A Wanderer in Venice Part 21

At the end of the Merceria is S. Salvatore, a big quiet church in the Renaissance style, containing the ashes of S. Theodore, the tombs of various Doges, and a good Bellini: a warm, rich, and very human scene of a wayside inn at Emmaus and Christ appearing there. An "Annunciation" by t.i.tian is in the church proper, painted when he was getting very old, and framed by Sansovino; a "Transfiguration" by t.i.tian is in the pretty sacristy, which, like many of the Venetian churches, is presided over by a dwarf. A procession of Venetian sacristans would, by the way, be a strange and grotesque spectacle.

The best of the S. Salvatore monuments is that by Sansovino of Doge Francesco Venier (1554-1556), with beautiful figures in the niches from the same hand--that of Charity, on the left, being singularly sweet.

When Sansovino made these he was nearly eighty. Sansovino also designed the fine doorway beneath the organ. The most imposing monuments are those of Caterina Cornaro (or Corner) the deposed queen of Cyprus, in the south transept; of three Cardinals of the Corner family; and of the Doges Lorenzo and Girolamo Priuli, each with his patron saint above him.

The oddity of its architecture, together with its situation at a point where a little silence is peculiarly grateful, makes this church a favourite of mine, but there are many buildings in Venice which are more beautiful.

Opposite, diagonally, is one of the depressing sights of Venice, a church turned into a cinema.

Leaving S. Salvatore by the main door and turning to the left, we soon come (past a hat shop which offers "Rooswelts" at 2.45 each), to the Goldoni Theatre. Leaving San Salvatore by the same door and turning to the right, we come to Goldoni himself, in bronze, in the midst of the Campo S. Bartolommeo: the little brisk observant satirist upon whom Browning wrote the admirably critical sonnet which I quote earlier in this book.

The comedies of Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) still hold the Italian stage, but so far as translations can tell me they are very far from justifying any comparison between himself and Moliere. Goldoni's _Autobiography_ is not a very entertaining work, but it is told with the engaging minuteness which seems to have been a Venetian trait.

The church of S. Bartolommeo contains altar pieces by Giorgione's pupil, Sebastian del Piombo, but there is no light by which to see them.

It was in this campo that Mr. Howells had rooms before he married and blossomed out on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, and his description of the life here is still so good and so true, although fifty years have pa.s.sed, that I make bold to quote it, not only to enrich my own pages, but in the hope that the tastes of the urbane American book which I give now and then may send readers to it. The campo has changed little except that the conquering Austrians have gone and Goldoni's statue is now here. Mr.

Howells thus describes it: "Before the winter pa.s.sed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near the Piazza to quarters on the Campo San Bartolommeo, through which the busiest street in Venice pa.s.ses, from S.

Mark's to the Rialto Bridge. It is one of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke, and the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society.

"Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent.

Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground; and each within its limits compa.s.ses an apothecary's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffe more or less brilliant, a greengrocer's and fruiterer's, a family grocery--nay, there is also a second-hand merchant's shop where you buy and sell every kind of worn out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty certainly a wood carver's and gilder's, while without a barber's shop no campo could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day.

In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolommeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto market.

"Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamour for the absence of quant.i.ty and a.s.sortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt b.u.t.tons and a paper of hair pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils.

Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the gla.s.s; charlatans who advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the crowd--these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolommeo.

"In San Bartolommeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above and shops below. The ground floor is devoted to the small commerce of various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied by tradesmen's families; and on the third or fourth is the appartimento signorile. From the balconies of these stories hung the cages of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots, which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the crowd.

All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the cas.e.m.e.nts was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By all the odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief, and a bright coloured gown, and wearing long dangling earrings of yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over the balcony rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made love at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in the crowd. On another balcony a lady sat; at the window of still another house, a damsel now looked out upon the square, and now gave a glance into the room, in the evident direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbours have the amiable custom of studying one another's features through opera-gla.s.ses; but I could not persuade myself to use this means of learning the mirror's response to the damsel's constant "Fair or not?"

being a believer in every woman's right to look well a little way off. I shunned whatever trifling temptation there was in the case, and turned again to the campo beneath--to the placid dandies about the door of the cafe; to the tide of pa.s.sers-by from the Merceria; the smooth shaven Venetians of other days, and the bearded Venetians of these; the dark-eyed white-faced Venetians, hooped in cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly clad, and moving with southern grace; the files of heavily burdened soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily about with their swords at their sides, and in their spotless Austrian uniforms."

Having reached Goldoni's statue there are two courses open to us if we are in a mood for walking. One is to cross the Rialto bridge and join the stream which always fills the narrow busy calli that run parallel with the Grand Ca.n.a.l to the Frari. The other is to leave this campo at the far end, at Goldoni's back, and join the stream which is always flowing backwards and forwards along the new Via Vittorio Emmanuele.

[Ill.u.s.tration: S. CHRISTOPHER, S. JEROME AND S. AUGUSTINE FROM THE PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI _In the Church of S. Giov. Crisostomo_]

Let me describe both routes, beginning with the second. A few yards after leaving the campo we come on the right to the little church of S.

Giovanni Crisostomo where there are two unusually delightful pictures: a Sebastiano del Piombo and a Bellini, with a keen little sacristan who enjoys displaying their beauties and places you in the best light. The Bellini is his last signed work, and was painted when the old man was in his eighty-fifth year. The restorer has been at it, but not to its detriment. S. Christopher, S. Jerome, and S. Augustine are sweetly together in a delectable country; S. Christopher (as the photograph on the opposite page shows) bearing perhaps the most charming Christ Child of all, with his thumb in his mouth. The Piombo--another company of saints--over the high altar, is a fine mellow thing with a very Giorgionesque figure of the Baptist dominating it, and a lovely Giorgionesque landscape spreading away. The picture (which I reproduce opposite page 116) is known to be the last which Sebastiano painted before he went to Rome and gave up Giorgione's influence for Michael Angelo's. It has been suggested that Giorgione merely supplied the design; but I think one might safely go further and affirm that the painting of the right side was his too and the left Piombo's. How far Piombo departed from Giorgione's spell and came under the other may be seen in our National Gallery by any visitor standing before No. 1--his "Raising of Lazarus". Very little of the divine chromatic melody of Castel Franco there!

S. Giovanni Crisostomo has also two fine reliefs, one by Tullio Lombardi with a sweet little Virgin (who, however, is no mother) in it, and the twelve Apostles gathered about. The sacristan, by the way, is also an amateur artist, and once when I was there he had placed his easel just by the side door and was engaged in laboriously copying in pencil Veronese's "Christ in the House of Levi" (the original being a mile away, at the Accademia) from an old copper plate, whistling the while.

Having no india-rubber he corrected his errors either with a penknife or a dirty thumb. Art was then more his mistress than Pecunia, for on this occasion he never left his work, although more than one Baedeker was flying the red signal of largesse.

Continuing on our way we come soon to a point where the Calle Dolfin meets a ca.n.a.l at right angles, with a large notice tablet like a gravestone to keep us from falling into the water. It bears an ancient, and I imagine, obsolete, injunction with regard to the sale of bread by unauthorized persons. Turning to the left we are beneath the arcade of the house of the ill-fated Marino Faliero, the Doge who was put to death for treason, as I have related elsewhere. It is now shops and tenements.

Opposite is the church of SS. Apostoli, which is proud of possessing an altar-piece by Tiepolo which some think his finest work, and of which the late John Addington Symonds wrote in terms of excessive rapture. It represents the last communion of S. Lucy, whose eyes were put out. Her eyes are here, in fact, on a plate. No one can deny the masterly drawing and grouping of the picture, but, like all Tiepolo's work, it leaves me cold.

I do not suggest the diversion at this moment; but from SS. Apostoli one easily gains the Fondamenta Nuovo, on the way pa.s.sing through a rather opener Venice where ca.n.a.ls are completely forgotten. Hereabouts are two or three popular drinking places with gardens, and on one Sunday afternoon I sat for some time in the largest of them--the Trattoria alla Libra--watching several games of bowls--the giuocho di bocca--in full swing. The Venetian workman--and indeed the Italian workman generally--is never so happy as when playing this game, or perhaps he is happiest when--ball in hand--he discusses with his allies various lines of strategy. The Giudecca is another stronghold of the game, every little bar there having a stamped-down bowling alley at the back of it.

The longest direct broad walk in Venice--longer than the Riva--begins at SS. Apostoli and extends to the railway station. The name of the street is the Via Vittorio Emmanuele, and in order to obtain it many ca.n.a.ls had to be filled-in. To the loss of ca.n.a.ls the visitor is never reconciled.

Wherever one sees the words Rio Terra before the name of a calle, one knows that it is a filled-in ca.n.a.l. For perhaps the best example of the picturesque loss which this filling-in entails one should seek the Rio Terra delle Colonne, which runs out of the Calle dei Fabri close to the Piazza of S. Mark. When this curved row of pillars was at the side of water it must have been impressive indeed.

And now we must return to the Goldoni statue to resume that other itinerary over the Rialto bridge, which is as much the centre of Venice by day as S. Mark's Square is by night. In another chapter I speak of the bridge as seen from the Grand Ca.n.a.l, which it so n.o.bly leaps. More attractive is the Grand Ca.n.a.l as seen from it; and the visitor to Venice should spend much time leaning upon the parapet of one side and the other at the highest point. He will have it for the most part to himself, for the Venetians prefer the middle way between the shops.

These shops are, however, very dull--princ.i.p.ally cheap clothiers and inferior jewellers--and the two outer tracks are better. From here may best be seen the facade of the central Post Office, once the Fondaco dei Tedeschi splendid with the frescoes of Giorgione and t.i.tian. The frescoes have gone and it is now re-faced with stucco. From here, too, the beautiful palace of the Camerlenghi at the edge of the Erberia is most easily studied. The Rialto bridge itself exerts no spell. It does not compare in interest or charm with the Ponte Vecchio of Florence.

The busiest and noisiest part of Venice begins at the further foot of the bridge, for here are the markets, crowded by housewives with their bags or baskets, and a thousand busy wayfarers.

The little church of the market-place--the oldest in Venice--is S.

Giacomo di Rialto, but I have never been able to find it open. Commerce now washes up to its walls and practically engulfs it. A garden is on its roof, and its clock has stopped permanently at four.

It was in this campo that the merchants anciently met: here, in the district of the Rialto, and not on the bridge itself, as many readers suppose, did Antonio transact his business with one Shylock a Jew. There are plenty of Jews left in Venice; in fact, I have been told that they are gradually getting possession of the city, and judging by their ability in that direction elsewhere, I can readily believe it; but I saw none in the least like the Shylock of the English stage, although I spent some time both in the New Ghetto and the Old by the Cannaregio.

All unwilling I once had the company of a small Jewish boy in a gaberdine for the whole way from the New Ghetto to the steamboat station of S. Toma, his object in life being to acquire for nothing a coin similar to one which I had given to another boy who had been really useful. If he avowed once that he was a starving Jewish boy and I was a millionaire, he said it fifty times. Every now and then he paused for an anxious second to throw a somersault. But I was obdurate, and embarking on the steamer, left the two falsehoods to fight it out.

The two Ghettos, by the way, are not interesting; no traveller, missing them, need feel that he has been in Venice in vain.

At the other end of the Rialto campo, opposite the church, is the famous hunchback, the Gobbo of the Rialto, who supports a rostrum from which the laws of the Republic were read to the people, after they had been read, for a wider audience, from the porphyry block at the corner of S.

Mark's.

Leaving the Gobbo on our left and pa.s.sing from the campo at the right-hand corner, we come to the great arcaded markets for fruit and vegetables, and further to the wholesale and retail fish markets, all of which are amusing to loiter in, particularly in the early hours of the morning. To the Erberia are all the fruit-laden barges bound, chiefly from Malamocco, the short cut from the lagoon being through the Rio del Palazzo beneath the Bridge of Sighs and into the Grand Ca.n.a.l, just opposite us, by the Post Office. The fruit market is busy twice a day, in the early morning and in the late afternoon; the fish market in the morning only.

[Ill.u.s.tration: S. MARIA GLORIOSA DEI FRARI]

The vegetables and fruit differ according to the seasons; the fish are always the same. In the autumn, when the quay is piled high with golden melons and flaming tomatoes, the sight is perhaps the most splendid.

The strangest of the fish to English eyes are the great cuttle-fish, which are sold in long slices. It strikes one as a refinement of symmetrical irony that the ink which exudes from these fish and stains everything around should be used for indicating what their price is.

Here also are great joints of tunny, huge red scarpenna, sturgeon, mullet, live whole eels (to prove to me how living they were, a fishmonger one morning allowed one to bite him) and eels in writhing sections, aragosta, or langouste, and all the little Adriatic and lagoon fish--the scampi and shrimps and calimari--spread out in little wet heaps on the leaves of the plane-tree. One sees them here lying dead; one can see them also, alive and swimming about, in the aquarium on the Lido, where the prettiest creatures are the little cavalli marini, or sea horses, roosting in the tiny submarine branches.

From all the restlessness and turmoil of these markets there is escape in the church of S. Giovanni Elemosinario, a few yards along the Ruga Vecchia di San Giovanni on the left. Here one may sit and rest and collect one's thoughts and then look at a fine rich altar-piece by Pordenone--S. Sebastian, S. Rocco, and S. Catherine. The lion of the church is a t.i.tian, but it is not really visible.

As typical a walk as one can take in democratic Venice is that from this church to the Frari, along the Ruga Vecchia di San Giovanni, parallel with the Grand Ca.n.a.l. I have been here often both by day and by night, and it is equally characteristic at either time. Every kind of shop is here, including two old book-shops, one of which (at the corner of the Campiello dei Meloni) is well worth rummaging in. A gentle old lady sits in the corner so quietly as to be invisible, and scattered about are quite a number of English books among them, when I was last there, a surprising proportion of American minor verse. Another interesting shop here supplies Venetians with the small singing birds which they love so much, a cage by a window being the rule rather than the exception; and it was hereabouts that an old humorous greengrocer once did his voluble best to make me buy a couple of grilli, or crickets, in a tiny barred prison, to make their shrill mysterious music for me. But I resisted.

At night, perhaps, is this walk best, for several very popular wine shops for gondoliers are hereabouts, one or two quite large, with rows of barrels along the walls; and it is good to see every seat full, and an arm round many a waist, and everybody merry. Such a clatter of tongues as comes from these taverns is not to be beaten; and now and then a tenor voice or a mandolin adds a grace.

CHAPTER XXII

S. ROCCO AND TINTORETTO

The Scuola di S. Rocco--Defective lighting--A compet.i.tion of artists--The life of the Virgin--A dramatic Annunciation--Ruskin's a.n.a.lysis--S. Mary of Egypt--The upper hall--"The Last Supper"--"Moses striking the rock"--"The Crucifixion"--A masterpiece--Tintoretto's career--t.i.tian and Michel Angelo--A dramatist of the Bible--Realistic carvings--The life of S. Rocco--A humorist in wood--A model council chamber--A case of reliquaries--The church of S. Rocco--Giorgione or t.i.tian?

There are Tintorettos everywhere in Venice, in addition to the immense canvases in the Doges' Palace, but I imagine that were we able to ask the great man the question, Where would he choose to be judged? he would reply, "At the Scuola di S. Rocco,"--with perhaps a reservation in favour of "The Miracle of S. Mark" at the Accademia, and possibly the "Presentation" (for I feel he must have loved that work) at the Madonna dell'Orto, and "The Marriage in Cana," that fascinating scene, in the Salute. In the superb building of the S. Rocco Scuola he reigns alone, and there his "Crucifixion" is.

The Scuola and the church, in white stone, hide behind the lofty red-brick apse of the Frari. The Scuola's facade has, in particular, the confidence of a successful people. Within, it is magnificent too, while to its architectural glories it adds no fewer than six-and-fifty Tintorettos; many of which, however, can be only dimly seen, for the great Bartolommeo Bon, who designed the Scuola, forgot that pictures require light. Nor was he unique among Venice's builders in this matter; they mostly either forgot it or allowed their jealousy of a sister art to influence them. "Light, more light," is as much the cry of the groping enthusiast for painting in this fair city, as it was of the dying Goethe.

The story of Tintoretto's connexion with the Scuola ill.u.s.trates his decision and swiftness. The Scuola having been built, where, under the banner of S. Rocco, a philanthropical confraternity might meet to confer as to schemes of social amelioration, it was, in 1560, decided to invite the more prominent artists to make proposals as to its decoration.

Tintoretto, then forty-two, Paul Veronese and Schiavone were among them.

They were to meet in the Refectory and display their sketches; and on a given day all were there. Tintoretto stood aside while the others unfolded their designs, which were examined and criticized. Then came his turn, but instead of producing a roll he twitched a covering, which none had noticed, and revealed in the middle of the ceiling the finished painting of S. Rocco in glory. A scene of amazement and perplexity ensued. The other artists, accepting defeat, retired from the field; the authorities gazed in a fine state of confusion over the unconventional foreshortening of the saint and his angel. They also pointed out that Tintoretto had broken the condition of the compet.i.tion in providing a painting when only sketches were required. "Very well," he said, "I make you a present of it." Since by the rules of the confraternity all gifts offered to it had to be accepted, he thus won his footing; and the rest was easy. Two or three years later he was made a brother of the Order, at fifty pounds a year, in return for which he was each year to provide three paintings; and this salary he drew for seventeen years, until the great work was complete.