THE churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and many a masterpiece
lurks in the unaccommodating gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many
a noble work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin roses of a
scantily visited altar; some of them, indeed, are hidden behind the
altar, in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered
you for approaching the picture, in such cases, are a kind of mockery
of your irritated desire. You stand on tip-toe on a three-legged stool,
you climb a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the
custode. You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough
to perceive that it is beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head,
of a fig-tree against a mellow sky; but the rest is impenetrable
mystery. You renounce all hope, for instance, of approaching the
magnificent Cima le Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora; and
bethinking yourself of the immaculate purity that dwells in the works
of this master, you renounce it with chagrin and pain. Behind the high
altar, in that church, there hangs a Baptism of Christ, by Cima, which,
I believe has been more or less repainted. You can make the thing out
in spots; you can see that it has a fullness of perfection. But you
turn away from it with a stiff neck, and promise yourself consolation
in the Academy and at the Madonna dell' Orto, where two noble pictures,
by the same hand,—pictures as clear as a summer twilight,—present
themselves in better circumstances. It may be said, as a general thing,
that you never see Tintoretto. You admire him, you adore him, you think
him the greatest of painters, but, in the great majority of cases, you
don't see him. This is partly his own fault: so many of his works have
turned to blackness, and are positively rotting in their frames. At the
Scuola di San Rocco, where there are acres of Tintorettos, there is
scarcely anything at all adequately visible, save the immense
“Crucifixion” in the upper story. It is true that in looking at this
huge composition you look at many pictures; it has not only a multitude
of figures, but a wealth of episodes; and you pass from one of these to
the other, as if you were “doing” a gallery. Surely, no single picture
in the world contains more of human life; there is everything in it,
including the most exquisite beauty. It is one of the greatest things
of art; it is always interesting. There are pictures by Tintoretto
which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of beauty more
radiant, but there is no other such vision of an intense reality and a
splendid execution. The interest, the impressiveness, of that whole
corner of Venice, however melancholy the charm of these gorgeous and
ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to a visit to the
Scuola. Nothing that all travellers go to see appears to suffer less
from the incursions of travellers. It is one of the loveliest booths of
the bazaar, and the author of these lines has always had the good
fortune, which he wishes to every other traveller, of having it to
himself. I think most visitors find the place rather alarming and
wicked-looking. They walk about a while among the fitful figures that
gleam here and there out of the great tapestry (as it were) with which
Tintoretto has hung all the walls, and then, depressed and bewildered
by the portentous solemnity of these objects, by strange glimpses of
unnatural scenes, by the echo of their lonely footsteps on the vast
stone floors, they take a hasty departure, and find themselves again,
with a sense of release from danger, and of the genius loci
having been a sort of mad whitewasher who worked with a bad mixture, in
the bright light of the campo, among the beggars, the
orange-venders, and the passing gondolas. Solemn, indeed, is the place,
solemn and strangely suggestive, for the simple reason that we shall
scarcely find four walls elsewhere that inclose within a like area an
equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it, and dense and
difficult to breathe; for it was genius that was not happy, inasmuch as
it lacked the art to fix itself for ever. It is not immortality that we
breathe at the Scuola di San Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality.
Fortunately, however, we have the Ducal Palace, where everything is so
brilliant and splendid that poor, dusky Tintoretto is lifted in spite
of himself into the concert. This deeply original building is, of
course, the loveliest thing in Venice, and a mornings stroll there is a
wonderful illumination. Cunningly select your hour—half the enjoyment
of Venice is a question of dodging—and go at about one o'clock, when
the tourists have gone to lunch and the echoes of the charming chambers
have gone to sleep among the sunbeams; there is no brighter place in
Venice, by which I mean that, on the whole, there is none half so
bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through the great windows from
the glittering lagoon, and shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and
ceilings. All the history of Venice, all it's splendid, stately past,
glows around you in a strong sea-light. Every one here is magnificent,
but the great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before
you in a silver cloud; he thrives in an eternal morning. The deep blue
sky burns behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white
colonnades sustain the richest canopies, under which the first
gentlemen and ladies in the world both render homage and receive it.
Their glorious garments rustle in the air of the sea, and their
sun-lighted faces are the very complexion of Venice. The mixture of
pride and piety, of politics and religion, of art and patriotism, gives
a magnificent dignity to every scene. Never was a painter more nobly
joyous, never did an artist take a greater delight in life, seeing it
all as a kind of breezy festival and feeling it through the medium of
perpetual success. He revels in the gold-framed ovals of the ceilings,
with the fluttering movement of an embroidered banner that tosses
itself into the blue. He was the happiest of painters, and he produced
the happiest picture in the world. The “Rape of Europa” hardly deserves
this title; it is impossible to look at it without aching with envy.
Nowhere else in art is such a temperament revealed; never did
inclination and opportunity combine to express such enjoyment. The
mixture of flowers and gems and brocade, of blooming flesh and shining
sea and waving groves, of youth, health, movement, desire,—all this is
the brightest vision that ever descended upon the soul of a painter.
Happy the artist who could entertain such a vision; happy the artist
who could paint it as the “Rape of Europa” is painted. Tintoretto's
visions were not so bright as that; but he had several that were
radiant enough. In the room that contains the “Rape of Europa” are
several smaller canvases by the greatly more complex genius of the
Scuola di San Rocco, which are almost simple in their loveliness,
almost happy in their simplicity. They have kept their brightness
through the centuries, and they shine with their neighbours in those
golden rooms. There is a piece of painting in one of them which is one
of the sweetest things in Venice, and which reminds one afresh of those
wild flowers of execution that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in
the dark corners of all of Tintoretto's work. “Pallas chasing away
Mars” is, I believe, the name that is given to the picture; and it
represents in fact a young woman of noble appearance, administering a
gentle push, to a fine young man in armour, as if to tell him to keep
his distance. It is of the gentleness of this push that I speak, the
charming way in which she puts out her arm, with a single bracelet on
it, and rests her young hand, with it's rosy fingers parted, upon his
dark breast-plate. She bends her enchanting head with the effort,—a
head which has all the strange fairness that Tintoretto always sees in
women,—and the soft, living, flesh-like glow of all those members,
over which the brush has scarcely paused in it's course, is as pretty
an example of genius as all Venice can show. But why speak of
Tintoretto when I can say nothing of the great “Paradise,” which
unfolds it's somewhat smoky splendour, and the wonder of it's
multitudinous circles, in one of the other chambers? If it were not one
of the first pictures in the world, it would be about the biggest, and
it must be confessed that at first the spectator gets from it chiefly
an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really
wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition,
and that some of the details of this composition are supremely
beautiful. It is impossible, however, in a retrospect of Venice, to
specify one's happiest hours, though, as one looks backward, certain
ineffaceable moments start here and there into vividness. How is it
possible to forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however
frequent they may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which
forms the treasure of that apartment?