Théophile Gautier

Travels in Italy (Voyage en Italie, 1850)

Parts XXI to XXV - Wider Venice

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Part XXI: The Asylum.
Part XXII: San Biagio – The Capuchin Monks.
Part XXIII: The Churches.
Part XXIV: The Churches continued – The Scuola di San Rocco – Palaces.
Part XXV: The Ghetto – Murano – Vicenza.

Part XXI: The Asylum

The island of San Servolo lies beyond San Giorgio, in the main lagoon, towards the Lido. The isle is limited in extent, like almost all those which surround Venice, pearls detached from their watery shells. It is almost entirely covered with buildings, and its ancient convent to which succeeded various orders of monks and nuns, has become a hospital for the insane, currently under the direction of the brothers of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God, who are particularly dedicated to healing the sick.

When we left the landing-stage at Saint Mark’s Square, the wind was contrary; the water of the lagoon usually so calm looked like an ocean, its little wrinkles attempting to become waves; the foam gushed beneath the toothed beak of the gondola, and the water lapped quite loudly against the sides of the boat, driven onward, forcefully, by two vigorous rowers; our little Antonio would not have sufficed to battle the weather alone. We danced about enough for a not too well seasoned stomach to have felt nausea due to seasickness; fortunately, a large number of crossings had made us less sensitive to this, and we quietly admired the skill with which our gondoliers, standing at bow and stern, balanced on their swaying perches.

We could undoubtedly have postponed our visit to another time but, so far, we had only seen Venice in its pink and blue guise, its level waters sparkling in small green wavelets, as in Canaletto’s paintings, and did not wish to lose this opportunity of viewing the effect of a strong wind. Certainly, azure is the natural background against which the milky domes of Santa Maria della Salute and the silver helms of Saint-Mark should be displayed, however large masses of greyish clouds, pierced by a few shafts of light, and a sea in glaucous tones, festooned with foam, framing buildings glazed in chill hues, produced a fine English watercolour in the style of Richard Parkes Bonington, William Callow, or William Wyld, who is by no means to be disdained.

This was the sight we viewed when we turned about; opposite was San Servolo, with its reddish bell-tower and its buildings with tiled roofs, half-hidden by the rolling waves; further off lay the low dark line of the Lido, separating the lagoon from the open sea.

Near us, like black-backed swallows skimming the waves, gondolas returning to the city sped past us, fleeing before the weather and pursued by the wind which was set against us.

At last, we arrived at the San Servolo landing-stage, where the sea made our frail boat wobble so much that we had some difficulty getting ashore.

There is nothing very interesting about the interior of the convent-hospice: there are long whitewashed corridors, rooms of chill cleanliness and monotonous uniformity, as in all buildings of this type. It took little labour to convert the monks’ cells into housing for the insane. In the chapel, a gilded altarpiece, some smoky blackish canvases that nothing precludes from being Tintorettos, and that is all. However, it was not as a pretext for descriptions of art and architecture that we visited this Venetian Bedlam.

Madness has always strangely preoccupied me. That a material organ can suffer deterioration and be damaged, that is readily understandable; but that thought, an impalpable abstraction, can be harmed in essence, is barely comprehensible. Brain damage does not explain madness. How is thought affected by that inflamed or softened pulp contained in its casing of bone? In the ordinary course of things, the body dies and the spirit departs; but here the spirit dies and the body remains. Nothing is more sinister or more mysterious. The ship is without a compass, the flame has left the lamp, and the living person no longer possesses a guiding self. Does the soul, obscured by madness, regain its lucidity after death, or are such souls mad for all eternity? Can the soul be neither immaterial nor immortal, since it can become sick and die? Terrible doubts, deep abysses over which we lean trembling, but which attract us like all abysses.

So, it was with an anxious curiosity, mingled with secret terror, that we gazed at those corpses, in whom what remained of the spirit only served to delay putrefaction, edging along the walls, with dull eyes, sagging cheeks, drooping lips, and dragging feet to which the will no longer sends its power, making gestures without reason like damaged animals or machines, insensitive to the burning sun, to the icy rain, no longer possessing a notion of themselves, or believing in others, no longer seeing objects in their true aspect, but rather surrounded by a world of weird hallucinations. How often, troubled by this great insoluble problem, have I visited Charenton, Bicêtre, and other asylums, and been prompted, like Hamlet on contemplating Yorick’s empty skull, to search for the crack through which the soul has leaked like water from a vase. But is it not more horrible that here the skull is still alive? How many times have I halted, in a dream, before Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s superb psychological engraving (Das Narrenhaus), that gripping and painful poem of dementia!

In the corridors, the peacefully insane, who could be allowed to wander without causing danger to themselves or others, crept confusedly about the corridors, beneath greyish hoods, like shapeless molluscs crawling on the walls after rain. They looked at us in a daze, tittering, and attempting a sort of mechanical salute.

Madness, which creates enormous lacunae, does not always thereby suspend all the faculties. Mad people have produced poetry and paintings in which the memory of certain artistic rules has survived the shipwreck of reason. Metre is often quite well-observed in the poetry of the completely demented. Dominikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco, whose paintings I admired in the churches and museums of Spain, created mad masterpieces. I saw in England a ‘combat between lions and stallions’ executed by a madman which he burned into a board with an iron point, red-hot from the fire, and which looked like a sketch by Géricault in bitumen.

One of the insane residents of San Servolo, though he was not an artist by profession, had a mania for painting, and the good brothers of Saint John of God whose principle is not to upset their patients whenever possible, had indulged his fantasies by allowing him a large wall that he had taken pleasure in smearing with the strangest chimeras.

This insane fresco represented a kind of facade of bricks, divided into arcades, the arches of which formed panels where a menagerie of the most frantic extravagance roamed about.

The wildest images in fairground booths that clowns attack with their wands before an astonished crowd; the most fanciful heraldic animals, the most strangely deformed Chinese or Japanese monsters, are beings of dull, bourgeois plausibility in comparison to the creations of that deluded mind. Rabelais’ facetious imagination applied to the animal kingdom, or the Apocalypse converted into a menagerie, could alone give some idea of the work.

Add to that the fierce ignorance and truculent barbarism of its execution; there were four-headed eagles here, that would have torn apart, at a blow, the double-headed eagle of the Austrians; crowned lions, red-tongued and toothed like sharks, so fierce in appearance, that they would have made the lion of Saint Mark retreat in fear, along with the blue lion of the Percies of Northumberland; pythons with such complicated coils and such forked darting tongues that all the arrows of Apollo from Eugène Delacroix’s ceiling in the Louvre would not have been enough to pierce them; along with formless nameless beasts, the equivalent of which are hardly found other than in the microscopic world, or the diluvian deposits found in caverns.

The artist of this demented fresco firmly believed in the existence of these deformed monsters and claimed to have painted them from nature.

San Servolo contained another singular madman. He was a workman who had lost his reason as the result of an excess of jealous rage. His wife was seduced by a gondolier, and he had, it is said, surprised them together. Whenever the image returned to him, he uttered dreadful cries, rolled on the ground, or bit his arm, severely, believing he was devouring his rival, without the pain warning him that he was staining his mouth with his own blood, and chewing his own flesh.

Only one thing distracted him from his raging mania; the drilling of an artesian well by François Degousée on the island, which lacking water has it brought in from Fusina, from the Brenta canal. He was interested in the progress of the operation and assisted the workers with great skill and energy. When he was content with his efforts, he rewarded himself for his services with a cross of honor, gold or silver paper medals, and braided cords of different colours, which he wore with a most dignified and majestic air, as a diplomat in an ambassador’s salon wears his row of crosses. If he had been lazy, distracted, or clumsy, he chastised himself by removing his badges, and reproached himself, alternately taking a humble or irritated tone, depending on the role he adopted. The monks told us that his judgments were very just, and that he was rigorously severe on himself. Only once had he forgiven himself, being unable to resist the eloquence with which he addressed himself when asking for mercy.

Other madmen were quietly playing boules in a kind of arid garden, surrounded by walls bordering a corner of the island, facing the Lido; two or three were walking with hasty steps, pursued by some fearful hallucination. Another, lean, desiccated, his head bare, remained motionless like a heron at the edge of a marsh, no doubt believing himself to be the bird whose attitude he imitated.

But what impressed me most deeply was a young monk who, leaning against a wall, kept watch over them from afar. His figure remained in my memory, where it has lodged as a model of asceticism. Earlier I had been amazed by those bodies who lived on without a soul; here was a soul before our eyes who lived without a body. The spirit shone alone; mortification having conquered the flesh. The human being had been eclipsed.

His skull, bordered by a crown of hair and shaved above, seemed of a green cadaverous hue. It was as if the mould from the sepulchre had already covered him with its bluish patina; his eyes, intoxicated with faith, shone at the bottom of deeply-bruised sockets, and his hollow cheeks met his chin in twin lines as straight as the sides of a triangle; when he lowered his head, the bones of his vertebrae between the nape of his neck and the hood of his robe protruded, on which that lean spirit of the cloisters could have said his rosary. His slender hands, the colour of yellow wax, were only a network of veins, nerves, and ossicles. Fasting had dissected them alive on the chill table in his cell. His sleeves hung on his wasted arms, like flags from their poles. His habit fell from shoulders to his heels, in a straight line, with a single fold, as stiff as the drapes in a Cimabue or Orcagna painting, not allowing his form to be divined by the least inflection, much like a corpse’s shroud or that of a spectre. My frightened gaze sought to find the man under this brown robe; there was only a shadow.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s kneeling corpses, with their violet mouths, leaden complexions and eyes drowned in the shadow of their hoods, or the pale phantoms of the Plague in their pallid linen, would have seemed like depictions of Silenus or Falstaff next to this monk of San Servolo; neither the sickly emaciation of the Middle Ages, nor the fierce asceticism of Spanish painting, have ever dared go so far.

Murillo’s Saint Bonaventure depicted as returning to complete his writings after his death, can alone give an idea of this fearsome face; though Bonaventure is less haggard, less wrinkled, less green in complexion, and more alive, despite having been buried for fifteen days.

I never liked those Rabelaisian monks, short and fat, pot-bellied, eating well, and drinking better; and Frère Jean des Entommeures only pleases me in the context of Gargantua and Pantagruel. So, this monk delighted me; and I know not what kind of amiable jest regarding choirboys and little girls the Voltaireans would not have dreamed up on his account.

This poor monk was the confessor of madmen. What a terrible and sinister vocation! Listening to the incoherent confessions of those troubled souls, elucidating cases of conscious delirium, receiving confidences born of hallucination, viewing convulsed masks macerating through wooden grilles, to confess that menagerie amidst stupid laughter, and imbecilic tears! One was no longer surprised by his strange appearance, his skeletal leanness, and his deathly pallor.

How did he go about introducing the idea of God to the harpings of dementia, to garrulous idiocy? What can he say to those unfortunate people, who no longer possess a soul, no longer enjoy freedom, and who cannot sin or be anything but innocent of all crimes?

Does he set the fiery braziers of hell before their poor deranged imaginations, to contain depraved fantasies through sheer terror? Or does he open to their hopes some childish paradise far beyond the sea, its lawns dotted with flowers, where white deer graze, where peacocks trail their starry tails, where rivers of cream flow from meringue rockeries; a heaven of pastries and preserves?

During our visit the weather had calmed, so we resolved to take advantage of what remained of the day to visit the Lido. There are, on the Lido, a few drinking places where working people go to dine and dance on feast days. It is scarcely dry land; however, some trees survive, and meagre tufts of grass make unsuccessful attempts at imitating turf; but good intention must make do instead, and feet that slip all week on the paving slabs of Venice are not sorry to sink up to the ankle in the shifting sands that the sea piles up there. One can imagine, thus, that one is walking on firm ground.

As we were there during the working week, the Lido was deserted and not very cheerful in appearance. But a tumult of popular joy would have bothered us at that moment, and the solitude of the arid shore suited the serious nature of our thoughts. We were walking the beach where the great Byron had galloped his horses, and where the Venetians came to bathe in groups. The beautiful compatriots of Titian and Paolo Veronese sheltered there, to undress, behind frail sheets of canvas supported by sticks; because the cabins on wheels of Dieppe and Biarritz had, fortunately, not penetrated so far.

As the weather was uncertain, we eschewed any anacreontic encounters and, boarding our gondola, returned to Saint Mark’s Square, where, after hearing the musical reveille, we retired to our own Campo San Moisè, to enjoy a restless sleep, in which the monk of San Servolo, the figures of madmen and monsters, and those fantastic elements of fresco, combined to create a dark and extravagant nightmare as in some novel by Monk Lewis or Charles Maturin.

Part XXII: San Biagio – The Capuchin Monks

Everyone, at least once in their life, has been obsessed with a musical motif, a fragment of poetry, a scrap of conversation, overheard by chance, which pursues you everywhere with an invisible ghostly obstinacy. A monotonous voice whispers in your ear the cursed theme, a silent orchestra plays it in the depths of your mind, your pillow repeats it to you, your dreams whisper it, an invincible power forces you to mumble it imbecilically from morning to evening, as the devotee mutters their litany in sleep.

For eight days, a poem by Alfred de Musset, doubtless imitated from some old Venetian popular song, fluttered madly on my lips, and chirped away like a little bird, without my being able to put it to flight. Despite myself, I hummed it under my breath in the most disparate situations:

At San Biagio, on the Zueca,

You were happy, very happy.

At San Biagio.

At San Biagio, on the Zueca,

We were fine there.

Just take the trouble

To remember,

Take the trouble

And you’ll recall.

At San Biagio, on the Zueca,

Gathering vervain in the meadow:

At San Biagio, on the Zueca,

To live and die there.

The Zueca (an abbreviation for the Giudecca) was facing us, separated only by the width of the channel, and nothing was easier than going to the San Biagio of the song, which conjures up an island of Cythera, a languorous Eldorado, an earthly paradise of love, where it would be sweet to live and die. A few strokes of the oars would have borne us there; but the temptation was resisted, knowing that one must not approach enchanted shores if one does not wish to see the mirage melt into vapour, and I continued to hum the unbearable refrain:

At San Biagio, on the Zueca

which was beginning to become what they call a saw in workshop slang; a saw with sharp teeth, though without any ill intent on my side. My travelling companion, my dear Louis (Louis de Cormenin), who had tolerated this cantilena, importunate as a mosquito’s buzz, for more than eight days with that charming placidity, and that imperceptible smile of irony which gives his Berber-bearded head so fine and sympathetic an expression, being unable to contain himself any longer, declared his authority one morning, by setting foot in the gondola, and telling young Antonio: ‘To San Biagio, to the Zueca!’ To my disgust, he made me sail to the heart of my dream, and my refrain; an excellent homoeopathic remedy.

We found no meadows at San Biagio, and were unable, to my great regret, to gather vervain. Around the church there are cultivated areas, market gardens where vegetables replace flowers. My disappointment did not prevent me from admiring the most beautiful grapes and superb pumpkins. It is probable that at the time when the song was created the summit of the island was occupied by wasteland, including fresh grass scattered with flowers in the spring, and where loving couples walked, hand in hand, gazing at the moon. An ancient Venetian guide-book describes the Zueca as a place full of gardens, orchards, and delightful corners.

Instead of finding pretty flowers, in tender colours, with penetrating scents, blooming amidst the grass, encountering yellowing pot-bellied pumpkins beneath spreading leaves calms one’s poetic enthusiasm, and, from that moment, I no longer sang: ‘At San Biagio, on the Zueca.’

To employ our time there, we went, along the island, to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer (Il Redentore), located near the Capuchin monastery.

The church possesses one of those beautiful Greek style facades of such elegant and harmonious proportions as Palladio once created. This kind of architecture is very popular with people of taste. It is sober, pure, and classical. Though I will be accused of barbarism, I admit to finding it only moderately charming. I scarcely accept, for Catholic churches, anything other than the Byzantine, Romanesque or Gothic styles. Greek art is so associated with polytheism that it can barely express any other thought. Also, churches built according to its plan in no way possess the religious stamp, in the sense that I attach to the phrase; that luminous ancient serenity, with its perfect rhythm, and its logic of forms, cannot render the vague, infinite, deep, mysterious meaning of Christianity. The unalterable cheerfulness of paganism cannot express incurable Christian melancholy, and Greek architecture is therefore suitable for temples, palaces, stock-exchanges, ballrooms, and galleries, more or less ornate, where Jupiter might be at ease, but where Christ has difficulty finding a lodging.

Once resigned to its style, the Church of the Redeemer strike quite a beautiful figure at the edge of the canal, in which it is reflected, along with its large monumental staircase of seventeen marble steps, its triangular pediment, its Corinthian columns, its bronze doors and its statues, its two pyramidions and its white dome, which produces such a beautiful effect at sunset, when one journeys offshore in a gondola, between the public gardens and San Giorgio.

The church was built to fulfil a vow made by the Senate in order to ward off the plague of 1576, which caused such terrible mortality in the city, and bore away, among other illustrious figures, Titian, that patriarch of painting, loaded with years and glory.

The interior is very simple, even a little bare. Either because money was lacking, or for some other reason, the statues which appear to fill the niches along the nave are nothing but trompe-l’oeil work skilfully executed in grisaille by Paolo Piazza, a Capuchin priest. The niches are real; but the statues, painted on wooden boards, betray their secret by their lack of depth when seen in profile, though from the front the illusion is complete. This same Padre Piazza created, in the refectory of the convent, a painting which he had the whim of signing with the letter P five times, which is interpreted as follows: Paolo Piazza Per Poco Prezzo (Paolo Piazza, for little reward) he was doubtless badly paid for his labour, and took his revenge in this manner.

A for the paintings, we would need to commence with the usual litany, Tintoretto, the Bassanos, Paolo Veronese; I lack the pretension to describe them to you one after another. There is such an abundance of fine pictures in Venice that one almost ends by being deterred, in the belief that at that time it was no more difficult to create a superb church painting than to scribble a newspaper article with a flourish of the pen is today. However I recommend to the traveller a Giovanni Bellini of supreme beauty, which adorns the sacristy.

The subject is the Blessed Virgin and the child Jesus between Saint Jerome and Saint Francis. The divine Mother looks with an air of deep adoration on the infant sleeping in her lap. Little smiling angels flutter in the background, above a sea, playing on lutes. We know with what delicacy, what flowering of feeling, what innocence of spirit, Giovanni Bellini treats his familiar scenarios with the brush; but here, apart from the naive charm of the composition, the Gothic fidelity of the drawing, the somewhat severe finesse of the modelling, there is a burst of colour, a light warmth of tone which suggests Giorgione. Though some connoisseurs attribute this painting to Palma Vecchio, I believe it to be a Bellini; the unusual brilliance of colour arises from the perfect state of conservation of the painting. Venice is so naturally a colourist that grey is impossible there, even for artists, and the most severe Gothic gilds its asceticism with a Giorgionesque amber hue.

Two or three Capuchin monks who were at prayer would have granted this church, if it had been illuminated with a more miserly light, the air of one of those paintings by François Granet so admired twenty years ago; the good fathers were perfectly posed, and all they were missing was a touch of bright red in the ears. One of them was humbly sweeping the choir, and we asked to see the monastery; he acceded with great politeness to our request and allowed us to enter via a small side-door in the church cloister. I had long harboured the desire to view the interior of an active monastery.

In Spain, we had been unable to satisfy this desire for the religious and picturesque. The monks had recently been secularised, and the monasteries, as in France after the Revolution, had become national property. I had walked through the Charterhouse of Miraflores, near Burgos, where we had found only a poor old man, dressed in blackened clothes somewhere between the costume of a peasant and that of a priest, smoking his cigarette beside a brazier, who guided us along the deserted corridors and abandoned cloisters, onto which the empty cells opened. At Toledo, the monastery of San Juan de los Reyes, an admirable building in ruins, contained only a few shy lizards and furtive snakes, which vanished at the sound of our footsteps under the nettles and rubble. The refectory was still almost intact, and, above the door, a terrible painting showed a rotting corpse, whose green belly released, amidst its effusions, the filthy guests of the sepulchre; the intention of the work was to offset the sensuality of the meal, served however with eremitic austerity. The Charterhouse of Granada contained only turtles which flapped heavily into the water from the banks of the fishponds as the visitor approached, while the magnificent Monastery of San Domingo, on the slopes of Antequera, listened, in deepest solitude, to the babbling of its fountains, and the rustling of its laurel grove.

The Capuchin monastery of the Zueca barely resembled those admirable buildings, which possessed long white marble cloisters with elegantly formed arches, marvels of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance; their courtyards planted with jasmines, myrtles and oleanders; their gushing fountains; their cells revealing through a window the blue velvet of the Sierra Nevada iced with silver. It was not one of those splendid retreats where austerity is but one more charm for the soul, and to which the philosopher could adapt as easily as the Christian. The cloister was not relieved by any mark of architectural ornamentation; low arches, short pillars, a prison courtyard rather than a place to walk and daydream. An ugly roof with garish red tiles covered the whole. Not even a severe, sad bareness, those cold grey tones, that pallid sobriety favourable to thought; a harsh flickering light crudely illuminated its miserable details, and highlighted its prosaic, mundane wretchedness. In the garden which we could glimpse from there, stood rows of cabbages and other vegetables of a bitter green colour. Not a shrub, not a flower: everything was sacrificed to strict utility.

We then entered the interior of the convent, traversing corridors intersecting at right angles; at the end of these corridors, there were small chapels built into the wall and coloured with crude frescoes in honor of the Madonna or some saint of the Order.

The leaded windows with their mesh of glazing granted them some daylight, but without producing those chiaroscuro effects of which painters know how to take such good advantage. One would have said that in their construction everything had been calculated to produce as much ugliness as possible in the smallest space. Here and there, hung engravings glued on canvas, representing, in an infinity of small medallions, all the saints, all the cardinals, all the prelates, all the illustrious characters produced by the Order, a sort of genealogical tree of that impersonal and constantly renewed family.

Low doors darkened at regular intervals the long white lines of the walls. On each of them could be read a religious thought, a prayer, or one of these brief Latin maxims which contain a world of ideas. To the inscription was joined an image of the Virgin, or the portrait of a saint, the object of devotion particular to the cell’s inhabitant.

A vast tiled roof, supported by a visible wooden framework, covered, without touching, the alveoli of these monastic bees, like a lid placed on rows of boxes.

The sound of a bell was heard, indicating either a mealtime, prayers, or some other ascetic exercise; the cell doors opened, and the deserted corridors were all at once filled with a swarm of monks who set off two by two, heads lowered, broad beards spreading across their chests, hands crossed in their sleeves, towards the part of the convent to which the summons called them. When they lifted their feet, their sandals on leaving the heel, made a sort of clicking sound, most monastic and lugubrious in nature, which gave a sad rhythm to their spectral march.

About forty of them passed before us, and we saw only their heavy, dazed, stupid heads, characterless despite their beards and shaved pates. Ah! How different to the monk of San Servolo, so consumed by ardour, so scorched by faith, so ravaged by macerations, whose feverish eye was already shining with the light of the other life, ecstatically confessing the delirious! A Daniel amidst the lions!

We had certainly entered the monastery disposed to be if not pious, at least respectful. If we lack faith, we still admire it in others, and if we cannot believe, at least we can understand. We had prepared ourselves to feel all the austere poetry of the cloister, and were most cruelly disappointed.

The convent felt like a hospital, an asylum, a barracks. The uncivilised odour of this human menagerie caught us in the face and sickened us. If one might say of various holy personages that they were possessed by the madness of the cross, stultitiam crucis, it seemed to me that these monks were possessed by its idiocy; and, despite myself, my spirit rebelled, and I blushed for the deity on viewing such degradation of the creature made in his image. I felt ashamed that a hundred men had gathered in a single place, to be filthy and to stink, according to some set of rules, in honor of one who created eighty thousand species of flowers. This nauseating incense revolted me, and I felt, for these poor Capuchin fathers, an involuntary and secret horror.

I even viewed myself, I, a named subscriber to Le Constitutionnel, the owner of busts of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire in terracotta, the bearer of a Touquet snuffbox, a liberal of the Restoration, in the most humiliating light you could imagine; I indulged, for my part, in imbecilic thoughts of the form: ‘Would it not be better if these robust fellows, made for the plough, threw away their habits, re-entered human life and achieved their salvation while working, instead of eschewing shirts and dragging their sandals about the cloister, in a state of idleness and stupidity?’

As we left the convent, two of the fathers who had business in Venice asked us to take them across the Giudecca canal, in our gondola. Out of humility, they declined to accept the place of honor under the felze that we offered them, and stood near the bow; they struck a good enough pose thus; their brown homespun robes formed two or three large folds that Fra Bartolomeo would not have disdained to use in painting the habit of Saint Francis of Assisi. Their bare feet in their sandals were very fine; the digits splayed, the toes as long as those in the feet of ancient statues.

We gave them a few twenty-kreuzter coins to say Mass for us. The Voltairean ideas which we had harboured throughout the time of our visit had rightly deserved this Christian submission on our part, and if it was the devil who had aroused them, he had to be trapped, and forced to gnaw his tail like an angry monkey.

The good priests took the money, slipped it into the folds of their sleeves, and, finding us such good Catholics, gave us some small intaglio images that we have carefully preserved: ‘Saint’ Moses, the ‘prophet’; Saint Francis, some other bearded saints, and a certain Veronica Giuliani, a Capuchin abbess (abadessa cappuccina) whose head was shown falling back, her eyes swimming in ecstasy like those of Saint Teresa the Spanish nun, who pitied the devil for not being able to love, yet was not placed on the Index as I was for an idea of the same nature.

We dropped off the good fathers at the landing-place of San Moisè, and they swiftly vanished into the narrow streets.

The day was not conducive to illusions: at San Biagio, on the Zueca, pumpkins had replaced vervain, and where we expected to find a savage cloister with livid monks, in the manner of Zurbaran, we had encountered a vile Capuchin barracks, and garb like that in Jakob Schlesinger’s coloured lithographs. This disappointment felt particularly cruel to me; since for many a year I had cherished the dream of ending my days in a monk’s robe in some beautiful monastery in Italy or Portugal, say Montecassino or Mafra, and now I no longer desired that at all.

Part XXIII: The Churches

With the exception of Saint Mark’s Basilica, a marvel whose only analogues are the mosque of Constantinople, and the mosque of Cordoba, the churches of Venice are not particularly remarkable as regards architecture, or at least possess nothing to amaze the traveller who has visited the cathedrals of France, Spain and Belgium. Except a few of little interest, of earlier date, they all belong to the Renaissance and the Rococo genre, which in Italy swiftly followed the return to the classical tradition. The best, are in the Palladian style; the worst, in a peculiar genre that we will call the Jesuit style. Almost all the old churches in the city have unfortunately been refashioned under one or other of these influences. Certainly, Palladio, as so many noble buildings demonstrate, was an architect of superior merit; but he lacked any feeling for Catholicism, and was more suited to rebuilding the temple of Diana at Ephesus, or that of the Panhellenic Jupiter at Aegina, than to raising the Basilica of the Nazarene or some martyr of the Golden Legend. He sipped, like a bee, the pollen of Hymettus, and ignored in his flight the flowers of the Passion. As for Jesuit taste, with its gibbous domes, its swollen columns, its over-heavy balustrades, its convoluted scrolls like Joseph Prudhomme’s signature, its puffy cherubim, its emasculated angels, its napkin-ring cartouches which seem to be waiting for their beards to be shaved, its chicory leaves as big as cabbages, its unhealthy affectations and ardent ornamentation, which one might take for excrescences of unhealthy stone, I profess an insurmountable horror of it all. It does more than displease me, it disgusts me.

In my opinion, nothing is more opposed to the Christian idea than that vile jumble of pious trinkets, that excess without beauty, without grace, overloaded and heavy, a uniform excess, which turns the chapel of the Most Holy Virgin into an Opéra girl’s boudoir. The Chiesa degli Scalzi is of this type, an example of rich extravagance; its walls, inlaid with coloured marble, forming an immense dappled surround woven in white and green; its ceilings frescoed by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Gregorio Lazzarini, in cheerful, bright, clear tones, the pink and azure of which would be wonderfully suited to a ballroom or theatre. It must have been charming, when full of little powdered abbots and beautiful ladies, in the days of Casanova and Cardinal de Bernis (see Casanova’s ‘History of My Life’), during a Mass to the music of Nicola Porpora, with the violins and choir of La Fenice. Indeed, nothing would be more natural in such a place than to celebrate the Lord to the sound of a gavotte. How I prefer the low Romanesque arches, the short porphyry pillars with ancient capitals, the barbarous images which stand forth from the golden shimmer of the Byzantine mosaics, even more the long ribs, tapered columns, and pierced trefoils, of Gothic cathedrals!

These architectural defects, to which we must resign ourselves in Italy, because almost all the churches are built more or less in this style, are compensated for by the number and beauty of the works of art the buildings contain. If one fails to admire the setting, one is forced to admire the gems. These are none other than paintings by Titian, Paolo Veronese, Tintoretto, Palma Vecchio and Palma il Giovane, Giovanni Bellini, Allessandro Scalzi, Bonifazio Veronese, and other wonderful masters. Each chapel has its gallery, which would honor a king. Even the Scalzi church itself, once its style is accepted, offers remarkable details: its wide altar-steps covered in Verona brocade, the beautiful twisted columns in French red marble, the gigantic statues of prophets, the jasper balustrades, the mosaic panels, have a certain style and are not lacking in grandeur. The church contains a very beautiful painting by Giovanni Bellini, a Virgin and Child; a magnificent bronze bas-relief by Jacopo Sansovino, representing episodes from the life of Saint Sebastian; and a delightful group in less severe style, by Guiseppe Toretto, Canova’s master, namely a Holy Family, Saint Joseph, the Virgin and the Child Jesus. The Virgin has a fine, plump face, a coquettish tilt of the head and extremities all of aristocratic delicacy. She looks like a duchess at the court of Louis XV, and one sees in her none other than Madame Pompadour. Angels from the ballet, students of François Robert Marcel, accompany this lovely domestic grouping. It is not religious, certainly; but this mannered and spiritual grace has much charm, and this sculptor of decadence is yet another fine artist.

The church of San Sebastiano, built by Sebastiano Serlio, is somewhat of a gallery and pantheon dedicated to Paolo Veronese. He worked there for years, and rests there for eternity surrounded by a halo of his masterpieces. His tomb is there surmounted by his bust, with a shield depicting his coat of arms, three stems of clover on a field we could not distinguish; let us admire the Saint Sebastian of Titian, what a beautiful old man’s head, what a superb and masterful bearing, and how pretty and naïve the attitude of the child who holds the saintly bishop’s mitre! but let us move on quickly to reach the master of this site, the great Paolo Veronese. In the Crucifixion, the three Marys at the foot of the cross are notable for the magnificent sense of order, the complex feeling for breadth, of a painter whom no one has equalled in the art of filling the voids of these vast canvases. Brocades, and damasks break into opulent folds, undulate in splendid combinations, and Christ, from the top of the tree of sorrows, cannot withhold a vague half-smile, as if the joy of being so well-depicted consoles him for his suffering. Mary Magdalene is adorably beautiful; her large eyes are drowned in light and tears; a teardrop still hangs trembling next to her purpurin mouth, like a droplet of rain on a rose petal. The background of the landscape is unfortunately a little too like theatre decoration, and its poor layout toys with and confuses the eye; his Presentation of Jesus in the Temple is also a very remarkable painting, despite the exaggerated limbs of the figures placed at the front of the composition; but the head of Saint Simeon is of divine unction and marvellous execution, and the Child Jesus presents himself through an astonishingly audacious use of foreshortening.

In the right-hand corner of the painting, a dog, its melancholy muzzle raised in the air, seems to bark at the moon. Nothing justifies the presence of this isolated creature; but we know Paul Veronese’s predilection for dogs, especially greyhounds; he placed them in all his paintings, and the San Sebastiano church contains the only canvas which does not contain one, which is noted as a unique curiosity amongst the works of this master. I was unable to verify for myself the accuracy of the assertion; but on reflection, it seems that the art of Paul Veronese always presents itself to my memory accompanied by a white greyhound, just as a canvas of Il Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi) appears invariably flowered and signed with a carnation. Some amateur, with time available, should ascertain the truth of the claim regarding this characteristic detail.

The purest of these picturesque diamonds is his Saint Mark and Saint Marcellinus Being Led to Martyrdom. Art can scarcely be taken further, and the painting must take its place among the seven wonders of human genius.

What colour and what sense of design in the group of two women, each with a child, whom the eye first encounters when penetrating the canvas! What ineffable unction, what celestial resignation on the faces of the two saints already bright with their future haloes, and how charming that woman’s head which appears in three-quarter view below Saint Sebastian’s shoulder, young, blonde, driven by emotion, eyes full of sadness and solicitude! This head, which is all we see of the figure, is of an attitude so precise, of a design so perfect, that the rest of her body can easily be imagined behind the interposed figures that hide her; we can follow its invisible lines to the end, the anatomy being so exact.

Saint Sebastian is said to be a portrait of Paolo Veronese himself, and the young girl that of his wife. They were then both in the prime of life, and she had not yet acquired the ample and heavy matronly beauty which characterises her in the portraits of her that remain, among others that in the gallery of the Pitti Palace, in Florence. Fabrics, details, ornamentation, everything is finished with the extreme care, the conscientious finish of supreme works, where the artist works simply to exercise his genius and satisfy the desire of his heart. It is in the depths of this canvas that the painter lies buried. Never did a brighter lamp illuminate the shadow of a tomb, and the masterpiece shines above the coffer like the blaze of an apotheosis.

The Coronation of the Virgin takes place amidst iridescence, effusions, and scintillations of light that only ever existed on Paolo Veronese’s palette. In an atmosphere of molten gold and silver which traverses Christ’s hair, a Mary of such celestially human beauty that she makes your heart race, while making you bow your head, floats on a cloud. His Esther Crowned by Ahasuerus is of an unparalleled grandeur and opulence of tone. Here Paolo Veronese was able to display his sumptuous manner at ease; the pearls, satins, velvets, and gold brocades sparkle, shimmer, gleam and fragment in shivers of light. What a masculine and proud appearance the warrior in the foreground has, clad in the nonchalant anachronism of his armour! And how the great sacramental dog boldly camps there, as if acknowledging its breeding, and feeling the honor of being painted by Paolo Veronese! Die of envy, Louis Godefroy Jadin, portraitist of such creatures!

At the end of the church, in a location almost invisible from below, there are large grisailles from the master’s hand, very lightly worked and beautifully designed; humidity, weather, and neglect has begun to mar them; an Austrian bomb, piercing the vault, has scored them with a furrow.

The sacristy still contains paintings by him, which date from his early youth, when his as yet timid genius was searching out its way. Legend provides several explanations for the prodigious abundance of Paolo Veronese paintings in this church: first a particular devotion of the artist to Saint Sebastian; then, more romantically, the murder of a rival which forced him to seek asylum in that place of refuge which he embellished in gratitude while at leisure there. According to others, it was to avoid the revenge of a senator whom he had caricatured in Saint Mark’s Square, meaning that the painter had to remain hidden in San Sebastian for two years. We give these tales told by the sacristan for what they are worth, without troubling to examine them further.

Before leaving this radiant church, whose riches I am far from having described, lower your eyes, dazed by phosphorescent ceilings, to the grey pavement beneath, and you will discover at your feet a humble stone which hides the vault of a dynasty of gondoliers. The first name recorded is Zorzi de Cataro, from the San Barnaba landing-stage, with the date 1503. The last bears the date 1785. The republic did not long survive the Zorzi.

Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari is not in the dreadful, classic Jesuit style that I spoke of earlier; its ogives, lancets, Roman tower, and large red brick walls give it a more religious feel. Above the door there is a statue by Alessandro Vittoria, representing the Saviour. The Church of the Frari, built by Nicolas Pisano, dates back to 1250.

It is here that the tomb of Canova is located: this monument that the artist had intended for Titian, modified to some degree, served for himself. I admired it only moderately; it is pretentious, theatrical and cold. At the base of a green marble pyramid attached to the wall of a chapel, yawns the black door of a vault, towards which a tiered procession of statues is ascending, via the steps of the monument: at the head walks a funereal male figure carrying a sepulchral urn; behind allegorical figures advance holding torches and flower garlands. To counterbalance this right side of the composition, a large naked figure, which, doubtless, symbolizes the fragility of life, leans on an extinguished torch, and the winged lion of Saint Mark sadly lowers his muzzle on his paws, in a pose similar to the famous lion by Bertel Thorwaldsen. Above the door, two winged spirits support a medallion portrait of Canova.

The tomb seems all the poorer and meaner as regards idea and execution, in that the Frari is full of ancient monuments in the most beautiful style, achieving the most beautiful effects. Here rest Bishop Marco Zeno (d. 1641) Alvise Pasqualigo (Procurator of San Marco, d.1528), Francesco Barbaro (Humanist and Senator d.1454), Jacopo Marcello (Naval Commander d.1484), and Benedetto Pésaro (Naval Commander, d.1503), in sarcophagi adorned with statues in wondrously proud attitudes.

There is an admirable triptych, here, by Bartolomeo Vivarini dated to 1474, and a Titian Virgin who is draped in a white veil to charming effect. The equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, grandly mounted on his bronze steed, arrests the gaze on arriving by canal at the small square at the end of which rises the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Though its construction dates back to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, it was only consecrated in 1430. The tympanum of the facade is pretty, the arch which surmounts it is wonderfully carved with flowers and fruit. We visited the church mainly to see Titian’s Martyrdom of Saint Peter; a painting so precious that its sale is forbidden under penalty of death (later destroyed by fire in 1867, a copy by Johann Loth now hangs in its place). I love the ferocious artistry, and this is the only case where a scene of capital punishment is worth preserving. However, despite its beauty, other works of Titian seem as worthy as this one of so great a jealousy on the part of Venice, and we had formed, from copies and engravings, a concept of it different from and superior to the reality. The scene takes place in a wood; Saint Peter is overthrown, the executioner holds him by the arm and already raises his sword; a priest flees in terror, and in heaven two cherubic angels appear, ready to collect the soul of the martyr. The executioner is firmly planted; his aggressive, threatening stance is well done. A bestially energetic expression contracts his features. His eyes shine beneath his low forehead like those of a tiger. His nostrils dilate and he smells blood. But there is perhaps too much fear and not enough resignation in the head of the saint. He sees only the sword whose chill blade is about to pass between his vertebrae, and he forgets that above, in the azure, hover celestial messengers with palm fronds and crowns. He is too much the ordinary condemned person whose head is about to be severed, and fears the pain. As the monk on the left, he is fearful, tense from terror, but unable to escape. His body, in foreshortening, extends long legs, thrown back in the act of running. His arms are stretched out to the left, his head to the right.

Though the composition may give rise to criticism, one can only bow before the magnificent landscape, so grand, so severe, so stylish; the simple, masculine, and robust use of colour, the broad and grandiose action, the impassive sovereignty of touch, the haughty mastery, which reveals the god of painting. Titian, as I have already said, is the only artist that the modern world can compare to the ancient, in terms of calm strength, tranquil splendour, and endless serenity.

I could tell you more regarding the funeral monuments which line the walls; the altar of the Chapel of San Domenico, where the history of that saint is modelled in a series of bas-reliefs in bronze, by Guiseppe Maria Mazza of Bologna; the Christ on the Cross by Tintoretto (removed to the Accademia); the magnificent sculptures of the Capella del Rosario; and the Coronation of the Virgin, by Palma Vecchio; but, in a church where there is a Titian, we only see Titian. His sun quenches all the stars.

Part XXIV: The Churches continued – The Scuola di San Rocco – Palaces

San Francesco della Vigne, with its red and white bell tower, is also worth visiting. Near the church there is a strange cloister, enclosed with black wooden grilles, which surrounds a kind of courtyard cluttered with wild mallows, nettles, hemlocks, asphodels, burdocks and other plants of ruins and cemeteries, in the middle of which rises a cave made of rockery and coral, quite similar to those little rocks adorned with shells that are sold in Le Havre and Dieppe. This cave houses an effigy of Saint Francis in wood or coloured plaster, a devotional toy, a piece of Jesuit Chinoiserie. Under the damp mossy arches of the cloister, in the midst of tombs worn by friction their inscriptions already illegible, we noticed on a stone slab a gondola carved in somewhat coarse relief, but still quite visible. It covers a vault of gondoliers, like the tomb of the Zorzi of Cataro in the church of San Sebastiano; every family of gondoliers had its burial vault.

In the church, we saw a painting by Antonio Falier da Negroponte, of remarkable beauty and very well-preserved (Madonna and Child Enthroned). It is the only work of this painter I have ever encountered, one whose name I had never heard spoken, but who nonetheless deserves to be known.

I will give a fairly detailed description. The Virgin, seated on a throne, dressed in a robe of green and gold brocade and an embroidered mantle of the most delicate finish, one side of which a little girl supports in an attitude of ingenuous devotion, looks lovingly at the Child Jesus placed crosswise on her knees. The head of this Virgin, of exquisite delicacy, would do honor to Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Perugino, Dürer, or the sweetest and purest of the Gothic masters. She is blonde, and the gold of her hair, treated strand by strand, blends with the splendour of a trefoiled halo, inlaid with precious stones in the Byzantine style; at the top of the painting, from the depths of a naive ultramarine paradise, the Eternal Father in a majestic and satisfied pose looks down on the sacred group; two beautiful angels are holding an arch of flowers, and behind the throne, inlaid with goldwork and enamel, like that of an empress of the Later Empire, roses and lilies bloom, arranged in covered niches, which recall the flowery appellations of the litany.

All this is treated with that religious meticulousness, that infinite patience which seems to take no account of time and which exploits the endless leisure of the cloister. Indeed, Negroponte was a monk, as the scroll traced on the painting declares: Frater Antonius di Negroponto pincsit. But extreme attention to detail takes nothing away from the grandeur of the work, its imposing effect, and the richness of colour which contrasts, victoriously, with the gleam of gold and embossed ornaments. It is both an image and a gem, as to my mind paintings should be that are exposed to the adoration of the faithful. Art, in such circumstances, benefits from adopting the hieratic and mysterious role of the idol. The Madonna of Brother Antonio da Negroponte in San Francesco della Vigna fulfils these conditions admirably and supports with honor the neighbouring Resurrection by Paolo Veronese, the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence by Girolamo da Santacroce, and the Madonna and Child with Saints by Giovanni Bellini, one of his best works, unfortunately placed in a dark chapel.

We must not neglect a visit to San Pantaleone, if only for the gigantic ceiling painting by Gian Antonio Fumiani, representing various episodes from the life of the saint, his martyrdom, and his apotheosis. Since the monastic stiffness and naivety of missal illumination, as seen in the work of Brother Antonio da Negroponte, many years have passed, and art has travelled far. Why does this ceiling, however, which equals in bold facility that of the Salon of Hercules at Versailles, by François Lemoyne, and the frescoes in the Escorial, by Luca Giordano, leave one cold despite its artistic foreshortenings, its use of trompe-l’oeil, all its resources and cleverness of execution? It is because the means are everything, the hand is ahead of the head, and there is a lack of soul in this immense composition, suspended above one’s head, like an opera Glory, by visible threads. The driest, clumsiest, most constrained Gothic has a charm lacking in these great mannerists so learned, so nimble, so skilful, and so expeditious in practice.

In the church of Santa Maria della Salute, depicted in the magnificent exterior view that Canaletto painted and that everyone can see in the Louvre, we admired a superb ceiling painting by Titian, showing Cain’s murder of Abel, executed with masterful robustness and energy: it is both calm and violent like all the most successful works of that unrivalled artist. The architecture is by Baldassarre Longhena; the white domes are very gracefully curved, and stand out against the azure like breasts full of milk; a hundred and thirty statues with flying draperies, in elegantly styled poses, populate the cornice; a very pretty Eve, in the costume of her day, smiled at us every morning from this cornice, when we were staying at the Hotel Europa, beneath a pink ray of sunlight, which dyed her marble with a blush of modesty. Religion is not severe in Italy, where nudity sanctified by art is most acceptable. I have already mentioned, if my memory fails to deceive me, the surprise I felt on encountering a similar Eve, even less clothed if that is possible, on the roof of Milan Cathedral.

One could continue this pilgrimage from church to church indefinitely, since all contain treasures which would lead to endless description; but I do not pretend to be writing a guide-book; I only wish to paint, in a personal manner, the life in Venice of an unbiased traveller, curious about everything, wandering everywhere, capable of sacrificing an ancient monument for a young woman passing by, taking chance as his cicerone, and only speaking, at the risk of being incomplete, of what he has seen himself. These are sketches made from nature, daguerreotype plates, small pieces of mosaic collected in situ, which are juxtaposed without my worrying too much about a correctness and uniformity that is perhaps impossible to achieve in something as diffuse as the wanderings on foot, or in a gondola, of a journalist on holiday in a city unknown to him, and where so many objects, on every side, arouse his curiosity.

So, without seeking a laborious transition, I will conduct you instantly to the Scuola Grande de San Rocco, an elegant building composed of two orders of superimposed Corinthian columns, each encircled, at a third of its height, by interlaced leaves and twigs in stone, to most beautiful effect.

Saint Roch, as we know, enjoyed the privilege of curing the plague; he is held in great veneration by the Venetians, who were particularly exposed to such contagions through Venice’s trade relations with Constantinople and the seaports of the Levant. His statue shows, on his exposed thigh a dreadful dark bubo, since saints are homoeopaths, and only heal the diseases they are afflicted by. The plague is treated by a plague-stricken saint, ophthalmia by a martyr whose eyes were gouged out, and so on. This is a case, as we say, of: Similia similibus. Medicine aside, doubtless these blessed characters sympathised more tenderly with those subject with regard to the evils they suffered.

At the Scuola de San Rocco, there is a lower room entirely painted by Tintoretto, that fearful consumer of tasks, and, climbing a magnificent monumental staircase by Scarpagnino (Antonio Abbondi), one has, to right and left, as if to justify the name and patronage of that saint of the plague, different episodes of the great Venetian epidemic of 1630, which might equally serve as illustrating the Parisian cholera. These cadaverous paintings are: on the right, a work by Antonio Zanchi; on the left, one by Pietro Negri.

In the first of these paintings, we see the arrival of the plague in Venice. The scourge, personified in the figure of a skeleton, traverses the dense unhealthy air, carried by a woman with withered breasts, haggard, gaunt, and green as putrefaction, in winged flight, in a pose from the Triumph of Death by Orcagna. In the foreground, a woman flees in three-quarter view; she is blonde and chubby like any true Venetian woman, and it would really be too bad if the hideous spectre reached her, since she is so charming in her fright and perfectly drawn.

On the other side, a very solidly planted gondolier, of gigantic proportions and exaggerated musculature, urges on, with a superb movement, a boat intended for the transport of corpses. A female corpse, shadowed in black, with livid flesh, but whose fleshy arms and powerfully-outlined throat show that she was but a moment ago struck down as if by lightning by the scourge, presents herself, head first, in in a violent and dramatic foreshortening; near her a man holds his nose (a naive and dreadful detail), not being able to bear the stench of this beautiful body barely cold, and already decomposing.

This lugubrious invocation is completed by The End of the Plague. The air is calmer. A woman in the foreground reveals very beautiful shoulders, of a whiteness more vivid than those bluish tints of the livid flesh which summon up chlorine and quicklime. Health has returned to the people. One can breathe without fear of swallowing poison, squeeze a friendly hand without bearing away the germ of death. The Republic, through the powerful intercession of Saint Roch, has obtained from heaven the cessation of the scourge. All this upper group is done with delightful grace. The saint, inclined at the feet of Jesus Christ and the Virgin, begs with ineffable ardour, and we understand that celestial goodness cannot refuse so fervent a prayer. The republic, symbolised by a beautiful woman, in the style of Paolo Veronese, holds a most noble pose in a twisting attitude; it is annoying that her hands are not in accord with the beauty of her head.

It is at the Scuola de San Rocco, that Tintoretto’s masterpiece is to be found, that artist being so fertile and so uneven that he transitions from the sublime to the detestable with prodigious ease. This immense painting presents, in extensive development, all the blood-stained drama of the Crucifixion. It occupies the end of a large room.

The sky, doubtless painted with that Egyptian blue pigment which played such evil tricks on the artists of the period, has false and elusive tones unpleasant to the eye and unseen before the carbonisation of that erroneous colour, which so strangely blackened the background of Paolo Veronese’s The Supper at Emmaus; but this imperfection is quickly forgotten, as the foreground groups capture the viewer completely, after a few minutes of contemplation. The sacred women form a trio near the cross expressing the profoundest desperation human suffering can conceive; one of them, completely covered with her mantle, lies on the ground and sobs, in desolate prostration, to most pitiful effect.

A black African, stands on tiptoe, to raise the cross of one of the thieves, with a strained and contorted movement, which lacks naturalness; but he is painted, like everything else in this work, with a brush so vehement and furious, that we cannot help but admire him. Never did Rubens, Rembrandt, Géricault, or Delacroix, in their most feverish and turbulent sketches, achieve such anger, such rage, such ferocity. With this work, Tintoretto fully justifies his name Robusti; pure vigour cannot be taken further; it is violent, exaggerated, melodramatic, but full of a supreme quality: strength.

This canvas, radiant with sovereign artistry, excuses the painter his many acres of smoky encrustations and blackened colours that are encountered at every step in the palaces, churches, and galleries, of Venice, and which are rather those of a dye-maker than a painter. The Crucifixion bears the date 1565.

Before leaving the Scuola di San Rocco, one must view Titian’s very fine Christ Carrying the Cross, the face revealing a sad and profound expression; also, charming bronze altar gates, cast in 1756 by Guiseppe Filiberti, of an exquisite delicacy and with an astonishing perfection of detail. These works precious, despite their modern date, represent different features of the life of Saint Roch, the patron saint of the place. The joinery work in the upper room is also very remarkable. But, if we set out to admire everything here, our task would never end.

Following my serendipitous method, let me return to the Grand Canal, and offer some details regarding C’a Vendramin Calergi, the palace now occupied by the Duchesse de Berry. The architecture, rich and noble, was designed by Mauro Codussi; in the entablature and above the windows, little sculpted spirits support historical ornamented crests in excellent taste, and grant the facade a degree of elegance; a garden of moderate extent displayed a few verdant trees next to the palazzo, which would be indistinguishable from others if the large mooring posts, in white and blue, did not indicate, by the fleurs-de-lis with which they are sown, a princely and quasi-royal residence.

Once one has obtained permission to visit the palace, valets in green livery welcome one, most politely, at the foot of the stairs, whose steps the water bathes, moor one’s gondola to the poles, and introduce one to a vestibule to await the fulfilment of the formal process of admission.

This vestibule runs the length of the palace; it creates a sort of courtyard similar to the courtyards of our hotels; one needs to remember that we are in Venice, so one should not expect to see an unharnessed carriage, or saddle-horses returned from the woods.

Two stored gondolas, alone, and a few earthenware pots filled with fir trees and other meagre plants dying of thirst, furnished the bareness of this vast waiting room of a type to be found in all Venetian palaces, an antechamber which also serves as a landing stage.

In the middle of this vestibule, on the left, is a large staircase between two walls, where two ropes of red silk hang, and a like array of unfortunate perennial plants reigns. A narrow carpet lines the steps and leads to an immense room, similar to the vestibule, without furniture or ornament. From there one enters the dining room, whose walls are covered with family portraits. This room takes the form of a long rectangle. It is well-lit by two large balcony windows.

An oval table occupied the middle, and a screen hid the entrance. On the right wall we noticed a portrait of the Duchess of Burgundy, in a velvet blue dress; those of the Comte d’Artois and Madame la Princesse de Lamballe, and several minor officials. On the left wall, opposite, an equally full-length portrait of Louis XV; and, on each side, those of his daughters, Mesdames de France.

From this dining room, a concealed door opens onto a dark chapel, so small that it could scarcely contain six people. There are four prie-dieus within. On the right, a large door gives access to a wholly modern living room, cluttered with paintings, and an infinity of small pieces of furniture: English tables, Parisian coffers, no lack of those charming useless luxuries which recall one’s homeland through its cherished trivialities; two portraits of Her Royal Highness the Duchesse de Berry are placed opposite: one by Thomas Lawrence shows her in a white satin dress, with a rose pinned at her left side, and reveals the most delightful little foot in a satin shoe that it is possible to gaze on. The entire far end of this room is covered by such paintings as everyone has seen at the art exhibitions of the day, for the most part representing heroes of the insurrection in the Vendée.

Re-crossing the dining room, one enters, via a door on the left, a living room which seems relatively small compared to the previous rooms, and somewhat overwhelmed by the sumptuous furniture that it contains. There are thirty places set for the elite; it forms a kind of Tribune, a Salon Carré, in which not a single one, it may be, of the great artists is unrepresented. Among these masterpieces a Virgin by André del Sarto, glows with a beauty to thrill the least knowledgeable of bourgeois visitors, the most prosaically armoured philistine.

This living room, illuminated by mild and gentle daylight, appeared to be the favoured room, the very heart of the building, and it was with regret that we departed to visit the famous salon where two porphyry columns are located, their value so great that it surpasses that of the entire palazzo. They are placed in front of a doorway, and produce little more effect than the lapis lazuli of the Salon of the Palazzo Serra in Genoa, which one would readily believe to be painted and varnished, and frighteningly close to resembling blue metallic moire. They both appear false, though most incontestably genuine.

What adds to this unfortunate impression, is that, opposite these columns, in one of those tall chimney breasts whose architecture meets the vault above, stands a stove which may provide comfort, but has nothing elegant about it, and whose earthenware does not go well with the porphyry. There is still one last room which reveals nothing remarkable. At the four corners, four pedestals support four busts: those of the Duc de Berry, Charles X, and two other members of the royal family. From there, one meets with the apartments of Count Ettore Lucchesi-Palli, and the tour is done.

It would merely be expressing a philosophical commonplace if I were to transcribe here such thoughts regarding the fragility of human fortune as this visit to the Vendramin-Calergi palace, a humble refuge for the misfortunes of the great, necessarily gave rise to. But it is not the first time that Venice has possessed the privilege of sheltering fallen royalty; Voltaire’s Candide supped there at the inn with six deposed monarchs, who lacked the means to pay the bill (See ‘Candide’, Chapter 26).

From the palace of the Duchess of Berry, we went to the Palazzo Barbarigo, to see the famous Titian paintings there. Unfortunately, the Russian consul had just bought them for his master the Czar, and the precious collection was under seal, awaiting its departure. We had to be content with a few works of little value, and the carved and gilded coffered ceilings which are very beautiful, but in an unfortunate state of disrepair.

We were also shown a wonderful overburdened cradle with extravagant ornamentation of an excessive richness, like the cradle of some long-hoped-for king’s son; it was in this golden crib that the eldest of the Barbarigo family slept. Now the cradle is empty; the Titians leave for Russia; rain filters through the gilding of the cracked ceilings, and the facade, covered with mould from humidity and neglect, will subside into the green waters of the canal.

We left there with broken hearts. Nothing was sadder than that cradle, belonging to an extinct family, in a palace that was crumbling away.

We welcomed, instead, our visit to the post office to collect our letters from France, currently the humble abode of another figure fallen from greatness, Daniele Manin, an unsung hero equal to the most famous heroes of antiquity. On the modest balcony of his apartment, on the corner of Calle San Paternian, a few neglected pots of flowerless hyacinths withered, and the dusty windows had the melancholy aspect that houses acquire whose spirit has departed for exile, or for death and eternal exile.

Part XXV: The Ghetto – Murano – Vicenza

One day, we wandered adventurously into Venice’s lost corners, since we like to know something of a city other than that given by the official view, sketched, described, and related everywhere, and were curious, our legitimate tribute of admiration having been paid, to lift the monumental mask that every city places over its face to conceal its ugliness and miseries. From alley to alley, by dint of crossing bridges and taking side paths, we arrived, near Canarregio, in a Venice which scarcely resembles the charming Venice of the watercolourists. Half-collapsed houses, their windows closed by boards; deserted squares, empty spaces where laundry dried on lines, and a few ragged children played; arid beaches on which boatmen were caulking their boats amidst thick clouds of smoke; abandoned churches shattered by the Austrian bombs, some of which had burst over these city extremes; and canals with dense green water, where empty pallets and the detritus of vegetables floated, formed scenes of misery, solitude, and abandonment which created a painful impression. Artificial cities, won from the sea, like Venice, need wealth and splendour; all the richness of the arts, all the magnificence of architecture, is required, to console its inhabitants for the absence of Nature. Though a palazzo designed by Vincento Scamozzi or Michele Sanmicheli looks fine, with its balconies, columns and marble staircase, on the banks of the Grand Canal, nothing is sadder than a derelict house subsiding between sky and water, woodlice running about its mouldy feet, crabs gripping the stones.

We had been walking for some time through a maze of alleyways which often brought us back to our point of departure. We noted with surprise the absence of religious emblems on the street corners; no more little chapels, no more Madonnas decorated with ex-votos, no more carved crosses in the squares, no more effigies of saints, none of those external signs of Christian devotion so numerous in other areas of the city. Everything seemed strange, rawer, and more mysterious. The odd furtive figure glided silently between the walls with a circumspect air. These figures lacked the Venetian appearance. Semitic features, coal-black eyes in pallid faces, lean cheeks, narrower chins, everything showed a different origin. The rags that covered their poverty were skimpy, pitiful, dirty, with a particular sordidness, denoting want even more than poverty, misery more than mere hardship, and arousing pity rather than contempt.

The streets narrowed more and more; the houses rose in towers of superimposed hovels, seeking a little breathable air and light above the shadows and mire. Several of these houses had nine floors, nine levels of ragged clothes, waste, and humble industry. All the forgotten diseases of the leprosariums of the Near East seemed to be gnawing away at those neglected walls; the humidity speckled them with dark patches like gangrene; the efflorescence of saltpetre there simulated in the plaster the roughness, warts and buboes of plague; the plaster, peeling like scabby skin, peeled off in scaly films. No edge was perpendicular; everything was lopsided; one floor was hollowed out the next projected; the bleary-eyed windows lacked whole panes. Paper was plastered over them here and there, bandaging though inadequately the windows’ wounds; sticks, like fleshless arms, waved indescribable rags above the passers-by; soiled mattresses were drying in the sun on the sills of those black and gaping apertures.

In places, remnants of red brick rendering, and crumbling plaster, gave to some of the facades, less decrepit than the others, an unhealthy flush like the one that dulls the cheekbones or chest of a low-class courtesan covered with make-up. These houses were none the less ugly and repulsive, though one might say health triumphed there over death, artifice over misery. Which is the least repellent, a corpse with all its lividity, or a corpse whose yellow wax face has been adorned with vermillion?

Ruined bridges, bending their arched backs as if crushed by the years, and close to letting their arches slide into the water, connected these masses of shapeless hovels together, separated by stagnant, muddy canals, black as ink, green as mud, clogged with rubbish of all kinds, which the tide lacks the strength to scour away, powerless as it is to stir the sleeping water, opaque and heavy, similar to that of the Stygian Marsh, and the rivers of Hades.

Finally, we emerged onto a fairly large paved square in the midst of which yawned the stone mouth of a cistern. At one corner stood a building of superior architectural aspect, including the doorway which was surmounted by an inscription carved in Hebrew characters. The mystery of the absence of Christian motifs was explained; this fetid and unhealthy neighbourhood, this aquatic ‘Court of Miracles’, was simply the Ghetto, the Jewish Quarter in Venice, which sadly retained a sordidness more characteristic of the Middle Ages.

Perhaps, if we had entered those rotten houses, cracked, and striped with foul slime, we might have found, as in ancient Jewish Quarters, Rebeccas and Rachels of radiant oriental beauty, adorned with gold and precious stones, seated like Hindu idols on the most precious carpets from Smyrna, amidst golden dishes and priceless riches piled up through paternal prudence; because Jewish poverty is sometimes a cover. If the Christian may adopt a false air of luxuriousness, the Jew may adopt one of false poverty, akin to certain insects that, to escape their persecutors, roll in the dust and render themselves the colour of mud. This habit acquired in the Middle Ages, when it was essential for survival, has not yet been lost, though nothing justifies it now, and it is continued with the obstinacy as regards customs attributable to every people.

The building decorated with a Hebrew inscription was the synagogue. We entered. A rather fine staircase led into a large rectangular room lined with well-carved woodwork, upholstered with a splendid red silk damask. The Talmud, like the Koran, forbids its adherents all reproductions of the human figure, and treats this aspect of art as an idolatrous practice. Synagogues are necessarily bare like mosques or Protestant temples, and therefore cannot achieve the magnificence of Catholic cathedrals, regardless of the aspirations of the faithful. This creed, wholly abstract, is meagre on the eye: a pulpit for the rabbi who comments on the Pentateuch, a forum for the cantor who leads the prayers, a cabinet in which the scrolls of the Torah are kept, and that is all.

We noticed, in this synagogue, a large number of chandeliers in yellow copper with curved arms and a sphere below, akin to the Dutch taste, as is often seen in the paintings of Gerrit Dou or Frans van Mieris the Elder, notably Gerit Dou’s painting of the Dropsical Woman, which is the subject of a popular engraving, and Frans Van Mieris’ The Cloth Shop. These chandeliers probably came from Amsterdam, the northern Venice, where the Jewish population is also large. The abundance of lighting should not be surprising, because seven-branched candlesticks, lamps, and torches accord with the Biblical texts.

The Jewish cemetery is on the Lido; the sand covers it, vegetation invades it, and children have no scruples about trampling and dancing on overturned or split tombstones. When we criticised them for their irreverence, they responded, naively: ‘They are Jews.’ A Jew, or a dog is the same thing in their eyes. These tombs, for them, cover, not corpses, but carrion. The funeral field to them is not a cemetery, but a throughfare. In Spain, in Puerto de Santa Maria, we heard a similar thing; a black African, a menial, had just been killed by a bull in in the arena; his body was carried away, and we were all moved: ‘Calm down,’ said a neighbour, it’s nothing; he’s only an African.’ Jew or African, they are human, nonetheless! How long will it still be necessary to teach this to children and barbarians?

Nothing is sadder, more dreary or more heartbreaking than this uneven sandy ground with tombs like tumuli. The half-erased inscriptions, in characters that we could not read, further added to their mystery, their air of oblivion and isolation; we were unable to give the dead, lying there, the satisfaction of hearing their names and epitaphs recited. This cemetery reminded us of an Arab cemetery near Oran, on a dusty, stony hill, of dreadful aridity, swept by the sea wind, scorched by the sun, through which we passed without paying more attention to the collapsed tombs than the stones in our path. At least the Arab dead were not troubled by the sound of songs and saltarellos; because the Lido is both a cemetery and a tavern: they bury the dead, and dance there as well.

The Christians of Venice are allowed to sleep more peacefully, on the little island of San Michele, on the way to Murano; they are laid to rest beneath the briny sand, which must lie softly on the bones of a Venetian, and the gondolas, as they pass, by salute the crosses.

Murano has wholly lost its ancient splendour; it is no longer, as in the past, the magical source of false pearls, mirrors and glassware. Chemistry has plumbed its secrets; it no longer has the sole privilege of creating those beautiful bevelled mirrors, those tall glasses on filigreed bases, those ewers ribboned with milky spirals, those crystal spheres that seem like tears of the sea frozen on to delicate oceanic vegetation; or those glass beads that tinkle on the loincloths of black African women. Bohemia’s products are as good, Choisy-le-Roi’s are better. The art, in Murano, has remained static amidst universal progress.

We visited one of its glassworks, where they manufacture small coloured beads. Long hollow tubes, in different tints, some transparent, others opaque, are chopped into small fragments, then rolled in boxes, until friction has rounded them; they polish them, then string these pearls with horsehair, and gather them in skeins.

A bottle was blown for us threaded with a white and pink filigree ribbon. Nothing is simpler and more expeditious than the process involved. The artisan was a tall and handsome lad, with black and curly hair, whose ruddy complexion scarcely confirmed the prejudice I had previously held regarding a profession deemed mortal, and which gentlemen can seemingly exercise without derogation. He took a lump of molten glass from the end of his tube, amalgamated the threads of colour that he wanted to turn at the same time, and with a single breath blew the piece, which swelled up, as frail and light as a soap bubble. He made a glass for us, in the same way, which he sold to us for a few coins.

Murano contains another curiosity that was shown to us with a certain pride: a horse, a creature more chimerical in Venice than a unicorn, griffin, coquecigrue, a flying billy-goat, or a succubus. There Richard III would cry: ‘My kingdom for a horse!’ in vain. It gave us particular pleasure to see this honest quadruped, an animal whose existence we were beginning to forget.

Encountering this horse made us somewhat nostalgic for dry land, and we returned to Venice in a dream. It seemed long since we had seen plains, mountains, cultivated fields, roads lined with trees, streets furrowed by carriages, and we thought nothing could be more pleasant than to hear the sound of the whip and the bells of a post-chaise. But a repeat visit to the Correr Museum, where, among a hundred other rarities, they keep the woodblock of that marvellous map of Venice engraved by Jacopo de’ Barbari; to the Palazzo Manfrin, which contains a rich collection of works by the Venetian masters; and to various bric-a-brac merchants’ shops, ossuaries where the ancient magnificence of the republic is laid to rest, soon chased away those rural and continental ideas.

A small incident delayed our initial wish to depart, by a few more days. One morning as we bargained, in a goldsmith’s shop on the Frezzaria, for one of those little gold chains as fine as hair, which I wanted to bring back as a travel souvenir for one of my Parisian friends, we saw a beautiful girl enter, carelessly draped in a large striped shawl in bright colours, which was, in truth, the only piece of clothing she had on, except for the vest and white petticoat beneath it, an outfit which, however, is nothing extraordinary for Venice. If her toilette was succinct, her beautiful lustrous black hair, combed with care, the opulent braids of which coiled several times on her golden neck, formed a charming coiffure not lacking its flower placed neatly behind one ear; she approached the display and chose a bracelet of coins that she had undoubtedly coveted for several days. The merchant gave her a price that seemed exorbitant to her, and indeed was, given the small worth of the trinket, a fact which made her enter into the most entertaining fit of anger in the world.

All pink with disappointment, she began to insult the merchant in that sweet lisping Venetian patois that we were beginning to understand, and which is no less graceful even in a quarrel. She called the honest goldsmith a Jew, a scoundrel, a forger, and a ‘Gran cane della Madonna’, a gross Italian profanity.

The merchant laughed, and maintained the price, without being moved by the charming outburst of invective he had provoked for our amusement, and which we ended by adding the cost of the bracelet to our account, on the condition that Vicenza, which was the girl’s name, allowed us to sketch her.

Beautiful girls in Venice, though it is strange in a city so populated with painters, would rather consent to being one’s mistress than one’s model: they understand love far better than art, and believe themselves pretty enough to make us let fall our pencils and palettes while looking at them. According to them, only ugly people should pose. A singular theory which is nevertheless explained by their naive and fiery imaginations. They do not suppose that a young man young could copy their beauty cooly, or cast upon them that analytical and scrutinizing look by which flesh metamorphoses to marble. Such ideas perhaps offer an explanation for the unique female type employed by each Italian master.

Vicenza, who, in any other case, would have certainly been, less fierce, made a host of difficulties, but finally agreed to come and pose, accompanied by one of her friends, a former dance extra at La Fenice.

To tell the truth, she had little faith in our drawing abilities and anticipated a more gallant meeting; nor did her disbelief cease when she saw us open our pastel box, set the paper in place, and arrange our pencils.

Vicenza offered a brunette variation on Venetian beauty that is not found in the paintings of the old masters, excessively preoccupied with the blonde type, which alone they depict. She had skin of incredible fineness, an amber pallor, black nocturnal and velvety eyes, red and vivacious lips, and an air of something sweet and wild at the same time.

While posing, she bit and chewed at roses that she tore from her bouquet, removed and replaced her bracelet, made her slipper dance on the end of her foot, and rose every minute or so, to come and look over our shoulder to see how the work progressed. We found much difficulty in making her return to her place and re-adopting her pose.

Finally, the portrait was finished, for good or no; she was satisfied with it, and took it to give to her lover. But I have kept a copy which is sufficient to prove that, despite Paul Veronese, Giorgione, Titian and all their golden-haired women, there was at least one lovely brunette in Venice.

The End of Parts XXI-XXV of Gautier’s Travels in Italy

Bookmarks

Notes

Images

Théophile Gautier

Travels in Italy (Voyage en Italie, 1850)

Parts XXI to XXV - Wider Venice

Contents

Part XXI: The Asylum

Part XXII: San Biagio – The Capuchin Monks

Part XXIII: The Churches

Part XXIV: The Churches continued – The Scuola di San Rocco – Palaces

Part XXV: The Ghetto – Murano – Vicenza