Chapter IV: Part 4

The time of gathering for the pilgrims was fixed for the following year 1202, at the feast of St. John, and amid many tears of piety and devotion the Doge and deputies swore to abide by their charters, and the envoys of both parties set out for Rome to receive the confirmation of their covenant from Innocent III. But the drama which had begun amid such moving demonstrations of good will and Christian sentiment necessarily had its dilemmas and its complications. It was essential to the fulfilling of the pact that all the crusaders should assemble at Venice to pay their toll, and embark on the ships; otherwise the crusaders could not hope to provide the money due to the Venetians. The Republic, for its part, had amply fulfilled its compact. All who arrived were received with joy and lodged most honourably at San Nicolo del Lido. The chronicle can find no parallel for the richness of the provision made for the would-be crusaders. But there were, alas, three times as many vessels as there were men and horses to fill them.--“Ha! it was a great shame,” bursts out Villeharduin, “that the rest who went to the other ports did not come here.” The dilemma was a serious one. Even of those who were there, some declared themselves unable to pay their passage, and the money could in no way be made up. Some were for sacrificing their whole estate that the Venetians should not lose by the defection of the others, but the counsel found small support among those who now wished to be rid of their bargain. But the small party who felt themselves, in a sense, the conscience of the Crusade carried the day. “Rather will we give all we possess and go poor among the host, than that it should disperse and come to naught; for God will render it to us at His good pleasure.” So the Counts of Flanders, Loys, Hues de St. Pol and their party began to collect together all their goods and all they could borrow. “Then you might have seen a vast quantity of gold and silver borne to the palace of the Doge to make payment. And when they had paid, there still was lacking from the covenant thirty-four thousand marks of silver. And those who had kept back what they possessed and would give nothing were very glad at this, for by this means they thought the expedition would have failed. But God who counsels the disconsolate would not so suffer it.” The Doge put before his people that not only would their just claim remain unsatisfied though they should exact from the crusaders the utmost they could collect, but they would bring discredit on themselves by acting as strict justice would permit. He suggested the combining of two advantages, a material and moral. Let them, he suggests, demand the reconquest of Zara as substitute for the debt, that they may not only have the fame of possessing the city but the praise of generosity. And Dandolo, the old wise doughty Doge, has yet another suggestion to propose. There was a great festival one Sunday in San Marco, and the citizens and barons and pilgrims were assembled before High Mass began. Then amid the silent expectation of the great gathering the Doge mounted the lectern and made the famous offer of his own person as leader of the host. “‘I am an old man,’ he said, ‘and feeble, and should be feeling need of repose, for I am infirm in body. But I see there is none who could so well rule and lead you as I who am your lord. If you will consent that I take the sign of the Cross to preserve and guide you, and that my son remain in my stead and keep the city, I would gladly go to live and die with you and with the pilgrims.’ And when they heard, they cried all with one voice: ‘We pray you for God’s sake to grant us this, and to do so and to come with us.’ And the people of the city and the pilgrims, felt deep compassion at this, and they wept many tears, thinking how that valiant man had so much need to stay behind, for he was an old man, and though his eyes were still fair to look on he could not see with them on account of a wound which he had received in his head. Nevertheless he had a great heart. Ha! how little they resembled him who had gone to other ports to avoid danger! So he came from the pulpit and went to the altar and knelt down, weeping bitterly, and they sewed the cross for him on a great cotton cap because he desired that the people might see it. And the Venetians began to take the cross in great numbers, and many on that very day, and still the number of crusaders was few enough.” It was no wonder that the pilgrims had great joy in the crusaders for the good will and valour they felt to be in them. Whatever aim may previously have been uppermost as an incentive to enthusiasm and self-oblation, there was no doubt that Venice now was giving of her best. This retiring of the old Doge from his ducal throne to embark on a more arduous leadership is one of the most moving episodes in the annals San Marco.

But at this moment an event occurred that changed, or rather diverted into a new channel the current of the Crusade, providing in fact, as our chronicler Villeharduin remarks, the true occasion of his book. Into the midst of the pilgrims assembled at Verona on their way to Venice there came Alexius, son of Isaac the deposed Emperor of Constantinople, in quest of help against his usurping uncle. What more opportune than the neighbouring host of “the most valiant men on earth” for aiding in the recovery of his lost kingdom and the reinstatement of his tortured father. To the crusaders, and especially we may believe, to the Venetians, this new motive did not come amiss. It is startlingly like life, this Fourth Crusade, with its original aim thus gradually becoming but a secondary purpose in a far more complicated scheme, a middle distance in an increasingly extended horizon. The relief of the Holy Sepulchre, the avenging of the shame of Christ, assume in fact a rather shadowy outline in a prospect dominated by Zara and Constantinople.

The departure from Venice did not mark the term of the obstructions to which the Crusade was fated. The disgraceful contest between the French and the Venetians within the streets of Zara, the defection of a number of the pilgrims, the death of others at the hands of the wild inland inhabitants of Dalmatia--all these causes reduced the already meagre company before it had well started on its way. The Pope was placed in the dilemma of strongly disapproving the secular turn given to the Crusade, while realising that the Venetian fleet was the only means for accomplishing his ends in Palestine. His solution was to absolve the barons for the siege of Zara, permitting them still to use the fleet--though the devil’s instrument--while Venice, the provider, remained under interdict. We here come into contact with an element of singular interest in the relations of Venice and the East--her attitude towards the Papacy. The independence of San Marco was one of the essential articles of the Venetian creed. In spiritual matters none could more devoutly bow to the Apostle of Christendom; but the spiritual supremacy was an inland sea to Venice: it must be stable, fixed, defined; it must not flow with a tide upon the temporal shores where her heart and treasure lay. The authority of San Marco was a political principle. All state ceremonies were bound up with San Marco; the Ducal Palace itself was subsidiary to the Palace of St. Mark. How should a State that had sheltered, traditionally at least, a Pope “stando occulto propter timorem” that had acted as mediator between Pope and Emperor and seen the Emperor’s head bowed to the ground on the pavement of San Marco--how should such a State be subordinate to any rule but its own complete self-consciousness? Venice always followed the eminently practical rule of allowing much freedom in non-essentials in order to preserve more closely her control over the really material issues. The attitude always maintained by her with regard to the Inquisition is so closely parallel to her relations with the East and the pagans of the East, constantly deprecated by the Pope, that we may fitly quote here Paolo Sarpi’s admirable reply to the papal protests against conferring the doctorate in Padua on Protestants; the principle is the same, though limited in that instance to a particular and seemingly divergent issue. “If anyone openly declared his intention of conferring the doctorate on heretics, or admitted anyone to it who openly and with scandal professed himself to be such, it might be said that he had failed to persecute heresy; but, it being the opinion of the most Serene Republic that heretics and those who are known for such should not be admitted to the doctorate, and it being our duty to consider Catholic anyone who does not profess the contrary, no smallest scandal can accrue to the religion even though it should chance that one not known for such were to receive the doctorate. The doctorate in philosophy and medicine is a testimonial that the scholar is a good philosopher and physician and that he may be admitted to the practise of that art, and to say that a heretic is a good doctor does not prejudice the Catholic faith; certainly it would prejudice it if anyone were to say that such a man was a good theologian.” This was the position of Venice with regard to her pagan allies, the meaning of her superbly fitted lodges for Turk, infidel and heretic. The Saracen, the Turk and the Infidel might not be a good theologian, but he was a good trader, a channel for the glories with which Venice loved to clothe and crown herself. He was a part of her life more essentially and more irrevocably than the prelates of holy Church; his ban would have been more terrible to Venice than papal thunders. It was not primarily as hot sons of the Church, consumed with fire for the shame of the Holy Sepulchre that the Venetians with such generous provision prepared their ships for the Crusade: it was as men of business with no small strain of fire in their blood and a high sense of the glorious worth and destiny of their city.

There were moments of inspiration for the Crusaders amid all their toils and internal strife, and not least was the first view of Constantinople which had been for so long the emporium of Venice. The fleet had harboured at the abbey of St. Etienne, three miles from Constantinople, and Villeharduin describes the wonder and enthusiasm of those who saw then for the first time the marvellous city “that was sovereign over all others,” with its rich towers and palaces and churches and high encircling walls. “And you must know there was no heart there so daring but trembled.” We are reminded of this picture of Constantinople when we stand face to face with Carpaccio’s city in the _Combat of St. George_. It so successfully combines solidity and strength with the airy joy of watch-towers and towers of pleasure, that at first we have only the impression of fantastic play of architecture; but by degrees we come to feel the seacoast country of Carpaccio, that at first seemed so wild and unmanned, to be in fact bristling with defence and preparation. It is immensely strong in fortifications, no dream or fairy citadel. It is begirt with towers and walls along the water; strongholds lurk among the loftiest crags; towers of defence and battlements peer over the steep hillside; and, if we look closer, we see the towers are thronged with men. We remember Villeharduin’s note, “There were so many men on the walls and on the towers that it seemed as if they were made of nothing but people.” It is a sumptuous city, too, that we see in glimpses through the gateway, the city of a great oriental potentate.

We cannot follow Villeharduin through the vicissitudes of the siege and counter-siege. He himself confesses in the relation of one point alone that sixty books would not be able to recount all the words that were spoken, and the counsels that were given and taken. In the simple, terse and trenchant style that Frenchmen, and especially the Frenchmen of the old chronicles, know how to wield so perfectly, he tells us of the Doge’s wise counsel that the city should be approached by way of the surrounding islands whence they might gather stores; of the lords’ neglect of this counsel, “just as if no one of them had ever heard of it”; of their investment of the palace of Alexius in the place named Chalcedony, that was “furnished with all the delights of the human body that could be imagined befitting the dwelling of a prince”; of the capture of the city and the ravishing of its treasures that were so great “that no man could come to an end of counting the silver and the gold and plate and precious stones and samite and silken cloth and dresses _vaire_ and grey, and ermines and all precious things that were ever found on earth. And Jofroi de Villeharduin, the Marshall of Champagne, will bear good witness that to his knowledge since the centuries began there was never so great gain in a single city.” The division of the booty necessarily occasioned heart-burning and revealed certain vices of “covetoise” undreamed before. And as time went on and still the passage to Palestine was delayed the sanctuaries of the Greek Church were treated with barbarous irreverence and despoiled of their treasure and sacred vessels. Then with the retaking of Constantinople from Marzuflo there followed a time of abandonment of men and leaders to their fiercest passions and the almost total destruction of the city. Here again Venice stepped in, as the merchant had stepped in to rescue treasure from the pile of Savonarola, to enrich herself from the ruins of Constantinople.

The taking of Constantinople opened another door into the Eastern garden from which Venice had already begun to gather so rich an harvest. Picture the freights that Venetian vessels were bearing home in these years of crusade and conquest, to be gathered finally into the garner of St. Mark’s! It is strangely thrilling to imagine the first welcome of the four bronze horses, travel-dimmed no doubt, who only found their way to their present station on the forefront of St. Mark’s after standing many times in peril of being melted down in the Arsenal where they first were stored. But at last, says Sansovino, their beauty was recognised and they were placed on the church. It is only by degrees that we come to accost and know the exiles one by one. The more outstanding spoils, the Pala d’Oro, the great pillars of Acri, the bronze doors, the horses, the four embracing kings, these are among the first letters of St. Mark’s oriental alphabet; but there are many lesser exiles which have found a shelter in the port of Venice, which as we wander among the glorious precincts of San Marco impress themselves upon us one by one; such is the grave-browed, noble head of porphyry that keeps solitary watch towards the waters from the south corner of the outer gallery of San Marco, as if it had been set down a moment by its sculptor and forgotten on the white, marble balustrade. The whole being of San Marco is bound up with the East, and it is another token of the magic of Venice that she has been able to embrace and furnish with a life-giving soil those plants that had been ruthlessly uprooted and had made so long and perilous a journey. The official records, that tell of the arrival from one expedition and another of Eastern vestures for the clothing of San Marco, are not mere inventories to us who have walked upon the variegated pavement between the solemn pillars and seen the sunlight illumine one by one the marbles of the walls, with their imbedded sculpture and mosaic, or gild the depths of the storied cupolas and the luxuriant harmonies of colour and design on the recesses of the windows. They are significant, these records, like the entry in a parish register of the birth of some one whom we love; for the church of San Marco, though in fact a museum of many treasures, is not a museum of foreign treasures. Her spoils are not hung up in her as aliens like the spoils that conquerors bore to ancient temples; they found her a foster-mother of their own blood and kin. She herself is sprung from a plant whose first flowering was not among the floating marshes of the lagoon.

_By permission of the Hon. John Collier._

THE HORSES OF SAN MARCO, LOOKING NORTH.]

Turn, on a sunny day, from the Molo towards San Marco, passing below the portico of the Ducal Palace adjoining the Piazzetta. Framed by the pointed arch at the end is a portion of the wall which once formed the west tower of the Ducal Palace. This delicate harmony of coloured marbles and sculptured stone seems a rare and beautiful creation, not of stone but of something more plastic, more mobile, so responsive is it to the light, so luminous, so full of feeling. As we draw nearer and it becomes more clearly defined, we see great slabs of marble sawn and spread open like the pages of a book, corresponding in pattern as the veining of a leaf. They are linked by marble rope-work, and between them are inserted smaller slabs of delicately sculptured stone and a wonderful coil of mosaic. It is a veritable patchwork wall, but no less beautiful in its effect of harmony than in its details--the four porphyry figures of embracing kings its corner-stone. This wall is truly a key to the fabric of the church itself; it is like a window into St. Mark’s, that treasury of Eastern spoil; the East is in every vein, in every heart-beat of it. The spoil of the temples of ancient gods furnished forth the Church of San Marco as it furnished the saint himself. In this one angle we have cipollino and porphyry, serpentine and verd-antico, marmo greco and eastern mosaic, pillars of granite profound and glittering, breccia africana and paonazetto. The weight of centuries is upon it all; ages of lives have gone to its making, and it came to Venice only when generations had passed over its head. For the human race it has never been but old; the mind loses itself in speculation on that stupendous past that lies between us and the time when stone was not. And yet how strangely through that long, enchanted silence, when the centuries were endowing it with an immensity of strength and hardness and endurance for which we have no word of parallel but in its own nature, it has kept the similitude and mobility of life, at once withholding and revealing the riches of its beauty. How can we wonder that da Contarini, the strange and learned dreamer of the Cinquecento, burst out into a rapture of mystic joy in the presence of San Marco, “that golden church, built by the eternal gods, of our protector, Messer San Marco”? He celebrates the pinnacles and shining columns, the throng of glittering figures that burn like golden spirits in the sunlight, the sculptured marbles polished with soft Ethiopian sand. “It might be said that it has been gathered together from all parts of the world.” He then proceeds to seek among the marbles of San Marco those mysterious correspondences which the wonder of men has always felt to exist between human nature and the nature of the stone; he loses himself in contemplation of one after another of the precious marbles that in wide surface or minute mosaic form the priceless garment of St. Mark’s temple: diaspro, which must be seen in broad extent to realise its strange radiance, like flocks of cloudlets fleeting before the wind in the full illumination of the setting sun, dazzling our eyes with light; or that other adamantine marble of Africa, the breccia adriana di Tegoli, a harmony of greens before which serpentine and verd-antico must bow; or the most precious porpora of deep and glowing red; or that queen of all the stones, imperial in its beauty, a magnetic stone indeed, drawing the spirit into its luminous depths, weaving round it an enchanted web of secrecy, of divine inter-relations, till the human soul seems to commune with the very soul of colour--_diaspro sanguinoso_. What would not Sir Thomas Browne have read in those eloquent and secret pages where wave follows wave of colour, deep ocean green, pure carmine, translucent amethyst. Diaspro sanguinoso! in the setting of a ring, in the mosaic of a pavement, it is seen a dense green stone spotted with crimson--bloodstone. It is as if you saw the human eye in one of those weird, symbolic paintings of old time, isolated in its socket without the illumination of the human countenance about it. This sanguinary jasper is too subtle, too delicate, too mystical to belong to that titanic family of the stones of Africa. The dreaming soil of Egypt might have given it birth; it might own kinship with the myth of Aurora’s kiss; but to us it seems fraught with the magic of a more distant East.

There have been many vindicators of the freedom of Venice; many assertors that, though in appearance subject some time to Byzantium, she has always been politically independent. To us it seems a matter of lesser moment; but whether, in fact or in form, Venice were or were not ever politically dependent on Byzantium, the fact of her artistic dependence is one which she cannot deny without perjuring herself before a thousand witnesses. Document after document more durable than parchment--though many have already perished and many perish daily--attests the debt of Venice to the East. Till she perish altogether at the hands of a relentless, unregarding tyrant--a bastard child of Time misnamed Progress--she must continue to bear witness to her debt. So long as she breathes, each breath confesses it and the East will lay her tribute on the tomb of Venice dead--lamenting as for one of her own children.

Chapter Seven

TWO VENETIAN STATUES

In two of the public squares of Venice the statues, in bronze, of two of her heroes are set up, the one of a man of war, the other of a comedian: in the Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo the statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, in the Campo di San Bartolomeo that of Carlo Goldoni. The first is a warrior on horseback in full armour, uplifted high above the square, disdaining the companionship of the puny mortals who saunter without a purpose to and fro under his feet. Horse and rider stand self-sufficient and alone; one spirit breathes in both: in the contour of the stern face of the warrior, with its massive chin and proudly disdainful lip, in his throat with the muscles standing out like ropes upon it, and in the sweep of his capacious brow, under which the keenly penetrating eyes hold their object in a grip of iron; and, for the horse, in every line of his superbly curving neck, in the acute serenity of his down-looking eye, and in each curling lock of his mane that seem as if moved together by one controlling impulse. How clear the outline of his skull, everywhere visible beneath its fine covering of flesh and muscle! and his body, like the body of his master, how perfectly responsive an instrument it is! There is nothing here of that wild disorder of the beast untamed, which is mistaken sometimes for strength. The hand of Colleoni is light upon the bridle, the horse glories in a subjection that is itself a triumph: he and his master are one. Do but compare this for a moment with the prodigious mass, the plunging man and beast, that overlook the Riva degli Schiavoni--Victor Emanuel on horseback. It is not altogether an arbitrary contrast; the two great monuments seem to represent Venice before the fall and Venice after. What unity of purpose, what hope of conquest is there in those monstrous figures on the Riva? Beneath this redundancy of flesh and armour how shall they prevail against the world? They are not only different in degree, they are of a different species from Verocchio’s horse and rider. The spirit of the first Renaissance is in every line of his great statue--its strength, agility and decorative skill. How studied is the symmetry, the static perfection of the whole! how strongly and yet how delicately he emphasises the rectangular framework of the design! The rod of Colleoni, the trappings of his horse, the tail and legs and body-line--each is made contributive, while the backward poise of the rider balances the forward motion of the horse, and all is thus drawn into the scheme. It is all willed, but with that spontaneity of will which men call inspiration.

This statue, which so marvellously sums up in sculpture the central aim of Venice as a state in the fifteenth century, offers an instructive contrast to that in the Campo di San Bartolomeo, where the comedian Goldoni, though raised above the level of the square, still seems a companionable part of the life that passes around him, moving in its midst as he moved amid the life of the eighteenth century in Venice, meditating upon it, observing, loving it, faithfully and fearlessly recording it. Marked by a realistic fidelity and insight worthy of a greater age, Dal Zotto’s statue of Goldoni is in its own way itself a masterpiece and one of the noblest works of modern art in Venice, full of sympathy and understanding and admirable in execution. The sculptor might seem to have lived as an intimate with Goldoni, and the realism of his treatment suits the subject singularly well. The comedian is not aloft upon a pedestal, remote from men, in glorious aloofness; he is raised but slightly above our heads, not much observed of the crowd, but observing all. Briskly he steps along, in buckled shoes, frilled shirt and neckerchief, his coat flying open, and a book or manuscript bulging from the pocket of it, his waistcoat slackly buttoned, his cocked hat tipped jauntily upon his forehead over his powdered periwig. As he goes he crushes his gloves with one hand at his back and with the other marks progress with his cane. It is a strong, taut little figure, tending to roundness, with a world of suggestiveness in every motion, an admirable mingling of thought and humour in the face that laughs down on this strange, grotesque, conventional, lovable Venice. What a strange contrast is this, of the slippered sage of the eighteenth century, who houses the swallows in the loose folds of his slouch hat, and the armed hero of the fifteenth, whose every muscle is alert, responsive to the stern controlling will! Goldoni is a sage upon a different platform, meditating upon a different world. His Venice is the Venice of Longhi; she has become pedestrian; she has become a theme for comedy. Comedy might have found plentiful food, no doubt, in the Venice that employed Colleoni, the Venice of the first great painters. There is a fund of humour and whimsicality in the strangely fascinating faces of Carpaccio’s citizens. Yet try to picture them held up to ridicule by one of themselves upon the stage, and the imagination faints; the thing is inconceivable. In Goldoni’s age the interest of life was shifted to another field, and he stands as the central figure, the leader in a new campaign, representative not of its vices or its vanities or its follies, but of the solid virtues of which these are the shady side. He is one of those happy spirits which the reactionary age of small things produced, not only in Italy but everywhere in the eighteenth century; a spirit of clear, calm insight and capable judgment, neither enamoured of the life of his small circle nor embittered against it, content to live in the midst of it in serenity and truth.

Goldoni, Colleoni, each is representative of a period in the history of the Republic, periods widely separated in temper and in time, and yet related intimately; so intimately indeed that the period of which Goldoni is the master-spirit is actually foreshadowed in the very presence of the superb warrior of the other public square. To study the process of the growth and the decadence of the Republic is to find that there is no convenient preconceived theory with which it will fit in; it rebels against such manipulation, as everything individual rebels against the ready-made. We need rather to look upon Venice as upon a plant that springs and comes to its perfection and fades slowly away, changing and developing in indefinable gradations, showing at every stage some surprising revival from the past, some strange anticipation of the future. In the fifteenth century itself, while the earliest artists were at work for Venice at Murano, and Carpaccio was as yet unborn, Venice already bore about with her the seeds of her decay. In fact, the growth of her art coincides with the slow relaxation of her hold upon the bulwarks of her policy both at home and abroad. The election of Foscari as Doge in 1423 marks a moment of change in Venetian life and government, indicated by the substitution of the title Signoria for that of Commune Venetiarum, and by the abolition of the _arengo_--yet Carpaccio has still his grave citizens to portray, and Ursula sleeping the sleep of infancy. Among the exhortations which tradition has handed down to us as addressed from time to time to the Venetians by Doge or by ambassador is that supposed to have been spoken on his death-bed by Foscari’s precursor, the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo. It might have been spoken for our instruction, instead of as a reminder to his own subjects of what they knew so well, so vivid an impression is to be derived from it of the inner life of Venice during the first thirty years of the fifteenth century. Whether legendary or not, these exhortations have something significant and individual about them which really illuminates; it is as if a light were suddenly flashed into a vast room, pressing our vision upon one point, providing a nucleus of knowledge about which scattered ideas and impressions may group themselves intelligibly. Whatever they are, they are not the fabrication of a later time which has lost understanding of the spirit that animated the past. If the portrait they give is imaginary, they have seized upon the salient features and endowed them with a vitality which the photograph, however literal, too often lacks. Mocenigo’s farewell address is an impressive portico opening upon a new period in the career of Venice, a strange trumpet-note of ill omen on the threshold of her greatest glory. Behold, he says, the fulness of the life you have achieved, of the riches you have stored; turn now and preserve it; there is peril in the path beyond; there is twilight and decay and death. Your eyes, full of the light, have no knowledge of the shadow; but mine, dim now with age, have known it, and its grip is upon my limbs. Venice heard but might not heed his warnings. The sun himself must rise and fulfil his day and set. Decay is in each breath that the plant draws in; it cannot crystallise the moment; inexorably it is drawn onwards to maturity and death. It was inevitable for Venice that as her strength increased her responsibilities should increase with it; perforce she must turn her face to land as well as sea. She could not remain alone, intent only on nourishing and developing her individual life. In proportion to her greatness she must attract others to her, and the circle of her influence must widen till it passed beyond her own control. The dying words of Mocenigo came too late. A temporary delay there might have been; there was no turning back. Venice had been drawn already into the vortex of European mainland politics, and she could not stand aside. In our own colonial policy we are continually confronted with the problem of aggression and defence. In reality there is no boundary between the two, or the boundary, if it exists, is so fine that the events of a moment may obliterate it. St. Theodore carries his shield in his right hand and his spear in the left; and an old chronicler of Venetian glory interprets the action as symbolising the predominance of defence in his warrior’s ideal. Doge Tommaso Mocenigo would have approved the interpretation. But spear and shield cannot exchange their functions. Until the spear is laid aside, it will insist on leading; and Venice had not laid aside the spear, she had furnished herself anew.

“In my time,” says Mocenigo, after a pathetic preliminary avowal of his obligations to Venice and of the humble efforts he had made to discharge them, “in my time, our loan has been reduced by four millions of ducats, but six millions still are lacking for the debt incurred in the war with Padua, Vicenza, Verona.... This city of ours sends out at present ten million ducats every year for its trade in different parts of the world, with ships and galleys and the necessary appointments to the value of not less than two million ducats. In this city are three thousand vessels of from one to two hundred anforas burden, carrying sixteen thousand mariners: there are three hundred vessels which alone carry eight thousand mariners more. Every year sail forty-five galleys, counting small and great craft, and these take eleven thousand mariners, three thousand captains and three thousand calkers. There are three thousand weavers of silk garments and sixteen thousand of fustian.... There are one thousand gentlemen with incomes ranging from seven hundred to four thousand ducats. If you go on in this way, you will increase from good to better, you will be lords of riches and of Christendom. But beware, as of fire, of taking what belongs to others and making unjust war, for these are errors that God cannot tolerate in princes. It is known to all that the war with the Turk has made you brave and valorous by sea, ... and in these years you have so acted that the world has judged you the leaders of Christendom. You have many men experienced in embassies and government, men who are perfect orators. You have many doctors in diverse sciences, lawyers above all, and for this reason many foreigners come to you for judgement in their differences and abide by your decisions. Take heed, therefore, how you govern such a state as this, and be careful to give it your counsel and your warning, lest ever by negligence it suffer loss of power. And it behoves you earnestly to advise whoever succeeds me in this place, because through him the Republic may receive much good and much harm. Many of you incline to Messer Marino Caravello; he is a worthy man and for his worthy qualities deserves that rank. Messer Francesco Bembo is an honest man, and so is Messer Giacomo Trevisan. Messer Antonio Contarini, Messer Faustin Michiel, Messer Alban Badoer, all these are wise and merit it. Many incline to Messer Francesco Foscari, not knowing that he is an ambitious man and a liar, without a basis to his actions. His intellect is flighty; he embraces much and holds little. If he is Doge, you will always be at war. The possessor of ten thousand ducats will be master but of one. You will spend gold and silver. You will be robbed of your reputation and your honour. You will be vassals of infantry and captains and men-at-arms. I could not restrain myself from giving you my opinion. God help you to choose the best, and rule and keep you in peace.”

Mocenigo’s warning was disregarded. But although Foscari was made Doge, Venice did not rush into war. In spite of repeated efforts on the part of the Florentines to secure an alliance, the traditions of the old peace policy were tenaciously adhered to during the first years of the new reign. It was the temptation to secure Carmagnola as leader of her forces which finally overcame her scruples. Foscari’s discourse on this occasion, as reported by Romanin, is a curiously specious mingling of philanthropy and self-interest. Reading between the lines, we understand from it something of Mocenigo’s fears at the prospect of his election. The passion of empire is in his heart. Venice, whom eulogists loved to represent as the bulwark of Europe against the infidel, is now to be the champion of down-trodden Florence. It is the sword of justice that she is to wield. We are reminded of Veronese’s allegory--Venice seated upon the world, robed in ermine and scarlet, her silver and her gold about her, her breast clasped with a jewelled buckler, round her neck the rich pearls of her own island fabric, on her head the royal crown. Her face is in the shadow of her gilded throne and of the folds of the stiff rose satin curtain, as she looks out over the world, over the universe, from her lofty seat on the dark azure globe. The lion, the sword and the olive branch are at her feet. What is she dreaming of, this Venice of the soft, round, shadowed face? Is it of peace, or of new empire? Is it to the olive bough or to the sword of justice that she inclines? In a neighbouring fresco, Neptune, brooding in profound abstraction beside his trident, deputes to the lion his watch; but Mars of the mainland is alert, on foot, and his charger’s head from above him breathes fire upon his brow.

“You will be the vassals of captains and men-at-arms.” There was a note of prophecy in Mocenigo’s closing words, and it is indeed a question, in face of Verocchio’s superb warrior--who was the prince and who the vassal, who the servant and who the master. Colleoni’s triumph at his grand reception in Venice can scarcely have been the triumph of a mere man-at-arms. Studying the magnificent reserve of strength in his grandly moulded face and neck, we feel Venice must rather have acknowledged that an Emperor had descended in her midst. Little wonder that such a man dared ask a place on the Piazza of St. Mark itself! The period of his command embraced some of the most brilliant successes of the Venetian arms on land. Difficulties and perils that seemed insurmountable were yet surmounted by a mind possessed of supreme qualities of judgment, daring and nobility. Singularly akin, indeed, to Venice herself was this man who had a key to the minds of his antagonists, who read their secrets and forestalled their actions: it is not strange that he was dear to her. Though a professional soldier and no Venetian born, he could act as a worthy representative of Venice, and there might seem small fear of ruin for a Republic that could so choose her servants. But Colleoni had fought against the Lion and set his foot upon its neck, and the Lion had been constrained to turn and ask his service of him, the highest tribute it could offer, the completest confession of its defeat. And Colleoni could respect and be faithful to such a paymaster: for twenty years he led the Republic on land, and was never called to render an account before her judgment-seat. Magnanimously at his death he absolves her of all her debts to him, makes her two grand donations, then, by his own wish, towers over Venice, a paid alien, her virtual master, yet such a master as she was proud to serve. We wonder if this thought came ever to the mind of Verocchio, the Florentine, as he moulded the great figure of the hero: did the imagination please him of Venice the vassal, Venice subjected beneath the horse and his rider?

There was a fête given in honour of Colleoni at Venice in 1455, on the occasion of the bestowing on him the staff of supreme command. To Spino, Colleoni’s enthusiastic biographer and fellow citizen, the episode was portentous, as to one unfamiliar with Venetian traditions in this respect. It had, indeed, a significance he did not dream of; it was the reception not of a victorious fleet, not of an admiring monarch or fugitive pope, but of an army of mercenaries and their leader. Spino tells how Colleoni was accompanied by an escort of the chief citizens of Bergamo, Brescia and other cities of the kingdom that had been committed to his charge; how barges over a thousand were sent from Venice to fetch him and his party from Marghera; how the Venetians came out in flocks to meet him in gondolas and sandolos to the sound of trumpets and other instruments of music, preceded by _three_ ships called _bucintori_, “of marvellous workmanship and grandeur,” in which were the Doge and Signoria, the senate and other magistrates; and how ambassadors of kings and princes and subject states came to do homage to the new Serenissimo Pasqual Malipiero. He tells, as all the chroniclers of festivals at Venice tell, of the throngs, not only on windows and upon the fondamentas, but upon the house roofs along the Grand Canal; of Colleoni’s reception at San Marco and the display of the sacred treasures at the high altar; and how, as he knelt before the Doge, the staff of his office was bestowed upon him with these words, “By the authority and decree of the most excellent city of Venice, of us the Doge and of the Senate, ruler and captain-general of all our men and arms on land shalt thou be. Take from our hands this military staff, with good presage and fortune, as emblem of thy power, to maintain and defend the majesty, the faith and the judgments of this State with dignity and with decorum by thy care and charge.” For ten days the festivals continued with jousts and tournaments and feats of arms. But all was not fêting and merriment. Colleoni held grave discourses also with the Padri, and “their spirits were confirmed by him,” says Spino, “in safety and great confidence.”

The Venice who could thus do honour to Colleoni her general was a superb Venice, superb as Colleoni himself who in his castle of Malpaga received not only embassies from kings but kings themselves; who, at the visit of Cristierino, King of Dacia, came out to meet him “on a great courser, caparisoned and equipped for war, and he, all but his head, imperially clad in complete armour, attended only by two standard-bearers carrying his helm and lance, while a little further behind followed his whole company of six hundred horse in battle array, with his condottieri and his squadrons, all gloriously and most nobly armed and mounted, with flags flying and the sound of trumpets”; who, besides making rich provision for all his children, built churches, endowed monasteries and left to the Venetians, after cancelling all their debts to him, one hundred thousand ducats of gold. The Venice that employed Colleoni was superb--we have a record of her living features in Gentile Bellini’s marvellous presentment of the procession in St. Mark’s square--the brain as flexible, the jaws as rigid as those of the mighty warrior Verocchio conceived. Yet Spino’s comment on the last tribute paid by the Venetians to their general gives us pause--“confessing to have lost the defender of their liberty.” It was a confession which could still clothe itself triumphantly in the great bronze statue, but there is an omen in the words. In this confession of 1496 is foreshadowed the fall of 1796.

Much has been written of the social life of this Venice of the Fall; there are countless sources for its history in the letters, diaries and memoirs of its citizens and of its visitors, reputable and disreputable; richest sources of all, there are the pictures of Longhi, the comedies of Goldoni. But of the Venice that lay behind this small round of conventions and refinements, laxity and tyranny, perhaps less has been said. Of many avenues by which it might be approached we shall choose one, and since the praise of Colleoni has drawn our attention to the foundations of Venetian power on land, nothing will better serve our purpose than the foundation of her power by sea, that Arsenal which Sansovino described as “the basis and groundwork of the greatness of this Republic, as well as the honour of all Italy.” The Arsenal was, next to San Marco, perhaps the sanctuary of Venetian faith. It was far more than a mere manufactory of arms and battleships. In the celebration of the Sensa its workmen held the post of honour, the rowing of the Bucintoro. Its officers were among the most reputed in the State. The Council of Ten had a room within its precincts. It was entered by a superb triumphal arch, a sight which none who visited Venice must miss. The condition of the Arsenal may well be taken as an index to the condition of Venice herself.

We may set side by side two pictures of the Arsenal, one drawn from a curious little work of early seventeenth century, a time at which, though Venice was moving down the path of her decay, the glorious traditions of the past still found renewal in her present life, and the Venetian fleet was still a triumphant symbol of Venetian greatness; the other from the reports of her officials in the last years before her death. Luca Assarino was one of many guests who had to say to Venice, or to the Doge her representative, “My intellect staggers under the weight of a memory laden with surpassing favours. You received me into your house, did me honour, assisted me, protected me. You clothed yourself in my desires, and promoted them on every occasion; and this not only without having had of me any cause to honour me so highly, but even without having ever seen me.” He feels he cannot better discharge the burden of his gratitude than by shaping some of the emotions inspired in him by his visit to the Arsenal. There is a touch of sympathy and sometimes even a touch of truth and insight under the extravagantly symbolic garb of his appreciation. “Admiring first of all an immense number of porticoes, where as in vast maternal wombs I saw in embryo the galleys whose bodies were being framed, I realised that I was in the country of vessels, the fatherland of galleons, and that those masses were so formidable as to show themselves warriors even in their birth, fortifying themselves with countless nails and arming thus their very vitals with iron. I considered them as wandering islands, which, united, compose the continent of Venetian glory, the mainland of the rule of Christendom. I admired with joy the height of their masts and the size of their sailyards, and I called them forests under whose shade the Empire of the sea reposed and the hopes of the Catholic religion were fortified. And who, I said to myself, can deny that this Republic has subjugated the element of water, when none of her citizens can walk abroad, but that the water, as if vanquished, kisses his feet at every step?” Like all recorders of the glories of Venice, he is struck dumb at certain points by fear of the charge of fabling, but, collecting himself, he proceeds to speak of the trophies and relics, the rows of cuirasses, helmets and swords that remained as “iron memorials to arm the years against oblivion of Venetian greatness. What revolutions of the world, what accidents, what mutations of state, what lakes of tears and blood did not the dim lightnings of those fierce habiliments present to the eye of the observer?... I saw the remains of the Venetian fleet, vessels, that, as old men, weighted no less with years than glory, reposed under the magnificence of the arches which might well be called triumphal arches. I saw part of those galleons to which Christianity confesses the debt of her preservation.... And last, I saw below the water so great a quantity of the planks from which vessels afterwards are made, that one might truly call it a treasury hidden in the entrails of a lake. I perceived that these, as novices in swimming, remained first a century below the surface, to float after for an eternity of centuries; and I remarked that they began by acquiring citizenship in that lake, to end by showing themselves patricians throughout the seas, and that there was good reason they should plant their roots well under water, for they were the trees on which the liberty of Venice was to flower.” In his peroration the eulogist strikes a deeper note. “May it please Almighty God to preserve you to a longest eternity; and as of old the nations surrounding you had so high an opinion of your integrity and justice that they came to you for judgment of their weightiest and most important cases, so may heaven grant that the whole of Christendom may resort always to your threshold to learn the laws of good government.”