and golden there; in summer the wild rose threw its trailers and its starry flowers over their desolation. Some stones stood erect, others had fallen. The flat [Pg 45] stones lay at every angle; and on all of them long inscriptions in Hebrew recorded the love and honour paid to the departed by the persecuted race, who were forced to lay their dead on this wild and uninhabited shore. The place was full of history. It symbolised the unhappy fortunes of the race in the days of enmity and persecution. Here Shylock and Tubal, I thought, were housed at last. Here rested many a Jew, whose life was as noble as that of Shylock was base. The flowers had taken care of them, and woven over them a web of beauty. Nature had repaired the cruelty and intolerance of man. I should have bought the whole ground and surrounded it with a low wall, had I been a Jew; and tended the flowers, and left the place to itself. The birds and the insects loved it. It was as pathetic as it was beautiful.

Beyond it is the Church of St. Elizabeth where the bathers land. Five minutes’ walk takes one across from the lagoon to [Pg 46] the seashore, bordered by hillocks of shifting sand “matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,” and itself close to the blue incoming of the waves, luminous with shells, and hard enough to ride on with a great pleasure, such pleasure as Byron and Shelley had day by day

So Shelley wrote, and then described how he crossed the Lido to the lagoon and looked on the sunset. And to this day there are few changes more impressive than when the traveller leaves the seashore, with the freshness of the waves and the solitude of the sea-beach in his heart, and, crossing to the other side, looks forth on the still slumber of the lagoon, and on the towers [Pg 47] and peopled houses of the white and golden city, such a city—at the evening hour when all the sky behind is in a glory of crimson, pearl, and azure—as Galahad beheld when from the lofty cliff above the Ocean, he rode across the waves to be received at the glimmering gates with trumpets sounding, with songs and welcome by the angelic and the saintly host.

The Lido has its interest, but the greater charm belongs to the remoter islands, each alone in the waste of water, and with attractive names. It is their habit on slumbrous days to float in air and not on the water. A silver line of sunny mist stretches right across the base of the island, and on this it rests, as if it wished to join the sky. This sportive ethereality is one of the wanton wiles with which they bewilder the voyager’s imagination. Their names are romantic. San Lazzaro, Santa Elena, San Giacomo del Palude, San Francesco del Deserto, Il Spirito, La Grazia, San [Pg 48] Giorgio in Alga. Each had its monastic church in ancient days, and from every part of the lagoon the bells then sweetly rang over the receptive water at morning, noon, and evening. Of all these monasteries only two remain, San Francesco del Deserto and San Lazzaro. Only in these is the Church still served, the cloister and the cells still intact, the garden still cultivated, the cypress and poplar garth still a place of musing; and only at San Francesco, by the corner of the isle that looks to Venice, is there one stone pine, a Tuscan stranger in the alien north. The rest of the small islands and their churches are desecrated, used for state and municipal purposes, with the exception of Torcello and Burano.

There is perhaps no more beautiful row in Venice than, as the sunset begins in September days, to take the gondola out of the mouth of the Giudecca and make our winding way to St. George of the Seaweed, [Pg 49] set lovely in the lonely waters that look towards the Euganean Hills. Around it lie the shallower sea-marshes near the mainland, and when the gold of the sunset strikes them, they flame like emerald beds of fire. The tower of the island church used to rise, thin and black, with two upper windows through which the sun poured two shafts of light, against the south-western glow—a beacon seen far and wide, a memorial tower that in its silence held a thousand thoughts. It is now destroyed. It was not in the way; it might have been kept for the sake of beauty by a few clamps; but this was too much for modern Venice. I resented its departure bitterly. One consolation remained. When the boat drew near the angle of the island, there stood, and still stands, set high on the angle of the wall, an image of the Virgin, rudely carved, but with grave simplicity and faith. She held her son in her arms. On her head was an iron crown, engrailed, and [Pg 50] over her head an iron umbrella with a fringe of beaten iron. She looked towards Venice with blessing and protection, and claimed her right in Venice. She was a Virgin for the people and of the people, a gentle, lowly born, working woman, with a face of sorrow and strength, such as we may see every day in the small squares of Venice when the people gather round the well. And yet there was such nobility, love, motherhood, and so much sweet spirit in her air, so much of watching to protect and guard the sea and its fisher-folk, that I cried when I saw her first, and afterwards in my soul when I passed her, Ave Maria, Maris Stella!

There is somewhere another Virgin on another island, with also her lamp at night and her canopy, but I forget where she stands. Wherever she is, she is the same benign and lonely person, the Madonna Protectrix of the sailor and the lagoon.

The row home from this island as the sun [Pg 51] descends to its rest on autumn evenings, is of an extraordinary splendour and beauty. The little wavelets of the lagoon are ebony in shade and blazing gold on the side where the light falls. The sea-banks turn a golden brown, and their grasses seem to change into the warm green of the deep sea. The sky drops from liquid and pellucid blue to pearl, and then to orange, crimson and gold. The wild lights fall on the city which grows slowly on the eyes, and every tower is a tower of fire. And behind, beyond St. George of the Seaweed, but towards the left, are the triangled Euganean Hills, down the sides of the greatest of which I have often seen the sun roll like a wheel, such a wheel as Ezekiel saw in vision. Shelley saw them at this sunset hour.

Again and again I have seen this apparent transparency of the peaks. That Shelley recorded it is one example of how closely he observed nature, and how accurately he recorded her doings. Much more might be said of the islands; but this seems enough. Each of them, right away to the Piave on one side and to Chioggia on the other, has its history, its religion, and its ruin.

Perhaps one of the greatest pleasures of the lagoon is sailing on it. A gondola is scarcely a safe boat to sail, except in a following wind. It has no keel, and it turns over easily, but with one of the great oars behind it steers steadily. Once, with two rowers, I took more than two hours to row from Venice to Torcello against the wind. I sailed back in forty minutes. The lagoon was rough with short tossing waves edged [Pg 53] with foam, indescribably fresh and gay. The long boat, with its flat bottom, flew over the surface of four or five waves together, at a torrent speed. I never was so conscious of swiftness, and the boat itself was alive beneath, all its will in its movement, pulling and leaping like an Arab steed. This was delightful; nor is it less delightful, having made friends with the owners of one of the larger boats, to sail up and down the sea-streets of the lagoon, when the wind is fresh and the tide running fast, and the night is dark, save for glimpses of the hurrying moon. The steersman is silent, the sky is silent, the soul itself is silent. Nothing speaks but the wind in the sail and the water round the rushing prow, and these sounds deepen the silence. That which men feel who stand sentinel on the bow of a ship in the midst of the great Oceans, one may feel here close to a busy town. And in the vast solitude and peace the infinite Spirit of Nature [Pg 54] comes home to our spirit, and we feel our own infinity.

But quiet is not always the seal of the lagoon. I have seen it tormented and torn with wind, so ravaged that it was impossible to cross from the Piazzetta to San Giorgio Maggiore, so furious that the waves leaped up the quay and ran along the pavement to the space between the orient pillars whence St. Theodore and the Lion of St. Mark watch over the heart of Venice. Nor can I refrain from telling here what once I saw of deadly storm out on the lagoon close by the island of St. James of the Marsh. We had been rowing back from Torcello under a terrible sky, very lofty, of dark purple cloud, smooth as the inside of a cup. Across this, in incessant play, the lightning fled to and fro, not in single flashes, but in multitudes at the same time, ribbons and curling streamers and branching trees of white violet and crimson light. So far away and high they were that the thunder of their [Pg 55] movement sent no sound to us. Towards the Alps a white arch seemed to open under the pall of cloud, and in it were whirlings of vapour. The gondolier bent forward and said—We must take refuge. We must land at the island. I laughed, and said—No, we will go on; and I heard him mutter to himself—These English have no fear. And then I thought that he was certain to know far more than I of the lagoon, and I turned and said: “It is not courage we have, but ignorance; do what you think right”; and we drew the boat to the landing of San Giacomo, and crossed the little island to the rampart that looked forth to the mainland; and then, issuing out of the white wrath that seemed to dwell in the cloud-arch, a palm tree of pale vapour formed itself and came with speed. It reached the lagoon near Mestre, and towered out of it to the heaven, its ghostly pillar relieved against the violet darkness of the sky, its edge as clear as if cut down by a knife, and [Pg 56] about a yard apparently in breadth. It came rushing across the lagoon, driven by the Spirit of wind which within whirled and coiled its column into an endless spiral. The wind was only in it; at its very edge there was not a ripple; but as it drew near our island it seemed to be pressed down on the sea, and, unable to resist the pressure, opened out like a fan in a foam of vapour. Then, with a shriek which made every nerve thrill with excitement, the imprisoned wind leaped forth, the sea beneath it boiled, and the island, as the cloud of spray and wind smote it, trembled like a ship struck by a great wave. Then the whirlwind fled on to Burano and smote the town. Next morning a number of persons were brought into the Hospital at Venice who had been wounded by the whirl-storm. There is wild weather in Venice and on its waters.

I have known Venice so dark under black wind and rain that it was impossible to read at three in the afternoon in August. I have [Pg 57] stood on the Rialto in so heavy a snowstorm that not a single boat crossed the empty, desolate river of the Grand Canal. The palaces were clear in the cold light, their marbles shining in the wet. The tiled roofs were white with snow, and the dark ranges of gondolas moored to the quays were relieved by the snow that lay thickly upon them. The Campaniles rose out of the mist with a touch of snow on their windward side. A gloomier sight, a more unhappy day I never saw. Yet even in this wild weather Venice wore her beauty like a robe and exercised her incessant fascination. I have walked over the Piazza, crunching through the ice that covered its inundated marbles. I have sheltered from the furious rain and wind of a roaring Scirocco under the door of the Hospital in the Square of SS. John and Paul, and seen through the driving slant of rain Colleone proudly reining in his horse, his bâton in his hand, his noble casque outlined like a [Pg 58] falcon, and his eager and adventurous face in profile against the dun sky. He looked as he may have looked many a time, leading his men, when wild weather was roving over Lombardy.

I have felt as if the very waters trembled, like the palaces, with the appalling roar and shattering clash of such a thunderstorm as I have never known elsewhere; but the most impressive aspect of savage weather is when, in tremendous rain, one stands sheltered under the colonnade, at the corner where the Piazzetta turns into the Piazza. The enormous roof of St. Mark’s, and that of the Procuratie, collect the rain and pour it forth by the great spouts more than a yard in length which project over the pavement from the parapets. From each of these, from hundreds of them, a cataract leaps like a tigress, and falls resounding on the pavement. The noise is deafening, the pavement is half a foot deep in turbulent water, the wind screams, the [Pg 59] men are blown across the square, the gondolas rock at the steps and beat against the piles, the thunder roars till the two giant columns, where St. Theodore and the Lion stand in proud serenity, seem to shake, and through the black sap of rain, the lightning flares the Ducal Palace into momentary colour. It is a sight, a sound, not to be forgotten. Tintoret, with his sympathy for the wild work of nature, has seized and recorded this in his picture of the bearing of the body of St. Mark out of Alexandria. The Alexandrian Square he has made into the Piazzetta of Venice. The rain is falling in torrents, the waterspouts cascade to the pavement. The pavement is so deep in the running water that it is looped around the legs of the bearers of the body, fiercely swirling. It is a splendid picture of a Venetian storm, and in the background of it, that we may not lose the sea, the waves of the lagoon are breaking over the quay.

But these impressions are endless. In other towns there is some constancy in the doings of nature. The general aspect of the weather is much the same for a month at a time. In Venice not a day passes without many changes. The various and mutable sea-goddess has her own wild and fickle way with her peculiar people.

Once more, before I leave the lagoon and the islands, I will record a day I spent, when partly by gondola and partly walking, I made the circuit of Venice in pursuit of her sea-charm. Early in the morning I left the Piazzetta and rowed down the Riva dei Schiavoni till I reached the public gardens. Their sea-wall dipped from a path shaded by acacias, thick with white blossom in the spring, into the lagoon, and at the point of the peninsula the gardens make, I looked south along the quay into the very mouth of the Grand Canal, with the Palace and the Campanile on one side, and the Church of the Salute and of St. Giorgio on the other, [Pg 61] a glorious group of buildings which seemed to borrow splendour and delight in their own existence from the dancing, sparkling, rippling, glancing, laughing water which surrounded them. It was like an Empire’s gate, and the Empire was the Empire of the Sea. Right opposite, between me and the Lido, lay the Island of Sant’ Elena, like a jewel of emerald and pearl set in the blue enamel of the sea. Its little church was nestled in trees, and over its sea-wall hung dark green and tangled boughs of ilex, and pale acacia, and the golden wealth of fig trees; and all along the parapet roses trailed and the gadding vine, and scented the sweet soft wind. I little thought that, as I write now, there would not be left one trace of all this beauty. I rowed out to it there and landed. The church was used as a granary, but beside it the tiny cloister was still exquisite even in its ruin—paved with marble and brick; its small Gothic arches and the roofs of its remaining rooms garmented [Pg 62] and entangled with roses. A carved well stood in the centre, and all around the low wall of the arcades, every leaf and flower gleaming in the sunlight, tall oleanders, pink and white, grew in deep red pots of clay—a place so fair, so sweet and solitary, so noiseless save for the bees, that the delicate soul of St. Francis, whose was the church, would have prayed in it with joy, and praised the Lord who made the world so lovely.

Then I rowed round the wall of the Arsenal to San Pietro di Castello. Behind that church and the Arsenal is the most wretched part of Venice, where the people are poorest and wildest, and the lanes most unkempt and uncared for. Yet it was here, on this outlying island, that for many centuries the Cathedral of Venice claimed the reverence of the city. The old church has long perished, and its unhappy successor stands now in a deserted square with plots of dry and melancholy grass [Pg 63] where the fishermen dry their nets, nor has it any dignity or beauty of its own. But I loved the place for its loneliness, and for its wide view across the shining lagoon to the misty plain of the mainland, and beyond to the “eagle-baffling” rampart of the Alps. That wide-expanding view is no longer visible, for the Arsenal has been extended, and shut out its glory. The square is now quite desolate, but it is still worth visiting for its associations. Here every year the Brides of Venice were dowered by the State; here their ravishment by the pirates took place. It was Magnus, Bishop of Altinum, that set up here the first Church of Venice, the same Magnus to whom the Lord appeared in vision and told him to build a Church (St. Salvador) in the midst of the city on a plot of ground above which he should see a red cloud rest. A different vision built San Pietro. St. Peter himself appeared to Magnus and commanded him to set up a Church in his name, where he [Pg 64] should find on Rivo Alto oxen and sheep feeding on the meadows. The grass of the Campo still recalls the ancient legend.

Even now, as I write, I see the Tower and the paved square, and the gardens behind, and recall a favourite picture in the church which, amid the desolation of the island, is like a lovely maid in a deserted wood. It is said to be by Basaiti, and pictures St. George and the Dragon. It is arched at the top, and the arch is filled with a pale evening sky of rosy light, soft as a dream, and faintly barred with lines of vaporous blue. Into this tender sky rises on the left a mountain, broad and alone, and below the mountain a ranging hill, and below the hill the walls, towers and gates of a city, and below the city a two-arched bridge, and below the bridge a flowing river, and on the bank of the river St. George on his horse, his head bent down to his horse’s neck with the couching of his spear, and on the spear the formless dragon, and above the dragon [Pg 65] on the right, Sabra, clinging in lingering flight to the trunk of a great fig tree that flings into the rosy sky three long branches sparsely clothed with leaves. They hang, as if to crown the victor, over the head of St. George, whose face, young, yet full of veteran experience and holiness, is of the same grave tenderness as the sky. This is Basaiti in his noblest vein and manner, and the picture has on the whole escaped the restorers.

I left the square, with this noble painting in my mind, and rowed on to the Sacca della Misericordia beyond the Canal, which leads to the Church of SS. John and Paul. This is a great square piece of the lagoon, surrounded on three sides by sheds and houses, where all the wood used for building in Venice is brought from the mainland, and left floating on the water. The place has always fascinated me, I scarcely know why—for the view of San Michele and Murano and the Alps beyond is seen as well from other [Pg 66] points—but I think it partly is that the great trunks and beams, and the sawn planks seasoning in the water, bring back to me the mountain valleys, torrents and knolls of rock where the trees were hewn down, and fill the sea-city with images of the wild landscape of the land; and partly that one seems to see in the waiting wood all that human hands will make of it—houses, roofs, furniture, bridges, gondolas, barks that will meet the beating of the Adriatic waves, piles that will build foundations for new buildings. The coming human activity moves like a spirit over the floating masses in this tract of water.

Then I rowed on till, crossing the southern entrance of the Grand Canal, I touched on the low wall of the little grassy campo in front of the Church of San Andrea. It looked over the lagoon, the water of which lapped its sea-wall, to the mainland. Opposite it was the Island of San Giorgio in Aliga, its dark tower black against the pale [Pg 67] pearl and rose of the late afternoon sky; on its left, seeming to lie on the water, the violet range of the volcanic Euganeans, so far, so delicate, so ethereal, that they appeared to be made of the evening sky. The rest of the heaven was cloudy, but the sweetness of solitude, and the peace of this deserted place, and the spirit of the coming evening, were so full of grace that I landed, dismissed my gondola, and stood under the porch of the late Gothic church, enjoying the silence. There is a carving over the door, so simple and childlike in feeling that it is hard to believe it is Renaissance work. It is of St. Peter walking on the water and of St. Andrew close at hand in his boat, with a gondolier’s oar floating in the water, and beyond a piece of broken landscape. This little invention into which the sculptor had put his soul suited the quiet square, not larger than a large room. Thought and imagination seemed to be limited by the narrow space, but only seemed, for in front [Pg 68] opened out to the south the broad lagoon and the wide plain of the mainland, and I knew that to the north rose into an infinite sky the peaks of the Alps, aspiring to reach the celestial City. I lingered long, hoping that the clouds would clear away, but it was not then I had that revelation. Afterwards, when walking somewhere near San Sebastiano, I came to a small bridge and there I beheld what seemed to be the gates of Paradise. The clouds had lifted to the north and the south-west. They rolled away like a folding scroll, and what I saw was the clear light of the setting sun on one side, and on the other the whole range of the Julian Alps, with the rose of the sunset on their freshly fallen snows. I crossed a muddy canal and found myself with an unimpeded view on the grassy and deserted ground of the Campo Marte. It ran out then into the lagoon, and I stood on its wild beach looking out upon the waters. Sea-marsh and lonely piles and flitting sea birds and a solitary [Pg 69] fishing boat on the rippling surface, growing gold and crimson, led my eyes to the black tower of San Giorgio and to the hills of Padua, and then to the purple bases of the Alps rising into tender gray and shadowy blue; and above, tossed and recessed and fretted into a thousand traceries, the great waves of the snow peaks, all suffused with a divine rose. Slowly the evanescent tenderness departed, but with ceaseless change of rose and violet and gray. Only above the engrailed summits the pale azure was steadfast, the clear shining after rain. I watched the sun go down, I listened to the roar of the Adriatic as it came to me, a low murmur over the solitary field; I heard the Ave Maria peal sweetly from all the bells of Venice, and I thought of the Mother and the Child who saved the world. And then I went away, having seen a vision. [1]

I visited then a garden and friends I knew and when night fell rowed home down the Grand Canal. The moon had risen, and her light, in a sky now clear save of flying clouds, was intensely brilliant. The great sea-river, strangely quiet, almost magical in its stillness and in the flood of white luminousness that seemed poured upon it in streams, shimmered like liquid cornelian, a milky expanse among ghostly palaces on either hand. The mighty masses of the Renaissance palaces which, in losing all their irritating and confusing ornaments in the dim and melting moonlight, reveal their noble and beautiful proportions, supplanted the smaller palaces of Byzantine and Gothic form which depend so much for the impression they make on their lovely ornament and colour, both of which disappear in the moonlight. Above me, as I rowed, the glorious blue of the sky, across which [Pg 71] darted now and then a shooting star, appeared to watch over its beloved city. The moon seemed racing in it, so swift in the fresh sea-wind was the motion of the white clouds across her disk. Each as it crossed took rainbow colours, and threw a mystic shadow on the world below. Only one gondola passed me by, a lantern burning on its prow, and its rower, silent as his boat, looked like a spirit in the moonlight. Then the deep shadow of the Rialto hid the moon, and I found my lodging.

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

First, architecture was made different by it from all that it was in other Italian towns. The commerce and the wars of Venice in the East caused her nobles and merchant princes to study the buildings of the East. Rome did not influence them so much as [Pg 72] Constantinople, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land. It was long before the northern Gothic, chiefly Franciscan, had any power in Venice, and when it had, it was apart from the spirit of the city. The Church of St. Mark is an Eastern not a Western Church. Many of the palaces along the Grand Canal were built in imitation of palaces the merchants had seen when they anchored in Orient ports. Often, as one wanders in the narrow streets, a window, a door-head, a disc in the wall, will remember us of the Byzantine Empire. There is a disc near San Polo where the Emperor of Eastern Rome sits in full imperial robes and crown, just as Justinian is represented in the mosaic at San Vitale in Ravenna. At Ravenna, we are still closer to the architecture of that Empire, but here, and this is characteristic of early Venetian architecture, there is a greater liberty, a more individual choice and treatment of buildings than there is at Ravenna. It is scarcely imitation which we [Pg 73] see, but Eastern ideas of architecture freely modified and recreated into new forms by the architects. It is as if the free life of the sea itself had instilled its wild originality, variety and beauty into the imagination of the builders.

The continual change of the sea and its novelty entered not only into public but domestic architecture. All along the canals, the private houses built by the earlier architects of Venice change incessantly their form. In every house the ornament is individual. Moreover, in the work itself, there is a finish, a delicate delight in perfection of minute carving, a lavish invention which belongs to the best Oriental work. Its finish was always precious; and this ideal of finish entered also into the first buildings of the Renaissance in Venice, and made their sculpture and decoration more lively and more exquisite than elsewhere in Italy. This charm in ornament belonged to Venice, because it was the Queen of the Mediterranean [Pg 74] Sea, the mistress of the East. The Orient brought over the sea the subtlety, the delicate finish, and the golden beauty of its art to Venice.

From the East also—and learnt because Venice was a sea-power—came the extraordinary love of colour which must have made mediaeval Venice like a city built of rainbows. It passed, as I have said, into the fishing boats and their sails. It belonged to the poorest houses on the distant islands. It made the Venetian painters the first masters of colour. We have some notion of it from the exterior of St. Mark’s, which even by moonlight blazes like a breast-plate of jewels; from its interior, which, subdued into dark but glowing sanctities of colour, solemnizes the spirit. But in ancient days the colour-glory of St. Mark’s was extended over the whole city. It shone with gold and crimson, with azure and burning green, with deep purple and the blue of the sea waves. The sailors and merchants of the [Pg 75] East when they visited Venice saw in her architecture colour as brilliant as that of their own cities, and felt themselves at home. The architects, lavishing colour everywhere, made a water street in Venice as decorative as the title-page of a Missal.

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

Two other peculiarities, not found in the [Pg 76] other cities of Italy, give a distinct charm to the architecture of Venice; and they are both caused by her position in the sea. The first of these is that all her important buildings are covered from cornice to foundation with precious and lovely marbles. The foundations were laid with mighty blocks of Istrian marble, brought from the mainland; but it was impossible to bring from so far enough of solid stone to build the palaces, churches, and dwellings of Venice. With rare exceptions, then, the walls were of brick; but, for beauty’s sake, the brick was overlaid, outside and inside, with thin slabs of veined and various marbles, with alabaster, with discs of porphyry, with mosaic, or with frescoes. The oversheeting marbles were brought from across the sea. The frescoes were done by the Venetian artists. Imagination, flying high, can scarcely represent to itself the glorious aspect of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, as seen from the Rialto, covered from top to [Pg 77] bottom with frescoes by Titian and Giorgione. These have perished, but the inlaid and marble covered walls of the Venetian palaces remain, and they are like a lovely mosaic of rich colour. On their marble and alabaster the sea-winds and the sunlight have so acted that the surface has a sheen of flying and evasive colour, and a patina which I have not seen elsewhere, even in Genoa. Those accursed restorers have taken the trouble, notably in St. Mark’s, of scraping this away. It is like cleaning the patina away from a Greek bronze. Nature—sea and sun and wind—had adopted the buildings for her own, and given centuries of work to enhance the beauty of their original colour. Italy has despised and destroyed this labour of Nature. But in many places the charm remains, and it is the work, directly and indirectly, of the sea.

There is a second thing to say of the influence of the sea position of Venice on her [Pg 78] architecture, and of the charm of it. In the mediaeval towns of the Italian mainland, the palaces of the nobles and merchants, even the ordinary houses, present to the street lofty and blind walls of enormous strength, especially along the lower story. They have the aspect of prisons, and they were made in this fashion for the sake of defence in the incessant quarrels waged by the opponent families and parties in the city. There is no openness, no story of hospitable receptions, no brightness of life, no sense of peace, impressed on us by the great buildings of the inland towns of Italy. Even when we visit a little hill town like San Gimignano, we see that the common houses, as well as those of the nobles, wear the appearance of fortresses. It is quite different in Venice. The main entrance of the houses, of rich and poor, was on the seaside, on the canal. A wide door, leading to a long hall, opened by steps on the water. The glancing of the water plays on the roof [Pg 79] of the hall which goes back to a small garden. The great staircase mounts to the first story from this hall, and that story has wide, open-hearted windows with a deep balcony. Everything suggests peace, fearlessness, and the welcome of humanity. The steps seem made for the reception of crowds of guests. Tall piles, coloured in bands of red, white, and blue, tell what hosts of warless gondolas were moored there by the visitors. The whole of the lower story was often an arcade. The palace seems to throw itself open to the air, the light, and the populace. Its aspect is the aspect of friendship and hospitality, of a city whose citizens were at peace one with another.

This makes the appearance of Venice quite different from that of any other Italian town, and its charm is great. Nothing indeed can be prettier or more full of the delight of changing sunshine and shade, and of pleasant human life doing its work and having its joys in the sun, than to row [Pg 80] through the narrower canals, and look into these wide open doors, and see in the glint and glimmer of the light reflected from the water the shadowy spaces full of men and women at work, of boys and girls playing, of tiny fishermen and tiny bathers making the bright waters that lap their open doors their playing and their working place. The freshness, the breadth, the joyous movement of the sea, fill their dwelling, regulate their life, mould their character, and set the seal of the witchery of the sea on all they feel and all they do.

This is the charm which the Architecture of Venice derives from the sea. How far Venetian Painting was influenced by the position of Venice on the sea, what charm it derived from the life of the sea, and how far the sea was the subject of the artists, is now the question. It is not easy to answer it, for the influence of the sea position was not direct but indirect. It did [Pg 81] not make the painters of Venice desire to paint the sea or to care for it as our modern temper does, but it created, I think, a certain spiritual or imaginative influence in their soul, other than that produced by the landscape of the land, which, it may be quite unconsciously, entered into their art-work and had power over it.

The landscape that Cima, Basaiti, Giovanni Bellini, Catena, loved and painted, that Giorgione, Bonifazio, and Veronese placed in the distance of their pictures, was that of the mainland, of the spurs of the hills as they dipped into the Lombard plain, of the lovely network of rock and plain, river and woodland, of scattered castles and of white towns on the hilltops, which one sees from the heights of Verona. On the other hand, Titian painted the landscape of his native land, where the torrent comes down through the massive chestnuts of Cadore; where the gray limestone peaks leap upwards thousands of feet, and follow one another, [Pg 82] like the waves of the sea in the tempest; and the huge boulders, ablaze with coloured lichen lie like resting beasts on the short sweet grass in the green shade of walnut trees, and the rude farmhouses stand beside the groves of oak and beech. These were his delight, but the sea is not in his work nor in that of his fellows.

What does touch the sea in their pictures are the skies they painted above this inland landscape. Their freedom, their diffused softness, their lofty arch, their bright and vast expanse, their lucid atmosphere, their silver subtlety, and their involved and mighty storm-clouds, are the creation of the wide and moving sea. Carpaccio and Catena paint the pale and trembling azure above the afternoon on the seacoast. Giorgione has recorded the dark purple thunder-clouds which climb with eager speed from the horizon of the sea to threaten the works of men. Cima of Conegliano paints the clustered flocks of white cloudlets in a clear [Pg 83] pale sky which are common in the Venetian heavens, and which are born of the sea. Veronese paints the pure, cloudless, deep blue sky swept clean by the sea-wind, and under which the sea is radiant. In other pictures he paints a sky often seen over the Adriatic. It is indeed a seaside sky—blue with flat white stratus across the blue, calm, and trembling with reflections cast up from the sea. But Titian stands apart. His skies are of his own mountain valley. The splendours of the mountain rain, the whirling of the mountain-clouds belong to him alone.

The “softness and freedom,” so characteristic of the art of the great Venetian colourists that the phrase has almost passed into a proverb, did not belong to the earlier schools of Venice. These qualities came into her art with the advent of the New Learning, which reached Venice even earlier than it reached Florence, though it was less developed there than in Florence. As to freedom, the Spirit of the Renaissance set free [Pg 84] the imagination of the artists, and kindled in them a more vivid interest in humanity, even in natural scenery. The intellectual freedom it brought belonged to every city which it touched. It belonged above all to Venice. The spirit of a sea-people is by nature more free than the spirit of the people of the plains. It is as free as the spirit of a mountain folk. And such a spirit entered into the painting of the artists of Venice, as it did into the life of its citizens. They painted with more boldness, originality and fire than the inland schools. The passion of the various, even of the reckless, sea was in their heart. And this passion was in tune with the intellectual freedom the New Learning brought to Venice.

As to the softness which distinguished the Venetians, it was chiefly shown in a passion for various, noble, and harmonized colour, suffused, even to its darkest shadow, with soft and glowing light. And Venice was already, from its eastern associations, [Pg 85] the lover of rich colour, softly gradated, in buildings, boats, and dress. And then, beyond this, the colour of its seas and skies, as indeed always near the southern coasts, was tender, subtle, delicate alike when it was strong or evanescent, soft as a child’s cheek in slumber, but always glowing. Day by day, this warm softness of colour was instilled into the artists and nourished by the sea-nature of the place. It was a spirit in their pallet and their pencil.

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

Then there is the deep silence of the lagoon, in which the spirit of Nature most speaks to man, not only by night but by [Pg 86] day. We may be as quiet on the Venetian lagoons—with all the sense of sight open to receive, with the soul undisturbed by the challenge of human sounds—as we should be in the heart of a Highland glen. All that Nature displays of colour, form, or fancy; her mystery, her wild or mocking charm, her solemn silence fraught with thought—sinks deep into the heart when sunrise or sunset or starlight find us far out on the lagoon. A whole boatful of gay people are hushed as by a spell. This ease, then, in the reception of impressions on the senses, the quietude in which they are received, the soft magic in the quietude, the freedom of the waters, filled the soul of the Venetian artists, and made, as it were, the atmosphere which their art breathed, and the inner spirit of their pictures. It was one of the forces which made their work not only softer and freer, but more vivid and passionate than that of any other school in Italy.

Again, every one knows that the Venetian [Pg 87] painters brought colour to a greater perfection than it attained elsewhere. It came to them from the lavish colouring of the city of which I have already written, from the gorgeousness of the pageants, but chiefly from the natural scenery of their home. It is true, they painted man rather than Nature. But they felt her loveliness, and the deepest impression they received from her daily work was of the glory and ravishment, glow and depth of colour, varied from the most delicate to the most sombre hues in sea and sky and along the distant range of Alpine summits. In the city itself, from canal to canal, all the shadows are transfused with a glimmer of blue light, or full of crimson and green fire. It is the presence and power of the water which produces this. Over the sea, the blue of the waters is like that of the sapphire throne Ezekiel saw above the terrible crystal of the firmament. It is not terrible here, but deep and tender; and, when storm is at hand, of a purple so [Pg 88] solemn that Tintoret often uses it for the garments of those in tragic sorrow. But it was chiefly on the lagoon that the artists saw the richest and softest colour. In subdued sunlight, such as is frequent in the haze of the sea, the soft silvery, pearly grays vary infinitely over the smooth waters. In fresher and brighter days when the wind brings the flying clouds, the colour is that which is native to a sea-atmosphere, often clear, often thrilling through veils of ruby, sapphire, and emerald vapour, steeped always in the diffused light which is felt, like joy, over wide spaces of water, and under a vast expanse of sky. To these constant impressions we owe in part the extraordinary luminousness, glow, interfusion, subtlety, tenderness, splendour in height and depth of colour in the pictures of the great Venetians.

Another characteristic of Venetian painting is also derived from the charming of the sea. It is the intense glow of the flesh [Pg 89] colour. The deep warmth and ruddy light which seem to come from within the body to the skin in the figures of these painters, were studied direct from Nature. It is the colour of the naked body of the Venetian fishers to this day. And nothing that I know of produces it but the influence of the sea-winds combined with sunlight, and of the sunlight reflected from the waters in a soft and gracious climate. We may see something like this colour, in its coarse extreme, in the faces and hands of the boatmen on our coasts. Sea and sun have there worked with a fierce and racking climate to produce the colour, but to destroy its beauty by destroying the texture of the skin. But, at Venice, these natural forces work in a climate which does not injure the skin; and they overlay its surface with a glow of red and golden colour which is one of the loveliest hues in the world, and has the special qualities of depth and life, even of a certain passion.

There is more opportunity in Venice for its formation than in other southern sea-ports. All through the summer and autumn the Venetian youths of the people spend their time all but naked in the water. They walk, ankle-deep, over the shallows of the lagoons, fishing for sea-plunder. The men work on the embankments only in their shirts. Half their life they are practically naked;—and to look at one of these young Venetian fishers, standing in the blaze of the sun, with the greenish water glistening round him, its reflections playing on his glowing limbs, and all his body flaming soft as from an inward fire—is to see the very thing which Giorgione painted on the walls of palaces, which Bellini and Giorgione handed on to their followers, which Titian and Tintoret laid on their canvas and emblazoned in their fresco. They worked into their painting of the human body what they saw every day, and other schools of art did not attain the glory of flesh-colour [Pg 91] Venice attained, because they did not see it.

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

When Giovanni Bellini painted the naked body, there is nothing better in colour in the whole world. In San Grisostomo the Saint sits in front of the bending stem of a great fig tree, on which he rests his book. [Pg 92] His white beard flows down over his breast. Bellini’s certainty, firmness, enduringness of colour, are here at their very best. The glow and subdued flaming of the flesh, varied from point to point with an exquisite joy in the work, is beautiful beyond all praise. The glow of Giorgione’s flesh-colour is as deep, but thrilled through with a greater softness. In Tintoret’s hands the flesh-colour became more sombre, and in the faces of his many portraits had a curious dignity, as if, I have often thought, the royalty of the Sun had entered into it.

With his women, a difference arose. At first he painted them in the full Venetian manner. But afterwards, with his impatience of monotony or repetition, he changed the type. It alters from the full, opulent, rose-coloured women of Titian, Palma, Veronese, to a lithe, lissome, tall, rather thin woman, alive with youthful energy of fire, of the most gracious and subtle curves, exquisitely made, with a small head and lovely [Pg 93] face. With his invention of this type, he invented a new method of colouring, marked by a temperance in its use and glow which is strange in one so often accused, and sometimes guilty, of intemperance. He sent across the naked body alternate shafts of sunlight and of shade, and amused himself by painting the colour of flesh under these varied conditions. The result—since in all the shadow as in the light there was colour, and colour at its subtlest—is the loveliest, freest, and most delightful thing in Venetian art. “The Graces” in the Ducal Palace are an example of this. Any one can see another example in the picture of the “Origin of the Milky Way” in the National Gallery. It may be only a fancy of mine, but I cannot help thinking that Tintoret had seen such girls bathing from the Lido on days when the sunlight was broken over the sea by racing clouds. There is a freshness, an open-air purity and light in these images of his which it pleases me [Pg 94] to think would be absent if these lovely bodies had been painted in the rooms of palaces or in their gardens. The winds of heaven appear to blow around them from the unencumbered sea. The light of an ocean sky, the dance of reflected light from moving water seem to play upon them.

Again, the Venetian painters saw day by day the human body in graceful and incessantly changing movement, and the charm of it was derived from the sea-life of Venice. There are few attitudes and movements in any human work more graceful than those of the single rower of a gondola. He is so placed, and his peculiar method of rowing is such, that his labour educates him in lovely movement, and of movement altering almost at every instant to meet new circumstances. He is unable to take an awkward attitude. If he does, so lightly poised is he, he is tossed out of the boat; and it is only, I believe, because the attitudes are so various, so momentary, so hard [Pg 95] to see before they change, that sculptors have not reproduced them. It is plain that this incessantly beautiful movement of the human body had a great influence on the painters of Venice. Their eye was unconsciously trained from youth to realize the body of man in lovely poise and change.

Their eye was also trained to realize the aspect of stately, grave, and reverent signiors and merchants in the rich robes of the days of pageants; or in the quiet robes of councillors and citizens; and there are no more noble, dignified representations of men of honour, weight, and civic business, than those made by the Venetian artists. The only way in which this view of their art can be connected with the sea is that, owing to the commerce of Venice on every sea, there existed in the town a wise, wealthy, honoured middle class, different from the middle class in the other sea-towns of Italy, having worthy connections with the East, and sharing in a greater degree than elsewhere [Pg 96] in the government and culture of the city.

Moreover, the wonderful splendour of the pageants and triumphs of the town, most of which were bound up with the sea, enabled painters like Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, and Veronese, to display in decorative art the most gorgeous colour in dress and festive show. The processions in Venice, the festal days at the Salute and the Redentore, the marriage of Venice to the sea, were a varied blaze of radiant colour.

Finally, on this matter of painting, there are very few direct representations of sea-scenery in Venetian art. I have said that Titian painted the woods, rocks, and mountains of his native Cadore. Once only, if I remember rightly, he drew the lagoon and the plain below the Alps, and Antelao above the mist, soaring as if it would pierce the very rampart of heaven. Every day and evening he saw, from his garden at Casa Grande, the lagoon near San Michele filled with [Pg 97] joyous gondolas and alive with light and colour, but it never occurred to him to paint it. The mountain valleys, their groves and torrents were his home. They did not permit him, in their jealousy, to perceive the sea.

Only one among the greater Venetian painters seems to have cared at all, and that very little, for the sea in the lagoons—and he lived all his life in Venice. This was Tintoret. Sometimes, as in one of the Halls of the Ducal Palace, the background of his picture is made by the green waves of the lagoon beating on its scattered islands, or in another picture by the glittering surface of its water with the boats crimson in the sunlight. The green sea of the lagoon, prankt with flitting azures, soft, and shot with changing hues, is painted by him with a rapturous pleasure in his picture of Bacchus and Ariadne. A sea-going ship with its sails set is making its way, behind the figures, out to Malamocco. There is a picture [Pg 98] of his in Santa Maria Zobenigo where St. Justina and Augustine are kneeling on the seashore, and the gray-blue lagoon, in short leaping waves, is enriched by the scarlet sail of a Venetian bark. The sea in the St. George in the National Gallery breaks in low waves of bluish green, edged with foam, gloomy under a dark sky, upon a desolate coast. It is as like the water of the lagoon when storm is drawing near as it can be painted. Then he painted on the ceiling of the great hall in the Ducal Palace, Venice enthroned as the Queen of the Sea. A huge, globed surge of oceanic power and mass rises at her feet, and on it are afloat the sea-gods and goddesses, Tritons and monsters of the deep who bring the gifts of the sea to the feet of the Sea-Queen. It might be an illustration of the subject of this Essay, and it proves that the subject was not unconceived by Tintoret.

Indeed, if the soaring figure, which in the picture of the Paradise at the Ducal [Pg 99] Palace, rises with uplifted arms and face from the angle above the Chair of the Doge as he sat in council, towards the figure of Christ at the summit of the canvass, be in truth, as some have conjectured, the Angel of the Sea, whose nursling was Venice—Tintoret, setting this incarnation of the history of the city above its senate in council, among the saintly host, and aspiring to the throne of God, did most nobly and religiously conceive the sea as the mother and guard and glory of Venice.

But more remarkable than these few reminiscences of the sea were the skies which Tintoret painted from those he saw over the sea and the lagoon. Sometimes the sky is pure, but the blue is full of white light, such as the sea mists make when they rise into the heaven. Sometimes his sky is full of dark gray cloud, threatening ruin or heavy sorrow. When Christ descends through the sky to welcome his martyrs or answer the prayers of Venice, he bursts [Pg 100] through the clouds as through a sea, and they ripple away from Him in rosy concentric circles. It is an effect he may have seen from a seashore, but not on land. But, chiefly, with his stormy and stern nature, Tintoret—who had seen the skies of Venice when the tempest had come in from the sea—filled his heaven, especially when he paints the tragedies of earth, with the heavy bars of purple, mingled with angry gold which I have often seen after a thunderstorm at Venice, descending like stairs from the zenith to the horizon. And once at least, below the clouds, he has painted the lagoon, black and tortured by the wind.

I have said nothing of Canaletto or of Guardi. They seem to belong to another world than that of the great Venetians. But it would be uncourteous to omit them. Canaletto, or Il Canale, was really fond of the waters of Venice, much fonder of them than his predecessors were; and when he painted the long reaches of the Grand [Pg 101] Canal, he managed to represent one aspect at least of that wonderful sea-street, when under a faint wind it trembles into multitudinous small curving ripples that annihilate all reflections. He does not often vary from this, and when he varies he does not succeed so well. But he painted the buildings with a real desire to impress us with their nobility and largeness of design, with no special care for accuracy of detail, but with great care to give fully a sense of their splendour of situation and of architecture. And he drew over the scene—and this he did excellently—a clear, pure, luminous, tenderly gradated, but rather hard atmosphere, in which the buildings were frankly visible, and the waters almost austere. The pictures are so decorative that many of them tend to weary the eyes, and we turn with some relief to those other pictures of his in which the sky is dark, and a more grave and homelier representation is made of the Venice of his time. I [Pg 102] have not seen any pictures by him of the lagoons. But I have seen a set of drawings of the islands in the lagoon done in Indian ink, which in their slight and careless drawing pleased me because he seemed to love what he was doing, and to feel delicately the magical reflectiveness and charm of the waters of the lagoon.

Guardi cares more than Il Canale for the waters of Venice. He did his best to represent their lovely trembling in the light, and the images they made in their mirror of the buildings above them and of the life which moves upon them. It is easy, when one does not require the best, to admire, even to have a special liking for, his pictures. As to what the moderns have done for the Venetian waters, what the sea-charm of the city has impelled on their canvas—it would require an essay as long as this to tell the tale of it.

These things, with regard to Venetian [Pg 103] painting, are part of the charm which the sea exercised on the artists. One other charm is also derived from the sea. The sea and its life have largely made the character of the Venetian people. That is too great a matter to discuss fully, but if those who visit Venice will make friends with the fisher people, they will soon discover the historical character of the Venetian people as distinguished from the upper classes. It is salted with the nature of the sea. A wild, free, open, dashing, quiet and tempestuous character, too much the sport of circumstance and impulse, yet capable of a steady exercise of power when it loves or desires greatly—it is the human image of the sea on which they live. It is one of the pleasantest charms of Venice to know it, and be friends with it.

It is always a romantic character, and the sea has always fathered its romance. The history of the city, legendary and actual, is steeped in the romance of the sea. [Pg 104] Wherever we wander through the town, in the churches, by the monuments, squares, bridges and quays, among the islands in the lagoon, on the sea-beaten sand of the Lido, when we hear the beat of the hammers in the Arsenal, in the very names of the streets—we meet the sea, and stories of the sea, and have all the pleasure and charm a boy has when he reads of ocean adventure, and feels on his cheek the salt wind from the sea. I will only take one well-known example. Walking in the neighbourhood of the Church of Santa Maria Formosa, I happened to look up to the name of the street. It was called after the guild of workers who made the bridal chests and jewel boxes for the Venetian maidens. It was here they lived and wrought. But they were not only workmen, but sailors trained for war. And as I saw the name, I remembered the story of the brides of Venice, twelve of whom were each year, on the Feast of the Purification, dowered by the [Pg 105] State. It happened one year that pirates from Trieste, knowing this custom, stole in at night to the Island of San Pietro di Castello, and hid in the low bushes near the water. When the brides, carrying their boxes of gems and money, were among the peaceful throng in the Church, these bold bad men seized them and bore them away to the port of Caorle, and there, landing with the spoil, lit their fires and took to feasting. All Venice rose to pursue them, but the Chest and Box-Makers were the first, with that fierce swiftness which belonged to Venetian war, to take to their boats and pursue the ravishers; and outsailing all the rest, rescued the damsels and slew the villains as they were drinking round their fires. Returning with the rest, the Doge Candiano asked them what reward they would have from the State—and they answered: “Only that the Doge should visit in procession their Church of Santa Maria Formosa on the anniversary of the Day of [Pg 106] the Brides.” Everywhere in the city such romantic stories spring up from church and square, palace and bridge; and their historical charm is born of the sea.

In conclusion, I may write a little word on the sensational charm of Venice seated in the hearing of the sea waves, and adorned for worship by the beauty of her water-world. The word sensational here brings no reproach; it only means that the vivid impressions made on the senses are more numerous, varied, and intense in Venice than elsewhere. Each of them is accompanied with a spiritual passion as intense as the sensible impression. The imagination is incessantly kindled into creation by what it sees.

I will bring together, to illustrate this, what I saw in one day when I went to Torcello. We started early, on a lovely morning. As we rounded the angle of Murano we saw far away, and filling the line of the horizon, the rare vision of the peaks [Pg 107] of the Dolomites. Snow lay on them, but snow transfigured by distance into ethereal light. Fine bars of vapour lay across them, floating free, as if they were the battlements of fairyland. Below, their buttresses and flanks fell into the plain, blue as the heaven above them. Seen thus, across the dazzling lagoon, they made that impression of farness and mystery, of a land of enchanting secrets, of ethereal hope taking ethereal form, which is part of the magic which rises like a wizard vapour from the lagoons. The mountain glory is transfigured into a spiritual glory, and the soul loses its conscious life in a drift of dreams.

Then, through the winding of the dark piles, through the shallows haunted by sea birds, we came to Torcello. Torcello has been described by a master hand, and I will not follow him; but when we had visited the well-known places we went down along the banks to the large arm of the sea beside the island. There was not a sound, [Pg 108] save the cry of a scythe in the coarse reeds, as we sat on the flowery grass. The place was once full of human life, of wealth, and labour; it was now the very home of desolation. Deep sadness—the sense of all the might and splendour of the earth passing away into the elements, of nature only living, and living in regret—filled the heart. And the sensation was as different from that with which we had begun the day, as the glory of the mountains was from the wild sea-marsh where we sat, and the sorrowful salt water stealing by.

We left Torcello and went on to Burano, a small island about a mile from Torcello. The men are fishers, the women lace-makers. A few canals traverse it, and it has a large population. It belongs to itself alone, and the indwellers have kept their distinct type for centuries. For centuries they have been poor, rough, and helpful to one another. A British working man would think their life starvation. It is an austere struggle for [Pg 109] existence; but on the day I went to see them they had a festa. Baldassare Galuppi, whom Browning celebrated, was a native of the island, and this was his centenary. To honour this half-genius all the inhabitants cheerfully struck work, and turned out in their best array. The canals, the streets, were crowded; the market-place was full of booths and rejoicing folk. In the church the preacher was improving the occasion. A local poet had written a sonnet on Galuppi, and it was hung up at the corner of every street. Illustrated broadsheets with Galuppi’s portrait and his life were sold on every stall; the men and women were singing snatches from his music. A cripple, on gigantic crutches, seized hold of me and carried me off to the Municipio to show me the musician’s bust, as excited as the rest of the crowd to celebrate the artist of their town. We forgot the mountains, we forgot Torcello, in the gaiety, brightness, good humour, and artistic excitement of humanity. [Pg 110] Nothing can well be more wretchedly poor than the life of these hard-working people, and yet, to celebrate one dead for a hundred years, every memory of their misery perished in pleasant joy.

When we left Burano we rowed on another mile to visit the Island of St. Francis in the Desert. Ever since the fourteenth century, with a few intervals, it has been held by the Franciscans. A marble wall surrounds the tiny island, a marble pavement leads up to the small convent with its church and garden. Cypresses and tall poplars stand in the garden, and one stone pine looks out from the corner of the wall over the waste lagoon. It is a solitary and lovely place, like an island in the sea of the world.

We found service going on; the little bell was ringing, and we knelt among the monks. All the spirit of the silence, of the peace of obedience, chastity, and poverty, of the love that ruled St. Francis, fell upon us. [Pg 111] The depth of the religious life was here. I looked up as I knelt, and saw, rudely painted on the wall, the charming legend of the place—how St. Francis, returning from the East, took boat at Venice to reach the mainland, and as night fell was drifted to this island, slept, and woke in the morning among the low bushes which clothed its shore. And as the sun rose he began to chant the Matins. But who, said he, will sing the responses? At which all the little birds came flocking into the bushes, and when he paused sang the responses for him. [2] And Francis, rejoicing, struck his staff into the ground, and it became a tree where the birds had plenteous shelter. Part of the trunk of that tree is still kept in the cloister—small and poor, paved with brick, and a deep well in the centre. Vervain and roses and balsams grew round its low pillars in pots of red earthenware, and the scent of them was [Pg 112] sweet and solitary. And we forgot the noise and excitement of Burano, and remembered only the peaceful sainthood of the world, and the secret of obedience, and the love of God to poverty.

When we left the island the sun had set over the Euganean Hills, and again, as in the morning, but of how different a note, a new impression out of the life of Nature was made upon us. We rowed in silence through the teaching of evening. And when night came and the only light was the light of stars, the silence deepened into mystery. There is a sense of the infinite on the lagoon at night, and speech seems to break its spell. It is half awe, half pleasure; the excitement it brings is not for words; it is translated within into the language of the personal soul, the tongue which no one knows but one’s self alone.

This was our day. There is no other place I know of where so many varied impressions [Pg 113] may be awakened in the imagination. They are bound up with the sea and their charm is from the sea.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The view from both these places, San Andrea and the Campo Marte, is now blocked out by the great Fondamenta, built for the Orient Liners and the Adriatic trade of Venice.

[2] There is another form of the legend, but I prefer this.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The sea-charm of Venice

THE SEA-CHARM
OF
VENICE

THE SEA-CHARM OF VENICE

FOOTNOTES:

Transcriber’s note

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