public it was decreed that they should not only remain unmolested but be fed at the expence of the state. Venice has lost its liberty, but those light and gracecreatures appear to have escaped the German conquerors. dented architecture, the balconies, and Venice still palpitates in the piazza of Saint Mark; this brilliant decoration costs a million annually in repairs; while other distant quarters, some of which possess magnificent palaces, are left to fall into ruins: this corpse of a city, to use the expression of Cicero's friend, is already cold at the extremities, the life and heat remaining are confined to the heart. The Florian coffee-house, under the arcades Procuratie Nuove, in the old time of Venice was a species of institution; it has not survived the decline and fall of the city. This celebrated coffeehouse, like the other great coffee-houses in the piazza of Saint Mark, Quadri, Leoni, Suttil, etc., is however open the whole night in all seasons, and, in fact, is never shut. Florian was formerly the confidant and universal agent of the Venetian nobility. The Venetian who alighted there, had news of his friends and acquaintances; was informed when they would be back and what they had done in his absence; there too he found his letters, cards, and probably his bills; in short, every thing of moment had been done for him by Florian, with care, intelligence, and circumspection. Canova never forgot the more essential services he bad received from Florian at the commencement of his career, when he The infinite number of pigeons that Over the piazza of Saint Mark, the cupola of the church, and the roofs of the Ducal palace, add also to the Oriental aspect of bese monuments. In a country where the ruling power, though slow in action, is ever on the watch, one would prefer the veyance of letters by these birds. These pigeons have been in Venice from earliest days. It was the custom on Palm Sunday to let fly from above the pripal gate of Saint Mark, a number of pigeons with small rolls of paper ad to their feet, which prevented them rm continuing in the air, and as they they were caught by the crowd, who began Bercely to dispute the prizes the ment they were loosed. This was a species of distribution to the public rather less gable than ours. It sometimes happened that the pigeons got rid of wanted to become known; and be their impediments and sought an asylum remained his friend through life. Floon the roofs of Saint Mark and the Ducal rian was often tormented with the gout palace, near to those awful Piombi where in his feet, and Canova modelled his leg boman captives bemoaned a lot far more happy; here they rapidly increased, and such was the interest they excited that to comply with the wishes of the During the government of the Republic a person g to the city granaries fed the pigeons ry marning on the piazza of Saint Mark and the fia. When Venice was taken in 1796, these te pensioners were no longer supplied, and have been indebted to the compassion of the Veas for their subsistence. Consult the work of Jane Justine Renier Micbiel on the origin of in fêtes, Venice, 1817, 5 vol. 8vo, an agreeable ad learned work, one of the best books that bas published on the history of Venice. I met with the authoress, a very amlable woman, not and foot so that the shoemaker could take his measure without putting him to pain. This leg of a coffeehouse-keeper appears to me no less honourable to Ca withstanding the deafness which afflicted her when advanced in years. She died at the age of seventy-eight in the year 1832. Madame Michiel also translated Shakspeare, and defended Venice in the most patriotic manner against M. de Chateaubriand. 2 The vi-ling cards In Italy are commonly ornamented with emblems and monuments: I received cards at Verona on which was an engraving of the amphitheatre; the Venetians have on theirs the bridge of the Rialto, the front of Saint Mark, the columns of the Piazzetta, etc. nova than his Theseus, it is pleasing to esteem him as a man whom we have admired as an artist. At the extremity of the piazza there are three pili or flag-masts which formerly bore the glorious standards of Saint Mark, now replaced by the Austrian flag. The pedestals of these masts are in bronze, by Leopardo, and possess the elegance and taste of the Grecian artists. Independently of the great pains taken by the artist, they are so beautifully polished that the figures have all the appearance of having just quitted the workshop; whereas they have been there upwards of three centuries, exposed to the injury of the air, the African siroccos, and to the misty saline spray of the raging Adriatic. CHAPTER III. Church. Baptistry. — Bronze gate. - The Virgin della Scarpa.-Pala d'oro.- Historical stones.Horses.-Lion of Saint Mark.-Campanile.- Loggietta.-Treasury, The basilic of Saint Mark, begun about the end of the tenth century by the doge Orsolo, is of chequered architecture, a mixture of Greek and Roman, but more especially Gothic. A description of the mosaics, sculptures, basso-relievos, and arabesques with which it is ornamented, would be endless. There are brilliantly blended Grecian elegance, Byzantian luxury, and the talents of the Venetian masters. On seeing these splendid compartments, the golden arched roofs, the pavement of jasper and porphyry, the five hundred columns of black, white, and veined marble, of bronze alabaster, vert antique, and serpentine, one would feel inclined to take this christian temple, except that is is somewhat too gloomily lighted, to be a palace of the Arabian Nights. Religion has preserved all these riches, which might have been dissipated in the speculations and enterprises of a commercial and navigating people. The wrecks of the magnificence of ancient Rome ornament the cathedrals of the modern city, its successor. Saint Mark has collected the costly spoils of Constantinople. Italy thus embraces the ruins of these two imperial cities. The benitier, or holy-water vase, a work of the fifteenth century, of porphyry, is supported by an antique altar of Grecian sculpture, ornamented with | dolphins and tridents. One of the bronze doors of the baptistry, covered with the figures of saints and Greek inscriptions, appears to have been brought from the basilic of Saint Sophia. The mosaic, of the eleventh or twelfth century, on the wall, represents the Baptism of Christ, and is a warm animated composition.. St. John the Baptist, in bronze, placec over the font, by Francesco Segala, i one of the good statues of the sixteenth century. I remarked in this chapel o the baptistry, against the wall, the tomt of the doge Andrea Dandolo, who died in 1354, an intrepid warrior and skilfu politician, the friend of Petrarch and the oldest historian of Venice, as his ancestor was its greatest hero. The name of Dandolo is so noble and great that I loved to repeat it under the vaulted roofs of Saint Mark, and had not my respect for the solemnity of the place prevented me I should have made it re-echo there, as an illustrious traveller did that of Leonidas on the ruins of Lacedemon; but the echo of Saint Mark would doubtless have died away as speedily as that of Sparta, although the heroic acts of the Venetian warrior are less ancient by fourteen centuries. I must confess that my feelings were very different when, as I looked at the bronze door of the vestry behind the altar, a work that occupied thirty years of Sansovino's existence, I saw there in relievo the almost living head of Aretino beside those of Titian and the author, both of them his friends. I could perceive in it all the presumption of his talent and disposition; a mar who made a trade of calumny, who praised for a certain price, and who may be considered the representative of the licentious and ancient manners of Ve nice. The friendship between Titian Sansovino, and Aretino, if it does but little honour to the two artists, must have contributed in an extraordinary degree to the good taste and splendour of Venice. These three men aided each other by mutual counsels, and the superb gate of Sansovino is a kind of monument of their close and constant union. Titian could not always escape the importunate pecuniary demands of the greedy author, nor his calumnies when the money was not forthcoming. The four Evange See the following passage from one of Aretino's letters to the duke of Florence, dated October, 1545 La non poca quantità di danari che M. Tiziano si VENICE. lists of bronze in the choir, are also by Sansovino, and are considered as some of his finest works, also an altar behind the bigh altar, ornamented with bassorelievos in marble and bronze gilt. The Zeno chapel, the altar, and the monument of the Cardinal are the inestimable works of Pietro and Antonio Lombardo, and Leopardo. Here is also the celebrated statue of the Virgin cast by Alberghetti, with the cognomen of della carpe, because the Virgin has shoes on. The altar, the statue of St. James, and other masterpieces of Leopardo, are both poble and graceful. The finest of the Numerous columns of Saint Mark in white and black porphyry, is in the oratory of de Cross, nearest the altar on the epistle The twelve Apostles, the Virgin, St. Mark, in marble, placed above the arrave which separates the body of the charch from the choir, are by the brothers Jacobello and Pietro-Paolo dadir Massegne, excellent Venetian artists of the latter end of the fourteenth cenary, pupils of the Pisa school, who seem Worthy of a more advanced epoch. The real chandelier of Saint Mark, notwithSanding the oddness of its base, is conred as one of the most remarkable Works of its kind for the taste and nature of the figures, and the elegance of the taments. The Pala d'oro, a species of mosaic save the principal altar, is a curious old and silver on enamel, placed 147 | inscriptions that are almost barbarous ; gular, but the ensemble has something the figures are stiff, plain, and sindignified in it: one might compare it to interesting as regards the period to an old poem or some ancient chronicle, which it belongs, but which it would be irrational to take as a model after the masterpieces of the great artists. Venice appear to have forgotten their If the fickle and conquered people of indelibly impressed with it, and nohistory, the stones and monuments are where perhaps is the historical aspect of a place less defaced than there. A red marble pavement without any inscription near to the sixteenth arcade, recalls the most ancient recollections of Venice. It was there that Narses when he succeeded Belisarius built the ancient church of Saint Geminian, destroyed in the twelfth century, when the canal on the edge of which it stood was filled up. Every year the doge and senate visited the new church of Saint Geminian, pulled down in 1809, and they were identical stone, the original limit of the reconducted with great pomp to this thence, in a retired street, there is a small piazza of Saint Mark. Not far from white stone marking the spot where Boemondo Tiepolo, the Catiline of Venice, perished; he was killed by a pot of flowers that a too curious old woman ac. cidentally threw down from her window, in leaning forward to see him as he was ment of art belonging to the Greeks going, at the head of the conspirators, to of the Lower-Empire, and of that prosperty-hat military and commercial the Great council, a flower-pot which has seize the Ducal palace and overthrow ceded the poetical and literary civilisa- Catiline Orations did Rome and the civilisation of the Venetians which pre- effectually saved Venetian liberty, as the Lon of other Italian cities. Ordered at Constantinople by the republic towards Tiepolo's party, the council of Ten was senate. Immediately after the defeat of Core was augmented and enriched at Venice in the three following centu- dependently of the mementos of glory res: Rexhibits, symmetrically enchased and conquest which abound in Saint ag its numerous ornaments, a series Mark, certain squares of red marble, pictures representing subjects from under the vestibule, still mark the spot Old and New Testaments, the life of of the famous interview where a disMark, the Apostles, the angels, sembled reconciliation was affected bethe prophets, with Greek and Latin tween Alexander III. and the emperor due to the old woman's flower-pot. In els pure assai avidità che tiene di accre, causa ch' egli non dando cura e obbligo che con amico, nè a dovere che si convenga a' lo a quello con istrana ansia attende che ⚫ette gran case." Chara was the first who gave a detailed Cast of the Palad oro in the Fabbriche di Vene zia, although a work of that kind belongs less to the history of architecture than that of painting. The description is remarkable for its scrupulous accuracy. 2 See post, chapters XIV. and XXIV. This elegant church occupied the present hall and staircase of the Royal palace. Frederick Barbarossa, through the media-, tion of the victorious Venetians. times confounded with other artists o the same name; he died in 1529. Th ascent to its summit is by path, a rea foot-path of brick, smooth and withou steps. The sea, Venice rising from it bosom, the resplendent verdure of the fields on terra firma, the hoary tops of the Frioul Alps, the crowd of islets gracefully grouped around this imposing city present a point of view which may almos Saint Mark presents a collection of relics of the greatest antiquity, the various mementos of conquest and revolutions. Before the entrance of the church, on the right, near the Piazzetta, are two pillars covered with Coptic and hieroglyphic characters, said to have originally belonged to the temple of Saint Saba, at Saint Jean d'Acre. According to anti-be called a prodigy. quaries, the porphyry group, at the angle near the door of the Ducal palace, represents Harmodius and Aristogiton, the furious assassins of Hipparchus, the Athenian tyrant. The four famous horses of Corinth, or of the Carrousel, have resumed their former position on the tribune, over the principal door. Never was a trophy of victory more modestly placed, or worse, for they are scarcely perceptible. Won at Constantinople, brought back from Paris, these Greek or Roman steeds are associated with the two grandest instances of taken towns that history record. The lion of Saint Mark is replaced on his column, but mutilated. He ought never to have left it; though insignificant as a work of art, at Venice it was a public and national emblem of its ancient power. It is venerable on the piazza of Saint Mark, but on the esplanade of the Invalides it was only a superfluous mark of the bravery of our warriors, less noble than all those tattered flags taken on the battlefield and suspended in the nave of the church. It was, moreover, a singularly ill-judged and odious act of a rising republic to humiliate, and spoil of the vestiges of their past glory, such old republics as Venice and Genoa. The Sacro Catino, and the Lion of Saint Mark, were there patriotic monuments worthy of respect; elsewhere they sunk into mere shop or cabinet curiosities, the prey of ruthless conquest. The Campanile of Saint Mark is a bold structure, and one of the solidest and most elevated in Italy or even Europe; it was begun in the tenth century, but not finished till the sixteenth. The chief builder was the illustrious maestro Buono, a great Venetian architect, who is some Clcognara regards these horses as a Roman work of Nero's time; the Cav. Mustoxidi pretends that they are Greek from the Island of Chios, and that they were carried to Constantinople in the fifth century by order of Theodosius. The metal The Loggietta, at the foot of Sain Mark's steeple, is of rich and elegan architecture, by Sansovino; the foun bronze statues of Pallas, Apollo, Mer cury, and Peace, by the same artist, ar held in estimation, as are also the ornaments by Titian Minio, his clever pupil and those of Geronimo Lombardo o Ferrara, one of the first sculptors of the sixteenth century. The marble bassorelievos are exquisite, especially the Fal of Hella from the ram of Phryxus, an Tethys aiding Leander. In the interio is a Nostra Signora, another beautifu work of Sansovino. My eagerness to examine Saint Mark' Gospel, which was not in the library, a I had been informed, induced me t solicit admission to the treasury,—a! intrigue stimulated by the curiosity of traveller and amateur for which I hav no blush, and which was crowned with success. The Gospel, now almost moul dered to dust, is enclosed in a frame the damp has so far destroyed it, tha only a few straggling letters can be wit difficulty perceived. The ecclesiastic who showed it to me pretended, how ever, in opposition to Montfaucon, th it was on parchment and not papyrus,though which is correct cannot be easil decided now. This manuscript is i Latin, and was taken by the Venetians Utina in 1420. Notwithstanding all th miracles attending its transfer to Venic it is impossible to regard it as authenti since, as before observed, the apostle wrote only in Hebrew and Greek. 3 Th part of the treasure deposited in Sain Mark's (the other part, consisting of vase and pateras of hard Oriental stone mounted in gold and silver, is at th Mint) may be reckoned, I believe, on was analysed at Paris, and ascertained to be pa copper, instead of Corinthian brass as general stated, and as it was natural to suppose. 2 See book XIX. ch. vii. VENICE. 149 of the most extensive reliquaries in the world-a kind of glass-covered charnel-ceive that a singular exaggeration prevails It is impossible, however, not to perin all the narratives concerning the tyranny of the old Venetian government. For instance, we are told by a recent traveller that the reservoir of fresh water for the use of the city was placed within the limits of the ducal palace, and the nobles had thereby obtained the means of making their rebel subjects perish with thirst. It is a fact that there are two fine bronze cisterns, of the sixteenth century, there are others in the various squares of in the centre of the palace court; but itself. The accusations against the Vethe city, and every house has one to netian government, which was admired by Commines, were redoubled towards the probably, they were least merited. It close of its existence, at an epoch when, was long the fashion to extol its constitution, the wisdom of its laws, and the incorruptibility of its justice, which was even frequently invoked by foreigners, as it has since been to write on the constitution, finances, and commerce of England. base, seen by the glare of candles and Loches: there are exhibited some of the Loo numerous pieces of the true cross, with the nail, sponge, and reed used in our Saviour's passion; the knife he used at the last supper, with some Hebrew characters on the handle so nearly effaced that Mealfaucon could not decipher them; Some earth from the foot of the cross peated with the divine blood; the Ausers of Saint John Baptist; numerless relics of Saint Mark; a superb silver cross, presented by the empress Ie, wife of Alexis Comnenes, to the burch of Constantinople; and especially admirable chandeliers, chefs-d'œeuFre of the Byzantian goldsmiths, which would ample repay a visit to the tury. All these spoils proceed from the king of Constantinople; that vast se of the wrecks of antiquity, of bones and modern jewels-a barBaras conquest, as it even tore from the people the objects of their faith and ve cration. CHAPTER IV. fiscal palace-Government of Venice. - Calendric's Sigures and capitals.-Allegorical paint -ape of Europa, by Paolo Veronese.— Titan's St. Christopher.-Ceiling by Tergele-Council of Ten.-Lion's mouth. inquisitors-Grand council.-Portraits of The Gen-Tintoretto's Glory of Paradise. The Ducal palace, by its architecture and dan gloomy aspect, gives no bad representation of the ancient government cratic power; its origin even is surrounded of Fenice: it is as the Capitol of aristoWith errors; the doge who begun it, Marino Faliero, lost his head, and the architect Filippo Calendario was hung as conspirator. The names, too, of some parts of it, are in unison with the impresproduces: the Giants' Stairs, a per structure, witnessed the coroof the doges, and the Bridge of Sighs has the shape of a large sarcophaSuspended over the sea. rison, and a tribunal, one might say, A palace, The word centralisation were not ri Notwithstanding the heavy forbidding appearance of the Ducal palace, it has some elegant details, and in some parts is remarkable in an artistic point of view. The capitals of the Tuscan columns in the front, ornamented with foliage, figures, and symbols, original masterpieces, of a taste at once bold and pure, and so interesting for the history of art. Angelo of the middle ages, equally are chiefly by Calendario, the Michael eminent as a sculptor and architect, the unstable soil of Venice are still a miracle for solidity. The Loggietta is one of the most frequently mentioned works of Alessandro Vittoria ; the principal door, called della Carta, and its statues, arc excellent works of Maestro Bartolommeo; there are eight beautiful Grecian statues on the clock front; the Adam and Eve, on the inner front, are esteemed; the small front to the left of the Giants' Stairs, by Guglielmo Bergamasco, is of superior architecture; the two colossal statues of Mars and Neptune on the Giants' Stairs, are by Sandus applied under such circum-sovino, but of his latter years; and the Golden Staircase, magnificently embellished by Sansovino, is ornamented with stuccos by Vittoria. whose foundations of the Ducal palace on ces, that the ducal palace had furanted the first and most terrible example. See the Italian Miscellanies. The by-gone glory and splendour of |
