A Wanderer in Venice Part 26

CHAPTER XXVIII

GIORGIONE

The Palazzo Giovanelli--A lovely picture--A superb innovator--Pictures for houses--_The Tempest_--Byron's criticism--Giorgione and the experts--Vasari's estimate--Leonardo da Vinci--The Giorgionesque fire--A visit to Castel Franco--The besieging children--The Sacristan--A beautiful altar-piece--Pictures at Padua--Giorgiones still to be discovered.

It will happen now and then that you will be in your gondola, with the afternoon before you, and will not have made up your mind where to go.

It is then that I would have you remember the Palazzo Giovanelli. "The Palazzo Giovanelli, Rio di Noale," say to your gondolier; because this palace is not only open to the public but it contains the most sensuously beautiful picture in Venice--Giorgione's "Tempest".

Giorgione, as I have said, is the one transcendentally great Venetian painter whom it is impossible, for certain, to find in any public gallery or church in the city of his adoption. There is a romantic scene at the Seminario next the Salute, an altar-piece in S. Rocco, another altar-piece in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, in each of which he may have had a hand. But none of these is Giorgione essential. For the one true work of this wistful beauty-adoring master we must seek the Palazzo Giovanelli.

You can enter the palace either from the water, or on foot at the Salizzada Santa Fosca, No. 2292. A ma.s.sive custodian greets you and points to a winding stair. This you ascend and are met by a typical Venetian man-servant. Of the palace itself, which has been recently modernized, I have nothing to say. There are both magnificent and pretty rooms in it, and a little boudoir has a quite charming floor, and furniture covered in ivory silk. But everything is in my mind subordinated to the Giorgione: so much so that I have difficulty in writing that word Giovanelli at all. The pen will trace only the letters of the painter's name: it is to me the Palazzo Giorgione.

The picture, which I reproduce on the opposite page, is on an easel just inside a door and you come upon it suddenly. Not that any one could ever be completely ready for it; but you pa.s.s from one room to the next, and there it is--all green and blue and glory. Remember that Giorgione was not only a Venetian painter but in some ways the most remarkable and powerful of them all; remember that his fellow-pupil t.i.tian himself worshipped his genius and profited by it, and that he even influenced his master Bellini; and then remember that all the time you have been in Venice you have seen nothing that was unquestionably authentic and at the most only three pictures that might be his. It is as though Florence had but one Botticelli, or London but one Turner, or Madrid but one Velasquez. And then you turn the corner and find this!

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TEMPEST FROM THE PAINTING BY GIORGIONE _In the Giovanelli Palace_]

The Venetian art that we have hitherto seen has been almost exclusively the handmaid of religion or the State. At the Ducal Palace we found the great painters exalting the Doges and the Republic; even the other picture in Venice which I a.s.sociate with this for its pure beauty--Tintoretto's "Bacchus and Ariadne"--was probably an allegory of Venetian success. In the churches and at the Accademia we have seen the masters ill.u.s.trating the Testaments Old and New. All their work has been for altars or church walls or large public places. We have seen nothing for a domestic wall but little mannered Longhis, without any imagination, or topographical Ca.n.a.lettos and Guardis. And then we turn a corner and are confronted by this!--not only a beautiful picture and a non-religious picture but a picture painted to hang on a wall.

That was one of Giorgione's innovations: to paint pictures for private gentlemen. Another, was to paint pictures of sheer loveliness with no concern either with Scripture or history; and this is one of his loveliest. It has all kinds of faults--and it is perfect. The drawing is not too good; the painting is not too good; that broken pillar is both commonplace and foolish; and yet the work is perfect because a perfect artist made it. It is beautiful and mysterious and a little sad, all at once, just as an evening landscape can be, and it is unmistakably the work of one who felt beauty so deeply that his joyousness left him and the melancholy that comes of the knowledge of transitoriness took its place. Hence there is only one word that can adequately describe it and that is Giorgionesque.

The picture is known variously as "The Tempest," for a thunderstorm is working up; as "The Soldier and the Gipsy," as "Adrastus and Hypsipyle,"

and as "Giorgione's Family". In the last case the soldier watching the woman would be the painter himself (who never married) and the woman the mother of his child. Whatever we call it, the picture remains the same: profoundly beautiful, profoundly melancholy. A sense of impending calamity informs it. A lady observing it remarked to me, "Each is thinking thoughts unknown to the other"; and they are thoughts of unhappy morrows.

This, the Giovanelli Giorgione, which in 1817 was in the Manfrini palace and was known as the "Famiglia di Giorgione," was the picture in all Venice--indeed the picture in all the world--which most delighted Byron.

"To me," he wrote, "there are none like the Venetian--above all, Giorgione." _Beppo_ has some stanzas on it. Thus:--

They've pretty faces yet, those same Venetians, Black eyes, arched brows, and sweet expressions still Such as of old were copied from the Grecians, In ancient arts by moderns mimicked ill; And like so many Venuses of t.i.tian's (The best's at Florence--see it, if ye will), They look when leaning over the balcony, Or stepped from out a picture by Giorgione,

Whose tints are Truth and Beauty at their best; And when you to Manfrini's palace go, That picture (howsoever fine the rest) Is loveliest to my mind of all the show; It may perhaps be also to _your_ zest And that's the cause I rhyme upon it so, 'Tis but a portrait of his Son and Wife, And self, but _such_ a Woman! Love in life;

Love in full life and length, not love ideal, No, nor ideal beauty, that fine name, But something better still, so very real, That the sweet Model must have been the same; A thing that you would purchase, beg, or steal, Wer't not impossible, besides a shame; The face recalls some face, as 'twere with pain.

You once have seen, but ne'er will see again;

One of those forms which flit by us, when we Are young, and fix our eyes on every face: And, oh! the Loveliness at times we see In momentary gliding, the soft grace, The Youth, the Bloom, the Beauty which agree, In many a nameless being we retrace Whose course and home we knew not nor shall know.

Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below.

The Giovanelli picture is one of the paintings which all the critics agree to give to Giorgione, from Sir Sidney Colvin in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ to the very latest monographer, Signor Lionello Venturi, whose work, _Giorgione Giorgionismo_, is a monument to the diversity of expert opinion. Giorgione, short as was his life, lived at any rate for thirty years and was known near and far as a great painter, and it is to be presumed that the work that he produced is still somewhere. But Signor Lionello Venturi reduces his output to the most meagre dimensions; the conclusion being that wherever his work may be, it is anywhere but in the pictures that bear his name. The result of this critic's heavy labours is to reduce the certain Giorgiones to thirteen, among which is the S. Rocco altar-piece. With great daring he goes on to say who painted all the others: Sebastian del Piombo this, Andrea Schiavone that, Romanino another, t.i.tian another, and so forth. It may be so, but if one reads also the other experts--Sir Sidney Colvin, Morelli, Justi, the older Venturi, Mr. Berenson, Mr. Charles Ricketts, Mr. Herbert Cook--one is simply in a whirl. For all differ. Mr. Cook, for example, is lyrically rapturous about the two Padua panels, of which more anon, and their authenticity; Mr. Ricketts gives the Pitti "Concert" and the Caterina Cornaro to t.i.tian without a tremor. Our own National Gallery "S. Liberate" is not mentioned by some at all; the Paris "Concert Champetre," in which most of the judges believe so absolutely, Signor Lionello Venturi gives to Piombo. The Giovanelli picture and the Castel Franco altar-piece alone remain above suspicion in every book.

Having visited the Giovanelli Palace, I found myself restless for this rare spirit, and therefore arranged a little diversion to Castel Franco, where he was born and where his great altar-piece is preserved.

But first let us look at Giorgione's career. Giorgio Barbarelli was born at Castel Franco in 1477 or 1478. The name by which we know him signifies the great Giorgio and was the reward of his personal charm and unusual genius. Very little is known of his life, Vasari being none too copious when it comes to the Venetians. What we do know, however, is that he was very popular, not only with other artists but with the fair, and in addition to being a great painter was an accomplished musician.

His master was Giovanni Bellini, who in 1494, when we may a.s.sume that Giorgione, being sixteen, was beginning to paint, was approaching seventy.

Giorgione, says Vasari in an exultant pa.s.sage, was "so enamoured of beauty in nature that he cared only to draw from life and to represent all that was fairest in the world around him". He had seen, says the same authority, "certain works from the hand of Leonardo which were painted with extraordinary softness, and thrown into powerful relief, as is said, by extreme darkness of the shadows, a manner which pleased him so much that he ever after continued to imitate it, and in oil painting approached very closely to the excellence of his model. A zealous admirer of the good in art, Giorgione always selected for representation the most beautiful objects that he could find, and these he treated in the most varied manner: he was endowed by nature with highly felicitous qualities, and gave to all that he painted, whether in oil or fresco, a degree of life, softness, and harmony (being more particularly successful in the shadows) which caused all the more eminent artists to confess that he was born to infuse spirit into the forms of painting, and they admitted that he copied the freshness of the living form more exactly than any other painter, not of Venice only, but of all other places."

Leonardo, who was born in 1452, was Giorgione's senior by a quarter of a century and one of the greatest names--if not quite the greatest name--in art when Giorgione was beginning to paint. A story says that they met when Leonardo was in Venice in 1500. One cannot exactly derive any of Giorgione's genius from Leonardo, but the fame of the great Lombardy painter was in the air, and we must remember that his master Verrocchio, after working in Venice on the Colleoni statue, had died there in 1488, and that Andrea da Solario, Leonardo's pupil and imitator, was long in Venice too. Leonardo and Giorgione share a profound interest in the dangerous and subtly alluring; but the difference is this, that we feel Leonardo to have been the master of his romantic emotions, while Giorgione suggests that for himself they could be too much.

It is not, however, influence upon Giorgione that is most interesting, but Giorgione's influence upon others. One of his great achievements was the invention of the _genre_ picture. He was the first lyrical painter: the first to make a canvas represent a single mood, much as a sonnet does. He was the first to combine colour and pattern to no other end but sheer beauty. The picture had a subject, of course, but the subject no longer mattered. Il fuoco Giorgionesco--the Giorgionesque fire--was the phrase invented to describe the new wonder he brought into painting. A comparison of Venetian art before Giorgione and after shows instantly how this flame kindled. Not only did Giorgione give artists a liberty they had never enjoyed before, but he enriched their palettes. His colours burned and glowed. Much of the gorgeousness which we call t.i.tianesque was born in the brain of Giorgione, t.i.tian's fellow-worker, and (for t.i.tian's birth date is uncertain: either 1477 or 1487) probably his senior. You may see the influence at work in our National Gallery: Nos. 41, 270, 35, and 635 by t.i.tian would probably have been far different but for Giorgione. So stimulating was Giorgione's genius to t.i.tian, who was his companion in Bellini's studio, that there are certain pictures which the critics divide impartially between the two, chief among them the "Concert" at the Pitti; while together they decorated the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Ca.n.a.l. It is a.s.sumed that t.i.tian finished certain of Giorgione's works when he died in 1510.

The plague which killed Giorgione killed also 20,000 other Venetians, and sixty-six years later, in another visitation of the scourge, t.i.tian also died of it.

Castel Franco is five-and-twenty miles from Venice, but there are so few trains that it is practically a day's excursion there and back. I sat in the train with four commercial travellers and watched the water give way to maize, until chancing to look up for a wider view there were the blue mountains ahead of us, with clouds over them and here and there a patch of snow. Castel Franco is one of the last cities of the plain; Browning's Asolo is on the slope above it, only four or five miles away.

The station being reached at last--for even in Italy journeys end--I rejected the offers of two cabmen, one cabwoman, and one bus driver, and walked. There was no doubt as to the direction, with the campanile of the duomo as a beacon. For a quarter of a mile the road is straight and narrow; then it broadens into an open s.p.a.ce and Castel Franco appears.

It is a castle indeed. All the old town is within vast crumbling red walls built on a mound with a moat around them. Civic zeal has trimmed the mound into public "grounds," and the moat is lively with ornamental ducks; while a hundred yards farther rises the white statue of Castel Franco's greatest son, no other than Giorgione himself, a dashing cavalier-like gentleman with a brush instead of a rapier. If he were like this, one can believe the story of his early death--little more than thirty--which came about through excessive love of a lady, she having taken the plague and he continuing to visit her.

Having examined the statue I penetrated the ramparts to the little town, in the midst of which is the church. It was however locked, as a band of children hastened to tell me: intimating also that if anyone on earth knew how to effect an entrance they were the little devils in question.

So I was led to a side door, the residence of a fireman, and we pulled a bell, and in an instant out came the fireman to extinguish whatever was burning; but on learning my business he instantly became transformed into the gentlest of sacristans, returned for his key, and led me, followed by the whole pack of children, by this time greatly augmented, to a door up some steps on the farther side of the church. The pack was for coming in too, but a few brief yet sufficient threats from the sacristan acted so thoroughly that not only did they melt away then but were not there when I came out--this being in Italy unique as a merciful disappearance. More than merciful, miraculous, leading one to believe that Giorgione's picture really has supernatural powers.

The picture is on a wall behind the high altar, curtained. The fireman-sacristan pulled away the curtain, handed me a pair of opera gla.s.ses and sat down to watch me, a task in which he was joined by another man and a boy who had been cleaning the church. There they sat, the three of them, all huddled together, saying nothing, but staring hard at me (as I could feel) with gimlet eyes; while a few feet distant I sat too, peering through the gla.s.ses at Giorgione's masterpiece, of which I give a reproduction on the opposite page.

It is very beautiful; it grows more beautiful; but it does not give me such pleasure as the Giovanelli pastoral. I doubt if Giorgione had the altar-piece temperament. He was not for churches; and indeed there were so many brushes for churches, that his need never have been called upon.

He was wholly individual, wistful, pleasure-seeking and pleasure-missing, conscious of the brevity of life and the elusiveness of joy; of the earth earthy; a kind of Keats in colour, with, as one critic--I think Mr. Ricketts--has pointed out, something of Rossetti too. Left to himself he would have painted only such idylls as the Giovanelli picture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALTAR-PIECE BY GIORGIONE _At Castel Franco_]

Yet this altar-piece is very beautiful, and, as I say, it grows more beautiful as you look at it, even under such conditions as I endured, and even after much restoration. The lines and pattern are Giorgione's, howsoever the re-painter may have toiled. The two saints are so kind and reasonable (and never let it be forgotten that we may have, in our National Gallery, one of the studies for S. Liberale), and so simple and natural in their movements and position; the Madonna is at once so sweet and so little of a mother; the landscape on the right is so very Giorgionesque, with all the right ingredients--the sea, the glade, the lovers, and the glow. If anything disappoints it is the general colour scheme, and in a Giorgione for that to disappoint is amazing. Let us then blame the re-painter. The influence of Giovanni Bellini in the arrangement is undoubtable; but the painting was Giorgione's own and his the extra touch of humanity.

Another day I went as far afield as Padua, also with Giorgione in mind, for Baedeker, I noticed, gives one of his pictures there a star. Of Padua I want to write much, but here, at this moment, Giotto being forgotten, it is merely as a casket containing two (or more) Giorgiones that the city exists. From Venice it is distant half an hour by fast trains, or by way of Fusina, two hours. I went on the occasion of this Giorgione pilgrimage by fast train, and returned in the little tram to Fusina and so, across the lagoon, into Venice, with the sun behind me, and the red bricks of Venice flinging it back.

The picture gallery at Padua is crowded with pictures of saints and the Madonna, few of them very good. But that is of no moment, since it has also three isolated screens, upon each of which is inscribed the magic name. The three screens carry four pictures--two long and narrow, evidently panels from a ca.s.sone; the others quite small. The best is No.

50, one of the two long narrow panels which together purport to represent the story of Adonis and Erys but do not take the duty of historian very seriously. Both are lovely, with a mellow sunset lighting the scene. Here and there in the glorious landscape occurs a nymph, the naked flesh of whom burns with the reflected fire; here and there are lovers, and among the darkling trees beholders of the old romance. The picture remains in the vision much as rich autumnal prospects can.

The other screen is more popular because the lower picture on it yet again shows us Leda and her uncomfortable paramour--that favourite mythological legend. The little pictures are not equal to the larger ones, and No. 50 is by far the best, but all are beautiful, and all are exotics here. Do you suppose, however, that Signor Lionello Venturi will allow Giorgione to have painted a stroke to them? Not a bit of it. They come under the head of Giorgionismo. The little ones, according to him, are the work of Anonimo; the larger ones were painted by Romanino. But whether or not Giorgione painted any or all, the irrefutable fact remains that but for his genius and influence they would never have existed. He showed the way. The eyes of that beautiful sad pagan shine wistfully through.

According to Vasari, Giorgione, like his master Bellini, painted the Doge Leonardo Loredan, but the picture, where is it? And where are others mentioned by Vasari and Ridolfi? So fervid a lover of nature and his art must have painted much; yet there is but little left now. Can there be discoveries of Giorgiones still to be made? One wonders that it is possible for any of the glowing things from that hand to lie hidden: their colours should burn through any acc.u.mulation of rubbish, and now and then their pulses be heard.

CHAPTER XXIX AND LAST

ISLAND AFTERNOONS' ENTERTAINMENTS. II: S. LAZZARO AND CHIOGGIA

An Armenian monastery--The black beards--An attractive cicerone--The refectory--Byron's Armenian studies--A little museum--A pleasant library--Tireless enthusiasm--The garden--Old age--The two campanili--Armenian proverbs--Chioggia--An amphibious town--The repulsiveness of roads--The return voyage--Porto Secco--Malamocco--An evening scene--The end.

As one approaches the Lido from Venice one pa.s.ses on the right two islands. The first is a grim enough colony, for thither are the male lunatics of Venice deported; but the second, with a graceful eastern campanile or minaret, a cool garden and warm red buildings, is alluring and serene, being no other than the island of S. Lazzaro, on which is situated the monastery of the Armenian Mechitarists, a little company of scholarly monks who collect old MSS, translate, edit and print their learned lucubrations, and instruct the young in religion and theology.

Furthermore, the island is famous in our literature for having afforded Lord Byron a refuge, when, after too deep a draught of worldly beguilements, he decided to become a serious recluse, and for a brief while buried himself here, studied Armenian, and made a few translations: enough at any rate to provide himself with a cloistral interlude on which he might ever after reflect with pride and the wistful backward look of a born scholiast to whom the fates had been unkind.

According to a little history of the island which one of the brothers has written, S. Lazzaro was once a leper settlement. Then it fell into disuse, and in 1717 an Armenian monk of substance, one Mekhitar of Sebaste, was permitted to purchase it and here surround himself with companions. Since then the life of the little community has been easy and tranquil.

The extremely welcome visitor is received at the island stairs by a porter in uniform and led by him along the sunny cloisters and their very green garden to a waiting-room hung thickly with modern paintings: indifferent Madonnas and views of the city and the lagoon. By and by in comes a black-bearded father, in a ca.s.sock. All the Mechitarists, it seems, have black beards and ca.s.socks and wide-brimmed beavers; and the young seminarists, whom one meets now and then in little bunches in Venice, are broad-brimmed, black-coated, and give promise of being hairy too. The father, who is genial and smiling, asks if we understand French, and deploring the difficulty of the English language, which has so many ways of p.r.o.nouncing a single termination, whereas the Armenian never exceeds one, leads the way.

The first thing to admire is the garden once more, with its verdant cedars of Lebanon and a Judas-tree bent beneath its blood. On a seat in the midst another bearded father beneath a wide hat is reading a proof.