The chapel of the Rosary, which is entered just by the statue of Venier, was built in honour of his Lepanto victory. It was largely destroyed by fire in 1867, and is shown by an abrupt white-moustached domineering guide who claims to remember it before that time. Such wood carving as was saved ("Saved! Saved!" he raps out in tones like a pistol shot) is in the church proper, in the left aisle. Not to be rescued were Titian's great "Death of S. Peter, Martyr" a copy of which, presented by King Victor Emmanuel, is in the church, and a priceless altar-piece by Giovanni Bellini. The beautiful stone reliefs by Sansovino are in their original places, and remain to-day as they were mutilated by the flames. Their unharmed portions prove their exquisite workmanship, and fortunately photography has preserved for us their unimpaired form. An American gentleman who followed me into the church, after having considered for some time as to whether or not he (who had "seen ten thousand churches") would risk the necessary fifty centimes, expressed himself, before these Sansovino masterpieces, as glad he came. "These reliefs," he said to me, "seem to be of a high order of merit." The restoration of the chapel is being carried out thoroughly but slowly. Modern Sansovinos, in caps made from the daily paper, are stone-cutting all day long, and will be for many years to come.

Returning to the church proper, we find more Doges. An earlier Venier Doge, Antonio (1382-1400), is here. In the left aisle is another fine Ducal monument, that of Pasquale Malipiero (1457-1462), who succeeded Foscari on his deposal and was the first Doge to be present at the funeral of another, for Foscari died only ten days after his fall. Here also lie Doge Michele Steno (1400-1413), who succeeded Antonio Venier, and who as a young man is credited with the insult which may be said to have led to all Marino Faliero's troubles. For Steno having annoyed the Doge by falling in love with a maid of honour, Faliero forbade him the palace, and in retaliation Steno scribbled on the throne itself a scurrilous commentary on the Doge's wife. Faliero's inability to induce the judges to punish Steno sufficiently was the beginning of that rage against the State which led to his ruin. It was during Steno's reign that Carlo Zeno was so foolishly arrested and imprisoned, to the loss of the Republic of one of its finest patriots.



The next Ducal tomb is the imposing one of the illustrious Tommaso Mocenigo (1413-1423) who succeeded Steno and brought really great qualities to his office. Had his counsels been followed the whole history of Venice might have changed, for he was firm against the Republic's land campaigns, holding that she had territory enough and should concentrate on sea power: a sound and sagacious policy which found its principal opponent in Francesco Foscari, Mocenigo's successor, and its justification years later in the calamitous League of Cambray, to which I have referred elsewhere. Mocenigo was not only wise for Venice abroad, but at home too. A fine of a thousand ducats had been fixed as the punishment of anyone who, in those days of expenses connected with so many campaigns, chiefly against the Genoese, dared to mention the rebuilding or beautifying of the Ducal Palace. But Mocenigo was not to be deterred, and rising in his place with his thousand ducat penalty in his hand, he urged with such force upon the Council the necessity of rebuilding that he carried his point, and the lovely building much as we now know it was begun. That was in 1422. In 1423 Mocenigo died, his last words being a warning against the election of Foscari as his successor. But Foscari was elected, and the downfall of Venice dates from that moment.

The last Ducal monument is that of Niccolo Marcello (1473-1474) in whose reign the great Colleoni died. Pietro Mocenigo was his successor.

In pictures this great church is not very rich, but there is a Cima in the right transept, a "Coronation of the Virgin," which is sweet and mellow. The end wall of this transept is pierced by one of the gayest and pleasantest windows in the city, from a design of Bartolommeo Vivarini. It has passages of the intensest blue, thus making it a perfect thing for a poor congregation to delight in as well as a joy to the more instructed eye. In the sacristy is an Alvise Vivarini—"Christ bearing the Cross"—which has good colour, but carrying such a cross would be an impossibility. Finally let me mention the bronze reliefs of the life of S. Dominic in the Cappella of that saint in the right aisle. The one representing his death, though perhaps a little on the florid side, has some pretty and distinguished touches.

The building which adjoins the great church at right angles is the Scuola di S. Marco, for which Tintoretto painted his "Miracle of S. Mark," now in the Accademia, and thus made his reputation. It is to-day a hospital. The two jolly lions on the facade are by Tullio Lombardi, the reliefs being famous for the perspective of the steps, and here, too, are reliefs of S. Mark's miracles. S. Mark is above the door, with the brotherhood around him.

And now let us look again and again at the Colleoni, from every angle. But he is noblest from the extreme corner on the Fondamenta Dandolo.



CHAPTER XXV

S. ELENA AND THE LIDO

The Arsenal—The public gardens—Garibaldi's monument—The art exhibition—A water pageant—The prince and his escort—Venice versus Genoa—The story of Helena—S. Pietro in Castello—The theft of the brides—The Lido—A German paradise.

I do not know that there is any need to visit the Arsenal museum except perhaps for the pleasure of being in a Venetian show place where no one expects a tip. It has not much of interest to a foreigner, nor could I discover a catalogue of what it does possess. Written labels are fixed here and there, but they are not legible. The most popular exhibit is the model of the Bucintoro, the State galley in which the Doge was rowed to the Porto di Lido, past S. Nicholas of the Lido, to marry the Adriatic; but the actual armour worn by Henri IV was to me more thrilling.

Returning from the Arsenal to the Riva, we come soon, on the left, to the Ponte della Veneta Marina, a dazzlingly white bridge with dolphins carved upon it, and usually a loafer asleep on its broad balustrade; and here the path strikes inland up the wide and crowded Via Garibaldi.

The shore of the lagoon between the bridge and the public gardens, whither we are now bound, has some very picturesque buildings and shipyards, particularly a great block more in the manner of Genoa than Venice, with dormer windows and two great arches, in which myriad families seem to live. Here clothes are always drying and mudlarks at play.

Mr. Howells speaks in his Venetian Life of the Giardini Pubblici as being an inevitable resort in the sixties; but they must, I think, have lost their vogue. The Venetians who want to walk now do so with more comfort and entertainment in S. Mark's Square.

At the Via Garibaldi entrance is a monument to the fine old Liberator, who stands, wearing the famous cap and cloak, sword in hand, on the summit of a rock. Below him on one side is a lion, but a lion without wings, and on the other one of his watchful Italian soldiers. There is a rugged simplicity about it that is very pleasing. Among other statues in the gardens is one to perpetuate the memory of Querini, the Arctic explorer, with Esquimaux dogs at his side; Wagner also is here.

In the public gardens are the buildings in which international art exhibitions are held every other year. These exhibitions are not very remarkable, but it is extremely entertaining to be in Venice on the opening day, for all the State barges and private gondolas turn out in their richest colours, some with as many as eighteen rowers all bending to the oar at the same moment, and in a splendid procession they convey important gentlemen in tall hats to the scene of the ceremony, while overhead two great dirigible airships solemnly swim like distended whales.

In the afternoon of the 1914 ceremony the Principe Tommaso left the Arsenal in a motor-boat for some distant vessel. I chanced to be proceeding at the time at a leisurely pace from S. Niccolo di Lido to S. Pietro in Castello. Suddenly into the quietude of the lagoon broke the thunder of an advancing motor-boat proceeding at the maximum speed attainable by those terrific vessels. It passed us like a sea monster, and we had, as we clung to the sides of the rocking gondola, a momentary glimpse of the Principe behind an immense cigar. And then a more disturbing noise still, for out of the Arsenal, scattering foam, came four hydroplanes to act as a convoy and guard of honour, all soaring from their spray just before our eyes, and like enraged giant dragon-flies wheeling and swooping above the prince until we lost sight and sound of them. But long before we were at S. Pietro's they were furiously back again.

Beyond the gardens, and connected with them by a bridge, is the island of S. Elena, where the foundry was built in which were recast the campanile bells after the fall of 1902. This is a waste space of grass and a few trees, and here the children play, and here, recently, a football ground—or campo di giuoco—has been laid out, with a galvanized iron and pitch-pine shed called splendidly the Tribuna. One afternoon I watched a match there between those ancient enemies Venice and Genoa: ancient, that is, on the sea, as Chioggia can tell. Owing to the heat the match was not to begin until half-past four; but even then the sun blazed. No sooner was I on the ground than I found that some of the Genoese team were old friends, for in the morning I had seen them in the water and on the sand at the Lido, and wondered who so solid a band of brothers could be. Then they played a thousand pranks on each other, the prime butt being the dark young Hercules with a little gold charm on his mighty chest, which he wore then and was wearing now, who guarded the Genoese goal and whose name was Frederici.

It was soon apparent that Venice was outplayed in every department, but they tried gallantly. The Genoese, I imagine, had adopted the game much earlier; but an even more cogent reason for their superiority was apparent when I read through the names of both teams, for whereas the Venetians were strictly Italian, I found in the Genoese eleven a Macpherson, a Walsingham, and a Grant, who was captain. Whether football is destined to take a firm hold of the Venetians, I cannot say; but the players on that lovely afternoon enjoyed it, and the spectators enjoyed it, and if we were bored we could pick blue salvia.

This island of S. Elena has more interest to the English than meets the eye. It is not merely that it is green and grassy, but the daughter of one of our national heroes is thought to have been buried there: the Empress Helena, daughter of Old King Cole, who fortified Colchester, where she was born. To be born in Colchester and be buried on an island near Venice is not too common an experience; to discover the true cross and be canonized for it is rarer still. But this remarkable woman did even more, for she became the mother of Constantine the Great, who founded the city which old Dandolo so successfully looted for Venice and which ever stood before early Venice as an exemplar.



Helena, according to the hagiologists, was advanced in years before she knew Christ, but her zeal made up for the delay. She built churches near and far, assisted in services, showered wealth on good works, and crowned all by an expedition to the Holy Land in search of the true cross. Three crosses were found. In order to ascertain the veritable one, a sick lady of quality was touched by all; two were without efficacy, but the third instantly healed her. It is fortunate that the two spurious ones were tried first. Part of the true cross Helena left in the Holy Land for periodical veneration; another part she gave to her son the Emperor Constantine for Constantinople for a similar purpose. One of the nails she had mounted in Constantine's diadem and another she threw into the Adriatic to save the souls of mariners. Helena died in Rome in 326 or 328, and most of the records agree that she was buried there and translated to Rheims in 849; but the Venetians decline to have anything to do with so foolish a story. It is their belief that the saint, whom Paul Veronese painted so beautifully, seeing the cross in a vision, as visitors to our National Gallery know, was buried on their green island. This has not, however, led them to care for the church there with any solicitude, and it is now closed and deserted.

The adjoining island to S. Elena is that of Castello, on which stand the church of S. Pietro and its tottering campanile. This church was for centuries the cathedral of Venice, but it is now forlorn and dejected and few visitors seek it. Flowers sprout from the campanile, a beautiful white structure at a desperate angle. The church was once famous for its marriages, and every January, on the last day, the betrothed maidens, with their dowries in their hands and their hair down, assembled on the island with their lovers to celebrate the ceremony. On one occasion in the tenth century a band of pirates concealed themselves here, and descending on the happy couples, seized maidens, dowries, bridegrooms, clergy and all, and sailed away with them. Pursuit, however, was given and all were recaptured, and a festival was established which continued for two or three hundred years. It has now lapsed.

Venice is fortunate indeed in the possession of the Lido; for it serves a triple purpose. It saves her from the assaults of her husband the Adriatic when in savage moods; it provides her with a stretch of land on which to walk or ride and watch the seasons behave; and as a bathing station it has no rival. The Lido is not beautiful; but Venice seen from it is beautiful, and it has trees and picnic grounds, and its usefulness is not to be exaggerated. The steamers, which ply continually in summer and very often in winter, take only a quarter of an hour to make the voyage.

In the height of the bathing season the Lido becomes German territory, and the chromatic pages of Lustige Blaetter are justified. German is the only language on the sea or on the sands, at any rate at the more costly establishments. The long stretch of sand between these establishments, with its myriad tents and boxes, belong permanently to the Italians and is not to be invaded; but the public parts are Teutonic. Here from morning till evening paunchy men with shaven heads lie naked or almost naked in the sun, acquiring first a shrivelling of the cuticle which amounts to flaying, and then the tanning which is so triumphantly borne back to the Fatherland. The water concerns them but little: it is the sunburn on the sands that they value. With them are merry, plump German women, who wear slightly more clothes than the men, and like water better, and every time they enter it send up the horizon. The unaccompanied men comfort themselves with cameras, with which, all unashamed and with a selective system of the most rigid partiality, they secure reminders of the women they think attractive, a Kodak and a hat being practically their only wear.

Professional photographers are there too, and on a little platform a combined chiropodist and barber plies his antithetical trades in the full view of the company.

The Lido waters are admirably adapted for those who prefer to frolic rather than to swim. Ropes indicate the shallow area. There is then a stretch of sea, which is perhaps eight feet deep at the deepest, for about twenty yards, and then a sandy shoal arises where the depth is not more than three to four feet. Since only the swimmers can reach this vantage ground, one soon learns which they are. But, as I say, the sea takes a secondary place and is used chiefly as a corrective to the sun's rays when they have become too hot. "Come unto those yellow sands!" is the real cry of the Lido as heard in Berlin.



CHAPTER XXVI

ON FOOT. IV: FROM THE DOGANA TO S. SEBASTIANO

The Dogana—A scene of shipping—The Giudecca Canal—On the Zattere—The debt of Venice to Ruskin—An artists' bridge—The painters of Venice—Turner and Whistler—A removal—S. Trovaso—Browning on the Zattere—S. Sebastiano—The life of Paul Veronese—S. Maria de Carmine—A Tuscan relief—A crowded calle—The grief of the bereaved.

For a cool day, after too much idling in gondolas, there is a good walk, tempered by an occasional picture, from the Custom House to S. Sebastiano and back to S. Mark's. The first thing is to cross the Grand Canal, either by ferry or a steamer to the Salute, and then all is easy.

The Dogana, as seen from Venice and from the water, is as familiar a sight almost as S. Mark's or the Doges' Palace, with its white stone columns, and the two giants supporting the globe, and the beautiful thistledown figure holding out his cloak to catch the wind. Everyone who has been to Venice can recall this scene and the decisive way in which the Dogana thrusts into the lagoon like the prow of a ship of which the Salute's domes form the canvas. But to see Venice from the Dogana is a rarer experience.

No sooner does one round the point—the Punta della Salute—and come to the Giudecca canal than everything changes. Palaces disappear and shipping asserts itself. One has promise of the ocean. Here there is always a huddle of masts, both of barges moored close together, mostly called after either saints or Garibaldi, with crude pictures of their namesakes painted on the gunwale, and of bigger vessels and perhaps a few pleasure yachts; and as likely as not a big steamer is entering or leaving the harbour proper, which is at the far end of this Giudecca canal. And ever the water dances and there are hints of the great sea, of which the Grand Canal, on the other side of the Dogana, is ignorant.

The pavement of the Zaterre, though not so broad as the Riva, is still wide, and, like the Riva, is broken by the only hills which the Venetian walker knows—the bridges. The first building of interest to which we come is the house, now a hotel, opposite a little alfresco restaurant above the water, which bears a tablet stating that it was Ruskin's Venetian home. That was in his later days, when he was writing Fors Clavigera; earlier, while at work on The Stones of Venice, he had lived, as we have seen, near S. Zobenigo. Ruskin could be very rude to the Venetians: somewhere in Fors he refers to the "dirty population of Venice which is now neither fish nor flesh, neither noble nor fisherman," and he was furious alike with its tobacco and its steamboats; yet for all that, if ever a distinguished man deserved honour at the hands of a city Ruskin deserves it from Venice. The Stones of Venice is such a book of praise as no other city ever had. In it we see a man of genius with a passion for the best and most sincere work devoting every gift of appraisement, exposition, and eulogy, fortified by the most loving thoroughness and patience, to the glory of the city's architecture, character, and art.

The first church is that of the Gesuati, but it is uninteresting. Passing on, we come shortly to a very attractive house with an overhanging first floor, most delectable windows and a wistaria, beside a bridge; and looking up the canal, the Rio di S. Trovaso, we see one of the favourite subjects of artists in Venice—the huddled wooden sheds of a squero, or a boat-building yard; and as likely as not some workmen will be firing the bottom of an old gondola preliminary to painting her afresh. Venice can show you artists at work by the score, on every fine day, but there is no spot more certain in which to find one than this bridge. It was here that I once overheard two of these searchers for beauty comparing notes on the day's fortune. "The bore is," said one, "that everything is so good that one can never begin."

Of the myriad artists who have painted Venice, Turner is the most wonderful. Her influence on him cannot be stated in words: after his first residence in Venice, in the early eighteen-thirties, when he was nearing sixty, his whole genius became etherealized and a golden mist seems to have swum for ever before his eyes. For many years after that, whenever he took up his brush, his first thought was to record yet another Venetian memory. In the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery are many of the canvases to which this worshipper of light endeavoured with such persistence and zeal to transfer some of the actual glory of the universe: each one the arena of the unequal struggle between pigment and atmosphere. But if Turner failed, as every artist must fail, to recapture all, his failures are always magnificent.

There are, of course, also numbers of his Venetian water-colours.

Where Turner lived when in Venice, I have not been able to discover; but I feel sure it was not at Danieli's, where Bonington was lodging on his memorable sojourn there about 1825. Turner was too frugal for that. The Tate has a brilliant oil rendering of the Doges' Palace by Bonington. The many Venetian water-colours which he made with such rapidity and power are scattered. One at any rate is in the Louvre, a masterly drawing of the Colleoni statue.

To enumerate the great artists who have painted in Venice would fill a book. Not all have been too successful; while some have borne false witness. The dashing Ziem, for example, deprived Venice of her translucency; our own Henry Woods and Luke Fildes endow her daughters, who have always a touch of wistfulness, with too bold a beauty. In Whistler's lagoon etchings one finds the authentic note and in Clara Montalba's warm evanescent aquamarines; while for the colour of Venice I cannot remember anything finer, always after Turner, than, among the dead, certain J.D. Hardings I have seen, and, among the living, Mr. Sargent's amazing transcripts, which, I am told, are not to be obtained for love or money, but fall to the lot of such of his friends as wisely marry for them as wedding presents, or tumble out of his gondola and need consolation.

Bonington and Harding painted Venice as it is; Turner used Venice to serve his own wonderful and glorious ends. If you look at his "Sun of Venice" in the National Gallery, you will not recognize the fairy background of spires and domes—more like a city of the Arabian Nights than the Venice of fact even in the eighteen-thirties. You will notice too that the great wizard, to whom, in certain rapt moods, accuracy was nothing, could not even write the word Venezia correctly on the sail of a ship. Whistler too, in accordance with his dictum that to say to the artist that he must take nature as she is, is to say to the musician that he must sit on the piano, used Venice after his own caprice, as the study of his etchings will show. And yet the result of both these artists' endeavours—one all for colour and the other all for form—is by the synthesis of genius a Venice more Venetian than herself: Venice essentialized and spiritualized.

It was from this bridge that one Sunday morning I watched the very complete removal of a family from the Giudecca to another domicile in the city proper. The household effects were all piled up in the one boat, which father and elder son, a boy of about twelve, propelled. Mother and baby sat on a mattress, high up, while two ragged girls and another boy hopped about where they could and shouted with excitement. As soon as the Rio di S. Trovaso was entered the oarsmen gave up rowing and clawed their way along the wall. Moving has ever been a delight to English children, the idea of a change of house being eternally alluring, but what would they not give to make the exchange of homes like this?

We should walk beside this pleasant Rio, for a little way down on the left is the church of S. Trovaso, with a campo that still retains some of the grass which gave these open spaces their name, and a few graceful acacia trees. In this church is a curiously realistic "Adoration of the Magi" by Tintoretto: a moving scene of life in which a Spanish-looking peasant seems strangely out of place. An altar in a little chapel has a beautiful shallow relief which should not be overlooked. The high-altar picture—a "Temptation of S. Anthony" by Tintoretto—is now hidden by a golden shrine, while another of the show pieces, a saint on horseback, possibly by Jacobello del Fiore, in the chapel to the left of the choir, is sadly in need of cleaning, but obviously deserving of every care.

We now return to the Zattere, in a house on which, just beyond the Rio di S. Trovaso. Browning often stayed. In one of his letters he thus describes the view from his room: "Every morning at six, I see the sun rise; far more wonderfully, to my mind, than his famous setting, which everybody glorifies. My bedroom window commands a perfect view—the still grey lagune, the few seagulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the ruins are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins."

Still keeping beside the shipping, we proceed to the little Albergo of the Winds where the fondamenta ends. Here we turn to the right, cross a campo with a school beside it, and a hundred boys either playing on the stones or audible at their lessons within walls, and before us, on the other side of the canal, is the church of S. Sebastiano, where the superb Veronese painted and all that was mortal of him was laid to rest in 1588. Let us enter.

For Paolo Veronese at his best, in Venice, you must go to the Doges' Palace and the Accademia. Nearer home he is to be found in the Salon Carre in the Louvre, where his great banqueting scene hangs, and in our own National Gallery, notably in the beautiful S. Helena, more beautiful, to my mind, than anything of his in Venice, and not only more beautiful but more simple and sincere, and also in the magnificent "House of Darius".

Not much is known of the life of Paolo Caliari of Verona. The son of a stone-cutter, he was born in 1528, and thus was younger than Titian and Tintoretto, with whom he was eternally to rank, who were born respectively in 1477 or 1487 and 1518. At the age of twenty-seven, Veronese went to Venice, and there he remained, with brief absences, for the rest of his life, full of work and honour. His first success came when he competed for the decoration of the ceiling of S. Mark's library and won. In 1560 he visited Rome in the Ambassador's service; in 1565 he married a Veronese woman. He died in 1588, leaving two painter sons. Vasari, who preferred Tuscans, merely mentions him.

More than any other painter, except possibly Velasquez, Veronese strikes the observer as an aristocrat. Everything that he did had a certain aloofness and distinction. In drawing, no Venetian was his superior, not even Tintoretto; and his colour, peculiarly his own, is characterized by a certain aureous splendour, as though he mixed gold with all his paints. Tintoretto and he, though latterly, in Titian's very old age, rivals, were close friends.

Veronese is the glory of this church, for it possesses not only his ashes but some fine works. It is a pity that the light is not good. The choir altar-piece is his and his also are the pictures of the martyrdom of S. Sebastian, S. Mark, and S. Marcellinus. They are vigorous and typical, but tell their stories none too well. Veronese painted also the ceiling, the organ, and other altar-pieces, and a bust of him is here to show what manner of man he was.

Close to the door, on the left as you leave, is a little Titian which might be very fine after cleaning.

There are two ways of returning from S. Sebastiano to, say, the iron bridge of the Accademia. One is direct, the other indirect. Let us take the indirect one first.



Leaving the church, you cross the bridge opposite its door and turn to the left beside the canal. At the far corner you turn into the fondamenta of the Rio di S. Margherita, which is a beautiful canal with a solitary cypress that few artists who come to Venice can resist. Keeping on the right side of the Rio di S. Margherita we come quickly to the campo of the Carmine, where another church awaits us.

S. Maria del Carmine is not beautiful, and such pictures as it possesses are only dimly visible—a "Circumcision" by Tintoretto, a Cima which looks as though it might be rather good, and four Giorgionesque scenes by Schiavone. But it has, what is rare in Venice, a bronze bas-relief from Tuscany, probably by Verrocchio and possibly by Leonardo himself. It is just inside the side door, on the right as you enter, and might easily be overlooked. Over the dead Christ bend women in grief; a younger woman stands by the cross, in agony; and in a corner are kneeling, very smug, the two donors, Federigo da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza.

Across the road is a Scuola with ceilings by the dashing Tiepolo—very free and luminous, with a glow that brought to my mind certain little pastorals by Karel du Jardin, of all people!

It is now necessary to get to the Campo di S. Barnaba, where under an arch a constant stream of people will be seen, making for the iron bridge of the Accademia, and into this stream you will naturally be absorbed; and to find this campo you turn at once into the great campo of S. Margherita, leaving on your left an ancient building that is now a cinema and bearing to the right until you reach a canal. Cross the canal, turn to the left, and the Campo di S. Barnaba, with its archway under the houses, is before you.

The direct way from S. Sebastiano to this same point and the iron bridge is by the long Calle Avogadro and Calle Lunga running straight from the bridge before the church. There is no turning.

The Calle Lunga is the chief shopping centre of this neighbourhood—its Merceria—and all the needs of poorer Venetian life are supplied there. But what most interested me was the death-notices in the shop windows. Every day there was a new one; sometimes two. These intimations of mortality are printed in a copper-plate type on large sheets of paper, usually with black edges and often with a portrait. They begin with records as to death, disease, and age, and pass on to eulogise the departed. It is the encomiastic mood that makes them so charming. If they mourn a man, he was the most generous, most punctilious, and most respected of Venetian citizens. His word was inviolable; as a husband and father he was something a little more than perfection, and his sorrowing and desolate widow and his eight children, two of them the merest bambini, will have the greatest difficulty in dragging through the tedious hours that must intervene before they are reunited to him in the paradise which his presence is now adorning. If they mourn a woman, she was a miracle of fortitude and piety, and nothing can ever efface her memory and no one take her place. "Ohe!" if only she had been spared, but death comes to all.

The composition is florid and emotional, with frequent exclamations of grief, and the intimations of mortality are so thorough and convincing that one has a feeling that many a death-bed would be alleviated if the dying man could hear what was to be printed about him.

After reading several one comes to the conclusion that a single author is responsible for many; and it may be a Venetian profession to write them. A good profession too, for they carry much comfort on their wings. Every one stops to read them, and I saw no cynical smile on any face.



CHAPTER XXVII

CHURCHES HERE AND THERE

S. Maria dei Miracoli—An exquisite casket—S. Maria Formosa—Pictures of old Venice—The Misericordia—Tintoretto's house—The Madonna dell'Orto—Tintoretto's "Presentation"—"The Last Judgment"—A Bellini—Titian's "Tobias"—S. Giobbe—Il Moro—Venetian by-ways—A few minor beauties.

Among the smaller beauties of Venice—its cabinet architectural gems, so to speak—S. Maria dei Miracoli comes first. This little church, so small as to be almost a casket, is tucked away among old houses on a canal off the Rio di S. Marina, and it might be visited after SS. Giovanni e Paolo as a contrast to the vastness of that "Patheon de Venise," as the sacristan likes to call it. S. Maria dei Miracoli, so named from a picture of the Madonna over the altar which has performed many miracles, is a monument to the genius of the Lombardo family: Pietro and his sons having made it, in the fifteenth century, for the Amadi. To call the little church perfect is a natural impulse, although no doubt fault could be found with it: Ruskin, for example, finds some, but try as he will to be cross he cannot avoid conveying an impression of pleasure in it. For you and me, however, it is a joy unalloyed: a jewel of Byzantine Renaissance architecture, made more beautiful by gay and thoughtful detail. It is all of marble, white and coloured, with a massive wooden ceiling enriched and lightened by paint. Venice has nothing else at all like it. Fancy, in this city of aisles and columns and side chapels and wall tombs, a church with no interruptions or impediments whatever. The floor has its chairs (such poor cane-bottomed things too, just waiting for a rich patron to put in something good of rare wood, well carved and possibly a little gilded), and nothing else. The walls are unvexed. At the end is a flight of steps leading to the altar, and that is all, except that there is not an inch of the church which does not bear traces of a loving care. Every piece of the marble carving is worth study—the flowers and foliations, the birds and cupids and dolphins, and not least the saint with a book on the left ambone.

S. Maria Formosa, one of the churches mentioned in the beautiful legend of Bishop Magnus—to be built, you remember, where he saw a white cloud rest—which still has a blue door-curtain, is chiefly famous for a picture by a great Venetian painter who is too little represented in the city—Palma the elder. Palma loved beautiful, opulent women and rich colours, and even when he painted a saint, as he does here—S. Barbara (whose jawbone we saw in the S. Rocco treasury)—he could not much reduce his fine free fancy and therefore he made her more of a commanding queen than a Christian martyr. This church used to be visited every year by the Doge for a service in commemoration of the capture of the brides, of which we heard at S. Pietro in Castello. The campo, once a favourite centre for bull-fights and alfresco plays, has some fine palaces, notably those at No. 5250, the Malipiero, and No. 6125, the red Dona.

At the south of the campo is the Campiello Querini where we find the Palazzo Querini Stampalia, a seventeenth-century mansion, now the property of the city, which contains a library and a picture gallery. Among the older pictures which I recall are a Holy Family by Lorenzo di Credi in Room III and a Martyrdom of San Sebastian by Annibale Caracci in Room IV. A Judith boldly labelled Giorgione is not good. But although no very wonderful work of art is here, the house should be visited for its scenes of Venetian life, which bring the Venice of the past very vividly before one. Here you may see the famous struggles between the two factions of gondoliers, the Castellani and the Nicolotti, actually in progress on one of the bridges; the departure of the Bucintoro with the Doge on board to wed the Adriatic; the wedding ceremony off S. Niccolo; the marriage of a noble lady at the Salute; a bull-fight on the steps of the Rialto bridge; another in the courtyard of the Ducal Palace; a third in the Piazza of S. Mark in 1741; the game of pallone (now played in Venice no more) in the open space before the Gesuiti; fairs in the Piazzetta; church festivals and regattas. The paintings being contemporary, these records are of great value in ascertaining costumes, architecture, and so forth.

I speak elsewhere of the Palazzo Giovanelli as being an excellent destination to give one's gondolier when in doubt. After leaving it, with Giorgione's landscape still glowing in the memory, there are worse courses to take than to tell the poppe to row on up the Rio di Noale to the Misericordia, in which Tintoretto painted his "Paradiso". This great church, once the chief funeral church of Venice, is now a warehouse, lumber rooms, workshops. Beside it is the head-quarters of the pompes funebres, wherein a jovial fellow in blue linen was singing as I passed.

At the back of the Misericordia is an ancient abbey, now also secularized, with a very charming doorway surmounted by a pretty relief of cherubs. Farther north is the Sacco of the Misericordia opening into the lagoon. Here are stored the great rafts of timber that come down the rivers from the distant hill-country, and now and then you may see one of the huts in which the lumber-men live on the voyage.

From the Misericordia it is a short distance to the Fondamenta dei Mori, at No. 3399 of which is the Casa di Tintoretto, with a relief of the great painter's head upon it. Here he lived and died. The curious carved figures on this and the neighbouring house are thought to represent Morean merchants who once congregated here. Turning up the Campo dei Mori we come to the great church of the Madonna dell'Orto, where Tintoretto was buried. It should be visited in the late afternoon, because the principal reason for seeing it is Tintoretto's "Presentation," and this lovely picture hangs in a dark chapel which obtains no light until the sinking sun penetrates its window and falls on the canvas. To my mind it is one of the most beautiful pictures that Tintoretto painted—a picture in which all his strength has turned to sweetness. We have studied Titian's version in the Accademia, where it has a room practically to itself (see opposite page 36); Tintoretto's is hung badly and has suffered seriously from age and conditions. Titian's was painted in 1540; this afterwards, and the painter cheerfully accepted the standard set by the earlier work. Were I in the position of that imaginary millionaire whom I have seen in the mind's eye busy in the loving task of tenderly restoring Venice's most neglected masterpieces, it is this "Presentation" with which I should begin.



The Madonna dell'Orto is not a church much resorted to by visitors, as it lies far from the beaten track, but one can always find some one to open it, and as likely as not the sacristan will be seated by the rampino at the landing steps, awaiting custom.

The church was built in the fourteenth century as a shrine for a figure of the Madonna, which was dug up in a garden that spread hereabout and at once performed a number of miracles. On the facade is a noble slab of porphyry, and here is S. Christopher with his precious burden. The campanile has a round top and flowers sprout from the masonry. Within, the chief glory is Tintoretto. His tomb is in the chapel to the right of the chancel, where hang, on the left, his scene of "The Worship of the Golden Calf," and opposite it his "Last Judgment".

The "Last Judgment" is one of his Michael-Angelesque works and also one of his earliest, before he was strong enough or successful enough (often synonymous states) to be wholly himself. But it was a great effort, and the rushing cataract is a fine and terrifying idea. "The Worship of the Golden Calf" is a work interesting not only as a dramatic scriptural scene full of thoughtful detail, but as containing a portrait of the painter and his wife. Tintoretto is the most prominent of the calf's bearers; his Faustina is the woman in blue.

Two very different painters—the placid Cima and the serene Bellini—are to be seen here too, each happily represented. Cima has a sweet and gentle altar-piece depicting the Baptist and two saints, and Bellini's "Madonna and Child" is rich and warm and human. Even the aged and very rickety sacristan—too tottering perhaps for any reader of the book to have the chance of seeing—was moved by Bellini. "Bellissima!" he said again and again, taking snuff the while.

The neighbouring church of S. Marziale is a gay little place famous for a "Tobias and the Angel" by Titian. This is a cheerful work. Tobias is a typical and very real Venetian boy, and his dog, a white and brown mongrel, also peculiarly credible. The chancel interrupts an "Annunciation," by Tintoretto's son, the angel being on one side and the Virgin on the other.

And now for the most north-westerly point of the city that I have reached—the church of S. Giobbe, off the squalid Cannaregio which leads to Mestre and Treviso. This church, which has, I suppose, the poorest congregation of all, is dedicated to one of whom I had never before thought as a saint, although his merits are unmistakable—Job. Its special distinction is the beautiful chapel of the high altar designed by the Lombardi (who made S. Maria dei Miracoli) for Doge Cristoforo Moro to the glory of S. Bernardino of Siena. S. Bernardino is here and also S. Anthony of Padua and S. Lawrence. At each corner is an exquisite little figure holding a relief.

On the floor is the noble tombstone of the Doge himself (1462-1471) by Pietro Lombardi. Moro had a distinguished reign, which saw triumphs abroad and the introduction of printing into the city; but to the English he has yet another claim to distinction, and that is that most probably he was the Moro of Venice whom Shakespeare when writing Othello assumed to be a Moor.

The church also has a chapel with a Delia Robbia ceiling and sculpture by Antonio Rossellino. The best picture is by Paris Bordone, a mellow and rich group of saints.

This book has been so much occupied with the high-ways of Venice—and far too superficially, I fear—that the by-ways have escaped attention; and yet the by-ways are the best. The by-ways, however, are for each of us separately, whereas the high-ways are common property: let that—and conditions of space—be my excuse. The by-ways must be sought individually, either straying where one's feet will or on some such thorough plan as that laid down in Col. Douglas's most admirable book, Venice on Foot. Some of my own unaided discoveries I may mention just as examples, but there is no real need: as good a harvest is for every quiet eye.

There is the tiniest medieval cobbler's shop you ever saw under a staircase in a courtyard reached by the Sotto-portico Secondo Lucatello, not far from S. Zulian, with a medieval cobbler cobbling in it day and night. There is a relief of graceful boys on the Rio del Palazzo side of the Doges' Palace; there is a S. George and Dragon on a building on the Rio S. Salvatore just behind the Bank of Italy; there is a doorway at 3462 Rio di S. Margherita; there is the Campo S. Maria Mater Domini with a house on the north side into whose courtyard much ancient sculpture has been built. There is a yellow palace on the Rio di S. Marina whose reflection in the water is most beautiful. There is the overhanging street leading to the Ponte del Paradiso. There is the Campo of S. Giacomo dell'Orio, which is gained purely by accident, with its church in the midst and a vast trattoria close by, and beautiful vistas beneath this sottoportico and that. There are the two ancient chimneys seen from the lagoon on a house behind Danieli's. There is the lovely Gothic palace with a doorway and garden seen from the Ponte dell'Erbe—the Palazzo Van Axel. There is the red palace seen from the Fondamenta dell'Osmarin next the Ponte del Diavolo. There is in the little calle leading from the Campo Daniele Manin to the lovely piece of architecture known as the staircase dal Bovolo—a bovolo being a snail—from its convolutions. This staircase, which is a remnant of the Contarini palace and might be a distant relative of the tower of Pisa, is a shining reproach to the adjacent architecture, some of which is quite new. It is a miracle of delicacy and charm, and should certainly be sought for. And above all there is the dancing reflection of the rippling water in the sun on the under sides of bridges seen from the gondola; and of all the bridges that give one this effect of gentle restless radiancy none is better than the Ponte S. Polo.



CHAPTER XXVIII

GIORGIONE

The Palazzo Giovanelli—A lovely picture—A superb innovator—Pictures for houses—The Tempest—Byron's criticism—Giorgione and the experts—Vasari's estimate—Leonardo da Vinci—The Giorgionesque fire—A visit to Castel Franco—The besieging children—The Sacristan—A beautiful altar-piece—Pictures at Padua—Giorgiones still to be discovered.

It will happen now and then that you will be in your gondola, with the afternoon before you, and will not have made up your mind where to go. It is then that I would have you remember the Palazzo Giovanelli. "The Palazzo Giovanelli, Rio di Noale," say to your gondolier; because this palace is not only open to the public but it contains the most sensuously beautiful picture in Venice—Giorgione's "Tempest". Giorgione, as I have said, is the one transcendentally great Venetian painter whom it is impossible, for certain, to find in any public gallery or church in the city of his adoption. There is a romantic scene at the Seminario next the Salute, an altar-piece in S. Rocco, another altar-piece in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, in each of which he may have had a hand. But none of these is Giorgione essential. For the one true work of this wistful beauty-adoring master we must seek the Palazzo Giovanelli.

You can enter the palace either from the water, or on foot at the Salizzada Santa Fosca, No. 2292. A massive custodian greets you and points to a winding stair. This you ascend and are met by a typical Venetian man-servant. Of the palace itself, which has been recently modernized, I have nothing to say. There are both magnificent and pretty rooms in it, and a little boudoir has a quite charming floor, and furniture covered in ivory silk. But everything is in my mind subordinated to the Giorgione: so much so that I have difficulty in writing that word Giovanelli at all. The pen will trace only the letters of the painter's name: it is to me the Palazzo Giorgione.

The picture, which I reproduce on the opposite page, is on an easel just inside a door and you come upon it suddenly. Not that any one could ever be completely ready for it; but you pass from one room to the next, and there it is—all green and blue and glory. Remember that Giorgione was not only a Venetian painter but in some ways the most remarkable and powerful of them all; remember that his fellow-pupil Titian himself worshipped his genius and profited by it, and that he even influenced his master Bellini; and then remember that all the time you have been in Venice you have seen nothing that was unquestionably authentic and at the most only three pictures that might be his. It is as though Florence had but one Botticelli, or London but one Turner, or Madrid but one Velasquez. And then you turn the corner and find this!



The Venetian art that we have hitherto seen has been almost exclusively the handmaid of religion or the State. At the Ducal Palace we found the great painters exalting the Doges and the Republic; even the other picture in Venice which I associate with this for its pure beauty—Tintoretto's "Bacchus and Ariadne"—was probably an allegory of Venetian success. In the churches and at the Accademia we have seen the masters illustrating the Testaments Old and New. All their work has been for altars or church walls or large public places. We have seen nothing for a domestic wall but little mannered Longhis, without any imagination, or topographical Canalettos and Guardis. And then we turn a corner and are confronted by this!—not only a beautiful picture and a non-religious picture but a picture painted to hang on a wall.

That was one of Giorgione's innovations: to paint pictures for private gentlemen. Another, was to paint pictures of sheer loveliness with no concern either with Scripture or history; and this is one of his loveliest. It has all kinds of faults—and it is perfect. The drawing is not too good; the painting is not too good; that broken pillar is both commonplace and foolish; and yet the work is perfect because a perfect artist made it. It is beautiful and mysterious and a little sad, all at once, just as an evening landscape can be, and it is unmistakably the work of one who felt beauty so deeply that his joyousness left him and the melancholy that comes of the knowledge of transitoriness took its place. Hence there is only one word that can adequately describe it and that is Giorgionesque.

The picture is known variously as "The Tempest," for a thunderstorm is working up; as "The Soldier and the Gipsy," as "Adrastus and Hypsipyle," and as "Giorgione's Family". In the last case the soldier watching the woman would be the painter himself (who never married) and the woman the mother of his child. Whatever we call it, the picture remains the same: profoundly beautiful, profoundly melancholy. A sense of impending calamity informs it. A lady observing it remarked to me, "Each is thinking thoughts unknown to the other"; and they are thoughts of unhappy morrows.

This, the Giovanelli Giorgione, which in 1817 was in the Manfrini palace and was known as the "Famiglia di Giorgione," was the picture in all Venice—indeed the picture in all the world—which most delighted Byron. "To me," he wrote, "there are none like the Venetian—above all, Giorgione." Beppo has some stanzas on it. Thus:—

They've pretty faces yet, those same Venetians, Black eyes, arched brows, and sweet expressions still Such as of old were copied from the Grecians, In ancient arts by moderns mimicked ill; And like so many Venuses of Titian's (The best's at Florence—see it, if ye will), They look when leaning over the balcony, Or stepped from out a picture by Giorgione,

Whose tints are Truth and Beauty at their best; And when you to Manfrini's palace go, That picture (howsoever fine the rest) Is loveliest to my mind of all the show; It may perhaps be also to your zest And that's the cause I rhyme upon it so, 'Tis but a portrait of his Son and Wife, And self, but such a Woman! Love in life;

Love in full life and length, not love ideal, No, nor ideal beauty, that fine name, But something better still, so very real, That the sweet Model must have been the same; A thing that you would purchase, beg, or steal, Wer't not impossible, besides a shame; The face recalls some face, as 'twere with pain. You once have seen, but ne'er will see again;

One of those forms which flit by us, when we Are young, and fix our eyes on every face: And, oh! the Loveliness at times we see In momentary gliding, the soft grace, The Youth, the Bloom, the Beauty which agree, In many a nameless being we retrace Whose course and home we knew not nor shall know. Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below.

The Giovanelli picture is one of the paintings which all the critics agree to give to Giorgione, from Sir Sidney Colvin in the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the very latest monographer, Signor Lionello Venturi, whose work, Giorgione Giorgionismo, is a monument to the diversity of expert opinion. Giorgione, short as was his life, lived at any rate for thirty years and was known near and far as a great painter, and it is to be presumed that the work that he produced is still somewhere. But Signor Lionello Venturi reduces his output to the most meagre dimensions; the conclusion being that wherever his work may be, it is anywhere but in the pictures that bear his name. The result of this critic's heavy labours is to reduce the certain Giorgiones to thirteen, among which is the S. Rocco altar-piece. With great daring he goes on to say who painted all the others: Sebastian del Piombo this, Andrea Schiavone that, Romanino another, Titian another, and so forth. It may be so, but if one reads also the other experts—Sir Sidney Colvin, Morelli, Justi, the older Venturi, Mr. Berenson, Mr. Charles Ricketts, Mr. Herbert Cook—one is simply in a whirl. For all differ. Mr. Cook, for example, is lyrically rapturous about the two Padua panels, of which more anon, and their authenticity; Mr. Ricketts gives the Pitti "Concert" and the Caterina Cornaro to Titian without a tremor. Our own National Gallery "S. Liberate" is not mentioned by some at all; the Paris "Concert Champetre," in which most of the judges believe so absolutely, Signor Lionello Venturi gives to Piombo. The Giovanelli picture and the Castel Franco altar-piece alone remain above suspicion in every book.

Having visited the Giovanelli Palace, I found myself restless for this rare spirit, and therefore arranged a little diversion to Castel Franco, where he was born and where his great altar-piece is preserved.

But first let us look at Giorgione's career. Giorgio Barbarelli was born at Castel Franco in 1477 or 1478. The name by which we know him signifies the great Giorgio and was the reward of his personal charm and unusual genius. Very little is known of his life, Vasari being none too copious when it comes to the Venetians. What we do know, however, is that he was very popular, not only with other artists but with the fair, and in addition to being a great painter was an accomplished musician. His master was Giovanni Bellini, who in 1494, when we may assume that Giorgione, being sixteen, was beginning to paint, was approaching seventy.

Giorgione, says Vasari in an exultant passage, was "so enamoured of beauty in nature that he cared only to draw from life and to represent all that was fairest in the world around him". He had seen, says the same authority, "certain works from the hand of Leonardo which were painted with extraordinary softness, and thrown into powerful relief, as is said, by extreme darkness of the shadows, a manner which pleased him so much that he ever after continued to imitate it, and in oil painting approached very closely to the excellence of his model. A zealous admirer of the good in art, Giorgione always selected for representation the most beautiful objects that he could find, and these he treated in the most varied manner: he was endowed by nature with highly felicitous qualities, and gave to all that he painted, whether in oil or fresco, a degree of life, softness, and harmony (being more particularly successful in the shadows) which caused all the more eminent artists to confess that he was born to infuse spirit into the forms of painting, and they admitted that he copied the freshness of the living form more exactly than any other painter, not of Venice only, but of all other places."

Leonardo, who was born in 1452, was Giorgione's senior by a quarter of a century and one of the greatest names—if not quite the greatest name—in art when Giorgione was beginning to paint. A story says that they met when Leonardo was in Venice in 1500. One cannot exactly derive any of Giorgione's genius from Leonardo, but the fame of the great Lombardy painter was in the air, and we must remember that his master Verrocchio, after working in Venice on the Colleoni statue, had died there in 1488, and that Andrea da Solario, Leonardo's pupil and imitator, was long in Venice too. Leonardo and Giorgione share a profound interest in the dangerous and subtly alluring; but the difference is this, that we feel Leonardo to have been the master of his romantic emotions, while Giorgione suggests that for himself they could be too much.

It is not, however, influence upon Giorgione that is most interesting, but Giorgione's influence upon others. One of his great achievements was the invention of the genre picture. He was the first lyrical painter: the first to make a canvas represent a single mood, much as a sonnet does. He was the first to combine colour and pattern to no other end but sheer beauty. The picture had a subject, of course, but the subject no longer mattered. Il fuoco Giorgionesco—the Giorgionesque fire—was the phrase invented to describe the new wonder he brought into painting. A comparison of Venetian art before Giorgione and after shows instantly how this flame kindled. Not only did Giorgione give artists a liberty they had never enjoyed before, but he enriched their palettes. His colours burned and glowed. Much of the gorgeousness which we call Titianesque was born in the brain of Giorgione, Titian's fellow-worker, and (for Titian's birth date is uncertain: either 1477 or 1487) probably his senior. You may see the influence at work in our National Gallery: Nos. 41, 270, 35, and 635 by Titian would probably have been far different but for Giorgione. So stimulating was Giorgione's genius to Titian, who was his companion in Bellini's studio, that there are certain pictures which the critics divide impartially between the two, chief among them the "Concert" at the Pitti; while together they decorated the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Canal. It is assumed that Titian finished certain of Giorgione's works when he died in 1510. The plague which killed Giorgione killed also 20,000 other Venetians, and sixty-six years later, in another visitation of the scourge, Titian also died of it.

Castel Franco is five-and-twenty miles from Venice, but there are so few trains that it is practically a day's excursion there and back. I sat in the train with four commercial travellers and watched the water give way to maize, until chancing to look up for a wider view there were the blue mountains ahead of us, with clouds over them and here and there a patch of snow. Castel Franco is one of the last cities of the plain; Browning's Asolo is on the slope above it, only four or five miles away.

The station being reached at last—for even in Italy journeys end—I rejected the offers of two cabmen, one cabwoman, and one bus driver, and walked. There was no doubt as to the direction, with the campanile of the duomo as a beacon. For a quarter of a mile the road is straight and narrow; then it broadens into an open space and Castel Franco appears. It is a castle indeed. All the old town is within vast crumbling red walls built on a mound with a moat around them. Civic zeal has trimmed the mound into public "grounds," and the moat is lively with ornamental ducks; while a hundred yards farther rises the white statue of Castel Franco's greatest son, no other than Giorgione himself, a dashing cavalier-like gentleman with a brush instead of a rapier. If he were like this, one can believe the story of his early death—little more than thirty—which came about through excessive love of a lady, she having taken the plague and he continuing to visit her.

Having examined the statue I penetrated the ramparts to the little town, in the midst of which is the church. It was however locked, as a band of children hastened to tell me: intimating also that if anyone on earth knew how to effect an entrance they were the little devils in question. So I was led to a side door, the residence of a fireman, and we pulled a bell, and in an instant out came the fireman to extinguish whatever was burning; but on learning my business he instantly became transformed into the gentlest of sacristans, returned for his key, and led me, followed by the whole pack of children, by this time greatly augmented, to a door up some steps on the farther side of the church. The pack was for coming in too, but a few brief yet sufficient threats from the sacristan acted so thoroughly that not only did they melt away then but were not there when I came out—this being in Italy unique as a merciful disappearance. More than merciful, miraculous, leading one to believe that Giorgione's picture really has supernatural powers.

The picture is on a wall behind the high altar, curtained. The fireman-sacristan pulled away the curtain, handed me a pair of opera glasses and sat down to watch me, a task in which he was joined by another man and a boy who had been cleaning the church. There they sat, the three of them, all huddled together, saying nothing, but staring hard at me (as I could feel) with gimlet eyes; while a few feet distant I sat too, peering through the glasses at Giorgione's masterpiece, of which I give a reproduction on the opposite page.

It is very beautiful; it grows more beautiful; but it does not give me such pleasure as the Giovanelli pastoral. I doubt if Giorgione had the altar-piece temperament. He was not for churches; and indeed there were so many brushes for churches, that his need never have been called upon. He was wholly individual, wistful, pleasure-seeking and pleasure-missing, conscious of the brevity of life and the elusiveness of joy; of the earth earthy; a kind of Keats in colour, with, as one critic—I think Mr. Ricketts—has pointed out, something of Rossetti too. Left to himself he would have painted only such idylls as the Giovanelli picture.



Yet this altar-piece is very beautiful, and, as I say, it grows more beautiful as you look at it, even under such conditions as I endured, and even after much restoration. The lines and pattern are Giorgione's, howsoever the re-painter may have toiled. The two saints are so kind and reasonable (and never let it be forgotten that we may have, in our National Gallery, one of the studies for S. Liberale), and so simple and natural in their movements and position; the Madonna is at once so sweet and so little of a mother; the landscape on the right is so very Giorgionesque, with all the right ingredients—the sea, the glade, the lovers, and the glow. If anything disappoints it is the general colour scheme, and in a Giorgione for that to disappoint is amazing. Let us then blame the re-painter. The influence of Giovanni Bellini in the arrangement is undoubtable; but the painting was Giorgione's own and his the extra touch of humanity.

Another day I went as far afield as Padua, also with Giorgione in mind, for Baedeker, I noticed, gives one of his pictures there a star. Of Padua I want to write much, but here, at this moment, Giotto being forgotten, it is merely as a casket containing two (or more) Giorgiones that the city exists. From Venice it is distant half an hour by fast trains, or by way of Fusina, two hours. I went on the occasion of this Giorgione pilgrimage by fast train, and returned in the little tram to Fusina and so, across the lagoon, into Venice, with the sun behind me, and the red bricks of Venice flinging it back.

The picture gallery at Padua is crowded with pictures of saints and the Madonna, few of them very good. But that is of no moment, since it has also three isolated screens, upon each of which is inscribed the magic name. The three screens carry four pictures—two long and narrow, evidently panels from a cassone; the others quite small. The best is No. 50, one of the two long narrow panels which together purport to represent the story of Adonis and Erys but do not take the duty of historian very seriously. Both are lovely, with a mellow sunset lighting the scene. Here and there in the glorious landscape occurs a nymph, the naked flesh of whom burns with the reflected fire; here and there are lovers, and among the darkling trees beholders of the old romance. The picture remains in the vision much as rich autumnal prospects can.

The other screen is more popular because the lower picture on it yet again shows us Leda and her uncomfortable paramour—that favourite mythological legend. The little pictures are not equal to the larger ones, and No. 50 is by far the best, but all are beautiful, and all are exotics here. Do you suppose, however, that Signor Lionello Venturi will allow Giorgione to have painted a stroke to them? Not a bit of it. They come under the head of Giorgionismo. The little ones, according to him, are the work of Anonimo; the larger ones were painted by Romanino. But whether or not Giorgione painted any or all, the irrefutable fact remains that but for his genius and influence they would never have existed. He showed the way. The eyes of that beautiful sad pagan shine wistfully through.

According to Vasari, Giorgione, like his master Bellini, painted the Doge Leonardo Loredan, but the picture, where is it? And where are others mentioned by Vasari and Ridolfi? So fervid a lover of nature and his art must have painted much; yet there is but little left now. Can there be discoveries of Giorgiones still to be made? One wonders that it is possible for any of the glowing things from that hand to lie hidden: their colours should burn through any accumulation of rubbish, and now and then their pulses be heard.



CHAPTER XXIX AND LAST

ISLAND AFTERNOONS' ENTERTAINMENTS. II: S. LAZZARO AND CHIOGGIA

An Armenian monastery—The black beards—An attractive cicerone—The refectory—Byron's Armenian studies—A little museum—A pleasant library—Tireless enthusiasm—The garden—Old age—The two campanili—Armenian proverbs—Chioggia—An amphibious town—The repulsiveness of roads—The return voyage—Porto Secco—Malamocco—An evening scene—The end.

As one approaches the Lido from Venice one passes on the right two islands. The first is a grim enough colony, for thither are the male lunatics of Venice deported; but the second, with a graceful eastern campanile or minaret, a cool garden and warm red buildings, is alluring and serene, being no other than the island of S. Lazzaro, on which is situated the monastery of the Armenian Mechitarists, a little company of scholarly monks who collect old MSS, translate, edit and print their learned lucubrations, and instruct the young in religion and theology. Furthermore, the island is famous in our literature for having afforded Lord Byron a refuge, when, after too deep a draught of worldly beguilements, he decided to become a serious recluse, and for a brief while buried himself here, studied Armenian, and made a few translations: enough at any rate to provide himself with a cloistral interlude on which he might ever after reflect with pride and the wistful backward look of a born scholiast to whom the fates had been unkind.

According to a little history of the island which one of the brothers has written, S. Lazzaro was once a leper settlement. Then it fell into disuse, and in 1717 an Armenian monk of substance, one Mekhitar of Sebaste, was permitted to purchase it and here surround himself with companions. Since then the life of the little community has been easy and tranquil.

The extremely welcome visitor is received at the island stairs by a porter in uniform and led by him along the sunny cloisters and their very green garden to a waiting-room hung thickly with modern paintings: indifferent Madonnas and views of the city and the lagoon. By and by in comes a black-bearded father, in a cassock. All the Mechitarists, it seems, have black beards and cassocks and wide-brimmed beavers; and the young seminarists, whom one meets now and then in little bunches in Venice, are broad-brimmed, black-coated, and give promise of being hairy too. The father, who is genial and smiling, asks if we understand French, and deploring the difficulty of the English language, which has so many ways of pronouncing a single termination, whereas the Armenian never exceeds one, leads the way.

The first thing to admire is the garden once more, with its verdant cedars of Lebanon and a Judas-tree bent beneath its blood. On a seat in the midst another bearded father beneath a wide hat is reading a proof. And through the leaves the sunlight is splashing on the cloisters, pillars, and white walls.



The refectory is a long and rather sombre room. Here, says the little guide-book to the island, prepared by one of the fathers who had overcome most of the difficulties of our tongue, "before sitting down to dine grace is said in common; the president recites some prayer, two of the scholars recite a psalm, the Lord's prayer is repeated and the meal is despatched in silence. In the meantime one of the novices appears in the pulpit and reads first a lesson from the Bible, and then another from some other book. The meal finished, the president rings a bell, the reader retires to dine, the Community rises, they give thanks and retire to the garden."

Next upstairs. We are taken first to the room which was Byron's, where the visitors' book is kept. I looked from the window to see upon what prospect those sated eyes could fall, and found that immediately opposite is now the huge Excelsior Hotel of the Lido. In Byron's day the Lido was a waste, for bathing had hardly been invented. The reverence in which the name and memory of his lordship are still held suggests that he took in the simple brothers very thoroughly. Not only have they his portrait and the very table at which he sat, but his pens, inkstand, and knife. His own letters on his refuge are interesting. Writing to Moore in 1816 he says: "By way of divertisement, I am studying daily, at an Armenian monastery, the Armenian language. I found that my mind wanted something craggy to break upon; and this—as the most difficult thing I could discover here for an amusement—I have chosen, to torture me into attention. It is a rich language, however, and would amply repay any one the trouble of learning it. I try, and shall go on; but I answer for nothing, least of all for my intentions or my success." He made a few metrical translations into Armenian, but his principal task was to help with an English and Armenian grammar, for which, when it was ready, he wrote a preface. Byron usually came to the monastery only for the day, but there was a bedroom for him which he occasionally occupied. The superior, he says, had a "beard like a meteor." A brother who was there at the time and survived till the seventies told a visitor that his "Lordship was as handsome as a saint."

In the lobby adjoining Byron's room are cases of autographs and photographs of distinguished visitors, such as Mr. Howells, Longfellow, Ruskin, Gladstone, King Edward VII when Prince of Wales, and so forth. Also a holograph sonnet on the monastery by Bryant. Elsewhere are various curiosities—dolls dressed in national costumes, medals, Egyptian relics, and so forth. In one case is some manna which actually fell from the skies in Armenia during a famine in 1833.

The chief room of the library contains not only its priceless MSS., but a famous mummy which the experts put at anything from 2200 to 3500 years old. Another precious possession is a Buddhist ritual on papyrus, which an Armenian wandering in Madras discovered and secured. The earliest manuscript dates from the twelfth century. In a central case are illuminated books and some beautiful bindings; and I must put on record that if ever there was a cicerone who displayed no weariness and disdained merely mechanical interest in exhibiting for the thousandth time his treasures, it is Father Vardan Hatzouni. But the room is so pleasant that, were it not that one enjoys such enthusiasm and likes to stimulate it by questions, it would be good merely to be in it without too curiously examining its possessions.

Downstairs is a rather frigid little church, where an embroidered cloth is shown, presented by Queen Margherita. The S. Lazzaro Armenians, I may say, seem always to have attracted gifts, one of their great benefactors being Napoleon III. They are so simple and earnest and unobtrusive—and, I am sure, grateful—that perhaps it is natural to feel generous towards them.

Finally we were shown to the printing-room, on our way to which, along the cloisters from the church, we passed through a group of elderly monks, cheerfully smoking and gossiping, who rose and made the most courtly salutation. Here we saw the printing-presses, some of English make, and then the books that these presses turn out. Two of these I bought—the little pamphlet from which I have already quoted and a collection of Armenian proverbs translated into English.

The garden is spreading and very inviting, and no sooner were we outside the door than Father Hatzouni returned to some horticultural pursuit. The walks are long and shady and the lagoon is lovely from every point; and Venice is at once within a few minutes and as remote as a star.

In the garden is an enclosure for cows and poultry, and the little burial-ground where the good Mechitarists are laid to rest when their placid life is done. Among them is the famous poet of the community, the Reverend Father Gonidas Pakraduni, who translated into Armenian both the Iliad and Paradise Lost, as well as writing epics of his own. The Paradise Lost is dedicated to Queen Victoria. Some of the brothers have lived to a very great age, and Mr. Howells in his delightful account of a visit to this island tells of one, George Karabagiak, who survived until he was 108 and died in September, 1863. Life, it seems, can be too long; for having an illness in the preceding August, from which he recovered, the centenarian remarked sadly to one of his friends, "I fear that God has abandoned me and I shall live." Being asked how he was, when his end was really imminent, he replied "Well," and died.

As we came away we saw over the wall of the playground the heads of a few black-haired boys, embryo priests; but they wore an air of gravity beyond their years. The future perhaps bears on them not lightly. They were not romping or shouting, nor were any in the water; and just below, at the edge of the sea, well within view and stone range, I noticed an empty bottle on its end, glistening in the sun. Think of so alluring a target disregarded and unbroken by an English school!

The returning gondola passes under the walls of the male madhouse. Just before reaching this melancholy island there is a spot at which it is possible still to realize what Venice was like when S. Mark's campanile fell, for one has the S. Giorgio campanile and this other so completely in line that S. Georgio's alone is visible.

Some of the Armenian proverbs are very shrewd and all have a flavour of their own. Here are a few:—

"What can the rose do in the sea, and the violet before the fire?"

"The mother who has a daughter always has a hand in her purse."

"Every one places wood under his own pot."

"The day can dawn without the cock's crowing."

"If you cannot become rich, become the neighbour of a rich man."

"Our dog is so good that the fox has pupped in our poultry house."

"One day the ass began to bray. They said to him: 'What a beautiful voice!' Since then he always brays."

"Whether I eat or not I shall have the fever, so better eat and have the fever."

"The sermon of a poor priest is not heard."

"When he rides a horse, he forgets God; when he comes down from the horse, he forgets the horse."

"Dine with thy friend, but do no business with him."

"To a bald head a golden comb."

"Choose your consort with the eyes of an old man, and choose your horse with the eyes of a young man."

"A good girl is worth more than seven boys."

"When you are in town, if you observe that people wear the hat on one side, wear yours likewise."

"The fox's last hole is the furrier's shop."

"The Kurd asked the barber: 'Is my hair white or black?' The other answered him: 'I will put it before you, and you will see'."

"He who mounts an ass, has one shame; he who falls from it, has two."

"Be learned, but be taken for a fool."

Of a grumbler: "Every one's grain grows straight; mine grows crooked."

Of an impatient man: "He feeds the hen with one hand and with the other he looks for her eggs."

I have not printed these exactly as they appear in the little pamphlet, because one has only to turn one page to realize that what the S. Lazzaro press most needs is a proof-reader.

I said at the beginning of this book that the perfect way to approach Venice for the first time is from Chioggia. But that is not too easy. What, however, is quite easy is to visit Chioggia from Venice and then, returning, catch some of the beauty—without, however, all the surprise and wonder—of that approach.

Steamers leave the Riva, opposite Danieli's, every two hours. They take their easy way up the lagoon towards the Lido for a little while, and then turn off to the right, always keeping in the enclosed channel, for eighteen miles. I took the two o'clock boat on a hot day and am not ashamed to confess that upon the outward voyage I converted it (as indeed did almost everybody else) into a dormitory. But Chioggia awakened me, and upon the voyage back I missed, I think, nothing.

Choggia is amphibious. Parallel with its broad main street, with an arcade and cafes under awnings on one side, and in the roadway such weird and unfamiliar objects as vehicles drawn by horses, and even motor-cars noisy and fussy, is a long canal packed with orange-sailed fishing boats and crossed by many little bridges and one superb broad white one. All the men fish; all the women and children sit in the little side streets, making lace, knitting, and stringing beads. Beside this canal the dirt is abnormal, but it carries with it the usual alleviation of extreme picturesqueness, so that Chioggia is always artist-ridden.

The steamer gives you an hour in which to drift about in the sunshine and meditate upon the inferiority of any material other than water for the macadamizing of roads. There are sights too: Carpaccio's very last picture, painted in 1520, in S. Domenico; a Corso Vittorio Emmanuele; a cathedral; a Giardino Pubblico; and an attractive stone parapet with a famous Madonna on it revered by fishermen and sailors. The town is historically important, for was not the decisive battle of Chioggia fought here in 1379 between the Venetians and their ancient enemies the Genoese?

But I cannot pretend that Chioggia is to my taste. To come to it on the journey to Venice, knowing what is in store, might put one in a mood to forgive its earthy situation and earthy ways; but when, all in love with water, one visits it from Venice, one resents the sound and sight of traffic, the absence of gondolas, and the presence of heat unalleviated.

At five o'clock, punctually to the minute, the steamer leaves the quay and breaks the stillness of the placid lagoon. A few fishing boats are dotted about, one of them with sails of yellow and blue, as lovely as a Chinese rug; others the deep red that Clara Montalba has reproduced so charmingly; and a few with crosses or other religious symbols. The boat quickly passes the mouth of the Chioggia harbour, the third spot at which the long thread of land which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic is pierced, and then makes for Palestrina, surely the narrowest town on earth, with a narrower walled cemetery just outside, old boats decaying on the shore, and the skin of naked boys who frolic at the water's edge glowing in the declining sun. Never were such sun-traps as these strips of towns along this island bank, only a few inches above sea level and swept by every wind that blows.

Hugging the coast, which is fringed with tamarisk and an occasional shumac, we come next to Porto Secco, another tiny settlement among vegetable gardens. Its gay church, yellow washed, with a green door and three saints on the roof, we can see inverted in the water, so still is it, until our gentle wash blurs all. Porto Secco's front is all pinks and yellows, reds, ochres, and white; and the sun is now so low that the steamer's shadow creeps along these facades, keeping step with the boat. More market gardens, and then the next mouth of the harbour, (known as Malamocco, although Malamocco town is still distant), with a coastguard station, a fort, acres of coal and other signs of militancy on the farther side. It is here that the Lido proper begins and the island broadens out into meadows.

At the fort pier we are kept waiting for ten minutes while a live duck submits to be weighed for fiscal purposes, and the delay gives an old man with razor-fish a chance to sell several pennyworths. By this time the sun is very near the horizon, setting in a roseate sky over a lagoon of jade. There is not a ripple. The tide is very low. Sea birds fleck with white the vast fields of mud. The peacefulness of it all under such unearthly beauty is almost disquieting.

Next comes Malamocco itself, of which not much is seen but a little campo—almost an English village green—by the pier, and children playing on it. Yet three thousand people live here, chiefly growers of melons, tomatoes, and all the picturesque vegetables which are heaped up on the bank of the Grand Canal in the Rialto market and are carried to Venice in boats day after day for ever.

Malamocco was a seat of ducal government when Venice was only a village, and not until the seventh century did the honours pass to Venice: hence a certain alleged sense of superiority on the part of the Malamoccans, although not only has the original Malamocco but the island on which it was built disappeared beneath the tide. Popilia too, a city once also of some importance, is now the almost deserted island of Poveglia which we pass just after leaving Malamocco, as we steam along that splendid wide high-way direct to Venice—between the mud-flats and the sea-mews and those countless groups of piles marking the channel, which always resemble bunches of giant asparagus and sometimes seem to be little companies of drowning people who have sworn to die together.



Here we overtake boats on the way to the Rialto market, some hastening with oars, others allowing their yellow sails to do the work, heaped high with vegetables and fruit. Just off the mud the sardine catchers are at work, waist high in the water.

The sun has now gone, the sky is burning brighter and brighter, and Venice is to be seen: either between her islands or peeping over them. S. Spirito, now a powder magazine, we pass, and S. Clemente, with its barrack-like red buildings, once a convent and now a refuge for poor mad women, and then La Grazia, where the consumptives are sent, and so we enter the narrow way between the Giudecca and S. Giorgio Maggiore, on the other side of which Venice awaits us in all her twilight loveliness. And disembarking we are glad to be at home again. For even an afternoon's absence is like an act of treachery.

And here, re-entering Venice in the way in which, in the first chapter, I advised all travellers to get their first sight of her, I come to an end, only too conscious of how ridiculous is the attempt to write a single book on this city. Where many books could not exhaust the theme, what chance has only one? At most it can say and say again (like "all of the singing") how it was good!

Venice needs a whole library to describe her: a book on her churches and a book on her palaces; a book on her painters and a book on her sculptors; a book on her old families and a book on her new; a book on her builders and a book on her bridges; a book—but why go on? The fact is self-evident.

Yet there is something that a single book can do: it can testify to delight received and endeavour to kindle an enthusiasm in others; and that I may perhaps have done.



INDEX

Accademia, the, 98, 168.

Adriatic espousals, 27, 54, 161, 263.

Alberghetti, 75.

Albrizzi, Countess, and Byron, 132.

Alexander III., Pope, 18, 53, 54.

Americans, 65, 259.

Amleto, performance of, 163.

Animals, 250.

Architects, Venetian, 93.

Armenian monastery, 299.

Armenian proverbs, 304.

Arsenal, the, 166, 263.

Artists, modern, 14, 272, 276, 306.

Austrian rule in Venice, 12, 13, 106-107, 162.

Austrian tourists, 13, 32.

Barbarigo, Cardinal Gregorio, 125, 147.

Barbarigo, Pietro, Patriarch of Venice, 97.

Barbaro, Marc Antonio, 147.

Basaiti, pictures by, 96, 154, 169, 172, 190.

Bathing, 268.

Bead-workers, 202.

Beauharnais, Eugene, Prince of Venice, 12.

Beerbohm, Max, 104.

Bellini, Gentile, pictures by, 10, 51, 257. his "Holy Cross" pictures, 179-180. his S. Lorenzo Giustinian, 180. his tomb, 256.

Bellini, Giovanni, pictures by, 50, 51, 63, 118, 125, 154, 169, 172, 192, 193, 203, 208, 215, 219, 224, 249, 259, 283. his "Agony," 169. his "Loredano," 169. his "Peter Martyr," 169. his career, 190. and the Venetian School, 193. his last picture, 224. his tomb, 256.

Bellotto, Bernardo, see Canaletto.

Benedict, S., his life in panels, 200.

Benzoni, Countess, and Byron, 138, 139.

Beppo, Byron's, 134, 290.

Berri, Duchesse de, in Venice, 122.

Bissolo, picture by, 173.

Boccaccini, Boccaccio, picture by, 190.

Bon, Bartolommeo, 73, 232.

Bon, Giovanni, 73.

Bon, Pacifico, his tomb, 251.

Bonconsiglio, picture by, 170.

Boni, Giacomo, 86.

Bonington in Venice, 272. picture by, 273.

Book-shops, 229.

Bordone, Paris, his "Fisherman and Doge," 177. picture by, 284.

Bovolo staircase, 285.

Bowls, 226.

Bragadino, his career, 257. his tomb, 257.

Brangwyn, Frank, picture by, 114.

Bridge of Boats, the, 203.

Bridge of Sighs, see Doges' Palace.

Bronson, Mrs. Arthur, on Browning, 107, 140.

Browning, Robert, in Venice, 98, 99, 100. his funeral service, 102. his love of Venice, 103. and the Lido, 140. and the Colleoni statue, 256. on Venice, 275.

Browning, and the Zattere, 274.

Browning, Mrs., on Venice, 100.

Brule, Albert de, his carvings, 200, 201.

Bruno, Giordano, in Venice, 143.

Bucintoro, the, 263. yacht club, 149.

Buono of Malamocco, 8.

Burano, the journey to, 157. its charm and dirt, 158. the Scuola Merletti, 158. on Venice, 63.

Byron, in Venice, 112, 128, 129. his Beppo, 134. on gondolas, 134. his Venetian life, 137. and the Lido, 137. his Marino Faliero, 138. his Two Foscari, 138. Shelley visits, 139. his Julian and Maddalo, 139. on Giorgione's "Tempest," 290. and S. Lazzaro, 299.

Byways of Venice, the, 284.

Cabots, the, 77.

Cafes, 34, 38.

Calendario, 59.

Calli, narrow, 101.

Campanile of S. Mark, the, 43. lift, 43. golden angel, 43. bells, 44, 265. view from, 44.

Campaniles, 42, 43, 98, 165, 189, 197, 283.

Campo Daniele Manin, 285.

Campo Morosoni, 165.

Campo S. Bartolommeo, 221.

Campo S. Giacomo dell'Orio, 285.

Campo S. Margharita, 196.

Campo S. Maria Formosa, 280.

Campo S. Maria Mater Domini, 285.

Campo Santo, 152.

Campos, their characteristics, 221.

Canal, the Grand, 91-150.

Canal, di S. Marco, 195.

Canals, filled in, 226.

Canaletto, his career, 188. pictures by, 5, 68, 118, 187, 207.

Canova, 77. his "St. George," 68. works by, 118, 252. his early studies, 127. his career, 248. his tomb, 248.

Caracci, picture by, 281.

Caravaggio, picture by, 190.

Carlo, A., his guide to Venice, 4, 134.

Carmagnola, 64.

Carpaccio, pictures by, 62, 73, 113, 117, 146, 172. his "Santo Croce" picture, 180. his S. Ursula pictures, 182. his career, 184. Ruskin on, 184. his pictures, at S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, 210. his last picture, 306.

Casanova, Jacques, in Venice, 75, 162.

Castel Franco, 294.

Castello, island of, 267.

Cat, the Frari, 250.

Catena, pictures by, 169, 190.

Childe Harold, Venice in, 136.

Children, Venetian, 26, 39, 120, 227, 245, 295.

Chimneys, old, 96, 97, 285.

Chioggia, 306.

Churches, origin of some, 28. Venice approached from, 1, 307. the most comfortable, 165, 245.

Churches: SS. Apostoli, 225. S. Bartolommeo, 221. S. Donato (Murano), 155. S. Eustachio, 115. S. Fosca (Torcello), 160. S. Francesco della Vigna, 214. its campanile, 42. S. Geremia, 119. Gesuati, 271. S. Giacomo di Rialto, 227. S. Giobbe, 284. S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, 180, 210. S. Giorgio Maggiore, its campanile, 42, 189. its pictures, 168. its panels, 200. S. Giovanni Crisostomo, 224. S. Giovanni Elemosinario, 229. S. Giovanni in Bragora, 209. S. Giovanni e Paolo, 254. S. Giuliano, 219. S. Gregorio, abbey of, 96. Madonna dell'Orto, 282. S. Marcuola, 121. S. Margiala, 284. S. Maria della Carita, 98. S. Maria del Carmine, 277. S. Maria Formosa, 280. S. Maria del Giglio, 147, 164. S. Maria dei Miracoli, 279. S. Maria della Salute, 95. Misericordia, 281. S. Moise, 162. S. Pietro in Castello, campanile, 43. S. Pietro Martire (Murano), 154. Redentore, 203. S. Rocco, 231, 244. S. Salvatore, 49. Scalzi, 119. S. Sebastiano, 275. S. Stefano, 165. S. Theodore, 9. S. Trovaso, 274. S. Vio, 97. S. Vitale, 146. S. Zaccaria, 207. S. Zobenigo, 164. S. Zulian, 285.

Cigharillo, Gianbettino, his "Death of Rachel," 187.

Cima, pictures by, 125, 172, 190, 209, 261, 277, 283.

Clement XIII, Pope, 103. his birthplace, 123.

Clemente, S., island of, 309. Shelley at, 141.

Cloisters, 165.

Cobbler's shop, a, 285.

Colleoni, Bartolommeo, his career, 255. his statue, 21, 151, 255, 262, 273.

Concert barges, the, 195.

Constantinople, the expedition to, 56.

Contarini, Pietro, 124.

Conti, Niccolo, 75.

Cooper, Fenimore, in Venice, 127.

Corner, Catherine, Queen of Cyprus, 76, 114, 147, 180, 220.

Correr, Teodoro, 118.

Coryat, Thomas, on the Pietra del Bando, 15. on the Acre columns, 16. on absence of horses, 21. on bronze wells, 75. on Loggetta, 86. on palace balconies, 148. on prison, 207. on Merceria giants, 219. on Bragadino monument, 257.

Council of Ten, the, 50.

Credi, di, picture by, 281.

Custodians, 52, 60, 85.

Cyprus, the acquirement of, 147.

Cyprus, Queen of, see Corner, Catherine.

Danieli's Hotel, 104, 207, 272.

D'Annunzio, his Il Fuoco, 122.

Dante, 77.

Desdemona, the house of, 148.

Dickens, Charles, on Venice, 5.

Dogana, the, 94, 270.

Doge and Fisherman, the story of, 177.

Doges, the, 46. incorrigibly municipal, 46.

Doges: Barbarigo, Agostino, 96,147. Barbarigo, Marco, 147. Contarini, Alvise, his tomb, 216. Contarini, Francesco, his tomb, 216. Corner, Marco, his tomb, 258. Dandolo, Andrea, 28, 58, 77, 80. Dandolo, Enrico, 21, 36, 53, 54, 166. Donato, Francesco, 49. Faliero, Marino, 58, 225. Foscari, Francesco, 73. his tomb, 251. his career, 252. Grimani, 47. Gritti, Andrea, 49, 62, 81 his tomb, 216. Giustinian, Marcantonio, 166. Giustinian, Partecipazio, 60. Lando, Pietro, 50. Loredano, Leonardo, 50. painted by Bellini, 169. his tomb, 258. painted by Giorgione, 298. Loredano, Pietro, 50, 61. Malipiero, Pasquale, his tomb, 260. Manin, Lodovico, 11, 61. Marcello, Niccolo, his tomb, 261. Michiel, Domenico, 156. Michiel, Vitale, 53, 104. Mocenigo, Alvise, 49, 243. his tomb, 256. Mocenigo, Giovanni, his tomb, 257. Mocenigo, Pietro, his tomb, 257. Mocenigo, Tommaso, 67. his career, 260. his tomb, 260. Moro, Cristoforo, the original of Othello, 284. his tomb, 284. Morosini, Francesco, his career, 165. his death, 166. his tomb, 165. Morosini, Michele, his tomb, 258. Oberelio, Antenorio, 59. Oberelio, Beato, 59. Partecipazio, Angelo, 59. Partecipazio, Giovanni, 60. Partecipazio, Giustiniano, 7. Pesaro, Giovanni, his tomb, 250. Ponte, Niccolo da, 49. Priuli, Girolamo, 60. his tomb, 220. Priuli, Lorenzo, his tomb, 220. Steno, Michele, his tomb, 260. Tiepolo, Jacopo, his tomb, 256. Tiepolo, Lorenzo, his tomb, 256. Trevisan, Marc Antonio, 50. his tomb, 216. Tron, Niccolo, his career, 252. his tomb, 252. Valier, Bertucci, his tomb, 257. Valier, Silvestro, his tomb, 258. Vendramin, Andrea, his tomb, 258. Venier, Antonio, his tomb, 259. Venier, Francesco, 75. his tomb, 220. Venier, Sebastiano, 49, 51. his career, 158. his tomb, 258. Ziani, Sebastiano, 53.

Doges' Palace, the, 15, 16, 46. Scala d'Oro, 47. Sala delle Quattro Porte, 47, 50. Sala del Collegio, 49. Bocca di Leone, 50. Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci, 50. Sala del Senato, 50, 67. Sala del Maggior Consiglio, 51, 60, 67, 68. Sala dello Scrutinio, 61. Archaeological museum, 62. Bridge of Sighs, 63, 136, 137. the cells, 63. Shelley on, 142. its history, 66. its building, 66, 67. Giants' Stairs, 67, 74. the carved capitals, 68. Porta della Carta, 73, 74, 76. courtyard, 74. its restoration, 198.

D'Oggiano, Marco, picture by, 94.

Dona dalle Rose, Count Antonio, 125.

Donato, S., his body brought to Murano, 156.

Douglas, Col., his Venice on Foot, 218, 285.

Duerer on Bellini, 181

Duse, Eleanora, 97.

English travellers, Byron and, 138.

Erberia, the, 228.

Faliero Conspiracy, the, 49.

Fantin-Latour, picture by, 114.

Favretto, 114.

Fenice Theatre, the, 132, 162.

Ferdinando, gondolier, 87.

Fildes, Luke, his Venetian pictures, 273.

Fiore, Jacobello del, pictures by, 62, 160.

Fireworks, Venetian, 197.

Fish, 40, 229.

Fish-market, 113, 229.

Flagstaffs, the Piazza, 256.

Flanhault, Mme. de, and Byron, 130.

Florian's, 31, 32, 38.

Football match, a, 265.

Foscari, Jacopo, 64.

Foscarini, Antonio, 64.

Foscolo, Ugo, 76.

France, Anatole, 8.

Francesca, Pietro della, picture by, 190.

Francesco, S., in Deserto, island, 158.

Franchetti, Baron, 124.

Franchetti family, 146.

Frari church, the exterior, 245. the campanile, 42, 43. Titian's tomb, 246. Canova's tomb, 248.

Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor, 18, 53, 54.

French occupation, 137.

Frezzeria, Byron in the, 130, 162.

Fruit in Venice, 40.

Fruit-market, see Erberia.

Funeral, a, 208.

Fusina, Venice approached from, 2, 297.

Galileo, autograph of, 77, 84.

Gardens, 97, 143, 202, 215.

Garibaldi statue, 264.

Genoa, the war with, 58.

George, S., the story of, 211.

Germans in Venice, 268.

Giambono, pictures by, 170.

Giardinetto Infantile, 123.

Giardini Pubblici, 12, 105, 264.

Giordano, Luca, picture by, 96.

Giorgio Maggiore, S., 197.

Giorgione, pictures by, 94, 123, 127, 224, 244, 281, 287. and Titian, 247, 294. his "Tempest," 287. his innovations, 289, 298. and the attributors, 291. his career, 292. his statue, 295. his masterpiece, 296.

Giudecca, the, 202.

Giustiniani, Marco, 61.

Giustiniani, Niccolo, 104.

Giustiniani, family, 104, 215.

Glass-making at Murano, 152.

Gobbo, the, 228.

Goethe, in Venice, 106.

Goldoni, 77. autograph of, 84. his statue, 101, 220. Browning on, 101. his plays, 220. his Autobiography 221. room at the Museo Civico, the, 117. Theatre, Hamlet at the, 163.

Gondolas, Byron on, 134. Shelley on, 141.

Gondoliers, 33, 87. Wagner on, 108. their folk-song, 108. Howells on, 144. battles between, 281.

Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 104.

Gramophone, a, 196.

Grossi, Alessandro, gondolier, 87.

Grimani, Cardinal, 63.

Grimani, Count, 41.

Grimani, Breviary, 84.

Guardi, Francesco, his career, 189. his "Dogana," 187.

Guardi, Francesco, pictures of, 38, 68, 96, 116, 149, 189.

Guariento, fresco by, 51.

Guides, 17, 259.

"Hamlet" in Venice, 163.

Harding, J.D., his Venetian pictures, 273.

Hatzouni, Fr. Vardan, 302.

Helena, S., her life, 266.

Henri III of France in Venice, 109.

Henri IV, his armour, 263.

Hohenlohe, Prince, his palace, 147.

Honeymooners, 32, 195.

Hoppner on Byron in Venice, 137.

Horses, absence of, 21. the golden, 10, 21, 57.

House moving, a, 274.

Houses, desirable, 96, 204, 205.

Howells, W.D., in Venice, 104, 144, 221. his Venetian Life, 144. on gondoliers, 144. on Venice, 204, 264. on campos, 221. on S. Lazzaro, 303.

Ibsen and Browning, 103.

James, G.P.R., buried in Venice, 152.

Jerome, S., and the lion, 213, 215.

Jews in Venice, 227.

Joseph II, Emperor, 103, 115.

Lace making at Burano, 158.

Lavery, John, picture by, 114.

Layard, Sir Henry, in Venice, 111.

Lazzaro, S., 299. Byron at, 130, 299, 301. its history, 300. visitors to, 302. the printing-room, 303.

"Leda and the Swan," 63, 298.

La Grazia, Island of, 309.

Leopardi, autograph of, 84.

Lewis, "Monk," visits Byron in Venice, 136.

Liberi, Pietro, picture by, 61.

Library, the Old, 80, 149.

Library, S. Mark's, 84.

Lido, the, bathing at, 14, 15, 267. Browning at, 101, 102, 140. Byron at, 137, 139. Shelley at, 139. Clara Shelley's, grave, 141. the aquarium, 229.