Signoria of Venice

“ The group of Councillors on the dais swayed and parted against that wonderful background of Tintoret, the dead Christ and the two Doges reverently kneeling in proof of the devotion of this Most Serene Republic. Around the vast and sumptuous chamber, where the proud Signoria assembled, like a council of kings, Venice had chronicled her triumphs and her religious humility in endless repetition and intimately blended, as became her faith; the Doges Priuli, kneeling in prayer; Venice, mounted defiantly on the Lion of Saint Mark ”

“ A flood of crimson suffused the pallor of her pearly diadem, and her maidens, sleeping grey among the waters round her, unfolded rosy petals upon the surface of the lagoon.
It is this power of living communion with the daily pageant in which sun and moon are doge and emperor, and the stars and the clouds their retinue—this it is which, finding expression once at Venice in a temporal glory that has passed away, is the abiding assurance of her immortality. This is the spirit which, if once it helped to make her great, still makes her great to-day, the spirit that endures. ”

“ Figured as a regal lady, with yellow hair tightly knotted round a small head poised upon her upright throat and ample shoulders, Venice takes her chair of sovereignty—as mistress of the ocean to whom Neptune and the Tritons offer pearls, as empress of the globe at whose footstool wait Justice with the sword and Peace with the olive branch, as a queen of heaven exalted to the clouds. They have made her a goddess, those great painters; they have produced a mythus, and personified in native loveliness that bride of the sea, their love, their lady. ”

“ Those illustrious remains inspire a great and painful sentiment: Venice herself, the magnificent catafalco of her warlike magistrates, the two-fold coffin of their ashes, is now no more than a living skin.
Stained-glass windows and red curtains, while veiling the light in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, increase the religious effect. The numberless columns brought from the East and from Greece have been planted in the basilica, like avenues of exotic trees. A storm rose while I was roaming in the church: when will the trumpets sound that shall rouse all these dead? ”

“ Lying awake in Venice, when the wind blows hard, one hears the sea thundering upon its sandy barrier, and blesses God for the murazzi. On such a night it happened once to me to dream a dream of Venice overwhelmed by water. I saw the billows roll across the smooth lagoon like a gigantic Eager. The Ducal Palace crumbled, and San Marco's domes went down. The Campanile rocked and shivered like a reed. And all along the Grand Canal the palaces swayed helpless, tottering to their fall, while boats piled high with men and women strove to stem the tide, and save themselves from those impending ruins. ”

“ In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old city seems crowned once more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago. It is easy, then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies—with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon the rich argosies of Venetian commerce—with Othellos and Desdemonas, with Iagos and Roderigos—with noble fleets and victorious legions returning from the wars. ”

“ The generalising influences at play in great political centres have hardly affected the inhabitants of the city which for a thousand years of independence was a body politic complete in itself. Nor has Venetian common life lacked those elements of beauty without whose presence the popular muse is dumb. The very industries of the Venetians were arts, and when they were young and spiritually teachable, their chief bread-winning work of every day was Venice—her ducal chapel, her campanile, her palaces of marble and porphyry. ”

“ The clouds piled themselves in luminous masses and drifted into the hollows of the wonderful Euganean hills, and a crimson sunset tinged peaks and clouds with glory, as Padua with its low arcaded streets, and San Antonio—cousin to San Marco in minarets and Eastern splendor—and the Lion of Saint Mark upon his lofty column, closed the vista of their weary day. The chimes of Venice were too far for sound, but from every campanile of this quaint city the vesper bells, solemn and sweet, pealed forth their call to prayer—as if no threat of Rome's displeasure made a discord in their harmony. ”

“ A few paces off, bare and erect like a ship's mast, the gigantic Campanile towers in the air, and announces to distant mariners the time-honored royalty of Venice. At its base, closely pressed to it, the delicate loggetta of Sansovino seems like a flower, so many statues, bas-reliefs, bronzes, and marbles, whatever is rich and imaginative of living and elegant art, crowd around it to adorn it...
"Like a magnificent diamond in a brilliant setting, the Ducal Palace effaces the rest.... Never has the like architecture been seen; all here is novel. ”

“ Not less appropriate was it that the genius of Tintoret and of Venetian art should culminate in the representation of Paradise. Of all commonwealths, Venice had enjoyed the longest prosperity; of all peoples, hers had been the most sensitive to the joy of life. Even at the end of the sixteenth century, when her power abroad had been curtailed, and when luxury at home was slowly enervating the integrity of her citizens, she was still outwardly imposing, magnificent. No pope had ever succeeded, either by guile or by force, in ravishing her independence. ”

“ One can scarcely imagine a more charming spot than the site of the castle of Asolo. Encircled by the Alps, the plains of the Brenta and the Piave spread out before it. The group of Euganean Hills rises proudly in the distance. Under a clear moon the silver threads of the rivers may be followed to the sea; and in the rich, distant, level country Vicenza and Padua lift their towers, while far away to the sun-rising lies Venice, its many spires clear cut against the blue sky and the blue Adriatic; and to the north the snow-capped Rhœtian Alps stand forth as if to guard all the land they overlook. ”

“ The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama, is tedious as a twice-told tale. Her art, her palaces, are her own eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her sky. ”

“ There is nothing like—nothing equal to Venice. She is the city of the imagination—the realization of romance—the queen of splendor and softness and luxury. Allow all her decay—feel all her degradation—see the "Huns in her palaces," and the "Greek upon her mart," and, after all, she is alone in the world for beauty, and, spoiled as she has been by successive conquerors, almost for riches too. Her churches of marble, with their floors of precious stones, and walls of gold and mosaic; her ducal palace, with its world of art and massy magnificence ”

“ After suffering a severe defeat at Zagognara, the Florentines for the third time appealed to Venice, and in an impassioned oration threatened that if the Venetians permitted Filippo Visconti to make himself King of North Italy, they would help him to become Emperor. ”

“ THE MIRROR OF THE LAGOON
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 ”

“ In days before the railway and its bridge 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 the sapphire, azure, and pale grey—a jewelled crown of architecture on the head of slumbering ocean. ”

“ The fifteenth century is the period of greatest splendour in the history of the Republic. Mature in her constitution, and with a dominion firmly established by sea and land, Venice presented a brilliant spectacle to the eyes of Europe. Yet this period contains the germs of her decadence. Supreme in the Mediterranean by the defeat of Genoa, Venice was almost immediately called upon to face the Turks and to wear herself out in a long and single-handed contest with their growing power ”

“ The most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life and its deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only aroused by the touch of a secret spring. ”

“ All the principles of art are violated: and out of their violation springs a new art, borrowed from the East but stamped with the mark of Venice; in a while this is transformed and becomes, in the hands of the Lombardi, the Leopardi, and the Sansovino, the glory and the adornment of the city. Opulent and untamed imaginations have spoiled the treasury of the Magnificoes to build these sculptured palaces and basilicas of marble and mosaic, to lay their pavements with precious stones and cover their walls with gold and onyx and Oriental alabaster. ”

“ It was on the 20th of July that a post galley brought the sad news to Venice that her greatest Doge lay dead. Pietro Ziani, a wealthy noble, experienced in Venetian statecraft, was chosen to second him. The Republic had now in fact become an empire. From the mother city along the Gulf of Trieste over Dalmatia, Croatia, the Morea, the islands of Corfù, Crete and the Archipelago from Greece to Constantinople, even up to Syria, the standard of St Mark was planted. ”

“ I was now free to indulge myself to the full in the search for what Venice really has in greater abundance, perhaps, than any other city in Christendom—remains, namely, of mediæval domestic work. Nothing can be conceived more delightful than such a search. You seldom go a hundred yards—often it is much less—without coming upon some remains, or perhaps some nearly perfect example, of an old Venetian palace ”

“ This first attempt of Venice to establish herself in possession of mainland territory proved a failure. But the rise of the great Lords of Verona, Padua, Milan, the Scala, Carraresi, and Visconti, and the struggles which took place between them, could not fail to disturb the quiet of the Lagoons and to draw Venice once more into the mesh of Italian politics. It was impossible for Venice to be indifferent to events which were affecting cities so close to herself and so necessary for her commerce as Padua and Treviso. ”

“ These reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of [Pg 170] loneliness and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless horizon, the solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and greyness of evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city crumbling to its grave in mud and brine.
These first impressions of Venice are true. Indeed they are inevitable. They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the brain. ”

“ But if geography gave Venice an unrivalled site, the Venetians did the rest. Through all the early years of their history they defied Constantinople to the east of them, and Pope and Holy Roman Emperor to the west; sometimes turning to one, sometimes to the other, but stubbornly bent all the while upon independence, replying, when invited to become subjects: 'God, Who is our help and protector has saved us to dwell upon these waters. This Venice, which we have raised in the lagoons, is our mighty habitation, no power of emperor or of prince can touch us' ”

“ For the Venice of every day is a dead city, with nothing left of its ancient glories but wealth. Though the millions be reckoned in lire, there are over a hundred millionaires in Venice. But of that mighty artistic and religious impulse which produced countless churches and palaces, pictures and frescoes, which strewed the very street walls with spirited sculpture, and warmed even parochial offices with priceless paintings, there is as little trace as of the indomitable energy that founded a great Republic on wooden piles and guarded it from the sea by dykes and from its enemies by the sea. ”

“ Thrown into relief against pale violet draperies and mantles of azure and gold, their living flesh, their backs and shoulders, are impregnated with light or swim in the penumbra, the soft roundness of their nudity harmonizing with the tranquil gayety of their attitudes and features. Venice in their midst, ostentatious and yet gentle, seems like a queen whose mere rank gives the right to be happy, and whose only desire is to render those who see her happy also. ”

“ For fourteen hundred years the history of the island is the history of endless changes of masters. We see it first a nominal ally, then a direct possession, of Rome and of Constantinople; we then see it formed into a separate Byzantine principality, conquered by the Norman lord of Sicily, again a possession of the Empire, then a momentary possession of Venice, again a possession of the Sicilian kingdom under its Angevin kings, till at last it came back to Venetian rule, and abode for four hundred years under the Lion of Saint Mark. ”