Théophile Gautier

Travels in Italy (Voyage en Italie, 1850)

XVI to XX - The Accademia

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Part XVI: The Arsenale di Venezia – Fusina.
Part XVII: The Accademia di Belle Arti.
Part XVIII: The Accademia continued.
Part XIX: The Accademia further continued.
Part XX: The Streets – The Austrian Emperor’s Birthday Celebrations.

Part XVI: The Arsenale di Venezia – Fusina

Venice - View from the Island of St. George

The weather was fine and, seeing the sky so pleasing, we fancied taking our lunch at the Free Port, on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and visiting, at the same time, its beautiful Palladian church, whose red bell-tower rises to such good effect midst the lagoon. The facade was retouched a little by Vincenzo Scamozzi; the interior contains, in addition to the obligatory complement of vast paintings by Tintoretto, that robust workman who painted acres of masterpieces, and various Greek marble columns, gilded altars, and statues in stone and bronze, an admirable choir of carved wood, representing various scenes in the life of Saint Benedict, and recalling Alonso Berruguete’s wonderful wood sculptures, in the cathedrals of Spain. This fine work was created, with delightful artistry and incredible patience, by Albert van den Brulle, one of those talented artists who pass unknown amidst the superfetation of geniuses produced by preceding centuries, the sheer number of whom exceeds the capacity of human memory. A charming bronze statuette, set on the chancel balustrade, on the right as one enters through the porch, and representing Saint George, offers the unique feature of bearing the closest of likenesses to Lord Byron. This portrait I found striking, in its anticipatory and, so to speak, prophetic appearance. Moreover, one could not witness anything more elegant, more disdainfully aristocratic, more English in a word, than that head of a Greek saint, lips contracted in the mocking manner of the author of Don Juan.

I know not whether the noble lord, who spent much time in Venice and who must necessarily have visited the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, noticed this unique resemblance, which doubtless, would have left him feeling flattered.

Behind the church, on the tip of the island facing the Piazzetta, where the Austrians have established a cannon-battery, are the warehouses and basins of the Free Port. One traverses, after navigating the gate guarded by customs officers, various courtyards surrounded by tallish arcades, and filled with neglected growth, and arrives at a sort of restaurant and osteria, a meeting-place for sailors and gondoliers, who savour the pleasure of drinking duty-free wine there, much as the workmen in Paris exit the barriers to get drunk.

Venice - The Piazzetta of St. Mark, with a view of the Island of St. George

The restaurant is always crowded with people, and customers are spread about, outside, on benches around wooden tables, the shadow of the church serving as an awning. Rascals, pushing wheelbarrows loaded with bales, circulate among the drinkers, whom they ogle with an envious air, and beside whom they will go and sit, once they have earned the few pence necessary for these frugal orgies.

Opposite the restaurant, a large empty store, arched and whitewashed like a blockhouse, complete with window-grilles, overlooks a deserted alley, and serves as a refuge for folk whom the somewhat turbulent gaiety of the outside world might weary, and for amorous couples seeking solitude.

They serve Adriatic red mullet (triglie), so appetizing, so ruddy, of so fresh and vivacious a hue, that one would eat them just for the pleasure of their colour, were they not, as in fact they are, the best in the world; peaches, grapes, a glass of Cypriot wine, and coffee, make a lunch of exquisite simplicity, and, if chance sets one’s hand on a good Havana cigar, which one smokes lying in one’s gondola while returning to the Riva degli Schiavoni, I see little to detract from one’s happiness, as long as one has received good news, in letters from France, the previous day.

It was early, and, before visiting Fusina, we had time to visit the Arsenal, though not the interior, since access from mere curiosity is now forbidden; but what interested us more than seeing beams, guns, and ships under construction, was the chance to admire the lions of Piraeus, trophies seized by Doge Francesco Morosini in the Peloponnese, during the Great Turkish War.

These two colossi, in Pentelic marble, are devoid of the zoological truth that Antoine-Louis Barye would, doubtless, have given them; but they have something so proud, so grandiose, so divine, if this word can be applied to animals, that they produce a deep impression. Their golden whiteness stands out admirably against the red facade of the Arsenal, composed of a portico populated by statues of some merit, however, the deserted neighbourhood makes them appear like dolls, and their two turrets of red bricks crenelated and bordered with stone, like the houses of the Place Royale, in Paris. Trophies gained from a defeat, yet still retaining their proud, haughty countenance, these lions have the air of retaining, in the city of Saint Mark, a memory of the ancient goddess Cybele; and the great Goethe celebrated them with an epigram that I translate here, asking forgiveness for substituting my weak verse for the Olympian lines of that Jupiter of Weimar:

Two ancient Greek lions stand quiet at the Arsenale;

Seeming small next to the gates, tower, and canal.

If Cybele came down, they would nestle together

Before her, happy to draw her chariot once more.

But now they rest there sadly; a new winged tomcat

Purrs everywhere, and Venice calls him her Patron.

(Goethe: Venetian Epigrams, XX)

The Arsenal, with its immense basins, and its covered dry-dock, by means of which, it is said, a galley could be built, rigged, equipped, and launched in a day, reminded me, in its dreary abandonment, of that of Cartagena in Spain, so active at the time of the ‘invincible’ Armada. It was from here that the fleets departed, en route to conquer Corfu, Zante, Cyprus, Athens, and all the rich and beautiful islands of the Archipelago; but then Venice was Venice, and the lion of Saint Mark, now gloomy and defamed, possessed the nails and teeth of the fiercest heraldic monsters, and, despite Goethe’s epigram, made a superb and triumphant figure on her coats of arms.

Our excursion to Fusina required two oarsmen; Antonio’s companion joined him. We even carried a sail to gain help from the wind which was favourable.

We passed between San Giorgio and the tip of the Giudecca, the side of which we skirted, grazing past its courtyards and gardens full of vines and fruit trees, and entered the lagoon proper.

The sky was perfectly clear, and the light so bright, that the water shone like a sheet of silver and it was impossible to distinguish the edge of the horizon out to sea. The islands appeared like small brown patches, and the distant boats seemed to be sailing through the sky. It really took all one’s reasoning powers to convince oneself they were not floating on air. The eye alone was certainly deceived. The railway viaduct, a gigantic work of engineering that joins Venice to the mainland, and which we could see from afar, on our right, offered the singular effect of a mirage. Its numerous arches, mirrored by blue and calm water of a clarity like that of purest ice, together with their reflections, formed perfect circles, and looked like those strange completely-round Chinese doors, which one sees on Oriental screens; such that the architectural fantasies of Beijing seemed to have influenced this chimerical arcade in the city of the Doges, the city whose silhouette, adorned with numerous bell-towers, and dominated by the Campanile surmounted by its golden angel, presented its flank to the view, in an unexpected and picturesque way.

After passing a fortified islet, having at its tip a charming statue of a Madonna, and a very ugly Austrian sentry, we followed one of those canals traced in the lagoon by a double row of piles, which indicate passages where the water is sufficiently deep; for the lagoon is a kind of salt-marsh, where the flow and the reflux prevent stagnation, but whose depth of water is scarcely more than three or four feet, except in certain places scoured by nature or by humankind, which the posts we have spoken of designate. A few of these posts bear on their summit miniature chapels, crude diptychs fashioned, out of piety, by sailors, which hold images and statuettes of the Madonna. The gracious protector whom the litany calls Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea, is there in the midst of her element. These Madonnas of the waters are somewhat touching. No doubt the divine one is present everywhere, and her protection descends from heaven as quickly as it rises from the sea, but this pious credulity seeking more immediate help, the protectress being present in the midst of peril, has about it something childish, charming, and poetic. I love these Venetian Madonnas eroded by the salty air, and grazed by the wings of passing gulls, and willingly address to them an Ave, María, grátia plena.

The blue line of the Euganean Hills was emerging, vaguely, before us against the soft blue of the sky, more like a vein of darker azure than a terrestrial reality. The trees and houses on the shore, which we could already see, appeared, because of the sloping surface of the water, to be plunged knee-deep in the sea, while the red bell-towers of the islets, diminutive versions of the Campanile, which has the air of a hereditary ruler over its generations of offspring, seemed to rise, in their immediacy, from the flow like great stems of coral. Low ground, covered with a jumble of vegetation, lay before us. We leapt from the gondola. We had arrived at Fusina.

It is at Fusina that the Brenta canals end, from which Venice obtained its water supply before the artesian wells drilled by Joseph Degousée furnished her, by rare good luck, with an abundant flow, to fill the cisterns with clear, limpid, sometimes gaseous water, a glass of which I drank near the convent of the Capuchin fathers (Convento dei Padri Cappuccini), on the Giudecca.

The ravages of war, at Fusina, have not yet been repaired, its houses gutted by cannonballs, ruined by the bombing, luxuriant vegetation staining their shattered walls, white as forgotten bones on a battlefield. A small rustic chapel remains intact, respected by the opposing parties or, as God’s dwelling place, restored more swiftly than those of humankind.

The fertile, humid soil, impregnated with sea salt, thickened by plant detritus, heated by the invigorating sun, allows a whole flora of those charming plants that we call weeds because they are free to flourish in uncultivated abandonment and solitude. In short it is like a virgin forest; barbed spikes of wild oats sway at the edge of ditches; hemlocks agitate their greenish-white umbels above banks of nettles; wild mallows display their curly leaves and pale pink flowers; bindweeds hang silvery bells from the arms of brambles; in the midst of grass up to one’s knees, a thousand nameless flowers sparkle and glitter, flakes of gold, azure, purple scattered there by the great colourist to vary a too-uniform shade of green. On the banks of the canals, water lilies deploy their large viscous plates, and raise their yellow blooms; arrowheads of saggitaria tremble in the wind; loosestrife, with willowy leaves, extends its purple flowers; irises brandish their glaucous daggers; ribboned reeds, and flowering rushes clump together in dense, picturesque disorder. Elderberries, hazelnut bushes, shrubs and trees that no one prunes, cast their shadows riddled with sunlight over that tangled lushness.

Lizards, lively, alert, twitching their tails, traverse, like arrows, the narrow paths where tree-frogs lurk in ruts full of rainwater. Choirs of frogs, with a simultaneous leap, plunge, as you pass, beneath the grasses of the Brenta. As we followed the canal, a beautiful water-snake delivered herself without fear to the most graceful evolutions. She swam quickly, head held high, undulating her supple body; a flash of sapphire crossing the silvery water, she seemed a queen at play in her domain, quite untroubled by our presence. She barely cast a distracted glance of her jewelled eyes towards us, a glance that said: ‘Why is this intruder here’ It was the first time in my life that a reptile seemed pretty. Perhaps that charming snake was descended from the line of the sinuous serpent that seduced Eve with its graceful coils, the brilliance of its colouring, and the eloquence of its speech. As we returned, we found her in the same place, parading like a coquette and, like some Célimène (see Molière’s play ‘Le Misanthrope’) of the canal-bank, seeking to garner a look, or what is more likely, attract a shy lover hiding beneath the watercress, or among the reeds.

Locks and dams, accidentally providing picturesque motifs, retain the waters far and near. Light arches of brick, which serve both as buttresses and bridges, frequently cross the canal, but all half-ruined and tottering, overgrown with vegetation which replaces the stones or bricks that fall, already well-nigh overtaken by Nature, so swift to erase the works of humankind, enduring rather than accepting them. This dereliction is regrettable from the point of view of the engineer, but not at all so for the poet and the artist; if moss eats at the cladding, if climbing plants split the walls, if rushes end up blocking the canal, it suits the scene perfectly.

This uncultivated corner of Fusina delighted me in the extreme, and lodged in my mind far more clearly than places that merited it more. Closing my eyes, I can see yet, in memory’s darkened room, though a year already separates me from the scene, the veins of leaves, the shadows the trees cast on the path, the honey-bees buzzing in the mallow-flowers; a thousand small insignificant details, perfectly sharp and clear.

Probably the pleasant effect of this freshness and solitude was due to our few weeks stay in Venice, where one sees, as I have already said, only marble, sky, and water. Tired, perhaps without realising it, of gliding along in a gondola on the canals, or on foot over the polished slabs of Saint Mark’s Square, we experienced a secret joy in treading the naked breast of Cybele’s mother. Saturated with art, statues, paintings, palaces, drunk on the genius of mankind, we were brought, by a reaction in Nature’s favour, to find this piece of land abandoned to the luxuriance of wild vegetation a delight; we who respect life to the extent of not picking a flower, gathered masses of foliage and huge bouquets to carry back to the Campo San Moisè.

On our return, the gondolier transported us through streets of water that as yet we did not know. Decaying cities are like dying bodies: life, retreating towards the heart, gradually abandons the extremities; the streets become depopulated, neighbourhoods become deserted, the blood no longer has the strength to reach the furthest ends of the veins. The entrance to Venice, as one arrives from Fusina, is heartbreaking in its melancholy. A few rare boats, bringing supplies from the mainland, glide silently over the sleeping water, beside stretches of deserted houses. Palaces, charming in their architecture, lack window-frames, and the gaps are closed, roughly, by boards nailed crosswise; the plaster of these abandoned homes is peeling; moss spreads its green carpets over the lower levels, the water-steps are encrusted with shells and marine plants, stairs which crabs alone climb these days.

From the windows of the odd inhabited house hang rags and tatters of drying linen, sole indications of life given by the families that have taken refuge within. Here and there a magnificently worked grille, a balcony with complex foliage, a crude coat of arms, marble columnettes, a carved mask, a cornice bearing sculptures above a cracked, blackened wall, gullied by rain, eroded through neglect, reveals an ancient splendour, the palazzo of some patrician family that died out, or fell into poverty.

As one progresses, this unfortunate impression dissipates, life, little by little, is reborn, and one finds oneself, with pleasure, amidst the animation of the grand canal or Saint Mark’s square.

Time had seemed to fly at Fusina; it was already the hour for dinner. The crabs, which swarm in the canals, began to raise their hideous bodies, and curved pincers, above the line drawn by the water at the feet of the houses, a manoeuvre they perform every day, at six in the evening, with the punctuality of a stopwatch.

We dined that evening in Campo San Gallo, a square located behind the Piazza, at a German gasthof, where we forewent the vini nostrani, black as blackberry juice, in favour of a mug of Munich beer.

We partook of our refreshment there in the open air, under an awning striped with white and saffron bands, side by side with French painters, German artists, and Austrian officers, the latter short, blond, thin young men, well-corseted in their elegant uniforms, most polite, very well-bred, with the physiognomy of young Werther (see Goethe’s famous epistolary novel), and eschewing soldierly manners; the conversation was generally of an aesthetic nature, interrupted now and then by one of those complicated and laborious pleasantries, remembered from Jena, Bonn or Heidelberg; the tilted cap of the student reappearing beneath the soldier’s shako.

In the midst of the square stood a cistern-head, where the women of the neighbourhood and the Styrian water-carriers came to draw water at certain times; at the end of the square, there was a little church emblazoned with the arms of the Patriarch of Venice, the door of which, closed by a red curtain, emitted vague scents of incense to mingle with the fumes from the gasthoff’s cooking, and a murmur of prayers and organ notes to enhance the discussions of art and philosophy. Sometimes, old women, heads buried in black bautas, like bats hooded by their wings, plunged in as the curtain was raised.

Young girls, their hair adorned, draped with shawls in bright colours, passed by, fans in hand, smiles on their lips, gently pushing away with their feet the ruffles with which their skirts were festooned, and, instead of entering the church, took the little alley that leads from Campo San Gallo to the Piazza. They will enter the church later, when they only have God left to love, God being a woman’s last passion.

There were also ecclesiastics, fine large fellows, with honest and cheerful faces, going to confession or to some evening office. They wore purple stockings like bishops, and red belts like cardinals, which is, they say, a privilege of Saint Mark’s diocese, the patriarchal metropolis.

Opposite the gasthoff, a house of modest appearance is notable for a marble slab charged with a Latin inscription. It was in this house that Canova died. The inscription is beautiful and touching, and I cannot resist the pleasure of recording it here: Has ædes Francesconiorum quas ob diuternae amicitiæ candirem lautioribus hospitiis prætulerat, Antonius Canova, sculpturæ princeps, exstremo halitu consecravit III. Id. Oct. An. MDCCCXXII. Which can be translated thus, on behalf of women who were never taught Latin, and men who have forgotten it: ‘This house, owned by Francesconi (Antonio ‘Floriano’ Francesconi the owner of Caffè Florian), being preferred to more sumptuous hospitality through the sincerity born of an old friendship, Canova, the prince of effortless sculpture, consecrated with his last breath, on October the thirteenth 1822.’

Apologies for the somewhat awkward English, which at least renders with accuracy the concise form of the inscription. This is not the place to speak at length about Antonio Canova, who began his wider career in Venice with the showing of his group of Daedalus and Icarus at the Sensa (the Feast of the Ascension, in 1779), while still an obscure student of the sculptor Guiseppe Torretto. I shall have the opportunity to return to his works in Rome and Florence.

To this Francesconi house, so nobly preferred to a palace, a puerile memory of ours is attached; in real life, the comedic rubs shoulders with what proves touching. The little dog belonging to that house, who would take his exercise in the campo or in the neighbouring streets, would return at the hour when we dined, that of his dinner probably, and often found the door closed. He barked pitifully on the threshold, but sometimes no one opened the door, I know not if the servants, distracted, did not hear him, or whether they wanted to punish him in some way. One day, touched by his trouble, I went across and pulled the bell-pull on his behalf, and then sat down at our table. A girl appeared at the door, seemingly most surprised to see no one there, and the dog entered, tail low, crawling half on his stomach, like the guilty fellow he was.

He did not forget this service of mine, and, every time he found himself in the same situation, he gazed towards me with a melancholic pleading look, which was impossible to resist. A tacit agreement was established between quadruped and biped. He graced me with an amiable expression and a wagging tail, for the price of one ring of the bell. This is how I found myself linked to the honest dog of the Francesconi house, and how the memory of him is confused in my mind with that of Canova.

After hurrying our modest meal, composed of sea-lice soup, a veal steak, no other kind being consumed in Italy, a pasticcio of polenta, and stuffed zucchette, we drank a coffee at Caffè Florian and read the Journal des Débats, the only French newspaper permitted in the despotic States, and finding nothing of interest on the theatre posters which line the arcades of the Procuracies, we traversed random streets, which is the best way to enter into the everyday life of the people; since guide-books speak of little more than monuments, and other things of note, leaving aside all the characteristic details and thousand and one well-nigh imperceptible differences, that alert one at every moment to one’s being in a different country.

A large sign at the bottom of Saint Mark’s square, on the corner of the Doge’s Palace, near the Paglia bridge, over which all of Venice passes in order to stroll on the Riva degli Schiavoni, promised, in gigantic letters with bold illustrations, an incredible and wonderful spectacle. The poster alone was a delight! It advertised a giant mimed melodrama, of the kind that are played at the Cirque Olympique, composed by those illustrious annalists Ferdinand Laloue and Fabrice Labrousse, historiographers of the cannons and gunpowder of the imperial epic, entitled: Napoleon in Egypt! But the wonder of the spectacle consisted of a Pyrrhic dance performed by the entire French army around the First Consul. Imagine, if you can, from this, the French Army and the members of the Institute performing a Pyrrhic dance around the Bonaparte described by Auguste Barbier!

O Corse à cheveux plats: O flat-haired Corsican...

(Auguste Barbier: L’Idole)

A drawing, in barbaric taste, accompanied the poster. Bonaparte, in the rigid costume of the Guides, received the ulama of Cairo, humbly prostrated in their caftans, as Turks in Siberian pelisses offered him, according to ancient custom, the keys of Cairo in soup-bowl helmets; a staff-officer, dressed in trousers with foot straps in fine gold and shod with boots à la Suvorov, stood behind the commander-in-chief. Between crenelated towers, we saw wild-eyed Africans passing by on sentinel duty. The poster vaguely recalled, in its savagery of design and Gothic crudeness of colour, an Épinal print, or the plates in The Four Sons of Aymon in Bibliothèque Bleu (‘Blue Book’, equivalent to a chapbook) edition.

We did not fail, of course, to attend the show. At eight in the evening, the pre-announced time for the performance, we clambered into our gondola. The gondola is, as we know, the Venetian carriage, whereby one travels not on foot, but by water. The piece was to be played at the Teatro Malibran. Lying on the looped black-leather cushions of our gondola, we were borne along the canals by two vigorous oars, a most pleasant way to travel. The sun had set, and we glided through water as black as the water of Lethe. From time to time, when crossing beneath bridges, the gleams from gas-lamps shone out, suddenly, patterning the canal with light; then, passage made, darkness returned, as we plunged into the shadows once more, the shadows of night and the watery shadows, skirting the palazzos, from which so many dark tales have fled, from which the noble families, registered in the Golden Book of the serene republic, have departed on their last eternal journey to the tomb.

Finally, our gondola landed. The gondoliers raised their oars, and we moored to a ring sealed in the bank. A long line of gondolas, ranged in a line, awaited their fares. We disembarked and crossed the bridge which leads to the Teatro Malibran. These water-carriages lined up beneath a bridge have a singular appearance, when one is unaccustomed to visiting the Opera or the Circus by boat.

The theatre was entered via a long, vaulted corridor, which resembled, in its splendour, the Radziwill Passage, in Paris. Crude quinquets (Argand lamps) on the walls, granted a little light to this narrow passage. We obtained our tickets, and were sent on to another ticket-office, taking one’s seat proving a lengthy operation, as there are several bureaucratic stages before one is allowed into one’s box. The first ticket-office grants one general access, the second provides access to one’s specific destination. Equipped with the ultimate and sacred ticket, we entered our box. In Italy, the boxes are arranged otherwise than with us. The benches, instead of being in front, are at the side, almost like the seating in omnibuses, the left side being reserved for women or notable people whom one wishes to honor or treat with courtesy.

The room was very dark, and we could see below us, in the pit and in the orchestra, a tumultuous agitation of heads whose silhouettes could be vaguely discerned. A darkened room, a suddenly alien microcosm, conveys the idea. The darkness arose from the lack of chandeliers, the ceiling being absent, and the audience viewing the room by means of starlight, under an open sky. I have previously spoken of this arrangement as regards the theatre in Milan, and will avoid repeating the description. The apron is enough to illuminate the actors, and, indeed, providing there are footlights, that suffices. A darkened room seems more mysterious and fanciful in itself, and prevents one’s attention wandering to the ladies, their dresses, and the events around one. The less one sees of one’s surroundings, the more one is a spectator of the drama.

A French officer has fallen into the power of the followers of Murad Bey and has been imprisoned in the seraglio; but as he is French, an officer and only twenty years old, he will soon capture the hearts of all women. The seraglio’s Zoraidas and Zulmes protect him. However, there is discord in Agramante’s camp: some wish to return to the city, others to go to war. There is much dispute in the seraglio. Ridiculous people wearing turbans, who seem to have plunged their heads in baking-moulds, parade about, swearing to avenge Mohammed. The muftis, arms crossed on their chests, arrive, preaching holy war. The assassination of the commander-in-chief of the French army is planned: a Muslim of the noblest type, his belt weighed down by yatagans and khanjars, takes upon himself the sinister task. An idiot of a eunuch, voluptuous, gluttonous, and cowardly, traverses the stage.

In the next act, we are in the French camp. Bonaparte appears with a formidable number of staff-officers. The First Consul is here dressed as emperor, by an anachronism allowed in Venice. He is clad in tall boots, his hands behind his back, his vest transformed into a medieval tabard. He gives orders, grants medals, and pinches the ears of his men familiarly. Now the Muslim, with a long beard, arrives to submit a petition but, suddenly, he raises a three-foot knife towards the general to assassinate him, as they did Kléber, the conqueror of Ptolemais. Fortunately, the murderer is arrested. Bonaparte forgives him, and wins him over by means of a long harangue in gibberish, delivered in Pindaric tones. The moustachioed and bearded Muslim swears to die for the commander-in-chief, and the battle begins.

The suburbs burn, the city burns, the seraglio is ablaze, never has such a fire been seen. The muftis mourn, their arms still crossed, and the enemy soldiers, abandoning their weapons, weep beneath their baking-moulds. Only the women dressed in light veils refrain from crying. In this Egypt, the women are the men. The French officer emerges from the trunk in which love has concealed him, he takes the seraglio, fights the Sultan, Murad Bey, conquers the enemy lines with the point and edge of his blade, and triumphs in a mighty struggle for the flag. Finally, Bonaparte arrives, followed by the inevitable entourage, forgives everyone, rolls his eyes towards the sky, and takes a pinch of snuff while thinking of Frederick the Great who is no more (Frederick died in 1786) and of the Eighteenth of Brumaire which is yet to come (in 1799).

The French army expresses its delight, and performs, as the programme promised, a flamboyant Pyrrhic dance around its general. The drum beats La Diane (the Reveille), the guns flourish bouquets, and all the world exults with joy. To end the celebration, the scornful drums beat out a patriotic refrain that the enthusiastic audience in the room encores, and the curtain falls.

I neglected to say that Hungarian soldiers, in white jackets and blue trousers, represented the French army, for greater historical accuracy.

We returned to our gondola, and went for a stroll in the Piazzetta, by the light of the moon. The Teatro San Benedetto, currently Teatro San Gallo, promised a lyric troupe for the autumn season, but we were to leave Venice before they arrived. Teatro La Fenice was closed, as La Scala, in Milan, had been.

Part XVII: The Accademia di Belle Arti

At the entrance to the Grand Canal, next to the white church of La Salute, and opposite the red houses of the Campo San Vidal, a scene illustrated in Canaletto’s masterpiece, rises the Academy of Fine Arts (La Scuola Grande), in which through the care and attention of the late Count Leopoldo Cicognara, a large number of treasures from the Venetian school have been gathered together.

The architecture of the façade of La Scuola Grande is by Giorgio Massari, and the sculptor Antonio Giacarelli sculpted a Minerva seated on the Adriatic lion which decorates the summit (since removed to the Castello gardens). The statue pleased me only moderately. Minerva is a big girl, sculpted with robust charm, who in no way resembles that ideal figure exiting, armed, from Jupiter’s head. Her mount, treated in the style of those meek lions in Louis XIV wigs, with a globe under one paw, seen on the terrace of the Tuileries, looks a bit like a poodle among the crowd of tongued, clawed, winged, armed, and haloed lions, of fierce appearance and heraldic presence which accompany Saint Mark on all the buildings of Venice. Perhaps this humble lion, not wishing to frighten visitors with too truculent an appearance, is biased towards the benign.

When one thinks of the Venetian school, three names inevitably come to mind. Titian, Paulo Veronese, and Tintoretto. They seem to have hatched suddenly from the most azure of seas, beneath a warm ray of sunlight, in a spontaneous flowering. After them come Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, and that is the sum total. I am speaking here of the general public and the normal run of amateurs who have not visited Italy or made a special study of Venetian painting. However, there is a whole series of almost unknown, yet admirable, artists, who preceded the great names that I have cited, as the dawn precedes the day, less brilliant, but fresher, more tender. These artists of the Venetian Gothic, to all the naive finesse, all the smoothness, all the suavity of Giotto, Perugino, or Hans Memling, join an elegance, beauty and richness of colour that the latter never attained. A singular thing: the works of these latter colourists have almost all turned black, the harmony of their palette has vanished beneath smoky varnish; the glaze is gone, the outlines of their underlying sketches have emerged through the upper layers, while the works of the earlier designers, their humble, meticulous efforts, their lack of impasto, their simple local tone, retain an incomparable brightness and youthfulness.

These panels and canvases, often preceding by a hundred years or so the paintings of the famous, seem, were it not for their style which dates them, as if completed yesterday; they have still all the glow of novelty: the centuries have passed without leaving a trace. Not a single sign of retouching or repainting. Is this due to the fact that the pigments used were purer, chemistry not being advanced enough to over-sophisticate them, or to invent new ones of uncertain effect and problematic durability? Or is it rather that those hues, left well-nigh pure as in illuminated manuscripts, have retained the same values as they possessed on the palette? I cannot decide; but this remark, more clearly applicable to their work, also applies to all the schools of art that preceded what is termed the Renaissance. The older the painting, the better preserved it is. A Van Eyck is fresher than a Van Dyck, an Andrea Mantegna than a Raphael, and an Antonio Vivarini than a Tintoretto. The same applies to the frescoes: the most modern have deteriorated the most.

We were prepared, in a way, by the masterpieces spread throughout the galleries of France, Spain, England, Belgium, and Holland, for the wonders of Titian, Paulo Veronese, and Tintoretto. These great artists in no way deceived us. They fulfilled, faithfully, all the promise of their genius, while we were expecting that same; rather, we experienced a delightful surprise on seeing the works, little known outside Venice, of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, of Marco Basaiti, of Rocco Marconi, Giovanni Mansueti, Vittore Carpaccio, and others, the complete list of whom would degenerate into a mere catalogue. It was a whole new world; to find Venetian brilliance in the form of Gothic naivety, the beauty of the South in the somewhat stiff shapes of the North, paintings by Holbein as colourful as those of Giorgione, and those of Lucas Cranach as elegant as those of Raphael, was rare good fortune, and we were perhaps more sensible of it than was needed; for, in the first fire of enthusiasm, we were not far from regarding the illustrious masters, the eternal glories of the Venetian school, as corrupters of taste, and great decadents, almost like those neo-Christian Germans who ban Raphael from the paradise of Catholic painters, as too sensual and too pagan.

For a few days these new names were the sole things on our lips; because, when one has made some fresh artistic discovery, one cannot help but imitate Jean de La Fontaine who stopped people in the street to ask: ‘Have you read Baruch?’ (Baruch ben Neriah, a pupil of the prophet Jeremiah is credited with writing the Book of Baruch, in the Apocrypha).

If I were writing a history of Venetian painting, and not of my travels, I would start with Niccolò Semitecolo, the earliest artist represented in the Accademia collection, who died in 1370, and continue chronologically down to Francesco Zucharelli, the latest, who died in 1788; but the gallery is not arranged in this manner, and my scheme, which should be followed everywhere, would not correspond to the actual locations occupied by the paintings, which are hung based solely on their dimensions. I will proceed room by room, and the reader can follow my descriptions on the page, as they would see the works hung on the walls.

The Academy of Fine Arts, as we know, occupies the former Scuola Grande de la Carita. There is still some original decoration, a very beautiful ceiling in the first room. This ceiling, divided into panels each showing a cherub’s face in the centre encircled by wings, is associated with a minor legend: a member of the Society was responsible for gilding it at his own expense, asking in recompense that his name be registered as a donor. This satisfaction was denied him. The member, Cherubino Ottale, achieved his wish nonetheless; he took care to sign his donation with an ingenious ornamental rebus. Ottale, in Italian, means octal. The cherub’s heads, wreathed by eight wings, represent, hieroglyphically, the first and last names of this conceited bourgeois who makes himself known thus to posterity, a forgivable act of vainglory, since the ceiling is very ornate, in exquisite taste, and must have emptied the member’s purse of a significant quantity of gold coins.

This room is the Salon Carré, the exhibition gallery, of the Academy of Fine Arts; it is a showcase in which are arranged, in the best-lighted locations, the purest diamonds, the Koh-i-Noors, Great Moguls, Regents, and Sancys of this rich Venetian mine, whose veins have produced so many precious artistic gems.

Every great Venetian painter has left here a superior example of his talent, a masterpiece of masterpieces, one of those supreme works where genius and talent, inspiration and skill, came together in rare harmony; a conjunction difficult to achieve, even in the lives of the greatest of artists. On that day, the hand was able to achieve what the mind wished, as in that sphere of Paradise where Dante says: ‘Our wills are unified’ (Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto III:80).

The Calling of the Sons of Zebedee, by Marco Basaiti, is close to the German school in its naivety of detail, slightly sad tenderness of tone, and a certain melancholy unusual in the Italian school. The Master of Nuremberg (Albrecht Durer) would not have disavowed this landscape, both fantastic and real, with its Gothic castle adorned with pepperbox turrets, drawbridge, and barbicans, at the edge of Lake Tiberias, while a fisherman from Chioggia or the Murazzi would find nothing wrong with that fishing boat and its nets in the foreground, so humbly and faithfully studied; the figure of Christ possesses unction and sweetness, the figures of the two future apostles, who leave the lake’s fishes behind to fish for men, breathe an atmosphere of living faith.

One should also halt in front of Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, by Francesco Beccarucci di Conegliano. It is a very beautiful thing. The composition is divided into two zones, an upper zone, in which we see the saint extending his hands with the divine imprints, in glorious resemblance to the Saviour which his devotion earned him; and a lower zone, populated by saints and the blessed, mostly seeming to be of the Franciscan order, and appearing to rejoice in the miracle. There are beautifully painted ascetic heads here, profound religious feeling, and a perfection of execution, though somewhat dry. When one examines these Gothic paintings, of a cold and stiff appearance, carefully, they come to life, little by little, and end by gaining an extraordinary living power; however, they offer neither a grasp of the science of anatomy nor a superfluity of muscles and flesh. These awkward characters, have the air of reticent folk who would like to address you but do not dare, yet dream of saying what is in their hearts: their gestures are often gauche; but their physiognomy is so benign, so gentle, so childishly sincere, that one half-understands them, and they remain indelible in one’s memory. Beneath their maladroit appearance, they possess something that other more skilful masterpieces lack: soul.

I admit to a feeling of horror at the Bassanos, older and younger. The eternal animal paintings from their workshop spread throughout Europe, tedious and worthless art, reproduced mechanically, justifying my extreme aversion. However, I must agree that The Resurrection of Lazarus, by Leandro Bassano, is better than all those entries and exits from the Ark, sheepfolds, rustic parklands, pails, sheep’s backsides, and women in red petticoats milking, that are the despair of visitors to every gallery.

Let me mention in passing The Wedding at Cana, by Alessandro Varotari, a large, wide, well-ordered, canvas, of skilful execution, and laudable in all respects, which, anywhere else, would appear a masterpiece, and we reach a singular painting by Paris Bordone, whose magnificent portrait of a man dressed in black everyone may admire in the Louvre, not far from the man with the reddish beard and calf-leather gloves, which after being attributed to several great masters, seems likely to be permanently declared a Titian.

Bordone’s painting, which represents a fisherman presenting Saint Mark’s ring to the Doge, relates to a legend, of which a strange incident was depicted by Giorgione, as we will see in the next room. Here is the story in brief: one night when the fisherman slept aboard his boat, moored conveniently by the landing-stage of San Giorgio Maggiore, three mysterious individuals jumped into his vessel and ordered him to take them to the Lido; one of the three characters, as far as could be discerned amidst the shadows, had an apostolic beard, and the look of a high dignitary of the Church; both the others, by a definite glimpse of armour concealed beneath their coats, showed themselves to be men of the sword. The boatman turned the prow of his vessel towards the Lido and began to ply his oars; but the lagoon, initially calm began to churn and stir strangely: the waves shone with sinister light, monstrous apparitions emerged to menace the boat, to the great fear of the gondolier; hideous forms, devils half-human and half-fish, seemed to race from the Lido towards the city, causing the waves to foam in a thousand scintillations, stirring a tempest, and whistling and howling amidst the storm; but the flaming swords brandished by the two knights and the outstretched hand of the holy personage made them retreat, then vanish, in sulphurous explosions.

The battle was of long duration; fresh demons forever followed the first; however victory rested with those in the boat, who were returned safely to the Piazzetta landing-stage. The boatman knew not what to think of these strange happenings; then, as they departed, the oldest of the group, a golden halo suddenly shining forth above him, said to the boatman: ‘I am Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice. I learned last night that the devils, gathered in council at the Lido, in the cemetery there, had formed the resolution to rouse a dreadful storm and destroy my beloved city, under the pretext that many debaucheries are enacted there which grant evil spirits power over its residents; but, as Venice is a good Catholic, and will confess her sins, in the fine cathedral she will raise for me, I resolved to defend her from this danger of which she was unaware, with the help of my two brave companions, Saint George and Saint Theodore, and commandeered your boat; now, as every effort deserves its reward and you have spent a difficult night, here is my ring; take it to the Doge and tell him what you saw. He will give you enough gold coins to fill your hat.’

With this, the saint resumed his place on the summit of the porch of Saint Mark’s cathedral, Saint Theodore climbed to the top of his column, where his crocodile, in a bad mood, grumbled away, and Saint George went to nestle at the bottom of his columned niche, in the large window of the Doge’s Palace.

The boatman, much surprised, and with good reason, might have thought he had dreamed the episode having drunk a few too many glasses of Samian wine that evening, were it not that the large, heavy ring of gold, studded with precious gems, which he held in his hand, prevented his doubting the reality of the night’s events.

He, therefore, set off to seek the Doge who, horned cap on his head, was presiding over the Senate, and kneeling, respectfully, told the tale of the battle between the demons and the lords of Venice. The story seemed incredible at first; but the presence of the ring, which was truly that of Saint Mark, and whose absence from the church treasury had been noted, proved the boatman’s veracity. The ring, kept in a carefully guarded coffer secured by triple locks which bore no traces of tampering, could only have been removed by a superior power. The boatman’s hat was filled with gold, and a thanksgiving Mass was celebrated to mark their escape from danger; which did not prevent the Venetians from continuing their dissolute lifestyle, spending the nights at masked balls, in gaming, dining, making love, indulging in intrigue, and prolonging for a good six months of the year their extended orgy known as the Carnival. Venetians count on Saint Mark’s protection for their entry into Paradise, and take no notice otherwise of their salvation. As the matter involved Saint Mark, they built him a correspondingly fine church, and the saint is still under obligation to them.

Paris Bordone chose for his painting the moment when the boatman knelt before the Doge. The composition of the scene is very picturesque; we see in perspective a long line of black-capped or hoary heads of senators, of magisterial appearance. Curious onlookers line the pavement and form skilfully contrasted groups; sumptuous Venetian costumes are displayed there in all their splendour. As in almost all the paintings of this school, the architecture plays a major role. Beautiful porticos, in Palladian style, animated by characters going to and fro, fill the remainder of the scene.

This painting possesses the merit, rare in the Italian school, which is almost exclusively occupied with reproducing religious or mythological subjects, of depicting a popular legend, a scene of manners, ultimately a subject for Romanticism, such as Delacroix or Louis Boulanger might have chosen, and executed with skilful nuances; and this gives it a unique physiognomy, and a most peculiar attractiveness.

A young French painter, Louis Marius Garcin, was in the process of making a copy of this beautiful canvas which I hope soon to view in Paris.

It seems to me that a gallery exhibiting well-executed copies of the masterpieces of every school would be a thing of interest and beneficial to the arts. Many elements of such a gallery already exist. I would devote a room to each great master filled with copies of their entire production, now scattered in museums and churches across Europe; I would choose also masters of the second rank, original, spirited and, though genius is absent, full of talent. And I would unite, in that one place, all that is scattered throughout the world, the viewing of which requires, long, expensive, or unachievable journeys.

Space in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, or the Louvre, would be perfect for such a collection, which, in addition to the instructiveness it would offer artists, would have the advantage of extending the life, or at least the memory, of masterpieces on the verge of disappearing.

Part XVIII: The Accademia continued

The pearl of the Prado in Madrid is a Raphael; that of the Accademia of Venice is a Titian, a marvellous canvas forgotten, and then found again, about which there is a tale. For many years Venice possessed this masterpiece without knowing it. Relegated to an old church which was little attended, it had slowly disappeared under layers of dust, and behind a network of spiders’ webs. Its subject could barely be discerned. One day, Count Leopoldo Cicognora, an art connoisseur, detecting a certain something in its obscured figures, and scenting a masterpiece beneath its livery of abandonment and misery, moistened a portion of the canvas with a drop of saliva, and rubbed it with his finger, not exactly an action of great propriety, but one which an art lover could not help but execute when face to face with a smoky patina, were he twenty times a Count, and a thousand times more proper. This spot on the noble canvas, preserved intact under the layer of dust, like Pompeii beneath its cloak of ashes, revealed paintwork so young and fresh, that the Count had no doubt that he had found an unknown masterpiece by some great master. He had the strength of mind to control his emotion, and proposed to the priest to exchange the large dilapidated painting for a beautiful, brand-new one, clean, pristine, and well-framed, which would honor the church and please the faithful. The priest accepted with pleasure, smiling to himself at the oddity of this Count, who gave something new for something old and asked nothing in return.

Cleansed of the filth that soiled it, Titian’s Assunta (The Assumption of the Virgin, now returned to the Frari church) appeared radiant as the sun conquering the clouds. Parisians can get an idea of the importance of this discovery by going to the Beaux-Arts and viewing Henri Serrur’s beautiful, recently-executed copy currently placed there.

The Assunta is one of Titian’s greatest works, and the one in which he rose to the greatest heights of art: the composition is balanced and organised with infinite skill. The upper, arched portion, represents paradise, glory, to speak, in the ascetic language of the Spanish. A semi-circle of angels, drenched and lost to incalculable depths in a flood of light, glittering sparks above a flame, sparkling more vividly than the eternal day, form a halo for God the Father, who arrives from infinite depth, with the motion of a soaring eagle, accompanied by an archangel and a seraph who hold a crown and wreath respectively.

This Jehovah, seeming like a divine bird, presenting himself as a head and body in horizontal foreshortening beneath a flow of flying draperies like open wings, astonishes with its sublime boldness; if it is possible for a human hand to depict the figure of the divine, Titian certainly succeeded. Boundless power, with imperishable maturity make this white-bearded face shine, the beard needing only to quiver to shake off the eternal snow; since the Olympian Jupiter of Phidias, never has the master of heaven and earth been represented more worthily.

The centre of the painting is occupied by the Virgin Mary, who is raised, or rather surrounded by, a garland of angels and blessed souls, since she requires no help in ascending to heaven; she rises through the strength of her robust faith, the purity of her soul, lighter than the most luminous ether. There is, in truth, in this figure an incredible power of ascension, but to obtain his effect, Titian avoided resorting to a slender form, with tapered draperies, in translucent colours. His Madonna is truly a most real, active, and beautiful woman, as solid as the Venus de Milo in the Tribune Room of the Uffizi in Florence, or the Venus of Urbino also to be found there. An ample and substantial gown with numerous folds flutters around her; its breadth might well have contained a deity, and, if she was not on a cloud, the Marquis du Guast might well lay his hand on her breast, as in the painting in the Louvre (Allegory of Marriage). And yet nothing is more celestially beautiful than this bold, strong figure in her pink robe and azure mantle; despite the powerful voluptuousness of the body, the gaze sparkles with purest virginity.

In the lower section of the painting, the apostles are grouped together in various attitudes of delight and skilfully-contrasted surprise. Two or three little angels, who connect them to the intermediate zone of the composition, seem to be explaining to them the miracle that is occurring. The heads of the apostles, of varied ages and character, are painted with a force of life and a surprising reality. The draperies have the amplitude and abundant spread which characterises Titian’s style, both of the richest and yet the simplest.

Viewing this Virgin, and comparing the artist’s concept to the Virgins of other different masters, I thought how wonderful and ever fresh art is. The endless variations on this theme of the Madonna, in the catalogue of paintings with Catholic subjects, without ever exhausting the theme, surprises and confounds the imagination; but on reflection, one realises that, to the common subject, each painter adds a fond dream, and a personification of their talent.

Are not Albrecht Dürer’s Madonnas, in their painful somewhat constrained grace, their weary faces more interesting than beautiful, their air of matrons rather than virgins, their German bourgeois candour, their tight clothing broken by symmetrical pleats, who are almost always accompanied by a rabbit, an owl, or a monkey, in a vague recollection perhaps of Germanic pantheism, are not they depictions of the ideal woman he favoured and might have loved? And does she not represent the very genius of that artist? As much as she is his Madonna, she might easily be his Muse.

The same applies to Raphael. The type of his Madonna, where, mingled with Classical memories, one always finds the features of La Fornarina, sometimes anticipated, sometimes copied, most often idealised, is it not that type, graceful and imbued with a chaste voluptuousness, a most accurate symbolisation of his elegant talent? That Christian, nourished by Plato and Greek art, a friend of Leo X the dilettante pope, that artist who died of love while painting the Transfiguration, does he not live on, entire, in those modest Venuses, holding that child on their knees who is the God of Love? If we wished, in an allegorical table, to symbolise the genius of each painter, could the angel of Urbino be represented otherwise?

Does not the Virgin of the Assunta, large, strong, and colourful, with her robust, healthy grace, her beautiful bearing, her simple and natural beauty, represent Titian with all his qualities? One could research the matter further; but I have said enough to make my point.

Thanks to the dusty shroud that cloaked her for so long, the Assunta shines with a youthful brilliance, as if centuries have not passed by, and we enjoy the supreme pleasure of seeing a painting by Titian as it issued from his palette.

Opposite Titian’s Assunta, is The Miracle of the Slave, by Tintoretto, being the one picture robust and powerful enough to face so splendid a masterpiece. Tintoretto is the king of the violent. He has a passion for composition, a fury in his brushwork, an audacity in his foreshortenings, and this Miracle of Saint Mark may pass for one of his boldest and fiercest paintings.

The work has as its subject the patron saint of Venice aiding a poor slave to whom a barbaric master has caused grief and torment because of the stubborn devotion that the poor fellow showed to the saint himself. The slave is lying on the ground on a cross, surrounded by his executioners busily making vain attempts to nail him to the dreaded timber. The nails are blunted, their mallets break, their axes fly to pieces; more merciful than mankind, the instruments of torture are dulled in the hands of the torturers; they gaze at each other questioningly and whisper together in their astonishment; the judge leans down from the gallery of the court to see why its orders are not being carried out; while Saint Mark, in one of the most violent foreshortenings ever risked by a painter, plunges headfirst from heaven to earth, eschewing clouds, wings, and cherubim, without any of the aerial means commonly used in sacred paintings, on his way to delivering the man who has faith in him. This vigorous, athletically-muscular figure, of colossal proportions, splitting the air like a missile launched from a catapult, produces a most singular effect.

The design has such power, that the massive figure of the saint is sustained by the eye, and appears not to fall, in a true tour-de-force. Add to this that the paint is so intense of tone, so abrupt in its contrasts of light and shade, so vigorous in its placements, so harsh and turbulent in touch, that Caravaggio and the fiercest painters of the Spanish school would seem as weak as rose-water beside it, and you will gain some idea of this painting which, despite its barbarities, always preserves, through its setting, that abundant and sumptuous architectural appearance, that is unique to the Venetian school.

There is also, in the same room, an Adam and Eve, and a Cain and Abel, by the same painter, two magnificent canvases in the form of studies, perhaps the most accomplished products, from the point of view of execution, that the artist produced.

Against a background of a muted and mysterious green, the distance foliage of Eden, or rather the wall of the workshop, two superb bodies, with a white and warm glow, vivacious complexion, and powerful reality are highlighted: it seems that Eve is offering Adam the fatal apple which stuck in his throat, a scene which sufficiently legitimises the presence of two naked figures in the open air; but that is of no importance. Believe that never did a more beautiful torso, whiter and softer flesh emerge from the brush of a colourist. Tintoretto, who according to his biographer Carlo Ridolfi wrote on his studio wall: ‘The draughtsmanship of Michelangelo and the colours of Titian’, completed, in this painting, at least half of that program.

The painting of Cain and Abel, its counterpart, breathes all the fury, and savagery to be expected of such a subject and such a painter. Death, the consequence of our first parents’ error, makes its entry into the young world, amidst formidable shadows, in which murderer and victim struggle together. At the corner of the canvas, there is a dreadful detail, A severed sheep’s head bleeds. Is this the sacrifice offered up by Abel, or a symbol implying that animals as well as innocent human beings must bear the penalty for Eve’s curiosity? Dare we affirm that; it was probably not in Tintoretto’s mind. He had other matters to think of than such niceties, he, the greatest master of design, the most intrepid plier of the artists’ brush who ever existed, and who worked more swiftly than Luca Giordano, called ‘Fa Presto’.

Bonifazio Veronese, of whose work the Louvre has only one inadequate example, is an admirable artist. His Parable of the Rich Man, in the Accademia, copied, most intelligently, by Henri Serrur, to whom we already owe a beautiful facsimile of the Assunta, is a deeply Venetian painting. There is no lack of beautiful women with coiled braids, threads of pearls, dresses of velvet and brocade, along with magnificent lords in gallant and courteous poses, musicians, pages, an African servant, a rich damask tablecloth, dishes of gold and silver, and dogs crossing the mosaic paving, one sniffing the rags of Lazarus with the mistrust of a well-behaved creature; there is a balustraded terrace, where wine stands in ancient vessels; white colonnades behind which the dappled blue of the sky can be seen. Only, the silvery greys of Paulo Veronese here take on an amber tint, the silver turns a golden-red. Bonifazio, who painted portraits, gave his heads a more intimate feel than did the creator of the four great Feasts, and the ceilings of the Doge’s palace, accustomed to regarding things from the point of view of decoration. The physiognomies of Bonifazio, studied, and individual, in their characteristics, faithfully recall the patricians of Venice, who so often posed for the artist. Anachronism in the costumes reveals that the subject of Lazarus is only a pretext and that the real purpose of the painting is to show the lords, with their courtesans and mistresses, in the depths of one of those lovely palazzos which bathe their marble feet in the green waters of the Grand Canal.

Refrain from passing too swiftly in front of these apostles of a beauty, a richness of colour, and a seriousness as regards religion, that the Venetian school does not always show, especially from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, when the pagan ideas of the Renaissance were introduced into art, and further increased the sensualist tendencies of these sumptuous masters. The Accademia has a large number of works by Bonifazio. This one room, besides The Parable of the Rich Man, and the apostles whom I mentioned, contains an Adoration of the Magi, a Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, a Saint Jerome and Saint Beatrix, a Saint Mark, and a Christ Enthroned with Saints, all paintings of the greatest merit and which valiantly support the neighbouring works by Titian, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese.

A great painter, little known in France, is Rocco Marconi, an artist of pure style and deep feeling, a sort of Italian Albrecht Dürer, less fanciful and less imaginative than the German, but owning to a kind of archaic tranquility in his manner, which makes him appear older than his contemporaries, as Ingres does among the likes of Eugène Delacroix, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Thomas Couture, Charles Louis Müller and Narcisse Diaz. His Christ between Saint Peter and Saint Andrew recalls a similar subject by the painter of The Apotheosis of Homer (Ingres), which was formerly in the church of Trinità dei Monti, in Rome, and which can now be seen at the Luxembourg (Christ Returning the Keys to Saint Peter, now in the Musée Ingres in Montauban). The heads possess both character and nobility, the draperies are pleated in great taste, and the group, firmly coloured, stands out against a slice of sky flaked with fluffy clouds. I have mentioned Albrecht Dürer and Ingres in describing Marconi’s art: a third, even more exact resemblance comes to mind, that with the Spanish painter Juan de Juanes, in his admirable paintings of the life of Saint Stephen; there is the same purity, the same quiet and sober use of colour.

Here, on a stretch of wall, is a whole group of paintings by those Venetian Gothic artists, so suave, ingenuous, sweet and charming, about whom I spoke a few words on entering the Accademia.

Giovanni Bellini, Cima da Conegliano, and Vittore Carpaccio present themselves to us, all three with the same subject, one which sufficed for the entire Middle Ages and produced thousands of masterpieces: namely the Madonna and Child on a throne surrounded by saints, usually the patron saints of the recipient, a usage which makes pedants cry anachronism, on the pretext that it is not natural for Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Sebastian, Saint Catherine or any other saint to be in the same scene as the Holy Virgin, mingling medieval costume with antique draperies.

These critics fail to understood that, for a living faith, times and places co-exist, and there is nothing more touching than this rapprochement between the object of adoration and the devotee, a true rapprochement, because the Madonna was regarded as a living being, contemporary, current; she took part in the existence of all; she served as an ideal for all humble lovers, a mother to all the afflicted. She was not relegated to the depths of the sky, to which we relegate the gods in an age of unbelief, under the pretext of respect; one lived on terms of familiarity with her, confided one’s sorrows to her, and one’s hopes, and no one would have been surprised to see her appear in the street in the company of a monk, cardinal, nun or any other holy person. All the more reason to readily admit to a painting that mixture which shocks the purists and which is deeply Catholic.

For my part, I take infinite pleasure in those thrones and canopies, with their precious and delicate ornamentation, those Madonnas with the child on their knees, and those little angels, naively haloed in gold as if mere colour was insufficient for them, playing the viola d’amore, rebec or angelica.

Yes, despite my penchant for pagan art, I love those naive Gothic paintings, those Fathers of the Church wearing a cardinal’s biretta and bearing large missals under one arm; those Saint Georges in knightly armour, those chastely naked Saint Sebastians, like Christian Apollos, who, instead of firing arrows, receive them; those priests, saints and monks in their beautiful flowered dalmatic robes and their black or white frocks, with fine minute pleats; those young female saints leaning on a wheel, while holding a palm-frond, ladies of honor to the Heavenly Queen; all that loving and devout procession that gathers humbly in the lower section of some apotheosis of the Virgin Mother. I find that this arrangement, hieratic in its manner, satisfies the requirements of church painting, as it is understood, more effectively than scholarly compositions conceived from the viewpoint of historical accuracy. There is, in this method of composition, a sacred rhythm which captures the eye of the faithful. Those aspects of the image, so necessary, to our mind, in matters of devotion, are preserved, and art loses nothing: because, constrained on the one hand, individuality reclaims its rights on the other; every artist leaves the mark of their originality on the manner of the work’s execution, and these paintings, composed of similar elements, are perhaps the most personal. Carpaccio’s winged virtuosos bear no resemblance to those of Giovanni Bellini, although they sound their instruments, at the feet of the Virgin, on the steps of an almost identical baldachin. Those of Carpaccio are more elegant, with a more youthful grace, seeming like pages from a noble household; those of Giovanni Bellini are naiver, more childish, more babyish; they perform their music with the zeal of children in some country choir under the eye of their priest. All are charming, but of a diverse grace, marked by the character of the painter (See Carpaccio’s ‘Presentation of Jesus in the Temple’ and Bellini’s ‘San Giobbe Altarpiece’, both in the Accademia).

Part XIX: The Accademia further continued

The Holy Family by Paolo Veronese, is composed in the painter’s usual abundant and sumptuous style. Clearly, lovers of honest reality will not find the humble interior of a poor carpenter there. That column, wrapped in pink brocatelle from Verona, that opulent foliate curtain, whose richly pleated folds form the background of the painting, proclaims a princely dwelling; but The Holy Family is rather an apotheosis than the exact representation of Joseph’s poor household. The presence of Saint Francis carrying a palm-frond, of a priest in a chain-mail neck-guard, and a saint on the nape of whose neck is curled, like a horn of Ammon, a brilliant rope of golden hair in Venetian fashion, along with the quasi-royal dais on which the divine Mother is enthroned presenting her toddler to their adoration, provides abundant proof.

In the second room, an immense canvas depicts the Feast in the House of Levi, one of four large paintings of feasts by Veronese. The Louvre has two: the Supper at Emmaus, and the Wedding at Cana of the same size as the Venetian painting, which is in the same style, ample, ornate, and effortless; the same silvery gleam, the same air of feasting and joy. In his paintings, there are swarthy men in their opulent gowns of damask or brocade, blonde women dripping with pearls, African slaves carrying dishes and ewers, children frolicking on the steps of balustrades, pale greyhounds, columns and statues of marble, beautiful skies of a bright turquoise blue, which creates the illusion, in this case, when, on standing back, you view its sky framed by the door of the next room, of a diorama. Paolo Veronese, not excluding Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt, is perhaps the greatest colourist who ever existed. His palette is neither full of yellows like Titian, nor reds like Rubens, nor bituminous like Rembrandt. He paints in the open with an astonishing rightness of location: none know better than him the relationships between hues, and their relative values; he knows more about them than the chemist Michel Chevreul and obtains, through juxtaposition, nuances of an exquisite freshness which, separated, would seem grey and earthy. No one displays to the same degree that velvety, flowery light.

The composition of the Annunciation, by the same artist, is notable. The Virgin Mary, leaning at one end of the long transverse canvas, the central void of which is occupied by elegant architecture, awaits with a modest air the arrival of the angel relegated to the other end of the painting, who, with open wings, seems to glide towards her in angelic greeting. This arrangement, contrary to the rule which places the group towards which the painter wishes to draw one’s eyes at the centre of the scene, is a brilliant fancy which might not have been executed so happily by any other than Paul Veronese.

The Venetians winning victory over the Turks, thanks to the intervention of Saint Justina (Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto), is one of these subjects which appeal to the national self-esteem and which one finds often repeated. I have already had cause to describe a similar composition in the Doge’s Palace; the mix of armour and costumes, helmets and turbans, Christians and infidels, was a happy theme for the artist, and he treated it skilfully. I cannot describe in detail all the works of Paolo Veronese that the Accademia contains. It would take a volume dedicated to the subject; since all these Venetian geniuses displayed a prodigious fecundity.

The Accademia possesses one of Titian’s last paintings, a priceless treasure! The years, so heavy for all, passed without pressing too hard on this patriarch of painting, whose life was long, and whom the plague surprised still working, at almost ninety years old.

The painting, serious and melancholy in appearance, whose funereal subject seems a presentiment of his own death, represents a Christ removed from the cross (Pietà); the sky is dark, a livid light illuminates the corpse supported piously by Joseph of Arimathea and Saint Mary Magdalene. Both are sad, shadowed, and appear, from their gloomy attitude, to despair of the resurrection of their Master. We see them questioning, with secret anxiety, how this body, anointed with balm, which they will entrust to the sepulchre, could ever emerge from thence; in truth, Titian never depicted so dead a corpse. There is no longer a drop of blood beneath the greenish skin, in those bluish veins the colour of life has ebbed forever. Christ in the Garden of Olives, by Eugène Delacroix in the church of Saint-Paul Saint-Louis, and his Pieta, in the church of Saint-Denys-de-Saint-Sacrament, alone can give an idea of this sinister and painful work, where, for the first time, the great Venetian abandoned his former, unalterable serenity. The shadow of approaching death seems to battle the light in this work of a painter who always had the sun on his palette, and it envelops the painting in a cold twilight. The artist’s hand froze before being able to complete his task, as evidenced by the inscription in black letters at the foot of the canvas: Quod Titianus inchoatum relict Palma reverenter absolvit Deoque dicavit opus: what Titian left unfinished, Palma, with reverence, completed and offered to God. This noble, touching, and religious inscription renders the painting a monument to the master.

Doubtless, Palma Giovane, a fine painter himself, must have trembled on approaching the work of the greater artist, and his brush, however skilful, must have hesitated, and wavered more than once perhaps, when adding to Titian’s brushstrokes.

If this omega of Titian’s picturesque life is to be found in the Accademia, the alpha can also be found there, in the form of a large painting whose subject is The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple. This canvas was painted by Titian in his youth. Tradition claims he was only fourteen years old, which is ridiculous, given the beauty of the work. Nonetheless, taking a sensible view, the Presentation doubtless dates back to the painter’s early career, and we can judge the immense distance travelled. All the qualities of the artist are germinal in this earlier work. They developed more fully subsequently, but already exist there in a visible manner. The splendour of the architecture, the grandiose stances of the old men, the proud and abundant flow of the draperies, the placement of the colours, the masculine simplicity of workmanship, all reveal the master in the younger man. The bright clear tones, that the high sun of a virile old age will gild with warmer notes, already possess the masculine solidity, the robust consistency, and distinctive characteristics of the creator of Sacred and Profane Love, in the Borghese Palace in Rome; of the Venus of Urbino in the Uffizi in Florence, and the Allegory of Marriage in the Louvre.

Titian is, in my opinion, the only entirely healthy artist to have appeared since antiquity. He has the powerful serenity and strength of Phidias. There is nothing feverish about him, nothing tormented, nothing unquiet. The disease of modernity has not touched him. He is handsome, robust, and calm like some pagan artist of ancient and better days. His superb nature flourishes, at ease, in a warm azure, beneath a hot sun, his tones reminiscent of those beautiful antique works, in marble, gilded by the fair light of Greece; without struggle, effort, violence. He achieves the ideal at the first stroke, almost without thought. A calm, lively joy illuminates his immense oeuvre. The reality of death alone he seems to doubt, except perhaps in that last painting. Without sensual ardour, without voluptuous intoxication, he reveals to the sight, in purple and gold, the beauty, the youth, all the amorous poetry, of the female body, with the impassivity of God revealing a naked Eve to Adam. He sanctifies nudity with this expression of supreme repose, of beauty fixed forever, the absolute realised, which renders the freest works of the ancients chaste. He alone only has depicted women who could, without appearing weak and sickly, lie down next to the reclining woman of the east pediment of the Parthenon (see the Cast of Aphrodite and Dione, in the British Museum).

In speaking, of the fisherman bringing the Doge the ring of Saint Mark, I related the associated legend. Giorgione treated another episode of this wonderful story, the battle of Saint George and Saint Theodore against the demons. Regardless of the admiration I feel for Giorgione’s, warm, lively and colourful Pastoral Concert (in the Louvre), I admit to only a moderate liking for this work of his in the Accademia (‘Storm at Sea’ is now attributed to Palma Vecchio). Those athletic reddish demons, frolicking in the midst of greenish water, that arrested muscular fantasy, those forms of man and fish, un-mysteriously combined, do not in any way respond to the chimerical idea of such a fight as I imagine. The bright skies of Venetian art lack darkness enough for imaginary monsters out of dreamlike legend to swarm there at ease. Daylight hinders the horned creatures and shapeless larvae that hide in the shadow of Faust’s stove, Rembrandt’s spiral staircase (see his ‘Philosopher in Contemplation’ and ‘Philosopher in Meditation’ in the Louvre), or the cave in Teniers’ Temptation of Saint Anthony; sixteenth-century Venetian art is whimsical, but not fanciful.

The Descent from the Cross by Rocco Marconi has all the serious qualities, all the unction of the Gothic artists, along with their quiet symmetry, and a richness of tone and a flowering of colours which fail to extinguish the neighbouring tones. The dead Christ, recalling by his bloodless flesh the matt pallor of the Host, lies gently against the Virgin’s breast, supported by a Magdalene of tender and delicate beauty, whose long blonde hair falls in cascades of gold over a magnificent dress of textured damask, of a sombre and opulent purple like that of a ruby. Is your robe soaked in the blood of your beloved Saviour, O Mary Magdalene, or in the heartfelt tears falling from your eyes?

Alessandro Varatori, Il Padavanino, has a Spanish-style Virgin in Glory. The Holy Spirit descends in a torrent of light. A warm golden fog fills this canvas which recalls the apotheoses or rather ascensions of Murillo, to avoid employing a profane word when speaking of that most Catholic of painters.

I was not too impressed, despite the great talent he displays, by the vast apocalyptic web of Palma il Giovane’s Triumph of Death. Saint John, seated on a rock, on Patmos, regards, pen raised and ready to address a scroll, the formidable vision which passes before him: Justice and War ride dark steeds, and Death, mounted on a great pale horse, reaps the human harvest, in the form of sheaves of corpses on either side of the road.

Except for Tintoretto who, with his tawny colours and violent brushwork, can portray terror and tragedy, these lugubrious subjects are generally most unsuited to Venetian painters, whose happy natures reflect the azure of sea and sky, the whiteness of marble and flesh, the gold of hair and brocade, the bright textures of dazzling flowers and fabrics. They cannot maintain a serious style for long, and, behind the fearful mask with which they try to cover their bright cheeks, we hear their stifled laughter emerge from the canvas.

A most interesting painting by Gentile Bellini is his Procession in St. Mark’s Square, involving the relics kept by the Brotherhood of Saint John the Evangelist, at the moment when the tradesman Jacopo de’ Salis prayed before the fragments of the True Cross. One cannot imagine a more complete collection of the costumes of the time; the artist’s patient and meticulousness workmanship prevented a single detail being lost. Nothing is sacrificed, everything is rendered with a Gothic conscientiousness. Each head is a portrait, a portrait resembling a daguerreotype, plus colour.

The depiction of St. Mark’s Square as it then was, possesses the accuracy of an architectural plan. Ancient Byzantine mosaics, later replaced, still adorn the portals of the old basilica and, remarkably, the pinnacles are entirely gilded, which in truth they were not, though a painter like Gentile Bellini would never merely have imagined them. The pinnacles were, in fact, to be gilded; but Doge Loredan needed the gold intended for that process to fund his war, and the project was never completed; the only trace left of it is in this painting by the artist, who gilded his Saint Mark’s Basilica in anticipation.

A certain miracle involving a relic of the True Cross which fell into the water from the top of a bridge in Venice, the Ponte di Rialto or Ponte San Lorenzo I am not sure which, much occupied the painters of this period; the Accademia contain no less than three important paintings on this curious subject; one by Lazzaro Bastiani, one by Gentile Bellini, and a third by Giovanni Mansueti. These paintings are of the highest interest; they differ in content from the usual subjects of Italian painting, which revolve within the narrow circle of devotion or mythology, and rarely involve the details of real events. These monks of all orders, patricians, common people throwing themselves into the water, swimming, diving, attempting to find the holy crucifix fallen to the floor of the canal, present the strangest scene. On the banks the crowd waits in prayer, to witness the results of the search. In particular a line of ladies kneeling, hands superimposed, adorned with pearls and gems, in short-waisted dresses like those of the Empire style, presents a series of overlapping profiles, with Gothic amiability, finesse, beauty, extraordinary delicacy, and variety: the effect is strange and charming (see in particular, Gentile Bellini’s ‘Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo’).

We see, in these paintings, the ancient houses of Venice with their red walls, windows with Lombardic trefoils, terraces topped with pickets, and flared chimneys, the old bridges suspended by chains, and the gondolas of yesteryear, which are not of the form they affect today, they are much less tapered; there is no felze, but a cover stretched over hoops, like those of the river-boats at Saint-Cloud; and none bear that kind of violin-neck of polished iron which serves as a counterweight to the rower placed at the stern.

Nothing is more elegant, more youthfully graceful than the group of paintings in which Vittore Carpaccio depicted the Legend of Saint Ursula. Also, the artist in his Presentation of the Virgin, (now in the Brera, Milan) within his series The Marriage of the Virgin, which is one of the first and perhaps the most delightful of his paintings, has the perfect charm, the adolescent slenderness of Raphael; we cannot imagine more naively adorable attitudes than those of its tilted heads, a more angelic coquetry. There is especially a young boy, with long hair, seen from behind, letting his cape with its velvet collar fall half-over his shoulders, which has a beauty so proud, so youthful, so attractive, that you would think you were seeing a Cupid by Praxiteles dressed in a medieval costume, or rather an angel who possessed the fancy to disguise himself in Venetian magnificence.

I am surprised that Carpaccio’s name is not more widely known; he has all the adolescent purity, all the graceful seduction of the painter from Urbino (Raphael) in his first manner, and moreover that admirable Venetian use of colour that no other school has been able to attain.

The Giralomo Contarini gallery, the legacy of that amateur patrician of arts, who gave the Museum weapons, statues, vases, carved furniture and others precious items, contains choice works of the Venetian and other schools. I will cite, from among others, the Supper at Emmaus, by Marco Marziale, a canvas treated with a meticulous, almost Germanic dryness, where one may note an African attendant draped in a striped multi-hued coat as colourful as a Valencian capa de muestra; also Andrea Previtali’s Madonna and Child with Saint John and Saint Catherine, in which blonde heads are highlighted against a green landscape also glimpsed through the window in the background; Vincenzo Catena’s Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John; an almost identical subject by Giovanni Battista Cima, a little too dry and trenchant in its perspective of mountains behind a stretch of water; the Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine, in which Saint Peter and Saint John assist as witnesses, by Francesco Boccacino Cremonense, and in which the Sacred Bride with hair of that reddish gold so dear to the ancient masters, and wearing a beautiful historiated and decorated robe gleams amidst a landscape of sea and mountains of an azure softness; and a Madonna con Bambino, by Francesco Bissolo, very soft, very pretty, very fresh, and delicately charming.

The Four Allegories, by Giovanni Bellini, is distinguished by singular inventiveness. In the panel showing Prudence, a naked woman stands on an altar, accompanied by angels or cupids playing trumpets and a drum. In Perseverance, a naked young man, wreath on head, cape over his shoulders, offers a gift to a fleeing warrior; Fortune shows a woman holding a globe, her hair braided in the shape of a helmet, aboard a boat, while little cupids play among the waves like Tritons; while Falsehood, bearing a snake, emerges from a conch shell carried aloft. I prefer Jacques Callot’s etchings to his paintings, which are of more or less doubtful authenticity. There is, in the Pinacoteca Contarini, a fairground scene engraved by the etcher from Nancy, which teems with hordes of bohemians, charlatans, beggars, and rogues, thieving, performing tricks, begging, drinking, and playing cards or dice, an instantaneous view of that picaresque world he knew so well (see ‘The Fair at Impruneta’); but the brush does not serve the artist so happily as the burin.

Let me end with the jewel, the pearl, the star of this museum: a Madonna with the child Jesus (Enthroned Madonna adoring the sleeping Christ Child), by Giovanni Bellini. Here is a well-worn, hackneyed subject, treated a thousand times, yet one which flourishes again in eternal youth beneath the brush of the old master! What is it? A woman holding a child on her knees, but what a woman! That face pursues you like a dream; whoever has seen it once sees it forever; it is of an impossible beauty, yet strangely true to life, of an immaculate virginity yet a penetrating voluptuousness; disdainful and yet infinitely gentle. I seemed, in front of that canvas, to be contemplating a portrait of the unspoken dream surprised in my soul by the artist. Every day I spent an hour of silent adoration at the feet of this celestial idol, and would never have been able to leave Venice, if a young French painter, taking pity on us, had not made me a copy of that beloved face.

Part XX: The Streets – The Austrian Emperor’s Birthday Celebrations

People rarely speak of the streets of Venice. They exist, however, and in quantity, but the canals and gondolas dominate descriptions of the city due to our unfamiliarity with them. The absence of horses and carriages grants the Venetian streets a unique appearance. Their narrowness is closer to those in the cities of the Near East. As the islets are limited in area, the houses are generally very tall, and the narrow passages that separate them look like saw-cuts in huge blocks of stone. Certain calles in Granada and alleyways in London give a fair idea of their nature.

La Frezzaria is one of the liveliest in the city; it is indeed a mere seven or eight feet wide, but corresponds to the Rue de la Paix, in Paris, relatively speaking. It is in this street that the goldsmiths mostly reside who make those slight little chains of gold, thin as a hair, of the type which we call jaseron, which are one of the characteristic curiosities of Venice. Except for these chains, and some coarse silver jewellery for the use of country folk, which artists may find picturesque, their shops contain nothing remarkable. Fruiterers offer the more splendid displays; nothing is fresher, better arranged, or more appetising than those piles of reddened peaches like rows of cannonballs in an artillery park; those masses of translucent golden or amber grapes of the richest colours, glowing like precious gems, whose beads, strung as necklaces and bracelets, might adorn, admirably, the neck and arms of some young Maenad of antiquity.

Tomatoes mingle their violent red with those blonde hues, and watermelons, splitting their green sides, show pink wounds. All of these beautiful fruits, brightly lit by the gas, piled on layers of vine leaves, shine wonderfully. One cannot feast the eyes more pleasantly; and often, without being hungry in the slightest, we bought peaches and grapes purely out of love for their colour. I recall also certain displays, laid out by the fishmongers, of small fish so white, so silvery, so pearly, that we longed to swallow them raw, like ichthyophages of the South Seas, for fear of spoiling the taste, and which allowed us to comprehend the barbarity of ancient diners, who viewed moray eels as they died in glass vessels, so as to enjoy the opaline hues with which their agonies stained the sides.

In the evening, these streets provide a most lively and glowing spectacle. The displays are as brightly lit as during the day, and the narrowness of the passage ensures that the light does not dissipate. The fried-food booths and pastry shops, bars, restaurants, and numerous cafes, blaze and seethe with a perpetual to-ing and fro-ing.

Each store, without exception, has its miniature chapel, decorated with a Madonna in front of which lighted lamps or candles, and tubs of real or artificial flowers, are placed. Sometimes a statuette in coloured plaster, sometimes a smoke-darkened painting; sometimes a Greek image with a Byzantine gold background, or a simple modern engraving. For the Italian devotee, the Madonna replaces the ancient Lares, the household gods of the Romans. This cult of the Virgin, a cult both touching and poetic, owns very few schismatics, if any, in Venice, and Voltaireans would be dissatisfied in this respect with ‘the progress of enlightenment’ in the ancient city of the Doges. On well-nigh every street corner, on almost every bridge-approach a Madonna on an altar is presented in a niche, behind a grille or glass; she is embellished with a crown made of reeds, a necklace of beads, paper-flowers, a lace dress embroidered in silver, and all those pious tinsel decorations with which naive southern faith overloads, in a spirit of childish coquetry, the object of its adoration. Candles and lamps perpetually illuminate these repositories cluttered with votive offerings, hearts of silver, wax legs or female breasts, paintings of shipwrecks scarred by lightning, burned houses, and other disasters in which the miraculous Virgin intervenes. Before these chapels there is always some old woman praying, some young girl kneeling, some sailor making a wish or celebrating having accomplished it, and also sometimes those whose attire proclaims them to belong to a class which, among us, lacks simplicity of belief, and leaves the religion of Christ to the people, and the servants. We found, contrary to our preconceived idea, that Italy is more devout than Spain.

One of these chapels near the Ponte della Paglia, on the Riva degli Schiavoni, still attracts many of the faithful, either because it is on a busy thoroughfare, or because it is awarded some privilege or immunity of which I am ignorant. There are also boxes, here and there, dedicated to souls in purgatory. The small coins thrown into them fund masses for the poor forgotten dead.

After the Frezzaria, the street that leads from Campo San Moisè to Campo Santa Maria Zobenigo is one of those which offer the stranger the most subjects for observation; a lot of alleyways flow from this artery, since it places the banks of the Grand Canal in communication with Piazza San Marco; the shops stay open longer than elsewhere, and, as it is fairly straight, foreigners can traverse it without fear of getting lost, which is quite easy in Venice, where the layout of the streets, complicated by canals and cul-de-sacs, is so tangled that the authorities have been obliged to mark them with a line of stone markers, accompanied here and there by arrows, indicating the route from the Piazza to the landing stage for the railway, located at the other end of the city, near the Scalzi church.

How many times have we not amused ourselves, at night, wandering this maze inextricable to anyone other than a Venetian! After having followed twenty streets, traversed thirty alleys, crossed ten canals, and ascended and descended as many bridges crossed at random beneath the porticos, we often found ourselves back at our starting point. On these excursions, for which we chose moonlit nights, we surprised Venice in her secret aspects, seen from a host of unexpected and picturesque points of view.

Sometimes we came across a grand palazzo half in ruins, outlined in the shadows by a silvery ray of light, making the remaining pieces of glass in its shattered windows gleam, suddenly, like fish-scales or mirrors: sometimes a bridge, tracing its black arc on a perspective of bluish, slightly-misted water, and, further on, a path of red light streaming from a lighted house onto the dark oil of the sleeping canal; at other times a deserted square where the ridge of a church was visible, strangely populated by statues which, in the darkness, took on a spectral appearance, or a tavern where gondoliers and their hangers-on gesticulated like madmen, their silhouettes thrown on the window as in some Chinese shadow play, or even a door half-open onto the water, through which dark figures leapt into a mysterious gondola.

Once, we found ourselves, near the Grand Canal, in a truly sinister alley. Its tall houses, originally plastered in that red which usually colours old Venetian buildings, had a fierce and truculent appearance. Rain, humidity, neglect, and the absence of light at the bottom of this narrow cutting, had faded the facades little by little, and erased their colour; the vague reddish tint that still stained the walls, looked like the poorly-cleansed aftermath of some crime. Tedium and cold dread oozed from those blood-stained walls; a faded odour of saltpetre and well-water, a smell of mould reminiscent of prison, cloister, or cellar, filled our nostrils. As for the rest, no ray of light, no appearance of life, showed at the blind windows. The low doors, studded with rusty nails, and garnished with iron door-knockers corroded by time, seemed never to be opened; nettles and weeds grew on their thresholds which seemed not to have been trodden by human feet for many a long year. A skinny black dog, that sprang, suddenly, from the shadows like a jack-in-the-box, began a furious and plaintive barking on seeing us, as if unaccustomed to the aspect of man. He followed us for a while, tracing a path around us, like the animal that followed Faust and his assistant Wagner. But staring at him, I said, like Goethe: ‘Don’t growl, dog! With this holy sound, which I with all my soul embrace, your bestial noise seems out of place.’ (See Faust Part I; lines 1202-1205)’ This speech seemed to astonish him, and, finding himself revealed, he disappeared uttering a painful howl. Was it a dog, was it the Devil? That is a matter I prefer to leave deliberately vague.

I very much regret not having the ability of a Hoffmann to render this sinister street the scene of one of those frightening and bizarre tales, like The Sandman, The Desolate House, or The Adventures of New Year’s Eve, where alchemists fight over the body of a mannequin and beat it with sweeps of their microscopes amidst a whirlwind of monstrous visions. The bald, wrinkled, grimacing heads, decomposing in perpetual metamorphosis, of Hoffman’s characters Doctor Trabacchio, Archivist Lindhorst, and Councillor Tusman, and of scientists like Lazzaro Spallanzani, Antonie von Leeuwenhoek, and Jan Swammerdam, would have suited those black windows perfectly.

If Carlo Gozzi, the author, in his Memoirs, of the chapter on Contrattempi, who believed himself to be an object of resentment on the part of elves and enchanters, whose tricks he had discovered and whose secrets he betrayed in his magical pieces, had ever traversed this lonely alley, some of those inconceivable mishaps must surely have happened to him which instead seem reserved for that poetic aspect of himself which informs Turandot, The Love of Three Oranges, and The Blue Monster. But Gozzi, who had a feel for the invisible world, would always have avoided this Calle dei Avocatti at twilight.

Returning from one of these fantastic trips, during which the city seemed more deserted than usual, we went to bed in melancholy mood, having endured a battle with a monstrous mosquito, buzzing like a wasp, waving its drum-major’s tufted plumes, unfurling its trunk like the god Ganesh, and sawing its wings with the most daring ferocity; a dreadful fight in which we were the underdogs, and whence we emerged riddled with empoisoned bites.

We had just begun to sink into that black ocean of sleep, so akin to death, whom the ancients called death’s brother, when, through the wall of our numbness, we heard muffled sounds stirring, a rumble like distant thunder, a muttering of fearful voices. Was it some storm or battle, a cataclysm of nature, a struggle of demons and souls? Such was the question posed to our half-awake minds.

Soon a dizzying clamour tore the veil of our sleep, like a flash of lightning splitting a dark cloud. Cymbals clashed, their brass discs resonating like the crash of armour; tambours and gongs vibrated hollowly beneath frenzied blows; a bass drum roared like a melee of a hundred bulls; tubas and trombones unleashed metallic hurricanes; the cornets chirped desperately; the little flute made desperate efforts, to rise above and dominate this noise; all the instruments were struggling to raise a din. It sounded like a Berlioz Festival adrift, at night, on the water. As this tempest of music passed under our balcony, I thought I heard the bugles of Jericho sounding at once, together with the trumpets of the Last Judgment. A storm of loud bells formed the accompaniment.

The tumult headed towards the Grand Canal, amidst the reddish light of many torches. I found the serenade a little violent, and questioned, complainingly, with all the strength of my heart, whom this enormous nocturnal noise, this colossal hullabaloo was intended for. ‘The lover is hardly discreet,’ I thought, ‘and is not afraid to compromise his beloved. A guitar, a violin, a theorbo would have sufficed, it seems to me.’ Then, the noise receding, I was about to return to my slumbers, when a blinding white glare penetrated our closed eyelids, like one of those pale lightning-bolts which the opaquest of nights cannot shroud, while a fearsome detonation, which made the window-panes dance and shook the house from top to bottom, shattered the silence. I made a three-foot leap, like a carp, in the bed; was this a peal of thunder amidst the room? Was the siege of Venice commencing all over again, without warning? Would a bomb burst through the ceiling in our sleep?

These deafening detonations were repeated every quarter of an hour, until morning, an affront to our windows, and our nerves. They seemed to arise from a location nearby, and each time a livid glare announced their arrival; between the discharges, a deep silence, a silence like death, ensued, apart from those nocturnal murmurs which are like the breathing of sleeping cities. In the midst of this uproar, Venice, struck dumb, seemed to have capsized and drowned in her lagoons. All windows were dark; not a gondola light shone on the matt-black darkness.

Next morning, the answer to the enigma was revealed to us. The city was celebrating the birthday of the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph I (18th of August). All that bacchanal had taken place in honor of the German Caesar. The batteries of the Giudecca and San Giorgio had dispatched their volleys, and many of the neighbouring windows had been broken. With daylight the noise began again, only more loudly. The frigates fired in alternation with the batteries; the bells clanged from the thousand bell-towers of the city; gunshots from the rank and file crackled over all, at regular intervals. The burnt powder, rising from all sides in large clouds, was incense intended to delight the master’s nose, if from the top of his throne in Vienna he happened to turn his head towards the Adriatic. It seemed to me that in these tributes to the emperor there was a certain military ostentatiousness, a certain dual intent in the wealth of fusillades. This birthday compliment involving cannon, served two ends, and it took but little enmity to comprehend them.

We sped to the Piazza. A Te Deum was sung in the cathedral. The garrison, in full dress, formed a square in the Piazza, kneeling and rising as their commander ordered, according to the various phases of the divine office. A brilliant array of staff-officers, adorned with gold braid and medals, occupied the centre and glittered proudly in the sunlight; at certain moments, the guns were raised together, and a fusillade, admirably executed, made white whirlwinds of frightened doves fly into the azure sky. The poor pigeons of St Mark’s Square, scared by the tumult, and believing that in defiance of their immunity they were being prepared for slaughter, knew not where to hide; they collided in the air, mad with terror, bumped into the cornices, and fled like wildfire among the domes and chimneys; then, silence being restored, they returned to peck familiarly in their usual places, at the very feet of the soldiers, such is the force of habit.

All this happened without the usual crowds. The Piazza, always so bustling, was deserted. Only a few foreigners hovered, in isolated little groups, beneath the arcades of the Procuracies. The rare spectators who were not foreigners were betrayed by their blond hair, their square faces, their Teutonic origins. No female faces appeared at the windows, and yet the spectacle of fine uniforms worn by handsome officers is appreciated in all countries of the world by the more gracious portion of the human species. Venice, suddenly depopulated, resembled those oriental cities in Arabic tales ravaged through the anger of some magician.

This din punctuating the silence, this agitation amidst emptiness, this immense deployment of forces in complete isolation, possessed something strange, painful, alarming, almost supernatural. This nation that played dead while its joyful oppressors exulted, this city which suppressed itself so as not to witness the triumph, made a deep and unique impression on us. Non-being making itself manifest, a menacing muteness, absence as a sign of revolt, form one of those desperate recourses, to which slavery resorts when crushed by despotism. In truth, no universal outcry, no chorus of curses directed against the Emperor of Austria, could have been more effective.

Unable to protest in any other way, Venice had created a vacuum round the celebration, and flattened its solemnity beneath a pneumatic piston.

The artillery fusillades continued all day, while the regiments drilled on the Piazza and the Piazzetta, with ourselves as well-nigh unique spectators. Tired of this monotonous entertainment, we went for our favourite walk along the Riva degli Schiavoni, where a few Greeks and Armenians wandered. Even there our eardrums were still tormented by the cannon fire from the naval frigate anchored in the port. A poor little dog tied, by a piece of rope, to the mast of a vessel from Zante or Corfu, ran scared at each detonation and, mad with fear, fled in a circle as wide as the rope allowed, protesting as best he could against that stupid screeching noise, as if wounded by its sound. We were of the dog’s opinion, and, as we were not tied by a cord, we fled to Quintavalle, where we dined under the arbour at Ser Zuane’s, at a bearable distance from the odious military uproar.

In the evening, no one entered Caffè Florian! Those who have lived in Venice have only an idea of the immense significance of that little fact. The flower-sellers and caramel-sellers, the tenors, the shadow-puppeteers and even the usual idlers had disappeared. No one on the chairs, no one on the benches, no one under the porticoes; no one even in church, as if it were useless to pray to a God who leaves his people to suffer oppression. I know not if that evening the little candles were lit for the Madonnas at the crossroads.

The musicians of the Austrian reveille played, in deserto, a magnificent overture; German music though; a piece by Weber, if I remember correctly!

Not knowing what to do with the tail of this dismal evening, we entered the Apollo Theatre (Teatro Goldoni); the room looked like the interior of a dove-cote. The empty black boxes looked like niches from which the coffins had been removed; a few squads of Hungarians half-filled the bare benches. A dozen German officials, flanked by their wives and children, were trying to replace, and emulate the absent public; but, disregarding the soldiers, the enormous room held no more than fifty spectators. An inadequate troupe, sadly and reluctantly, performed a tasteless translation of a French piece, in front of smoky footlights. A cold sadness, a mortal ennui, from the vault, fell upon one’s shoulders like a wet and icy overcoat. The darkened room, face to face with the Austrians, was in mourning for Venice’s liberty.

Next day, a sea breeze carried away the odour of powder. The doves, reassured, enacted their snowy evolutions over Saint Mark’s Square, and the Venetians, by appointment, all stuffed themselves with ice-cream at Caffè Florian.

The End of Parts XVI to XX of Gautier’s Travels in Italy

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