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still of importance as regards the arts.
The school of Trevisa forms a brilliant
branch of the Venetian.

The Duomo, although modernised, is still of an imposing appearance. Three chapels are by the Lombardi, father and son, able Venetian sculptors and architects of the fifteenth century; their simplicity and purity render more conspicuous the false taste of the works of the last century. The contrast is still further shown by the beautiful tomb of Zanetti, bishop of Trevisa, by the Lombardi : the eagle with extended wings, surrounded by a wreath of flowers, greatly excited the admiration of Canova. The tomb of Pope Alexander VIII. (Ottoboni), who was a canon of the cathedral, by the Trevisan Comino, is horribly heavy.

The Virgin on a throne, ornamented with beautiful crimson curtains, holding the infant Jesus, and beside her St. Sebastian and St. Roch, is by Geronimo Vecchio, of Trevisa, painted in 1487; it has all the languishing colouring and dignified grace of that painter. Assumption by Penacchi, an artist of The Trevisa of the sixteenth century, notwithstanding the stiffness of the draperies, produces a pleasing impression: a group of angels carrying up the Virgin is perfectly Mantegnesque. A long Procession by Dominici, another painter of Trevisa of the same century, who died young, is extremely curious: all the small figures are natural, true, and full of life, and exhibit the contemporary portraits of the authorities of the city. A whimsical inscription put at the bottom brings to our recollection the peculiar estimation made of this picture by Canova, the rival of Phidias. The vault of Saint Liberal, where his tomb stands, is an ancient, bold, and solid construction. The St. Justine, transparent, and well preserved, by Bissolo, a good Venetian artist of the sixteenth century but little known, has a sort of liveliness about it, notwithstanding the sword that pierces the bosom of the chaste martyr: the canon on his knees praying with such an earnest pious air, is said to be the portrait of the person who ordered the picture.

A Virgin sitting with the infant Jesus on one knee, supposed to be by Sansovino, is of the finest times of sculpture.

The able Trevisan painter, Paris Bordone, has decorated the Duomo with three masterpieces. The grand St. Lau

[Book V.

rence strikes by the beauty and celestial expression of the saint's head, the flesh of St. Jeroine, the foreshortening rangement of the whole. The Nativity of St. Sebastian, and the excellent arpresents the most happy contrast: the Infant Jesus who is looking with an air presented in a chaste and noble attitude; so loving and so happy at his mother, recity offering to Christ two doves, and the a shepherdess full of grace and simplialmost speaking figure with the ebon beard and hair, the portrait of Aloisaa Rovero, who ordered the picture. The Mysteries of the Rosary, a small picture in six divisions, is exquisite and elegant, and may be considered a sort of miniature display of the author's peculiar toria, expresses penitence: the effect is qualities. St. John the Baptist, by Vitstill increased by the statue being from the quarries of Istria, better adapted by kind than the most brilliant marble. its dark grey colour for a subject of this The Cross carried by the angels, by school, with the figures of St. James Amalteo, a good painter of the Venetian major, St. Diego, St. Anthony the abbot, and St. Bernardin, is a noble, graceful, scape is a view of Motta, a town of the and animated composition: the landTrevisan, where the artist resided: the colouring has not the ordinary vivacity of Amalteo, who was upwards of fiftywinding Sheet, held by three bishops nine when he executed it. followed by priests holding torches, The Holy and shown to the adoration of the faithful, by Francesco Bassano, is rich, broad, and true. Pordenone, a powerful artist, surnamed the Michael Angelo of the Venetian school, has painted two superb standing some exaggeration, is bold and frescos; the Epiphany, which, notwithmajestic; there is a foolish vain inscription indicating that it was ordered by the shall hereafter have occasion to mention. canon Brocardo Malchiostro, whom we The Eternal Father surrounded by a descending to the earth, a fresco in multitude of little angels entwined and the cupola, is wonderfully lively and airy.

But the finest of the pictures of the Duomo is the Annunciation by Titian and natural, both in the perspective and when young, admirably expressive, true, drapery; the only fault is, his having introduced the canon Malchiostro, who,

because he ordered it, had the whimsical | pretension to figure in it.

The church of Saint Nicholas, the finest in Trevisa, dates from the year 1300, and bas the Gothic grandeur of the monasteries of Saint Dominick. The architect belonged to the middle ages, but of his name we are ignorant, as we are of many others, builders of vast basilics, and immense monuments of that period, characterised by the strength and durability of its works. These singular and religious artists were more anxious about their salvation than their fame. Thus in architecture, the middle ages truly appear, as some one has observed, to be the epoch of great men now unknown. Saint Nicholas owes its foundation to the zeal and bounty of Pope Benedict XI., who was born in the Trevisan and belonged to the convent.

As at the Duomo, an altar by the Lombardi, not withstanding its exiguity, shews strikingly the false taste of the last century, exhibited in an enormous altar by the celebrated P. Pozzi. The tomb of Count Agostino d'Onigo of TreVisa, a senator of Rome (which does not mean that he was a Roman senator), is another excellent work of the Lombardi. The Apparition of Christ, by Giovanni Bellini, shows by its morbidezza that the old master had the good sense to approach the manner of his two great pupils, Giorgione and Titian. In the lower part of the picture are the contemporary portraits of the bishop, the podestà, and the prior of the convent, all members of the pious Monigo foundation, that charitably helped poor females, several of whom figure among the portraits and are full of life. The St. Christopher carrying the Infant Jesus on his shoulder is of the colossal size of thirty-four feet, independently of his legs which are in the water; it dates from the year 1410, is a most able fresco by Antonio, of Trevisa, and interesting as regards art. The Virgin on a throne with St. Thomas d'Aquin, St. Jerome, St. Liberal, St. Dotnick, St. Nicholas the bishop, Benedict XI., and on the steps of the throne a little angel playing on the lyre, is an immense, elegant, and majestic composition, and was for a length of time supposed to be by Sebastiano del Piombo,

The srebilerts of the churches Saint Anastasia of Verona, Saint Augustine of Padua, recently

but was found from the registers of the convent to be by a monk, Fra Marco Pensabene, a Venetian, the great artist of the cloister, who must have been one of Giovanni Bellini's best pupils, though spoken of by none, notwithstanding his pretty interesting name of Fra Pensabene.

The hall of the chapter, painted in 1352 by Thomas of Modena, represents a gallery of celebrated Dominicans, each bending over his little desk, reading or meditating, some wearing spectacles; figures with little of the ideal, and totally destitute of variety, but natural and true.

The church of Saint Theonist, now appertaining to a girls' school, presents on the arched roof, a Paradise, in which the soul of the saint enters triumphantly, a fresco by the Venetian Fossati and the figures by Guarana; it is remarkable for the ornaments and perspective; an Assumption by Spineda, a noble and able artist of Trevisa, the imitator and almost the rival of Palma, for drawing and delicacy of colouring; and a Magdalen at the foot of the cross, with the Virgin and St. John, a work after the manner of Titian, by Jacopo Bassano, who afterwards adopted a style of his own and was also chief of a school.

The church of the Scalzi (or barefooted Carmelites), by its form and extreme cleanliness, invites the soul to devotion. Notwithstanding it has undergone a fatal restoration, we recognise the original touch of Paris Bordone in the Virgin with the Infant Jesus, St. John the Baptist, and St. Jerome; the latter. half-naked and covered only with the cardinal's purple, is presenting his hat to the Infant Jesus, who takes it as a plaything.

The church of Saint Augustine, of an elliptic shape and good architecture, has a Virgin, St. Joseph, and a saint, which brings to our mind the lively manner of Andrea Schiavone.

Saint Leonard contains the Glory of the saint, a fresco of fine colouring by Giambattista Canaletto,and an old Virgin with the Eternal Father, St. Bartholomew, and St. Prosdocimus, perhaps by Jacopo Bellini, the worthy father of Giovanni and Gentile; the retouching has injured the Virgin, but as regards the

destroyed, Saint John and Paul of Venice, are not known.

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Eternal Father, the saints, and chiefly the little angels, it is a fine, noble, and graceful work. Another retouching has destroyed the figure of St. Sebastian, with St. John the Baptist and St. Erasmus, by Giovanni Bellini; but the St. Erasmus remains untouched, and has preserved all the charming characteristics of the artist.

The front of the church of Saint Giovanni del Tempio, or Saint Gaetan, is worthy, from its purity and chasteness, of its date, 1508, which is inscribed on it, and it shows the style of the Lombardi; but with the exception of a small gallery with a cupola, the interior, horribly modernised, is not at all in conformity with such an exterior.

The steeple of Saint Martin indicates that the building is of a very ancient date. An Assumption by Spineda is much esteemed; likewise St. Martin giving alms, and a Trinity by Orioli, a prolific painter and poet of the seventeenth century, born at Trevisa, to which he confined his natural but almost uncultivated talents.

At Saint Andrew, the Virgin, St. John, Chrysostome, St. Lucy and below a little angel playing on the harp, in spite of its dilapidated state, exhibits the simplicity and taste of Gentile Bellini.

The most ancient church of Trevisa is that of San Giovanni del Battesimo, which possesses a Baptism of Christ, by Spineda, and a St. Apollonius, by Francesco Bassano.

The small church of Saint Gregory has the picture of the Saint, habited in his pontifical robes, one of the masterpieces of the younger Palma.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Mont-de-Piété.-The Dead Christ, by Giorgione,

and with the other holds the corner o the crimson cloth, placed under the body of Christ. In spite of the injury of time the retouchings, and the bad light it i | placed in, it will ever be admired fo boldness of foreshortening, the play o the light, and the terror blended with compassion that it inspires.

One of the rooms of the Mont-de-Piét displays a Miracle of the loaves an fishes, a small, curious, and unnotice fresco full of life, with a charming land scape; this fresco, although much da maged, obtained the suffrages of tw good judges, S. Missirini, and Coun Cambray Digny, a Tuscan architect, ori ginally from Picardy; they were both o them at Trevisa in 1831, and may b said to have in some manner found it out An old clerk told these gentlemen tha tradition attributed it to Ludovico Fiu micelli, a native of Trevisa, who too earl abandoned the study of painting for tha of architecture and fortification, but S Missirini has no hesitation in believing i to be worthy of the able Venetian maste Bonifacio. In the same room are als the rich Epulon and Moses striking the rock, presenting two animated land scapes, by Ludovico Pozzo, a Flemist artist, long resident at Trevisa, and rather posterior to Fiumicelli.

Such was the fecundity of art in Italy in the sixteenth century that it is to be found even in an establishment to aid the indigent, where it shines amid the pledged garments of the poor, making à Montde-Piété almost a museum.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Library.-Theatre. Pola palace-Ancient Dofu palace.-Hospital. - Bridge.

The chapter library was founded by a liberal and noble Trevisan, Count Azzani The Mont-de-Piété (where money is lent Rambaldo Avogaro, a celebrated antiby the State on pledges) of Trevisa has quary, the friend of Muratori, a canon still its celebrated Dead Christ, by Gior-zealous for the literature and history of gione, painted for this establishment, a most magnificent proof of its antiquity and richness. Christ is supported in a sitting posture by angels on the long marble stone of the sepulchre. The paleness and sunken appearance of the dead body is wonderfully contrasted with the freshness, strength, and agility of the angel, who has started to the opening of the tomb to which he clings with one hand,

his country. He resuscitated the old academy of the Solleciti, which for a length of time had ceased to deserve its name. The correspondence of Avogaro with the learned of different countries is preserved in this library, and forms no less than 26 folio volumes.

The Onigo theatre, a good substantial building of stone both inside and out, harmonious in its construction, was ar

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ranged internally by one of the Galli Bibiena, who were famous in Europe during the last century for their taste and sull in decoration, and without whose aid it seemed hardly possible to celebrate a marriage, a victory, or a princely pro

cession.

The Pola palace, built by the Lombardi, notwithstanding the ruined state of the staircase, is worth notice for its noble front and vestibule.

An honest shopkeeper occupies the ancient Dolfini palace, remarkable for the richness of its front, though the architect Paznossini of Trevisa flourished when architecture was on the decline in Italy. In the arched roof of the principal saloon, now a warehouse, there is a Triumph of Bacchus, a fresco of a yellewish tint, with some fine foreshortening by Dorigny, a Parisian artist, one of Lebrun's pupils, who came to Italy when young and established a school; be lived at Trevisa, and died at Verona, at the advanced age of eighty-eight,

having for many years infested the Venetian school to the utmost of his power.

The gate of Saint Thomas, which dates from 1518, has been held worthy, from the beauty of its front and its solid construction, to be attributed to Pietro Lombardi, as also the statue of St. Paul which surmounts it.

The civil hospital of Trevisa is worth a visit, on account of two pictures in the director's new apartment: the Nativity, full of grace and nature, by Caprioli, an artist of the Modena school of the fifteenth century; and the Holy family, a masterpiece combining the graceful, natural, and expressive, by the elder Palma.

A fine brick bridge in a good state of preservation, notwithstanding its three centuries, is thrown across the Sile of which the poet Dante has sung,

Dove Sile a Cagnano s' accompagna,

and which river waters the beautiful country of Trevisa.

BOOK THE SIXTH.

CHAPTER I.

Venice—lla decline.-Venice on terra firma.

VENICE.

It would be difficult to describe the impression Venice produces on its first appearance; the multitude of domes, stes ples. palaces, columns, rising out of the bosom of the waters, looks at a distance like a city under water and produces a feeling of surprise and fear. One can scarcely imagine that to be the end of his journey and the destined place of his sojourn. Rotterdam, it is said. is not less extraordinary; it may be No, but I cannot imagine that Holland ever resembled Venice: if commerce was the soul of the two states, in the one it was simple, grave, unassuming, austere, and economical; in the other brilliant, pompous, dissolute, the friend of pleasure and the arts. Liberty in VeRace was the oppressive privilege of a

class of nobles; in Holland it extended to all classes. The paintings of Canaletto have so familiarised us with the harbour, the squares, and monuments of Venice, that when we penetrate into the city itself, it appears as if already known to us. Bonington, an English artist of a melancholy cast, has painted some new views of Venice, in which is most perfectly sketched its present state of desolation; these, compared with those of the Venetian painter, resemble the picture of a woman still beautiful, but worn down by age and misfortune. All those gondolas, hung with black, a species of floating sepulchres, look as if they were in mourning for the city; and the gondo lier, instead of singing the verses of Ariosto and Tasso, is neither more nor

These verses were, it is well known, only a Venetian translation; the gondoliers did not understand the text.

less than a poor boatman with but little poetry in his composition, whose only song is a harsh screaming ah eh at the turning of each calle, to avoid the danger of collision with other gondolas that are not immediately visible. This aspect of Venice has a something in it more gloomy than that of ordinary ruins: nature lives still in the latter, and sometimes adds to their beauty, and although they are the remains of by-gone centuries, we feel they will live for centuries to come, and probably witness not only the decay of their present master's power, but of succeeding empires too here these new ruins will rapidly perish, and this Palmyra of the sea, retaken by the avenging element from which it was conquered, will leave no trace behind. No time ought to be lost in visiting Venice, to contemplate the works of Titian, the frescos of Tintoretto aud Paolo Veronese, the statues, the palaces, the temples, the mausoleums of Sansovino and Palladio tottering on the very verge of destruction.

I visited Venice three different times, at intervals of about a year; and at each visit was forcibly struck with its rapid decline. A skilful observer who was living there then calculated that it might go on for sixty years more in this manner. I cannot avoid acknowledging that the description I gave of Venice on my first visit, to be accurate now, must be reduced in some of its features. The population formerly was one hundred and ninety thousand, at the end of the last century it was but one hundred and fifty, and is now not more than one hundred and three, out of which forty thousand are dependent on the charity of the rest. The number of gondolas, formerly six thousand five hundred, was in 1827 six hundred and seventy-eight. Comines pretended when he was there they amounted to thirty thousand (il s'en finiroit trente mille).

In the midst of its destruction Venice found a man full of zeal, taste, and knowledge, who has collected, and rendered imperishable in some degree the grandeur and magnificence of its monuments. In the work entitled Fabbriche più cospicue di Venezia, by Cicognara

The calle are the streets, the passages of Venice, of which there are two thousand one hundred and eight; the number of houses twenty seven thousand nine hundred and eighteen, and of bridges three hundred and six.

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and the members of the academy of fine arts of Venice, which is the first and only complete work on this fine city, is a faithful and precious inventory of all its masterpieces, some of which even since its publication are no longer in existence. Another excellent work, a collection of Venetian inscriptions by S. Cigogna, will also be the means of preserving recollections of what Venice was, and which the author has nobly dedicated to his country.

Some years ago a bold plan was proposed by a zealous Venetian in order to prevent the ruins of his native city; this was to join Venice to the continent, a project already formed by Marco Foscarini, an enlightened Doge of the last century, at the epoch which preceded the fall of the republic. A road of communication was proposed to be made on the narrowest point of the lagoon, the length of which does not exceed two miles and a half; the materials to make this road might be easily procured in the mud of the marshes and the gravel of the neighbouring rivers; it was suggested that it should be planted with trees, paved for foot passengers, and edged by two parallel canals, with drawbridges for the defence of the city: the expense would not exceed a million and a half of florins (156,000 pounds). Not cortesting the material advantages that Venice might immediately gain by its being joined to terra firma, the more particularly since the permission granted for a railroad between Milan and this city, I do not know, if it were carried into effect. whether such a change would not be to the imagination at least a different species of destruction, since it would take from the queen of the Adriatic her peculiar character and wondrous aspect.

CHAPTER II.

Piazza of Saint Mark.-Pigeons.-Coffee-bonses.

Pili.

The Piazza of Saint Mark has not its like in the world, the East and West are there brought into each other's presence: on one side the Ducal palace with the in

* See Memoria sul commercio di Venezia, e sul mezzi d'impedirne il decadimento, letta al veneto Ateneo dal socio ordinario Luigi Casarini, segretario dell' inclita congregazione centrale. Venezia. 1823, in-8°.

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