IT is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not, somehow, a
great spirit of solemnity within it, the traveller would soon have
little warrant for regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration
of the outer walls, which has lately been so much attacked and
defended, is certainly a great shock. Of the necessity of the work only
an expert is, I suppose, in a position to judge; but there is no doubt
that, if a necessity it be, it is a deeply regrettable one. To no more
distressing necessity have people of taste lately had to resign
themselves. Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid, all
semblance of beauty has vanished, which is a sad fact, considering that
the external loveliness of St. Mark's has been for ages less impressive
only than that of the still comparatively uninjured interior. I know
not what is the measure of necessity in such a case, and it appears
indeed to be a very delicate question. To-day, at any rate, that
admirable harmony of faded mosaic and marble, which, to the eye of the
traveller emerging from the narrow streets that lead to the Piazza,
filled all the farther end of it with a sort of dazzling, silvery
presence,—today this lovely vision is in a way to be completely
reformed, and, indeed, well-nigh abolished. The old softness and
mellowness of colour,—the work of the quiet centuries and of the
breath of the salt sea,—is giving way to large, crude patches of new
material, which have the effect of a monstrous malady rather than of a
restoration to health. They look like blotches of red and white paint
and dishonourable smears of chalk on the cheeks of a noble matron. The
face toward the Piazzetta is in especial the newest-looking thing
conceivable,—as new as a new pair of boots, or as the mornings paper.
We do not profess, however, to undertake a scientific quarrel with
these changes, and admit that our complaint is a purely sentimental
one. The march of industry in united Italy must doubtless be looked at
as a whole, and one must endeavour to believe that it is through
innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply interesting country is
groping her way to her place among the nations. For the present, it is
not to be denied, certain odd phases of the process are more visible
than the result, to arrive at which it seems necessary that, as she was
of old a passionate votary of the beautiful, she should to-day burn
everything that she has adored. It is, doubtless, too soon to judge
her, and there are moments when one is willing to forgive her even the
restoration of St. Mark's. Inside, as well, there has been a
considerable attempt to make the place more tidy; but the general
effect, as yet, has not seriously suffered. What I chiefly remember is
the straightening out of that dark and rugged old pavement,—those deep
undulations of primitive mosaic, in which the wandering tourist was
thought to perceive an intended resemblance to the waves of the ocean.
Whether intended or not, the analogy was an image the more in a
treasure-house of images; but from a considerable portion of the church
it has now disappeared. Throughout the greater part, indeed, the
pavement remains as recent generations have known it,—dark, rich,
cracked, uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened malachite,
and polished by the knees of innumerable worshipers; but in other large
sections the idea imitated by the restorers is that of the ocean in a
dead calm, and the model they have taken, the floor of a London
club-house or of a New York hotel. I think no Venetian and scarcely any
Italian cares much for such differences; and when, a year ago, people
in England were writing to the “Times” about the whole business, and
holding meetings to protest against it, the dear children of the lagoon
(so far as they heard, or heeded, the rumour) thought them partly
busy-bodies and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubtless were, but they
took a good deal of disinterested trouble. It never occurs to the
Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be worth taking; the
Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of existence in
which personal questions are so insipid that people have to look for
grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. I must not, however,
speak of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension of giving a description
of it, or as if the reader desired one. The reader has been too well
served already. It is surely the best-described building in the world.
Open the “Stones of Venice,” open Théophile Gautier's “Italia,” and you
will see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because
there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it: the
way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of
months, and the light is not in the great Square, and you pass in under
the pictured porticoes, with a feeling of habit and friendliness, and a
desire for something cool and dark. There are moments, after all, when
the church is comparatively quiet and empty, when you may sit there
with an easy consciousness of it's beauty. From the moment, of course,
that you go into an Italian church for any purpose but to say your
prayers, or look at the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping
barbarians I just spoke of; you treat the place like an orifice in the
peep-show. Still, it is almost a spiritual function,—or, at the worst,
an amorous one,—to feed one's eyes on the mighty colour that drops
from the hollow vaults and thickens the air with it's richness. It is
all so quiet and sad and faded; and yet it is all so brilliant and
living. The strange figures in the mosaic pictures, bending with the
curve of niche and vault, stare down through the glowing dimness; and
the burnished gold that stands behind them catches the light on it's
little, uneven cubes. St. Mark's owes nothing of it's character to the
beauty of proportion or perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced
or far-arching; there are no long lines nor triumphs of the
perpendicular. The church arches indeed; but it arches like a dusky
cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to
touch and kneel upon and lean against,—it is from this the effect
proceeds. In this sort of beauty the place is incredibly rich, and you
may go there every day and find afresh some lurking pictorial nook. It
is a treasury of bits, as the painters say; and there are usually three
or four painters, with their easels set up in uncertain equilibrium, on
the undulating floor, It is not easy to catch the real complexion of
St. Mark's, and these laudable attempts at portraiture are apt to look
either lurid or livid. But, if you cannot paint the old loose-looking
marble slabs, the great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes, of
which the lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light, the
tabernacles whose open doors disclose a dark Byzantine image, spotted
with dull, crooked gems,—if you cannot paint these things, you can at
least grow fond of them. You grow fond even of the old benches of red
marble, partly worn away by the breeches of many generations, and
attached to the base of those wide pilasters, of which the precious
plating, delightful in it's faded brownness, with a faint grey bloom
upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age.