Cadorin quotes two of great importance, made during the progress of the work in 1342 and 1344; then one of 1349, resolving that the works at the Ducal Palace, which had been discontinued during the plague, should be resumed; and finally one in 1362, which speaks of the Great Council Chamber as having been neglected and suffered to fall into "great desolation," and resolves that it shall be forthwith completed.

The interruption had not been caused by the plague only, but by the conspiracy of Faliero, and the violent death of the master builder. The work was resumed in 1362, and completed within the next three years, at least so far as that Guariento was enabled to paint his Paradise on the walls, so that the building must, at any rate, have been roofed by this time. Its decorations and fittings, however, were long in completion; the paintings on the roof being only executed in 1400....

The works of addition or renovation had now been proceeding, at intervals, during a space of a hundred and twenty-three years. Three generations at least had been accustomed to witness the gradual advancement of the form of the Ducal Palace into more stately symmetry, and to contrast the works of sculpture and painting with which it was decorated—full of the life, knowledge, and hope of the fourteenth century—with the rude Byzantine chiselling of the palace of the Doge Ziani. The magnificent fabric just completed, of which the new Council Chamber was the nucleus, was now habitually known in Venice as the "Palazzo Nuovo;" and the old Byzantine edifice, now ruinous, and more manifest in its decay by its contrast with the goodly stones of the building which had been raised at its side, was of course known as the "Palazzo Vecchio." That fabric, however, still occupied the principal position in Venice. The new Council Chamber had been erected by the side of it toward the Sea; but there was not then the wide quay in front, the Riva dei Schiavoni, which now renders the Sea Facade as important as that to the Piazzetta. There was only a narrow walk between the pillars and the water; and the old palace of Ziani still faced the Piazzetta, and interrupted, by its decrepitude, the magnificence of the square where the nobles daily met.

Every increase of the beauty of the new palace rendered the discrepancy between it and the companion building more painful; and then began to arise in the minds of all men a vague idea of the necessity of destroying the old palace, and completing the front of the Piazzetta with the same splendor as the Sea Facade. But no such sweeping measure of renovation had been contemplated by the Senate when they first formed the plan of their new Council Chamber. First a single additional room, then a gateway, then a larger room; but all considered merely as necessary additions to the palace, not as involving the entire reconstruction of the ancient edifice. The exhaustion of the treasury, and the shadows upon the political horizon, rendered it more imprudent to incur the vast additional expense which such a project involved; and the Senate, fearful of itself, and desirous to guard against the weakness of its own enthusiasm, passed a decree, like the effort of a man fearful of some strong temptation to keep his thoughts averted from the point of danger. It was a decree, not merely that the old palace should not be rebuilt, but that no one should propose rebuilding it. The feeling of the desirableness of doing so was too strong to permit fair discussion, and the Senate knew that to bring forward such a motion was to carry it.

The decree, thus passed in order to guard against their own weakness, forbade any one to speak of rebuilding the old palace, under the penalty of a thousand ducats. But they had rated their own enthusiasm too low; there was a man among them whom the loss of a thousand ducats could not deter from proposing what he believed to be for the good of the state. Some excuse was given him for bringing forward the motion, by a fire which occurred in 1419, and which injured both the Church of St. Mark's, and part of the old palace fronting the Piazzetta. What followed, I shall relate in the words of Sanuto.

"Therefore they set themselves with all diligence and care to repair and adorn sumptuously, first God's house; but in the Prince's house things went on more slowly, for it did not please the Doge to restore it in the form in which it was before; and they could not rebuild it altogether in a better manner, so great was the parsimony of these old fathers; because it was forbidden by laws, which condemned in a penalty of a thousand ducats any one who should propose to throw down the old palace, and to rebuild it more richly and with greater expense.

"But the Doge, who was magnanimous, and who desired above all things what was honorable to the city, had the thousand ducats carried into the Senate Chamber, and then proposed that the palace should be rebuilt; saying: that, since the late fire had ruined in great part the Ducal habitation (not only his own private palace, but all the places used for public business), this occasion was to be taken for an admonishment sent from God, that they ought to rebuild the palace more nobly, and in a way more befitting the greatness to which, by God's grace, their dominions had reached; and that his motive in proposing this was neither ambition, nor selfish interest; that, as for ambition, they might have seen in the whole course of his life, through so many years, that he had never done anything for ambition, either in the city, or in foreign business; but in all his actions had kept justice first in his thoughts, and then the advantage of the state, and the honor of the Venetian name; and that, as far as regarded his private interest, if it had not been for this accident of the fire, he would never have thought of changing anything in the palace into either a more sumptuous or a more honorable form; and that during the many years in which he had lived in it, he had never endeavored to make any change, but had always been content with it as his predecessors had left it; and that he knew well that, if they took in hand to build it as he exhorted and besought them, being now very old, and broken down with many toils, God would call him to another life before the walls were raised a pace from the ground. And that therefore they might perceive that he did not advise them to raise this building for his own convenience, but only for the honor of the city and its Dukedom; and that the good of it would never be felt by him, but by his successors." ...

Then he said, that 'in order, as he had always done, to observe the laws, he had brought with him the thousand ducats which had been appointed as the penalty for proposing such a measure, so that he might prove openly to all men that it was not his own advantage that he sought, but the dignity of the state.' There was no one (Sanuto goes on to tell us) who ventured, or desired to oppose the wishes of the Doge; and the thousand ducats were unanimously devoted to the expenses of the work. "And they set themselves with much diligence to the work; and the palace was begun in the form and manner in which it is at present seen; but, as Mocenigo[51] had prophesied, not long after, he ended his life, and not only did not see the work brought to a close, but hardly even begun."

There are one or two expressions in the above extracts which, if they stood alone, might lead the reader to suppose that the whole palace had been thrown down and rebuilt. We must however remember, that, at this time, the new Council Chamber, which had been one hundred years in building, was actually unfinished, the council had not yet sat in it; and it was just as likely that the Doge should then propose to destroy and rebuild it, as in this year, 1853, it is that any one should propose in our House of Commons to throw down the new Houses of Parliament, under the title of the "old palace," and rebuild them....

It was in the year 1422 that the decree passed to rebuild the palace; Mocenigo died in the following year, and Francesco Foscari was elected in his room. The great Council Chamber was used for the first time on the day when Foscari entered the Senate as Doge—the 3rd of April, 1423, according to the "Caroldo Chronicle;" the 23d, which is probably correct, by an anonymous MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum; and the following year, on the 27th of March, the first hammer was lifted up against the old palace of Ziani. That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly called the "Renaissance." It was the knell of the architecture of Venice—and of Venice herself.

The central epoch of her life was past; the decay had already begun; I date its commencement from the death of Mocenigo. A year had not yet elapsed since that great Doge had been called to his account; his patriotism, always sincere, had been in this instance mistaken; in his zeal for the honor of future Venice, he had forgotten what was due to the Venice of long ago. A thousand palaces might be built upon her burdened islands, but none of them could taken the place, or recall the memory, of that which was first built upon her unfrequented shore. It fell; and, as if it had been the talisman of fortune, the city never flourished again.

I have no intention of following out, in their intricate details, the operations which were begun under Foscari and continued under succeeding Doges till the palace assumed its present form, for I am not in this work concerned, except by occasional reference, with the architecture of the fifteenth century; but the main facts are the following. The palace of Ziani was destroyed; the existing facade to the Piazzetta built, so as both to continue and to resemble, in most particulars, the work of the Great Council Chamber. It was carried back from the Sea as far as the Judgment angle; beyond which is the Porta della Carta, begun in 1439, and finished in two years, under the Doge Foscari; the interior buildings connected with it were added by the Doge Christopher Moro (the Othello of Shakespeare) in 1462.

Some remnants of the Ziani Palace were perhaps still left between the two extremities of the Gothic Palace; or, as is more probable, the last stones of it may have been swept away after the fire of 1419, and replaced by new apartments for the Doge. But whatever buildings, old or new, stood on this spot at the time of the completion of the Porta della Carta were destroyed by another great fire in 1479, together with so much of the palace on the Rio that, tho the saloon of Gradenigo, then known as the Sala de Pregadi, was not destroyed, it became necessary to reconstruct the entire facades of the portion of the palace behind the Bridge of Sighs, both toward the court and canal.

The palace was not long permitted to remain in finished form. Another terrific fire, commonly called the great fire, burst out in 1574, and destroyed the inner fittings and all the precious pictures of the Great Council Chamber, and of all the upper rooms on the Sea Facade, and most of those on the Rio Facade, leaving the building a mere shell, shaken and blasted by the flames. It was debated in the Great Council whether the ruin should not be thrown down, and an entirely new palace built in its stead. The opinions of all the leading architects of Venice were taken, respecting the safety of the walls, or the possibility of repairing them as they stood. These opinions, given in writing, have been preserved, and published by the Abbe Cadorin, and they form one of the most important series of documents connected with the Ducal Palace.

I can not help feeling some childish pleasure in the accidental resemblance to my own name in that of the architect whose opinion was first given in favor of the ancient fabric, Giovanni Rusconi. Others, especially Palladio, wanted to pull down the old palace, and execute designs of their own; but the best architects in Venice, and, to his immortal honor, chiefly Francesco Sansovino, energetically pleaded for the Gothic pile, and prevailed. It was successfully repaired, and Tintoret painted his noblest picture on the wall from which the Paradise of Guariento had withered before the flames.

The repairs necessarily undertaken at this time were however extensive, and interfere in many directions with the earlier work of the palace; still the only serious alteration in its form was the transposition of the prisons, formerly at the top of the palace, to the other side of the Rio del Palazzo; and the building of the Bridge of Sighs, to connect them with the palace, by Antonio da Ponte. The completion of this work brought the whole edifice into its present form; with the exception of alterations in doors, partitions, and staircases among the inner apartments, not worth noticing, and such barbarisms and defacements as have been suffered within the last fifty years, by, I suppose, nearly every building of importance in Italy.



THE LAGOONS[52]

BY HORATIO F. BROWN

The colonization of the Venetian estuary is usually dated from the year 452, the period of the Hunnish invasion under Attila, when the Scourge of God, as he was named by his terror-stricken opponents, sacked the rich Roman cities of Aquileia, Concordia, Opitergium, and Padua. In one sense the date is correct. The Hunnish invasion certainly gave an enormous increase to the lagoon population, and called the attention of the mainlanders, to the admirable asylum which the estuary offered in times of danger.

When Alcuin, the great scholar from Yorkshire, was teaching Charlemagne's son and heir, Pepin, he drew up for his pupil's use a curious catechism of questions and answers. Among others this occurs: "What is the sea." "A refuge in time of danger." Surely a strange answer, and one which can hardly be reckoned as true except in the particular case of the Venetian lagoons. For the mainlanders were caught between the devil of Attila and the deep sea of the Adriatic, and had they not found the lagoons ready at hand to offer them an asylum and to prove a refuge in time of danger, it must have fared hard with them.

But this date of 452 is not to be taken as the date of the very earliest occupation of the lagoon. Long before Attila and his Huns swept down upon Italy, we know that there was a sparse population occupying the estuary, engaged in fishing and in the salt trade. Cassiodorus, the secretary of the Gothic King Theodoric the Great, has left us a picture of this people, hardy, independent, toughened by their life on the salt water; their means of living; the fish of the lagoons; their source of wealth; the salt which they extracted from its waters; their houses, wattled cabins built upon piles driven into the mud; their means of locomotion light boats which were tied to the door posts like horses on mainland.

"Thus you live in your sea-birds' home," he exclaims, "rich and poor under equal laws; a common food supports you; house is like unto house; and envy, that curse of all the world, hath no place there." No doubt this early population of the lagoons, already intimately associated with its dwelling-place, modified by it and adapted to it, helped to form the basis upon which the latter strata of population, the result of the Hunnish invasion, could rest; and in all probability some of the characteristics of this early population, its independence and its hardihood, passed into the composition of the full-grown Venetian race. But beyond the brief words of Cassiodorus we know little about these early lagoon-dwellers. It is really with the Hunnish invasion that the history of Venice begins its first period of growth.

The population which flocked from the mainland to seek refuge in the estuary of Venice came from many different cities—from Aquileia, from Concordia, from Padua; and tho the inhabitants of all these, no doubt, bore the external stamp which Rome never failed to impose, yet, equally doubtless, they brought with them their own particular customs, their mutual hates and rivalries.

While living on the mainland these animosities had wider space in which to play, and were therefore less dangerous, less explosive. But in the lagoons, under stress of suffering, and owing to confinement and juxtaposition, they became intensified, exaggerated, and perilous. There was a double problem before the growing Venetian population which required to be solved before Venice and the Venetians could, with any justice, be considered a place and a people. First, the various and largely hostile populations who had taken refuge in the lagoon had to be reconciled to each other; and secondly, they had to be reconciled to their new home, to be identified with it and made one with it.

The lagoon achieved both reconciliations; the isolation of its waters, their strangeness, gradually created the feeling of unity, of family connection, among the diverse and hostile components of the population, till a fusion took place between the original and the immigrant inhabitants, and between the people and their home, and Venice and the Venetians emerge upon the history of the world as an individual and full-grown race. But this reconciliation and identification were not accomplished at once. They cost many years of struggle and of danger. The unification of Venice is the history of a series of compromises, an historical example of the great law of selection and survival.



THE DECLINE AMID SPLENDOR[53]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

Venice the beautiful city ended, pagan-like, as did its sisters the Greek republics, through nonchalance and voluptuousness. We find, indeed, from time to time, a Francis Morosini, who like Aratus and Philopoemen, renews the heroism and victories of ancient days; but, after the seventeenth century, its bright career is over. The city, municipal and circumscribed, is found to be weak, like Athens and Corinth, against powerful military neighbors who either neglect or tolerate it; the French and the Germans violate its neutrality with impunity; it subsists and that is all, and it pretends to do no more. Its nobles care only to amuse themselves; war and politics with them recede in the background; she becomes gallant and worldly....

But the evening of this fallen city is as mellow and as brilliant as a Venetian sunset. With the absence of care gaiety prevails. One encounters nothing but public and private fetes in the memoirs of their writers and in the pictures of their painters. At one time it is a pompous banquet in a superb saloon festooned with gold, with tall lustrous windows and pale crimson curtains, the doge in his simarre dining with the magistrates in purple robes, and masked guests gliding over the floor; nothing is more elegant than the exquisite aristocracy of their small feet, their slender necks and their jaunty little three-cornered hats among skirts flounced with yellow or pearly gray silks.

At another it is a regatta of gondolas and we see on the sea between San-Marco and San-Giorgio, around the huge Bucentaur[54] like a leviathan cuirassed with scales of gold, flotillas of boats parting the water with their steel becks. A crowd of pretty dominos, male and female, flutter over the pavements; the sea seems to be of polished slate under a tender azure sky spotted with cloud-flocks while all around, as in a precious frame, like a fantastic border carved and embroidered, the Procuraties, the domes, the palaces and the quays thronged with a joyous multitude, encircle the great maritime Venetian sheet....

In truth they never concern themselves with religion except to repress the Pope; in theory and in practise, in ideas and in instincts, they inherit the manners, customs and spirit of antiquity, and their Christianity is only a name. Like the ancients, they were at first heroes and artists, and then voluptuaries and dilettanti; in one as in the other case they, like the ancients, confined life to the present. In the eighteenth century they might be compared to the Thebans of the decadence who, leagued together to consume their property in common, bequeathed what remained of their fortunes on dying to the survivors at their banquets. The carnival lasts six months; everybody, even the priests, the guardian of the capucins, the nuncio, little children, all who frequent the markets, wear masks. People pass by in processions disguised in the costumes of Frenchmen, lawyers, gondoliers, Calabrians and Spanish soldiery, dancing and with musical instruments; the crowd follows jeering or applauding them. There is entire liberty; prince or artizan, all are equal; each may apostrophize a mask. Pyramids of men form "pictures of strength" on the public squares; harlequins in the open air perform parades. Seven theaters are open. Improvizators declaim and comedians improvize amusing scenes. "There is no city where license has such sovereign rule." ...

The Chiogga campaign is the last act of the old heroic drama; there, as in the best days of the ancient republics, a besieged people is seen to save itself against all hope, artizans equipping vessels, a Pisani conqueror undergoing imprisonment and only released to renew the victory, a Carlo Zeno, surviving forty wounds, and a doge of seventy years of age; a Contarini, who makes a vow not to leave his vessel so long as the enemy's fleet is uncaptured, thirty families, apothecaries, grocers, vintners, tanners admitted among the nobles, a bravery, a public spirit like that of Athens under Themistocles and of Rome under Fabius Cunctator. If, from this time forth, the inward fire abates we still feel its warmth for many long years, longer kept up than in the rest of Italy, and sometimes demonstrating its power by sudden outbursts.

The nobles, on their side, are always ready to fight. During the whole of the sixteenth century, even up to the seventeenth and beyond, we see them in Dalmatia, in the Morea, over the entire Mediterranean, defending the soil inch by inch against the infidels. The garrison of Famagouste yields only to famine, and its governor, Bragadino, burned alive, is a hero of ancient days. At the battle of Lepanto the Venetians alone furnish one half of the Christian fleet. Thus on all sides, and notwithstanding their gradual decline, peril, energy, love of country, all, in brief, which constitutes or sustains the grand life of the soul here subsists, while throughout the peninsula foreign dominion, clerical oppression and voluptuous or academical inertia reduces man to the system of the antechamber, the subtleties of dilettantism and the babble of sonnets.

But if the human spring is not broken at Venice, it is seen insensibly losing its elasticity. The government, changed into a suspicious despotism, elects a Mocenigo doge, a shameless speculator profiting on the public distress, instead of that Charles Zeno who had saved the country; it holds Zeno prisoner two years and entrusts the armies on the mainland to condottieri; it is tied up in the hands of three inquisitors, provokes accusations, practises secret executions and commands the people to confine themselves to indulgences of pleasure. On the other hand luxury arises. About the year 1400 the houses "were quite small;" but a thousand nobles were enumerated in Venice possessing from four to seventy thousand ducats rental, while three thousand ducats were sufficient to purchase a palace.

Henceforth this great wealth is no longer to be employed in enterprises and in self-devotion, but in pomp and magnificence. In 1495, Commine admires "the grand canal, the most beautiful street, I think, in the world, and with the best houses; the houses are very grand, high and of excellent stone—and these have been built within a century. All have fronts of white marble, which comes from Istria, a hundred miles away, and yet many more great pieces of porphyry and of serpentine on them; inside they have, most of them, at least two chambers with gilded ceilings, rich screens of chimneys with carved marble, the bedsteads gilded and the 'ostevents' painted and gilded and well furnished within." On his arrival twenty-five gentlemen attired in silk and scarlet come to meet him; they conduct him to a boat decked with crimson silk; "it is this most triumphant city I ever saw."

Finally, while the necessity of pleasure grows the spirit of enterprise diminishes; the passage of the Cape in the beginning of the sixteenth century places the commerce of Asia in the hands of the Portuguese; on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic the financial measures of Charles V., joined to bad usage by the Turks, render abortive the great maritime caravans which the state dispatches yearly between Alexandria and Bruges. In respect to industrial matters, the hampered artizans, watched and cloistered in their country, cease to perfect their arts and allow foreign competitors to surpass them in processes and in furnishing supplies to the world.

Thus, on all sides, the capacity for activity becomes lessened and the desire for enjoyment greater without one entirely effacing the other, but in a way that, both commingling, they produce that ambiguous state of mind similar to a mixed temperature which is never too severe and in which the arts are generated. Indeed, it is from 1454 to 1572, between the institution of state inquisitors and the battle of Lepanto, between the accomplishment of internal despotism and the last of the great outward victories, that the brilliant productions of Venetian art appear. John Bellini was born in 1426, Giorgone died in 1511, Titian in 1578, Veronese in 1572 and Tintoretto in 1594. In this interval of one hundred and fifty years this warrior city, this mistress of the Mediterranean, this queen of commerce and of industry became a casino for masqueraders and a den of courtezans.



THE DOVES OF ST. MARK'S[55]

BY HORATIO F. BROWN

In Venice the pigeons do not allow you to forget them, even if one desired to forget a bird that is so intimately connected with the city and with a great ceremony of that ancient republic which has passed away. They belong so entirely to the place, and especially to the great square; they have made their homes for so many generations among the carvings of the Basilica, at the feet of the bronze horses, and under the massive cornices of the New Procuratie, that the great Campanile itself is hardly more essential to the character of the piazza than are these delicate denizens of Saint Mark's.

In the structure of the ducal palace, the wants of the pigeons have been taken into account, and near the two great wells which stand in the inner courtyard little cups of Istrian stone have been let into the pavement for the pigeons to drink from. On cold, frosty mornings you may see them tapping disconsolately at the ice which covers their drinking troughs, and may win their thanks by breaking it for them. Or if the wind blows hard from the east, the pigeons sit in long rows under the eaves of the Procuratie; their necks drawn into their shoulders, and the neck feathers ruffled round their heads, till they have lost all shape, and look like a row of slate-colored cannon-balls.

From Saint Mark's the pigeons have sent out colonies to the other churches and campi of Venice. They have crossed the Grand Canal, and roost and croon among the volutes of the Salute, or, in wild weather, wheel high and airly above its domes. They have even found their way to Malamocco and Mazzorbo; so that all Venice in the sea owns and protects its sacred bird. But it is in Saint Mark's that the pigeons "most do congregate;" and one can not enter the piazza, and stand for a moment at the corner, without hearing the sudden rush of wings upon the air, and seeing the white under-feathers of their pinions, as the doves strike backward to check their flight, and flutter down at one's feet in expectation of peas or grain. They are boundlessly greedy, and will stuff themselves till they can hardly walk, and the little red feet stagger under the loaded crop. They are not virtuous, but they are very beautiful.

There is a certain fitness in the fact that the dove should be the sacred bird of the sea city. Both English "dove" and Latin "columba" mean the diver; and the dove uses the air much as the fish uses the sea, it glides, it dives, it shoots through its airy ocean; it hovers against the breeze, or presses its breast against the sirocco storm, as you may see fish poised in their course against the stream; then with a sudden turn it relaxes the strain and sweeps away down the wind. The dove is an airy emblem of the sea upon which Venice and the Venetians live, but more than that—the most permanent quality in the color of the lagoons, where the lights are always shifting, is the dove-tone of sea and sky; a tone which holds all colors in solution, and out of which they emerge as the water-ripples or the cloud-flakes pass—just as the colors are shot and varied on a young dove's neck.

There is some doubts as to the origin of these flocks of pigeons which shelter in Saint Mark's. According to one story, Henry Dandolo, the Crusader, was besieging Candia; he received valuable information from the interior of the island by means of carrier-pigeons, and, later on, sent news of his successes home to Venice by the same messengers. In recognition of these services the government resolved to maintain the carriers at the public cost; and the flocks of to-day are the descendants of the fourteenth-century pigeons. The more probable tradition, however, is that which connects these pigeons with the antique ceremonies of Palm Sunday.

On that festival the Doge made the tour of the piazza, accompanied by all the officers of State, the Patriarch, the foreign ambassadors, the silver trumpets, all the pomp of the ducal dignity. Among other largess of that day, a number of pigeons, weighted by pieces of paper tied to their legs, used to be let loose from the gallery where the bronze horses stand, above the western door of the church. Most of the birds were easily caught by the crowd, and kept for their Easter dinner; but some escaped, and took refuge in the upper parts of the palace and among the domes of Saint Mark's. The superstition of the people was easily touched, and the birds that had sought the protection of the saint were thenceforth dedicated to the patron of Venice. The charge of supporting them was committed to the superintendents of the corn stores, and the usual hour for feeding the pigeons was nine o'clock in the morning. During the revolution of 1797, the birds fared as badly as the aristocracy, and were left to take care of themselves; but when matters settled down again the feeding of the pigeons was resumed by the municipality, and takes place at two in the afternoon, tho the incessant largess of strangers can leave the birds but little appetite for their regular meal.

In spite of the multitudes of pigeons that haunt the squares of the city, a dead pigeon is as rare to see as a dead donkey on the mainland. It is a pious opinion that no Venetian ever kills a pigeon, and apparently they never die; but the fact that they do not increase so rapidly as to become a nuisance instead of a pleasure, lends some color to the suspicion that pigeon pies are not unknown at certain tables during the proper season.



TORCELLO, THE MOTHER CITY[56]

BY JOHN RUSKIN

Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which near the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level, and hoist themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and interrupted by narrow creeks of sea. One of the feeblest of these inlets, after winding for some time among buried fragments of masonry, and knots of sunburned weeds whitened with webs of fucas, stays itself in an utterly stagnant pool beside a plot of greener grass covered with ground-ivy and violets. On this mound is built a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic type, which if we ascend toward evening (and there are none to hinder us, the door of its ruinous staircase swinging idly on its hinges), we may command from it one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours.

Far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen-gray; not like our northern moors with their jet-black pools and purple heath, but lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with the corrupted sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels. No gathering of fantastic mists, nor coursing of clouds across it; but melancholy clearness of space in the warm sunset, oppressive, reaching to the horizon of its level gloom. To the very horizon, on the northeast; but to the north and west, there is a blue line of higher land along the border of it, and above this, but farther back, a misty band of mountains, touched with snow.

To the east, the paleness and roar of the Adriatic, louder at momentary intervals as the surf breaks on the bar of sand; to the south, the widening branches of the calm lagoon, alternately purple and pale green, as they reflect the evening clouds or twilight sky; and almost beneath our feet, on the same field which sustains the tower we gaze from, a group of four buildings, two of them little larger than cottages (tho built of stone, and one adorned by a quaint belfry), the third an octagonal chapel, of which we can see but little more than the flat red roof with its rayed tiling, the fourth, a considerable church with nave and aisles, but of which, in like manner, we can see little but the long central ridge and lateral slopes of roof, which the sunlight separates in one glowing mass from the green field beneath and gray moor beyond. There are no living creatures near the buildings, nor any vestige of village or city round about them. They lie like a little company of ships becalmed on a faraway sea.

Then look farther to the south. Beyond the widening branches of the lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake into which they gather, there are a multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set shapes of clustered palaces, a long irregular line fretting the southern sky. Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood—Torcello and Venice. Thirteen hundred years ago, the gray moorland looked as it does this day, and the purple mountains stood as radiantly in the deep distances of evening; but on the line of the horizon, there were strange fires mixed with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human voices mixed with the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand. The flames rose from the ruins of Altinum; the lament from the multitude of its people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the paths of the sea.

The cattle are feeding and resting upon the site of the city that they left; the mower's scythe swept this day at dawn over the chief street of the city that they built, and the swathes of soft grass are now sending up their scent into the night air, the only incense that fills the temple of their ancient worship.



CADORE, TITIAN'S BIRTHPLACE[57]

BY AMELIA B. EDWARDS

We reached Pieve di Cadore about half-past eleven A.M., delays included. The quaint old piazza with its gloomy arcades, its antique houses with Venetian windows, its cafes, its fountain, and its loungers, is just like the piazzas of Serravalle, Longarone, and other provincial towns of the same epoch. With its picturesque Prefettura and belfry-tower one is already familiar in the pages of Gilbert's "Cadore." There, too, is the fine old double flight of steps leading up to the principal entrance on the first floor, as in the town-hall at Heilbronn—a feature by no means Italian; and there, about midway up the shaft of the campanile, is the great, gaudy, well-remembered fresco, better meant than painted, wherein Titian, some twelve feet in height, robed and bearded, stands out against an ultramarine background, looking very like the portrait of a caravan giant at a fair....

Turning aside from the glowing piazza and following the downward slope of a hill to the left of the Prefettura, we come, at the distance of only a few yards, upon another open space, grassy and solitary, surrounded on three sides by rambling, dilapidated-looking houses, and opening on the fourth to a vista of woods and mountains. In this little piazza stands a massive stone fountain, time-worn and water-worn, surmounted by a statue of Saint Tiziano in the robes and square cap of an ecclesiastic. The water trickling through two metal pipes in the pedestal beneath Saint Tiziano's feet, makes a pleasant murmuring in the old stone basin; while, half hidden behind this fountain, and leaning up as if for shelter against a larger house adjoining, stands-a small whitewashed cottage upon the side-wall of which an incised tablet bears the following record:

"Nel MCCCCLXXVII Fra Queste Vmili Mura Tiziano Vecellio Vene a celebre Vita Donde vsciva gia presso a cento Anni In Venezia Addi XXVII Agosto MDLXXVI."

A poor, mean-looking, low-roofed dwelling, disfigured by external chimney-shafts and a built-out oven; lit with tiny, blinking, medieval windows; altogether unlovely; altogether unnoticeable; but—the birthplace of Titian!

It looked different, no doubt, when he was a boy and played outside here on the grass. It had probably a high, steep roof, like the homesteads in his own landscape drawings; but the present old brown tiles have been over it long enough to get mottled with yellow lichens. One would like to know if the fountain and the statue were there in his time; and if the water trickled ever to the same low tune; and if the women came there to wash their linen and fill their brazen water jars, as they do now. This lovely green hill, at all events, sheltered the home from the east winds; and Monte Duranno lifted his strange crest yonder against the southern horizon; and the woods dipt down to the valley, then as now, where the bridle-path slopes away to join the road to Venice.

We went up to the house, and knocked. The door was opened by a sickly, hunchbacked lad who begged us to walk in, and who seemed to be quite alone there. The house was very dark, and looked much older inside than from without. A long, low, gloomy upstairs chamber with a huge penthouse fire-place jutting into the room, was evidently as old as the days of Titian's grandfather, to whom the house originally belonged; while a very small and very dark adjoining closet, with a porthole of window sunk in a slope of massive wall, was pointed out as the room in which the great painter was born.

"But how do you know that he was born here?" I asked. The hunchback lifted his wasted hand with a deprecating gesture. "They have always said so, Signora," he replied. "They have said so for more than four hundred years."

"They?" I repeated, doubtfully. "The Vecelli, Signora." "I had understood that the Vecellio family was extinct." "Scusate, Signora," said the hunchback. "The last direct descendant of 'Il Tiziano' died not long ago—a few years before I was born; and the collateral Vecelli are citizens of Cadore to this day. If the Signora will be pleased to look for it, she will see the name of Vecellio over a shop on the right-hand side, as she returns to the Piazza."

I did look for it; and there, sure enough, over a small shop-window I found it. It gave one an odd sort of shock, as if time were for the moment annihilated; and I remember how, with something of the same feeling, I once saw the name of Rubens over a shop-front in the market-place at Cologne.

I left the house less incredulous than I entered it. Of the identity of the building there has never been any kind of doubt; and I am inclined to accept with the house the identity of the room. Titian, it should be remembered, lived long enough to become, long before he died, the glory of his family. He became rich; he became noble; his fame filled Italy. Hence the room in which he was born may well have acquired, half a century before his death—perhaps even during the lifetime of his mother—that sort of sacredness which is generally of post-mortem growth. The legend, handed down from Vecellio to Vecellio in uninterrupted succession, lays claim, therefore, to a more reliable pedigree than most traditions of a similar character.



FOOTNOTES:

[1] From "Travels in Italy." Translated by A. J. W. Morrison and Charles Nisbet. Goethe's visit to Italy was made in 1786. He was then only thirty-seven years of age. The visit had important influence on his subsequent career. The greatest of his works were still to be written. It was not until after 1794 that Goethe devoted himself entirely to literature.

[2] Goethe at this time had published several short plays besides "The Sorrows of Werthe," "Wilhelm Meister," and a few other works less important.

[3] By that name Italians know the Pantheon.

[4] From "Remarks on Several Parts of Italy in the years 1701, 1702, 1703." At the time of his departure for Italy, Addison was twenty-nine years old. None of his important works had then been written.

[5] Addison's belief has been amply justified by the extensive excavations made since his time.

[6] From "Ancient Rome, In the Light of Recent Discoveries." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1888.

[7] Lanciani here has referred to the Catholic Church, in which historians have seen, in the spiritual sense, a survival of imperial Rome.

[8] From "Six Months in Italy." Published by Houghton, Mifflin CO.

[9] From "Six Months in Italy." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.

[10] Mr. Hillard was writing in 1853.

[11] From "The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1897.

[12] This mausoleum, built by Augustus on the bank of the Tiber for himself and his family, had long been used as the imperial sepulcher.

[13] From "Rome." By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, John C. Winston Co. Copyright, 1897.

[14] From "Italy: Rome and Naples." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1868. Translated by John Durand.

[15] From "The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1897.

[16] From "The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1897.

[17] From "Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe." Mrs. Lippincott's visit was made in 1852.

[18] From "Recollections of the Last Four Popes, and of Rome in their Times." Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman (1802-1865), an English cardinal, was famous during his lifetime for intellectual vigor and scholarly attainments. In presenting an intimate view of a papal election it was his unusual privilege to describe not only "the things he saw," but also, as his later destiny revealed, to tell of the things of which he formed a part. The election pictured is that of Leo XII.

[19] From "Six Novices on the Grand Tour, by One of Them." Privately printed. (1911.) By permission of the author.

[20] From "Six Months in Italy." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.

[21] From "Italy: Rome and Naples." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1868. Translated by John Durand.

[22] From "Pictures from Italy."

[23] From "The Marble Faun." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.

[24] From "Pencillings by the Way."

[25] From "Pictures from Italy."

[26] From "French and Italian Note-Books." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers of Hawthorne's works, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1871, 1883, 1899.

[27] Hiram Powers, the American sculptor, who lived long in Florence, and is best known for his "Greek Slave."

[28] From "Journeys in Italy." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Brentano's. Copyright, 1902.

[29] From "Florence."

[30] From Taine's "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers. Henry Holt & Co. Translated by John Durand. Copyright, 1869.

[31] Since Taine wrote, the facade has been added.

[32] From "Italian Cities." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1900.

[33] From "The Makers of Florence." Published by the Macmillan Co.

[34] That is, the Baptistery at Florence.

[35] From "Florence." By permission of the publishers, John C. Winston Co. Copyright, 1837.

[36] From "Florence." By permission of the publishers, John C. Winston Co. Copyright, 1897.

[37] From "Florence." By permission of the publishers, John C. Winston Co. Copyright, 1897.

[38] Dante was buried at Ravenna. The reader will recall Byron's lines:

"Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore."

[39] From "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869. Translated by John Durand.

[40] From "Letters of a Traveller." Bryant's letter is dated in May, 1834.

[41] The court of the Austrian Grand Duke Leopold III. In 1859 Leopold was expelled, and Florence, with Tuscany, was annexed to the Sardinian kingdom.

[42] From "Venice: Its History, Art, Industries and Modern Life." Published by John C. Winston Co.

[43] From "Two Months Abroad." Privately printed. (1878.)

[44] From "Journeys In Italy." By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Brentano's. Copyright, 1902.

[45] Marie Taglioni, the ballet dancer, who was born in Stockholm of Italian parents in 1804 and married to Count Gilbert de Voisons in 1847, when she retired from the stage. She died in 1884.

[46] From "The Stones of Venice." St. Mark's is merely a church. It is not a cathedral; that is, it is not the "cathedra" of a bishop. Originally it was the private chapel of the Doge. Likewise, St. Peter's at Rome is a church only—the church of the Pope. The cathedral of the Pope (who is the Bishop of Rome), is St. John Lateran.

[47] Venice and territory adjacent to it were long in subjection to Austria. Having put an end to the republic in 1797 (the republic had then had an unbroken existence for about thirteen hundred years), Napoleon, by the treaty of Campo Formio, ceded this territory to Austria. In 1805, however, Venetia was added by Napoleon to his Kingdom of Italy. In 1814, after the first fall of Napoleon, it was ceded back to Austria and in 1815 became part of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom. Under the leadership of Manin, in 1848, a republic was proclaimed in Venice, but Austria laid siege to the city and captured it. It was not until 1866, at the conclusion of the war against Austria, that Venice was annexed to the new Italian kingdom of Victor Emmanuel.

[48] From "In and Around Venice." Published by Charles Scribner's Sons.

[49] From "In and Around Venice." Published by Charles Scribner's Sons. After its fall, the Venetians set about raising funds for rebuilding the Campanile. In the course of several years, the new structure was finished and the event duly commemorated.

[50] From "The Stones of Venice."

[51] Several men of this name are famous in Venetian annals, as soldiers, statesmen and doges. The one here referred to is Tommaso, who defeated the Turks, added Dalmatia to the Venetian domain, greatly encouraged commerce and founded the Venetian library.

[52] From "Life on the Lagoons." Published by the Macmillan Co.

[53] From "Italy: Florence and Venice." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers. Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1869.

[54] The state ship of Venice.

[55] From "Life on the Lagoons." Published by the Macmillan Co.

[56] From "The Stones of Venice."

[57] From "Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys: A Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites." Published by E. P. Dutton & Co.

THE END