Beryl De Zoete

“ It is a substantial glory; but as our eye flits on from jewel to jewel in the clear blue paving, a sudden line is drawn beyond which it may not pass. The rich flood of vital colour has its bound, and beyond it lies a region bathed in light so intense that even colour is refined into a mystic whiteness—a mirror of crystal, devoid of substance, infinitely remote; and above it, suspended in that lucent unearthly atmosphere, hover the towers of Torcello and Burano, like a mirage of the desert, midway between the water and the sky. ”

“ Massiveness and grace are magnificently combined in this east wall of the Ducal Palace; it is at once solemn and brilliant; and as we look back to its angle with the Riva, the rose and snowy marbles gleam as if they were transparent.
A little further and the waters have us in their power. The Ponte di Canonica denies us passage; the tide is too high for us to pass beneath it, and we are forced to return to the Riva degli Schiavoni.200 But before we turn we may see one of the most beautiful of Renaissance palaces rising in clear whiteness against the blue of the sky. ”

“ Who but Tintoretto could have dreamed of achieving this perspective built solely of human forms and faces? Into all the mysteries of life—those echoes of experience which we touch but faintly, those substances with which we feel inexplicable correspondencies—into these Tintoretto has looked: the rays from behind the Son of God have poured into the heart of the universe, and from it has grown his Paradise. Joy is the heart of this great symphony; it works upon us rather as a creative force than as a thing created, sounding continually some new note or rarer harmony of colour. ”

“ They are a choir of spirits, yet each has a mute music of its own, and accosting them one by one—slowly and in the silence entering into their life—we may come to know and love the several members of this company of the blest, till our senses grow alive to their harmony as they sing together, sometimes in the clear, cold light of the spreading dawn, sometimes in the evening twilight—when peak after peak is lit with the flame of sacrifice and, in the Titanic memory of the sunset cloud, the great fire lit on earth burns up with solemn flames into the sky. ”

“ It is here that the soul of Torcello still abides, to dream out upon the mystery of day and night to the mountains and the city and the sea. And even if the sunlight is rich and jubilant in the yellow fields below, where the autumn has such fitting habitation, it spreads upon the waters a broad path of silver that gleams mysteriously like moonlight upon the distant spaces of the ocean shield, waking points of light out of the immense surrounding dimness. And it is most of all in the deep night that the gulf of the centuries may be bridged. ”

“ Even the hot sunshine, though it irradiates the features of Murano, cannot penetrate to that spent heart. The marvellous fascination of its Grand Canal, with its swift and unaccustomed current of blue waters, cannot draw us from the sadness, or disperse the spectral melancholy which invades the spirit and surrounds it as an atmosphere. The sun infects the dirty children with a desire to shine, and prompts somersaults for a soldino; but the weary women, the old, crouching men, still creep about the fondamenta impervious to his rays. ”

“ Autumn is the loom on which was woven the robe of Venetian art, autumn with its indomitable splendours of gold and silver, green and cremoisin and the supreme scarlet of the salvia. These colours are steeped in an impermeable dye: they seem saturated with the light, burning out the more gloriously, the more intensely, as their allotted span grows less. The passion of the spring is of another kind; it needs the present magic of the sun to draw out its exquisite, incipient radiance ”

“ She is a sphinx who holds the key of every mystery. In her presence we are overcome by the impulse to kneel and worship. She is not, like many Byzantine Madonnas, grotesque, forbidding in her immensity, in her aloofness; for even while she rebukes and subdues our littleness of soul, she draws all our senses as a being of absolute,40 inexplicable beauty. She holds us rapt and will not let us go. The memory of the Duomo of San Donato is concentrated in the single magical figure of her Madonna, leaning in benediction from the golden apse. ”

“ To those men who dreamed this figure, to us who look upon her and worship, the dominion of Time is a forgotten thing; we ask no pity for our human woes; they have passed, they have crumbled: she gives us a better gift than pity, insight into the hidden things of life and of art; she wings with hope, if with stern hope, our dream of beauty. ”

“ A campanula on the ruined wall to the left of the arch stands out clear and pale against the brick building behind, where once the cloister opened out, an exquisite harmony of lavender and rose. Fragmentary though it is, this façade of the famous monastery is one of the most precious relics of the islands of the lagoons.
There is an island where we cannot think of death, where decay dare not come; though the water plants smell faint upon its shores, and the cypresses that clothe it rise black against the sky. ”

“ The three-arched bridge of San Lorenzo, which is the structural centre of the composition, is thronged with a white-robed confraternity bearing splendid candles which glint among the trees that are tied upon the bridge, and that we see receding into the campo of the church which is hidden from us. In the centre of the bridge is fixed the banner of the Confraternity, waving in the wind. The throng upon the bridge is by no means idle; there is the effect of that incessant movement of which one is conscious in the densest crowd, and those at its edge are eagerly watching the doings in the water. ”

“ The robe of her divinity was more akin to the dazzling incomparable blue of the bay that lies within the curve of the Schiavoni, as we may see it from the Palazzo Ducale on a morning of sunshine and east wind; that indomitable intensity of colour, unveiled, resplendent, filled to the brim with the whole radiance and strength and glory of the day—that is the girdle of Venice, the cup she drank of in her strength. But it is clear that she had bowed to a new dominion: with the ocean she wedded the world.
The lagoons are full of mysteries of light; they are a veritable treasure ground of illusion. ”

“ But much persists that is indestructible; and though Venice has become a spectacle for strangers, for those who are her lovers the old spirit lingers still near the form it once so gloriously inhabited, wakened into being, perchance, by a motion, an echo, a light upon the waters, and once wakened never again lost or out of mind. Does not the silent swiftness of the Ten still haunt the sandolo of the water police, as it steals in the darkness with unlighted lamp under the shadow of larger craft moored beside the fondamenta, visible only when it crosses the path of a light from house or garden? ”

“ Many a porch or gable or wide-projecting roof, or sculpture of fantastic beast or naïve saint or kneeling angel, seems to step out and call upon us in the night, catching in us perhaps as we pass by some touch of sympathy with the enduring soul of the past. One must be late indeed in Venice to secure untroubled peace. Ever and again, even after midnight, the silence of the great white campos is broken by a group scattered here and there before the door of a café; voices in eager talk will echo under a low portico, a sleepy child will clatter by in wooden pattens. ”

“ There is a corner of Venice little known to the stranger, or even to Venetians themselves, except as a passage to the cemetery of San Michele, but not less loved on that account by those who are happy enough to have their lot cast there. The breezes blow with a freshness that is rare in the more confined spaces of the city or on the Grand Canal; the tide sets into the Sacca della Misericordia full and fresh from the northern lagoon, still beating with the pulse of the open sea. This favoured, this unique corner of Venice is a large square basin of water, open on one side to the lagoon. ”

“ Decay is in each breath that the plant draws in; it cannot crystallise the moment; inexorably it is drawn onwards to maturity and death. It was inevitable for Venice that as her strength increased her responsibilities should increase with it; perforce she must turn her face to land as well as sea. She could not remain alone, intent only on nourishing and developing her individual life. In proportion to her greatness she must attract others to her, and the circle of her influence must widen till it passed beyond her own control. The dying words of Mocenigo came too late. ”

“ The Austrian had less power to hurt Venice than she herself possesses. In those of her sons who understand her malady there flows an undercurrent of deep sadness, as if day by day they watched the ebbing of a life in which all their hope and all their love had root. They cannot sever themselves from Venice: they cannot save her. Venice pretending to share in the vulgar life of to-day, Venice recklessly discarding one glory after another for the poor exchange of coin, still has a power over us not wielded by the inland cities of Italy, happier in the untroubled beauty of their decay. ”

“ The fidelity of Bellini and Carpaccio to the facts of Venice fills us continually with fresh wonder: it is not the fidelity of copyists standing outside the scene they paint; their very heart is in its stones. As we watch Gentile’s gorgeous procession sweep like a stream from the gate of the Ducal Palace round the border of the Piazza, with the sound of trumpets, the rustle and swing of noble garments and the gleam of banners, we feel that the painter had heard and felt the triumph of the music, so marvellously has he conveyed its influence in these moving figures ”

“ VENETIAN WATERWAYS
(PART I) In Venice it is difficult to make choice of one route rather than another, when the means of transit is indeed an end in itself, and in some degree the same delight awaits us on every way we choose. We may pass hours on the Grand Canal merely combining enjoyment of its changefulness with a welcome monotony of rest; every moment the water is expressive, every moment it lives under some new impulse and reveals itself afresh. Carpaccio’s picture, The Miracle of the Holy Cross, is a marvellous rendering of the life of the Grand Canal ”

“ Yet, if we accept in the right spirit the extraordinary delays and dilemmas of traffic—immense, interminable barges suddenly blocking the entire canal, or a flock of gondolas and sandolos in seemingly inextricable confusion—we shall always have our reward; not only the pleasure of watching the riddle of passage solve itself, thanks to the seeming elasticity of the rio, but a glint of sun-jewels on a new angle of the waters, some richness of ornament on house or bridge, some relic of ancient Venice, some name of calle or rio will break upon us with a fresh revelation. ”

“ For Venice is not a dead body: she is a living soul. Overflowing all moulds in which we may think to contain her, she reveals herself continually in new mystery, new wonder. We spoke of Venice as being paved with sky, and every day there is cast upon her pavement a fresh revelation of changefulness and beauty. A thousand forms and patterns move in procession over the water, passing each instant into something “rich and strange,” a fleeting succession of aerial designs drawn with tremulous pencil in colours which never lived on the palette of a mortal artist. ”

“ It was a familiar sight for Venice, the dedication of pilgrims that is represented here; and there is a strange pathos in the slim, small figures as they move in two lines half-wavering up the aisle, each wearing a crown of thorns, perhaps in prophecy of coming martyrdom. They are not marching confidently to victory like an army; their crosses are held at all angles, forming errant patterns among themselves. Some are girt for their journey in short vestments under their long robes. It is curiously unlike a procession native to the city ”