Chapter VI: Part 6

This stream of wonderful maidens moves all to one rhythm, winding with sweeping trains down out of the misty dawn to end and centre in the glorious figure of St. Ursula waiting the bishop’s consecration of her mission. She is so entrancingly radiant that the young cross-bearing bishop who stands beside her seems, as he gazes, to be illumined by her fire and joy. The ships in which the company is to embark lie like phantoms on the misty sea-line, and the long lights of dawn are above the water--pale rose and gold and purple--while the curtain of night is slowly withdrawn, leaving spaces of darker blue and glowing cloud. The early morning mists still hang about the shadowy hulks of the huge vessels and the figures near the shore, making as it were two spheres of action. The grassy slope down which the travellers come, seems in its undulations to yield itself to their motion, to reflect and echo it, and is luminous as all the figures are. The faint rainbow raiments of those distant companies that sweep forward nearer to the shore are like wings lit from the dawn and half-folded, while the foremost ranks of the procession are in the full golden light of day. Note with what daring Tintoretto has placed the strong rose-robed angel with the palms of martyrdom across the picture directly overhead. Her figure cuts across the phantom ships; one arm hides part of the procession; yet far from obscuring or diverting from the central theme, she leads the eye more directly to St. Ursula. There are no spectators of this morning procession, unless it be the marvellous group on the left. The central figure is that of a woman, meditative, gathered into herself; she scarcely seems to belong to the procession; she is dreaming apart with downbent face, and is very close in feeling to Carpaccio’s sleeping St. Ursula. Beside her is a radiant youth, his face one of Giorgione’s faces, in a helm shaped like a shell and set with pearls. There are many types of Venetian ladies in the procession, such as were idealised by one and another of the painters; all are here, in marvellous richness of raiment and jewelled headgear. We do not question whether they are fitly robed for a great journey; we only share in their joy. The wine of dawn seems to have entered into them, and to sing in every motion, every colour of the superb lyric--the intoxication of embarking on a mystic voyage in the pale radiance of dawn.

We pass out again through the long corridors under the great sculptured portal. On our left is the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, a storehouse of Renaissance art, and before us the friend of whom we never grow weary--Colleoni astride of his war-horse in the centre of the square. This paid servant, this adopted son of Venice, is not on the Piazza where it was his wish to be; but he stands even more fitly here upon this small campo beside the canal. Anywhere he would be monarch; but we are admitted here into his private presence-chamber, while the great stirring Piazza would seem but the crowded outer court. If, before leaving the campo, we make a short journey on foot along the Salizzada which passes on the south of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, we may find a treasure buried in dirt and neglect. None would guess its presence; but those who care for unfrequented paths may venture under the unattractive sotto-portico which leads to the outer staircase of a once beautiful Renaissance palace. It is given over to the poor, but a sculptured doorway still surmounts the stair; its chief beauty however is a series of delicately sculptured arches in the brickwork below, and a fine well-head half imprisoned by the chimney of a neighbouring bakery. The wall of the bakery is so near the staircase of the palace that we can get no complete conception of the arches, and the dirt and ill odours of this neglected corner are likely to daunt all but the most enthusiastic seekers after treasure. Yet these fragments, in elegance and beauty of design, may rank with the worthiest remains of the Venetian Renaissance.

Returning to Colleoni’s square, we again embark and continue our way down the Rio dei Mendicanti, past courtyards flooded by still rising water, and turn soon to the right, into the Rio Santa Marina--a picturesque canal, ever varying in width and angle. At the corner of the Palazzo Pisano we are confronted again by the problem of the high water. If we would include in our tour the Palazzo Sanudo, with its riches of many ages, Byzantine, early Gothic and Ogival, its two courtyards, its beautiful garden on the fondamenta and its dolphin-shaped knocker, we must turn to the right along the Rio delle Erbe. But it is useless to hope that this morning any gondola will be able to pass under its low bridges, and in consequence we must continue our way to the church of the Miracoli, by skirting the other side of the lozenge-shaped island on which it stands. We soon turn at right angles into the Rio dei Miracoli, and in a few moments we see the sun shining on the cupola of the church, gilding the marbles of the circular east tower and lighting the traceries of serpentine and porphyry and cipollino on the west front. It is a joyous and radiant aspect, this of the Miracoli, with its broad spaces of Greek marbles and its bands of Verona, its plaques of verd-antique and porphyry, its sculptured angels and grave apostles. It stands in quiet beauty on the brink of the canal. From its little campo opens the beautiful inner courtyard of the Sanudo Palace, while on another side it is bordered by the spacious and noble Corte delle Muneghe, formerly known as the Corte Cà Amadi, from the family whose arms are still to be seen on the brickwork. Close to the well in this court stood originally the image of the Madonna, thanks to whose miracles we now possess this most beautiful church built in her honour. The chronicles relate that a certain Francesco Amadi, an inhabitant of Santa Marina, had piously set up an image of the Virgin close by his house. The fame of this image as a worker of wonders grew so great that it was transferred by Angelo Amadi, in 1480, to the Corte di Cà Amadi, and set up there for popular veneration. In his Venetian Annals for 1480, Malipiero thus briefly relates the occurrence: “This year began the cult of the Madonna of Miracles which was at the door of Corte Nuova, opposite the door of the Amai in the narrow calle, and because of the crowd of people it became necessary to move the image, and carry it to the courtyard of Cà Amai, and immense offerings have been made of wax, statues, money and silver, insomuch that it has reached four hundred ducats in one month. And in process of time it amounted to three thousand ducats of alms, and with them we bought Corte Nova from the houses of the Bembo, Querini and Baroci, and there was built a most beautiful temple and convent, into which we put the nuns of Santa Chiara of Murano.” The foundation-stone was laid on February 25, 1481, when the image was moved with great pomp from the court to the little wooden shelter on the site chosen for the church. An interesting account of the move is contained in the _Memorie_ of Angelo Amadi. It affords a vivid verbal picture of religious festivals in Venice at the time they were finding their most splendid expression on canvas. “On the day of the twenty-fifth of February,” begins Amadi, “in the name of Messer Jesus Christ and of the glorious Virgin Mary, we removed the image from our house to transfer it to the hut or house of wood where the chapel or church is to be made; at which removal were present all the Schools or Fraternities, the Battudi, that is, the School of Madonna Santa Maria della Misericordia, to which I belong, and the School of the Carità, and of San Marco, and that lately founded of San Rocco, whose brothers go about in sackcloth, beating themselves continually with scourges and iron chains.” All the Procurators of San Marco, he says, were present, with countless cavaliers and doctors and a great part of the Signoria, the Patriarch in his pontificals, and a host of vicars and canons and other clerics, all richly and splendidly clothed. The Amadi insisted on themselves carrying the portable stand that had been made for the image, covered with cloth of gold, cremosine and cloth of silver, and adorned with silver candelabra and oriental censers. “Nor would we allow any other to carry it, that we might demonstrate publicly that it belonged to us and had been made by our ancestor.” Four citizens accompanied the image-bearers, carrying poles on which to support the stage as it mounted bridges or stopped in the streets. It was followed by the dignitaries already enumerated and almost the whole Venetian populace. The procession left the house of the Amadi to the sound of trumpet and pipe; it made a circuit of the bridges, streets and squares of the city as far as Santa Maria Formosa, halting in the parish church of the Amadi for many lauds to be sung. “And along all the calli and in the squares of the churches all the people kneeling on the ground prayed devoutly with tears and hands joined on their breasts, calling aloud and raising a great outcry.” In this manner the procession returned to the shelter, and the foundation-stone was laid by the Patriarch amid the chanting of lauds. After a final _Te Deum_ the image was left to the devotions of the people who, till night fell, continued to pour out their offerings for the building. There is something stirring in this ceremony with its popular outcry and petitions for mercy. It reminds us of that strong element of piety which in Venice went side by side with its strong commercial instincts.

The church of the Miracoli seems to belong peculiarly to Venice in the light of these stories of its birth. It is itself one of the miracles, this little Roman temple; with its quadrangular-domed choir, raised high above the nave, its marble ambones, its dark painted roof, and walls lined with marbles, it impresses us with a sense of sublimity. All here is perfectly proportioned and decorated with simple and absolute fitness. It is impossible to mount the flight of marble steps leading from nave to choir, past the wonderful little figures of St. Clare and St. Francis with his profound contemplative smile, past the Annunciation Angel and the Virgin draped like a Roman matron, into the choir where the great cross of porphyry and serpentine hangs in the apse, without feeling that we are mounting to sacrifice in a temple full of the Deity. But what part has that marvellous little company of sea youths and maidens in the tale of the Passion? They are the offspring of some delicate fantasy careless of all save itself, yet they seem to need no other passport than beauty to their place in the temple. Work of the same imaginative quality is to be seen on a pillar in the nave: not here a dream of mermaids with delicate breasts and arms and glittering tails, but a purely naturalistic subject. The artist has conspired with the stone to sing his delight in the life of the fields, and he has achieved his purpose so that the very spirit of the wild creatures lives again. A lizard with smooth scales and lithe, restless tail, ears of corn, a serpent holding a bird by its look as it rears itself for a spring, birds fighting and birds preening their breasts,--all these delicate beings, that move amid a design of admirable grace, are a field pilgrim’s scrip laid open for all who will read. These old artists were not afraid. To them all things of nature appeared symbols worthy to lay on the altar. And it is because of this permeating imaginative vision that the Church of the Miracoli is one of the jewels of Venice, instinct with life, from the grave mystery of its marble-lined walls, slab alternating with slab, Carrara cream and white, paonazetto, marmo greco, marbles of Verona red and almond, to lizard and serpent, siren and infant, from the dusky gold and colour of the ceiling to the eloquent figures that stand in constant ministration on the ambones.

Santa Maria dei Miracoli might well mark the limit of our tour; but if we go a short distance further into the Rio San Canciano we shall come on three examples of the earlier domestic architecture of Venice, which we shall do well not to miss. The first is a house by the Ponte Widmann, dating from the ninth century. It is exceedingly picturesque, with its long, low portico, and a profusion of Byzantine ornaments of most varied device on the walls--weird lions and birds and oriental beasts. The capitals of the window columns also are Byzantine, though the balconies are Renaissance. We can also distinguish, though it is immured, the ancient solario, or sun-terrace, which, in this house of old Venice, was evidently of considerable beauty and extent. Passing under another bridge after the Ponte Widmann, we come to the Ponte Pasqualigo, and landing at the calle on the left, we have on the right of us, only a few steps down, one of the oldest houses in Venice. So well cared for is it by its present owners that we seem not to be examining a relic, but to move in a living page of the past. On the morning we saw it, the sun was streaming into the court and falling on the Signora, who, in scarlet shawl, and with a brilliant kerchief round her head, was dozing in the sun. She rose and gave us a cordial welcome, and we climbed the outer stair, under an immense projecting roof, into the garden hanging above the court, full of sunshine and flowers; higher still, on the altana, was a bright line of clothing hung out to dry. The structure of the ancient roof overhanging the stair is very remarkable, with its secondary beams that jut horizontally under a long cross-beam running the whole length of the gallery. The rooms, which open out of one another from the terrace, are rich also in beams, though now for the most part covered with a foolish uniformity of ceiling. The floor of the reception room is, as usual, paved with small variegated stones, but it is remarkable for occasional little islands of mosaic, one of which, a tiny square of deep blue and gold set diamond-wise, is a veritable gem of colour. Worthy to rank with this hospitable, ample house of ancient Venice, is a courtyard opening on the water, into which we pass immediately from the Ponte Pasqualigo. The wooden barbicans of the projecting roof adjoining the portico rest on pillars of fine earliest Gothic, grave and strong and simple in their build. The sense that they are individuals bearing the burden of the beams is increased by the fact that it is not geometrically adjusted to their shoulders. It rests there because they are willing; there is an understanding, a _combinazione_ between beam and pillar, but the two were not mechanically made to fit.

Returning to the Rio dei Miracoli we leave the church on our left, and crossing the Rio Santa Marina and the Rio San Giovanni Grisostomo, we pass directly into the Rio del Teatro, leaving the water-entrance to Marco-Polo’s palace on our right. This corner is one of the most beautiful in the canals of Venice. It is rich in palaces and fragments of ancient ornament, and full of strange interplay of lights from the many tortuous ways that converge here. There is a constant fascination in the broad sweep of water at the crossways, in the problems of traffic, in the warning cries that herald boat or barge passing under the many bridges. There is perhaps no spot in Venice so full of ancient mystery, of the gloom, the light, the sound and stillness of her waterways. A little further on we pass into the Rio della Fava, full also of delightful and unexpected corners; and looking back from the Ponte di San’ Antonio we see the site of Mansueti’s picture commemorating another miracle of the Holy Cross; or rather we see one corner of the picture; for Mansueti has cut away the whole length of a calle and all the houses between this bridge of San’ Antonio and the Campo di San Lio, so that in his painting, for obvious artistic reasons, the waters of the canal flow directly in front of the campo, which he has narrowed to little more than a fondamenta. In a sketch for this picture now in the Uffizi at Florence, Mansueti has more faithfully transcribed the actual surroundings of the Campo di San Lio. His picture illustrates a miracle of the Cross that would seem to offer small scope for artistic treatment. A member of the Confraternity of San Giovanni Evangelista, on being invited by another Brother to attend the Cross in procession, impiously replied, “I will neither accompany it, nor do I care whether it accompanies me.” Within a short while, continues Flamino Corner, the perverse man died and the School assembled for his burial; but when the procession reached the Ponte di San Lio, the parish of the dead man, the Holy Cross became so heavy that no force could avail to move it. While all stood appalled and dismayed by such an occurrence, the friend of the dead man recalled the impious words he had spoken, and made known the reason of the refusal of the Cross. It was removed from the procession, and, the chronicler informs us, withheld henceforth from any but public solemnities. In Mansueti’s composition a number of Brothers are gathered on the bridge attempting to drag the Cross, and the clergy of San Lio and a group of citizens are waiting on the campo to receive it. There is much quaintness in the rendering of this rather humorous incident, and the picture is full of rich and homely detail, in the houses and in the doings of their inhabitants, the chase of a cat, the hanging of a clothes line, the stacking of the pliant rods on which the clothes are hung. The windows, with closed or open gratings, are thronged with onlookers, chiefly splendid ladies. In Bellini, the windows are unpeopled, but here there is scarcely one uncarpeted, and without its contingent of festive heads and shoulders; whilst in one of the windows, in the house we can still identify, a fascinating infant prances against the grating and pokes a fist through the bars. The bridge in the picture is obviously too low for any gondola to pass under it; it is merely a temporary private way thrown across the rio, which it is easy to believe that Mansueti has substituted in order that we may see above it the procession winding out of the Rio del Piombo. As we look back from the Ponte San’ Antonio we may get, in spite of Mansueti’s changes, a distinct impression of his scene; the sun, shining through the small circular ogival window in the house that still bounds our horizon, lights up a gay interior of green walls draped in crimson and gold with singular richness of effect.

The name of the Rio della Fava, the Canal of the Bean, boasts a traditional derivation that throws a curious light on Venetian pieties. It appears that in 1480, the same year in which was initiated the cult of the Madonna dei Miracoli at the Cà Amadi, another wonder-working image, under the patronage of the same family, was thought worthy of a chapel in San Lio. This chapel was named Santa Maria della Consolazione, or della Fava, from its proximity to the Ponte della Fava. “The ecclesiastical writers,” says Tassini, “recount that the bridge was so named because a man living by it, who had hidden some contraband salt under some sacks of beans, a vegetable he dealt in, when warned that the police were approaching threw himself at the feet of the said miraculous image for succour and obtained this favour--that the Justices, despite their search, found nothing in the house but simple beans.” This naïve faith in the willingness of the Madonna to meet all contingencies survives among the humbler citizens of Venice to-day. A proof is provided by the personal experience of a friend who had bespoken overnight a gondola for the station in the dark early hours of the next morning. The gondolier duly arrived and set out with his fare from San Marco. But they had gone no further than the church of the Salute when his lamp gave out and he halted and asked leave to replenish it. No place for procuring oil was apparent, but the gondolier knew one. He went to the shrine of the Madonna and addressed the figure thus, “Blessed Madonna, thou thinkest harm of no man and thou wouldst not that harm should come to any. I turn to thee for help in my need. The police are not like thee. They will have no pity in their fine if they see me at the station with my lamp unlit. I beg thy lamp for this little while.” And, as there was-no sign of refusal, the Madonna’s lamp was taken to the station and returned on the homeward journey.

Continuing our way down the Rio della Fava we pass almost immediately, on the left, the Palazzo Gussoni, a palace the great beauty of which cannot be overlooked. It is a building of the first Renaissance combining extreme richness of detail with simplicity of general effect. The basement is beautifully and variously sculptured and surmounted by a band of Verona marble; above it rises a design of leaves and ears of corn growing and spreading like a plant, and full of graceful and delicate fancy. The unique feature of the palace is the richly sculptured stone barbacan that supports the projecting portion of the upper storey overhanging the Calle della Fava. There is in Venice an abundance of fine wooden barbacans, but this is the only example we remember of the sumptuous casing in stone.

A little further and we pass below a palace of the Transition, from whose graceful balcony keep watch a row of sculptured lions in half-relief. As we come into the Rio della Guerra, the midday light plays reflectively on the water, striking out of it a thousand fitful diamonds, and the now ebbing tide washes with a soft caressing sound against the houses. At the juncture of the Rio della Guerra with the Rio del Palazzo is the Casa dell’ Angelo so named from the beautiful sculptured angel on the wall that faces us. It stands erect, with wings spread, holding in the left hand a globe signed with the Cross, which it seems in the act of blessing. The lower part of its body is covered with two shields bearing, according to Tassini, the arms of the Narni family. It is sheltered by a pent-roof, supported on graceful pillars, most delicately and nobly worked. In the lunette above the angel, in the immediate shadow of the roof, is discernible a painting of the Madonna and Child between two kneeling angels, which still retain traces of soft and beautiful colouring. But the most precious possessions of this palace front are the remnants of fresco under the broad projecting roof at the further end of the building. The beautiful figure of a woman, with head resting on her hand and braided golden hair, is still intact. There is another fine figure between the windows, and there are many fading fragments in the plaster below. Tradition unanimously attributes these frescoes to Tintoretto, and it is difficult to believe that the lovely woman could have come from any other hand.

The Ponte Canonica, which adjoins our first Capello Palace, now allows us an easy passage, and we can take our way on the ebbing tide down the Rio del Palazzo. Below the sombre weight of the Bridge of Sighs, between the palace and the prison, we pass again into the aureole of Venice. Within the brilliant bay formed by the Riva degli Schiavoni the gulls are making festa, and away towards the city they whirl and drift like shining snowflakes in the radiance of the Grand Canal. As we pass the Piazzetta to land at the Molo, the golden sword of Justice gleams superbly luminous in the blue above San Marco. Venice has put on her glory.

Chapter Nine

VENETIAN WATERWAYS

(PART II)

The centre of our second tour is an ancient and comparatively unfrequented region in the north of Venice--that part of Cannaregio over which watches the Campanile of the Madonna dell’ Orto, with its crowning image of snowy stone and four solemn apostles looking out over city and lagoon. The beautiful figure of the Madonna, round whose feet, between the tiles of her ruddy cupola, spring little plants the birds have sown, rises day after day triumphant out of the duel between sun and mist, a pledge of the victory of light; and through all vicissitudes of weather she is seen, sometimes in dazzling outline upon the deep blue, or against a canopy of grey, sometimes herself tempered to shadowy greyness by the brilliance of the cumuli that out-rival even her snowy purity.

We will enter from the Grand Canal by the Rio San Marcuola, nearly opposite the Correr Museum, and pass below the Ponte dell’ Anconetta on the Strada Nuova, or more properly the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which in its broad and ungracious uniformity is one of the most forbidding streets in Venice. It seems at first to have no reserves into which by a little tact or sympathy we may ingratiate ourselves; yet many activities generally to be encountered in other raiment and under other auspices, lurk behind its mask. On this very Rio San Marcuola is a workshop where antiquities are fabricated for the show-rooms of the Grand Canal. We see them here in their early stages, a rude stone well-head awaiting an ancient sculpture, a Renaissance chimney-piece, a Byzantine lion in Verona marble; and the forger is no villain but an honest, genial workman skilled to do better, but content to supply what he is asked for. A little beyond the bridge we come on one of the oldest squeri or boat-building yards of Venice. Black sprites of boys pass to and fro, plunging their torches into cauldrons of burning pitch, to draw them in the wake of flaming branches along the upturned sides of the gondolas; and men, with something of the fire and of the blackness in their eyes and faces, swink like the skilled demons in Spenser’s cave of Mammon. It is outside, on the squero, that this coarser work with pitch and cauldron goes on; in the inner workshop are the frames of gondolas in making, exquisite skeletons with subtle apportioning of oak, elm, nut and larch, and long unbroken sides of beech. Opposite the squero, on our right, is the ugly new brick wall of Paolo Sarpi’s convent. Above it may be seen a weed-grown fragment of the ancient building with its relief above the door. Boni has suggested that a more appropriate memorial to Sarpi’s memory than the erection of a bronze statue might have been the preservation or renewal in its original beauty of the old convent with which he was so closely and intimately connected.

We strike almost immediately into the Rio della Misericordia, and as we look down the long vista to right and left of us, under the low bridges, we begin to realise the peculiar character of this district. It is entirely different from that of our first tour; long parallel canals run from east to west, cutting the land into narrow strips and giving the strips a curious effect of isolation. These canals are bounded on the west by the lagoon, and the effect of sunset light flooding the long waterways is strikingly beautiful. If we were to follow the Rio della Misericordia to the left, we should come to the curious wedge-shaped island of the Ghetto Nuovo and the tall deserted houses of the Ghetto Vecchio. But we will tend only slightly to the left, and passing under a low bridge continue our former course into the Rio della Sensa. This name has in it echoes of historic festivals; it originated in the fact that the stalls for the great Ascension fête on the Piazza were stored in the warehouses that stood on its banks. As late as the last celebration of this famous offshoot of the Sposalizio festival, in the year 1776, fifty-seven thousand ducats were spent on erecting the enclosure in which the stalls were set up. The Rio della Sensa has many links with the past. Above a door in a humble wall on the fondamenta hangs a shield on which is sculptured an arm cased in steel. This shield belonged to the Brazzo (Braccio) family, of Tuscan origin, who had settled in Venice and acquired much land in this district. The name is worthy of preservation; for one at least of the family has left an enduring mark in the annals of the city. “In 1437,” we read in Tassini’s _Curiosità Veneziane_, “a Geoffrey da Brazzo, with some companions, founded, in the Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the Scuola di San Marco of which he was the Grand Guardian.” Within the unpaved court the house of the worthy Geoffrey is still standing, and it preserves its early Gothic and Byzantine features but little obscured by later additions. It is not altogether gloomy though evidently inhabited by very poor people; little gardens still blossom from the leads and window boxes, and tables and chairs are set out under the vine in the yard below. In the seventeenth century the family became extinct, its history being closed by a rather sordid domestic tragedy; and it is pleasanter to revert to the earlier days of this simple, dignified citizen’s dwelling when Geoffrey and his associates discussed in it the hopes and fears of their School. Another page of Venetian history lies open for us at the Campo dei Mori further along the same rio to the right. Our attention is attracted at once by a curious figure in oriental turban, with a pack upon its head, at the corner of the square which strikes the fondamenta. Two more figures in the same style of dress are stationed at other corners of the square. The crowd of urchins who throng round us the instant we alight will tell us that these are Sior Rioba and his brothers. The key to these figures is to be found in a palace, the inner court of which opens on our right hand as we turn inwards from the canal. It belonged to three Greek brothers, by name Rioba, Sandi and Afani, of the family Mastelli, who leaving the Morea in the twelfth century, on account of disturbances there, came with great wealth to Venice and built themselves this house by the campo which has preserved their origin in its name. This family also has a noble record in Venetian annals. It took part in the Crusade of 1202, and received citizenship for its reward. Later it rested from its labours and set up a spice shop in Cannaregio at the sign of the Camel. From these avocations it passed to a more reposeful existence on the banks of the Brenta, and, like the da Brazzo family, it became extinct in the seventeenth century. The courtyard of the palace, known now as the Palazzo Camello, possesses many fascinating reminders of its past, though some of its old beauties have been taken from it even in recent years. The open arches of the sotto-portico have been filled in, and a corkscrew stair is now only recognisable by the pillars we see immured in a circular tower. The pillars that once supported the arches of the entrance portico, now half buried in the ground from the constant raising of its level, are fine and uncommon examples of the transition from Gothic to Renaissance. Above the portico are two striking projections of carved stone, once serving perhaps to support a lantern or coat of arms, and in the angle of this wall and the main building are the relics of a Gothic pedestal on which, without doubt, some image has stood. The low-beamed court to the water is still intact with its finely-carved architraves and early Gothic pillars; but beyond the point of its present habitation it has been allowed to fall into decay from the invading damp. If we venture along this outer court to the water’s edge, we shall find ourselves in the Rio della Madonna dell’ Orto almost opposite the campo and church. By the help of a barge which we may reasonably hope to find moored alongside the water-door of the court, we obtained a view of the most characteristic aspect of the Palazzo Camello. The passer-by on the fondamenta cannot fail to be impressed by its beautiful decorative balcony and windows and the Byzantine frieze in a lower storey, but above all by a camel and driver sculptured in admirable relief on the wall.

Returning to the Campo dei Mori, we make our way again to the Fondamenta della Misericordia, where we disembarked. Almost immediately on our left, backing the Palazzo Camello, and perhaps originally forming a part of it, is the house of Tintoretto. It is still unspoiled of its ancient decorations of small sculptured figures and formal designs; and, above all, it is interesting architecturally for its elaborate carved wooden cornice on the two upper storeys to which time has given the appearance of stone. Howells, in his description of Tintoretto’s house, conveys an impression of sordid desolation in the building and its inmates. It may lately have fallen on better days; for there is now nothing forbidding about it, and indeed it is a welcome refuge from the swarms of dirty and discordant children whom the presence of a stranger on this campo seems to have a peculiar power of attracting. Its upper windows look out across the rio on a garden with a majestic cypress tree, and down the long canal to the wide waters of the lagoon. And some of the inmates of the house still have a share in the ancient, though humbler, arts of Venice. There are beadmakers working, as usual in almost total darkness, in an airless room in the basement. After we have seen these rows of patient, crouching workers, bending hour after hour over their gas jets, the beads of the lamp-lit Merceria will call up irresistibly the low benches, the glittering wires, the glazed and darkened windows. For there seems a strange irony in the birth of these shining toys out of the gloom. Many unacknowledged artists have worked upon these beads; much, no doubt, of their workmanship is mechanical; but if we look into them we shall find many little originalities in the gradation of line and colour, many touches of taste and feeling in their graceful and various designs. The house is much as it might have been in Tintoretto’s day, but the walls seem empty and unresponsive and to have less part in him than those palace fronts in which some faded fresco bears witness to the magic of his hand. But there is a building near by that may rightly be called the house of Tintoretto, where we may more faithfully commune with his mind--the Church of the Madonna dell’ Orto, in which, Ridolfi tells us, Tintoretto worked for his keep alone “because his fertile brain was constantly boiling with new thoughts,” and thereby roused the wrath of his fellow artists. It was here that Meissonier, coming in his old age to Venice, set himself down at the feet of the master and copied Tintoretto’s _Last Judgment_ in the choir. But it is not primarily for the artist’s great works in the choir that we return again and again to the Madonna dell’ Orto. It is for a painting no less the work of a giant, but of a giant gifted with tenderness equal to his strength. The _Presentation of the Virgin_ has been moved from its original place on the organ to a side chapel in which both light and space are inadequate, so that, coming on it first out of the daylight, we receive only a vague impression of its greatness. It is only gradually that it breaks on us in its combination of vigorous motion and life with sublime repose, and that we come to distinguish the elements that make up its power and to appreciate the singleness and intensity of vision which, amid all its wealth of resource, never wavers in loyalty to the central idea. In Titian’s _Presentation_, the mountain background, the crowd of Venetian citizens, the old egg woman, the Virgin, the High Priest, appear as separate interests; in Tintoretto’s _Presentation_ all the elements are unified; there is but one moment, one point, to which everything tends. The lovely women in the foreground, the mighty figures reclining on the stair, the mysterious trio behind in the shadow of the balustrade, all subserve the quiet, yet passionate drama enacted above in the meeting of the High Priest and Virgin. At last, as at first, these two figures fill our mind; their mutual contemplation is compelling. The Virgin is set against the sky, near the top of the stair she is ascending with blithe and childlike confidence, her right hand over her heart. She has no eyes except for the High Priest. She moves up to him without hesitation or drawing back. And he is bent on her entirely. From the height of his great stature, with the supreme majesty of his office about him, the High Priest, between his robe-bearers, extends his hands above the ascending childish figure--a world of thought, of awe, of worship, in that mysterious and lofty benediction.

We will go back again along the Rio della Sensa to the point where we entered it, turning now to the right under the Ponte Rosso into the Rio dei Trasti which soon Widens into a broad way of unbridged water leading out to the lagoon and dividing the island of the Madonna dell’ Orto from that of Sant’ Alvise. The rio into which we have now come is the third long parallel waterway we have struck in our journey through this district. It stretches on either side of us, spanned by wooden bridges, between the west lagoon and the Sacca della Misericordia. We will follow it for a short distance to the left to the little campo of Sant’ Alvise from which it takes its name. Here, in the church hangs that series of strange little canvases that Ruskin did not hesitate to attribute to Carpaccio. They are hung on a wall near the entrance door without order or precaution, signed in great sprawling childish characters Vetor Carpacio. Perhaps our pleasure at penetrating the by-ways of the city to this remote little island makes us at first uncritically appreciative of the quaint square canvases. Ruskin thought them the works of Carpaccio at eight or nine years of age, but he was confessedly writing from memory, and face to face with the reality might have reconsidered his verdict. The paintings seem too sophisticated for a young Carpaccio, too feeble for an older one. The architectural details belong in many respects to a period of the Renaissance later than that which Carpaccio knew, and though, behind their technical incompetence and absurd anachronisms, we seem to catch glimpses of the masterful imaginativeness of Carpaccio, we shall probably feel Molmenti’s verdict against their authenticity to be more substantial than Ruskin’s reminiscence which was framed in the enthusiasm of his discovery of one of the greatest of Venetian artists. One of the paintings, _The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba_, has an interest apart from its quaint fancy. We may conjecture that the artist was drawing on a memory of some work from the east; for the wooden bridge and the figures wavering at each end of it, the winding river, the little round Renaissance building to symbolise Jerusalem, and, above all, the swans in the stream below, and the tall blue peaks in the background, remind us of nothing so much as the willow pattern plate familiar to our childhood. We will leave on one side the scenes from Christ’s Passion by Tiepolo, which by some incongruous chance also are preserved in this humble aisleless church, merely remarking that it is necessary to arrive here early; for the sacristan, whose duties extend to both the churches on the two neighbouring islands, hurries off at half-past nine for the office at the Madonna dell’ Orto, and Sant’ Alvise is shut.

We will return along the rio, past the Madonna dell’ Orto and the Palazzo Camello to the Sacca della Misericordia. We shall have occasion elsewhere to speak at length of this unfrequented square of water. It looks out to Murano and the mountains, and is bounded on the south and west by the Abazia della Misericordia and the garden of the Casa degli Spiriti. The Abazia della Misericordia is one of the most beautiful ruins in all Venice. It has its roots far back in the past; for the abbey church was built in 939 and handed over to hermits and, later, to Augustinian Brothers, who added to it a convent. A school was erected beside the church in 1308, and this was later enlarged and extended by a hospital and chapel. In the sixteenth century the old hospice was given over to the silk-weavers, and another, more spacious and magnificent, was substituted. On the Fondamenta dell’ Abazia, close beside the Scuola di Santa Maria della Misericordia, is a wonderful relief, over the entrance to the hospice for poorer members of the confraternity, bearing the date 1505. It represents the Virgin with robes outspread to enclose and shelter a little company of hooded Brothers who kneel around her; the relief is beautiful in workmanship, and there are traces of lovely colour in the folds of the Virgin’s garments. An exquisite square campanile rises in the part of the abbey buildings that is still inhabited by Franciscan Brothers, but the northern front which overlooks the Sacca is a long, roofless, two-storeyed wall of brick with closed shutters--the façade of a weed-grown ruin. This isolated northern wall is exquisite in colouring: its pink plaster has been partly worn away to the red bricks, partly tempered to soft coral where it still lies on the hoary stone. Sparse weeds cover the top, outlined against the sky, and plants which no hand of man has sown spring from the crevices in the brick. In the early morning the Abazia is in shade, and its image in the smooth, shining water is gifted with a new beauty and strength. Looking back upon the east wall, part of which is in ruins, we see the broad Rio di Noale branching in two smaller channels right and left of the garden wall of the police station. This wall has a central window looking out to the lagoon, and often towards evening two figures may be seen through it, framed against the green and taking their pleasure in the garden as in some old picture.

The Sacca della Misericordia has a majestic corner-stone in the Casa degli Spiriti, the long garden of which is joined to the island of the Abazia by the Ponte della Sacca, a beautiful bridge of pale rose stone bound and lined with white marble. To those who live overlooking the Sacca, the House of the Spirits becomes an inseparable part of the landscape of the lagoon. Modern incredulity has preferred to talk of smugglers instead of spirits, or to find in the weird echoes which inhabit the Sacca and the neighbouring waterways an explanation of its name. Others maintain that it owes it to the companies of wit and intellect that gathered there in the days of Titian and Aretino; no proofs, however, have been offered in support of this alluring suggestion. But if modernity has driven out the spirits, the house itself has become a ghost. In the midst of the thunderstorms which from time to time break over the lagoon the Casa degli Spiriti stands out a ghostly landmark, framed suddenly by a sickle of gold or flashing silver, or illuminated by a level flood of purple, a place of revel for the spirits of the storm. In the calm moonlight it appears more pallid than the moon herself; in the black starless night still the huge corner-stone looms out on the edge of the lagoon. And there is no watch-tower to equal the Casa degli Spiriti for the spectacle of dawn upon the mountains. Those who wake within Venice under a glimmering grey sky, with rifts of remote, transparent blue, hear talk of coming rain. But the House of Spirits which kept watch all night upon the north lagoon, has had its day already in one short hour of dawn. It has seen the Alps rise blue and clear behind the low green line of the mainland; it has seen the ruby fire drawn from them by the dawn; it has seen the crystal path of the lagoon fade to the dove’s neck with its waves of peacock green; it has seen the fishing-boats come pressing with their many-coloured sails against the sunrise, each, as it turned before the wind, sealed with a golden blessing from the god of day.

But the House of the Spirits which dominates these, the immaterial glories of the lagoon, rules over a domain of vivid colour and activity. For from the early hours of the morning there is continual traffic down the Sacca of fruit barges bound for Rialto from Sant’ Erasmo, the garden of Venice, and of milk barges from the mainland. It is not always an easy life, that of the feeders of the city--in which, as Sansovino says, nothing grows, but everything is found. There are many days when cold and rain and adverse winds mean real suffering to the sellers of fruit and milk. Again and again one is reminded of T. E. Brown’s wonderful description of the fishing-boat, with its dirt, its noise, its foul-mouthed crew transformed beneath “the broad benediction of the west” as one sees a milk barge toiling up the channel against wind and tide, with its crowd of men and women. The men begin to hoist the sail with loud excited cries; the women crouch low for shelter, smoking or munching their crusts. They seem lumpish leaden combatants in the lists against the elements, with small hope of conquest. Then, suddenly, as it rounds the corner of the Casa degli Spiriti, the ponderous boat with its dejected crew spreads its sails like a bird, a thing of swift delight lifted into the strong hand of the wind.

If we halt but for an hour in the shadow of the Abazia, we may have a glimpse of many aspects of the city’s floating life; joy and mourning follow in unplanned succession, strong passion and the merchandise of every day jostle each other. Now there passes down the Sacca a gondola bearing a coffin to San Michele, now a slow-creeping barge under a mountain of planks, now a little company of lowing calves who can have but one destination in this city without pasture, now a barge of necklaces from Murano that lie coiled together like shining fish of many colours.

There is a moment of late August when all seasons seem to meet and lavish their brightest colours on Rialto, and on the many fruit-stalls of Venice and on the barges that creep leisurely up and down the canals. If we turn again to the heart of the city in the wake of one of those fruit barges, we may imagine ourselves sharing in ancient pomps and festivals. For their tapestry is gorgeous; pyramids of peaches bound about with green leaves, of tomatoes and brilliant pepper pods, huge watermelons cut open to show the crisp, rosy pulp; piles of figs, brown and green; pears, apples, grapes; and choicest of all, the delicious red _fragola_ or strawberry-grape. All these and many more make up the brilliant burden of the barges from Sant’ Erasmo. We may follow them as they wind through the lesser waterways, now in sun, now in shadow, till the pageant is welcomed in the full flowing day of the Grand Canal and the barges empty themselves at Rialto.

Chapter Ten

ARTISTS OF THE VENETIAN RENAISSANCE