VENICE THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

VENICE
The Lion and the Peacock

VENICE

The Lion and the Peacock

Laurence Scarfe

with drawings by die Author

LONDON

ROBERT HALE
1952

Made and printed in Great Britain by

William Clowes and Sons Limited

London and Becclcs

For Duffey, Caroline and Nicolas

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION page I

PART ONE

Entry by Railway 9

Entry by Road 17

Hotels and Tourists 23

Piazza San Marco 33

Shops 53

Toyshop 55

Summer Storm 59

Restaurants 61

Trattoria 66

Fragments: One 69

Animals 79

A Palace 83

Restoration of Mosaics 89

Idling 97

Opera 100

Interlude 103

vii

Fragments : Two page 107

Gondola Strike 117

Festa del Redentore 123

PART TWO

Time 131

The Basilica of St. Mark 133

Quattrocento *49

Cinquecento 169

Seicento i?7

Settecento 193

PART THREE

Torcello 219

Murano: Venetian Glass 233

Giudecca 243

PART FOUR

Le Zattere 253

Fragments: Three 256

Campo Santa Margarita 261

Trio 263

Fragments: Four 269

Festa della Luce 273

Envoi 274

INDEX to Paintings and Painting 277

INDEX to Mosaics 279

GENERAL INDEX 280

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Piazzo San Marco frontispiece

Festival Gondola of Beads title-page

Figures on the Bronze Gates of the Loggetta introduction

Gondola Station, Grand Canal page 16

The Molo 22

The Nave of St. Mark's 32

The Courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale 3 8-39

One of the Giants on the Clock Tower, San Marco 44

Piazzetta dei Leoncini 51

Market near the Rialto 52

Northern Aspect of St. Mark's 58

Potted Ferns 65

The Rialto Bridge 68

The Colleone Monument 78

Garden Statues : Wood Nymph and Flower Girl 82

Studies of the Bronze Horses of St. Mark's 96

At the Arsenale 106

House on the Riva degli Schiavoni in

St. Mark's Ferry 116

IX

Gondola Repair Yard

Street Stall

St. Mark's from the Piazzetta

The Pulpit of St. Mark's

Palazzo Dario

Wall Statues in the Campo dei Mori

Santa Maria dei Miracoli

Detail of the Gateway of the Arsenale

Santa Maria della Salute

A Gateway of the Palazzo Barbaro

Lion at the Gateway of the Arsenale

Puppets : Carnival Figures

The Bridge at Torcello

San Fosca, Torcello

Garden at Torcello

Sixteenth-century Table Glass, Museum at Murano

Glass Animals, Jugs and Bottles. Sixteenth-century

Sixteenth-century Table Glass, Museum at Murano

Fair on the Giudecca

Painted Boat on the Zattere

11 Redentore from the Zattere

Campo Santa Margarita

Garden, Campo San Vidal

Boat on the Giudecca Canal

Eighteenth-century Puppets : Carnival Figures

page 119
122
132

144
148

154

163

168
176
189
192
203
219
223
229
232

233
236
242
252

255
260
262
268
275

INTRODUCTION

E,GEND says that at midday on the twenty-fourth day of March,
anno domini 413, the emigrants from Padua laid the first stones
on the Rialto. Fleeing from the miseries of war, they founded a new
trading post, which was destined to become one of the greatest and
most durable commercial enterprises ever carried out by a community
in Europe. We shall never know just how much the early settlers
knew of the wonderful possibilities of their position at the head of
the Adriatic, how much was foresight and how much was extra-
ordinary good fortune. That they knew of their position in regard
to the Italian mainland, which had been, as it is now, a battle ground
from time immemorial, is sure enough, for they had but recently left
it in fear and disgust, to squat upon a series of melancholy islands in-
habited by water fowl. That they .knew of their position in regard
to the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean can be safely assumed, but
it is less sure that they could have foreseen all the possibilities f their
relationship with India and the East. As time went on and the events
of history developed, they found themselves extraordinarily well
situated, on a tight group of islands unassailable both from the main-
land and from the sea, living and prospering on the great trade

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

route from East to West. Venice became, in effect, a huge emporium

a shining example of a city state with sufficient sense to live

peaceably at home on the wealth of the world, amidst neighbours
constantly torn by strife and jealousy, in a place where nobody
could get at her, fighting her battles on the territory of those less
favourably situated.

Fortune smiled upon Venice much to the chagrin of others
and not merely granted her the gift of wealth and an astute company
of merchants, but enabled her to thrive just at the right period of
history, when the clouds were lifting from the Dark Ages on one
of the greatest periods of civilization the world has ever known.
The acquirement of wealth gave rise to the usual passion for glory,
and at a time when men still had an active sense of beauty genera-
tions of Venetians gave themselves up to a robust form of elegant
living, building a city of palaces and churches and arranging for
themselves an endless series of fetes, processions and carnivals for the
glorification of their state. Never were the proceeds of commerce
so well sublimated into art, and never did art so consistently grace
the growth of an economic system. But fortune ever gives with one
hand and takes with the other, and just at that time when the star
of Venice was shining brightest and the coffers were overflowing,
-as though to spite die Venetians and pay them out for being too
successful, a new India was discovered in the opposite direction to
the old one. The Americas, a hitherto unsuspected string of conti-
nents and islands lurking in uncharted seas, provided the furious
rivals of Venice with a much-hoped-for alternative as a source of
wealth. (Venetian traders coming home from Tudor England in 1497
reported to an incredulous and self-satisfied city how a countryman
of theirs, John Cabot, had planted the Banner of St. Mark next to
the English flag upon Newfoundland, but though the story was
litdd heeded it was prophetic of the end of Venice.) Thus the dis-
covery of America marked the beginning of the decline of Venice
as the development of America, a process not yet completed, may
well mark the eclipse of Europe.

So great, however, had Venice become at that time, and so glorious
was the city, caught up in the passion of her own activities, bemused
by her own beauty, that for many more generations the Republic
remained intact, until, after a few hundred years of splendid and
finally boisterous decadence, Napoleon broke into the city, as he
had broken into many another, and the last Doge abdicated. On

INTRODUCTION

June the fourth, 1797, a "Tree of Liberty" was planted in the Piazza
San Marco, the "Libro cTOro" containing the names of the proud
families of Venice, and the Ducal insignia were burned. The first
foreign conqueror for a thousand years trod upon the Rialtine
Islands, and the Republic was dead. Once more Venice was isolated,
now bereft of wealth and empire, rich only in works of art and the
glorious memories of an heroic past, her impoverished noble families
living in the great palaces where their forefathers had made history
and lived so splendidly, secure in the knowledge that their city was
the most beautiful in the world, but tormented by the idea that it
was also the most useless.

WHAT under the circumstances was to be done with Venice?
By the nineteenth century America was busily taking advantage of
European inventions, still fighting Red Indians and laying railways.
The British were in India and in many other pkces besides. The
nations of Europe were still quarrelling and founding new industrial
empires. But Venice was stranded, a unique survival from the past,
a quiet city of incredible beauty, languishing, her buildings slowly
dropping into the canals for want of repair. At this time she must
have presented a scene of romantic decay, and she became a haunt
for poets, musicians, writers and eccentric foreign residents, who
seem to have lived here for almost nothing, dreaming in the
moonlight. They were, had they but known it, laying the founda-
tions of the new Venice, providing the sentimental basis for the
romanticism which underlies the tourist trade of the twentieth
century. Byron, Browning, Wagner, Ruskin and even such
delightful creatures as Marie Corelli, who brought a gondok back
to sail on the river at Stratford-on-Avon and a host of others
from many countries published the nature and charms of Venice
to the world. The Venetians, tired of penury and possessing, as
always, a subtle and civilized sense of humour, realizing that fortune
had not entirely deserted them, seized upon this idea with akcrity.
They did what many more have had to do since they sold their
antiques and opened their houses to visitors. By the end of the nine-
teenth century tourists began to come to Venice again in increasing
numbers, and now, halfway through the twentieth, we can safely
say that the tourist trade is firmly established and is, in fact, the
staple industry. The decay was repaired, the cornices and balconies

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

made safe, bathrooms and lavatories installed for the fussy, eighteenth-
century methods of sewage disposal abolished, magnificent hotels
complete with telephone systems built inside old palaces, a causeway
constructed over the sea from the mainland to bring rail and road
traffic, aqueducts under the sea to bring fresh water, the desolate
beaches of the Lido prepared for the hosts of people who were sure
to want to take their clothes off and lie in the sea, and latterly an
aerodrome for those who drop out of the sky. . . .

Today Venice must be assessed afresh, for we are halfway through
a new century. It is no good coming to Venice with a long face.
This is no longer the Venice of sombre Byzantium, of the fresh,
hopeful days of the Renaissance, the fulsome days of the Baroque
or the elegant days of the Settecento : for though the scenes of all
these periods are still here, hardly changed at all in their particular
beauties since the days they were erected, the only play enacted
today is the Comedy of Tourism, our own especial kind. Thousands
of people come here annually from all parts of the world, to live,
for a span, the odd outside-life of tourism, living round the perimeter
of the real, secret life of Venice, making little contact with the
Venetians and using the seductive city for the purposes of their
own brand of romanticism. Everyone who comes to Venice for the
first time comes as though on a honeymoon. Venice is an escape
from the ugliness of other towns, from the everyday tasks of the
twentieth century, from the great problems of this century. It
provides the ideal solution for the modern holiday, for those who
want to marvel at works of art and for those who merely want to
sit in the sun. The only fear one can possibly have is that it might
become too popular, with all that that implies. Furthermore, though
the tourists support the Venetians, it is almost literally true to say
that the Venetians of today are living on the work of their ancestors.
Tintoretto, Titian, Carpaccio, Bellini and Tiepolo, Sansovino,
Palladio and Longhena are keeping the people of today. It is for-
tunate for them that art is eternally alive or they could otherwise

be accused of living off the body. of a corpse Venice, however,

is no less wonderful for all that, and no praise can be too high for her
"beauties, no description can equal the reality, and no artists, except
in occasional flights of fancy, have been able to convey her true
flavour. Of all places, Venice must be seen to be believed.

It is no longer the Monte Carlo it was in the eighteenth century,
die city of the Grand Tour; it is no longer what it was in the nine-

INTRODUCTION

teenth century. It is something quite new today, but continuing its
life with all the trimmings of a new century. The extraordinary
thing is that the twentieth century has taken on so well in Venice,
and it has in no way diminished its splendour. Modern luxuries
the grand hotel, neon, chromium, speed-boats and all the hundred
and one things we have tagged on to the old Venice fall so short
of its past glories that they have been quietly absorbed. Therein
lies her great charm : we can have the past, we can have the present,
both at their best, but what little of the present we have is com-
pletely subservient to a greater idea, an idea which we, with all our
cleverness and inventions, are no longer capable of having.

THE tourist must always live in a world-above^-a-world and it is
his privilege to be bewitched. Despite the all-too-obvious signs of
hardship among many of her citizens, Venice gives abundantly of
the better things of life. The warm world of pleasure must always
remain a greater reality to the tourist than the politics argued around
the ScaM Bridge, and, once away from the lifelines of the railway
and the motor road, the aim of Venice is quite frankly to amuse, and
the object of the visitor is to enjoy himself. The tourist is therefore
mostly aware of the ornamental, and however much he may pene-
trate beyond the wiles of art, both old and new, it is through them
that he must form his firial impressions. Yet in the last analysis these
jmpressions must always remain personal : they can make no greater
claim than that.

The aim of this book is not the barren pursuit of aesthetics but an
attempt to follow some of the threads of social life backwards and
forwards through the arts of the past and into the twentieth century,
as though we were eternal tourists: to pursue, in fact, the pleasant
dream of Venice, at all times fantastic, through the minds of the
artists who recorded so much of her history, and to reconstruct
from their pictures and buildings certain aspects of the city. It turns
out to be in the end the pursuit of pleasure, in a city where humanists
always have been, and still are, able to enjoy themselves.

In the section on the Arts of Venice I have selected, though not at
random, but mainly because they develop this theme, certain paint-
ingsandbuildingsto ofiset the contemporary scene. We all too readily
tend to regard the art treasures of the past as a bag of sweets into
which we dip for the sake of their pleasant taste, but though I have

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

not ignored, nor would be able to ignore, aesthetic merits, I have
selected my examples so as to piece together, fragment by fragment,
the final picture. With such an object in mind, gallery-going and the
ghoulish visiting of tombs can become an interesting occupation
to enrich the already abundant life of today. Yet in galleries and
churches we are given to dreaming : the excitements of the past are
muted, we move among memories and echoes. . . . Nostalgia leads
to melancholy, though in Venice more pleasantly than anywhere

else

I have purposely selected work for discussion that is available in
Venice at the present time, of which there is more than enough to
illustrate my theme, though many Venetian masterpieces are dis-
persed throughout the world.

Ponte Salute, 1951

PART ONE

Entry by Railway

IN our time there is little of die sensation of the Grand Tour
about the journey to Venice, for not one of the various machines
that takes us there, the train, the motor car, the aeroplane or even
the humble bicycle, bears any resemblance to the slow and stately
roll of the stage coach, and though it may be preferable to approach
Venice by sea, as was intended, few people these days go to the
trouble of arranging such a detour. Yet in spite of our new methods
of travel Venice still remains secure on her islands in the middle of
the shining sea, and it is only after many hours of subdued excite-
ment that we reach her. This exhausting delay has all the painful
thrills of courtship, for only the most prosaic of men would say
that he was not already in love before he went. The pain is exquisite,
the hours of sleeplessness are full of the fever of anticipation, and
the only one of the senses that seems to keep at all normal is the
appetite.

For here we are on the Simplon-Orient Express, the most ro-
mantic and most exciting train in Europe. . . .

The sensation of speed as we sit in our little upholstered compart-
ment, and the fantastic spectacle of the Alps as we pass through
them, increase the sense of unreality, and it is only punctuated by
the dinner bells, and later by the gentlemen of the customs who
come to interrupt our noisy but drowsy insomnia with their rubber
stamps and awkward questions. We are trundled and shunted
through the Alps, and rush through the tunnels and the hollows of
the mountains in the weird blue light from the tiny bulb, and en-
deavour to keep our feet warm as the cold, stale air forces its way
through the flapping blinds. In the Simplon Tunnel the nightmare
reaches its height, for there we are almost asphyxiated by an inrush
of smoke, until the whole train is full of coughing and spluttering
people in a fog more dense and more virulent than ever was re-
ported to occur in London. The corridors are full of agonized shapes
bent double and almost crawling about for air, and for the next
two hours we struggle for breath and wheeze and whistle as though

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

in the throes of bronchitis. No sooner are we settled and about to
resume our troubled dream than the excitable Yugoslav lady in the
next compartment breaks in on us thinking that we are the
lavatory

Dawn, still the most innocent of pleasures, restores a certain
amount of sanity to the ride, and though we are covered with grit
and in a state of disarray, the scenery outside by no means brings
us back to complete normality, for here is the landscape of astonish-
ment! Miles and miles of waste matter, mountains of rocks still
weeping with the agony of upheaval. Alps shrouded in clouds of
melancholy, tipped with snow of desolation, a scene of turbulent
and terrifying beauty, dripping with rain. There is water everywhere,
gulleys filled to overflowing, watershoots rushing into boiling rivers,
waterfalls dashing themselves into valleys strewn with boulders.
Occasionally in the clean grey light we pass various smelting works
sending up fountains of orange sparks, but everything is dwarfed
by mountains. . . . And we fall to thinking how people living in
this gigantic setting came to make such delicate things as wrist
watches. . . . We pass tiny villages perched on inaccessible heights,
and, nearer to the railway, towns of unusual cleanliness and neatness,
in moss green, pale pink, white and slate-grey, and then at last we
reach the great stretch of Lake Maggiore lying like a pool of tears
and we are in the Plain of Lombardy.

The dreams and mists of the night, the odd sensations of burrow-
ing and panting, of being drenched with rain, and of being half
suffocated in the middle of a mountain, give way to something akin
to relief and happiness, as the train, now busy with the bustle of
breakfast, slips down into Italy, During the night too, at some point
in our dream, the train has changed its character, for now everything
is Italian instead of French, and for the first time we bring out the
little bundle of dirty notes that we had saved for a whole year left
over from the last trip to Italy, and for which we so cunningly
risked our reputations with those international watchdogs whose
sole purpose in life is to harry poor travellers and preserve the
parish boundaries of a quickly shrinking Europe. But even this
peccadillo, which makes us momentarily share the thrill of inter-
national racketeers, is quickly forgotten at the sight of Italy. Italy
again! At last we are on the right side of the Alps! For some reason
which I can never understand, Italy gives me confidence : clouds of
doubt, storms of indecision, little cold winds of fear, all seem to get

10

ENTRY BY RAILWAY

left behind at the first sight of the sun and the classical neatness
of the countryside. It is useless to keep repeating that we all come
home to Italy, but sometimes the commonplace expression is the
most apt.

The journey across the Plain of Lombardy gives us just sufficient
time to make the adjustment between the world we have left behind
and the world we will live in when we reach Venice, and though it
may be quicker to go by air and settle down on the Lido like a
mosquito, this interim period is very valuable, for of all the cities
in the world Venice is a city of the horizon and it is better to slide
into it gradually than to drop into it from above. Furthermore,
this gradual ride, when we have left the straggling ugliness of Milan
behind, is very beautiful, like a ride on a scenic railway through a
vast garden, studded with towns whose very names conjure up a
hundred pleasant associations Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, Padua,
each with its city walls, its towers, villas and cathedral. But each
also with its scars from the war, for the armies swept this way, and
there are still many wrecked buildings with pock-marked plaster,
and on the sidings an occasional row of burnt-out coaches and
rolling-stock.

Very soon, to the north, the Alps become a distant fringe, with
magnificent pile upon pile of cumulus clouds suddenly halted by the
heat of the plain, while around us on every side stretches a green and
cultivated landscape, clear and crisp in the morning sun. The fields
of reddish earth are hedged with sycamores, willows and acacias,
and as far as eye can see there is a topiary of tall Lombardy poplars
looking like columns with statues on them. Vines are festooned
among dwarf poplars and along poles, the maize fields wave their
silvery tassels and sunflowers dot die shrill green with violent spots
of yellow. Along the pale green rivers and the canals are banks of
rushes and reeds and occasionally a cluster of tufted bamboo. Hay-
makers, in large straw hats, slowly turn the swathes the hats, the
flesh, the hay and the earth all burnt to the same colour while in
other fields white oxen slowly lumber or draw the hay-carts down
narrow lanes. Farm buildings, built in Roman style round an en-
closed quadrangle, stand out against the viridian, their walls washed
pink or red, or even pure ultramarine with white paintwork, while
in their gardens June roses hang like paper flowers. The roofs are of
Roman tiles and are sometimes enlivenJed by statues; statues of the
saints appear in niches in the walls, and on one occasion there is a

II

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

house with an amphora built into the apex of the gable. Interspersed
among the farms are severe villas, box-like and white, blossoming
at the top with baroque cornices and heraldic devices, or else old
churches newly repaired since the war, with gleaming white sculp-
tures of modern design, among hamlets of tumbledown houses
where the washing blows. All is a colour scheme of ochre, light red,
emerald, white and cocoa pink.

The stations too have been largely rebuilt since the war, in a style
that is cheerful and practical. They are oases of noise and commotion,
and seem to be used as social clubs as much as anything. The arrival
of a train produces a crescendo of excitement, the sleepers awake,
the young men cease from gossiping, the old ones stop their card
playing, families struggle in emotional ganglions either to get on
or to get off the train. Nuns break through obliquely with their
black bundles, and boys thrust their gleaming chromium bicycles
through the crush. Then there are the young and handsome police-
men, serious and helmeted, hands behind their backs, pistols at their
sides, who always perambulate in pairs with great dignity, followed
by ice-cream and mineral-water sellers. We on the train lean out
of our windows bemused, and read underneath, upside down, the
names on the white board Paris, Milano, Venezia, Trieste, Beo-
grad, Istanbul

As we near the green flat lands of Mestre everything becomes more
quiet and deserted. The flat verges of the track grow clover, small
blue convolvulus, wild barley and poppies, and we are more con-
scious of the puffing of the engine. Among the tall poplars the cam-
paniles with their conical roof caps hint at Venice. There are belfries,
poplars and pylons stretching to the horizons on either side, while
nearer, the waving emerald fronds of the acacias are stirred by the
passingofthetrain.Mestre,thelaststationbeforeVenice,is thenearest
small town on the mainland, but it is so near to Venice that I doubt
if anybody has noticed it very much. I have only the most fleeting
memory of its appearance, for when I go through it I am too excited
and when I come back I am far too sad. On this occasion there were
a few gipsies camped in a field, their bony horses, unharnessed,

wandering and nibbling at the edges Then we were off again:

next stop Venice. Very quickly now we glide along. The sky opens
up, and the light becomes more brilliant as we near the sea. The trees
become bushes and then scrub, the fields become marshes, and then
tutu into iron-rust mud-flats, which in their turn become grey.

12

ENTRY BY RAILWAY

Among the mud-flats, veined and channelled, are winding canals,
and upon them black barges with orange sails.

The canals open out into shallow pools, and the train is soon upon
the causeway joining Venice to the mainland. Telegraph wires,
cables and other life-lines swing out over the lagoons, and the
whole vast seascape, dwarfed now by the great expanse of sky, is
stuck with poles and pylons, which fade away among the low-lying
islands in a bright and dazzling haze. Far away and scarcely visible
are Torcello, Burano and Murano, and, as the train rides rapidly
over the sea, the towers and domes of Venice begin to appear,
colourless yet and indistinguishable, shimmering between sky and
sea behind a moving screen of poles. Soon, as we near Venice,
things begin to sort themselves out: the pylons fade and the towers
get bigger, until, over all, rises the Campanile di San Marco. Colours
become defined from the general haze, golden ochre, pink and white,
as the shabby buildings of the northern, fondamente take shape, with
boats moored up against them, black and ultramarine, with sails
of orange and red. In front of us is the outsize bright green dome of
San Simeone Piccolo, and the low-lying platforms of the station.
We are in Venice at last. We have entered by the back gate, by the
tradesman's entrance. . . .

The station has a matter-of-fact charm. It is built of concrete, and
the awnings of the platforms have ceilings of what might be either
shining glass mosaic or fish scales laid in cement. There is a row of
potted flowers and palms in earthenware tubs, glossy magazine
stalls and all the usual appointments, including a fountain of drink-
ing water. We learn as time goes on that this is no ordinary station,
for from it we not only enter one of the most exotic of cities, but
say goodbye to many a friend. Venice is a pkce of comings and
goings, and the station the beginning and ending of Venice for the
majority of visitors. Thus, perforce, this small terminus at the end
of a causeway over the sea takes on an added importance, and though
there is little to admire, we become attached to it in a special way.
It is one thing, meanwhile, to enter the station, but quite another
to get out, for no sooner are we through the barrier than we have
to undergo an ordeal by porters. Twenty men in white suits, each
with the name of an important hotel engraved upon his hat and his
heart, arrange themselves in a row on either side of the corridor,
and each, with all the good intentions in the world, thinks that we
have come to stay at his especial hotel. As the names of these grand

13

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

pkces are shouted out, it is embarrassing for us to know that ours
is a meaner destination, and disheartening for them that they are
deprived of the pleasure of whisking us and our baggage to such halls
of luxury. The situation is not much better when we get outside,
except that there is more room in which to dodge about, for we are
beset by a crowd of hatless young men in well-laundered shirts who
are very, very willing to help us with so small a quantity of baggage.
The Venice of our dreams is beginning to come up against
reality; our days of courtship from afar are over, for we have met
Venice at last, even though we have been introduced to her from
behind.

Entry by Road

HP HE entry by train into Venice is quite a pleasant experience,
JL and though we might have wished, to approach in a more
leisurely fashion by steamer from Fusina or Chioggia or even
from our private yacht if we had one the majority of people come
over the causeway. The train, however, is not the only way, for
parallel with the railway line is the motor road, so that it is possible
to bring a car right into Venice. This latter method has a peculiar
character of its own, and at the risk of delay I think it deserves
some notice, if only to emphasize the contrast between the twentieth
century and the remains of past centuries, with which we live when
we reach Venice. We are most of us in some measure sufficiently
accustomed to railways to overlook the row of scars they have
left on the countryside, but the acute modernity of the auto-strada
from Padua to Mestre must come somewhat as a surprise even to
the hardened motorist. Living as we do in a violent age, we cannot
hope to leave it except by violent means : and along the auto-strada
we are, quite frankly, projected from the twentieth century, and come,
limp and exhausted, upon a scene of comparative tranquillity where
little has changed since the eighteenth.

In the past, trade and commerce were kept in their places as rather
sordid adjuncts to elegant living, but today we seem to care little
for elegance but only for selling commodities to each other; we
seem to have lost the desire to see either nature or architecture un-
adorned by advertisements. Thus, as no century but ours could have
created a Piccadilly Circus where people make pilgrimages to see
advertisements in neon tubes and stand for hours enraptured before
them no century but ours could have created a road like the auto-
strada from Padua to Mestre. If we were to sit down and deliberately
devise the quintessence of the motor age we could not do it more
perfectly than it has been done here, though doubtless, as our
cities change and we build new ones, there will be further
developments.

Mile after mile of concrete has been laid in a perfectly straight line

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

across the countryside, regardless of any features that may have been
underneath, and now it is possible to dash at high speed into Venice,
as though Venice, having been there for so long, couldn't wait a
little longer. People arrive breathless and hot and almost fall into the
Grand Canal with haste. (This method of arrival certainly pleases the
hotels and the porters for the greater the speed with which you
arrive the more money you will almost certainly possess!) But it is
not so much the factor of speed which gives the autostrada its
character, as the way the verges of the road are used to display
advertisements. For, as though the makers and masters of the twen-
tieth century were afraid to let us go, they give us a concentrated
dose of propaganda, and every ten yards, without exception, on
either side of the road, for all those long and boring miles, are
arranged huge hoardings with brightly coloured advertisements for
canned foods, machine oils, corsetry, beauty aids, toothpastes,
sedatives, laxatives, patent medicines, spare parts, typewriters,
sewing machines and every conceivable blessing bestowed upon us
by the ant-heaps of modern industry. So as not to hurt the eyes, the
hoardings are considerately arranged at angles, but are arranged so
cleverly that no sooner has one message reached the brain than
another one strikes it. They play little games among themselves,
such as when they spell out a mystic name letter by letter over a
quarter of a mile, and then give the complete answer in one glorious
splash of colour, with a kind of bright chuckle and a picture of a
huge set of cleaned teeth. And then, to further intrigue the eyes
for monotony is anathema to advertising we are favoured by ten-
foot lettering across a bridge, or, if any house had the misfortune to
have been standing there when the concrete was laid, it has now
become covered with placards and posters on every possible angle
and surface, so that if you lived there you would look out of die
windows in the middle of an enormous face, or become a little
figure peeping round a huge letter, or else coincide exactly with the
end of a huge tube of toothpaste and look as though you were
being squeezed out. In such a setting there never was a greater
excuse for speed, and it is like running down an endless brightly
coloured paper alley, from which there is no escape whatsoever, no
blinking from side to side it is impossible to see the landscape,
anyway, so cleverly are the intervals of the advertisements arranged
and we sit enclosed in a tin box in upholstered comfort, in a state
of almost trance-like fascination, usually to the accompaniment of

18

ENTRY BY ROAD

blaring music from a hidden radio. Not content with this fine spec-
tacle of advertisements which some wag in London called "the
art galleries of the people" each motor car or autobus is required
to pay an entrance fee, and at either end is a toll gate with a
commissionaire.

As the trains are welcomed by a modern and up-to-date station,
all motor traffic congregates in a modern square called the Piazzale
Roma. In this outpost of the twentieth century are examples of
typical bus and coach stop architecture, the universal architecture of
the petrol age, the same to be found at the Coach Station in Victoria
or over the whole planet wherever the petrol engine has penetrated.
It is surely the drabbest style ever evolved by man, utterly without
character, mechanics' architecture, yet the first really honest uni-
versal style that has in no way relied on revivals from previous ages.
Though at St. Pancras or Euston we might be forgiven for thinking
we were about to enter a Gothic cathedral or a Greek temple, at the
Piazzale Roma there is no doubt at all that we have either come out
of a motor car or are just about to get into one. The Piazzale Roma,
though actually in Venice, is one of the ugliest squares in the world,
and this is the main architectural contribution of our century to the
glories of Venice. One thing at least we must be thankful for, that
here all motor vehicles must remain. They can go no farther. By a
glorious accident of history the streets of Venice are paved with
neither gold nor stones but awash with sea-water, and thus Venice
has unwittingly beaten the motor car. In the Piazzale Roma there
is a gargantuan garage of many storeys, built to receive all in-
coming cars which are driven up spiral ramps as into an enormous
shell. And here they must stay until it is time to reclaim them.
(On the return journey along the autostrada it will be discovered
that the advertisements are on both sides of the hoardings, thus
saving space and creating efficiency, as well as reminding the
motorists that they are again back in their own century.) Once in
the car park, all wants are catered for: an hotel is phoned, a lift
called by some an elevat or works down the centre of the building,
porters hand the baggage into waiting gondolas, and the visitors
are rowed away, somewhat astonished, from the sights of the
twentieth century into a city where little has been added for two
hundred years. . . . How very helpless a motorist must feel when he
first steps into a gondola!

19

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

* * *

THE first and quite overwhelming impression on entering Venice
is that life slows down. Everything becomes leisurely. There is no
need to hurry at all. It is as though the clock were put back a genera-
tion or two, and we glide over the lapping and gently moving waters
as our grandfathers must have done. I choose this period deliberately,
for on first arrival there is a distinctly Edwardian atmosphere about
Venice, an impression which slowly fades as we get to know
her better. Later we come to realize the peculiar timelessness of
Venice, which enables us to drift up and down history through the
medium of her buildings and works of art: superficially she has
about her the qualities we associate with the Edwardian era, an
atmosphere of old-fashioned gaiety, at once modern and yet
belonging slightly to the past. The public steamboats which ply up
and down the Grand Canal, as well as the host of other kinds of
water traffic, create for an Englishman the feeling of a regatta on the
Thames. It is like arriving in the middle of a permanent holiday.

The little steamboats water buses they are chug from side to
side of the Grand Canal. They lazily approach and bump the landing
stages, exchange passengers and leave again with a quiet, homely
patience. They glide past the scores of palaces that line die waterway,
down past the markets and under the big arch of the Rialto Bridge,
then round the bend and under the Japanese-garden-bridge at die
Accademia, along to the great white ornament of Santa Maria
della Salute which always seems to be leaning backwards from the
water or slightly swaying thence to San Marco. Gay and bright
in holiday clothes, crowds of people stroll along the quayside and
throng the Piazzetta and the Piazza; the air is full of the fluttering
wings of pigeons, throbbing with the music of the great bells and
sweet with the strains of the string orchestras playing sentimental
Austrian tunes. . . . Irresistibly the flavour of another age steals over
us, the days of straw hats, bustles and parasols, the last few years
before the petrol age. Slowly we realize what it is that is creating
this feeling: there are no motor cars, no traffic, no advertisements!
People are simply strolling about, quite at random, in any direction
they please, singly or in groups, or, merely standing still if they so
desire, in the middle of everything, looking at nothing in particular,
unless it be a statue on a parapet or an angel against the sky. ...

Do not come to Venice if you are pressed for time.

20

Hotels and Tourists

scene on the Riva degli Schiavoni in the late afternoon is
-L always one of great animation. Through the Canale delk
Grazia, one of the water gates to Venice, the steamboats are bringing
in their loads from the islands, and every now and then the hooters
split the air with shrieks of delight. As the boats near the quaysides
it might be thought that they were carrying choirs, for they are full
of children returning from schools or from some bathing haunt and
singing at the tops of their voices in the high-pitched way so charac-
teristic of Italian children. Nuns, oddly dressed shepherdesses,
lead their flocks ofFthe boat, and, with great confusion, get them past
the ice-cream barrow and through the sottoportico on their way to
San Zaccaria. Gondolas ride at anchor, patiently waiting for moon-
light, while speedboats bounce and splash along the surface of the
water on their way to the evening races up the Grand Canal. A long,
low-lying cargo boat, with brilliant patches of red lead upon her
side, makes her way slowly from the docks out to sea. In the back-
ground is the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, white and pink, with
its green dome clear and sharp in the evening light. There is the
endless parade of people in front of us, walking backwards and for-
wards along the waterfront, and at the caf tables crowds of visitors
are busy with ice-creams and brightly coloured drinks, cups of
coffee, and tea, which is served here with some degree of accuracy.
Along the Riva are some of the more expensive hotels in Venice,
and all day long, groups of tourists arrive from the Piazzale Roma or
the station. As the laden gondolas draw in to the quayside a whistle
blows, and young men clothed in white with golden epaulettes,
slaves of the hotel foyers, rush out to meet them. The whistle blows
again, and baggage slaves, old men with white bristles on their faces,
dressed in humiliating French-blue overalls with aluminium
stamped name-plates on their caps, break loose from a huddled
group of porters waiting for the call. They seize the heavy loads
with eagerness, and then, groaning anjl resigned, hump the suit-
cases, trunks and hat-boxes in procession through the crowd of

23

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

ice-cream and balloon sellers, idlers, urchins and strollers, and past the
crowded cafe tables. The owners of this impressive baggage, having
received the final salutations of the gondoliers, take up lie rear of
the procession, rather self-consciously assuming an air of nonchal-
ance which deceives nobody except themselves soberly dressed in
their travelling clothes: suits somewhat overpressed, the ladies
sporting international travelling hats. But, as their baggage, so care-
folly emblazoned with all the heraldry of the Grands HStels de I' Europe,
is the only familiar sight in Venice so far, they follow it, rather
helplessly, occasionally stealing a sideways glance at the frontage of
their new hotel. The troupe of slaves lead the way, and the pro-
cession is last seen disappearing into a softly lit interior, glittering
with gold, sparkling with chandeliers and littered with glossy
magazines arranged in fans upon shiny table tops. . . .

In these marble halls, in that naked expensive modern style where
so much emphasis is placed on the beauty of unadorned flat materials
arranged in slabs, or in the seductively renovated, seductively lit
old palaces (where so much emphasis was pkced on adorning
already elaborately shaped surfaces) these visitors move around in a
make-believe world like princes and princesses. For that, indeed,
is what the luxury tourists in Venice have become. This is an exten-
sion into real life of film romanticism: you are directed, produced
and presented by a system which is easy, glamorous and very
pleasant, with backcloths, settings and lighting the like of which
are not to be found anywhere else in Europe. In this sumptuous
atmosphere, constantly irradiated with electric lights day and night,
with the vision somewhat out of focus, we must presume that the
visitors retire to intimate quilted chambers, to beds as soft as summer
clouds, to perfumed baths, with gilded consoles kden with gladioli
(which are in season at this time), and ivory telephones hidden in
settecento lacquer cabinets, and with slaves of every description-
Negro and Chinese as well as beautiful Italians who are only too
pleased to feel the tingle of an electric bell down their spines, who
will rush about tirelessly and noiselessly with luxurious food and
drinks in between meals. It is a world of sophisticated behaviour,
where everything is possible, where the outrageous and exorbitant
become normal, where all the whims of human nature which
would be tolerated normally only in the sick-room and the nursery
--are gratified and even encouraged, and where life is very pleasant,
dreamy and absurd. (I spent a whole evening in the DanieUi a litde

24

HOTELS AND TOURISTS

while ago with an American acquaintance who for hours tormented
the information clerks with exhaustive enquiries about plane ser-
vices from Venice to Switzerland because he wanted to buy a cuckoo
clock. They played the game with straight faces, flicking through
timetables and brochures, entering into the fantasy of the whole
thing as part of normal life, exactly as in dreams.)

The habits of the luxury tourists are less subtly changed than the
habits of the humbler type in Venice, for, apart from their occasional
outings by gondola, they seem to be quite satisfied with the charms
of their wonderful hotels : for what can life hold of equal splendour?
Venice forms but another background to a world tour from one
grand hotel to another, carried out rather like the great perambula-
tions of princes from court to court during the Renaissance
except that in those days there were so many retainers in the en-
tourage that they usually left the countryside impoverished and
bereft of singing birds, while today the wealthy are encouraged to
leave behind a fragment of their fortunes where they pass, anony-
mously, through the real world, cushioned and protected by the
glamour of their existence from the stern realities of the century.
Occasionally they stroll on foot to make an expensive purchase in
the Piazza San Marco,-or cross the Grand Canal in a gondok for a
thousand Ike (they could do the same for ten at the ferry) to buy a
piece of exotic glass or an antique, or else issue from their hotels to
glance dumbly at the knobbly front of the San Moise on their way
to the night club or to those one or two smart bars which remind
them so much of London or New York. These modern bars, which
make them feel at home, are a kind of bohemian version of the
grander modernism of the hotels, where they can relax over gin,
whisky and international cocktails and burst out into noisy gossip,
away from the quiet dignity and ceremonial of hotel life. Even
though these bars are in die tittle informal alleys, how remote they
really are, part of the unreality of Venice, Venice masked for the
festa

The great triumph of the luxury tourists occurs after dark.
The dream spreads outwards from the hotels and drifts about the
canals like a pleasant apparition. A piece of the film breaks loose,
and for an hour or two we keep catching glimpses of it slipping
under bridges or at the end of alleys, or we hear, above the normal
noise of Italian night life in the streets, strains of the sound track play-
ing the familiar sweet tunes. Every night the gondoliers mass their

25

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

black swans outside the bright crystal doors of the hotels. The boats
are trimmed with paper lanterns (little concertinas of coloured
paper with flickering candles inside) or, on certain occasions, with
boughs of leaves in arches, over the velyet cushions. Soon, with
unsmiling faces stilled by the trance of luxury the procession of
spotlessly clad, middle-aged business men and their wives embarks.
The gondoliers break out into the well-known songs, perhaps with
guitar or other musical accompaniment, and then glide mockingly
away with their precious cargo and with a great show of synthetic
romanticism. These large flotillas, of eight to ten gondolas, all full
of people who apparently enjoy their romance in herd formation,
as in die warm intimacy of a crowded cinema, make their way
slowly up the Grand Canal and then along the side canals up the
well-known processional route. The gondoliers sing, the lanterns
sway, and wrapped in each other's arms or sitting hip to hip upon
the cushions, the occupants glide through Venice in complete
silence, a silence at once extraordinary and embarrassing, as though
we on the bridges were possessed of the gift of seeing the faces of
people wracked by private ecstasy in the middle of a film. And yet
at the same time they are the actors and actresses in the film and we
are the audience: for the Venetians succeed where Hollywood has
failed for thirty years, and they are staging, for the benefit of wealthy
tourists flatteringly elected to play the leading r6les, a film version
of Venetian life, or, rather, what the Venetians think is expected of
them. The truth seems to be that this version as presented and
directed by the Venetians is very much better than ever Hollywood
could contrive, for the locale is authentic and the properties genuine.
Perhaps this is what the Americans desire of Venice: anyway, they
seem extraordinarily pleased with it, and it adds interest to the
Venetian evenings. The whole quaint spectacle is somewhat aston-
ishing to English eyes, for we are still a little backward and squeamish
about some of the methods of mass exhibitionism beloved of Ameri-
cans : we are made to feel more than ever like grandparents witness-
ing the exuberant and, to us, tasteless behaviour of uncontrollable
offspring. The world, however, cannot stand still ... It all becomes
part of the mirage of Venice.

THE metamorphosis of the humbler tourist is less spectacular, but
each in its own degree is full of those curiosities which make foreign

26

HOTELS AND TOURISTS

travel a compound of irritation and delight and Venice a place of
infinite surprises. I do not propose to mention in great detail die
many different kinds of minor hotels and alberghi, the majority
of which are clean, comfortable and dull, but rather to pick upon
one or two that might bring out a certain piquancy, to help me
build up the picture of Venice the exotic, and yet not to exaggerate,
unless by using some odd image I can express still more the magic
of the place. Let us, then, follow the tourist who carries his own
baggage, who is somewhat suspicious of porters, or even allergic,
as many are in this century, to servants of any kind. He disappears
into some shaded doorway in a crowded alley, nearly always
surprised at the shabbiness of the place after the glowing name
and allurements printed on the letter heading he received in
England. . . . Perhaps his hotel turns out to be one of those pkces
where the rooms become cheaper the higher he climbs : until, if he
were prepared to sleep on the roof he could do so for practically
nothing (services and taxes included). ... It would sport a slightly
attractive entrance, perhaps with a mirror, or a chair or two upon
which nobody ever sits, and then a flight of stairs up to the office of
the padrone. This gentleman, pale through living in one room for
thirty years, is nearly always asleep on his couch. A great pendulum
clock hanging above him is ticking away the hours of his imprison-
ment; the eagle carved in walnut hovering upon its pediment is
waiting for carrion. His room is stacked with ledgers, police forms
for the tourists, and has a telephone with a mouthpiece like a black
daffodil and a little starting handle. . . . Upon his desk will be seen
stacks of that so familiar and glamorous notepaper : this is where it
came from, and it has brought a man a thousand miles, back to
Venice,

From this office radiates a gloomy labyrinth of staircases and cor-
ridors, hanging with twenty-five-watt bulbs and decorated with
posters of last year's festivals. The rooms at first look dreadfully
gloomy, for they are always left in total darkness until the new
occupant arrives. They seem to sleep between visits, and each new
tourist brings a new day. The homely fat lady, dressed in conven-
tional black with a white apron, who knows the mysterious arrange-
ment of all the furniture in every hole in the labyrinth, now makes
her way across the sleeping room and throws open the rattling
shutters, announcing in triumph, "Ecco Venezia!" much in the
same way as the cab driver used to announce the glories of Rome

27

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

in the last century. Suddenly, in rush an alarming noise from below
and blinding sunshine from above. There is either a view of the
narrow street with its procession of people seen from above, a view
of the rooms opposite, or the well in between four walls draped
with washing hanging on sticks like sad pennants, or else, if luck
will have it, a truly magnificent view of the Basilica of St. Mark
with its colourful parade of pigeons and people in the Piazza.
Such rooms will have red damask wallpaper, or dark brown, per-
haps with late nineteenth-century oleographs upon them of Italian
rustics making love under a pergola, or examples of exceedingly
ugly wall plaques, in green and caramel pottery, with sea-horses
or snakes struggling to free themselves from the prickly background.
The beds might be of massive turned mahogany, or massive turned
mahogany imitated in cast iron and grained, or else they may be
lighter structures painted with swags of roses. (Whatever the design
of the beds, it is best to sleep upside down on them, or, to be more
explicit, to reverse the pillows so that the head is where the feet
usually are. This procedure, which alarms the chambermaid for
some days, who tries to make the visitor sleep properly like other
people, is due to the fact that the beds have been so well slept in
that they slope badly one way, and thus if the weight is reversed
the bed usually becomes level again.) The wash bowls in these rooms
are usually only supported by the waste pipe and it is safer not to
lean upon them ; all drawers are difficult to open, and the wardrobes,
which have distorting mirrors at the front (as though to mock at
you for coming, or to make you part of the mirage of Venetian
life), possess rows of forlorn coat hangers left by generations of
visitors. Behind the doors are nearly always found those ekborate
arrangements of turned mahogany knobs, reminiscent of bagpipes,
which are another kind of coat hanger but which nearly always
fold up when used, while outside there is a balcony covered with
Virginia creeper or other climbing plant which straggles along the
front of the building.

At one time, when such rooms were furnished, in 1890 or 1900,
they must have been modern and smart, and little has been added
to them since the day the decorators left. They are truly period
pieces, belonging to die Baedeker period of hotel furnishing, and
they can be quite charming, especially if well situated; and, as
practically everyone concerned with the running of such hotels has
long ago lost any interest in efficiency, they can be homely and

28

HOTELS AND TOURISTS

private. One could safely die in such rooms without anybody being

the wiser However, for those who prefer something a little

more recent there are the many hotels furnished and decorated
during the Oatmeal Period, twenty or thirty years ago, when the
walls were uncompromisingly distempered and the rooms provided
with simple box-like furniture in ginger pine, rooms clean and
characterless but hateful to live in for long, prepared as though to
receive a hospital patient. Then there are the many examples of
excellent small hotels, which reflect, like distant cousins, some of
the glamour of the grand hotels, which ape in miniature the features
and manners of their betters, with a display of glittering lights,
awkward upward-shooting sprays of gladioli, carpeted floors and
staircases, a liberal supply of magazines and deep square chairs, and
a few odd panels small and second-rate of mosaic or engraved
glass to add the spice of modern art. In fact, there is little that Venice
does not know about hotels, and it is wise never to remain long in
one place, if only to discover a better one or one equally surprising
in a completely different way.

THE tourists quickly shed their travelling caterpillar clothes, and
then emerge into the streets as butterflies, resplendent in gay dresses
and bright shirts. They become the owners of one of the innumer-
able designs of straw hats, from sober panama and orange-coloured
topee to variegated Mexican styles ; and then, if they have not
already done so, they cover their eyes with dark glasses, so that the
Venetian scene so gay and colourful is reduced to the greyness
of a winter's day or, what is more extraordinary, is seen through
green glass, so that it looks like a rather unconventional scene on the
ocean bed. A desire common to nearly all on arrival is to shed as
much clothing as possible in the heat, so that, unlike Arab countries,
where people seem to go muffled in bedding, there is a constant
display of arms and legs white legs for the sun to scorch and white
arms to bump up against in the crowded alleys. (This phenomenon,
peculiar to our own times, has occasioned the Church to adopt a
slightly modified view towards nakedness, but still it is difficult and
by no means easy to enter a church half-naked, and has given rise to
new functions for the beadle at the door and a new occupation to
old ladies who are shocked at the spectacle, as well as to a new prob-
lem of behaviour, for it is now decreed that men's arms and boys'

29

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

legs may visit a church, but men's legs and women's arms are con-
sidered unduly seductive and must be draped. . . .) It is odd, how-
ever, to see a tourist issue nonchalantly from the portal of his hotel
dressed in a most violently coloured coat-shirt, with a design of
arum lilies or South American jungle flowers all over it, with his
legs quite naked, except for sandals, as though he had come out of
his bathroom and forgotten to put his trousers on. ... But still,
personally, I am in favour of as much nakedness as possible, provid-
ing that, after a certain age, a little discretion is exercised. . . .

No sooner does the tourist emerge into the teeming streets,
glancing this way and that, clutching a map, a guide-book and
camera, than he is set upon by all manner of people who want to
relieve him of money. . . . First the man who advances with a
tray of postcards, who performs tricks with folding views of Venice,
concertina-like, long enough to make Christmas festoons ; wadges
of cards, coloured, uncoloured, good and bad; masses of guide-
books in all European languages, and maps galore from those
which have little pictures on them of the sights, which are quite
useless ; maps of Venice which have been very freely rendered by
cartographers' assistants in the back-alley printing works of Venice,
Padua and Milan; to really good maps of Venice which have the
streets, squares, canals and bridges drawn in the right proportions.
Next comes the man with the white cloth cap and black alpaca
coat who appears, at first, to have unusually gaudy sleeves like a
mandarin, but who, on a closer look, is seen to be draped with
scores of cheap and charming glass necklaces, and with him another
man who advances with a little, well-made box of shallow drawers,
to show you, not his collection of beetles, but trays of cameos and
mosaic and glass brooches. Then whispering into your ear as you
pass the street corner is the man who can change your money, or
those sirens who will oblige by introducing you to the many shady
pleasures of Venice. And the young men who seem to conjure an
inexhaustible supply of American cigarettes out of their pockets,
and their brother conjurors who keep extremely large and glittering
wrist-watches up their sleeves, watches so ekborate that you could
time a split-second bombardment or easily judge the winner of a
car race. Then the bright-eyed, bright-shirted youths who will take
you rowing, at your expense, or show you Venice, or drink a beer
with you if you'll pay for it, or who will become your bosom friend
for the evening, or take you to visit their favourite gondolier, or

10

HOTELS AND TOURISTS

any manner of thing, whatever will best cater for the pleasure of
your stay in Venice. Finally, the people who live in the Piazza San
Marco the plague of photographers, the bird-seed men, the flower
sellers; and those others, usually most deserving, who are hungry,
envious and maddened by shortages, who yet somehow remain
cheerful and proud the scores of adolescents condemned to a life
of idleness through unemployment, who come from the prolific
families of the outer districts of Venice to live a Tantalus-existence
among the fashionable crowds of the Piazza.

Today there is another class of tourist more peculiar to our
time, tourists who do not effect a metamorphosis because they
have nothing to change into the brave young people in their
'teens and early twenties, who have come to Venice from all over
Europe by a hundred ways, on foot, on bicycles, hitch-hiking
students, schoolboys and schoolgirls, ready for summer adventures
away from home and young enough to endure the hardships of a
passage across Europe on very little money. They too see a side of
Venice that the rest don't see, but one thing is sure : that they enjoy
every hour of their stay, judging by their eyes, their ceaseless activity,
their talk. These young people the lanky English schoolboys, the
vociferous French, the serious Scandinavians, the younger genera-
tion of blond young men from Austria in those incredibly dirty
leather shorts are the great tower climbers, the great picture-
gallery-goers, the great Lido-swimmers, braving the heat of the
day and needing no siesta (as they will in twenty years' time!).
On the Island of the Giudecca is a youth hostel, another in the
artists' quarter of the Zattere, another at the University. (The work-
men, the artists, the educationalists and the youth of all nations :
do they not always appear together the labourers, the dreamers,
the idealists?) It is perhaps unfortunate for young people in Venice
that they are at an age when they have the least money and the
greatest appetites, but they make up in ebullience for what they
cannot eat of expensive foods. At the end of die day they can eat
together of quite wholesome though roughly served food in that
communal restaurant not far from the Rialto Bridge where they
can get a meal for a tenth of the price they would have to pay around
San Marco, or else they can eat in those down-to-earth, virile, noisy
sailors' trattorie on the Giudecca, with the luxury lights twinkling
across the water. . . . And if they cannot sleep in a proper bed there
is always the bottom of a barge for a night or two.

31

Piazza San Marco

1 I { HE only rime of the day when the Piazza San Marco wears an
JL air of innocence is round about four o'clock in the morning.
The dawns in Venice at this time of the year are unbelievably pure,
the air is fresh and clear and sweet-smelling, and the whole of the
sky is a soft pink which turns the buildings a pale lemon yellow,
The squares are deserted and quiet, except for the murmuring of the
pigeons that nestle with the saints and angels under the canopies of
St. Mark's and sit drowsily in neat rows among the richly encrusted
Byzantine ornaments. In front of me is the low fountain in the
Piazzetta dei Leonard bubbling up from the marble pavement like
a spring, and beyond, the rows of arcades, absolutely deserted. All
hint of revelry, of parading and showing-off that were herebutafew
hours ago are gone. The musicians are safely snoring in their beds,
the instruments are muffled in Florian's and Quadri's, Vanity, the
only one in Venice who has the gift of eternal youth, is sleeping
elsewhere, renewing herself for another long day. For a few hours
there is only the murmuring of the pigeons and this incomparable
stage-set suffused with pink light.

BY nine o'clock the scene has changed to one of bustle. The pigeons
are busily washing themselves, preening themselves and having their
early sips of water at the fountain. They paddle into the shallow
pool a dozen at a time, drink, bob and flutter, come out, shake their
feet, stretch their wings, straighten their tail feathers and then,
bright-eyed and cheerful, wheel away into the Piazza to start an-
other day of gorging bird-seed. The Piazza is quite unimaginable
without these gay little creatures strutting about in their immaculate
grey, pecking, bowing to each other, courting and murmuring,
good mannered and bright. They live a most elegant life, completely
free from worries, supported on the rates in a kind of welfare state
of their own, with free access above to Byzantium, and gay cosmo-
politan society below.

3 33

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

As the sun sweeps over the Piazza the shutters begin to go up in
the cool of the arcades and the shops reveal their glittering mer-
chandise. There is a scraping of hundreds of chairs and tables, and a
flicking of cloths as the waiters prepare the cafes for the never-failing
supply of visitors ; and the musicians somewhat wearily uncover their
instruments, their hair freshly brilliantined, for another non-stop
session of sweet music that continues from mid-morning till midnight
throughout the season. The early camera-clickers are out, though
the clicking has not yet reached the intensity that it will in a few
hours' time, and the tourists begin to appear, their faces shining with
delight at being in the Piazza San Marco so early in the morning
instead of being in office, factory or schoolroom. At nine o'clock
the great bells of the Campanile begin to sway, and soon the whole
square vibrates with overwhelming melodious noise and the day
has officially begun.

Round about this time, which is the time when Americans seem
to be well under way (Europeans seem to start somewhat later), the
tourist bureaux are crowded with people demanding information
about their next buses and trains to all parts of Italy or possibly the
world. Queueing is an English virtue, one of our ktest additions
to centuries of virtue! but the enthusiasm for it is shared by no
other race, except when they are reduced by starvation to bread
queues. So that to visit an international tourist bureau in Venice
when it is crowded, between nine and ten, demands infinite patience
and stamina and tactics more appropriate to the football field. It has
become the mode that one assumes one is there alone, and that the
only information of any importance to be given on that day is the
information about one's own journey: thus, amid scenes of un-
paralleled bad manners, people who would otherwise behave quite
courteously extract knowledge from the tortured and harassed men
behind the counter. It is once more, I believe, the mania for speed
that causes people to suddenly behave like lunatics, as though every
plane, train, boat or bus were about to rush away without them,
leaving them in a forlorn stationary position when they should be
hurtling away to another part of the globe. I always marvel at the
patience of the men behind the counter though they are less
patient in Italy than in England who spend their lives coping with
those terrible time-tables of international travel, who live a dry and
complicated fantasy life of world communications and answer the
interminable questions of semi-hysterical crowds. All this pushing

34

PIAZZA SAN MARCO

and elbowing becomes absurd, because later, round about eleven
o'clock or mid-day, the crowd has moved off and the very same
information is available in quietness that was available at nine-
thirty in pandemonium. Money-changing is the second great
adventure of early morning business in the Piazza, but here, in
the more solemn atmosphere of the banks, some slight order
has been brought into the proceedings, at least behind the grills:
we must assume that there is a system, though it is a mysterious one,
and the crowd never quite believes that it is being properly treated.
Here are relinquished neat travellers* cheques for fistsful of varie-
gated banknotes. We catch a glimpse of other people's money sys-
tems and subconsciously note the different designs on travellers'
cheques. Ours are neat and so are the Americans', the Germans' are
over-designed, the French ones are huge like school diplomas, and
the Egyptian ones simply bewildering. The process of reduction to
Italian currency is done by turning a mysterious handle on an adding
machine (which we trust is reliable) and the little slip is then passed
to the cashiers, who have the ability to count milliards of lire in
what must be the most musical set of numerals in the world. So
fond are they of counting that they have an odd method of dupli-
cating, which involves repeating die same numeral twice straight
off, a kind of numerical stammer accompanied, of course, by
grandiose flicking of the notes and banging of rubber stamps.

By the time the banknotes are sorted and stowed away the
Piazza will have miraculously filled with people, and the pigeons
will be gorging themselves. There is one thing about the crowd
in the Piazza which distinguishes it from all other crowds it is
always well washed, colourful, happy, immaculate and at the same
time overcome by a desire to have itself photographed. Our
ancestors for who except the Scots would not claim some^con-
nection with the civilization of the Mediterranean? have provided
an incomparable background against which to be photographed,
and everyone here suddenly realizes that he is twice as attractive
as he thought he was when he glanced into his hotel mirror, and
thinks, in his new-found self-appreciation, that the ornate facade of
St. Mark's is a background of suitable splendour. The curious thing
is that people do look good when they are in the Piazza San Marco,
which points to the value of a fine architectural setting. It is possible
to sit here and count more good-looking people passing by than
anywhere else in the world. We are astonished at the beauty of the

35

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

iiunan race, and marvel at the mysterious qualities of an architecture
which has for close on a thousand years formed a background for a
lundred radical changes of fashion. So fine and so subtle is the inter-
play between columns and spaces, between archways and crockets,
between pinnacles and domes that quite ordinary people like our-
selves are somehow flattered and made intensely aware of the impor-
tance of our bodies, the way we dress them and the way we stroll
them along. Everyone takes an interest in turn-out, to be in harmony
with the setting. Slovenliness is banished like a fiend, for everyone
knows that the moment he sets foot in the Piazza San Marco he is
on the stage and that he is taking part in the greatest parade on earth.
We are at once the actors and the audience, we are anonymous
and yet important. Friend meets friend and is immediately aston-
ished at the transformation. People fall to knocking years off their
ages, men hitherto taciturn become gallant, the ladies coquettish,
for the Piazza San Marco is the parade of the youth of all ages. Such
is the power of Venetian architecture, a lesson to all builders of
cities in the future. . . .

The professional photographers, though they have not been
allowed to build booths, have nevertheless taken permanent posses-
sion of one or two flagstones, and they encamp with tripods, black
hoods, boxes of plates and sun helmets. About these gentlemen with
their little black tents there is an old-fashioned air, so much more
leisurely are they, so much less frightening than the slick young men
who wield their modern cameras like weapons, who take one so
by surprise that they might as well be using water-pistols for the
nervousness they create. Besides, with the older method one has
more time to collect one's wits and think of one's best poses ; the
other way is far too candid and only creates an agony of suspense
until one sees the prints. To the professionals in the Piazza falls the
task of photographing the larger squads of tourists. Rubicund and
rosy Swiss will be lined up in rows, the ladies in front, the giants
behind, all giggling happily and blinking in the sun. They will be
provided with corn by the photographer's bird-seed assistant,
scattered on hands and arms and hair like confetti, and then, with
the happy domes of the Basilica bobbing up behind them, they will
be snapped under a cloud of fluttering pigeons. Meanwhile, as every
tourist these days carries a camera, the private photographers go
around seriously or semi-seriously snipping and snapping every-
where. If the Piazza San Marco were to dissolve tomorrow which

36

PIAZZA SAN MARCO

it might well do, for is it not a mirage? it could be reconstructed
in every detail without the slightest difficulty from the millions of
photographs taken in any one season.

The morning crowds quickly swarm into the Palazzo Ducale or
else into the Basilica. On a fine day the Staircase of the Giants is
thronged with visitors, once more snipping and snapping their way
into the palace. The courtyard of the palace is a moving mass of
amateur photographers, crouching and peering at all angles, swarm-
ing around the two over-ornamented bronze well-heads, and
adjusting their exposure meters under the arcades. Here let me inter-
pose and tell how I was prevented from drawing in this courtyard
by one of those fussy little officials. Why could I not sit down and
draw if so many were allowed to photograph, I asked? And though
I already knew the answer, it was nice to hear him say that there
were too many of them and only a few left of us. So if you enter
the stream of photographers you are free to record what you please,
but if you are merely an artist you must first obtain a permit. The
artist is here, in Venice of all places, completely vanquished by the
camera! Such has been the ironical course of history.

You will gather from all this that around San Marco there takes
place an orgy of photographing, and I fear that that is so : it is the
only fitting description that in any way approaches the truth.
People even take moving pictures of static architecture. But let us
not dwell too long on this modern phenomenon which makes all
tourism in Italy so selfconscious, so frequently embarrassing, and
state, here and now, that the splendour of the Piazza quite over-
whelms the antics of the tourists. Walk to the far end of the Piazza
and the crowd becomes a mass of small points of gay colour, sur-
rounded on all sides by palaces, with the trance-inducing avenues
of identical arches and windows, balustrades and parapets, the
dominating sheer brick of the Campanile on the right, the smaller
Tower of the Moors on the left, and the exquisite cluster in white
and gold and blue of the Basilica in the background.

VENICE still keeps up the wonderful custom of firing off a cannon
at mid-day. We are, as ever, taken by surprise and reminded by the
shock that we are getting hungry. The sun is at its zenith, the heat
is at its greatest and fresh breezes are coming in from the Adriatic.
The cannon also takes the pigeons by surprise, for they suddenly

37

PIAZZA SAN MARCO

it might well do, for is it not a mirage? it could be reconstructed
in every detail without the slightest difficulty from the millions of
photographs taken in any one season.

The morning crowds quickly swarm into the Palazzo Ducale or
else into the Basilica. On a fine day the Staircase of the Giants is
thronged with visitors, once more snipping and snapping their way
into the palace. The courtyard of the palace is a moving mass of
amateur photographers, crouching and peering at all angles, swarm-
ing around the two over-ornamented bronze well-heads, and
adjusting their exposure meters under the arcades. Here let me inter-
pose and tell how I was prevented from drawing in this courtyard
by one of those fussy little officials. Why could I not sit down and
draw if so many were allowed to photograph, I asked? And though
I already knew the answer, it was nice to hear him say that there
were too many of them and only a few left of us. So if you enter
the stream of photographers you are free to record what you please,
but if you are merely an artist you must first obtain a permit. The
artist is here, in Venice of all places, completely vanquished by the
camera! Such has been the ironical course of history.

You will gather from all this that around San Marco there takes
place an orgy of photographing, and I fear that that is so : it is the
only fitting description that in any way approaches the truth.
People even take moving pictures of static architecture. But let us
not dwell too long on this modern phenomenon which makes all
tourism in Italy so selfconscious, so frequently embarrassing, and
state, here and now, that the splendour of the Piazza quite over-
whelms the antics of the tourists. Walk to the far end of the Piazza
and the crowd becomes a mass of small points of gay colour, sur-
rounded on all sides by palaces, with the trance-inducing avenues
of identical arches and windows, balustrades and parapets, the
dominating sheer brick of the Campanile on the right, the smaller
Tower of the Moors on the left, and the exquisite cluster in white
and gold and blue of the Basilica in the background.

VENICE still keeps up the wonderful custom of firing off a cannon
at mid-day. We are, as ever, taken by surprise and reminded by the
shock that we are getting hungry. The sun is at its zenith, the heat
is at its greatest and fresh breezes are coming in from the Adriatic.
The cannon also takes the pigeons by surprise, for they suddenly

37

THE LION AND THE fEACOCK

rise and rush overhead in a great circle and then setde down again
It is also a signal for all the clocks and bells in the Piazza to start up
as though the explosion were the turning of the key in the lid of
giant musical box, and now, one after the other, they begin t
perform and jangle, to boom and bounce, until the whole squai
is drenched and shuddering with delightful noise. The signal is take
up by scores of other churches, first the bells of the Salute just aero:
the canal, and then by campanile after campanile, until the who!
of Venice at noonday is an island of ringing bells in the middle <
the sea. I am not a church-bell hater ; indeed, I do not know how an]
body could hate the bells of St. Mark's. In England, where we mal
our bells play tunes often rather doleful hymns we have a tei
dency to become caught up in certain literary and emotional associ
tions at times of the day when we least expect to, but in Venice-
indeed, wherever I have been in Italy bells seem to be enjoyed f
their delightful noise alone. As though the noise in the streets t 1
healthy human noises of shouting, singing, quarrelling and endl<
talking were not enough, the very buildings must join in aj
release tremendous floods of sound at given points of the d
throughout die whole peninsula from the Dolomites to Sici
Not for the Italians the doleful strains of "Rock of Ages" and^uc
like tunes with all their sombre messages, but great outbursts of jc
tempests of noise to supplement the sunshine and the blue ski
The bells of St. Mark's at the height of the season are an experiei
to be remembered for ever with affection. England, however, d<
score one point, for though we may be treated to tunes during 1
day, the bells are silent during the night, whereas in Venice the gr
outbursts continue at their appointed intervals throughout the wh
twenty-four hours. This, as can be imagined, has a distressing efl
upon visitors to Venice who are not used to such things in the mid
of the night, and it is interesting to think of the whole tourist po
lation turning over in their hot beds when the rumpus starts wJ
the Venetians are sleeping soundly. It is possible, however, to le
to sleep through the noise of the bells, though sleep in the vicii
of the Piazza San Marco is a very relative term : so many interest
things happen during the night. . . .

From noon until the hour of siesta is over the Piazza is qui
than during the morning, though it is not entirely deserted. Pec
retire to eat and then, if they are sensible, to rest or sleep for a wl
Sleeping on the Basilica is not now encouraged, and anyone i

PIAZZA SAN MARCO

dozes under the aretes is gently winkled out by the police. This
must have been upsetting for many people, foi; cathedrals always
have their habitues, old men who have slept there for years ; and
even now one man comes every afternoon to one of the archways
in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini and uses a marble column as a pillow.
The police are less watchful of the sides of the Basilica than they are
of the front. But the most stirring event of this rather torpid inter-
lude takes pkce soon after two o'clock, when the pigeons are officially
fed by the municipal bird-seed man. He scatters grain in front of the
Napoleonica, and instantly thousands of pigeons fly down from their
perches; the air is full of fluttering wings, the pavement a moving
mass of bobbing heads and wanton tails, as noisy and breezy as a
summer gale. Any photographers there are always some who
happen to be straying innocently by at this hour become wonder-
struck at such a spectacle, and caught by the hysteria of the fluttering
wings are moved to rapid action: the clicking of shutters mingles
with the noise of pecking beaks. But soon it is all over, the pavements
are picked clean, and the drowsy quiet of the early afternoon settles
upon the Piazza. The light is white and brilliant, the heat too much.

WHEN we enter the Piazza once again, at any time between five
and eight o'clock, we go, as it were, to a party. For the whole square,
especially in front of the Basilica, is thronged with people in their
thinnest, gayest frocks and shirts strolling about and talking at the
tops of their voices. The sense of social intercourse, of pleasant
gossiping, of mere perambulation is delightful The air is balmy,
as often as not there is a golden and pink sunset, and the feeling of
intimacy is enough to make the loneliest hermit relinquish the cave
of his own mind for ever. The noise of conversation is deafening,
greater in volume than was ever achieved at parties in Chelsea and
Hampstead, and, unlike those parties, this is a party where news-
papers are freely sold. Under the archway leading to the Merceria,
where there is a great confluence of people returning from shop-
window gazing, the newsboys, old and young, cry out, with extra-
ordinarily well-developed and powerful voices, the names of the
evening papers, announcing every day, like the messengers from hell,
the dreadful things that are happening in the world outside the

ktest cataclismo, crisi, disastro, assassino Or they announce, more

to the lilnng of the Venetians, the ktest sporting results, or the

39

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

results of those never-ending motor car and cycle races in the Alps
which seem to be in progress for every moment the roads are not
choked with snow and boulders.

The cafes by now are full of people sipping coffee, Americanos, or
siroppi, or leisurely eating ice-creams, to the background accompani-
ment of the music of any of the four orchestras which are playing
at the same time. The Piazzetta is a bright parade of lads and lasses
walking up and down, up and down from San Marco to the sea,
while their elders sit upon the pink marble benches at the foot of the
Campanile and perhaps think of their own young days (or more
likely talk about the present-day condition of the lira) or sit around
the bases of the two Columns. The masts of the yachts sway gently
from side to side; the gondolas, with their polished steel plumes
flashing in the evening sun, ride up and down like bkck swans by
the Molo, and the gondoliers in full summer dress, stand idly by in
groups, or lie, straw hats over their faces, hands behind their heads,
jm their velvet cushions. Italian sailors stroll among the crowd in
pairs, neat figures clad in white and blue, their hats perfectly straight
upon their black heads figures never quite convincing to English-
men, who are always taken by surprise at the sight of the sailors of
other nations. They walk along the Molo and the Riva as though they
were still on deck: as though Venice were a large and decorative
ship permanently at anchor, open at this season to visitors. Occasion-
ally a pair of them sit astride a marble bench and play a game of
draughts with coloured pebbles upon squares that have been deeply
scored into the marble by years of usage. Children play their eternal
games; mothers dandle babies in those flimsy and flouncy clothes
which always make them look so like new Christmas dolls. Spec-
tators stand around the points of interest: everyone takes a keen
interest in everybody else with unabashed curiosity. We come to
San Marco to stare and be stared at in the friendliest possible way
the Italians gaze with unflagging interest upon the foreigners who
come from all parts of the world, the foreigners gaze with astonish-
ment upon the extraordinary scene of Italian life, where the simple
pleasures of talking and showing-off are brought to such a fine art.
Pride and vanity are fully justified by youth and beauty, and the
whole rhythm of Venetian life seems bent to this purpose. There is
one youth who comes to the Piazza every day and who wears a little
locket pinned on to the breast of his shirt. Inside the locket is a
photograph a photograph of himself. . . .

42

PIAZZA SAN MARCO

By seven o'clock die party is in full swing. The Piazza and the
Piazzetta are crowded with hundreds of people, and then, as though
to mark the climax, the bells start up again. The noise of the bells
is blown by the wind away over the roof-tops and lost in the alley-
ways and the side canals, while below the hubbub intensifies as
people gaze in the direction of the two bronze Giants on the roof
of the Clock Tower who, with slow deliberation, bang their ham-
mers upon the bell to mark the hour, as they have done with un-
failing regularity every day since 1496. Napoleon, who made some
telling remarks about Venice, described the Piazza San Marco as
"the largest drawing room in Europe," and I would add to this the
rider that the Clock Tower is the largest mantelpiece clock in Europe.
It is a huge and gaudy toy, in ultramarine and gold, a somewhat
muddled piece of popular art, with signs of the Zodiac, seasonal
charts, phases of the moon and a panel showing how the sun circles
round the earth a piece of delightful human conceit since unfor-
tunately disproved all smothered in glittering ornaments and pat-
terns. There are moving panels, which slowly slip into pkce and
give the hour and minute in Roman numerals, a gilded figure of
the Madonna in a niche, a gilded Lion of St. Mark, and on the roof
the two rugged and rather pleasing Giants, naked except for scanty
sheepskins. Clocks, upon which such lavish art and ingenuity have
been spent ever since machines were devised to measure time
that most appalling thing in the universe have always appealed to
popular taste, and this clock in Venice has received as much adula-
tion, though in a different sense, as the Basilica itself. Even today the
interest is as great as ever, in spite of our modern obsession with
other, more infernal machines which can hasten the passage of time
much more quickly; and the Venetians regard it with precisely the
same love and affection as the family clock. Old men in straw hats
and the high, stiff collars of another age adjust gold watches from
their embroidered waistcoats, and young people glance apprecia-
tively at their glittering chromium wrist-watches, upon which they
can check the events of their lives to the split second at any hour
of day or night, to see if the Giants are late.

THE pink and pale blue of the kter afternoon very soon change
to tangerine and violet, and then it is that we discover the moon
among the golden balls of the crosses of St. Mark's, so clear and

43

PIAZZA SAN MARCO

sharp and globular, so intensely yellow against die purple. . . . And
then the indigo night, and stars in a flawless sky ; and in spite of the
hundreds of sentimentalized pictures of Venice by night, we cannot
but marvel at this setting where the permanent beauties of nature
have been so well appropriated by the Venetians to glorify their own
temporary stay on earth. So well planned are the Piazza and the
Piazzetta that under all conditions the sea and the sky fit in perfectly
during the day the sea is like a green lawn spreading from a
terrace at the end of a vista, and at night the squares become star
chambers, with the moon moving along the spiky cresting of the
Palazzo Ducale, between the Columns of St. Mark and St. Theodore
and behind the row of statues on the Library. It is, indeed, a setting
as near to perfection as we can hope to get, and makes us envy the
joy of the artists who built it.

THERE are stars in the sky and jewels in the shops. . . . The arcades
are brilliantly lit and the shops are rows of alcoves in a crystal grotto :
small shops, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of glittering
things gilded and silvered glassware from Murano, cases of exotic
jewellery, trays of uncut stones of every description, leatherwork
stamped with gold and inlaid with colour, festoons of shining
printed silks, cobwebs of lace from Burano. . . . Tourists, breathless
with excitement, go from shop to shop, astonished as much by
the prices as by the display; but still seem to be able to buy from
this bazaar, for the shops are always full and litde parcels are
being wrapped. Venetian shops still retain a curiously oriental
flavour about them, especially die shops of the Piazza, though it is
more the orientalism of a Christmas pantomime the western
version of Baghdad or the chinoiserie of Aladdin's cave. I should
not be in the least surprised to find the shopkeepers in huge jewelled
turbans and pointed slippers, or an ebony eunuch walking down the
arcade with a golden tray of fruits fashioned from priceless gems
upon his head. . . .

Music is provided in the Piazza by three orchestras which pky
different tunes at the same time. There is a constant intermingling
of different kinds of music : of modern jazz tunes, tunes from
Old Vienna, Neapolitan tunes, tunes from South America and
even tunes from Scotland, so that at one and the same time there
might be a samba, "Santa Lucia" and "Auld Larig Syne" striking

45
One of the Giants on the Clock Tower, San Marco

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

the ear. The orchestras, working in the cramped spaces of the
arcades in between the busy shops, are open to the endless stream of
people. Thus it is possible to be within a foot or two of the musicians,
a position much favoured by gangs of Venetian youths for whom
this free entertainment comes as a daily palliative against the boredom
of unemployment. The arcades are congested and lively and full of
rich comedy, but full also of a certain sadness, especially for the
musicians, for what a terrible thing it must be to have to play jazz
non-stop from morning till night, day after day, smiling all the time !
I am full of admiration for these groups of young and not-so-young
musicians who provide the Piazza San Marco with its constant
background of haunting music : for we never leave Venice without
some nostalgic tune ringing in our ears for months to come which
conjures up a hundred memories. But over a period of a few years
I have watched one or two musicians distinctly change : they get a
wild stare though their teeth still be flashing and they go pale
from being kept out of the sun. One youth whom I noticed for two
years, whose job it was to rub two pieces of serrated bone together
and shake seeds in a gourd in one of the jazz orchestras, I found
wandering disconsolate on the northern fondamenta gazing out to
sea at the Island of San Michele. His pkce was taken this year by
another young man, gaily rubbing and shaking. Not only do the
orchestras play music but there is singing, andit is a lively background
they provide to the caf6 life, a constant striving to attract the tourists
to sit at the tables, and endless competition between Quadri's and
Florian's on opposite sides of the square.

How welcome it is, after hours of wandering for one cannot
parade all the time to sit at one of the little tables (red for Quadri's,
orange for Florian's) and, for the price of a drink, gossip the even-
ing away in as many languages as one commands, or else just to sit
alone, pleasantly exhausted, and watch either the antics of the people
at the other tables or the rows of people who stand and watch the
spectacle of the cafes or listen to the orchestras. Or else, on those
special occasions, to ruminate through the noise of the municipal
band which struggles, against the hum of conversation, with "Poet
and Peasant" or Mozart set for brass and brays its ways for a few
hours after the manner of all brass bands in all the parks and squares
of Europe. Not only are there constant musical entertainments for
the people of the cafes, and the joys of the parade, but a variety of
diversions of different kinds. For instance, though at first one is

PIAZZA SAN MARCO

under the impression that sheet lightning is playing over the Gulf
of Venice, one discovers that this is the light from the flash-bulbs
of the wandering photographers. These young men, rather earnest
and quiet, perhaps thwarted journalists, come upon one unawares
and temporarily blind one by their artificial lightning. They leave
a little card which says, "Come and admire yourself tomorrow at
our studio free of charge," and then pass on, apologetically, to the
next table. The greatest plague, simply because I am a professional
artist, are those men who come round with infinite cheek and make
revolting caricatures of tourists. That they make most sitters look
like pigs is probably no accident, for they tour all the restaurants
where people are feeding, while but half a mile away others are
starving. (But still we bring our money here and we are the
greatest industry Venice has in this century.) These men must be
trained in some horrid school in Venice, for they all work alike in
thick bkck chalk, and with a few swift strokes produce a picture
of a pig which manages, by some sinister means, to resemble the
sitter. Then there are the Hungarian astrologers who steal upon one
unawares to lure one to their dens. They leave politely printed cards,
with a list of the occult sciences in which they are qualified, as do
also the graphologists who ask one to scribble a little on their cards
to have one's character read as though one didn't already know by
now! Finally there are the one or two sweet old ladies who bring
baskets of camellias to pin on the bosom of one's kdy friend. They
manage to produce an old-world sadness, a kind of Viennese melan-
choly, and rows of women are left with identical white flowers
on their breasts. . . . Their hair is smooth and grey, they dress
simply in stockingette and wear buttoned shoes. They are the direct
descendants of the flower-girls of the eighteenth century, or else
perhaps they are the very same grown old: one can never be quite
certain in Venice.

ILLUMINATIONS have always been a great feature of Venetian life.
During celebrations both secular and ecclesiastical the buildings
have been transformed by lights into something still more glorious*
It has always been difficult to distinguish between the secular and the
religious, however, for in no place have things ecclesiastical been so
quickly transformed into the secular, and we are not always sure
whether we are attending a Christian or a pagan festival. Yet, by

47

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

this very method religion is kept alive and satisfies both parties, and
today the festivals of Venice, the greatest of which are essentially
religious, have become the most famous in Europe. In the past all
illuminations were made by the lighting of thousands of candles
placed either in lanterns or in glass holders, accompanied then as
now by elaborate firework displays on a gigantic scale, as I hope to
show elsewhere in this book. Though the era of gaslight seems to
have mercifully contributed little to this tradition or the city
would have been blown up long ago the advent of electricity has
helped considerably and, in our own day, by the mere draping of
miles of wires about the buildings, illuminations are achieved on a
scale undreamt of in past centuries. It is now possible to illuminate
the buildings with a far greater range of scenic effects for instance,
with moving colours gradually changing from one to another, with
strong colours and soft colours, and with flood-lighting either dif-
fused or particular, or with any of those hundred and one foibles of
the electrician, from fairy-lights to searchlights. The results, on the
whole, are most successful in spite of the occasional use of shocking
colour schemes, and the development of electric illumination has
undoubtedly added to the charms of Venice in the tourist season.

Obviously, no greater source for experimenting with floodlight-
ing is to be found than with the Basilica of St, Mark, and the effects
of the electrician's art are added to the arts of architecture, sculp-
ture and mosaic, and the result, even though we know by what
ordinary means it is done, forms an occasion of great importance in
the magical summer entertainments. Thousands of people assemble
for this spectacle, and nobody goes away disappointed. A great ramp
of seats is erected in front of the Napoleonica, which quickly fills
with spectators some two hours before the event. The cafe tables
too are fully occupied, and gradually the remaining part of the
Piazza fills up with standing people, until finally there is estimated
to be a crowd of some hundred thousand souls, as many as we muster
in London in front of Buckingham Palace on great occasions. As
nothing is done in Italy without some accompaniment of noise,
a full orchestra and choir toil through the evening listened to for
once with comparative respect in front of the Basilica. From the
high seats at the back the musicians and singers, surrounded by the
great buildings, look exceedingly small, like toys in evening dress,
and from this position the music comes fitfully up the square, swelling
and fading on the breeze. Most of it is breathed in by the vast stand-

48

PIAZZA SAN MARCO

ing crowd but at least we are seated, and that fully compensates
for the parts of the concert we miss. Standing is the curse of all public
spectacles. . . .

Electrical illuminations differ in another respect from all others :
they come on suddenly and take us by surprise and they equally
quickly go out and leave us bewildered in darkness. Not only that,
but it has been my experience that Italian flood-lighting, magni-
ficent when it actually takes place, usually takes a long time to come
on. It is often harrowing to be near the electricians, who are emo-
tional and excitable, and there are a series of preliminaries to be
gone through before the lights are made to work properly. For the
electricians the grand and exciting experience of bringing St. Mark's
out of the night is largely a matter of dealing with wires, small
screws, bulbs and poky little holes, and thus the public, so patiently
waiting, are treated to a series of false alarms as adjustments are
made. The lights of the arcades, shining up to now as usual, suddenly
go out one at a time, then flash on again. Then they all go off again
and come back one at a time. This tantalizing performance is re-
peated several times with variations in different parts of the Piazza,
on one side then on the other, to the accompaniment of waves of
sighing from the thousands of spectators, first sighs of pleasure, then
terrible sighs of disappointment. The musicians by now are hope-
lessly drowned by the noise of the herd, but still they continue to
move their arms and open their mouths. But, at last, the lights of the
Piazza go out one at a time, to a final sigh of pleasure. The music
stops, and the whole of Venice seems to be plunged in darkness. For
a moment a curious sensation of coldness and fear sweeps the Piazza
and there is an uncanny silence that only occurs in vast crowds. . . .
Slowly, very slowly, with the inevitability of a dream, the Basilica
begins to look phosphorescent. The magic stills the crowd and they
are held in its spell. Then, from a faint glow the colours begin to
emerge, slowly, slowly . . . pink arcades, sea-green domes, golden
Byzantine crosses; faint at first, the light stealing in slow waves
backwards and forwards . . . lighter, lighter yet, until, against the
indigo night, the Basilica glows with erotic unreality, robbed of
form, robbed of substance a manifestation hanging in darkness.
More than ever, at this moment, we think of St. Mark's as a palace
more suitable for the ocean bed than for dry land; as though it
were made of fretted coral and shells, with seaweeds waving above
its arches, sea-horses rearing on the parapet, and clusters of

49

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

under-water plants growing on the domes. . . . Here is Venice the
theatrical, Venice the spell-binder!

BUT the illumination of St. Mark's does not occur very often,
nor is it done every year. By midnight, on a normal day, the Piazza
is beginning to wear the look of sadness that comes after the party.
There are still many people about, mostly sitting in groups upon the
steps of the flag-poles or else on the benches of the Loggetta, but
the parade is over. The cafes are almost empty, and the table-tops
have a metallic glitter in the lamplight. The bells start their midnight
commotion, but few people bother to look at the Giants banging
in the dark. In the archway of the Merceria a few doubtful char-
acters hang around, still hoping to effect last-minute introductions.
The Basilica is now securely sealed against the terrors of the night:
the great bronze doors are firmly closed, the pigeons silent upon
their perches.

life, however, does not come to a standstill, and continues in one
or two nearby pkces in full swing. Sometimes the orchestras con-
tinue playing, but playing now tunes to please themselves. The
gondolieri, after their day is done, come up from the Molo and stand
in groups, hats in hand, among the empty tables, and quietly listen
to the sweeter strains of real Italian music. . . . The Calle Larga, just
behind the Piazza, is as full as ever, and the cafes and bars are thronged
with people who have little intention of going to bed. And in the
Piazzetta dei Leoncini the cafes seem to receive all the stragglers
from the Piazza, who sit and drink, talk, sing, dance and sometimes
quarrel violently until the early hours. To the last the day is exuber-
ant, though at this hour usually bizarre, and sometimes sinister.

One of the old ladies, who was so coyly selling camellias four or
five hours ago, moves briskly in her sheath of black stockingette,
her basket empty on her arm, and abuses the waiter in a bar close by.
This scene is enacted almost every night, until, still muttering and
turning round to fling a final curse, she disappears up a dark alley
and is not seen again until next day with another fresh basket of
pure white flowers.

Piazzetta del Leoncmi

Shops

EVERY morning the man underneath my balcony fixes the
blind of his shop with a bit of wire. I discovered that this is not
an isolated occurrence, but that many of the shop blinds in the Calle
Larga behind St. Mark's need adjustments before they stay up.
This takes place round about ten o'clock, which is the rime the shops
prepare themselves to receive visitors. The blinds seem to be broken
in great numbers and the only way they can be fixed for the day is
with the help of a kit of tools and step-ladders, and thus it is common
to see three or four shops in a row with ladders in front of them with
men hammering and using chisels, wrenches and screwdrivers.
Where I take breakfast the bartender comes out solemnly every
morning with a ladder, a hammer, a chisel, pieces from a wooden
box and a three-inch nail. From the wood he makes wedges, then
climbs the kdder and hammers them into the blind-fitting on one
side. On the other side the procedure is slightly different the large
nail is knocked through a hole. As the lane is very narrow, the fold-
ing of the step-ladders among the early traffic the passing sweeper,
the wine barrow, bakers' boys, postmen, housewives and early
postcard sellers forms a little music-hall act.

The boy from the tobacconist's shop opposite comes out to flick
away a few spots of dirt from the windows, but they rarely require
washing in this clean atmosphere. They are sometimes polished in a
very leisurely fashion. Nothing is done in a hurry here. ... A plas-
terer dose by, in newspaper hat, gently fills in a few cracks with
cement and strokes it smooth with a wet brush. . . . The ice-man
comes along and delivers his load against the heat of the day, and the
the wine-man fresh bottles against the thirst. . . . The owners of the
kce shops the most boring shops in Venice, hung with yards and
yards of lace tablecloths, table-mats, pillow slips and so forth take
up their positions at the shop doorways with an anxious look upon
their faces. On some mornings two nuns arrive with huge bundles
under their arms, and, standing black amongst the white, unwrap
more and more kce. . . .

53

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

The knick-knack shops arrange their trays of souvenirs for the
tourists : gondolas in chromium, Lions of St. Mark in all materials,
little musical boxes, glass ashtrays from Murano, shell boxes, and
models of St. Mark's in globes in which snow falls when they are
shaken the Venetian variants on the now almost universal range
of objects sold to tourists worthless most of them but occasionally
pleasing. The shops that sell glass necklaces arrange their festoons
down the sides of the doorways, a feature which makes so many
shops in Venice look seductive. These are some of the nicer of the
more common glass products prepared for tourists necklaces of
sequences of small sprays of lemons and oranges with spiky green
leaves, or tiny glass birds and leaves, small flowers in neat rows, or
strings of variegated glass, single or plaited into heavy chains. Coral
necklaces too of many kinds, and the more usual heavy swathes in
white or vermilion or turquoise. But to wear a necklace of lemons,
oranges or birds is a delightful idea, with ear-rings to match
doves nestling in the ears! They are much too small in scale to
be vulgar in design, mere drops and splashes of glass left over
after the large, ugly vases are made. Still I have never seen anybody
wearing them. Glass mosaic brooches are a great feature of this
cheap Italian jewellery, redolent of futile hours and bad pay!
Views of Venice, the ubiquitous lion, the gondola, the moon all
the stock features, and the more traditional designs of doves drink-
ing from bowls or perched on dishes of fruit or vines. What a long
way these last three designs have travelled from Roman times. . . .
Then there are the extraordinarily bad cameos engraved on ovals
of shell: oh, how tedious it becomes to be shown trays of these
things by every curio-seller in Venice ! until, eventually, we become
known to each other and they give us a wink instead of a peep.
Finally there are those dreadful picture shops, selling examples of
latter-day veduta painting. What a sad story it would make if one
were to write about the people who made all this rubbish for the
tourists. It is hardly worth while as a subject ; and I have seen some
conditions under which lace is produced picturesque and
depressing.

Toyshop

and toyshops are always inextricably mixed in the
mind. I do not mean sandstone caves, where krge flagstones,
in their gargantuan fall, have left a few awkwardly shaped holes
for bats, but those sparkling caverns of limestone, where, secretly
and in the dark, nature has been at play and produced highly
decorated interiors in an ageless rococo of her own subterranean
jokes which have persisted ever since the early days when the
rocks were laid ponderously down. la the astonishment of torch-
light the floors, ceilings and walls glitter and shine, and sprout
and hang with a thousand evocative shapes. But it is less the
sight of the caves than the strange echoes they awaken later in the
mind that are significant, as though in some odd way we were
reconnected with myths and legends long since out of fashion:
these in turn, by their very unreality, take us back to childhood,
where in a period of almost erotic delight common objects were
animistic and filled us with elation or horror. . . . And thus, in the
Christmas pantomime one of the last remaining vehicles, along
with Punch and Judy, of the old stories of magical heroes and giants
(both oddly enough connected with Italy) we re-live the thrill of
caves and all the mad dramas of childhood. We reproduce the sparkle,
the joys and terrors of caves, and live once again through all the more

acute and turbulent emotions And toys, of course, however

faithful they may be to reality (including those engaging reproduc-
tions of modern weapons which are coming to occupy even the
fantasy lives of two-year-olds) come straight from some magic
cave, some large, mysterious, inexhaustible womb where toy
motor cars, mechanical guns, telephones and cooking stoves seem
to have their beginnings. . . .

Imagine then, if you can, in the very heart of Venice (so near the
heart that it is but a few hundred yards away from the traditional
commercial centre of the fabulous days, the Campo San Bartolomeo
and the Rialto) in a street so narrow that it might be a declivity
between rocks, a fantastic toyshop wherein are displayed, in riotous

55

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

fashion, all the bright new riches of such a cave. At the rub of his
lamp itself so hardly come by a modern father may, after paying
out some extraordinary sum of money for the privilege of preserv-
ing dreams, gratify the wishes of his children. The sides of the door-
ways are hung with enticing samples of the goods within, while
above, like the facia of a Moresque bazaar, are large embroidered
hangings rugs and bedspreads with crudely drawn scenes of Venice
in raw and strident colours. Inside is a scene of wonder, a deep, en-
crusted cave lined and hung with toys and festive decorations.
The emotions are further disturbed, with tremendous dramatic
effect, by the low ceiling of the shop which is entirely made of
mirrors, so that the shelves and displays of toys, as well as the cus-
tomers, appear to be hanging down upon themselves. By looking
upwards you gaze into your own eyes looking down upon you from
the top of a telescoped body, while all about move hanging dwarfs,
walking as it were upon another ceiling higher up. The objects sus-
pended from the mirrors festoons of coloured paper, coloured
balls in nets, paper lanterns, fans and suchlike things are immediately
reflected upwards, and seem like fantastic plants growing in mid-air,
while the duplication of every object and of every movement
all upside down makes the place appear twice as big as it really is,
thus increasing not only the stock but the crowd.

On the shelves lining the walls, on the trays and on the long
table in the middle of the room, displayed in complete disorder,
are the toys and other objects. . . . Coloured baskets, mechani-
cal toys of all descriptions, rows of dolls, celluloid fish, rattles,
different varieties of aeroplanes, tanks, machine guns, cannon,
daggers, swords, autogyros, railway sets. Rubber dolls and dogs
for chewing. Ships, submarines, telephones, trick birds and trum-
pets. Cooking stoves, bathroom sets, cots with dolls, scales, hammers,
saws, chisels and saucepans. Sewing machines, flat irons and pistols.
Lead aad plastic battalions Romans, Red Indians, Alpine troops,
Arabs, Scotsmen, horse guards, privates, generals and marines.
Babies in celluloid eggs, spoons, knives, forks. Bundles of beads in
cellophane bags, farmyard animals and spinning tops; trumpets,
tambourines, guitars, pianos and accordions. Counting frames,
snakes-and-ladders, puzzles, bricks. Balls of all kinds, shovels,
buckets, bows and arrows. Skipping ropes, hoops, wooden horses,
wheelbarrows. Woolly toys bears, monkeys, lions, rocking horses
and jungle games. Mexican hats, darts, cowboy costumes. Painted

56

TOYSHOP

fans, decorated mirrors, shell boxes, musical boxes, glass necklaces,
silver gondolas, brass galleons, silver Lions of St. Mark. Decorated
glassware, dolls* pottery, weathervanes. Inlaid souvenir boxes,
scooters, doves drinking at alabaster vases, horn ships, gondolas of
painted wood. Glass balls with falling snow in the Piazza, thermos
flasks, teething rings, crucifixes of shells. . . . Prams, pushchairs,
reins with bells, fur dogs, net bags and parasols. . . .

57

Summer Storm

IT has been one of the worst summers in Venice for many a year,
or so I am told : that is to say, it has rained about once a fortnight.
This piece of diabolical weather, so bad for the tourist trade but
so good for the streets! all seems a part of the general tendency
of the twentieth century, when everything is apparently getting
worse. The spinners of yarns, the idling gondoliers, the old men
sitting on the steps of the Columns in the Piazzetta, all talk of the
"good old days" in exactly the same way as we do at home, except
for the one important fact that the weather really was better in past
summers, whereas for us in England the weather only seems to
have been good in novels about Henley in Edwardian times. The
spectacle of summer rain in Venice, providing it does not go on too
long, I always find rather exciting. It is so unusual as to have all the
charm of novelty, and as it is nearly always accompanied by thunder
and possibly hail, it is rather like being involved in a curious and per-
verted firework display. The skies change colour violently for a few
hours, there are coloured flashes, and thousands of ice balls like krge
pearls tinkle on the roofs and clatter in the streets.

This evening there was rain on the Riva, and from the Isola di
Sant* Elena to the Salute a magnificent thunderstorm raged and
blazed for two hours, ^nailing the summer spectacles the muni-
cipality puts on for the benefit of tourists in all respects except one
it was not quite so remunerative. That most satisfying group of
buildings of San Giorgio Maggiore shone pure white against a lead-
blue sky, the sea became a deep turquoise and the great dome of
the Salute black against a lemon sunset. Vast forks of lightning trailed
over the Adriatic with aimless extravagance, and sheets of rain
swished about and bounced on the quayside. Along the Riva the
cafes filled up with a sudden inrush of visitors idlers, fishermen,
gondoliers and sailors all in their summer clothes, and astonished
groups of tourists who bore the air of having been shamefully
swindled by the tourist agencies. To the gende noise of the ice-
machines and the distant hooting of steamers, they sipped

59

St. Mark's* Northern Fagafc

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

unnecessary coffees and watched with patience the adventures of the
storm. Directly in front of us were moored the empty steamboats
for Chioggia and the islands, the tar-black tugs, bobbing gon-
dolas and a magnificent barge with two red stars on the prow
like astonished eyes and a vivid sail of gamboge yellow against the
dark grey sky. As the rain stopped and the sunlight broke through
from the Grand Canal, an enormous rainbow formed behind San
Giorgio Maggiore, and slowly, still against a dark sky, it moved
along the whole length of the waterfront, apparently having one
foot in the sea in front of us and another on the Lido. People now
began to venture out again, shook themselves like dogs and re-
sumed the evening perambulations along the waterfront and up into
the Piazza. For quite an hour the great arc of the rainbow moved
about the sky, now seen against the spiky cresting of the Palazzo
Ducale, now against the statues of the Libreria Vecchia. Lightning,
more distant now, played far out over the Adriatic, and finally the
sun shone on the dark backcloth behind St. Mark's and turned it a
flaming orange. All the domes and crockets became a cobalt blue,
and the golden crosses, all the metal ornaments and the mosaics
shone and glistened in the evening light.

60

Restaurants

IT is wise not to settle too quickly on a "favourite restaurant'*
in Venice, as the general standard of cooking is so high. I am
sure that to stay here for a year would be to find not one but
many. Most writers of travel books refer to their "favourite res-
taurant," which is often a source of irritation to English people
who are as likely as not living in a town or city where there isn't
a good restaurant within miles. Yet the phenomenon of good cook-
ing in Continental countries is a constant source of surprise to the
English, and it comes to play such an important part in foreign
travel that any writer who failed to mention it would make a very
selfconscious omission. To judge by the conversation of many Eng-
lish people abroad it might be assumed that the main reason for
leaving home was to eat good food, for so bad have things become
in English restaurants and so restricted the diet in the home that
eating on the Continent has become something akin to an obsession.
Connoisseurship of food and wine another of those almost extinct
virtues now made the subject of selfconscious club dinners (milder
versions of the Hell Fire Club of West Wy combe) has now given
place to addiction, and it is no uncommon sight to see knots of English
people abroad indulging themselves orgiasdcally, glassy-eyed and
intent upon plates of meat and delicacies, or passing secret infor-
mation to each other in the evenings about strings of good restaur-
ants from the Channel Ports to the Balkans. This form of addiction
is for once fully justified, for any nation which has to endure such
food as we have can readily be forgiven for exaggerating the impor-
tance of cooking when on a Continental holiday. The people left
at home, staunch starch-eaters, retaliate with some such phrase as
"food snobbism," but if ever any phrase fell short of the truth,
this does, even if nothing can be proved except by sampling.
Personally, to be rather facetious, I would say that cooking is about
the only form of art appreciated by everybody; and whereas it
might be difficult for many people when travelling abroad to
become deeply interested in painting or architecture, they rarely

61

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

fail to respond to a work of art on a plate (even though stomachs
unused to certain rich combinations have been known to revolt
a little later).

The great restaurants of the world have earned their reputations
(though they don't always live up to them), but, almost without
fail, they are trying and pompous, and I for one as usual go my
own way and make my own discoveries, after having my trial
"famous" meal so as not to miss anything. I rarely fail to discover,
after an adventurous week or two, some cheaper place which is as
good and often better, with an intimate native atmosphere unspoilt
by the luxuries of polite furnishings, ruined by the praises of authors
or shy with the presence of great men, dead or alive. After all,
what are our lives for if we are not going to enjoy them uniquely,
and what are our stomachs for if we are not going to let them have
discoveries and adventures of their own? A stomach is a secret
thing, invisible and sensitive, but it knows what is good without
being told by a publisher. After a while it is on the scent like a
hound, and then says one fine evening: "Halt! This is the place.
We don't need to go any farther!" And there we stay, if we are
wise, with our stomach, and live together through heavenly meals.
. . . The padrone, the hefty signora, the cook, the waiters and the
wine-boy soon know when they have met friends. We are taken
into the family, one's stomach becomes a respected person (not just
a carpet bag as in England), and it comes along like a favoured
guest, every evening, to be fed on good tilings. . . . Very soon even
money becomes of less importance, and we use each other's Christian
names, and though our common charter is only a menu, and food
our main link, we build our lives together intimately, my stomach,
the restaurant staff and I a little world of importance, spinning
on its own axis, self-centred, contented. . . .

To such a pkce one brings one's friends (those quick, effortless
friendships one makes in Venice a week before they fade away
never more to be continued!), or those friends one always somehow
finds who belong to the international band of wandering vagabonds
like oneself ragamuffins of the art world who, because they do
not come on Polyglot Tours, can usually stay as long as they like,
who, though relatively poor or with secret fortunes, have managed
to slip away from responsibilities. The restaurant becomes a ren-
dezvous, other stomachs come, and with them they bring com-
panionship, without which even a stomach would be empty. . . .

62

RESTAURANTS

Though an author may say something about Venetian Gothic
architecture worth reading, or dismiss the whole contents of the
Accademia in Venice as "rubbish," as one man did so effortlessly
two years ago, or cast long shadows down the years as Ruskin has
done, he can do little more for the reader than mention his favourite
restaurant, because he cannot provide a meal with every copy of the
book. He is to be forgiven for mentioning it, though it may have
become tedious, and even though it is quite impossible to find
other people's restaurants (the streets always seem to have been re-
named since the book was written), any book on Italy that does not
mention food is suspect immediately. If it does not mention food
it will surely have an extra packing of "culture" in it that will
smack more of the head than the heart. . . . Eating, for any traveller
who does not live on leaves from old guide-books, is just as impor-
tant as works of art, for though works of art may lift the dusty veils
of history, eating connects one with the life of today. Food, life and
love have always been inextricably mixed, and in Italy for centuries
the brimming cornucopia has been dragged along by happy cherubs.
Thus when a writer tells of his favourite restaurant, though it may
be impossible to find it when you come, or however remote you
may be from him when you read his words, he is inviting you to
sit in the next chair, behind the vinegar and oil, the tooth-picks, the
salt and pepper, behind the silver vase with red carnations in the
middle of die table. Soon, if only as a faint echo of a dream, the
wine and cornucopia will come . . . except that taste, unlike the
flavour of a thought, cannot be conveyed by words, and thus the
dream will be sure to disappoint and mean absolutely nothing. But
no matter, restaurants are being mentioned: let us pass on.

THE Venetian instinct to beguile and amuse has been brought
up to date in restaurants, and quite a number of commercial side-
lines have been developed to help the tourist enjoy his food. Else-
where I have mentioned the street vendors the sellers of postcards
and maps, cameos and necklaces, those artists who specialize in pig-
like caricatures, the newspaper sellers and the flashlight photo-
graphers. They all continue their rounds into the evenings, and call
at all the most frequented restaurants and frattorie with great regu-
larity. Of this group the flashlight photographers cause the greatest
interference, as we are temporarily blinded in the act of eating a

63

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

piece of veal. The results of their labours are rarely flattering, as
people are not as a rule at their best with their mouths open. . . .
But the wandering musicians are nearly always welcome, and with
accordion, violin and guitar, as well as voice, bring the musical
delights of the Piazza to the dinner table. A plate is passed round
and a small fee levied, and nobody, I am sure, begrudges the
musicians their money, various and unequal as their talents are.
In remoter parts of Venice, away from the tourist centres, the enter-
tainments become more interesting. I have seen a wonderful troupe
of child acrobats, and the most strange and gipsy-like singers wan-
dering alone, or, on occasion, been present when some strolling
musicians have come into a trattoria and stayed the whole night.
But these are chance adventures which cannot be foretold. . . ,
Then there is the man who enters and attaches a huge tin butterfly
to his forehead, where it noisily buzzes and flaps its gaudy wings
the seller of mechanical toys. Out of the depths of a Gladstone bag
he brings his wares, and quite rapidly, among the wine-glasses and
the fruit, hop and dance and gambol a most attractive miniature
circus bears, mice, monkeys, trick cyclists, clowns, donkeys, all
jogging and dithering and grinning. As though finally to sum up the
art of make-belief, when this fascinating troupe have gone back into
the bag, he puts upon the table a fair-sized doll, which writhes in
every limb and rolls its eyes and cries. . . . This never fails to attract
the ladies and disconcert the men but its price proves so pro-
hibitive that it is almost cheaper to have a real one.

BEHIND the Teatro Fenice, near the monument inlaid with cannon
balls and cannon, is the Taverna Fenice, where, under an awning
and hidden by a screen of frondy plants from the gaze of hungry
passers-by, it is possible to eat some of the best food in Venice. It is
very near the theatre, and in the evenings, when the weather is fine,
the awning is drawn back to reveal gorgeously dressed people
dining before the performance. The theatre starts at half-past nine
in Venice. . . . But near St. Mark's, in a quiet little campo behind
a smaller church, I have found a restaurant, which modestly calls
itself a trattoria, where the food is just as good although the menu
less extensive at half the price. It too has an awning (and a hedge of
privets instead of potted ferns), as well as the added amenities of a
pin-table and billiards saloon and a homely bar. There, treated with

64

RESTAURANTS

the minimum of fuss and with the most natural Venetian courtesy,
I have browsed through one splendid meal after another, each one
as good as the last. I have lived through the tribulations of the
waiters the headaches, the toothaches, the anxieties over grown-up
sons, even a pregnancy none of which in any way interfered with
the quality of the cooking (except on one occasion when almost
everybody had toothache). When the season is over and all the
visitors are hibernating, the waiters pack up and go hunting or be-
come fishermen. . . . Who could resist a waiter called Tiziano who
says, "Would you like a Mixed Fry of the Sea, a Sole of St. Peter,
or Octopus, Sior Lorenzo?"

Trattoria

SOME of the best steaks in Venice are cooked in a small trattoria
in a narrow alley behind the Bocca della Piazza. There are no
airs and graces to attract the tourists, merely two rows of tables, a
bar and a back room, starkly lit by the fitful light of neon tubes.
So strong is the light that every detail stands out clearly as in a dream :
harsh shapes, one against the other; everything in cruel focus. There
is the slight feeling of a tiled cellar about the place ; a whiteness
everywhere : on walls and tables, and among the glitter of chromium
fittings on the bar. The padrone, who is only four feet six high and
the colour of a grey cigar, greets his visitors with a smile a complete
set of silver teeth. He is a happy little man, with a suave business air,
persuasive and silvery, talking gaily of his connections in Trieste,
that back-alley for soldiers and sailors of today. That he is unpleasing
in spite of his affability is quickly felt, for everything here, except
the food, is not what it seems. The scene quickly changes from
normality to the bizarre : we are trapped, as in the middle of a film,
unable to leave.

Near the entrance to the trattoria, leaning against the bar, is a
cluster of French poets, intoning in that Mohammedan way of
theirs some of the ktest obscurantist verses. Two large Italians are
making a protracted good-bye, kissing each other as though they
were never to meet again, then finally saying as they break apart,
"Until tomorrow!" There is a constant coming and going up and
down the central aisle, and far more people seem to be coming in
than there are tables to hold them. The normal business of the trat-
toria goes on with difficulty among the commotion and the waiters,
have trouble getting the dishes to die tables. By the kitchen door is a
great refrigerator, with its door open like the door of a sepulchre,
showing rows of dismembered sheep on hooks and piles of liver
and kidneys and uncooked fish. From the kitchen comes the sound
of sizzling and the scraping of metal and the involved smell of cook-
ing. A table near the refrigerator holds baskets of fruit, olives and
salads in large glass jars, platefuls of cooked peppers, horrid to look

66

TRATTORIA

at, surprising to eat. Above are rows ofchianti bottles, straw bellies
touching.

At the next table sits a man with a pallid face having dinner with
an enormous cream poodle as high as himself, both eating, with a
great show of fondness, off the same group of plates. Behind him
sits another man reading a sporting paper, but he is so shortsighted
that he peers at the paper from a distance of two inches and seems
to rub his face up and down the columns. In the far corner a girl
in a vermilion dress counts money on an empty white tablecloth,
and at another table near her is an American soldier, with red eyes
and a curious lack of control over the muscles of his mouth, eating
steak. Everyone in the cafe is talking to himself: pockets of activated
loneliness in the white light. ... In the back room is pandemonium,
a crowd of figures, mostly sailors, their all-white shore uniforms
contrasting with the vivid colours of the dresses and the oily black
hair of the girls. They are swaying and lurching, shouting and
giggling, and occasionally a small man creeps out from the crowd,
his hands festooned with artificial pearls and glass beads which he
is trying to sell to the sailors. More sailors come rolling in, in their
tight white suits, shouting to each other and constantly adjusting
their white caps with a jaunty action on their short hair. They join
the others in the back room, where a state of easiness prevails, of
extreme familiarity, for they all seem to know each other, to have
met before in Trieste. . . .

When the American soldier has "figgered out" that I am English
he picks up his steak and Coca-cola and joins me. He has been here on
leave for six days, but has never gone to his hotel room except to
wash. Tonight he complains of extreme fatigue and eats underdone
steak. Three years in the army this is the life. Apparently.
However, his main grumble of the evening is that now the sailors
are in port the prices will rocket. Prices always double. Inflation
overnight. As much as would pay for a room at a grand hotel:
and as much as would pay for a room at a small hotel for a
fortnight. Different amenities of course.

67

Fragments: One

ID O not think that I should like to approach Venice from the air.
The city should be seen from no higher vantage point than the
top of the Campanile, or else, metaphysically, from heaven.

BOYS in short shorts and loose, flapping coat shirts, holding huge
bunches of gladioli wrapped in cellophane. . . . Where are they
carrying these torches? Are they torches of love? Or is it another
funeral? But always gladioli, all over Venice.

RUSKIN even did Bradford a bit of good in an odd way, for did
they not build the Wool Exchange in sham Venetian Gothic?
He trounced them rarely when they asked him to give a speech
about it. ... First, develop a theory about the virtues of an archi-
tectural style that flourished in another century, and do it so con-
vincingly that people club together to build in it. When they invite
you to come along to discuss the building, and flatter you by realiz-
ing your dreams, only then do you see how foolish it all is, and
severely trounce them for trying to please you. Such a muddle of
perversities and niceties! The building has now gone completely
black, but the Palazzo Ducale remains pink and white.

THE Bronze Horses are delightfully out of pkce perched up there
'on the parapet of St. Mark's. We have come to accept them as part
of the general scene of splendour : of richness added to richness.
Sometimes, in an idle moment, I wonder if Canaletto was right
when he suggested in one of his Capricci now at Windsor that
they be remounted on pedestals in front of the Basilica? But that
was his idea, not mine! I am content (and rather excited) to think

69

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

that I can actually stroke the behinds of the horses that were in
Nero's Circus and high on Trajan's Arch, and in so many other
fine places besides.

PIAZZA SAN MARCO : note the clever interlocking of spaces and
solids the large piazza with the Basilica jutting into it, and the
two piazzetti, neatly luring one round the corners. And the vast bulk
of the Campanile balanced by the space leading to the Porta della
Carta, between St. Mark's and the Palazzo Ducale. How much is
design, how much accident?

A MAN with binoculars in St. Mark's peering into the farthest
Byzantine heaven. . . .

THAT odd window behind the Bronze Horses : so obviously like
the end of a railway station. It is a successful solution to the lighting
of the nave, but it spoils the facade. It appears in Gentile Bellini's
painting of 1496. In those days the mosaics on the front were as fine
as those inside ; today they are only tolerable from the far end of the
Piazza, except in one instance. In 1496 the horses were gilded
as was much else on the front and thus showed up more against
the great dark window. Today the horses merge into it at no great
distance. Wouldn't it have been interesting to have had a Byzantine
stained-glass window in the same spirit as the mosaics?

SAN GIORGIO DEI GKECi: Ikons, magic pictures, which through
being adored became sacred and worked miracles. . . . (Those end-
less squabbles in Byzantine life about God: how many natures the
Son had; of equal importance with the betting in the Hippodrome.
. . . Theodora said at the sack of Byzantium when asked to flee:
"Byzantium is winding sheet enough/')

WATCHING men moving paving-stones near the Rialto, to lay
down a telephone cable, made me think of the incredible amount

70

FRAGMENTS: ONE

of hard labour that must have gone into the building of Venice.
For apart from one or two islands rising out of the lagoons the city
is entirely man-made: even artificial islands. The latter were made
by driving piles of oak, larch, elm and poplar, in an upright position,
packed close together, into the sub-soil. Away from the destructive
action of air and water, they formed platforms of iron-like strength,
and apparently they get harder as they grow older. The trunks
were slowly rammed into the bed of clay, some twenty to twenty-
five feet in thickness, but if they were forced below this they pene-
trated to sand and water beneath, which then forced the pile out
again in a geyser. The piles once firmly fixed in the clay and fastened
together formed an enormous block and became all one with the
building. The water side of the buildings is nearly always faced
with marble, in order to resist the tidal water.) The whole of
Venice is made of stones and marbles, laid in slabs and blocks
and sheets, until it is veritably sheathed in stones. . . . Bricks are
faced with marble, or else mosaic, or marble stucco. . . . Then
the roofs are tiled with Roman tiles, and the great buildings
sheeted with lead or copper on domes and pinnacles, and the skyline
is alive with statues, crosses and pennants. . . . The white Istrian
stone, which can be cut conveniently in slabs, can be used like
planks, and has given rise to much interesting building, as on the
roof of the parapets of St. Mark's.

The stones weather black in parts, but mostly stay white in this
clean atmosphere, the tooling as fresh as on the day it was left. The
domes of St. Mark's are sheathed in lead, nailed on to a sturdy
wooden foundation ; the rain has made lively curves in black on the
lead, to that the great bulbs look as though they are hung with a
thousand tassels of black seaweed. . . . The stones on the bridges
and parapets are particularly pleasing where they have worn smooth
and shiny with age. Every single stone has been brought into
Venice. . . .

THE weekend crowds are the greatest in the Piazza, when boats,
trains and buses bring people from the outlying islands and towns.
On weekdays there are fewer people: though it is odd to see work-
people coming home to Venice at night: a typical city crowd with
briefcases and attach^ casesbut without bowler hats fresh from

71

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

the mundane tasks of the twentieth century, coming home to such
a fantastic and brilliant city.

A CRUCIHX in a barber's shop.

THE "artists' caf&" of yesteryear have now become "film stars'
caf&."

THE most mediaeval street in Venice is the Calle del Paradiso,
narrow, cavernous, full of old shops and dreary wine cellars.
Eternally draped with washing all the way along, so that the light
is filtered through shirts, bed sheets and underclothing. At the far
end is the impressive, beautifully proportioned Gothic arch spanning
the street and opening on to the Ponte del Paradiso.

NOT far from the Colleone Monument is a bookstall at the en-
trance to a sottoportico. As I was passing by, or sauntering rather, I
saw a youth go up to the illustrated papers hanging down the side.
He glanced round, and then drew out of his shirt a small magazine
which he popped back into its place on the stall. Then, with quick
deliberation he chose another one, flicked through it, and put that
one down his shirt. Walking past me he gave me a great grin. He
had only been to change his magazine: he'd finished with the
first one.

PHOTOGRAPHS taken of your wedding at all its most sacred
moments! Do not let your memories fade! Let us accompany you
to the altar! ... (As though the business of getting married is not
unnerving enough, you can now be photographed, by flashlight,
at the following sacred moments: (i) placing flowers on the altar,
(2) kneeling with your bride, (3) placing the ring on her finger,

FRAGMENTS: ONE

(4) cutting the cake, (5) leaving by gondola.) Eat your cake and
have it.

THE sight of grown-up sons going round Venice with their
mothers fills me with anguish. This seems to be a particularly Ameri-
can custom.

A LADY in the upper hall of the Scuola di San Rocco enjoying
the Tintorettos through green sun glasses, . . .

MIDSUMMER: now is the rime of year for schoolteachers to come
out. From all over Europe and America they converge on Venice,
a universal type. . . . Also come the gaunt, indomitable, upright
ladies from polite art academies in England, here for their a-nrm?!
course of "culture," each sticking to their guide-books as though
they were the Scriptures, travelling frigidly and efficiently with their
individual pots of English marmalade and sending home a shower
of postcards where every other word is "lovely."

ROME is masculine, Venice feminine: the old soldier and the
courtesan.

THERE are great numbers of people who talk to themselves in
Venice. I suppose this is only to be expected in a city where every-
thing except the most intimate is done in public. Private life spills
over into public life; there is no strict dividing line as in England.
It would be possible to listen in to people's thoughts if you knew
the dialect : as it is you must be content with catching the keywords
of cento cinquanta and due milk lire, for most people seem to be
holding a monologue about money.

WHEN a postman empties the boxes of Venice showers of postcards
fall out. . . . Like a fisherman dragging in the shoals.

73

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

NEWS from home is the only thing that can break the spell of
Venice.

VENICE provides many ample marble benches for resting-places,
though, as there are no ruins, fewer places than Rome. But one is
never really at a loss for a seat, a warm seat, made of marble. I
always think that to be sat upon is one of the main functions of a
plinth: ample mouldings bottom high, from which to watch the
world go by. ... Walls that start straight from the ground and rise
sheer without ledges are unfriendly, fit only for dogs and slogans.
. . . Venice is the ideal city for strolling, sitting, watching, leaning,
or even for lying full length if you have a mind to. I have had some
most refreshing sleeps on the marble steps of the Salute, head on my
knapsack like a tramp lying in the cool shade of the most ornate
Baroque building in the world: a sumptuous thought.

SUMMER dreams on the roof of St. Mark's. The white flag-stones ;
the thick, squat parapets. Small, intimate, sun-drenched spaces.
Hot stones. Views of the carvings round the arches as one lies under-
neath them: the ugly water carriers, cramped up, holding the water
spouts ; the saints under their canopies, the angels kneeling among the
crockets. . . . Pigeons peeping through the balusters, coyly tilting
their heads. What does it feel like to be a pigeon living among the
fretted marbles and the gilding? Absurd question.

VENICE is no more slummy than many cities it only shows more.
The more sophisticated the buildings the worse they look in decay. "
. . . The soothing atmosphere of civilized decay. . . . The sadness of
a faded beauty who waits for the dark veils of night and the magic
of artificial light.

MEMORY of two years ago : when we had a picnic-lunch here, in
the disused cloisters of Madonna del Orto of black olives, scampi,
half a pound of ham, rolls and butter, fruit and a flask. The grass

74

FRAGMENTS: ONE

is long as it was then, the currant bushes are thriving, the ants are
still busy among the stones. The well is dried up. The boat builders
are still making their long boats under the arches and motorboats in
the refectory. Belfry above. Tintoretto asleep indoors.

FULL moon. Full moon in Venice fills me with pain. It is best
never to wander alone in the middle of the Piazzetta at midnight
among the splendid buildings, and watch the moon travel behind
the statues on the Libreria Vecchia, lighting up each one in turn>
or to let it rest between the pinnacle at the comer and the Pillar of
St. Theodore, or else you are sure to ask yourself the question:
"Has my youth been wasted?"

ON the Ponte dei Angeli in the heat of the day : an old man having
a fit. Stretched in the sun, clutching in one hand a few lire.

ON the Grand Canal : a surprise. A gondola races by. The gondolier
sits comfortably in the cushioned seat, wryly smiling at the surprise
he causes, arms folded. He had fitted a petrol engine.

ON the Riva: a touching "caterpillar" of four-year-old orphan
boys, about twenty of them. Little straw hats at the back of their
heads. Orphanage hair. Blue smocks. Black shoes. Hand in hand,
in pairs, shepherded by two harassed nuns. They pass an ice-cream
seller. He is so overcome that he stops them and gives them an ice-
cream cornet each.

ON the Riva : at night. An old, old man with a ten-foot telescope
in shining brass. Forty lire to look at the full moon. Long white
hair on his shoulders; another Venetian survival: a mediaeval
astronomer-astrologer. . . .

75

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

I MET some Yorkshire people who had the curious notion that
Venice was built on piles in the manner of the prehistoric lake
dwellings of Holderness. They were very disappointed not to be
able to see the piles. As though the buildings on top were not enough.

DOG collars in Venice are truly magnificent. They are inlaid with
mother of pearl, have designs of stars and spikes in silver and brass
on vermilion and blue leather, and are hung with bells and silver
balls. If only we could think up something like that for ourselves
instead of for the dogs, to revive a little of the fifteenth century.

IN the Swiss cafe: a large and very fat man in filthy lederhosen
having breakfast. He orders beer, takes out of his skin bag a hunk of
bread, butter and a complete cured ham. With a large hunting knife,
kept down the side of his hairy leg, he carves thick slices for his
breakfast.

I ASKED an English friend what he thought of the Basilica of St.
Mark. He cocked his head on one side and regarded it for a while.
Then he said: "I think I prefer the Pavilion."

AT the junction of the canals, in the Rio Santa Maria Formosa :
a congestion of boats carrying loads of wood, a sandalo loading
empty chianti bottles, and behind closed shutters a most terrible
quarrel taking pkce. Two men shouting and thumping. At any
moment I expected the shutters to fly open and one of them to be
pitched into the canal. But what is the point of eavesdropping on a
row in dialect?

so Ruskin didn't understand all those hundreds of Baroque heads
grotesques, he called them that we find carved everywhere

76

FRAGMENTS: ONE

upon the keystones of arches ? Well, today I was walking down a side
canal, which was quite deserted. Suddenly, as I passed, from a win-
dow opposite out flew a bucket of slops. Startled, I looked up, and
there was not a living soul to be seen, but on the keystone above
the window a grinning head of an old man with its tongue lolling
out.

CRY from the heart : August 6th : sirocco. Hot and wet. Limp. Rain.
Slimy underfoot. Caught a chill. Coughing. Also food poisoning.
Oh, for the shrill cold north, the clean wind, the bracing air!

77

Animals

T TENICE is a paradise for lovers of all sorts and for love of
V many kinds, but though the lover ofhorses maybe disappointed
to find only horses of bronze, the lover of cats may find a thrill in
every dark alley as well as an equally exciting pang of anguish at
the sight of a dead one, forlorn, in a side canal. Cats, which are
traditionally finicky about water, find Venice a trying place, and
are said to be eventually driven to distraction and to suicide in the
canals. Be that as it may, they abound in Venice, and I am told that
before the war there were forty thousand of them; and though
most of them met a horrid fate during that period, today, like
rabbits, possessing extraordinary powers of propagation, they
seem, like everything else, to be achieving a kind of inflation. Soon
there will be more cats than ever.

By the way, what an interesting thing is a cat census how is it
taken, and how do the results finally check with the increase of
kittens over suicides that must have occurred during the census
period? Do cat lovers enter in the names of their cats how exotic
they must be in Venice! the number of litters, preference for fish
over mice, the great rat eaters, the pigeon fanciers? Civil servants,
who love to pile up such delightful facts about life in order to
astonish the layman later on in an idle hour, must have had a won-
derful time counting the cats. (This is truly in the Venetian spirit
and I only hope it will be possible to compile many other different
kinds of census as time goes on; for instance, how nice it would be
to know just how many fragments of glass there are in the chandeliers
of Venice, how many art-historians come here in any one season and
what kind of fish they live on, how many pinnacles there are in
Venice, how many tins of metal polish are used every year to polish
up the bkdes of die gondolas, or, how long is the life of a rubber
stamp in the Questura Centrale, and how many officials in that build-
ing have been waiters just a week before, like the one I found who
took an hour and a half to fill in a useless form which asked for the
birth date of my maternal grandfather and what was my mother's

79

The Colleone Monument

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

maiden name, a form which remains in my possession to this day
because the police never bothered to collect it. . . .) But let us not
think too much about what cats eat in Venice : especially not of the
thousands of mice, which makes one shudder : at least they are in-
visible. I have a shrewd suspicion that the reason for the pande-
monium of bells in Venice during the night is really to frighten
away the mice and to give the cats a brief respite from their labours.

Venetian cats are very small and very lean, and some have an
ethereal beauty that goes with the excessive use of marble in the
buildings: snow white, with grey paws, lemon eyes, pink noses
and ears. Others are exoticaUy variegated, as befits a race of animals
who have lived for a thousand years in a city at the crossroads
between East and West: they all have oriental eyes and oriental
manners: an ancestor may have come back with Marco Polo, from
a Persian palace, from a bazaar at Alexandria, from a Greek island
where a Venetian pirate put in for water. . . . But whatever their
mixture, they have their devotees, and there are Venetians who
apparently prefer them to human beings, as in our own country.
There is one charming picture that takes pkce in the evenings in
the Piazza San Marco, of a youth who might have been a model
for Carpaccio, who brings his cat to the promenade nestling com-
fortably in his purple shirt a grey tabby with green eyes, against
his sunburnt skin Another picture, quite startling, of a hunch-
back on the Riva degli Schiavoni, who feeds six cats out of six
separate pieces of paper, three tabbies, two black, one plain grey,
every evening in an old Gothic doorway plastered with tattered
posters.

While the cats of Venice, as usual, live as a race apart, elegant,
pernickety, selfish and remote, the dogs of Venice, mercifully
fewer in number, share our lives with almost human intimacy,
though here, where everything is teased into the exotic by art,
they are transformed into a third sex, for, in a city where there are
neither sheep to be rounded up nor rabbits to be hunted, the dogs
live as luxurious but useless members of the family, purely decora-
tive, lovable and flattering. The little pet dogs of Carpaccio are still
here, lingering on from the fifteenth century, with bald bodies,
hair on head and feet and a waving plume on the tail. Poodles
abound, but do not have the Parisian cut but a Renaissance cut, so
that they could still accompany a kdy of that period or look well
against a tapestry. There are many examples also of those effeminate

80

ANIMALS

little creatures we see in the pictures of Longhi, lap dogs, small and
silken with sharp teeth, who accompanied the fop in embroidery
and periwig, and lived in rooms with green lacquer furniture.
Wolf-hounds in Venice lend themselves admirably to representa-
tions of the Lion of St. Mark. A few days ago I saw one in this
role, with mane around the ears, neck and shoulders, shaven body
and legs, and the tail shaved almost to the end, except for a tuft.
The great black hounds, used in the past as hunting dogs, are seen
still in aristocratic role, riding in speedboats up the Grand Canal
great slobbering creatures! and powerful mastiffs with collars of
spikes and studs. . . . Lovers all. ...

Finally there are the caged birds of Venice the doves, the love-
birds, the canaries and above all the tame bkckbirds for here, in
this man-made city, even the birds have to be imported. There is a
shop in a narrow alley not far from the Rio dei Melon! on the way
to the Rialto, where the crowds always gather to peer through the
grills into two dark, low rooms which are entirely inhabited by
caged birds. There is the dry smell of feathers, the rattle of bird seed
and an endless twittering, gurgling and squeaking. I have never yet
seen the shopkeeper, and the shop is always dark, as though the
hundreds of birds lived untended in a cellar. But once on the bal-
conies, in their ornate, gilded show cages among the flowers and
the climbing plants, the birds live happily in the sun and join in the
general commotion of the streets. Blackbirds are especial favourites,
and all day long changing groups of passers-by will halt under their
balconies and whistle a short tune to them which they answer
faithfully, with extraordinary sweetness and roundness. . . . The
cats, dogs and birds of Venice are more in harmony with the archi-
tecture than the humans, for their appearance has changed little
down the centuries: they are the only live things from the past.
Only the monkeys and especially the peacocks are missing.

81

A Palace

NEXT to men themselves, the most fascinating study is the
lumber they leave behind It is less ghoulish to live among

the lumber than to live in a cemetery, for whereas few people would
want to live with the mummies of their ancestors, many people find
it very comforting to live with their old furniture. There is a curious
excitement in sleeping in old beds in which people were born and
have died, in expectantly opening old cupboard doors, in drinking
from old wine-glasses other lips have touched, or in decorating one's
garden with old statues which have looked upon so many vanished
afternoons. So deep and profound is this love of the antique that
almost all nations have practised it in an endeavour not only to
establish their ow r n connection with the past but to clutch frantically
at memory, for memory is our only safeguard against the passage
of time. So ingrained is this extremely comforting habit of collect-
ing the remains of past ages, that it is a marvel that any new art
has been produced at all There is no doubt about it, however much
we argue to the contrary, that antiques are of more emotional value
to the majority of people than, the works of their contemporaries, and
thus the work of dead artists and craftsmen has nearly always been
of more cash value than the work of those still living. Our own
time suffers from this conservatism of taste no less than other periods
(even the Romans, practical as they were, collected the antiques of
their Etruscan forebears, and from the Greeks, and in their kter
phases developed a passion for collecting Egyptian obelisks, even
though at that time they had no clue to the inscriptions engraved
upon them), so that today as vogue follows vogue the antiques of
the world travel across continents and oceans in a constant stream
of packing-cases, as though mankind were in a state of permanent
house moving, while the creations of living artists lie idle in their
studios and workshops, waiting for time and death to hallow them.
Vast sums of money pass through the dealers* hands to pay for the
productions of past centuries, while artists working today who as
We might logically expect are producing the "antiques" of the

83
Garden Statues: Wood Nymph and Flower Girl

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

future are left to scratch out a living as best they may. Today, as
the aesthetic sense declines in an age more interested in machines
than works of art, the productions of artists and artist-craftsmen
are fewer in number than at any other time in history. In a few
centuries to come little will remain of our age to be collected, except
a litter of broken machines, with which no sensible person will
want to furnish his rooms, or, occasionally, a curious picture or
two that will give little clue either to the appearance of our age or
little comfort to the collector unless he be a psychologist. Scrap iron,
samples of concrete and plastic, and faded photographs may be the
chief relics of our age, and thus we may confidently expect that the
antique dealer of the future will be reduced to penury and the trade
ruined, or else relegated to museums as it should be. (I cannot resist
the temptation to recount how a well-known art dealer who, to
give him his due, makes a good living out of the more curious
kinds of contemporary art paid me the wonderful compliment
when he came to see my pictures of prophesying that my work
might be of more value when I am dead than it is now when I am
alive by saying, putting his hand on my shoulder and looking into
my still-living eyes : "Never destroy anything! All these things look
so well in retrospective exhibitions !") But there is one healthy sign
which I must record in favour of our own age, and that is that
people today hardly ever prefer to ride about in an early motor
car or a balloon except for fun when they can buy a new one or
go for a ride in the latest airliner. So it may well be, as the Machine
Age progresses and the artist is transformed into an engineer's
draughtsman, that in two or three generations from now people
will only sit in chairs designed in their own time and not in chairs
ranging from one hundred to four hundred years old as they do
now. . . .

These thoughts are provoked by the sight of one of the major
Venetian palaces now in use as a vast antique shop, and are par-
ticularly disturbing to a professional artist alive to the difficulties
confronting contemporary art. For if the gondoliers are perturbed
that the motorboats are doing them out of business, the modern
artist must be equally perturbed at the sale of antiques. It is impossible
to remain entirely unmoved by the spectacle of reproduction
"antiques" organized in this palace on the scale of a small though
ddightfully mad-happy factory, where furniture is made and
pictures are painted in long dead styles to the accompaniment of

84

A PALACE

snatches from opera and blithesome lagoon ditties. Despair is
tempered with amusement, as well as with admiration for the
genuine antiques and the technical cleverness of the reproductions.
It is all part of the spectacle of modern Venice, living quite blatantly
on the productions of its past. If the supplies run out, new ones are
made* * . .

THE gateway to the palace is at the end of a rather dingy alley,
and except for one or two decayed ornaments and slabs of peeling
heraldry there is little to indicate the splendours beyond the gate.
Once inside the roomy courtyard of the palace, the eye is immediately
astonished by the sight of some few thousand pieces of massed
statuary, large pieces and small, groups of figures and animals, huge
urns, garden ornaments, dozens of fountains, spare arches, loose
balustrades, detached balconies, pieces of wrought iron come like
refugees from the past with all their baggage, fleeing to the safety
of some ancient embassy from a revolution of taste. Surrounded by
a medley of cherubs, rustic figures, gods and goddesses and char-
acters from the Commedia dell* Arte a joiner is busily making an
"antique" cabinet in the sun. In an archway close by, in a similar
setting, yet screened from the direct rays by a cluster of detached
marble columns, is another man, an artist, putting the tinted glazes
synthetic dirt of ages on to a large painting of a romantic scene
in the manner of Guardi. On a bench improvised upon the backs of
two pink lions another is mending a great Venetian lamp, fitting
new windows and retouching the gilding, while threading in and
out of the crowd of marble witnesses, and among the urns and
archways hung with Virginia creeper, is a constant procession of
singing youths, carrying upon their heads cabriole-legged chairs,
tables, cabinets, vases, pieces of gilding or bales of precious damasks,
like the figures in a Roman triumph. The triumph, of course, is
purely Venetian, and to judge by the great hum, by the sense of
optimism and enjoyment, the triumph is in full swing. Occasionally
a door opens and out come one or two aproned workmen on their
way to another part of the building; a woman appears at a window,
shouts something down into the courtyard and then goes in again.
For the space of half an hour, when they are turned out, a band of
little girls come into the courtyard and make garlands of leaves to
trim up themselves and the statues. . . . (And here am I, sitting in

85

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

the shade making a drawing, until the ink in my pen runs out. I try
to supplement it by refilling with water from a puddle, but it comes
too weak and I have to abandon the drawing for the day. The sun,
moreover, is moving the shadows too quickly over the figure of the
wood-nymph whose arms terminate in bunches of leaves instead
of hands. . . .)

All around the courtyard under the arches are the gaunt, bare
rooms of the ground floor and the dark vaults of the cellars and
one-time kitchens. They have square window spaces, unglazed,
but with heavy iron grilles, which give glimpses of the bright canal
beyond, with swiftly moving brown figures of passing boatmen.
These rooms are stacked with more antiques, arranged round the
walls like figures in a mausoleum, or else the scene might be in some
utterly forgotten museum where the custodians have entirely given
up their vigilant dusting and allowed spiders, rats, bats and pigeons
to take their place. The horrid vaults are haunted by cats, quite a
score of them unless they are the same which reappear all with
eyes of shining emeralds, living out some life among the antiques.
Perhaps they are the souls of the builders of this palace come to live
again like outcasts in their own cellars, a palace now disgraced and
full of the wrong statues in the wrong places.

A SIMILAR sense of not-unhappy madness pervades the rooms
upstairs. This palace was built in the High Renaissance style in 1539,
and was the home of a famous cardinal. It is now filled with a motley
array of furniture, paintings and statuary of many periods, so that
all is incongruous, without order and absurd. Wandering through
the twilight of these shuttered rooms, I seem to be alone but for tie
thronging ghosts. I am startled by my own dim reflection in smoky
mirrors, and watched by eyes from portraits on the walls. . . .
With an absurdity which equals my surroundings, I sit to do my
writing on a bishop's throne of eighth-century workmanship,
in a square corner chamber built by Sansovino, of grey, pink
and white marble. Above me the coffered ceiling rises swiftly to a
roof lantern and the slanting sunbeams fall sharply on the inlaid
pavement, and on either side I look down two vanishing perspec-
tives of darkened rooms, through a receding series of identical
doorways. Two life-size statues of negroes, holding up huge candles
wired for electricity are kneeling nearby, while on every possible

86

A PALACE

pediment and cornice of the room are rows of alien busts. Only the
noise of a gramophone and bursts of talk from the street break in on
the silence of the palace.

The ceilings of the rooms and a few of the fireplaces seem to be
all that remain of the original decorations. One chamber I cannot
ask its name for there is no one about! has an unusual ceiling:
a pergola design, overgrown with painted orange and olive trees,
with sweeping rushes and amongst them, hosts of birds and water
fowl. Near the Sansovino room is a small cabinet of two rooms in
pale pink and white stucco evidently a bathroom, but now stacked
with lacquered chairs in the Chinese style, baroque lamps, glass
paintings and, in the shelves, a set of eighteenth-century Venetian
wood carvings of street beggars, more tattered than ever with age,
and sundry pieces of gilded altar furniture, brackets for holding the
Epistle and Gospel and a broken monstrance. From the windows a
view into a house with a scanty roof garden, where a woman is
bullying children. ... On a console table near the Cardinal's Chapel
are a pair of Staffordshire dogs, exactly like a pair I have at home,
and above them, of all things, a painting by Sargent. The Cardinal's
Chapel is a small and tidy place, still fitted with appropriate furni-
ture, but dark, with the shutters drawn. I am deceived by a wall
panel which, in the dreamy state the whole empty palace has pro-
duced, I imagine to be a small baroque painting of an Ascension, but
which turns out to be a panel of highly figured Sienna marble. . . .
The Cardinal's Bedroom next door is still fitted up as such, but
with an enormous four-poster and a host of incongruous cabinets
and stools and writing tables. Behind the bed is a great Hunt of
Diana in tapestry which may be French, while the ceiling is of
stucco arabesques in the style of the Villa Madaina, in a bad state
of repair.

AND then I discover that I am not the only person in the upstairs
rooms of the palace. In the cardinal's dressing closet, next to the
bedroom, a young man is seated at a desk of red leather, among the
same mad welter of antiques. He is poring over books and making

notes. We startle each other and then fall into conversation I

discover that he is a student and uses this room, next to the Car-
dinal's Bedroom, in which to study hydraulics and algebra!

87

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

* * *

THIS young man, studying the science of hydraulics his modern
books littered over the cracking upholstery, surrounded by antiques
in a derelict and ruinous Venetian palace does he not seem to
typify the youth of Italy ? Their past hangs so heavily about them
no nation seems to have produced such great quantities of art, such
thousands of splendid palaces and buildings. In this stifling atmo-
sphere, even of the domestic heritage of Catholic civilization, the
past is still potent : it becomes almost insignificant to learn modern
sciences. In England after our glorious industrial revolution we
quickly set to work to obliterate the past : our towns and cities have
been transformed in a hundred years and we have precious little
left to show of our own Augustan Age (and most of that is to be
found in Dublin). But this young man studying among his over-
whelming past, how will he come into this century? How will
Italy solve the problems of excessive art?

88

Restoration of Mosaics

morning I met my charming and courteous Venetian
JL friend who is in charge of the restoration of the mosaics of
St. Mark's. We had made this arrangement some time ago when
sitting over coffee in the artists* caf6 in the Campo San Barnabo one
blue and velvety evening. How long things take to work themselves
out in Venice. . . . We met in the atrium by those intriguing
pierced marble grills under the picture of the Building of the Tower
of Babel. The major domo, with his rod, eighteenth-century hat
and rather shabby black knee breeches, was busily performing his
duties of making the ladies cover up their nakedness a powerful
and threatening watchdog and the sightseers were streaming in in
what can only truthfully be described as a mob. Quite suddenly,
as though spirited away, my friend took me through a little bronze
door and we climbed up a narrow and difficult staircase where all
the steps were a different height and arranged very steeply. At the
top was a series of vaulted rooms used as studios and workshops,
looking for all the world like those crowded engravings of crafts-
men's dens of the fourteenth century. But these are the only artists*
studios in the world that have a view down the Piazzetta with a
glimpse of the Adriatic through the twin columns of Venice. How
nice to spend one's life up here till one's beard went white ! However,
my friend was neither old nor white, nor had he a beard, and he
soon fell to scurrying around enthusiastically among his benches
and his boxes of coloured marbles and glass, explaining this and that,
and handling precious slabs of priceless mosaic newly peeled off
the vaults of the Basilica. I must say here how helpful these people
are to visiting artists, how welcoming they are, and painstaking.
Nothing could be more cheering than to be welcomed into this
place, the very heart of secrets of Byzantium.

But I must get down to the business of describing the process
used in the restoration of the mosaics, which I hope will be as clear
to you at the end of it as it is to me who saw the whole process,
though it may not be, as craftsmen's recipes are worse to

89

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

understand than cookery books. Still, I think I must record it in all
its details, for I don't suppose that many people poke their noses as
far into St. Mark's as this. . . .

The craft of mosaic is essentially very simple : it is merely a matter
of laying coloured stones and bits of glass into a wet cement to make
a picture or design. If marble and stones are used the pictures will
retain their colours for ever, and these, used in combination with
pure gold fired into sheets of glass, create mosaics which are quite
permanent for just so long as they stay in their bed of cement.
The coloured marbles and glass can be made into sheets of any
thickness, and the Byzantine mosaicists used sheets slightly over a
quarter of an inch in thickness, sometimes about half an inch. The
sheets are then cut, either with a chisel-ended hammer or heavy
shears, into small cubes and arranged according to colour grada-
tions in boxes for easy sorting. The marbles always possess one
flat surface, but the various kinds of coloured glass often have a
nicely undulating surface, and when gold is fired into gkss it varies
slightly in colour according to the quality of the gold and the
colour of the glass. The range of colours in the marbles is very subtle,
from pure white, through pinks and reds, down to browns, yellows,
greys and blacks, but always very powdery and bright. With glass
it is possible to fire the sharper colours, especially very deep blacks
and blues, intense reds, shrill greens and yellows. The marbles are
usually dull in finish and the glass very shiny, but with these simple
materials a very great variety of colours and surface textures can
be obtained by endless combinations of the tesserce, as these cut
stones and glass are caUed. They are placed side by side, piece by
piece, until the whole picture is built up. The final surface of the
picture can be quite flat or can undulate like a sheet blowing in
a slight wind, or else the two methods can be combined and some
parts can be flat and other parts at slight angles so that the surfaces
catch the light. The undulating surface of the mosaics in St. Mark's
was fully exploited by the artists not only on flat walls but on
cupolas, the under sides of arches and vaults ; even the corners
and angles are rounded, so that the light constantly plays over
the undulations and increases the shine. The whole scheme is laid
upon a background of pure gold inlaid in glass, which creates an
effect of richness quite indescribable. Thus die mosaics are always
glittering from some angle, for even in the gloom of a dark day
they shine, and when the roving shafts of sunlight catch them they

90

RESTORATION OF MOSAICS

flash and appear to move, and, as one walks around the Basilica,
the whole surface is lively to the eye. Unlike paintings, which
have been a constant source of worry to artists for thousands of
years, especially since we abandoned the use of painting with
egg tempera, mosaics do not discolour or lose their brilliance.
Certain chemicals do, however, rise up to the surface from the lime
and cements and give a bloom which appears to make the tessera
lose their colour. The greatest and most devastating accident that can
happen to mosaic is the perishing of the cement through the action
of damp or simple disintegration. The tessera: lose their grip, and if
they fall down in any great areas the original mosaic is lost for good;
others are put back in their places which are never the same in
quality and which have been known to be very poor indeed. For
close on a thousand years the fabric of St. Mark's has stood the
strain of time and weathering, both inside and out, but naturally
the building has to be carefully watched, and we might assume
that if historic calamities do not interfere it will stand for an equal
length of time, for it is kept in a permanent state of repair by a small
band of workmen who spend their lives taking out pieces of crum-
bling fabric and inserting fresh. In the case of the mosaics the artists
are constantly running their hands over the surface and gently
pressing to see if the pictures are coming away from the brick
underneath. Unlike the rest of the building, where new pieces
are inserted, these faulty areas are then removed intact, cleaned and
replaced in new plaster. That is the principle of the operation : but
now let me go into more detail and tell you what I saw them doing
with the mosaics of St. Mark's.

First of all, even before the loose pieces are removed, a record is
made of the design. A sheet of white paper, about eighteen indies
square, of a strong though porous texture, is laid on the wall and
water brushed on to it. As the paper becomes soaked it stretches and
falls back into the undulations of the mosaic, and in this wet con-
dition it is soundly beaten into the surface with a krge stippling
brush, thus making, virtually, a papier mache cast of every single
piece of mosaic underneath. The paper also, by this time being
saturated, has become transparent like tracing paper, and it is possible
to see the details of the design underneath very clearly. The artist
then traces in watercolour the main lines of the drawing of the
masses of drapery, of a face, a scroll of lettering, a building, a bird,
animal or tree or whatever happens to be within the square. No

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

masses of colour are laid in at this stage : the tracing is merely line
work, though the colour scheme of the mosaics is very simple and
the lines are either blue or black or red to further help the identifi-
cation later on. This square of paper is then numbered and marks
placed around the edges for registration, that is, to make it fit
precisely into other squares of the design when they are made. It is
allowed to dry off a little, and then, when merely damp and semi-
stiff again, it is carefully peeled off the wall, retaining on its surface
a perfect cast of every single piece of marble and glass and all the
eccentricities of the surface. Gradually these paper casts are taken of
the whole vast areas of the mosaics of St. Mark's, whether they are
due for restoration or not, and the sections are numbered for piecing
together. Obviously these records are only made at the same time
as restoration is in progress, for the business of erecting scaffolding
in a busy cathedral and at such great heights cannot be undertaken
lightly.

Next the paper casts are collected together and taken into the
studios, where they are given a few coats of shellac and methylated
spirit, which make them more permanent and stiff. Then on a large
board various sections of the design are built up from the numbered
squares which are glued into position, and these are coloured up
with distemper colours and gold paint, tessera by tessera, to match
up with the original colours. The results are astonishingly accurate,
for each little cube of stone and glass is raised up in the paper cast,
and when pieced together they make perfect records of the pictures,
from which the mosaicists can work in their endless task of restora-
tion or for the purpose of study in schools and museums.

But let us return to the scaffolding to follow the actual work on
the wall surfaces, for so far I have only mentioned the making of
facsimile studies in paper and paint. Upon the loose areas of mosaic
is first pasted a piece of strong, thin paper, and over that a piece of
scrim cloth, slightly stronger than butter muslin. This, like the
previous paper section, is marked and numbered but allowed to dry
thoroughly while still in position. When dry the area is cut away
from its place, where it has been for centuries, and once more
taken back into the studio. Thus the work divides itself into two
that which is done on the wall and that which is done in the studio.
On the wall the workmen chip away and remove the Byzantine
plaster, which comes away very easily with the tool as it is usually
in a powdery condition. Their plaster was white and fine, made

92

RESTORATION OB MOSAICS

from marble dust and burnt lime with chopped straw and hair to
bind it together, and this the workmen dig away right down to the
brickwork underneath, which is left in a thoroughly clean con-
dition. Meanwhile, in the studio the artists carefully clean the
remnants of plaster off what is the back of the picture, for, if you
remember, the design is now stuck face downwards on paper, and
they insert new stones where the old ones may have broken, check-
ing up constantly with the casts they have already made. When these
sections of the cleaned mosaics are ready they are carried back to their
old places on the walls. The walls during their absence have been
repaired and laid with a new cement which is deeply scored to
receive the new plaster. The plaster is then laid in sections, large
enough for working on in a day, and the pieces of cleaned mosaic
still stuck on their sheets of paper are laid firmly into it, area
by area, each square of paper fitting snugly up to the others, marks
and numbers registering accurately.

After many weeks, or possibly months, according to drying con-
ditions, when the plaster is set and the paper is thoroughly dry, the
scrim and paper are removed by washing, leaving the old mosaic
now soundly stuck to the wall in a bed of new plaster and cement.

In examining certain areas of the Byzantine plaster from which
the mosaics had been lifted before it was chipped away down to
the brick work, we are given a sight that few people see the original
drawing of the Byzantine artist which he had roughly sketched into
the plaster while it was wet before he started his day's work. He
must have worked from a small design, but not from cartoons, and
then, as in true fresco painting, laid as much plaster as he could fill
in a day. On to this he made his vivid rough sketch to get the en-
largement in proportion and to serve as a guide, and into it he
pkced his stones, thousand upon thousand of small cubes of glass
and marble, until gradually, day after day, the whole vast schemes
were completed. This method of working is very characteristic
of twelfth- and thirteenth-century mosaics, and accounts for the
extraordinary freshness of the rendering. It is a method that is quite
spontaneous, for apart from the small design (over which there
must have been some pretty heated ecclesiastical arguments) the
work on the walls was laid in freshly day by day. The real act of
creation took pkce in the wet plaster, not at the design stage. By
this method too they were able to make the wall surface undulate,
and to press and tilt the tesserae as they wished, to catch the light,

93

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

The later mosaics of the Renaissance, which so disfigure St.
Mark's, especially on the front of the Basilica, were not done in this
way. For them an artist as important as Tintoretto would paint a large
picture in oil paint in the ordinary way, and from it a full-size
paper cartoon was made in reverse. On to this the bits of mosaic
were stuck, matching up the colours quite mechanically from the
painting. The cartoon, cut into manageable sections, was then
lifted into position and embedded in plaster, and washed off when
the mosaic was set. But the final effect was never seen until the last
operation, the wall was quite uniformly flat and uninteresting, and
what we see in the end is only a mechanical reproduction of an oil
painting, a rendering in marble of effects obtained by a brush. It is
doubtful if the artist himself ever touched his own design. They are
only interpretations, not original works.

It is interesting, before I leave this subject, to sum up the effects
made by the two methods of working. If we stand on one of the
galleries and look at a part which has both Byzantine and Renaissance
mosaics side by side, the difference is astonishing. The early mosaics
are clear, strong and readable for hundreds of feet. Every action is
telling and every part of the design remains visible without that
deterioration of drawing which takes place as distance increases.
The main, shapes for instance, the shapes of figures are all con-
ceived in silhouettes, and there is no overlapping or attempts at real
perspective. Details, such as leaves on trees, the patterns on a robe,
are all enclosed within this shape and function as decorative patterns
and increase the texture of the design. But the later mosaics, in
which, of course, there was a great difference in mental conception,
nearly always lose this readable quality, except in the case of very-
simple objects in isolated positions. They become nebulous and
muddled and look quite grey and colourless when compared with
the early ones. Their concern with perspective, in the drawing of
quickly receding limbs and flowing draperies, in the drawing of
naturalistic flowers and shrubs in landscapes, or in the rendering of
vast areas of boiling clouds upon which, perforce, these figures
must be standing, and their overall attempts at real lighting
and display of intricate emotions on people's faces, all conspire to
abuse the medium and produce failures. For even though all these
admittedly more subtle effects are possible in paint, they become
ridiculous when done in stones, especially when interpreted at
second or third hand. The art of Byzantium was perfectly rendered

94

RESTORATION OF MOSAICS

in mosaic, the art of the Renaissance was perfectly rendered in paint,
but I have never yet seen a Renaissance mosaic which is really
successful. I should thinJk Tintoretto had a surprise when he saw what
they had done to his "Paradiso" painting above the atrium. It is
coarse and unlovely even to modern eyes.

95

Idling

UNDER the bellies of the Bronze Horses of St. Mark's I met
a Viennese artist. As is the way in Venice, where people are
always just about to leave, we were very soon down to essentials :
he wanted to show me his paintings. I thought at first that this would
mean a trek to some distant studio in the heat, but no he had them
all with him downstairs! He'd left them with the beadle at the en-
trance to the Basilica. He went down and returned with quite a
heavy roll of canvases and paper, and between us we spread out the
pictures on the floor of the atrium roof, inside the cathedral. Perhaps
this was the first exhibition of early twentieth-century art to be
held in St. Mark's, if only on the floor! (I must admit that among
these sweeping golden vaults, and immediately beneath the enor-
mous stretch of Tintoretto's Paradiso mosaic, this work, reminiscent
of Paul Klee, made me feel rather like a pavement artist. . . . Such
quick, twitching statements of modern pain and Viennese pain
too, from that once-splendid city now split in quarters!)

Then we spent an hour discovering that we held the same opinion
about the mosaics and the pavement (unusual to find two artists in
agreement!) ; and yet we disagreed about one thing: he wanted to
pull down all the Renaissance mosaics and to fill their places with
gold, whereas I wanted to leave them, because I have come to accept
the less good with the very good. Also I am old enough to know
that what would go into their places if they were removed would
certainly not be plain gold. . . . Later, in highly critical mood, we
went to see an exhibition of contemporary paintings, one of those
ever-so-frequent shows of now universal pseudo-French Impres-
sionism, of fluffy, clotted paintings, befuddled and pretty. (Every
European country from Scandinavia to the Balkans has been in-
fected by the School of Paris pretty tufts of coloured wool every-
where, applied with glue! Oh, for a breath of fresh air to blow it all
away. . . .)

All evening we wandered about, and completely ruined our
dinner with pessimism. We discovered little except that the position

7 97

Studies of the Bronze Horses of St. Mark's

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

of the painter today is similar in all countries. . . . The half-declared
fear of science, the futility of industrial society, the sense of isolation
of the artist and the knowledge that art could be dispensed with
tomorrow and few would note its passing. . . . My generation of
artists at least had some uneasy connection with the nineteenth cen-
tury, had a backward glimpse down the vista. We grew up among
the broken idols of the 'twenties, slumbered through the uneasy
afternoon-dream of surrealism, and lived through the intensely felt
pacifism of the 'thirties. Then we were plunged into the nightmare of
a war which brought us face to face with human behaviour the like
of which had not been known since medieval times. But the war was
not cleansing and has only driven us into romanticism, where we
are still connected with the past by education and tradition, and, if
not entirely iconoclastic, we show little faith and have little con-
fidence. But this young artist, coming to manhood after the Second
World War, has had the unfortunate experience of growing straight
from innocence to cynicism without any middle period of idealism.
The past seems little to his generation except a scratching ground,
and they have taken refuge in abstractions and the art of idle moments.
Yet they show all the self-confidence of eclecticism, and allied to a
new architecture and new design in the crafts we may still live to see
a twentieth-century style. . . . Artists today have still one thing in
common : their passionate belief in the validity of the imagination
as a way of life. We are struggling to preserve ourselves as a human
type, at a time when men are less interested in humanism but are
forging ahead with astonishing experiments in physics, both on
earth and soon, we are told, among the planets. It would be a sad
anticlimax to centuries of grandeur if artists were to end merely as
entertainers or at best as occupational therapists.

WE paced the Molo backwards and forwards (each hour I remem-
bered some rusty German phrase of gloom that I thought I had left
behind among the litter of my student days) until under the arcades
of the Palazzo Ducale at midnight we parted. As Verdi's Requiem
was at that moment being solemnly unravelled in the courtyard of
the Palace to a crowd of fashionables, I did not know whether I was
taking part in a drama or a melodrama. At least we had shown each
other that the splendours of Venice had not blinded us to our own
century. ... In the early hours of the morning Fritz was to leave

98

IDLING

Venice, with his roll of paintings under his arm, to return to the
Russian Zone of Vienna. . . , But all Venice seemed in sultry mood
that night, for when I got home there was a row in progress under
my window. It flared up like a thunderstorm and rolled on rill
half-past one, till I was sick of it. Gondoliers were quarrelling
violently in gibberish, with the usual crowd of interested young
men looking on. ... Idling all day, idling all night. . . . Later,
everybody moved off, the day worn out at last, but just as sleep was
falling, the bells struck up again. . . .

99

Opera

staging of opera out of doors is always one of the delights
JL of the summer season in Italy, and in no other country is opera
pursued with such fierce enthusiasm, nor in any other country are
the nights so balmy, so less likely to damp enthusiasm. How lucky
these people are to be able to sit up half the night under the stars,
fanned by gentle breezes, hearing and seeing these extraordinary
performances. In Italian opera one comes to see more plainly than
ever the great trend of Italian life towards the theatrical: Italy is an
open-air theatre, and though there may be grim goings-on behind
the scenes, the best in Italian life is the staging of a great show. The
static arts of architecture, painting and sculpture have been used
merely as a background, century after century, for the continuous
performance of Italian life. The cities, with all their magnificent
buildings, secular and ecclesiastical, the squares, the avenues, have
all been used as a slowly changing permanent set for the play of
history. Art and life have been integrated. . . . Visitors to Italy from
the north often make the mistake of divorcing the arts from the
life lived among them, and with all seriousness tend to regard
architecture, painting and sculpture as subjects sealed off within
themselves. The palaces, squares, churches, the collections of works
of art are looked upon as something separate, whereas they are
meaningless apart from the life lived in them. The sun and the
climate, which draw all things outwards, have produced a nation
of extfaverts, and from the cradle to the grave a man parades. He is
on show. He works out the drama of his life as an actor, be it an
idyll, a tragedy or a melodrama. Thus his life is a public Affair most
of the time : his lines are spoken and sung in a melodious language,
accompanied by extravagant gestures and dressing up. Perhaps this
is the key to all life and art in Italy even to religious art, which is,

after all, only an attempt to prolong the life of Italy into eternity

(With us life is different, essentially withdrawn, non-violent and
melancholy. We solve die problem of material living, and then live
quietly, without ostentation. The extraverts among us, unless they

100

OPERA

be admirals, politicians or great sportsmen, are frownecl upon, and
undue expression of emotion is looked upon as bad taste, while
artists, if they survive at all, are nearly always romantics. Our lives
are truly hyperborean compared with this life in the sun, though
that is not to say that we haven't our own compensating qualities
and excellences.) Italian life is exterior, uninhibited, rational and
at all times demonstrative, and thus opera, which to us, with our
withdrawn attitude to life, is often comical and sometimes quite
ridiculous, is, to the Italians, a dramatized version of incidents
taken from real life, set to music. It is one further example of that
remarkable ability of the Italians to transpose life into art, which
both mirrors and exalts ordinary existence. Opera, and indeed most
of the arts up to this present calamitous century have been pur-
sued in Italy with the seriousness which we now devote to cricket,
football, horse-racing and golf.

To see Puccini's opera "Otello" in the open air in Venice is to
witness a strange transformation, an elevation of ordinary life into
the realms of art, as reminiscences of the Italy of the past so rich
in artistic intrigues, stagey assassinations, decorative poisonings and
dramatic suicides or to the realm of wish-fulfilment, where, in the
heightened emotional key so well produced by hysterical singing
and haunting refrains, the love affairs of ordinary men and women
take on the importance of those of heroes and heroines. Moreover,
this sense of super-reality is further heightened by the continuation
of the paste-board scenery of the opera into the real architecture
beyond the stage and around the square temporarily converted into
an amphitheatre. In the magic of stage lighting it becomes exceed-
ingly difficult to distinguish between the real and the temporary
scenery of Venice: the Gothic and Renaissance palaces round the
square and the church tower above merge to such an extent that we
are taken into the opera itself in a way no ordinary indoor theatre

can ever achieve Above are the stars and the moon, while

below is this fantastic story about a handkerchief that ends so grimly
with murder and suicide. . . .

Open-air opera has its diverting side, which is half the joy of the
performance. The intervals are extremely long, and during that
time we in the audience are given the opportunity to observe
ourselves, to make criticisms of dresses and appearances, to make
remarks of appraisal, to gush with emotion over a friend at the other
side of the amphitheatre, to snub enemies, to bow, to walk arm in

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

arm intimately up and down the aisle in front of the whole audience
pretending we are alone, to show off jewellery, arms and necks, to
show how delicately ice-cream or Coca-cola can be taken in evening
clothes. Now is the time to disturb Italian intellectual friends who
are busy blowing their own trumpets, or to sit with an American
friend who with great wit can point out things about other Ameri-
cans in the audience that only an American knows. ... In fact,
during the intervals the audience spills over and enjoys itself. It is
also given an opportunity of watching the scene-shifting, for as there
is no drop curtain and the floodlights which shine into the audience
are not completely blinding, the stage is still visible ; and it is often
difficult to decide which is more amusing, the scene in the audience
or the scene-shifting. In Rome elephants are sometimes brought
on to the stage, in Verona horses and chariots, but on this occasion,
where no such creatures play a part, the scene-shifting is confined to
the removal of architecture and furnishings. Scores of men, in their
vests, wrestle with enormous paste-board palm trees, remove whole
staircases bodily, lift mighty Gothic arches, bring in columns,
furniture, ships, ferns, balustrades, and then, for the last act, arrange
Desdemona's bed a real four-poster, with diaphanous drapes her
bedding, dressing-table and various pieces of her bedroom walls.
Meanwhile throughout the endless replacing of objects as though
the stage designer's drawings had been lost and everyone put his thing
down just where it pleased his fancy the singers drift around dis-
cussing their acting positions with each other : where lately they had
been quarrelling violently in the opera, now they are friends. . . .

After the last turbulent act, of praying, of screaming, of smother-
ing, of anguish, of suicide, during which the canary sings its haunting
refrain, the absurd woi&fazzoletto, handkerchief, is heard for the
last time, and the audience is struck dumb with emotion and aston-
ishment; after the bursts of applause, the kissing, the bowing, the
rejoicing at such a delightful performance, we leave the lights and
the greasepaint and disperse down the narrow alleys of a deserted
Venice, as though we ourselves were walking into the wings. . . .

Venice, after a busy day and the din of the last four hours, is quiet
now and secret. The night is still and warm, and the canals are bkck,
without a ripple. We pass under the Sottoportico del Arco Celeste
into the Piazza San Marco, and there, at two o'clock in the morning,
by moonlight, all other lights extinguished, is the permanent scenery,
looking very beautiful indeed and very deserted.

102

Interlude

1 HERE is a madness that sweeps all seaside resorts. It is a desire
i to be gay, to dance in the light and air, to eat unusual food, to
drink, to make love. Sea mists get into the mind and it all ends up in
sadness. Venice, being not merely by the sea but in the sea, is a city
that suffers this delirium not just on its front, as is usually the case,
but on every side: is, in fact, enveloped in it. Seaside madness pro-
duced Brighton, a town of delightful English eccentricities rather
mild and endearing of quacks and dealers, crazy individuals, amor-
ous weekends, vaporous sub-religions, with its pier, and above all
the regal folly of the Pavilion. No less curious than some of the shops
in Venice are those in that airy town on the South Coast, for with
the usual antique and second-hand shops in its narrow alleys
streets of surreal delight are to be found others that are rarely found
inland. There is a shop which deals exclusively in rubber faces, with
rows and rows of grimacing masks which can be stretched at will
in all directions with the finger and thumb. There is a stuffed-
kitten shop, and a shop which sells nothing but cork-bungs, bottle
stoppers and cork pictures. More curious still were the little slot
machines which at one time could be found in certain places in the
town, as though they had escaped from the pier. In a little cast-iron
alcove, behind a window, what is described as an "Egyptian lady"
reclined upon a couch, a stiff little doll of eighteen inches. If you
put your penny in the slot, and placed your handkerchief over a
small pierced grill at the front, it was gently sprayed with the scent
of attar of roses. . . .

There was a Brighton dentist too who, before these days of
clinical efficiency, performed behind bead curtains. He had seen
better days and was reduced to wearing his evening clothes per-
petually, with the patent leather shoes tied up with string. He had
the unusual feature of different-coloured eyebrows one was
ginger, one was white, but both were very bushy. His dentist's
chair was an ordinary armchair in olive-green brocaded plush,
which, when he wanted to tip the patient back to do the top teeth,

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he would prop up on a heavy family Bible. He worked a foot-drill
with a driving belt of knotted string, and it was fascinating to watch
the knots go round as the teeth were being drilled. The room was
always crawling with children and babies, and he talked incessantly,
and was in the habit of lifting up the smallest baby under one arm
to peer into the patient's mouth while he drilled with the other.
Afterwards, at the end of the operation, he would peel an apple,
very slowly, with an engraved silver knife, and offer segments all
round. He was described as a good-natured man, but, as he neglected
to send out any bills, he is now no more.

104

Fragments : Two

BET WEE N the twin towers of the Arsenale sailed, the galleons,
glittering with gold, pennants fluttering . . . past the row of
lions, the statuary, the ornate gates. Today swarms of brown boys
climb on the railings of the Bridge of Paradise in front of the towers ;
they cross themselves and then jump into the water to swim. The
lions have become the nursery toys of Venice, old, beloved, worn
smooth and shiny by generations of children, with many centuries
of changing fashions, pantaloons, breeches, trousers, shorts. The
catnpo here is dirty, faded, all glory departed, a rowdy place used
for gossip. Beyond, over the high walls, is a mysterious hint of
modern industry. I don't know what they make behind those walls
today, but it can no longer be pikes, breastplates, helmets and
greaves, or men-o'-war, anchors, cannon. And they are most cer-
tainly not re-gilding the Budntoro. . . . But at five-thirty, when the
sun casts long shadows across the marble gates and the statues turn
pink, a factory siren shrieks close at hand, and over the Bridge of
Paradise comes a throng of workmen in overalls, tired and grey,
with empty luncheon cans. Some come to the little bar at the corner
to have a drink and a gossip on their way home, but most of them
hurry along the quayside in the direction of the Campo ddla Bra-
gora. Soon it is quiet again and the children resume their playing
on the lions, jump from the bridge and swim in the canal.

ONE comes to know these sultry, clouded mornings when one
wakes tired and almost completely drained of energy* The sky
is overcast, Venice goes grey, St. Mark's is blanched like a folly
made of old coral, the city is moist and horrid; everyone wipes his
brow and does as little as possible, moves as little as possible. . . .
On days like these, what the English call "The Smells" rise from the
side canals and the narrow alleys, like whiffs from a thousand corpses.
Venice languishes, gives one a headache, is revolting. Even the

107
At the Atsenak

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

caged birds stop singing and droop on their perches. . . . Peeling
walls, dank white washing hanging limp, old unpainted shutters,
white marble bones of balconies, arched window frames like the
ribs of skeletons, slimy pavements, and the veiled presence of fes-
tering garbage The shops smell, the people smell, the tourists

smell. There is no escape from it: even the smell of carnations is
disgusting. On such days Venice is like a medieval lazar house,
worse than any other place on earth. Collapse on the nearest pedi-
ment if it is not fouled by pigeon droppings and wait : there is
no escape!

Soon the rain begins, and the dark surface of the canals is pock-
marked. The people, mumbling in the crowded alleys, break up
their groups and stop their endless grumble about cento dnquanta
and due mille lire, and begin to move rapidly in all directions. Then
the rain comes in greater quantities than any municipal water-cart
could ever carry, swilling and washing and flooding the lanes and
canals, squares and courtyards large and small, the quaysides, the
palaces, the people, the tourists. Everything and everybody is
unmercifully or mercifully swilled, to the accompaniment of
shattering thunder claps and flashes of lightning

By this time, being sensible, one is safely digging into a plateful
ofgnocchi with tomato sauce, followed by roast veal, mixed salad
and fruit, with un mezzo rosso. Then, later, when one wakens up,
the miracle has happened! The light is dazzling, the sky is blue, the
air is full of delightful scents, St. Mark's bright again in pink and
gold Venice is the most beautiful city in the world!

CAMPO SANTA MAMA FORMOSA: beauty has just passed by

Who by now has not heard of "Titian-red hair" ? Well, it is a thing
which has to be seen to be believed. It is not ginger and has no hint
of gold, but is almost crimson, a warm purple, like old polished
copper, sometimes quite dark. Who could resist this, against a
brown skin, or against an olive skin with carmine cheeks and lips.
Or that other kind of hair, so black that it is blue, or that pale
Venetian gold on dark temples?

A DRAGONFLY came to live on my brocaded wallpaper today.

108

FRAGMENTS: TWU

HERE am I sitting in one of the duller squares in Venice, the Campo
Daniele Manin, collapsed in the heat, sipping iced siroppa and think-
ing about nothing in particular. The only attractive building is the
house at the end of the square, in which Manin lived, painted cherry
red, with white marble balconies and architraves and dark green
shutters. (I am aware that there is a group of nice Gothic windows
behind me, but I am too lasy even to turn my head: this morning
is not for ogees and crockets, just for sitting!) In front of Manin's
house is a sandalo from which two youths are playfully trying to
push each other into the canal, there being nothing else to do at the
moment. Small knots of people are gathering on either bridge. The
youths push and shove, and one, rather wisely, has already taken off
his shirt. Quite soon he topples over the side and gets a wetting.
He heaves himself back into the boat and there is another struggle,
during which ttey both fall into the canal. . . . Out they come, their
clothes sticking close, and climb with agility up the grills of the
windows and on to the bridge. The shirtless one, glistening in the
sun, enjoying his performance, mounts the parapet, raises his arms
as if to dive, and then, to confound everybody, leaps into the air
in a sitting position and drops into the canal with a huge splash.
The second follows him back into the water, and they spend a
further gay ten minutes ducking one another. They help each other
out with great courtesy, and, arms entwined, climb glistening on to
the bridge. They put their clothes to dry on the parapets in the sun :
it is all over, the crowd moves on.

DO you remember those long, long afternoons of childhood
when the sunny hours seemed to go on for ever and the bees strayed
among the flowers without returning to their hives? Or have
you forgotten, now that you are grown up and the day is divided
into short periods between meals, and the years pass so rapidly
that you wonder if you haven't taken leave of your senses or whether
something extraordinary hasn't happened to the equinoxes?
Well, in Venice, on these warm marbles, the afternoons are long
again, they stretch out foj: ever: from the noonday commotion of
church bells round St. Mark's away into the violet evenings so busy
with the bustle of strolling people.

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

IN Venetian paintings there is a tendency to run to Arrivals and
Departures ; that is to say, people are either arriving by water or
are just about to go somewhere by water. Comings and goings are
always voyages one cruises about Venice, one travels about Venice,
whereas in London one merely "gets about." All the water-borne
journeys are little pomps ; all boating and floating upon water is
important. Thus it is an event to take the vaporetto, it is an adven-
ture to cross the Grand Canal by traghetto, while to journey by
gondola is still the most luxurious form of travel in spite of the
aeroplane. . . . And it must be nice to look forward to one's funeral
in one of those splendid black and gold gondolas that glide with
such awe-inspiring magnificence up the Grand Canal and away over
the sea to the Island of the Dead. . . . (On second thoughts, it is
better to be upright in one of the following gondolas than prone
under a heap of gladioli !)

I WENT to see an exhibition of contemporary paintings one of
those many one-man shows of Venetian scenes that look as though
Bonnard were working here and was somewhat surprised to find
the floor of the gallery inlaid with gravestones. . . . The gallery was
a converted church. In Venice old churches are used for many pur-
poses and have made admirable cinemas. The lurid dramas of
Hollywood take place on the spot where once the tabernacle stood.
It is curious to see the baroque facades plastered with photographs
of screen lovers and to find a box office in the narthex.

THE Lido : the largest hot-water bathing establishment since the
Baths of Caracalk.

MOST people go to Venice to escape from the twentieth century.
I know of an eminent Venetian whose great passion in life is the
London Undergound. Seated in his lovely city, he plans imaginary
journeys from Kennington Oval to PaddingtonA . .

THIS small, exquisite architecture three or four storeys high, this
low skyline with occasional outbursts of parapets and domes, of

no

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

cornices lively with, statues and knobbly spikes those were the
great days! I shall never get used to the mammoth concrete canyons
of our present-day cities. I don't like tall buildings or tall people :
they make me feel small. That is the simple truth of the matter.
Skyscrapers are bad for the human race they make us into ants.
They are no better than hives, packing-cases, egg-boxes. The secret
of the great cathedrals is that they do not make us insignificant,
they somehow prise open the mind and make us feel expansive;
but some great palaces, like the Palazzo Ducale, beat us into sub-
mission with their bombast, like meeting a tall, magnificent bully.
None of these buildings, however, dwarf us in quite the same way
as the tall modern buildings, which are so terrifyingly efficient, so
mechanical, so utterly unlovable.

VERY irritated today at the sight of a young priest on a boat. In
the crush I was afforded a very intimate view of his tonsure, for the
young man only stretched up to my nose and came to a halt immedi-
ately in front of it. . . . This sombre manner of hairdressing, which
for ever marks a man out as different, is both fascinating and revol-
ting : a mild scarification. ^Estherically, perhaps because we have
come to accept it, it fits in well with the art of the Church : it is so
appropriate, so right for the occasion. To me it seems to be an attempt
to make young men old before their time to imitate artificially
the bald pate, the little fringe that we have come to associate
with those sullen, glowering old men so tough, so humourless,
so difficult, so without charm such as we see depicted in the
Scrovegni Chapel at Padua, or in so many other paintings of that
artistically pure though emotionally chilly period. (There they are,
taking part in slow solemnities, crouching with rheum in desolate,
stony landscapes over the one small olive bush, or striking the rocks
to bring forth into an arid countryside some magic spring of much-
needed water Or else, in some interminable internecine quarrel,

when theology was the chief means of passing the intolerable seasons,
they are seen splitting each other's bald heads with the jaw bones
of asses, and then, in an ecstasy of apparently welcome pain, they are
wafted upwards from their vales of woe, helped by a group of
frigid minor air sprites, into some formal unimaginative heaven,
where at last they find flowers and mild, lilting music. Boredom on

112

FRAGMENTS: TWO

earth, boredom in eternity ) I know now what made me so angry

at this young man's tonsure : it was the implicit denial of life, the
wastage of youth.

IF travelling by vaporetto or lagoon steamer takes one back to the
'nineties, then travelling by gondok takes one back where . . . ?
Has any town a method of conveyance which has survived so com-
pletely down the centuries, which is so appropriate to the layout
of the city? It is the equivalent of going down the Strand in a sedan
chair, and yet it is surprisingly modern and not in the least quaint,
I can think of no more delightful way of moving about than lying
on the cushions of a gondok and gliding so swiftly it seems
along the canals, viewing the undersides of balconies and the plants
cascading over the window sills or seeing the dancing fret of light
under the bridges. Lying down thus seems a delightfully abandoned
form of exhibitionism after being brought up to travel demurely
almost, and in repressed silence sitting upright in rows in train
and bus. It is a most curious and pleasing sensation to see people
from underneath for a change, on bridges and banks, gazing down
upon one from parapets and balconies like figures in a baroque
ceiling. It is such a languid and satisfactory mode of travel that one is
almost tempted to undo one's shoekces. . . .

THIS endless game with beer-bottle tops! It goes on from about
nine in the morning till sundown, week after week, pkyed appar-
ently by the same group of ten-year-olds around the edges of the
fountain area in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini. They pky in all weathers,
except in torrential rain, when they retire between the columns of
the Basilica to continue as best they might until they are washed
out by the water flooding from the rain spouts. . . . Today, in
moderate rain, the game has continued with umbrellas and cloaks.
It is now almost dark and they are still pkying, . . .

THE boy with the face of a caterpillar is bullied by the owner of
the caf6 where I breakfast during that trying rime of the Fixing

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

of the Blinds. Every morning he is near to tears, humiliated in front
of foreigners. Even though I have trained them to make tea properly
and induced them to buy in a stock of real orange marmalade, I
really can't stand this caterpillar-misery much longer. The owner
does not strike me as being too glad to be alive : he has the misfor-
tune to have pebble glasses. His wife, who slaves at the scalding and
hissing coffee machines all day long, is ashen with fatigue, and often
burns her arms on the chromium. The daughter is too young to have
felt the full impact of life in a Venetian coffee house. She is bright,
pretty and obliging. But I must go.

114

Gondola Strike

HE bkck swans have disappeared! For the past week there has
JL been a strike of gondoliers. The canals are forlorn, people no
longer cross by ferry, and any boatmen who try to carry passen-
gers are threatened with a ducking. Late-night revellers find that
they have to make long detours to cross the bridges of the Grand
Canal. Tourists are deprived of romance, and there are no longer
the nightly processions of gondolas from the smart hotels. The
motor-boats have had the waterfront to themselves and the vaporetti
have been more than usually crowded. We have been deprived of a
familiar sight and there has been that curious pregnant stillness that
only occurs when men cease work in anger. A rash of posters has
appeared and leaflets have been distributed. . . . The argument is
this : the gondoliers are being put out of business by the motor-
boats. It is a feud of long standing. If the motor-boats gain ascen-
dancy Venice "will be deprived of a splendid tradition. The canals
will be full of fumes. Venice will no longer be the most beautiful
city in the world. Venice will be ruined. . . . Etcetera, etcetera. It
is an argument which is half true and half emotional, a cry from the
past; it is chiefly the familiar argument against so-called "progress'*

of the old world struggling for survival against new inventions.

Now, I am never very expert at diplomacy and I am cursed, if
curse it is, with the ability to see both sides of the question, and thus
I drift and lose myself in side issues. (Usually, tormented by blast
and counterblast, both of which seem reasonable, I find that I run
away and hide myself in art, because it is so much easier to control
a work of art, a fixed and positive act of creation, than to waste
time in storms of indecision.) But in this matter of the gondolas, as
I sit in the clear, warm air of Venice, my mind has, for once, made
an immediate decision, half rational, half emotional, like the wording
of the posters. I am all for retaining the gondolas, and furthermore,
would even go so far as to advocate the banning of certain kinds of

motor traffic on the canals It is quite clear what would happen

if the motor-boats won: Italians, being as they are, would turn the

117

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

Grand Canal into a race track for speedboats. The side canals would
be dangerously congested, the noise would be deafening, people
would fight and most certainly get drowned in collisions. The pace
of life would become hysterical and the calm of Venice would be
destroyed in the interests of speed. The lanes and alleyways would
stink of petrol. The authorities would most certainly start tearing
parts of Venice down to "open up" the city to accommodate motor
traffic, as they have had to do with other old cities. And last but not
least, there would be a terrible outburst of modern Italian motor-
boat design. . . .

For Venice of all cities upon earth is not built for motor traffic.
It is a survival of an old type of city, hardly altered since the eight-
eenth century. Its old function, its old glory have departed, but it
has risen again to comparative prosperity as a tourist centre. People
come here to see a unique city of astonishing beauty, hardly touched
by any of the major military or aesthetic disasters of our century.
They come, quite frankly, to escape from the familiar scenes of our
time, for romantic reasons or to study a type of city where the arts
of painting, sculpture and architecture are still intact. Shabby though
the old city is, it has nevertheless come to us complete, not as a
desolate ruin but as a living thing, and with it has survived a method
of getting about the waterways which has not only been developed
over hundreds of years, by men with as much sense of fitness as we
have, but also with a sense of elegance perfectly in harmony with
its surroundings. As a means of getting about such a peculiar city,
travel by gondola is still as practical as ever it was it is not a useless
survival which has been superseded by something better. It is still
the best method of navigating the narrow canals. Furthermore, it is
extremely graceful and gives the tourists a great deal of pleasure,
both as a treat to the eye and as a way of getting about.

To our modern way of thinking, however, gondola travel is
slow, and to many people it seems expensive. These are the two main
arguments against. . . . That it is slow is true, 1 but people should not
come here to rush about. The leisurely glide should be kept as
part of the cure of Venice: we rush about too much anyway, and
a lot of our rushing is pointless It is a good thing to take life at a
slower pace, even if occasionally one misses one's train home. . . .
Speed is not a civilizing influence (at least in Venice, however much
it may be in the stratosphere) : it is corrosive, things happen too
quickly. One of the greatest lessons that Venice has for us in the

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

twentieth century is that speed is not important to the enjoyment
of Hfe. I have heard people say in Venice, time and again, how much
energy they had left to do other things when they didn't have to
keep rushing at out, for on the contrary, the habit of speed appears
to shrink our lives rather than expand them. We seem to be less
able to spend enough time with ourselves. . . . That the gondolas
are expensive is a potent argument, yet they are not on the whole
any more expensive than taxi fares in most of our capitals and cities.
It would be true, however, to say that they would be used far more
by visitors if the fares were cheaper, but that the gondoliers would
have much less time for sleeping during the day. . . . Thus, though
it is most unlikely that we should ever want to revive horse cabs
in London, and that only the most eccentric of Englishmen would
wish to travel again in a sedan chair, nevertheless, for the sake of
Venice, let the gondolas be retained. Let us agree to go slowly for
the joy of it and for the sake of keeping Venice whole. As for the
expense of gondok rides, the tourists would hardly notice another
small tax; as it is, we keep Venice by the hundred and one litde
extras we pay at the end of our hotel bills : let the gondoliers be
subsidized by the tourists for the sake of their holiday enjoyment.
Cheaper means of travel are already available in the vaporetti and
the smaller municipal motor-boats : these services might be reason-
ably extended, without driving the gondolas off the water or
spoiling the city.

There is one place, however, where I think the petrol engine would
be a blessing, and that is on the large transport barges which are
still pushed with tremendous labour by manpower carrying coal,
timber, cement and all manner of heavy goods. Though it is a fine
sight to see almost naked bronzed figures, muscles glistening in the
sun, working these heavy loads along the main canals, it would
obviously be much better if they were motor-driven, as they some-
times are. . . . But let us keep the gondok and the gondoliers, and
preserve something of beauty and of extraordinarily fine waterman-
ship. Venice would be a sad pkce without them.

120

Festa del Redentore

AS though to anticipate ktcr events, about six o'clock on the
XJL night of the fourteenth of July the first night of the Festival
there was a huge double rainbow behind San Giorgio Maggiore.
Boat-loads of people were being emptied on to the Riva degli
Schiavoni, and the threat of rain caused some excitement among the
cafe proprietors, who kept running in and out with their canvas
chairs lest the seats should get wet, and taking down their awnings.
The Piazzetta and Piazza were already milling with people gaily

dressed, (What an extraordinary sight this is when viewed from

my balcony! How right Tiepolo's colour was! Against the white
and grey buildings the scene is of a powdery brilliance : the white
shirts of the men, the brilliant colours of the women's dresses
much vermilion and greeny-blue this year and all those middle
tones so beloved in Italy : pale khaki, pale chocolate, powder blue,
pale olive green, slate grey, ochre and cinnamon, in contrast to the
heads of black hair and the sunburnt faces.)

After an excellent dinner, where we are always bullied by the
waiter, who thinks it is barbaric to have steak well done
"shrivelled" he calls it, with a shudder we followed the crowd
across the Piazza to the Campo San Zobenigo, where, from the
gondola station, the first of the temporary bridges was built across
the Grand Canal, then along the Zattere to the great Bridge of
Boats across to the Church of the Redentore on the Giudecca. We
had expected too much, of course, after seeing so many old prints
of the Bridge of Boats, and were somewhat surprised to find an
army pontoon bridge manned by soldiers at intervals, instead of
how foolish we are and incurably romantic about Venice! a
bridge built on barges which should have been baroque. The
crowds were pouring over, up and down the small rises of the bridge,
a constantly moving stream of bright colour. The Church of the
Redentore, so elegant among the low line of meaner buildings, was
tonight illuminated in strident colours, which completely trans-
formed its appearance and destroyed all the architectural properties

123
Street Stall

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

of solids and spaces so painstakingly worked out by Palladio,
imparting to it instead the quality of a large toy at a Christmas
fair: the facade a most violent orange, the dome and towers the
most emerald of greens and the windows and the interior of the
cupola the most raspberry of reds. It looked, indeed, against the
deepening blue of the night the glow of the sunset still lingered
on as though it were made of sheets of coloured glass instead of
marble, repellent and gay, but still a fitting background to the scene.
The wide flight of steps leading up to the church slowly filled with
the people coming off the bridge and formed a grandstand from
which to view the spectacle on the Canal. Wandering among the
people were the balloon sellers with their huge clusters of highly
decorated globes glistening and swaying in the electric lights, and
the caramel sellers, the fruit sellers and the sellers of celluloid wind-
mills and the little dolls with staring eyes and fluffy skirts. At the
top of the steps, on either side of the main entrance to the church,
were the music-makers on the left a brass band, on the right a
choir both making music at once, music of a totally different
kind, creating utmost pandemonium.

The interior of the Redentore presented a more dignified scene
and one of great gaiety, as though a ball and not a religious service
were in progress, such a scene as there might have been in Bath in
the eighteenth century. The aisles were tastefully decorated, the
altars bright with candles and flowers and pots of aspidistras arranged
upon the pediments, while at the crossing, under the spacious and
extremely beautiful dome, were hung huge drapes of Indian, red
velvet trimmed with gold ribbons, from the arches down to the
pavement. . . . And yet, with all the added gaiety, the sweet reason-
ableness of Palladio could not be destroyed, and the church was
unusually neat. For this, the one great festival of the year, when the
memory of the Redemption of Jesus steals all the crowds away
from Venice at the height of the season, Palladio relaxes a little and
the humbler decorations mix well with his elegant classicism. On
this occasion, with the clergy massed in the sanctuary, the spirit
of the Baroque comes to life again for a few hours, aided by lights,
noise, glitter, clouds of incense, swags of drapery, urns of flowers
and the stately and orderly movement of the service, the sparkling
vestments and the swinging of censers. It would not have been in the
least surprising to see a flying ballet of angels in the dome ... or an
occasional feather come twirling down through the clouds of smoke.

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FESTA DEL RBDENTORB

Already there are two krge gilded cherubs in mid-air, hanging on
wires : tonight they are happily appropriate* What a fine sight
the ranks of Capuchin monks were in their festal robes with their
great untrimmed beards cascading down the embroidery, and how
handsome looked the very old ones, bowed and white, with beards
down to their waists.

FROM the ordered and solemn singing in the church, out again to
the cacophony of brass band and choir at the top of the steps, where
a dense crowd had gathered. Still more people were coining over
the bridge, and from the top of the steps they looked like an enor-
mous procession walking in a perfectly straight line, miraculously
on the surface of the waves. The night had become dark and clear,
starlit; round the Redentore was a pool of orange light, while the
quaysides of the Giudecca were hung with strings of lemon yellow
lanterns. Not far away, to the left, a small fairground was in full
swing, swarming with mothers and children, the roundabouts and
various games of chance intermixed with fruit stalls, banked high,
and stalls of shining chromium selling red and green drinks and
coconut milk. The cafes of the Giudecca were doing a roaring
trade, and all the shops were trimmed up for the night with coloured
paper and fairy lights. The wide canal was gradually filling with
boats, moving along the dark water like fireflies: trimmed with
arches of leaves, plume-like clusters of ferns, and festoons of laurels,
with paper lanterns among them. Tonight every craft in Venice had
been brought into use and half the population was on the water:
the entire canal was alive with boats against the faint background of
the Palazzo Ducale and the Campanile. Moving slowly up and down
among the smaller boats were the large decorated barges, looking
as though sections of one of our Victorian piers had broken loose
and were drifting away, with pavilions and bandstands hung with
beads of coloured lights. (A while ago I bought a little gondok
entirely constructed of coloured beads, with decorated hood and
prow trimmed with bead flowers tonight, except that each bead
was a light, it had come true : the spirit was the same.) On the largest
barges were complete orchestras, strings or brass, each giving a
concert by lantern light to its own group of gondolas and small
barks lying low upon the water around them. On others were
choirs singing lustily but tunefully among the bowers of evergreens

125

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

and fairylights, and in the lesser boats private parties were singing
their own individual songs to the accompaniment of accordion and
guitar. Some barges had tables down the whole of their length,
tables trimmed with vases of flowers and foil of good things to
eat and drink, under arches of laurel. The whole of the Guidecca
Canal was full of floating concerts and dining-rooms. . . .

About nine o'clock the bridge was closed and the last of the
people crowded on to the quayside. Soon the chains of lanterns
along the Giudecca and the floodlighting of the Redentore went out,
and across the water the cerise flares burning at intervals along the
Zattere (revealing theatrical beauties in Santa Maria Rosario that are
hidden in the daytime) slowly burned themselves out, until the
whole scene was in darkness. From the far end of the Giudecca
Canal, among the docks and shipping, the first of the fireworks
shot into the sky, and so began a programme that continued until
after midnight, a competition between five firms of fireworks
makers to see who could achieve the noisiest and most surprising
display. ... At first, each display is heralded by a loud explosion,
and begins slowly with a display of rocket firing immense showers
of variegated designs and then, after a while, as the enthusiasm
increases, the crackling and whistling gives way to greater explo-
sions, until, working up for the finale, the noise is like a bombard-
ment, with tremendous billowing clouds of smoke, out of the hot
belly of which shoot fountains of lights, comets, snakes and star
clusters, while drops of light and fireballs fall slowly into the sea
over an immense area. The finale of each display reaches an unbeliev-
able intensity & spasm of fireworks, and then, just as it seems quite
impossible for it to become more elaborate or noisy, it does so,
as though some excitable creature had flung a torch into the pile
of boxes and ignited the whole at once. The heavens shriek and
splutter with frenzy, and then, in sheer exhaustion, it ends with a
final big bang. . . . Firework displays on such a magnificent scale
can only be likened to actual bombardments, differing only in the
respect that they are more decorative and harmless : they represent
the military exercises of religious festivals. . . . On the other hand,
by creating imitations of Vesuvius, Etna and Stromboli they per-
petuate the volcanic origins of Italian emotions : they are the angry
side of Italian art, an anger magnificent and abandoned, as though
the whole fabric of civilization were thrown into the air in one
final, despairing and wonderful gesture .

126

FESTA DEL REDENTORE

What a fine scene there was as the great red clouds drifted away
over Venice, as the lights from the fireworks reflected in the sea below
and revealed the hundreds of decorated barges and gondolas, black
against the light ! The silhouettes of people on the quaysides, the masts
and rigging of the nearby shipping, the strings of shore lanterns now
hanging like jet beads, the dark shapes of the balloon sellers with
their bunches of semi-transparent, flower-decorated globes and the
sellers of windmills with their wares tied like acacia fronds at the tops
of poles combined to form a splendid scene against the red sky.

* * *

WE went back to San Marco by gondola, for the bridge was
closed and thousands of people were stranded upon the Giudecca
until the end of the displays. Down on the water level the aspect
changed, for we were low down among the towering gondoliers
and among the decorated barges with their singing occupants.
The great steel bkdes of the gondolas loomed dangerously out of
the night and passed quickly by. The Church of the Redentore,
again floodlit, with the crescent moon above, looked immensely
tall from the water level. We could also see under the long bridge,
along the shining water, the endless perspective of dark boats against
the illuminations. How rich the black boughs of leaves and the
black figures looked against the sky, and the groups of faces lit by
lantern light. ... As we glided past the back of the Salute our gon-
dolier had trouble with the candle in the lantern on the prow, but
his partner at the stern kept the boat moving, threading his way
skilfully through the drifting boats. The entrance to the Grand Canal
was deserted as we rounded the Dogana, but the quayside was
thronged with people, dark against die pale pink and white of the
Palazzo Ducale and the pale blue domes and dim gold of St. Mark's.

* * *

LOOKING back again across the water to the Giudecca, the people
disembarking on the Molo made a fine sight. ... A baroque water
scene, lit by the reflected light from the Piazzetta, in subdued night
colours, mostly whity-greens, greys, dark reds and umbers against
the black water: strangely pale after the orange and red glow we
had lived in on die other side. Dim figures sitting in boats, sailors
standing by their oars or lying down on their cushions, all singing,

quietly, to guitars*

* * *

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

VENICE that night was full of fumes. It was two o'clock before I
was able to drag my self wearily away, to rest, as I thought. But my
room overlooking the Basilica, so admirable as a Royal Box from
which to look down on the antics of the crowds, was no pkce in
which to sleep. Naively, as an Englishman, I had hoped against
my better judgment that it might have been possible to doze
occasionally throughout the night, in spite of the advance informa-
tion that the Festa del Redentore was described in most books as a
"Venetian Bacchanal" By this time the crowds were pouring back
over the Bridge of Boats, and soon the whole precincts of St. Mark's
were full of excited people, stimulated to an unusual degree by the
fireworks and no doubt by wine as well, so that throughout the
night there was singing and dancing and endless tomfoolery, en-
livened by strolling musicians. The only sensible thing to do was to
join in as best I might. . . .

At the rosy dawn all fumes blown away over Istria the revellers
were washing their faces at the fountain in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini,
arranging their hair in little mirrors, ready to start another day and
thronging the marble seats between the columns of the Basilica.
Young priests were counting their flocks peasants dressed entirely
in black with bkck bundles who had come in from the outlying
towns and villages. Men were still singing in groups : folk songs,
doggerel songs, accompanied with rhythmic clapping, and whole
sections from opera, especially those which gave opportunities for
solo tenor parts. (There was never a hint of jazz, for they were Italians
all : no other nationalities could stand the pace and all tourists had
retired long ago in utter exhaustion.) In the cafe, which had been
open for two days, there was utmost confusion, and the waiters were
dashing about on the verge of hysteria. Everybody was shouting as
loudly as possible at everybody else, and the early bells were clanging
from the Campanile, the Basilica and the Tower of the Giants

Then, at seven o'clock, the two Italians in the next room to me,
a nephew and an uncle, came home after a night in the streets.
Immediately on entering they played selections from "La Traviata"
on their gramophone, as though the tempest of noise in the streets
had not been enough for them. . . . The outcome was that for some
thirty hours I didn't have a wink of sleep but spent my time marvel-
ling at the vitality of these people, who poured out energy, hour
after hour, without any signs of flagging, while I was almost weeping
with fatigue.

128

PART TWO

Time

clocks of Venice are not synchronized. The hour shivers
JL with indecision, unwilling to make a definite statement. It is
noon four rimes in the Piazza San Marco: every hour, in fact, is
multiple. First rings the small bell at the corner of the Basilica. A
hammer beats under a canopy. Then, a few minutes afterwards
the first Giant swings round and strikes. Three minutes later
the second Giant swings round and strikes. Finally, with small
beginnings, the bells of the Campanile begin their musical thunder.
But the hour is never fixed there is always doubt : the mirage of
Venice shivers. We are never sure which hour we are in, and, while
dreaming in the summer heat, as the mirage settles, the mind sees
other scenes drifts backwards and forwards through history, aided
by visions left to us by painters, sculptors and architects. ... It is the
same hour, striking in different periods at once.

The Basilica of St. Mark

* I ^HE Basilica of St. Mark is a very complicated building. Its
JL personality is so intricate and elusive that it is almost impossible
to get a clear idea of it. There must be men who have lived with
St. Mark's since they were boys, to whom its secrets have revealed
themselves one by one as they grew older, and for whom every
piece of marble has some tale to tell. But there must be few of these,
even among Venetians, though there are many who are familiar
with some particular aspect. The scholars, quite sensibly, subdivide
its charms, much as they do when they dissect a butterfly and put
its parts under a microscope. They give us much valuable informa-
tion, for which we can only be grateful, and sometimes a lot of
wrong ideas, which only cast shadows in the mind. They tell us
about the domes and crockets, or the system of rainwater drainage.
They tell us of feats of construction, of the stresses and strains of
the building, some even give us precise measurements down to the
last centimetre or down to the last half-inch. They analyse the differ-
ent stones with which the building is lined, they extract romantic
meanings from them, and one of them drew moral conclusions.
They tell of its treasures and conjure up as best they may the
the historic background of each jewel and pkte of gold. Most
of all, they talk of the mosaics, which are among the greatest re-
maining monuments of Byzantine art in the world. But still we
remain baffled. The two permanent things about St. Mark's are its
continuity and the fact above all others that it is a church. The
first is an abstract quality which cannot be described, and the second
is one that we are apt to forget when we get lost in the details,
though these two things bind everything else together. Perhaps
the only possible way to look at St. Mark's is with the eye of inno-
cence for, unlike kter buildings in Italy which were often governed
by more rational architectural kws, St. Mark's seems to have been
largely an affair of the emotions. Face to face with the reality,
visitors from Northern Europe are confounded, for here is a build-
ing that has no connection with anything seen before. Of all the

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

churches in the world this building connects us with Byzantium,
and thus with the oriental beginnings of Christianity. Tradition
says that St. Mark's is a copy of the church of the Holy Apostles in
Constantinople, a church now vanished, and in the early centuries
every shipload from the East carried some treasure or some stone to
Venice to embellish it. Thus, though in plan and general construction
it followed the traditions of Byzantine architecture, its decorations,
especially as the centuries wore on, became a matter of devotional
offerings. The church is hung with thousands of gifts, and what
we see today can no longer strictly come under the heading of pure
architecture, for it is a building wrought more with emotion than
with intellect. It is thus a special case, for nowhere else is there a
building like it. Unique and eccentric, we cannot judge it at this
distance of time by any of the canons of taste and habits of mind
that have matured since it was built. We cannot think of it in terms
of Gothic, Palladian or Baroque, or now, after many centuries
of modifications, even as Byzantine. It is, nevertheless, the most
exciting building imaginable, and the exterior has achieved a most
unusual and pleasing fantasy. It is perhaps the most joyful exterior
I know, joy&l and serious at the same time. But we must look
upon it without strain, without cultural impedimenta, without being
expert. It is a baffling building of eccentric beauty, and no other
building so well expresses die mysterious charm of Venice.

The overwhelming impression of the exterior is that it is an
oriental building, an impression mainly gathered from the fine
cluster of domes surmounted by their multiple crosses of golden
balls. Its series of strong archways set the style for the later develop-
ments of Veneto-Byzantine domestic architecture, to be seen at
its best in the frontages of the Palazzi. Loredan and Farsetti, and
the Fondaco dei Turchi, and in a later phase in die front of the
Palazzo Dario, with its delightful roundels of inlaid precious marbles.
When the Gothic style came over the water to Venice it found a
sympathetic foundation in St. Mark's, and the flamboyant crockets
above the ogival arches on the front are in perfect harmony with the
Byzantine substructure. The Venetian Gothic style became indeed
a curious refinement of the heavier Byzantine style, and St. Mark's
once more spread its influence throughout Venice, from the stately
beauty of the Palazzo Ducale to its most sophisticated expression
in the Ca' d'Oro. St. Mark's was dius a link with the East, and a
prototype of the later developments of architecture in Venice, as

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THE BASItICA OP ST. MARK

well as with the beginnings of Renaissance architecture in Italy.
It is interesting to remember that for four hundred years the domes
of St. Mark's were the only domes in Europe. The next one was
Brunclleschi's in Florence.

I cannot say that I am wholeheartedly in love with the interior,
mainly because my mind has come to rest on architecture of a
later period. It is a glorious amalgamation of Oriental and Western
styles, and whereas the exterior is light and gay, the interior is
curiously heavy and clumsy. But the link with the East is stronger
than ever, for here if anywhere we catch the flavour of the Byzan-
tine Empire. There is a mixture of Oriental and Egyptian splendour
coupled with heavy Hebrew moralizing, with just a sufficient
leavening of Greek humanism to keep it alive. The effect is rich
and barbaric, and cuts us off completely from true Italian grace
and classical reasonableness. It has a stronger connection with the
Nile delta and Babylonia than with the purity of Greek thought
or the clarity of the Roman mind. This heavy Eastern style went its
own spicy way, covering itself more and more with ornaments,
until it produced the moon-wonder of the Taj Mahal and finally
the glistening confectionary of Ispahan.

Of all building material, marble is the richest. For purely sensuous
effects it outstrips even gilding and painting. Painting and gilding
produce a more emotional response, and were fully exploited during
the Renaissance, but the use of marbles, as in die interior of St.
Mark's, has a more fundamental appeal, more earthy, more con-
nected with rocks and caves. One has the sensation of being in a huge
cave cut out of rock, exquisitely finished ~with shining surfaces.
Every single part, from the pavement to the mosaics on the cupolas
and vaults, is faced with stones or else with coloured glass. Wood
is not used at all and metal only in altar furniture. The different
colours of the natural graim'ngs of the stones are put together to
form patterns, augmented by intricate carvings and inlays. Balus-
trades and finials, screens and panels, which we are accustomed to
see in wood, are all made of marble, and thus they are heavier and
thicker in quality. There is a fatness about them, and a glistening,
almost waxy look which creates an extraordinary richness, a rich-
ness appreciated as much by the hand as by the eye. The size of the
slabs of marble, too, increases this sense of bigness, for though they
may be inlaid, or worked with mouldings or pierced into grills,
they retain their massiveness.

135

THE !ION AND THE PEACOCK

The walls of the church are of split sheets of cipollino marble,
forming grained patterns when opened up and placed side by side,
an effect which I find rather repellent, though it has its devotees.
There is a particularly fine pulpit made of slabs, drums and columns,
with a dome swelling slightly outwards with an oriental fulsome-
ness that we immediately connect with turbans, gourds and fruits.
The pulpit is in two tiers, a half-hexagon on heavy columns, with a
quatrefoil above it, and then on that, supported on slender columns,
the little fat dome. There is an elaborate system of stairways leading
up into the pulpit, and the whole creates the effect of a mountain of
marble from which to hear voices from on high and has a distinct
connection with the tall Moslem pulpits with their long flights of
stairs, and even with minarets.

The pavement of St, Mark's, built on piles, undulates beneath
the feet and gives an odd sensation of dizziness. We walk about, as
though on a rather orderly pebble beach, upon inlays of oblongs
and hexagons, meanders, checks, diapers, triangles, borders and all
the intricate means of arranging sawn and polished marble beloved
of the Oriental turn of mind. The patterns of the pavement are not
all abstract, and at certain places the hard geometry makes way for
patterns of meandering vines, among which peacocks and peahens
perch. There are formal trees with doves and geese in them, and
lively designs with eagles, and at two places more ekborate panels
a picture of cocks strutting along bearing a trussed wolf on a pole,
and, of all the unlikely beasts to find on the floor of a Christian
church, a picture of a rhinoceros. By a somewhat inartistic substitu-
tion, the rhinoceros in the thirteenth century had taken the place
of the unicorn. The latter wild beast, so elegant and suggestive, was
said to be tamed by resting its head in the lap of a virgin, and it is
odd to think of a rhinoceros doing the same, but the idea persisted,
even though Marco Polo in 1298 said of the rhinoceros that "they
are not of that description of animals which suffer themselves to be
taken by maidens, as our people suppose, but are quite of a con-
trary nature." Whether or not the two cocks carrying the trussed
wolf is a symbol of good triumphing over evil I cannot tell, but it is
nevertheless a fine piece of artistic humour, the fulfilment of many
a wish both ancient and modern. An almost identical panel is to be
found in the pavement of San Donato at Murano. In spite of their
obvious use as symbols, I like to think of the cocks, geese, hens and
vines as being partly at least artistically capricious. Peacocks too, so

136

THE BASILICA OF ST. MARK

familiar as symbols of the Resurrection in Byzantine art, became as
time went on a common sight in Venice, and were used to decorate
many a secukr picture. Byzantine art was hieratic, that is plain to see,
but originally all these objects must have had their place in real life.
The mosaics of latter-day Rome, with which artistic trends those
of Byzantium were mixed, were less concerned with moralizing
and being deadly serious, and used the self-same motifs in their
pictures simply because they were the common objects of their own
farmyards. They derived their greater subjects from the stories of
the pagan deities than whom it would be difficult to find a less
virtuous crew and though some of their smaller groups were
used purely decoratively, many pointed some moral, derived from
JEsops Fables and similar stories. But I must not fall into the dan-
gerous trap of attributing fanciful motives to the stones of Venice
or I shall lose myself in detail and forget my main purpose. As it is,
I am merely idling upon the pavement of St. Mark's in the heat of
July. . . . Like all pavements, this one is better seen when we are
above it than when we are on it, and its full magnificence is best
appreciated from the galleries which run all round the church above
the arcading of the nave and transepts.

What a treat these galleries are! Narrow lanes of marble with
hefty balustrades, so smooth to -the touch, so perilously worn by
the tramp of centuries of visitors, held together with clamps of iron
and lead to keep them from tumbling down into the cathedral. At
all the junctions and turns they have smooth marble knobs like
pounds of cheese. Here we can sit all morning in a corner in rich
Byzantine gloom and look down upon winding trails of tourists,
or watch the restorers at work on the mosaics above. Outside it
may be as hot as a baker's oven, but up here, in these glittering
vaults, the air is cool, though heavy with a thousand years of incense.
Once on a level with the springing of the vaults, the atmosphere
of St. Mark's changes, for whereas below there is a heavy feeling
about the building, almost a sense of architectural tedium, the
mosaics are stimulating and lively. They are strangely different
from the architecture they adorn, as though there was a rift between
what the architects thought good and what the artists thought
good. This is perhaps understandable if we consider the extremely
conservative traditions of Byzantine builders. They were rarely
original, especially in famous buildings, when every part of a church
was built according to fixed rules, and Byzantine architecture was

137

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

certainly very solidly entrenched by the time St. Mark's was built.
Indeed, it has remained so ever since and has given orthodox churches
a fixed character right up to the present day. The first mosaics of St.
Mark's, however, some of which were added considerably later
than the building, very early showed quirks of originality. In the
main they followed the fixed traditions of Byzantine iconography,
but the rendering of individual scenes is extraordinarily fresh and
sometimes quite original, as for instance in the enormous mosaic
of the Miraculous Recovery of the Body of St. Mark. On the whole,
these mosaics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have a sparse-
ness, a clarity of statement, almost a sense of proportion and cer-
tainly a mastery of placing which the architecture seems to lack. In
short, in spite of the solemnity of the occasion, the artists working
in St. Mark's were beginning to enter the true stream of Italian art,
and in spite of their overall Byzantine flavour they strongly hint
at the art of Giotto, who was decorating the Scrovegni Chapel so
few miles away. The architects of St. Mark's looked backwards
to Constantinople while the artists looked forward to the
Renaissance.

I shall always remember the surprise I had when I first saw these
mosaics some years ago. We had been brought up to believe that
Byzantine work was as stiff in execution as it seemed to be in thought.
Photographs and copies especially copies, which the art schools
of England inherited from Owen-Jones and a host of German pro-
fessorsalways made them appear dead and dull. But to come face
to face with them in St. Mark's, literally within a few feet of them,
was to receive a great and pleasant surprise. No execution could be
more vigorous, no rendering of ideas more uncompromising or
direct. The very crudity of mosaic, when the stones were half an
inch square, and the technical subtleties so few no underpaintings,
glazes or varnishes to worry about coupled with the artists' for-
tunate simplicity of ideas and their equally fortunate ignorance of
anatomy and perspective, conspired to produce an art of unusual
vigour and power. Since those days artists have solved greater and
more subtle problems, and have worked in more difficult mediums,
but never in the whole history of Western art have they worked with
such downrighmess. The work of the Byzantine school of mosaic-
ists is naive only in the most superficial sense, but it is true to say
that they worked with the same freedom as children. We have only
to look at the other mosaics in the Basilica, done during the kter

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THE BASILICA OF ST. MARK

periods of Venetian art, and especially at those on the front, to
realize the purity of the early ones.

The individual pictures one can enjoy as the fancy takes one, but
as there are said to be forty-five thousand, seven hundred and ninety
square feet of them one's fancy must roam for weeks. The main
subjects illustrate stories from die Old and New Testaments, with
stories from the lives of the saints. Quite a large group of them illus-
trate the Story of the Bringing of the Body of St. Mark to Venice
and in a side chapel the subsidiary story of St. Isodore. Thus, in the
days when few people could read, by tilting the head backwards
the whole amazing incidents of the Bible could be seen on the
glittering ceilings, while the story of St. Mark, incredible though it
is, connected the Basilica with die miracles of old. The subject of
die latter series laid the foundations of nearly six hundred years of
paintings, for though Venetian history was singularly free of miracles
it was particularly rich in worldly incidents which provided subjects
for the greatest series of propaganda paintings ever made for any
European state. Thus it is not easy, among such a fine array, to
select one's favourites, for there is always something new to catch
the eye, and what one misses on one visit comes as a pleasant sur-
prise on die next. It all points to the fundamental fallacy of tourism,
which is ttat these things were not made to be visited rapidly but
were made to be lived with for a lifetime.

AMONG many other things, I am a lover of flying figures, for the
flying figure, with or without wings, is one of the most extra-
ordinary sensations of art. For thousands of years it seems as though
men have resented the fact that they could not fly. We have been
endowed with, more gifts fhan most creatures, but die gift of actually
being able to leap into the air and come to rest with perfect safety
upon the cornices, domes and spires of our buildings has been denied
us. We have been beaten by birds, though not vanquished, for at
last we can fly if only in machines. In the past die sensation of flying
through the air has not been unknown to us but has taken place
only in dreams, and thus in painting and sculpture especially in
painting our dreams have vicariously* come true. In centuries
when die imagination was more valid than it is today the flying
figure in art was as much a daily occurrence as die aeroplane is in,
our time, and was received as part of normal experience. Ceilings,

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vaults and domes became the home of enchanting dream worlds
where people took off with all the ease of birds. In Byzantine art
people stood as much as they flew ; in fact flying was reserved mostly
for angels and kindred spirits, for at that time, even though all eyes
were strained on the world to come where flying of some kind was
a great feature, the majority of people were only too well aware of
just how much their feet were planted on the earth. Only in later
centuries, notably the Baroque and Rococo, did the whole popula-
tion fly about in art, either as a symptom of elation at the satisfactory
condition of their material lives or as an escape from the tedium of it.
So in Byzantine art the angels, cherubim and seraphim, flew, as is
their nature, while the others mainly stood about in groups. The
great characteristic of the Byzantine flying figure is its true birdlike
quality. The figures are not merely human beings with wings;
they are curiously superhuman, androgynous, indeterminate and
magical. (And thus they fit in with the Byzantine conception of the
state where we are told that above the level of kings and queens,
and even above the level of the priests, there existed a further class
of state officials called angels, who with their high piping voices
and birdlike behaviour sang in the choirs and performed on earth
tasks which in heaven were reserved for real ones. But this is not
the proper place in which to pursue this fascinating subject, nor to
follow its developments down into the harems of the East or to the
last remaining choir of men with boys' voices in Rome at the end
of last century. It would need to be treated with great insight
and delicacy. . . .)

The most vivid angels in the mosaics of St. Mark's are the four
which are flying round the Cupola of the Ascension, supporting the
starry nimbus where Christ sits in glory upon a double rainbow;
while the other great angels are the four magnificent Archangels in
the soffits of the Cupola of the Pentacost. Of lesser angels there are
many, but none so powerful as these. The most populous group of
angels and the most bird-like are in the Baptistry in the Cupola of
the Apocalypse, mosaics perhaps of less merit but equally vigorous
and startling. I use this last word in its literal sense, for unlike the
angels of later work which are usually comforting creatures, Byzan-
tine angels take one by surprise and compel one to live in a remote
world of oriental magic, far, far removed from our own stolid
century. The Cupola of the Ascension, which occurs in the very-
centre of the building, is the most stately and ceremonious of all the

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mosaics of St. Mark's, and it must rank as one of the greatest of
ceiling decorations.

The scenes from the life of Christ on the western arches of the
central cupola are my favourite mosaics, especially the Cruci-
fixion, the Kiss of Judas and Christ before Pilate. The picture of the
Descent into Hell strongly follows the design of the same scene at
Torcello but with more movement, while the Resurrection is
impressive because it relies solely on the towering single figure in the
rocky landscape, placed next to the crowded scene of the Incredulity
of Thomas. Of quite another character are the scenes of the lives of
Philip, Giacomo, Bartholomew and Matthew, mosaics of sparse
understatement, having about them the simplicity of Greek pottery
painting. The scenes from the Life of Mary in the north transept are
punctuated with very curious pieces of architecture, acting as a foil
to the slow procession of drifting and leaning figures. Figures of
terror are Saint Hilarion and Paul the Hermit, severe, dreadful and
ascetic, but the single figures of St. Leonard, St. Clement and others
are weakly conventional.

The most populous and animated of all the mosaics are in the
atrium, where in sequence after sequence the stories of the Old
Testament are told with all the vigour imaginable. It might be wrong
to suggest an atmosphere of gaiety, but gay these pictures are
when compared with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel decorations or
Tintoretto's paintings in the Scuola di San Rocco ; nor do they suggest
any of the sombre qualities of medieval Gothic painting, through
which runs a streak of fatalism and cruelty and the hardness of northern
life. We do not have to go very far back to detect in these the essential
happiness of pagan art, for under a thin veil of Christian seriousness
we can easily see the motifs of Greek and Roman painting coupled
with the spiciness of Byzantium and Alexandria. The mosaics in the
Cupola of the Creation, the Life of Adam and Eve, the truly amaz-
ing series of the Building of the Ark and the Flood, and such scenes
as "Increase and Multiply" and the Sacrifice of Cain and Abel use
all the attitudes and properties so familiar in Greek and Roman
painting the vine pergolas, the sacrificial altars, the cornucopias, the
curtained recesses, the olive trees, the mounds of rocks, the little
pieces of architecture, while the animals and birds, so astonishingly
drawn, leaping and flying among the flowers and orange groves,
sum up all the virility of the previous thousand years. The figures,
too, in their attitudes and actions, have appeared before though

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

nudity is at a minimum and now they are dressed in longer clothes
and they smile less. However, they clearly show that Pan was dead
and that the brilliant interlude of nature gods was over for a while.
The art of these mosaics is truly Christian : they were the summing
up of the rough art of the Catacombs and the bringing together,
into a new age, of the streams of Judaism, the remnants of Greek
thought and the newly established dogmas of the Eastern Empire.

The other great quality of the mosaics of St. Mark's is that they
are illustrations, for, apart from the spoken word, pictures were the
only other means of passing on ideas to the masses. Printing was not
yet invented. Thus they present, with the minimum of fuss and with
no unnecessary images, the pith of the stories they tell. They are
true illustrations, and the imagery they use illustrates ideas rather
than actual scenes. Their intention is almost purely literary and they
precede books, and their pictorial content is in a sense incidental,
though slowly it was to lead throughout the fourteenth century
to the development of the tradition of pure painting, when literature
went one way and painting lived a life of its own. There are two
further groups of mosaics in St. Mark's which represent the begin-
nings of this process and which act as a link between Byzantine
Venice and the later Venice the first in the Chapel of St. Isodore,
the second, which tells the story of St. Mark, in the lunette above
the Portal of St. Alipio on the front of the cathedral, in the great
mosaic on the wall in the western transept and in the incidents under
the arches on either side of the choir. Both groups are concerned
with the legends of the two saints and the bringing of their relics
to rest in the Basilica, and thus, though the majority of .the mosaics
deal with subjects of the Old and New Testaments, these link up
the greater fact of Christianity with the beginnings of the glorifica-
tion of Venice.

The mosaics in the Chapel of Saint Isodore deserve a stronger
mention than they usually get, for though they are not as fine
artistically as the great mosaics in the main part of the Basilica,
they are remarkably vivid, very strong and form a unit of decora-
tion. In rich colours dark reds, blues, greens, black and white
on a gold ground they tell of die life, trial, torture, martyrdom
and the ultimate bringing of the body of St. Isodore to rest in
this chapel. But apart from their artistic merits, they indicate the
dominant religious mood of the time in which they were done,
a mood which, however important it may have been historically,

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THE BASILICA OF ST. MARK

I find rather gloomy, but which it is necessary to know if we are to
understand Venice. The mood, quite simply, is of men enduring
the miseries of life and of their rather violent methods of entering
into the escape of religious experience. The figures and objects appear
like actors and stage properties against a golden backcloth : they have
all the simplicity of a miracle play. What we see are not particular
groups of rocks but rockiness, not particular men, women and
soldiers but the essence of human beings playing those r6les. There
is no attempt at portraiture, and there is almost no difference in
facial expressions, neither smiles, nor pain, nor ecstasy. Unhampered
by portraiture and personality, they achieve a calm anonymity
which is timeless and hypnotic, and in spite of costume their mes-
sage is as vivid today as it was when the mosaics were laid. Even
the face of St. Isodore, undergoing his frightful experiences, has the
same blank expression as his tormentors. All seem to share equally
the same pathological experience, the murderers and the murdered,
for the sake of the faith they hold. The extraordinary thing is that
there is no hint of atrocity. The pictures make it all seem alarmingly
normal. Precept has robbed the scenes of horror and the argument
is established in spite of the unsavoury way of demonstrating it.
Soldiers peep from behind their shields, a man brings faggots to
stoke the fire, while St. Isodore burns with dumb suffering in the
leaping flames. He is then dragged, naked and bleeding, across rocks
by a man in black mounted on a red horse, and finally he is beheaded.
It is the glimpse into the religious mentality of the time which is
shocking : there is a kind of helplessness in this cruelty; the torturers
appear to have lost their way in life and seem unable to get back to
normality. Amidst these stupid, blank faces the only positive one
is that of the demon, a brown hairy monster with claws and wings,
as though evil were the only sharp thing in life, and goodness the
quality discovered too late after the saint had been murdered.
Over all these scenes hangs a heavy, peasant-like crudity their
religion seems earthbound, as if they only glimpse salvation
through violent actions and physical cruelty. . . . The series ends
with pictures of the body of St. Isodore being welcomed to Venice
by the Doge and its subsequent interment in this chapel. Behind
his marble screen, a few feet away, St. Isodorelies, so that all may
enter vicariously into his martyrdom.

Today we have a tendency to look upon works of art in too
dispassionate a way: we tend to overlook their subjects and get an

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THE BASILICA OF ST. MARK

devated enjoyment out of the way they were done. This is perhaps
s it should be, as by far the greater proportion of subjects seems
iepressing and there is little to be got from dwelling too long on
hem. But I find these early centuries gloomy they are altogether
oo heavy a place for me. Before I leave these splendid perfumed
Ireams of St. Mark's behind, and escape into die bright sunshine
>f the Piazza and incidentally into those brighter, more interesting
:enturies of the Renaissance and the delightful frivolities of later
Venice this is the pkce to recount the Legend of St. Mark, for it
s a theme which runs throughout Venetian art from beginning to
sad. Tradition says that when St. Mark was sailing up the Adriatic
L violent storm washed his boat upon one of the Venetian islands or,
:o be more precise, upon the island where now stands the church of
5. Francesco della Vigna, and that there an angel appeared to him
nrying : Pax tibi, Marce, hie requiescet corpus tuum. This phrase of com-
fort was interpreted by the inhabitants as meaning that it was or-
lained that the body of St. Mark should one day rest among the
agoons. However, St. Mark died in A.D. 57 and lay for many years
ji Alexandria, and thus if the Venetians were to have the body at all
iiey would have to steal it. In the year 828 two daring merchants,
10 doubt roaming the seas as respectable pirates, as they did at that
ime, one named Messere Rustico di Torcello, the other Messere
Bono di Malamocco, decided to slip into Alexandria in spite of the
ban on trading with the Infidel. There they gained the confidence
Df the guardians of the temple where the body was preserved. It
is said that at the dead of night they were led to the pkce of interment
by a "sweet odour." They wrapped the body carefully and placed
it in a large basket, and then to put the Mohammedans off the scent
they concealed it, so the tale goes, with quarters of pork and cab-
bages. And thus, as merchandise, the body of St. Mark came to
Venice. On arrival Doge Giustiniani forgave the merchants for
their illegal visit to Alexandria, and with the nobles and clergy he
welcomed the sacred body, and it ky for a space in the Palazzo
Ducale. A chapel was built on the Broglio, which we now call the
Piazza, and St. Theodore, who had been there before, was deposed,
and a year later amidst great rejoicing St. Mark was reinterred and
became the Patron Saint of Venice. The story, however, does not
end there, for the chapel was burnt down during the revolt of August
976. Armed men streamed into the Piazza from all sides, the Doge
and his infant son were massacred while taking sanctuary in St.

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

Mark's, and the chapel, the Palazzo Ducale and three hundred houses
disappeared in flames. The body of St. Mark vanished in the com-
motion. A new church was built, the one which we now see, and
by 1094 it was ready in all its glory, glittering widi splendid mosaics
and polished marble, but to everyone's sorrow, especially Doge
Vitale Falier's, it was ready for consecration except for the body of
St. Mark. So, as on many other solemn occasions, it was decided to
pray for a miracle, as it was now realized that only a miracle could
restore the lost treasure, and on the twenty-fifth of June a general
fast was proclaimed, and a procession of nobles, their wives and
children, headed by the Doge, joined in an intercession with the
Patriarch and clergy for the recovery of the body. Much to every-
body's amazement and joy one of the pillars of the nave began to
tremble, and suddenly two of the stones opened like doors and
revealed in a cavity the casket in which the body was laid. . . .
These final scenes, of the intercession and the opening of the pillar,
are the subjects of the great mosaic covering the wall space in the
west transept. The Basilica is cut in half to show the interior, and it
looks very much like the inside of a huge and glittering shell with
its convolutions of domes and vaults. The first half shows the nave
and sanctuary crowded with bowing and bended suppliants, and the
second half shows diem all standing upright gazing at the opened
compartment in the pillar. The Doge is prominent among them,
and the ladies and children are gorgeously robed, with cloaks edged
with ermine and sewn with designs of pearls, with diadems of gold
and jewels, and braided hair. Behind them stands a crowd in the
doorway, among whom are men with turbans. On this occasion
when all turned out in their most costly robes and jewellery, we can
sense the atmosphere of the Basilica as it was on its opening day,
which happened, quite by accident, to be a day of miracles and
wonderment.

Quattrocento

' I * HE Early Renaissance found Venice a city of merchants busily
JL keeping accounts. Even die Doge Mocenigo in 1423 had ample
time upon his deadi-bed to make a detailed report to his senators
of the war loan, the public debts, the taxes, the profits from trade,
the numbers of Venetian ships, seamen and shipwrights, and the
values of the houses and the rents therefrom. . . . We find that the
state had prospered during the time when Europe had been sleeping
through the Dark Ages, and, that gloomy and troubled dream being
over, the morning light discovered Venice to be very wide awake,
thriving, businesslike and robust. Nor did she at this time, if we are
to judge from records left to us, take a great deal of interest in the
enthusiastic culture of the period. Her merchants were far too busy
with the profit and loss to take much interest in poetry and literature,
or to concern themselves with the broken statues of antiquity or
the flights of Greek fancy, or even, at the beginning of the Renais-
sance, to be much interested in the exploits of Roman history. They
preferred their own heroes to the heroes found in books, and
were far too interested in the daily arrival of treasure ships to indulge
in day-dreams. This intense practical turn of mind produced
an efficient and enlightened state, and in spite of mercantile
ambitions of individuals to better themselves at the expense of
others, Venice had developed a system of state pensions, provided
for widows and orphans, had medical and welfare schemes, all of
which made a very sound basis for the glories of the Venetian
Renaissance. It was one of the few states of Europe who have
had the sense to put the horse before the cart: physical wants
were first provided for and spiritual delights followed. They seem
never to have fallen into the mire of superstition which has always
been such a retarding influence in the affairs of men. Nor were they
particularly interested in politics, for, as Sebellico remarked when
he tried to interest the young Venetian nobles in political dis-
cussions : "When I ask them what people think, say and expect
about this or that movement in Italy, they all answer with one

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voice that they know nothing about the matter." We are presented
with the picture of a group of noblemen, grave and cautious, soberly
dressed, secure in their wealth and understanding of this world,
who were first and foremost interested in the Venetian state as a
thriving business concern, only casually interested in the affairs of
the rest of Italy and who, though by no means impious, had learnt
to keep the church in its pkce. Even their doges they elected as old
as possible, so that the heads of the state should die quickly before
they could become a nuisance.

Into this healthy and sensible atmosphere the spirit of the Renais-
sance came in all the first flush of its enthusiasm and beauty. . . .

* * *

rr is easy to picture the contemporary Venetian craftsman viewing
German Gothic type founts as being already old-fashioned though
they had but recently come over the Alps. With speed and admirable
common sense they proceeded to adapt the neat handwriting of their
account books to the design of more practical and readable alphabets.
The ideas of the Renaissance came over the lagoons to them from
Florence and Rome, bringing the romantic dream of antiquity.
It was perhaps no accident that that dream was interpreted by the
Venetians Francesco Colonna and an unknown artist as a Vision of
Love, in that most superb of all early illustrated printed books the
Dream of Poliphilus, in which pageants and festivals played a great
part in a series of beautiful though muddled allegories. In Venice,
at an early stage of the Renaissance, the most vital motives were
thus given visual form in books, and for many years such books
were used as sources of ornaments and decorations. More important
still, the type faces designed at that time, blending the excellences
of the Italian chancery handwriting with a clear study of antique
letter forms, have had a boundless influence on printing. (William
Morris in his valiant attempt to clean up the horrid though fascina-
ting mess of kte nineteenth-century printing, returned to this
period for his inspiration. . . .)

THE invigorating curiosity of the time which I can only view
with the utmost envy beginning as a literary dream, led to the
study of ancient art and architecture, and was quickly transposed
into the reality of new building and sculpture. An interest in the

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glories of Ancient Rome, revived by poets and historians, ran
exactly parallel to the contemporary ideas of worldly glory ; and the
pomps and pageants, by which the state expressed itself in public,
took the form of a masquerade of Roman triumphs, still delightfully
naive, and filtered through the already well-developed traditions of
Byzantine usage and the splendours of medieval heraldry. Even
church buildings slowly took upon themselves the flavour of pagan
temples, and the ornaments veered away from the heavy delights
of St. Mark's and the never-quite-happy creations of Italian Gothic.
The vine and amorini, satyrs and dolphins, swags of flowers, the urn,
the shield and all the panoply of classical orders returned, seen
through innocent eyes, rarefied by the dreams of youth, refreshed
by the sleep of centuries. . . . The ornaments looked as though the
artists were straying through the meadows and along the seashore
for the first time. . . . When men were now able to withdraw their
gaze from the benefits of the world to come, they looked upon the
real world with new eyes, and saw that it contained not only fresh
prospects for economic developments but also that it was astonish-
ingly beautiful. Ideas of beauty, of elegance, of gracious living
and the joy of looking upon their own faces spread like a passion.
The confidence of youth, feeding upon the ideas of classical glory,
developed a new art, and those few generations who had the good
fortune to live at that time used their wealth and taste to foster what
is, in my opinion, the best of Venetian art. We cannot but envy a
period of peace and prosperity where the ideas and charms of youth
were taken into old age.

NOW, though examples of ancient sculpture and architecture
abounded in Italy, and were used as models for those arts during
the fifteenth century, examples of ancient paintings were few, and
except in the debased forms in which they were found in kte Roman
times exerted litde influence upon painting. The pictorial arts con-
tinued through an unbroken tradition from medieval times, and
came to constitute, as the movement developed, the really original
art of the Renaissance. In Venice especially, where the spirit of
independence was so great, the theme of development was kept
pure, and only in kter centuries became infected with eclecticism,
which quickly brought down the qualities of painting elsewhere.
The mosaics of the earlier centuries had educated the public to

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

appreciate pictures as well as serving at a rime when books were
few. Though Giovanni Bellini perhaps the greatest Venetian
painter of die fifteenth century and his followers continued to
paint religious subjects of unusual refinement, the art of painting
was not for long confined to the Church. It began to glorify the
state, and later the desires of private individuals in portraiture and
easel pictures. Painting, economically cheap at the time, became
extensively used in public buildings and private palaces, and formed
a perfect vehicle for expressing the ideas of the Renaissance. The
delight in life and pageantry, the new-formed appreciation of per-
sonal beauty public glory and personal lyricism were all cele-
brated and perpetuated in painting Painting was used for the

twin purposes of propaganda and pleasure. . . . The world seemed
young again; people were handsome; religion was sincere; and the
clerics were under control. . . .

THE great pageant paintings of the old Doge's Palace were des-
troyed in the fire of 1577, but the series of paintings done by the
same artists for the various Schools of Venice the Guildhalls of the
Mutual Aid Societies give some hint of their magnificence. Yet
by the time the artists were employed in the Schools, the subjects
of the paintings the stories of the various patron saints were
already becoming secularized: they had a half-domestic quality,
as though all happenings, sacred and profane, had taken place in
contemporary Venetian settings. The members of the guilds could
not only identify themselves with the histories of their saints, but
what is more, we might guess, their saints were given the honour
of almost residential status in Venice. It is little wonder that these
paintings achieved extraordinary popularity and suggested to cer-
tain noble houses the eventual possibility of eliminating the saints
entirely and having themselves glorified in painting. . . . (The
portrait must always be the outcome of painting, even, in its last
analysis, the self-portrait!)

One peculiarity of the early Renaissance style in Venice is that
Venetian Gothic persisted longer than the Gothic style in other
towns. And there exists in these paintings an engaging style of
architectural setting which is purely Venetian and which, while
rarely using the pointed arch, only half digested the elements of classi-
cal architecture, and so, combining these elements with Gothic crest-

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QUATTROCENTO

ings and Lombardic wall inlays, they created with unusual refine-
ment their own aesthetic. Furthermore, there is a fine harmony in
the costumes of the period, for in no instance did they attempt to
dress like the Romans, whose architecture and triumphs were to
exert such an overwhelming influence in the final stages of the
Renaissance. ... It is perhaps a blessing that men are always in-
terested in the latest fashions, even during periods of revival, and
reserve the toga for their statues. . . . The costumes of the period,
borrowing so much from the recent past of Gothic heraldry, were
of extreme elegance, and never at any period has the youthful figure
been so well exploited. The fashions were essentially the fashions
of youth, and had die extraordinary effect of making human beings
look like gorgeous birds. In fact, the peacock, that recurring motif
in Venetian art, used hitherto as a Christian symbol of resurrection,
had now reappeared in human form at the revival of classicism.
Yet this birdlike pride of costume was not foppish but the plumage
of Venetian masculinity in the full confidence of adolescence. (The
older men, with excellent taste and detachment, discreetly dressed
themselves in long robes and cloaks: but the pictures are full of
young men, and it is the latter who really are celebrated, though the
older ones are given their full dignities.)

In the series of paintings done by Carpaccio for the School of
St. Ursula we are shown, without exaggeration, costumes which
resolve themselves into feathers, niching, pearls, lacing, fine brocades,
rich velvets and snowy linen, contrasted with a constantly changing
variety of hose of smooth heraldic patterns. This period marked the
height of the art of hose, and never before or since have men's legs
been so superbly decorated, nor with such individuality. Legs too,
at this time, at least in youth, finished in the proper places, and were
offiet by tight waists, short tunics, exaggerated sleeves and shoulders,
shoulder-length hair and round caps, with or without feathers.
The figure, armed with stiletto or sword, was finally hung with a
short cloak, the hands encased in embroidered and tasselled gloves.
... As always, among the crowds of Venetians moved the stately
figures of Mohammedans in enormous turbans and shining brocades.
. . . How very harmonious are these scenes against the architectural
backgrounds the Oriental-Western motifs, the onion domes, the
gilded balls and crosses, the spiky Gothic crestings, the rhythmic
rows of arches, the crenellation of the towers, the "minaret" motifs,
the waving flags and slashed pennants snaking in the wind. Here,

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too, in architecture and costume alike is the essential aesthetic of
heraldry the roundel, the lozenge, the square and the stripe. The
animals, too, are improved by art, by shaving and clipping, by
leaving tufts, while, especially in Carpaccio's paintings (he must
have been a lover of animals and birds, and particularly of dogs),
are the tame birds of Venice, the popinjay, the peacock and the
dove, strutting and perching among the marbles, second only in
importance to the youths themselves.

In Carpaccio's world of splendid adolescents and exotic pets is to
be found the essential motif of Venice, the ageless sea-dream, where,
out of the sunny hours, the mysterious mists and fogs, the epileptic
storms of thunder and lightning, out of their isolation in the sea,
secure from the rest of the world, life was lived at a higher pitch
and produced an unusual sensitivity. The nearest living creatures
to the Venetians have always been the harmless little monsters of
the Adriatic. If they stooped down outside their islands they dredged
monsters, and, in the congestion of their exotic city, the clear
feverishness of the place produced an art of beautiful but harmless
delirium a man made aesthetic of marble, precious stones, glass,
for, feather, hair and skin, all teased into harmony with the fantastic
things to be found in the sea. . . . Yet at this time, saved by the
sanity of the period, it was essentially manly; kter, when the sense
of beauty overlapped from the normal to the abnormal as beauty
must always do at some point if it is persisted in perverse and gro-
tesque elements crept out and made a sinister Venice. . . . But here
the constants remain the scenes slide into each other against the
same background, people change costumes but gaze out of the
same eyes. There is the same colour always, the same dream of
Venice.

IN the series of The Miracle of the Holy Cross, painted by Bellini,
Carpaccio, Mansueti, Bastiani and Diana for the School of St.
John the Evangelist, the backgrounds 1 are no longer half imaginary
but show authentic scenes of contemporary Venice. . . .

In Gentile Bellini's painting of the Procession of Corpus Christi in the
Piazza San Marco the Basilica is seen with the original Byzantine
mosaics over the archways of the doors and in the four upper
arches. Apart from the mosaics of which this painting is the only
record we have regrettably repkced by those we have to look at

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today, the Basilica is unchanged, though the crockets, canopies,
pinnacles, as well as the four Horses, were a blaze of gold. In those
days the buildings on the right-hand side of the Piazza were level
with the line of the Campanile ; the Piazzetta dei Leoncini was
smaller, blocked by an archway; the Clock Tower not yet built,
but the Flag Standards are there. The extraordinarily stately pro-
cession moves from the Porta della Carta down the side of the Piazza
and across the front of the picture, leaving the centre of the Piazza
free for the wandering groups. The young men strut like birds;
there are loungers and Mohammedans ; a stall for the sale of trinkets ;
a group of musicians. The over-forties have sober robes of
great dignity and perpendicularity. . . . The clergy are identical
in their white albs; the rhythm of the arcading, the crestings of the
parapets, and the repetition of chimneys are quite hypnotic and
convey delightfully the slowly drifting movement of the
procession. . . .

Carpaccio's painting of the Rialto shows the Relic freeing some
unfortunate from a demon, but the subject is almost an excuse for a

picture of the crowded scene on the Grand Canal The Canal

is possibly slightly narrower than it is today. The buildings rise
sheer and cliff-like from the water's edge. The bridge is of wood,
with an enclosed passage-way and centre drawbridges to allow
clearance for masted ships. All the buildings are in the Venetian
Gothic style except the Palazzo San Silvestro, which has a hint of the
Renaissance transformation yet to come. The skyline is broken by
the typical funnel-like and highly decorated chimneys, and washing
is hanging out on poles, then as now. Against the dark water of the
Canal, a deep blue-black, are the figures of lithe gondoliers in feathered
caps, short tunics and decorated tights. There is a Negro gondolier
in the foreground with red cap and upright feather; tunic with
white shirt bursting from it ; tights with a design of black and white
cubes upon the thighs, golden garters above the knees, blue and
white stripes over the knees and calves, and red shoes. In one gon-
dola is one of Carpaccio's untidy white dogs, with a collar of bells.
. . . The gondolas of those .days had not developed the coxcombs
of shining steel, but were a cross between the present gondola and
the sandolonovf used for more humdrum jobs. They were more

like oriental bkck slippers upon the water The canal and the

fondanente have the same busy appearance as today, with the
crowds moving and gliding. . . .

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Bellini's painting of The Finding of the Holy Cross in die Canal of
San Lorenzo rates us into one of die side canals. The dignities of
the Piazza and the glitter of the palaces are not here: the painting
is given over to men and women who are more staid and solid and
much older. . . . Along with dieir ladies, the men are distinctly
fat, but though their portliness is hidden by long black robes, the
bulbousness of die heads and busts of the ladies are exaggerated by
tight dresses. They are tightly laced and criss-crossed with rows of
pearls ; their hair is braided and hung excessively with pearls and
veils, their ears and necks with more pearls, while some have coro-
nets. What they have lost of youth they have gained in wealdi and
jewellery: art is compensating for lost beauty. . . . The houses on
the quaysides have heavily barred windows, to guard against bur-
glars, or perhaps to protect the maidens from wandering lovers,
who seem traditionally to have regarded Venetian balconies as
husbands regard the threshold, . . . Window shutters were used
then as now; the windows, when glass was used, were made of
small discs of flattened drops leaded together, looking .like the
skins of fishes. . . . There are boats upon die canal; the bridge
is thronged with people; a boy clings dangerously to the parapet.
A Negro with loin cloth appears on a small landing-stage on the
right, watched by a serving-maid. In the water in this painting are
die weird figures of bald-headed monks retrieving the Relic from
the canal. The water fills out their cassocks like white clouds.
Kneeling on the right is a particularly hard looking row of successful
business men.

The painting by Mansueti of the scene outside the church of San
Lio is teeming with life. The engaging Venetian custom of throwing
your best Persian carpet or brocaded bedspread over your window-
sill when an object of religious veneration passes the house is com-
mon today, though to judge by this picture the quality of the
fabrics has seriously deteriorated. . . . Leaning on their carpets or
standing behind the window grilles are the severe ladies; while
above diem the servants peep out of their oven-like attics. One of
these is taking in the washing among the funnel chimneys. A boy,
in the middle distance, chases a cat over the rooftops with a stick.
Builders are arranging doth awnings to protect themselves from
the sun while they work; a boy underneath lets his pet monkey
crawl along the cornice, while a peacock struts on the parapet of
San Lio. Peacocks must have enjoyed immunity to wander and

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

trail at will all over the town. . . . Below, the streets are crowded
and the shops are closed, perhaps as much to avoid pilfering as
out of respect; a butcher's man carries a wooden box on his head,
with the neck and head of a plucked fowl hanging down like a
tassel.

In the other picture by Mansueti the scene is of the interior of a
palace. We have some difficulty today in visualizing these clean
and trim interiors, because of discoloration, dilapidation and the
earnest though devastating restorations as in the case of the Ca*
d'Oro. But this picture gives a very clear idea of such a palace in its
heyday. . . . The marbles are new, the carving crisp, the gilding
fresh. The neat rows of the embossed coffers of the ceiling glitter,
as do the gilded edges of the window mouldings, the picking-out
of the carvings on the fireplace, the gilded capitals, the balusters and
hand rails. Gold is everywhere added to the polished surfaces of
precious marbles, sumptuously but with reserve. In this spacious
and well-proportioned interior, on the decorative landing-stage,
the staircase and in the loggia, there is a moving throng of fashion-
ables: proud patricians in their long, perpendicular gowns, with
decorative page-boys moving among them, delivering messages
and busy on small errands. At the foot of the staircase a Moorish

servant sits with a chained cheetah There is a little dog; a

hooded falcon. . . . Splendid youths in embroidered tunics and
striped tights, hands on hips, lounge with easy grace against marble
column and balustrade. . . . While at the top of the staircase stand
the monumental ladies. Their fine, severe, full-length dresses, low-
cut, are discreetly edged widi pearls. They carry their heads with
grace and pride; the hair is braided to build up the clear, sweeping
profiles. Unlike the men's, the ladies' dress is not fantastic, but relies
rather on the innate beauty of the figure : it is almost demure when
the figure is slim and not too much adorned; but when the figures
are stout the forms burst out, and the idea of rotundity carries on
happily into pearls and balls of amber At a time when the bird-
motif was so well expressed in costume, it seems right that the men
should have worn the exotic plumage while the ladies remained
discreet: the men glowed with colours and variegated patterns,
exploited every point of their charms, strutted like peacocks : the
ladies relied on their essential shapes, knowing that nature had en-
dowed them with powers that men could not imitate For ever

we will think of the face of Simonetta Vespucci as representing this

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QUATTROCENTO

type of North Italian beauty, fair, simple, guileless at least in appear-
ance, and of those thousands of strutting youths proudly showing
off their finery. . . . The men discreetly relinquished the charms of
youth and clothed themselves with reasonable austerity, advancing
artistically by easy stages to costumes fitting their degrees of age.
The ladies, however, spending so much time upon their balconies
and in their vast palaces, could hardly be blamed for going from
strength to strength as the years went by, and occupying their time
with their jewel boxes and beauty preparations.

Yet the simplicity of women's appearance at this time is deceiving,
for though the men allowed themselves the most ekborate and
varied costumes, it seems that they wholeheartedly supported the
Church in restraining women from likewise breaking out into finery.
In public at least the result was one of simplicity, but in the privacy
of their own homes, where they spent a great deal of time, the art
of beautification was indulged on a grand scale. The lovely Venetian
women, to preserve the freshness of their complexions, are said
to have slept with slices of raw veal previously soaked in milk
upon their faces, and during the day to have spent the idle hours in
applying pastes and creams made from gum, lime, ants' eggs and
ashes. The ideal of blonde hair, a colour by no means common in
Italy, necessitated the use of bleaching waters and the invention of
a hat which consisted of a rim only, in which they sat in the sun
upon their balconies to advance the process. . . .

Carpaccio's painting, variously called The Ladies of Venice and
The Courtesans, perhaps the most intimate domestic painting of the
time, shows two ladies idling upon their balcony. (This painting,
with everything cut in half down the left-hand side, looks like the
detail of a larger one, but we can only sigh vainly for the rest.) It
creates an atmosphere of sunny afternoons, of the delightful aimless-
ness of balconies. . . . Two high-bosomed ladies sit gazing, abstrac-
tedly, at members of the domestic menagerie. ... In the foreground,
the kdy in brocaded velvet and red skirt leans forward, one hand
holding the paw of a little dog, white and hairless, with a wart upon
its cheek and a collar of bells. With her other hand she tugs at a
leather lead which a hound is grasping in its jaws. The second rests
her arm upon the marble parapet, where there are urns of flowers, a
ripening pomegranate and two fat doves. A parrot is at her feet,
its daw raised; nearby a thick-soled going-out shoe lies where it
has been kicked off. In one of the arches of the parapet a small

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

boy reaches out to grasp a peacock which is slowly walking
along. . . .

THE countryside and the mountains existed for the Venetians as
the mainland existed for sailors permanently afloat upon a gilded
barge. . . . The low green trees and the distant fringe of the Euga-
nean Hills were always across the water, lit by the sun or appearing
and disappearing in the mists. At home there were the crowded
water-lanes, the narrow alleys, the forced intimacy always the
buildings of bricks and marble, the caged birds, the tame peacocks,
the cultivated flowers upon the balconies, the man-made pleasures
of pageant and festa. The countryside, as for all pent in Venice,
became a dream-world, half-forgotten, in which figures moved about
upon tasks far removed from the seafaring life. Yet the basic dream
of the Renaissance was a pastoral idyll in which man and nature
existed side by side, without terrors : man glorified and in harmony
with the landscape. In was little wonder, then, that at this time the
interest in landscape painting increased, or that the figures which
moved about the landscapes were the ideal men of the Renaissance ;
or that later, as the mood developed, if we look closer, or when they
strayed up to the front of the picture, we discover that they were
Venetians. . . . The figures in the religious paintings were healthy
Venetians set in ideal landscapes : the saints were impersonated by
the men and women of the Piazza. People became models for
the saints as much as the saints were models for the people : at first
anonymously, yet no less real . . .Later the faces were individualized
into portraits, impersonating no one, and the landscape receded to a
glimpse beyond brocaded shoulders, later still to fade entirely, to
be repkced by a dark background or a window-ledge of marble
with nothing but the sky beyond. , . . The mind wanders strays
out into the clear morning-landscape of Bellini in which religious
incidents take pkce: or else discovers small pastoral incidents whose
meaning is now lost in forgotten customs ; or returns to Venice and
Carpactio's busy scenes upon the quaysides. The men and the back-
ground mix ideally, against clear or darkening skies the permanent
background of Venetian life but throughout runs the strain of
poetry,, of man's rektionship to the landscape, of his belief in his
own pre-eminence among the changing seasons. . . . The most
haunting painting in Venice, in which this lyrical mood is most

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strongly expressed, is Giorgione's Tempesta. ... As though to mark
the passage of this early day of the Renaissance, Bellini painted
morning-light, Carpaccio the full light of day, and Giorgione the
late afternoon. . . .

THESE is no more romantic figure in painting than Giorgione,
whose legend is shrouded in a bright cloud of mystery, through
which we get occasional glimpses of a charming personality. His
paintings are few some twenty in all and, as though to anticipate
his place as a painter of ideal youth, the fates were kind to Hm for
our sakes, and lie had the good fortune to die young. We are left
with the work of a young artist, guileless and unspoilt, who worked
through the idealistic years of his own life, in a period when
youth was the passion, who never grew old or lived long enough
to say a crabbed or cynical thing. In his personality came to be
embodied the desires of the age: whether it was that Giorgione re-
vealed to his companions the ideal, or whether the ideal, already
apprehended, found its expression in his life, must for ever remain
a mystery. Vasari says of him that he was ". . . of extremely humble
origin, but was nevertheless very pleasing in manner." Born at
Castelfranco, he was brought up in Venice. "He took no small
delight in love passages, and in the sound of the lute, to which he was
so cordially devoted, and which he practised so constantly, that he
played and sang with the most exquisite perfection, insomuch that
he was, for this cause, frequently invited to musical assemblies and
festivals by the most distinguished personages."

IN the Tempesta dark clouds are coming up from the east, and
lightning plays across the sky. In the middle distance are buildings
in the Venetian style with simple round arches and a dome; yet set,
mysteriously, in a green landscape; a city transposed, like a mirage,
into the countryside. The time must be late afternoon, when night
is corning up over Istria and the piles of clouds break loose and bank
up behind Venice, clouds in which the thunder rolls and the light-
ning flashes. From the west the sun still shines and touches the trees,
the lawns and the buildings and picks out the sparkling water of the
stream. . . . Deep green shadows are cast among the tamarisks; soft
shadows among die moss-covered rocks. . . . Upon a plinth of

11 161

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

bricks, by the water's edge, stand two broken columns, while behind
is a simple screen of architecture with pilaster, arches and roundels
of marble : a hint of classical ruins. In the foreground upon the grass
sits a young mother suckling her baby. She is unclothed, with a
white cloth over her shoulder as though she had but recently bathed.
To the left, but not looking at her, though his head is turned, stands
a young man, leaning upon a long staff. . . . There is nothing to
identify these figures : he is neither a soldier nor a gipsy, though he
has been called both ; she is just a mother with a child. They are
neither of them saintly; there is no stylizarion about them : yet they
dominate the scene. They are simply a man, a woman and a child
in a summer landscape in late afternoon : with rocks, sprays of foliage,
a clear stream, a hint of past greatness in the ruins, the busy city
beyond the bridge banished, like care, into the background, while
above rumbles die tempest, heralding the night. . . . About this
picture is a wistful air, a sad tranquillity, yet a confidence in the only
truths of our natures we shall ever be certain of: it is one of the
purest statements ever made by man about himself, quite without
affection, without style, of great simplicity.

The romantic dream of Poliphilus had become Giorgione's lyrical
assertion of reality. . . .

OF many Early Renaissance buildings in Venice I will concern
myself with only four, those which to my mind convey the flavour
of the period in its main aspects a church, an important public
building and two palaces.

Santa Maria dei Miracoli, built by Pietro Lombardi, was restored
at the end of the nineteenth century, and though one can seldom
approve of restorations done in that period, the results in this church
are not offensive, as they might easily have been in a building of a
more elaborate kind. Pietro Lombardi's architecture is one of
essences : of the rectangle, the circle, the square : all his other forms
are derived from these the rectangular box, the cylinder, the cube,
the polygons, the dome and the other forms made up of their inter-
locking. Into these primal shapes he cut simple apertures, circular
and rectangular; softened intersecting planes with mouldings;
placed pilasters and springing arches, shallow and almost flat, upon
the waUs; and then decorated them only at the points of greatest
interest with inlaid discs of contrasting marble. This is not an

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architecture of archaeology: it is the Florentine fantasy of classicism
turned Venetian. It has the flavour of boat-building about it,
not the flavour of unearthed ruins. . . . Santa Maria dei Miracoli
is my favourite Venetian church a building, in its exterior aspect,
of unusual harmony; well knit, compact; built upon a small
site, one side rising sheer from a canal. Other than these inlaid
discs and few simple mouldings and decorations, the ornaments
never obtrude. There is a feeling of calm about the building, of
reasonableness ; nothing of Byzantine sensuousness, of Italian Gothic
gaucherie, or the hysteria and bombast of the Baroque. Unlike the
Olympian perfection of Palladio, as expressed in II Redentore, its
perfection is one of personality, it retains the marks of eccentricity.
It is human perfection, not universal. . . . Palladio's architecture
never smiles, its ornaments are rhetorical though refined; the
humour of the sculptures and ornaments of the Baroque are satires
of Ancient Roman gravity. But Lombardi enjoys a quiet humour,
which seems to come from a simple happiness. ... It is an archi-
tecture which links with Giorgione, yet is purely Venetian: the
same spirit in an island, not a pastoral setting.

It is the mark of good architecture that it can employ ornament
without losing dignity (a quality almost entirely absent today).
There is all the difference between putting up an elegant and efficient
shelter and creating a happy building. Humour and sense of pro-
portion go together : they preserve the balance between the over-
serious and the banal. Wit and sophistication belong to the arts of
exaggeration; they verge on the comic and eventually dissolve in
the tragi-comic and the grotesque. The humour of the Lombardi
is the expression of balanced personalities, a form of contentment.
This is nowhere better expressed than in the sanctuary of Santa

Maria dei Miracoli Here is the very best mixture of the Classical

and Christian traditions. The ornaments are restrained and delicate,
always inventive, never in any passage dull. Round the bases of the
two main pilasters of the sanctuary arch are some of the happiest
examples of Renaissance ornamental sculpture I have seen in Venice.
Everything is small and intimate : no figure exceeds sixteen inches in
height: every motif is subordinated to the architectural scheme,
yet very richly worked. There are various arabesque panels, of goats,
satyrs, gryphons and bulls ; dolphins' heads terminating in acanthus
scrolls ; cherubs and mermaids playing among vines. ... As though
the nature gods had made peace for once with the Church and had

164

QUATTROCENTO

come here to gambol. ... On the balustrade of the choir are four
very fine three-quarter-length statues, especially an angel and two
female figures all standing as though rooted in marble. . . . Among
the sculptures and ornaments of the sanctuary there are children and
birds everywhere . . . and buds and pods, tendrils and flowers,
bunches of new-set grapes. . . .

Yet the wide nave pleases me very little : there is too much split
marble. And the barrel vault is exceedingly complicated, a gilded
puzzle out of which peep a hundred unrecognizable saints. In this
part of the church I suspect the restorers have been at work.

LA SCUOLA GRANDE Di SAN MARCO and the Palazzo Dario are two
other buildings in the same style. I have not, however, been inside
either, so I can only remark upon the fa$ades : the former is now the
Civic Hospital and the latter a private palace. Both carry into
secular architecture the same principles as are found in Santa Maria
dei Miracoli. The hospital building has a fa$ade of discreet pomp :
it echoes, in the flat, the bubble-motifs of the Basilica of St. Mark.
It is a memory of Byzantium seen through the medium of a half-
understood classicism: Byzantine architecture awakening. It is a
screen of true Lombardic discretion but of great richness : civic pomp
and pride at the possession of a fine building, expressed in columns,
mouldings, floreated pediments. Of unusual interest is the treatment
of the lower part of die facade, where, of all miraculous things, are
stone pictures : low reliefs of architectural perspectives, not in stucco
but in marble. The two great lions flank the main doorway of the
building under mock loggie ; farther on, to the right, under vistas of
flattened arches, are groups of figures, some of them in turbans. . . .
This facade, now weather-stained and discoloured, must have been
a glorious sight when new.

The Palazzo Dario leans slightly to one side with age The

seventy-five roundels of inlaid marble are like the mouths of trum-
pets. The chimneys, too, standing around the cornice of the house,
are like trumpets. . . . The whole building is musical- trumpeting
domestic pride.

THE Ca' d'Oro, built in the early part of the century, is an example
of Venetian Gothic lingering on to express the sophistication of

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domestic life. The ornamentation of the fa$ade the richest and
most elaborate Gothic building in Venice has nothing whatsoever
to do with the Church. It is coral-gothic, the gothic of the sea :
a purely Venetian phenomenon. It marks the degree of complete
secularization of the style, used in this case for romantic reasons.
The facade of the Ca' d'Oro is pure decoration; sophisticated self-
expression : a wilful eccentricity used at a time when people were
dreaming of ancient Rome. Though there is a harmless perversity
about it, there is only the faintest hint of over-ripeness. ... It has a
witty air, of architectural smartness. . . . Yet, in spite of its decora-
tive function, it still manages to be a piece of architecture : behind
the elaborately fretted arcades are the great loggie; the balconies are
the apron-stages of the rooms beyond. ... It is upon such balconies
that Carpaccio's ladies sunned themselves, in such loggie that they
were entertained by their domestic menageries peacocks, monkeys,
children.

The Ca' d'Oro today is a husk of a palace, not very well restored,
but there is sufficient shape about the rooms to hint at the richness it
once possessed. No family with such a facade to their house could
have lived a simple life. We must turn to Mansueti's picture of the
interior of a palace to bring life into it again. ... It is a memory : but
like the whole period, a memory of youthful splendour.

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Cinquecento

IT is with a feeling of regret for the lost youth, of the Quattrocento
that I suffer myself to be overwhelmed by the heavy adult splen-
dours of the ceilings of the Palazzo Ducale. It is never for very long
that I can submit myself to those acres of magnificent paintings and
those endless masses of gilded carving in the Sala del Maggior Con-
siglio and the Sala del Senato. . . . With the tearless sadness of man-
hood, yet brimful of devitalizing admiration for the perfections of
the period, I must extricate myself from the odour of battles, plots,
conspiracies, intrigues and hypocrisy all the well-known features
of adult life and escape once more into the streets, where the sun
shines and people are concerned with life at a simpler level. . . .
Likewise, to review the art of the sixteenth century from Titian to
Veronese would be to write another book and certainly does not
come within the scope of this one, so I do not intend to linger
among the splendours of the High Renaissance, except to follow
quickly some clues to the Venetian mentality of the fifteenth and
seventeenth centuries. I am concerned with the more lowly human
comedy which, from now onwards, since we have left the exquisite
and almost painful beauties of the fifteenth century behind, gathers
momentum and speeds us along to the decadence of Venice. The
miseries of our own times are burdensome enough without un-
earthing past miseries in the complicated world of wars, the in-
trigues of princes and popes, die cruelties of the Turks, the exploits
of the Pirates of Dalmatia or the threatening horrors of the Inquisi-
tion. So though we cannot understand the arts of Venice without
some reference to the events of history, we can, in spite of them,
take refuge upon these islands as the Venetians did, to look for the
more pleasant results of life. It is to their everlasting glory that their
chief concern was with peace, that at home all their efforts were bent
upon enjoying it, and that, commensurate with the enlightenment
of the times, they endeavoured to relieve want and human suffering
among themselves. They intrigued because they had to, and they
shed as much blood as anybody else, but their chief interest was

169

Detail of the Gateway of the Arsenak

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

to remain independent and intact, and to enjoy themselves at
home.

With the increased sense of dignity and the mature enjoyment of
their not-easily-won wealth, they took to religion again, not as a
paean of praise for the joy of being alive as in the Early Renaissance,
but more as adults do with a sense of doom. It was, however, a
personal religion, indulged amidst material comfort, comfort they
were determined to maintain in spite of the hypocrisy of the Church,
which constantly threatened them with massacre and excommunica-
tion, and of which, as usual, though they repelled the armies, they
took little notice. (At this time Italian scholars fleeing from the
universal miseries of the Inquisition found shelter in the liberal
atmosphere of Venice, and by so doing enriched the humanist
tradition. . . .) But, sincerely and magnificently as this new out-
burst of religion is expressed, as in the art of Tintoretto whom I
consider to be the greatest of all Venetian painters I still find it
heavy and overwhelming in sentiment. . . . Michelangelo was pre-
dicting titanic disasters upon mankind from the very heart of
Christendom, while Venetian painters, by no means unmoved by
the seriousness of man's estate, devoted their time almost equally
between their personal interpretations of religion and their glori-
fication of the state. The quality of ambivalence which runs like a
thread throughout all things Venetian used the imagery of two
worlds, the pagan and Christian, to express the prevailing senti-
ments of the time The Apotheosis of Venice by Veronese in the

Palazzo Ducale is inextricably mixed in the mind with the Assump-
tion of Our Lady by Titian on the High Altar of the Fran But,

while appreciative of the latter as a psychological necessity of the
time, with the former the theme of this book is concerned, for in it
is expressed that element of pleasure which is the dominant recurring
motif of Venice pleasure at all times fantastic, and at this time
grandiose as well

THE pastorals of Giorgione developed into the Bacchanals of
Titian. The satisfying ideas of paganism catering so well for the
many aspects of pleasure within die human mind were rendered
with a fulsomeness and jollity that had never occurred before,
perhaps not even in truly pagan times. The technical accomplish-
ments of oil painting and the mastery of the arts of perspective and

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CINQUECENTO

figure drawing combined the fantasies of nature gods with the
realities of landscape and atmosphere with summer storms, light-
ning, cloudscapes, sunlight, the starry heavens and they romped
and caroused among the gkdes and floated through the skies most
convincingly. . . . Titian created a world of intoxicating light and
colour peopled with robust figures, and though there were the hints
of decay, as in a garden at the end of summer before the petals drop,
it was a powerful world, where adults unashamedly enjoyed
themselves. . . .

Against this mental background of convincing mythology the
real Venice was glorified in painting. But whereas in Carpaccio's
paintings the Venetians were young and apparently mainly interested
in showing off their figures and clothes upon the quaysides, now the
scene moves indoors or into the courtyards of palaces, and the men
and women are much older, and though more splendidly dressed
than ever, their lives seem to have become dominated by intrigue.
The strutting youths have become courtiers : life has become com-
plicated and everyone seems interested in power. The youth has
become the man of the world. . . . Behind it all lurks an element of
danger, and in the eyes of the great portraits of the period there
is a sadness. Greatness of personality was achieved against a back-
ground of care.

THIS element of fear, sometimes of foreboding, must not, how-
ever, be exaggerated, for Venice was still powerful and wealthy, and
the dominant feeling of the painting of the period is one of triumph.
Still the moods of elation and disquiet swing backwards and
forwards, as though, in the hour of triumph, doubt of man's
omnipotence was sweeping over the lagoons. . . . Veiled under the
symbolism of religion, this disquiet appears in the most unexpected
pkces. ... In Tintoretto's painting of The Creation of the Animals
the element of foreboding is particularly strong : the act of creation
seems almost to be a loosening of fear upon the world ; it seems to re-
solve the whole splendours of Venice into the wind-blown desolation
from which they sprang. The very movement of the composition,
from right to left, is contrary to the movement of annunciation.
The figure of the Creator a figure of spikes and lightning
flies along the shore of a sea in a rushing wind. The banks are popu-
lated with animals in a state of excitement, prancing, running, tense

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

and taut. A horse neighs, eyes dilated. Swans, cranes, herons and
water-fowl fly swiftly over the sea, while in the receding swell,
monsters and fishes ride the waves. ... It seems almost as much a
rush into oblivion, away from life, as a picture of creation. . . . And
yet, at home, in the safety of the palace, in Veronese's Annunciation,
the most splendid and spirited Angel of all time announces the
message of hope, the recurring act of optimism. The Angel sweeps
down obliquely from left to right on wings of black and vermilion,
in a swirling mass of draperies of vermilion, rose pink and gold. . . .
This is no quiet, secret annunciation, but a trumpeting of good news,
to a Mary of the Palace. She receives the news with Renaissance
satisfaction, leaning upon a pagan altar decorated with rams' heads,
cherubs and festoons. . . . Behind this picture lies the whole settled
existence of Venetian domestic life, the confidence of wealth,
the surety of inheritance, the belief in power. The child would
grow up to be a successful merchant or an admiral.

But in Tintoretto's Massacre of the Innocents fear is again let loose :
this time in the streets, as though among people stripped of the
protection of power. Moving masses of people rush along the
arcades, drop over walls, and in the background struggle across a
ditch that affords no safety from terror. . . . Likewise in his haunting
painting of The Removal of the Body of St. Mark from Alexandria the
scene might well be a setting in the Piazza when the marble pave-
ments are awash with rain and the lightning flashes over the Basilica.
The body of St. Mark, whose symbol is the lion, is lying pathetically
in the arms of the merchants, while in the lashing storm figures are

fleeing through the arcades On the other hand, Veronese's

Apotheosis of Venice, in the Palazzo Ducale, is the most triumphant
expression of confidence : Venice has become almost a goddess, a
jewelled and brocaded matron floating upon a cloud, ministered to
by deities and attributes. They are above a balcony crowded by
noblemen and women, while below, on prancing horses, are warriors
among a pile of arms. The Winged Lion peeps shyly through. . . .

* * *

HNALLY, among this mass of magnificent painting, as though in
affirmation of the basic reality of life, there are to be found an un-
usual number of banqueting scenes. No matter that in most cases
they were pictures of biblical feasts or pictures of the Last Supper
Tintoretto painted six major works on this theme alone they one

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and all extol the recurring delights of the table. Their visionary
qualities come second to the splendid social act, and the scenes are set
in lowly houses as well as in great Renaissance palaces. ... In the
least grandiose of Tintoretto's paintings of the Last Supper the
small one in the church of San Trovaso, the scene, though reverently
treated, might have taken pkce in any ordinary house in Venice.
The group around the table, set with food and wine, is very lively
the figures lurching this way and that. One man reaches backwards
for the wine bottle on the floor, the one beside him leans forward
on to the table to catch the words of Jesus. Between them is an over-
turned rush-seat chair. Another leans over to raise the lid of a bowl
upon the floor. ... It is an intensely natural scene: with trestle
table, stools and chairs ; there are a cat and a serving boy standing by.
On the staircase sits a woman with a distaff, and conversing in the

loggia in the background two others, ghost-like and luminous

To feed ourselves is the beginning of the struggle for existence
in primitive societies; to gorge ourselves at banquets seems to be
the final expression of the triumph of commerce. It is hardly sur-
prising, therefore, to find that at the end of the Renaissance, when
Venice was entering upon her long period of brilliant decline,
the delights of the table came to play such an important part. Ban-
queting is the end of empires, and from the loaded dinner table
stem all the follies of decadence. . . . Also, as though to mark the
lack of spiritual sustenance in the religion of the time, paintings
of banquets came to fill a psychological need. They became not
only a reminder of the famous meals of antiquity but also a constant
reminder of the next meal : above all, they seemed to be an affir-
mation of the ability of Venetian enterprises to feed Venetians nobly.
. . . The dinner table, as has often happened since in bourgeois
society, became the hallmark of success. ... It is still, however, with
mild surprise that we discover that Veronese's Supper in the House of
Levi an enormous picture of extraordinary magnificence should
have been commissioned by the monks of SS. Giovanni e Paolo to
decorate their refectory wall. It is a striking comment on the times and
shows how thoroughly the ideas of the Renaissance had permeated
even to places where at one time piety and asceticism had been the
rule. . . . Never was there a greater excuse to paint a Renaissance
banquet. . . . Against a fantasy of Ancient Roman architecture,
filtered through the cheery wind-blown imagination of Veronese,
where only one, rather insignificant, Gothic window revives a faint

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memory of the Dark Ages, under a loggia of magnificent propor-
tions, a great banquet is laid upon a table forty feet long. Amidst
columns, balustrades and pavements of costly marbles, with dwarfs,
buffoons, serving-boys and maids, costly plate, Moors and men-at-
arms, sit the powerful and important wealthy Venetian merchants,
Councillors of State in vermilion and ermine, noblemen and their
wives. ... In spite of all this, the figure of Christ in the centre is
powerfully conceived, as are also the two apostles beside him, but
behind them, within a few feet, are two serving-boys in canary-
yellow silk liveries holding Venetian glass goblets. . . .

It is fair to say that this painting aroused some slight, formal storm
of protest, for a year after its completion in 1573 Veronese was sum-
moned before the Sacred Tribunal in the Capella di San Teodoro
and charged with irreverence for painting Our Lord at supper with
"buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs and similar indecencies. . . ."
Veronese, with a boldness that speaks well both for the respect paid
to artists and the enlightenment of the period, defended himself by
quoting the instance of Michelangelo, who "in the Papal Chapel at
Rome painted our Lord Jesus Christ, His Mother, St. John and St.
Peter, and all the court of heaven, from the Virgin Mary down-
wards, naked." . . . The court ordered him to repaint the picture
within three months at his own expense, but the order was never
enforced and ithangs today as on the day it was finished a sumptu-
ous banquet in Venice, at which Christ somehow happened to be
present. . . .

In the paintings of this period the grotesque is beginning to appear.
The quality of ambivalence is beginning to turn the world upside
down. Dwarfs appear among the noble figures ; buffoons sit at high
tables, while, around the periphery of the scenes, figures of satire
and unbelief peep over the balustrades. The tall hat, the hooked nose,
the exaggerated belly appear among the crowds. The reality of life
is becoming mixed up with characters of fantasy.

Seicento

IT appears to have been one of the abiding characteristics of
Venetians that though the rest of mankind have been tormented
by ideas of heaven and hell how to get to the former and how to
avoid the latter they have been better content to solve the immedi-
ate problems of living. Their spiritual experiences were absorbed
into their art and architecture, and on those occasions when religion
was allowed to interfere with affairs of state, their mystics and saints,
like their caged birds, had to be imported. Miracles of a supernatural
kind were few in Venice, but miraculous works of art were numer-
ous. Thus though the idea of hell and judgment, after the early
centuries at any rate, acted as small deterrent to their enjoyment of
life, they nevertheless pulled up sharply at the idea of physical decay
that is to say, Death and in common with the rest of Italy in-
dulged in the excitements of baroque art. In Rome the Baroque
was a perfect mortuary art, and skeletons lounge in every church
and seem to stir the air with a beating of black wings, but in Venice,
where the benefits of peace and wealth produced something like a
perpetual holiday, the skeleton appeared at the festa, trimmed and
garlanded or wearing the motley of Harlequin. Enigmatic Death
(who puts a stop to all junketings!) took upon himself many guises,
and his presence is always felt in Venetian Baroque as indeed at all
times in Venice though he was never allowed to spoil the holiday.
Human dignity and the belief in the glory of man were preserved
in a period of art when men were apt to be reminded, with morbid
pleasure and by the most violent artistic means, that all things end
in the graveyard monuments and men alike. Thus it is that the
Venetian spirit finally conquered the Baroque, and churches, for
ever reminding man of his dismal end, in the later stages of Venetian
Baroque did not have upon their facades a single religious symbol.
They became secular monuments to the earthly glories of certain
noble Venetian families, and later, in a mood of truly horrifying cyni-
cism, the sculptures mock at both man and death, and God Himself
is unacknowledged. (It was this that gave Ruskin such a problem, as

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

in the case of that leering head sculptured at the base of the tower of
Santa Maria Formosa, which seems to have made him almost sick
with indignation. In his anger he condemned the art which is an
amoral activity along with the immorality of the times, and thus,
I believe, made a great mistake.)

The skeleton, as a symbol of Death, does not often appear in
Venetian Baroque, though ideas of corruption lurk slyly behind
masks and gestures in many perverse forms. Yet the Baroque was a
perfect vehicle for certain aspects of the Venetian temperament,
especially as a means of expressing religious and secular ideas in the
most theatrical way possible. The indiscretion of admitting Death
in his crudest form of rotting flesh and worms, as in Rome was,
quite admirably I think, kept at bay. But they retained everything
else : the same unbalanced, excessive statements, the same embarras-
sing ecstasies and astonishing realism. It is difficult for us today, now
that the baroque tendencies in art have almost expended themselves,
to conceive of the spirit which produced such excesses. So exactly
the opposite to our own introverted and austere conceptions of
painting and sculpture were the feelings that prompted the Baroque
that it almost requires a reversal of our own ideals to come to terms
with it. We are given to uneasy laughter, as when we are first con-
fronted with the incongruous and pornographic, and we marvel
that men dared to express so much; we are repelled and fascinated
by their disclosures, but at the same time we are amused though
sadly at emotions which would have been better left as private
experiences. It would take a strangely histrionic temperament nowa-
days to experience sensations of true religion from such a fafade as
that of the church of San Moise ; nevertheless, the initial baroque
impulse was religious, and works of real religious significance were
produced, especially in painting. The Baroque was as suitable for
glorifying man as for expressing the glory of God: yet all the time
it contained the seeds of materialism; and though it ended in the
grotesque and perverse, it remained full of an astonishing vitality
to the last.

Our judgments are mainly aesthetic, and, being reared in the
schools of psycho-analysis, we can enjoy the spectacle of the
public confessional. We are astonished and invigorated by vitality
as well as amused by artistic indiscretions. I can never deny the
humanity of the Baroque: its failings are as glorious as its
triumphs. It was not an art of fear: at its best it was a statement

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of human confidence, at its worst it courageously enjoyed its own
perversity.

ABOVE all else I think that it is this intense liveliness, this almost
hysterical preoccupation with movement that is its great attraction.
We can enjoy the Baroque, now that we are no longer obsessed by
the ideas that produced it, with as much gusto as we can enjoy a
spectacular thunderstorm at sea while safely standing on dry land.
So full of movement are baroque designs, so thronged with feelings
and personalities, that when I think of sculptured figures, or figures
painted upon a ceiling, I must always regard them as living creatures.
It is almost impossible to think of them as sculpture and painting, so
strong is the theatrical element. . . . Give them more than a glance,
stay with them for any length of time, and the magic begins to work.
. . . The figures seem to move. Angels arrive and depart, open and
shut their wings; people stab each other; they writhe, they leap.
Cherubs gambol and bombard each other with flowers and fruit;
heroes flash their eyes, nod the plumes on their helmets. The saints
publicly enjoy their solemn ecstasies though an embarrassment to

the rest The architecture (rarely true architecture) is equally

lively and accommodating, so full of ramps to lean on, spandrels to
lounge in, niches to swoon in, and with a hundred convenient ledges
for trophies, urns and swags. ... In real life banquets and parties
usually take place upon the horizontal surface of the floor; nuptials
are celebrated on flat beds : but in the Baroque everything takes place
vertically, and thus necessitates that most delightful of all dream
sensations the act of flying. Figures in a baroque composition live
an effortless vertical life among broken orders, going up and down,
in and out, swirling, spiralling, swinging across, resting awhile with
ease upon chasms and precipices, legs a-dangle; while upon the
ceilings, for those figures which have strayed beyond the confines
of the architecture, there are vast cloudscapes, where they can wander
in Paradise, away, away, like birds, into the farthest distances . . .
where they find not Jove with his cloud-encircled brow, but the
Sacred Name ofjesus, somewhat incongruously engraved in Hebrew
upon a bright cloud. . . . Meanwhile the wind blows always : gales
for the heroes, zephyrs for the female saints, bleak, wintry winds
for the old male saints and warm, humid winds for the young.
The clouds roll and rumble in the heavenly ceilings, the sun breaks

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through, and sends shafts of golden light down upon our astonished

eyes The pagan and Christian worlds rise in the vapours of the

mind.

San Moise

IF ever a church facade said "Enter" it is the facade of San Moisfe.
We cannot honestly say, however, that it is an invitation to worship :
it is as though we were asked to a gay palace to find the entertain-
ment of a lifetime. Thirty-two figures sport and gambol upon a
system of cornices and broken pediments, which have no archi-
tectural function, resembling the rocks and ledges of an artificial
cliff. Naked cherubs the offspring of giants, large and unashamed,
climb and slither as children do in real life. Angels, with the
wind blowing their draperies, revealing their ankles, trumpet
and revel. Enormous swags of flowers and fruit now sadly
stained by pigeons, who find this the most accommodating home
in Venice after St. Mark's hang heavily about the architecture,
though in our time, after almost three hundred years of weathering,
they have assumed the forms of apples, onions and turnips with
centrepieces of cauliflower and outbursts of broccoli. But it is
a grey and black jollity, a piece of festivity blackened with age,
a muted celebration. . . . Over the central doorway, which in
this instance must be dignified with the pompous name of "portal,"
there is a truncated obelisk supporting a bust. It is neither die bust
nor the obelisk that is particularly remarkable, but the two monsters
on whose rumps the obelisk rests. They are, I believe, though I can-
not be sure, two camels, of all animals the most ugly, and of all
animals the least likely to be encountered halfway up a vertical cliff;
on closer inspection they may as well be dinosaurs, for they have the
most un-camel-like of faces. Figures stand on either side celestial
camel drivers in heavy robes which they are gathering up away
from the snouts of the animals, as though in fear that they might
root among their folds for apples. Two more figures are standing
on the camels' backs and leaning against the obelisk, one holding a
cornucopia, while the other, who might be Moses, holds a tablet of
stone. High above this, on an outstanding corbel, is the figure of an
apparently newly arrived angel. He leans forward in, an attitude
of tense excitement and blows his trumpet at us in the Campo San
Moise below. Large and languid figures, unaware or indifferent

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to this sudden visitation for such figures have lounged on broken
arches and pediments ever since the figures of Night and Day dis-
covered themselves on the Medici Tombs in Florence lift their
excessive draperies and grasp the surrounding rocks to prevent
themselves from slipping. Above the angel is a piece of heraldry
which has lost all semblance of the crispness of armour and slashed
leather, and become a blazoned cloud as though sculptured with
chisels of lightning. Higher still, against the sky, and exposed to a
perpetual gale from the Adriatic, is a row of gesticulating figures
holding those instruments of bronze which stone cannot imitate
swords, wands, rods and daggers. These figures are surely shouting
some fevered message into the wind, some exhortation to cease
from wicked ways, down to the Venetians and international tourists
in the Campo (whose real interests, as always, are in strutting and
gossiping, in showing off their clothes, their charms and their
virility).

Thus far in this description of the facade we have only travelled
up the centre bay and there are three in all but the elevation from
the pavement to the sky has been voluptuous if pigeon-drenched.
It is therefore almost a disappointment on entering the building to
find that it is just a church. . . , Too much effort has been expended
on getting us inside.

THE interior of San Moise has all the fashionable appointments of
the period, but after the exuberance of the facade they appear un-
usually quiet. There is an air of sadness about the pkce, for the
marbles of San Moise have not worn well, most of the paintings
have bkckened to the point of obscurity and the remaining frescoes
are scabrous and grey. In fact, there is little to detain us except the
high altar, and this only because it is perhaps the worst altarpiece in
Venice. In this period of emotional marble, when stones for stones
they are after all somehow become fluid, move and take flight,
we can never be sure, between glances, if statues have not shifted
on to the other hip or whether another angel has arrived. Above the
pediments, on which an immense marble transformation is taking
pkce, there are no straight lines. We leave the land of architectural
stability and are transferred to the scene on Mount Sinai. On a large
pile of rocks, of polished marble some twenty feet high, for all the
world like enormous pieces of wet liver fresh from the belly of some

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monster, the Tablets of the Law are being dropped by a flying
figure of Jehovah. He is surrounded by cherubs and trumpeting
angels, who descend like a swarm upon the figure of Moses kneeling
in an attitude of surprise at the summit of the rocks. His hair stands
on end as in a whirlwind, and I believe, though I cannot be sure at
this earthly distance, that he has two little horns on his forehead
that make him the bull of the tribe. At the foot of the rocks is a group
of figures in attitudes of selfconscious ecstasy and astonishment;
on the left is a pharisee in horned mitre, one hand on hip and point-
ing at the altar beneath, while behind this whole extraordinary
occurrence, on the real wall of the church, is a bad picture of heaven,
with a score of sad angels floating and trumpeting in the faded
glory of a late seventeenth-century twilight.

Other features of the sanctuary, which are attractive mainly
because they are stupendous, are two huge gilded screens, some
twelve feet high, which are placed on either side of the altar on cer-
tain occasions. They are in that debased but vigorous style in which
mouldings, architraves and outgrowths of acanthus amalgamate
into one swirling mass: as though an architectural setting, once
peopled with figures who have since flown away, had become hot
and started to melt. . . . These glittering screens, extending like
molten volcanic rocks, complete the idea of a magic mountain.
The assymetrical doorways cut into them might lead to some sacred
grotto rather than to the sacristry. They form a sensuous background
to the dramas of the church, and when the candles are lit upon the
altar they reflect a blaze of glory down the whole length of the
building. . . . On the other hand, the effect is so erotic that they
would make a magnificent set of nuptial couches.

San Pantalon

SAN PANTALON is remarkable today as an over-decorated Baroque
church. It is on a very old site, but the original church has dis-
appeared and all that remains of its furnishings is a painting of The
Coronation of the Virgin, by Vivarini, shyly tucked away in a closed
side chapel, as though the present church were ashamed of its
beginnings. It was developed and redecorated about 1670, and the
old one vanished in an orgy of debased baroque ornament and paint-
ing, the full extent of which only becomes evident as the eyes get
accustomed to the permeating dark- brown light. This gloomy

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atmosphere is caused, by an overwhelming but riotous ceiling paint-
ing by Fuminiani : a ceiling almost as big as that of the Sistine Chapel
but in no other way resembling it The subject of the painting is the
Martyrdom and Glorification of St. Pantalon, but the painting is
such a muddle and so discoloured that the incidents on first acquain-
tance are quite indistinguishable. It is, however, a remarkable work in
many ways, if only for the horses which are romping upon the
ceiling. These animals, in order to be visible from the floor below,
are painted as big as, if not bigger than, elephants and are prancing
along the painted cornices, their huge rumps leaning over into the
church. We can only be thankful that they are not real horses.
A system of painted cornices, peopled with foreshortened views of
giants, builds up a series of cleverly vanishing false architectural
features above the real, and in so doing makes the church look three
times its proper height. Muddled and complicated, the brown
incidents take place in and out of the painted architecture, and, in the
centre of the ceiling the Glorification I can only presume is a
host of flying figures, mostly angels, moving upwards in a swirling
mass to the figure of God the Father, as remote in the distance as the
moon in daytime. The angels in this particular ceiling I have taken
a dislike to, for they look very malevolent. They are sinister,
with insects' wings or are they bats' wings, or are they a
crackling leathery swarm of pterodactyls? Not content with
covering this great vault, Fuminiani allowed his figures to hang
down below the line of the real arches, by extending his canvas on
boards down the backs of arms and legs. The ceiling is in a bad
state of repair and, sagging in places, has started to drop off.
Another hundred years and one fine morning the congregation
will be found suffocating under the doth of a dusty and black
Glorification. . . .

A feature of quite a minor kind, but cheerful after the ceiling, is a
Crib in a small alcove. This is my first Santo Bambino in Venice . . .
a doll of about eighteen inches, dressed in quilted white silk swaddling
clothes sewn over with pearls; on its head a bonnet trimmed with
white angora fur, and behind, a halo, a circlet of gold set with gold
stars. The doll lies very stiffly upon its side in a cot shaped exactly
like the bottom half of a large Easter egg but encrusted entirely with
shells, stuck on, grotto-wise, and painted gold. The edges of the cot
are also trimmed with angora fur, and the whole is supported on
twiddly legs of painted wire, surrounded by bunches and swags of

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artificial flowers roses, forget-me-nots and lilies of die valley.
There are two electric candles on either side, and the walls of the
alcove are covered with Sacred Hearts of tinsel, each one a thank-
offering. . . .

I Gesuiti

THE facade of the Jesuit Church, so near the open lagoon on the
north side, is a success to halfway up its height. There is a fine effect
of deeply undercut, massed Corinthian columns, with great niches
for the statues of the Apostles, panels of ample decorations and
above the main doorway an ornament of the Sacred Name of Jesus.
Two angels have come to rest above the door and are swinging
metal censers and, on the top of each fat column, making an impos-
ing row, are breezy figures with metal haloes. . . . Thus far all is
well, and here under normal circumstances we should expect a
great tympanum, but it had to go a storey higher to give the end
of the nave a window. At this stage invention failed, and there is no
excitement until we reach the skyline, where there is an extremely
lively collection of figures on marble clouds, as though the building
were going up in smoke. These are perhaps the most breezy baroque
figures in Venice to appear on a cornice outside a building. (I par-
ticularly like the view of them end-on when in a boat coming back
from Murano. Then they rise above the red rooftops like a crowd
of white-robed giants in animated conversation gazing down into
the street below.)

The builders of this church, unlike San Moise, intended the entry
to be a surprise: and it is almost a pity to spoil it by describing it.
Any description, however, will be beggared by the reality, for this
church is truly one of the surprises of Venice. The interior scheme is
of a nave with side chapels but no aisles, and with shallow transepts
and chancel. But every square inch of the walls, over the entire
church, is inlaid with the most sumptuous brocade design in white
and antico verde marble, imitating in realistic folds and heavy drapes
a real cloth. It is done on such a scale as to have a paralysing effect
on the eye, for even though we know immediately that it is marble,
the illusion is so astonishing that we are sent into a swoon of admira-
tion for the patience of the craftsmen, their almost insane skill and
for the wealth of display. On dose examination we discover that
every scrap of the design has been fretted out and inlaid, each part

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fitting the other with hair-space perfection a work of tremendous
labour and expense. The pulpit has heavy curtains of the same
green-and-white brocade hanging in rich folds about it. The inlaid
design in this case wanders in and out of the folds with never a flaw
in the pattern, and hangs over the front with a marble fringe.
It really does look like cloth and must be a pleasure to preach
from

Standing at the corners of the crossing, like figures at a windy
crossroads, are four statues, and behind them, in revolting splendour,
is the high altar, a triumph of marble fretwork with ten spiral columns
of antico verde marble, under which is an enormous white globe
with representations of God the Father and Son sitting upon
it. ... The columns, wriggling their way upwards with thick and
violent movements, support a heavy and cumbersome baldacchino
of beehive shape decorated with fish-scale motives. But what is most
extraordinary is that the carpets of the sanctuary and the altar steps are
once more made of marble with inlaid designs of different colours.
The side altars are only slightly less elaborate and are equally exhaust-
ing. In all cases the applied ornaments have completely overwhelmed
the intention of the altar. The architraves and cornices dissolve into
a mad riot of angels and cherubs, swags and trophies, and in most
cases the cornices themselves cannot keep still but flap about in
curves. Under one of the side altars, behind a sheet of glass, is a per-
fectly realistic painted figure, full size, of the corpse of a saint
so realistic that it is impossible to tell whether it is of wood, wax or
flesh in an attitude of ecstatic death, not laid straight, but collapsed,
as though he had struggled up the church and dropped into position
ten minutes ago in a ready-prepared sarcophagus fitted up with
electric lights.

The ceiling of this church is a disappointment smothered with
white, gold and pale blue ornaments, with very harsh frescoes in
tie panels. There is a very black Titian Martyrdom of St. Laivrence
the most convincing version of that atrocity I have seen so far
and an Assumption by Tintoretto over the altar of the left transept,
which only asserts itself after we have ceased to marvel at the inky
surrounding it. This church has the most sumptuous interior in
Venice and is the most enervating. It is not the best Baroque by any
means ; in fact, it is rather tasteless a colossal waste of time, energy
and money. "When we enter we are surprised, but we leave it in a
fit of profound gloom.

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Santa Maria della Salute

SANTA MAMA DELLA SALUTE is the apotheosis of Venetian Baroque
architecture. . . . Esuberante is the key word. How beautifully this
ornate building sits upon the water of the Grand Canal, how cleverly
exploited are all the theatrical possibilities of its position! From
ramps of shallow steps, themselves a continuation in stone of the
tranquil waves, the building rises like a cluster of triumphal arches
placed octagonally, roofed by an enormous dome; and then behind
it, over out-jutting chapels, are two smaller domes flanked by bell
towers. The whole is arranged in a compact and unified group, as
though struggling for space and bubbling upwards. Yet this is a
perfectly timed uprising after the quiet, long, horizontal frontage
of the Dogana, and forms a triumphant ending to the island, which
without it would be a dull wedge of low buildings. In its isolated
position it set an interesting problem for its designer, for though the
majority of baroque churches (not only in Venice) usually rely
entirely on a single facade, the Salute had to be conceived as a com-
plete building in the round. It approaches nearer to true architectural
principles and relies less on vertical scenic effects. But even then the
result is largely theatrical, for many of the members have no reference
to the architectural features of the interior, and by far the majority
of the ornaments are employed for their own sakes as decoration
only. The great dome, for instance, is not a true dome but is built
upon wood acting like a lid upon an octagonal drum, and the
enormous voluted consoles do not support anything but are there
purely as a decorative transition to the triangular pediments of the
lower fa9ades. If they have a function at all it is to give the great
statues something to stand on. The lantern of the dome is a fine
piece of architectural daring, echoing, as it should, the main dome :
and I particularly like the row of obelisks with knobs upon them,
taking the place, at that great height, of the statues on the lower
volutes. With its rows of gesticulating angels, its brave show of
knights in armour and full-bottomed wigs, its bearded prophets
in ample wind-blown togas, its rich volutes and swinging curves,
it makes a lively and satisfying building. ... If the cessation of all
great plagues had been celebrated with die same freedom and wit as
this the world would be a finer place.

The interior of the Salute is strong and robust and more simple

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than we expect. It is like entering a theatrical setting for a baroque
play, yet a setting not on one stage but on eight. It has many
features in common with Palladio's Teatro Olimptco at Vicenza
as well as with the Pantheon in Rome. There is a bright and airy
octagonal floor from which radiate, beyond an arcade of rich clus-
tered columns, a series of chapels. The eye is thus constantly in-
trigued by entrances, as though we were tempted down a series of
avenues. . . . And yet I nd it strangely cold and unattractive : it
has none of the voluptuousness of St. Mark's. It is always deserted
and flooded by cold light. (A church should always be dark like the
recesses of the mind, hinting at mysteries.) The Salute is a fine mix-
ture of a theatre, a ballroom and a casino and could fulfil any of these
functions. I feel that its real purpose is as a setting for fashionable
crowds, and the lingering air of fashionable weddings is its only
connection with a church. . . . But we must never judge an empty
baroque church too harshly: for when there is some celebration
taking place, when the candles twinkle and the air is full of incense and
the eyes are regaled by little eddies of bright colour, when the senses
are charmed by droning and singing or washed by floods of organ
music, that is the time to see the setting take its proper place.
Baroque interiors are not to be judged as architecture : they are
stage sets, built for permanent use.

Standing on plinths round the gallery of the main octagon are
eight statues of the Prophets, which are the worst statues in Venice.
They have faces of indeterminate modelling and bodies hung with
limp rags, as though the wind had dropped. The wind must always
blow in the Baroque, indoors and outdoors. There must always
be movement. . . .

Santa Maria Zobenigo

FROM the Salute to a study of the facade of Santa Maria Zobeuigo
the idea of the secularization of Venetian Baroque churches is almost
complete. This fa9ade so near San Moise is not a church front at
all but the end of a church on which the monument to the glory
of a particular Venetian family has been erected. The glory of God,
so obviously fading among a gathering host of latter-day Christians
dressed as Romans, has now receded to the interior of the church.
His symbolic pkce on the front of this temple has been taken by
statues of the gentlemen who were paying for the building. Wealth

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and pride have displaced sanctity, and the Renaissance, which set
out to rediscover the greatness of man, has finished by erecting

monuments to his vanity. The Baroque is the style of egomania

The niches, of a two-storey facade of Ionic and Corinthian orders,
are occupied by members of the Barbaro family standing in pom-
pous attitudes and showing themselves off to the public. They stand
on their plinths in the costumes of admirals and generals, as though
on their poop decks or in command of their battles, reliving for
ever the attitudes of triumph they adopted in real life. Beneath diem,
in low relief, are decorative maps of their chief battles, of Zara,
Crete, Padua, Rome and Spalato, while above are very lively
reliefs of their naval battles. Above these the fa$ade begins to break
up into characteristic pediments on which loll and prace seven
symbolical figures of virtues, white against the sky. By a sculp-
tor's foible, the heads on all these figures are enlarged, in order,
so he thought, to correct the height at which they were placed, but
they only serve to increase the effect of the general swollen-headed-
ness of the whole facade. The only innocent figure on the building
is a cherub above the main doorway, carved upon the keystone.
This little fellow, at the time I write, is happily holding a real fern,
which has somehow come to grow in his marble hands. . . .

Chiesa dei Vecchi

THE final fall from grace is represented on the front of the Chiesa
dei Vecchi. . . . This church, so gloomy that it does not appear in
the guide-books, has been allocated, with the honest cynicism
reserved for old age alone, to the use of the old men in the adjacent
hospital, who, we must presume, are either too weak to protest at
the insult or else too far gone to care what further follies human
beings will commit. ... All churches in Venice are near other
churches, and this one is near San Zanipolo, the Pantheon of the
Doges, so at the corner in splendour sleep the illustrious, while in a
narrow alley round the back the old Venetians draw their last breaths.
Furthermore, the tombs of the Doges are there for all to see, they
are almost as glorious in death as they were in real life, but the
Chiesa dei Vecchi is permanently closed (the doors only open for a
short while at six in die morning when everybody is asleep) and the
aged are thus screened from the eyes of the living.

The Chiesa dei Vecchi has the most debased baroque fafade in

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Venice. Once more a secular front, built, though hardly to the glory,
of one Bartelomeus Carnionus unless he was an avowed cynic
who wanted to show his contempt for the Church. The bust of this
gentleman stands in an enormous scallop shell above his memorial
tablet held up by two slaves, and is the main feature of the front-
elevated there like an odd species of shellfish. It surmounts the main
order of very debased Ionic pilasters with floreated capitals. The
pilasters taper downwards weakly, and on them, in order of appear-
ance along the whole front, are four grotesque heads with faces
three feet wide : the first one leering, with flowing moustaches and
cunning slanting eyes, the second with the flat face of an old boxer
grinding his teeth, the third with a hooked nose and tongue lolling
out in defiance, and the fourth with a lively, cynical smile. All of
them have asses ears, flowing hair and moustaches. Below each one
is the head of a toothless lion, from which are suspended, tied up by
ribbons, very heavy swags of fruit. On the level of the bust the order
continues up to the cornice, and on each of the four plinths are giant
supporting figures. But, as if to mock the age-old burden of the
Church (who has tried so hard to lift us from baseness !) these figures,
whose task is to support the cornice, are ragged old clerics in capes
and cassocks, put to work with skirts girded up to their knees.
They lurch painfully over into the narrow street and hold up nothing
but a row of heraldic cartouches on a heavy flat cornice. Four
figures stand against the sky, dejected, and one of them is in the act
of ringing a bell, as though all divine messages had failed and only
the death knell was heard. . . .

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Settecento

WITH no diminishing of vitality the art of the Baroque ran
parallel to the historical decline of Venice, matching cynicism
with failure. Grotesque ornaments sprouted wart-like upon the
architecture: heads leered from the keystones ofardb.es, fruit hung
limp in swags upon pilasters, the capitals luxuriated like hothouse
plants. Columns wriggled or sagged under the great weight of the
entablatures, and the great blocks of stern rustication gave way to
the characteristic vermiculation as though wind and worms had

combined to eat away the stones The last truly great episode of

Venetian history was the storming of the Parthenon by Francesco
Morosini in the campaign of 1687, and from the smoking ruins
he brought back as trophies the two marble lions which were set
as dumb sentinels outside the gateway of the once-powerful Arsenale.

From thenceforward the history of Venice became a dismal series

of humiliations and defeats. As symbolical lions will, the Lion of
St. Mark settled down upon its haunches to browse in the sun, its
teeth gone, its claws blunt, its wings folded back. But the Peacock,
whose qualities outlast all calamities save that of actual starvation,
suffered no such decline, and strutted about more splendidly than
ever amidst the fine buildings and in the glittering interiors. Venice,
though no longer a great power, relaxed among the scenes of her
past magnificence and went on holiday for a hundred years. . . .

The dawn of the eighteenth century found her full of the enthusi-
asms of self-love, full of self-satisfaction. For the first time in her
history she began to take on the character that we know today
that of hostess. She opened a salon for the rest of Europe. With all
her accomplishments and with all the wit and fun of which she was
capable, she no longer concerned herself with empire building but
gave herself up to the sophisticated delights of the drawing-room.
. . . The chandeliers sparkled, the harpsichords tinkled, the violins
squeaked and out came the packs of cards and the dice boxes. . . .
The figures of endless Carnival frolicked in the streets, and upon
the water glided the sumptuous, secretive private gondolas and the

3 J 93

Lion at the Gateway of the Af senate

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

magnificently decorated barges in the pageants. The Piazza became
a permanent fairground; banquets, balls and parties were held
throughout the year, and the gambling houses became the most
famous in Europe. Venice arose anew, as a show place, as the most
splendid haunt in Europe, and marked the culmination of the Grand
Tour. Gaiety and frivolity, hard-headed and clear, completely un-
hampered by religious doubts, bred a new culture and a new way
of life, fostered by a government which saw in it the means of
replenishing the fast-emptying coffers. The traditional festivals and
water pageants of Venice were encouraged to become great inter-
national events, the Carnival was extended from a week to last for
months, while the gambling houses received public and official
sanction. . . . Venice was early learning the business of catering for
tourists on a grand scale. The endless prospects of leisure were
before her.

The Veduta Painters

BY far the greater proportion of wealthy foreign visitors were
English. In those days we occupied the position held by Americans
today, and though our desires were fundamentally the same, we
had the advantage of arriving on the scene at a period of greater
taste and enlightenment. The patronage of painting by the old
Venetian families having declined, the artists turned to their wealthy
visitors for commissions. And, as the main desire of all tourists is to
take home views of the pkces they have visited, both to remind
themselves later of their travels and to impress their less fortunate
countrymen, as well as to take back their own likenesses made
against unfamiliar backgrounds and painted by artists with foreign
names, the Venetian Settecento painters developed the new art of
view-painting and reduced portraiture to the making of facile
likenesses. These activities, though essentially superior, can be
correctly termed the dignified forerunners of the pictures-postcard
views and the seaside photographic portraits. The aim of this work
was never very high. Its main interest was verisimilitude, which
depended on the skill of the particular artist as a colourist and master
of perspective to produce a result which would be recognizable to
everybody and which would conjure up, at a kter date, the right
feelings of nostalgia and admiration. It quickly developed into an

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SBTTBCENTO

industry of international proportions, but no Venetian artist of those
times could have foreseen the great mechanical industry of today,
nor the hosts of tourists who, though they have no pretentions as
artists, can make their own little pictures by the mere click of a
lever. Nor would they care to own that odd group of artists who
produce the debased view-paintings of today, even less those trog-
lodytes who haunt the Piazza making their sinister nocturnal cari-
catures in the glare of electric light and to the din of jazz bands. . . ,
It is significant, however, that even at that early date there was a
desire for some mechanical device to eliminate the sheer drudgery
of perspective drawing. . . . There are hints and rumours of the use
of the camera obscura to help with the initial drawing, and though
few of the view-painters have openly admitted using it, we can
visualize something like a mysterious Punch and Judy booth into
which the artist disappeared for a few hours to trace upon his
board the "view'* reflected by mirrors through a small aperture.
(No one who has ever been inside a camera obscura can resist its
charm there is still one at work in the Casdehill in Edinburgh
and it would be an obvious temptation for an artist whose pre-
occupation was with verisimilitude to make a sly tracing and colour
it up afterwards.) This particular activity, which has for ever made
serious artists conscience-stricken, must not be exaggerated, for the
view-pictures of the period always remained superior to mechanical
copying. They make a most attractive series, which, though seldom
important works of art, often have much intrinsic value, and now
are of great topographical interest. Some of our most precise views
of eighteenth-century cities, not only of Venice, are the direct
result of the desires of tourists to take home pictures of their travels,
and, as in the case of Canaletto's views of London, show evidence
of the remarkable pride that the eighteenth-century patron had in the
architectural transformations of die period. In a sense it was a minor
renaissance, an essentially healthy art, and we can only praise the
taste of men (Englishmen too!) who had the confidence and en-
lightenment to commission what was at the time the very ktest

art However much we may suspect the motives of Joseph Smith

as an art dealer Walpole called him the "Merchant of Venice"
we are now profoundly thankful that he devoted forty years of his
life to encouraging Canaletto. That he made a handsome profit
from the sale of his collection to George ffl is of secondary impor-
tance compared to the wealth of interest now vested in the Royal

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Collections at Windsor. Likewise, on many a gloomy winter's day
in London, it is with nothing but joy that we can look at Canaletto's
views of Venice in the Wallace Collection and the National Gallery,
even if our motives are merely nostalgic. We are enjoying now, in
our public galleries, the fruits of eighteenth-century tourism. . . .
Canaletto's views are still the most convincing records of the
city, beside which, even the best modern photographs pale into
insignificance. Other artists, notably Guard! and Turner, have created
more important pictures of Venice, but Canaletto best preserves the
outer reality. It is therefore not entirely surprising to find that scarcely
any paintings by Canaletto remain in Venice at the present day, as

most of them are in England But I have noticed that there seems

to be an antipathy among Venetians for Canaletto : they say, quite
rightly, that he is only a master of perspective and that Guardi is
the better painter. With this I agree, but I always suspect a note of
sour grapes in these remarks because we and not they have his
paintings. ... It would not be unfair to say that the present-day
tourist attractions of Venice would be greatly enhanced if their
Canalettos were returned to them. . . . But at least they have the
real Venice, and after all we paid for the paintings two hundred
years ago. . . .

Rosalia

I DO not consider Rosalba Camera to have been the greatest
portrait painter of this time, but she was such a phenomenon of the
eighteenth-century drawing-room movement that she deserves
special mention. She was one of those fantastic personalities for
which Venice has always been famous. She was the archetype of the
artist suffragette, and in no time at all, possibly because it was un-
usual for a woman to become a successful professional artist, she
became the rage of the salons of Europe, numbering among her
friends the greatest men in the countries she visited. In her lifetime
she enjoyed the reputation that some of the greatest painters have
only had after they were dead. She travelled about, with her box
of pastels and trunks of dresses, in a state rivalled only by visiting
princesses. It is difficult for us, when looking at her pretty pastel
portraits today in Venice portraits which look as though they were
done with face powder, rouge and blue eye-shadow to understand
why she had such a reputation* But Rosalba's portraits somehow

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SETTECENTO

preserve for us the quality of the boudoir, with its idle wigs, yards
of lace, tinsel-threaded brocades and silver slippers : that soft streak
of effeminacy that lurked in so much eighteenth-century art. They
are pictures from the powder bowl . . ephemeral, and yet, we feel,
perfect likenesses, perfect holiday portraits.

Vignettes : One

NO century lends itself to the treatment of the vignette quite as
well as the eighteenth (ours is the century of the newsreel, the docu-
mentary film, the still photograph), and from now on the moods
of Venice present themselves as a series of charming pictures softened
at the edges. There is a long series of glimpses of Venetian life,
nearly all of a minor kind, which, piece by piece, build up into an
album & scrapbook of pleasure and entertainment, a scrapbook
never completed, through which we can browse, half understanding
some of the scenes because they happened so long ago, and under-
standing others better than they were understood at the time because

we see them at a distance Yet, like pictures of an oddly magical

kind, they are never quite what they seem, and beneath the beauty
of the surface there lies a sinister background. . . . The glitter of
sophistication and the liveliness of comedy cover the ache of
romanticism and the fear of nihilism. . . . Death comes to the Carni-
val, but he is never vulgar enough to declare himself. . . . Not for
nothing did the Venetians take to wearing masks and clouding their
heads in veils of bkck lace. ... He came to Venice in the most
attractive forms : at first quite unnoticed in the hilarious riots of the
streets : later he was shrouded in the Venetian silver fog, and finally
was blown away over the sea. . . . The scenes are all silent now :
there is no movement in pictures: they are flashes of ribaldry,
pleasure, splendour and then, later, they express a longing to
escape. . . .

THERE is a room in the Querini-Stampalia Gallery which is lined
from floor to ceiling with some sixty or more panel paintings by
Gabriele Bella, which, in their slightly amateurish fashion, give us
as vivid an idea of the early eighteenth century as Canaletto and

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Guard! did of a later period. As paintings they are negligible but as
documents invaluable. They are arranged in no particular order.
We can wander as we would round the city, aimlessly, like
visitors. . . .

THESE is a scene of violence. . . . The rival factions of citizens, the
Castellani and the Nicolotti, are having one of their periodical
rowdy meetings upon the bridge of San Fosca. The mobs of young
men are in all respects alike in dress; they are lurching forward
upon each other, pressing up the bridge with clenched fists and
sticks. They are, it seems, queueing up to be knocked off, for the
water of the canal under the bridge is full of bobbing heads and
floating caps. . . . Groups of respectable citizens, the men bewigged,
the ladies masked, are standing upon platforms arranged on barges,
or else are viewing the scene from the safety of their balconies. One
gentleman, in his finery and brass buttons, has drawn his sword to
enter the brawl, but is restrained by a pikeman and others.

IN 1740 when the King of Polonia came to Venice he was enter-
tained by the citizens in the Piazza with a great display of bull-
baiting. About ten bulls, tethered by long reins from their horns,
are lumbering about the ring in frustration and fury, goaded and
tormented by young men. The gentry are looking on from the
safe side of the fence, the ladies from their carpeted window ledges.

IN the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale (where we now have such
respectable orchestral concerts) another scene of bull-baiting is taking
place, this time with dogs, around the two bronze well-heads. . . .

ANOTHER bull-baiting scene of great excitement on the Rialto
Bridge. . . . Teams of masked men are leading the tethered bulls,
while men with wheelbarrows are attempting to pass them and run
over the bridge. Upon the steps of the bridge two men are being
tossed. . . . How terrifying to run up the steps to be met by the bulls
coming over the other side Crowds are standing by.

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SETTECENTO

IN the Campo Sant' Angdo is a bear-baiting scene which looks
rather pathetic. Many fierce hounds and men "with sticks are tor-
menting the unfortunate creature

TO the Merceria, looking towards the Tower of the Giants, with
a glimpse of the Piazza beyond. . . . In this narrow street, where
today are the smart shops, the money-changers, the procurers, a
great riot takes place between bravos. Arms are flying in all direc-
tions. One poor man lies on the ground, knocked out.

VERY near to brawling is the scene of the Ball Game in the Campo
alii Gesuiti. The crowds of spectators gather at either end of the
campo, one group far away in the distance, with the Murano Lagoon
over their heads. It is a confusing game : there are nine players in
white shirts and blue trousers, and four balls, if not more. One
player seems to be standing on a marked piece of ground in an
attitude of hurling the ball down the campo to six players who
stand on either side, waiting. There must be some excitement,
for in the nearest crowd of spectators violent quarrels have broken
out. People are being upset from their chairs and belaboured;
some are running away; dogs are jumping and barking. . . . The
church of I Gesuiti, by the way, at this date had a simple fafade
the fat columns, the breezy evangelists, the figures on the top cornice
which we know today, were yet to be revealed. . . .

THERE is great interest in a picture called Festival with a Bull Hunt,
the Killing of a Cat with the Shaved Head, the Seizing of the Duck and
the Goose, etc., in which these unfortunate animals and birds are seen
once more amusing the crowds. The scene is set in the Campo
Santa Maria Formosa. In the background is the bull hunt a
skirmishing among the young bloods. Not far from it two ducks
are hanging from the top of a greasy pole and two youths are trying
to reach them. In the centre of the campo on a raised platform are
musicians, and dancers of both sexes, gaily doing a jig and doubtless
singing. On the left on a smaller raised platform takes place the
Murder of the Cat. The cat seems to be strapped round its middle

199

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to an upright board, leaving its legs and head free to scratch and bite.
It is a large and vicious torn, and it is in the act of violently scratching
the lunging shaven head of a man. Two attendants in turbans, hold-
ing spears, give this weird scene an oriental flavour, and I feel that
something horrible happened as usually does at the murder of a

cat Along the bridge in the foreground run three almost naked

youths. Above the bridge, but almost out of reach, is hung a goose,
presumably alive for the purpose, on a rope which seems to be con-
trolled by the ladies watching on their balconies. The young men
run up the bridge, leap into the air and attempt to seize the moving
head of the goose. . . . One youth, who has lost his loincloth, is naked
in mid-air. . . . But they always fall into the water, where they are
swimming among the idling gondolas.

FROM these minor popular feasts, of which there are others taking
place, let us go to the Piazzetta to see the performance of acrobats
on a grand scale ... on the day of the Feast in the Piazzetta di San
Marco on Maundy Thursday. Halfway down the Piazzetta is a three-
tiered baroque pavilion in blue, white and gold, gaily hung with
garlands. In front of this, in a space left by the crowds, is a huge
and impressive pyramid of acrobats six times the height of a man.
Above them, down a rope stretching from the top of the Campanile
to the Palazzo Ducale, a man is being shot with a bunch of flowers
in his hand. These incidents are obviously part of the longer pro-
gramme for which great preparations have been made. . . . Tier
upon tier of people sit in the arches of the Palace, while in the centre
the Doge and dignitaries in red preside under a striped awning.
People also sit in tiers by the Basilica, the Library and die Loggetta.
In the foreground is an animated throng, among whom are men
selling comfits and souvenirs.

ANOTHER painting shows A Scene which can be Observed Every day
in the Piazzetta where the People of All Nations Gather Mornings and

Evenings Large booths are erected near the Palazzo Ducale, down

the centre of the Piazzetta and in between the Columns by the water-
front. The scene is like a fairground. . . . There is a show of freak
animals, acrobats and strong men blowing trumpets. Two Punch

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SETTECENTO

and Judy shows are in progress, and a gay scene of the Commedia
dell' Arte. There is a fruit-stall, and a fat lady on a trestle. Under the
arches of the Palazzo Ducale a doctor sells physic to the musical
accompaniment of two enormously fat singers and a guitarist in
black. There is a terrible scene of tooth-pulling in a mocking crowd
of figures, among whom are Pulcinello and Harlequin. . . . Else-
where two boys are fighting; groups are talking and gesticulating.
Some people are wearing masks. It is a somewhat wild and riotous
scene, but very rumbustious.

THE Piazza did not remain free of temporary erections for very
long at a time. In the Design of the Old Fair of the Sensa in Venice it
seems as though the entire space was given over to a ramshackle
double row of booths for the sale of practically everything. There
are picture shops, furniture shops, clothes shops, jewellers', metal
workers' and tobacconists* shops. There are men smoking long clay
pipes; one man smoking a pipe six feet long. It is informal and
untidy, the age-old type of bazaar. But in the next picture, called
The New Plan of the Fair of the Sensa, there had evidently been
complaints on aesthetic grounds, and the setting has become architect-
designed : the booths are arranged in the form of an enormous oval,
with colonnades for use on rainy days, and rows of statues on the
parapets. It is all painted white and looks very fine indeed. In and
out of the colonnades the masked ladies move, covered with black-
hooded capes and wearing tricorne hats. . . . There were many
solemn religious processions in the Piazza, as on the Day of Corpus
Domini, when the Doge, accompanied by councillors and clergy,
went in procession with statues, relics and candles under a tunnel
specially built round the square; or, as on the Night of Good
Friday, when there was a procession of the Host under a black
canopy, when everyone was dressed in black and walked with
candles dipped. . . . Above was the moon, with two candles sparkling
in every window of the surrounding buildings. . . . And again, on
Palm Sunday, when the Doge and Clergy were present at the release
of doves in front of St. Mark's. . . .

BUT it was during the days of the Carnival that the most fantastic
scenes took pkce. In the picture called the Masquerade on the Last

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

Day of the Carnival the Piazza San Marco is in a different guise. Here
nothing is serious, all is make-believe and frivolity. Like most true
carmval, it is a caricature of life, sinister and disturbing as well as
amusing. The dividing line between the macabre and laughter has
become very fine. The figures seem to move on the verge of the
unreal, as though the trivialities of life were the mask to a deeper
reality that had its roots in unsavoury things.

The Piazza is full of people who mock themselves in fancy dress :
dress stylized yet again into the bird motif, but not the bright birds
we saw in the works of Carpactio, but now into fat birds, overfed,
avaricious. The costumes of the ladies transform them into stately
drifting pyramids of kce, black cloaks and trailing skirts. They flick
fans before their faces, but their faces are masked, and on their heads
they wear the neat, small cockaded income. The men, in voluminous
black cloaks wrapped high about the neck and white stockings on
their legs, are like crows and magpies. They too wear masks, though
this time with the noses protruding like beaks, and on their heads
large black tricorne hats with sweeping lines, trimmed upon their
edges with flickering white feathers. . . . All identity is hidden
behind the masks : only the voice could have been revealing, or
some special sign between lovers. Indiscretion is made easy, intrigue
fostered by secrecy: privacy is preserved more for the opportunity
of licence than for modesty. ... All is false and obscure, nothing is
clear, all things are opposite. . . . Even Death, the one haunting
truth that nobody could deny, is derided ... for across the centre of
the crowd moves a mock funeral procession. A black coffin is
carried by six pall-bearers, with eight others holding prayer books.
They are dressed as priests in black but with vermilion cockaded
hats upon their heads and black masks upon their faces. In front of
them, standing together, are two figures in grey gowns, white wigs
and tall black hats, but with enormous grotesque heads and identical
masks of huge dwarf faces. Li this world of opposites dwarfs have

become bigger than life-size, hideous Behind the coffin follows

a mob of capering, mourners, dressed as figures from the Cotnmedia
dell 9 Arte. Harlequin, the gay tatterdemalion, full of wit and un-
seemly noises, dances with Brighella, the rogue and assassin. . . .
Near them is a woman with a tall conical hat with a red bow on top
and circular face-mask. . . . The figure of Pulcinello, the sly epicurean,
with his exaggerated stomach, his hump, his row of bells down
back and front of his red-aad-white striped jacket, black beaked

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mask, immensely tall hat, waves a bladder over the crowd, followed
by seven jeering boys. In other parts of the Piazza he appears again,
like a figure of magic in many places at once here he dangles a
vermilion whip and bells ; there he holds a huge sausage on a fork;
elsewhere he pushes a wheelbarrow with the figure of the Doctor
in it the sensualist and the gas-bag together. . . . The Piazza is
crowded and other incidents occur in a mad riot of fun and cari-
cature : behind everyone rise the familiar buildings, the Clock Tower,
the red Standards, the Basilica and the Campanile, just as they are
today. . . .

LET us leave the Piazza, only hinting at the many shows that
continued the whole year round, at festa z&etfesta, as well as at the
official ceremonies and processions of an ecclesiastical and civic
nature, with their displays of jewelled copes and mitres, canopies,
censers, candles, banners, statues and processional ornaments; the
Doge's public appearances in ermine, red and gold, with the mem-
bers of the Councils and other state dignitaries ; the parades of
soldiers with muskets, cockades, fifes, drums and flags; the parades
of sailors and boatmen, and the constant stream of foreign visitors
kings and princes and their retinues. . . . Indoors the events of the
season were equally splendid. . . . There were brilliant spectacles
and performances at the theatres La Fenice, Goldoni, Malibran
and others. One picture here has the tide of View of the Magnificent
Apparatus and Illuminations of the Theatre of San Samuele, entirely
decorated with Mirrors, Bas-Reliefs, and Transparent Scenes of Crystal.
. . . But the central attraction of the season was the Ridotto, die
public gambling house. One picture, called a Saloon of the New
Ridotto, shows the interior of a baroque palace, a hall of marble, with
Corinthian columns, gilded mirrors, balustraded cornice and a fres-
coed ceiling hung with lighted chandeliers. The floor is crowded
by men and women in masked costume as before, but it is apparendy
cold, for the ladies have discarded their fans for muffs and some of
the men too have muffs. Among them stroll a few figures of carnival
Pulcinello is here again but wearing a false face with long, droop-
ing beak, and one or two wenches dressed as peasants. One holds a
distaff of unspun wool, the other a basket with contents covered with
a cloth certainly not eggs in this throng, unless they are eggs of
gold. Two Negro servants await their master in the crowd. Their

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eyes flash in their cocoa faces ; their liveries are moss green with
gold edges ; they have pink jabeaux, vermilion hats with ribbons
hanging down die back and pheasants' feathers sticking up at the
front. Around the room on all sides are tables behind which sit
sober-looking men, without masks, in black clothes, white kce and
full-bottomed wigs, counting out heaps of gold and silver coin in
the candlelight on the presentation of slips. Behind, in a niche,
people retire to sit and take hot drinks served from a silver jug by a
red-coated attendant. On shelves behind him are rows of bottles and
jars, of drinks and sweetmeats, trimmed with flags. At the back of
the rooms are two doors, through which bkck figures are coming
and going in a mysterious darkness. . . . Though animated, the
crowd is orderly : people drift and move about over the dark red
carpet. Everything is under control, but all the players are masked :
there is no music, though there would be the quiet tinkle of coins.
As though money is the only open thing in life, the money-changers
are the only people unmasked. . . .

ANOTHER interior, another game. . . . This time a game of indoor
tennis, The Racquet Game. In a wide hall with large windows a
game is in progress. A net is stretched between two balustrades. The
floor is tiled in neat squares. There are boxes for balls at the sides.
Four players, two on either side, are dressed in white with yellow
caps and they play with small red racquets. The ball is a pretty one,
of blue and red segments. . . . The spectators, who are unmasked,
appear to be ordinary folk, though some are gentlemen. The whole
atmosphere is more normal: the healthy atmosphere of all sporting
rings. ... A boy retrieves a blue and red ball from one of the
window-sills. He has climbed a kdder placed against the sloping
ledge which goes all round the hall above the spectators. Balls
apparently shoot to the sills as much as to the scoring marks on the
end walls. . . . The Racquet Game is distinctly restful. . .

So far we have wandered about the streets, squares and buildings,
but the festivities of Venice took place as much on water as on land.
... In a picture called Ladies' Regatta on the Grand Canal we see the
unusual spectacle of women rowing boats in a race. These hefty
maidens and skilful too, for it is extremely difficult to use the

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Venetian oar in the standing position with, their dresses and hair
blowing in the wind, are starting off from the Dogana, followed by
boatloads of men in barges decorated with plumes and sprays of
leaves. There are crowds of people on the quayside of the Dogana
and Salute, and on the right a mass of highly decorated boats with
baroque carving in silver, gold and red, from which the spectators
cheer the race

Noblemen Fishing in the Canal Orfano shows two boatloads of
noblemen in a circle watching fishermen at work on the Canal
Orfano. Behind are frigates with sails unfurled. ... I suspect that
this is another occasion for a wager.

THEN there are two crowded scenes of the Doge going out in the
Bucintoro for his annual espousal with the Adriatic, a scene of great
splendour and movement, the ekborately gilded barge, flying the
Standards of the Republic, slowly drifting among a moving mass
of gondolas trimmed for the occasion. . . .

One other painting shows the wedding party of a noblewoman
arriving at Santa Maria della Salute. The great domed church its
volutes painted not half big enough rises behind the scene. At the
top of the steps a smart row of clergy and relatives, all soberly
dressed in black and white, awaits the bride. Fanning out on either

side are rows of soldiers in blue, holding decorated spears The

bride, dressed in. white with a long train, steps out of her gondola.
Her father in full-bottomed wig and blue coat takes her on his right
arm, and four great-bosomed ladies in sober black with white lace
caps wait to join the procession up the steps. . . . The canal is full
of gondolas, arriving, perhaps a little late, for the wedding. . . .
Boys are running about the quayside behind the small crowd
which has collected on either side, among whom appear to be a few
disappointed suitors. . . .

HNALLY let us leave these scenes of summer and good weather,
and look at die scene on the northern lagoon on the fifteenth of
January, 1708. The sea is frozen over; there is solid ice between the

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Fondamente Nuove and Murano, and the citizens are taking full
advantage of it. The day is gloomy; a lowering sky, a cold yellow
light everywhere ; snow upon the quayside and upon the roof-tops.
People stand muffled in cloaks with just their faces peeping out. . .
But on the ice there is a lively scene : people are sliding and skating,
their clothes flying in all directions, their arms in the air. This is
Italian skating, with gesticulation gestures of freedom and pleas-
ure, gestures of despair when they have fallen, gestures as suited for
the opera and ballet as for the ice. People are falling on their faces,
on their bottoms ; one woman is being pushed along in a wheeled
sledge; another is using a small boat for the same purpose. Some
are even wearing their masks while they skate. . . . Two monks are
trying themselves out on the ice, and both have come to grief. . . .
To the right is a Venice I have not seen Venice under snow. Grey
and cold it looks, with the bell towers rising above the blanketed
roofs. In the background is what might be the Island of San Francesco
Deserto, and farther, on the mainland, the faint white hills. Venice
fades away in the haze of a winter afternoon

Giambattista Tiepolo

THE central problem of Giambattista Tiepolo is that he was a
serious artist who lived in an age of brilliant trivialities. Essentially
profound, we find him constantly struggling to leave the seductive
emotional life of the lower salons of Venetian palaces to escape into
the quietness of the attics of his own mind. But he is constantly
waylaid upon the stairs by bands of revellers and sentimentalists who
insist on intriguing him with stories of love and feminine beauty,
until, even on those occasions when he manages to free himself,
he finds that his thoughts are influenced by the charms of the life
below him And yet, he remains the greatest painter of eighteenth-
century Venice, a genius among competent artists, and occupies the
unique historical position of being the last of the old masters and the
first of the new. In a kst out-pouring of astonishing vitality and
technical skill, he summed up the ideas and knowledge of the previous
two centuries, and, when working in Spain, he influenced Goya, who
in his turn influenced the French painters of the nineteenth century.
He was the last artist to work in die unbroken tradition of Venetian

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painting, a tradition which, by retaining its individuality to the end,
passed on the conceptions of the Renaissance'to the moclern world.

Still, his work leaves me with a sense of loss for I feel it somehow
fails. He was an artist of first rank, a wonderful draughtsman, as
accomplished a painter if ever there was one, fearless of size and
space, exuberant, fertile, altogether brilliant, and, although it is
absurd to wish an artist born into another age, I feel that had he been
contemporary with Tintoretto there would have been serious rivalry
between the two. Yet no artist can live apart from his age : that was
his greatest misfortune.

In spite of the many passages of unusual beauty in his work, I
find it unpleasant on the whole a curious mixture of flippancy,
sexuality, melodrama and real feeling. His mind hovered between
opposites as best it might at a time when all values had a double
meaning. . . . The Way of the Cross had become over-furnished in
the style of a Roman melodrama, while outside the Church the
theme was more frankly pagan. The new palaces with their furniture
and ornaments, the pictures on the walls, and the ceiling paintings
have a predominantly classical theme ; the old gods disported them-
selves in a polite bacchanal, and all rooms sooner or later led into
bedrooms to the cornucopia, the cherub and the bedlike cloud.
In the weird life of the streets frolicked Pulcinello and his crew
the Venetian Bacchus, tipsy, mocking, satirical little animals of
pleasure broken loose from the drawing-rooms. People hid them-
selves away behind protective masks so curiously vivid a mani-
festation of over-indulgence, so lascivious, purposely ugly. . . . Yet
it was a symbolical face, materialized in the form of painted cloth
to cover human weakness. These masks so like the bleached skulls
of birds with warts and bkck spots upon them were a kind of
declaration of sensuality, under which the real person hid away from
the exhaustion and futility of the age. Behind it was melancholy
and tiredness and vacuity. . . . This was the background against
which Tiepolo worked, these were the themes of his art.

The paintings in Sant' Alvise, The Coronation with Thorns, The
Flagellation and The Road to Calvary, are among his most serious
works. For once the flippant, the haughty and the merely beautiful
are absent. They certainly express pain and suffering, but it is the
slightly melodramatic suffering of an eighteenth-century Christ
arisen from the baroque welter of Venetian life, not quite real, with
an element of self-pity and an enjoyment of tears. Feelings seem

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over-indulged, for their own sakes, existing apart from die tragedy.
. . . The Road to Calvary is a huge painting of unusual melancholy.
There is a great wintry crag on which grow leafless trees Tiepolo's
symbols of despair. In the background is a coldly classical temple
against a snowy range of alps. Christ stumbles under the weight of
the Cross, and above him is the procession of soldiers, men and
horses, with turbans, helmets, trumpets and banners, moving
heavily up to the summit of the crag, where the crosses have already
been prepared for the Thieves. . . .

In his final phase in Madrid, after years of brilliant mural painting,
as though homesick, he made a few nostalgic pictures of imaginary
Venetian street scenes with pagliacci and charlatans moving among
crowds. Then as if he were privately concerned only with idle and
melancholy daydreams, he produced a series of etchings in which he
emptied himself of the whole jumble of the artistic properties of his

age They are all like stabs of pain Pan leering between ragged

figures, a kind of bacchic-shepherd; men burning human heads and
skulls; snakes among the faggots of an altar; dogs scratching; owls
perching everywhere on leafless trees. . . . Meaningless groups of
soldiers, orientals, horses, skeletons, animals ; shields, plinths, trum-
pets, rags, skulls, drums, bones and hour-glasses. . . . Groups of
ragged shepherds and pagliacci among fir trees. . . . Finally, the sad
appearance of a Bimbo in the arms of an old man.

These etchings which preceded Goya's Caprichos so far removed
in spirit from the haughty self-confidence of his grandiose ceiling
decorations, had come to be Tiepolo's private criticism of his own
age. The mask was torn off, and it revealed nothing but a collection
of meaningless images left over from three hundred years of
Renaissance art. ...

Vignettes: Two

APART from Giambattista Tiepolo, who indulged in his own
romanticism in the grand manner, the lesser artists continued in
their own way. . . . They left the bright, sunlit views of the real
Venice and, stage by stage, withdrew into their private dreams.
Moods of sadness led to despair, disgust to nostalgia, dissatisfaction
to hysteria, and then, as the moods dispelled themselves, there was

2 9

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

an escape into imaginary pastorals and the intellectual safety of
archaeology. ... Let us look at pictures again, in the Accademia,
one by one. . . .

HRST, here is the one Canaletto in Venice which can be safely
attributed to him, the painting of the loggia of a palace, a scene
such as might have been found anywhere at the time. It is an un-
romantitized and honest representation of the scene. Reason and
firmness play over everything ; it is a work of normal vision un-
hampered by the imagination. It is a kind of very fine journalism,
a recording of appearances tastefully handled.

But the strident atmosphere, the heat, the smells and the slum-
miness seem eventually to eat away the reasonableness. There is the
stirring of another theme: the picture shimmers, the scene moves
slighdy as though seen through hot water running down glass. In
Francesco Guardi's The Island of San Giorgio there are the identical
lagoons, boats and buildings as in Canaletto, but they are distorted.
The tower of San Giorgio Maggiore is twice its real height; the church
buildings move, lean slighdy inwards ; the dome sinks, is an insigni-
ficant depressed bubble; the houses of the Giudecca merge into an
indistinguishable mass. The sky is torrid as though in a threatening
storm, the lighting is that of a sultry, weird evening, foreboding,
picking out the sparkling shirts of the gondoliers, the limp, hanging
sails, the rags draped over the boats. The figures move lazily, shifting
heavy weights. The heat saps everything, holds everything down. . . .

Where Canaletto's technique was sure and calligraphic, Guardi's
was nervous and loose, as though his brush hovered and stabbed.
"Where Canaletto is safe and pleasant, confirming the common
vision, Guardi painted the uncommon, the flavour of a Venice that
existed only once, at his own time, and was gone. He painted
Venice in rags : in its decay, in its attenuation. . . .

His View of an Island might be anywhere between here and Tor-
cello. . . . Once more there is the gloom that precedes an electric
storm. A church upon an island; people upon die banks spreading
out washing to dry. A distant view of the towers of Venice on the
horizon, obscured in warm haze. Across the foregound a hooded

gondola glides smoothly Who is under the bkck hood? Where

are they going? So tired, so poindess The awful ennui of the

lagoons, dark, threatening, inescapable. . . .

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FROM Guardi the mood changes but continues surely upon its
way: Michele Marieschi painted work as reasonable if not of
quite the same quality as Canaletto, but in the two pictures in this
gallery, Fantastic View with an Obelisk and Fantastic View with a
Bridge, he establishes the process of breaking away from reality and
enters the realm of the imagination. Guardi regards the outer Venice
romantically, while in these paintings Marieschi desires the oblivion

of Venice In the View with an Obelisk there is a scene reminiscent

of the Molo, with a building on the right disturbingly like the ruins
of the Palazzo Ducale. The Gothic arches, hung with the faded,
colourless garlands of a past carnival, sprout weeds ; rickety scaffold-
ing stands at the corner as though in a belated attempt to mend
something beyond repair. A staircase of white marble meanders up
from the Molo to some classical building behind, a memory of
Sansovino. Facing the sea is an empty open-air pulpit, and then,
upon the pavement, the great obelisk, with weeds growing round it.
The figures in this picture are surely Venetians in fancy dress, though
this is not a masque but the fancy dress of a normal day in the
imagination. A gentleman in a vermilion costume which in real
life would be black leads a lady in a blue crinoline down the stair-
case. She is followed by her Negro page in white wig and gold
brocaded coat On the quayside are fantasy Venetians in colour-
ful rags, in turbans with feathers, black cloaks, carrying swords
and wands. The two men in the foreground are feathered like
bantam cocks : what appears to be a crouching beggar turns out to
be a heap of rubbish or abandoned merchandise. . . . From this
scene of melancholy a gondola glides away over a clear blue sea to
a sparkling rustic island in the background, an island of escape where
there are water-wheels, cottages, vineyards, a monastery on a hill

In Marieschi's View with a Bridge we are in a landscape of classical
ruins which seem at first glance to give no hint of the buildings of
Venice. But in a moment we realize that the bridge must be a ruin
of the Rialto, for there are gondolas and barks moving along the
canal The city has disappeared, and the Rialtine Islands are bare
again, like Torcello. There is the desire to escape, but still the haunting
memory of familiar pkces remains, as does the feeling of isolation.

NOW the nightmare takes over, but in the form of a religious
vision if it is religious, for all these things are hinted at, are obscure.

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Sebastiano Ricco has a picture called Nocturnal Apparition which
now dissolves all reality in nonsense. It shows an event of a super-
natural character taking place in an actual room, yet a room fuU of
sleeping figures, so that it must be a dream. They mix with each
other : reality, unreality, apparition and sleep. All sense of time
and all sense of place are lost in this haunting picture ; yet where can
it be but in a Venetian palace? ... In a room with red walls and
floor the colour of blood behind the eyes in a bed with a huge
green velvet baldacchino sleep two old men under tumbled brown
sheets. Two servants in ragged cloaks sleep at the foot of the bed.
The room has heavy gilt furniture, an urn of bronze, wall brackets
and, gazing out of sightless eyes, grey classical busts of heroes. At
the doorway, leaning up against the post, is another servant, asleep
while standing, armed with a sword. But this dream-watcher,
guardian of this overheated chamber, is powerless against the
apparition, for across the room, in a cloud of smoke, flies the figure
of an old man, his beard flowing, his head garlanded, holding in his
hand a wand. . . .

THUS the cycle is complete, from youth to old age, from Gior-
gione to the Settecento Romantics, and yet there is no stopping,
time goes on. ... There must be a reaction even from nightmare,
and here in Venice fun and optimism cannot be banished for very-
long. The gloom of the earlier Romanticism changes, clearing like

a summer storm With Francesco Zuccarelli the sun shines again.

His scenes take place in calm valleys, near smooth rivers, where, on
the mossy banks, goats nibble the heads off flowers, swans glide in
the backwaters among the rushes, and fishermen sit calmly by small
waterfalls in sparkling streams coming down from the foothills,
in that most lovely early evening light. The Alps are in the distance,
far away, a delicate blue ; in the middle distance is a Lombardy town,
its towers and turrets catching the evening sun. The trees are oaks
and poplars and umbrella pines cool greens and ambers feathered
against the pink and azure. . . .

His pastoral scenes are very choice works of their kind, not over-
stated though sweet. All slums are banished, as are all harshness and
ugliness, all the artificiality of towns. And yet these paintings are

themselves artificial His treatment of classical subjects is delicately

absurd. . . . Here is a bacchanal, but not the gutteral Roman bac-

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chanal, ratter a scene politely naughty, intended to please the ladies
in the drawing-room. . . . The setting is pastoral early evening
again, with frolics outside the cowshed at sundown. An obese
Bacchus sprawls naked upon a white sheet propped against an
empty wine jar. He is trimmed with vines, and a tendril gently
trails across his paunch. Around him maidens with tambourine and
thyrsus frolic with vine-decorated fauns. On the grass in front of
them three maidens with girt-up draperies are weaving in and out
the arms of two sunburnt fauns. In the distance one maiden chases
another into a circular temple in a bosky. ... It is all rather gay and
ineffectual.

In another painting called Bull Baiting we see the delights of the
sport in a romantic setting. On a kte afternoon the people have come
down to the meadows by the river. Two white bulls are tethered
by the horns and held by young people. Youths and maidens set
their hounds upon the bulls, and naked children run around them.
One child is on all fours pretending to be a bull. . . . Grown-ups
stand grouped in the shade of the trees, or lounge on vermilion

draperies Once more the tambourines, the girded skirts, the hint

of afternoon in a latter-day Arcady, with Italian towns in the back-
ground, and beyond, the Alps.

THE paintings of Giuseppe Zais, though romantic, return us to the
scenes of classical ruins as they must have appeared before the
excavations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And yet
they are imaginary. They conjure up the flavour of old Rome,
they might be scenes on the Tiber, or of the Baths of Caracalk
one painting here is almost an amalgamation of the Arch of Titus
and the columns and plinths of the Roman Forum with the House
of Caligula above. They seem to do for Rome what Marieschi
prophesied for Venice, though the latter has not yet come to pass.

LASTLY, there is a group of painters who represent another phase
of the movement, Visentini, Jolli, Moretti, Gaspari, BattagliolL . . .
They painted architectural fantasies pure tours-de-force in perspec-
tive and stage-lighting, based on a dry academic study of classical
architecture. Their paintings are dull, though correct, and must

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have had a high place in the cold hearts of the dilettanti. Once more
they dreamed of Venice, but of the obliteration of the Gothic and
Early Renaissance and the substitution of pseudo-Classical buildings.
In a picture by Moretti, Sansovino's Library is retained, but he
builds a horrid Roman bath where the Palazzo Ducale stands.
All this work is rather futile : it is an exercise in a learning which
had no creative outlet, though in their detached way it represents
the cooler flights of eighteenth-century fancy. The nineteenth cen-
tury feels not very far away, and the latter-day host of antique
dealers and fakers. . . .

Interiors

THE foregoing moods of Romanticism, which represent the dis-
solution, decline and recovery of eighteenth-century artistic thought,
had no historical sequence, except in the broadest sense, but were
part of the general turmoil of the disintegration of the artistic ideas
that started at the Renaissance. They occurred simultaneously, like
eddies in a swollen stream. The lives of the artists overlapped, they
worked together and influenced each other, gradually working out
the artistic progress of the century. Behind them, but still of diem,
was the genius of the Tiepolo family, who seemed the only major
artists to be trusted to carry on the great traditions and to hand on the
most important ideas to posterity. "With the development of tourism
and the shift in patronage, artists broke loose from Venice and spread
their influences far and wide throughout Europe. Canaletto, Ricci,
Pellegrini, Zucarelli all worked in England ; Rosalba went upon her
triumphant tour; the Tiepolo father and son did important work in
Wurzburg and other places, and Giambattista died in Madrid. . . .
But at home, side by side with all this, went the small domestic art
of the Longfri, the work of the theatrical designers and mural decor-
ators, and the host of artists working in the furnishing and orna-
mental crafts the cabinet-makers, the carvers, textile and tapestry
workers, the potters, metal workers, jewellers and craftsmen in

glass It was a lively age, and in these minor crafts the output was

enormous and might be considered the last major effort before the
onset of the Early Machine Age. . . .

The paintings of Pietro and Alessandro Longhi are works of great

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SETTECENTO

social interest (though in my opinion not comparable with those of
Hogarth, as has sometimes been asserted) in which are to be found
the echoes of gossip, tittle-tattle and domestic small talk. Never
do they concern themselves with any issues greater than everyday
trifles, with dressmaking and toilet scenes, chamber concerts, dancing
lessons and suchlike, in which there is no note of tragedy where all

is elegance, prettiness and domestic bliss And yet by portraying

these very scenes they are a criticism of the age. Satire often wears a
charming mask. . . . But it is in the minor arts that the eighteenth
century hurries to a close, in which are to be found the last pleasant

sighs of the Venetian spirit To the last they remained engaging

seaside arts.

THE Ballroom of the Palazzo Rezzonico is a fine example of
architectural illusionist painting, an art whose total eclipse must be
regretted if only for the loss of astonishment it affords. Today our
rooms have contracted with our notions of what a home should be,
but in those days there were no doubts that life should be spent
at an endless series of receptions, parties and balls. ... As though
the great salons were not large enough to contain the throng, they
were enlarged by the skilful use of optical illusions : architecture
expanded to match the blown-out personalities, and eventually the
gusts of gossip blew away among the clouds on the painted ceilings,
in a blaze of Olympian sunshine. . . . All the furnishings became stage
properties, and each noble house arranged a series of theatrical sets
for itself against which the family drama could be played. For the
sake of convenience they were arranged side by side: from the
wings of one set they entered the next until, having walked all
round the quadrangle, the pky started again and continued, with only

slight variations, for years Our only grumble today is that they

all strove for parts in the same pky, and consequently one pakce
is very much like another. Individuality was reduced to a minimum
perhaps for fear of offending visitors, who, being both audience and
actors at the same time, would have been disconcerted to find that
they had arrived in a strange setting to act a pky the words of which
they did not know. Conformity in furnishing had the virtue of
putting everybody instantly at their ease. . . .

The Palazzo Rezzonico is no exception to the rule, and though a
splendid pkce, with decorations in the grand manner, it offers none

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of those quiet little surprises to be found in English country houses.
We can thus pass quickly through the series of salons which have
ceilings by Giambattista Tiepolo, of great cleverness and unpleasant-
ness, and ascend into the upper rooms to see the paintings of
Giandomenico, his son, which are among the most interesting
in Venice. They are the series of frescoes transferred from his villa
at Zianigo, and they bring this huge dead palace to life again and
revive the pleasant afterglow of the Venetian holiday. They are full
of the airs of villa life, figures quietly strolling or dancing among the
umbrella pines, the pleasing idiocies of pagliacci who are doing
acrobatics in the trees or resting, exhausted with pleasure, upon
green banks, among empty wine jugs and food baskets, their shuttle-
cocks and battledores beside them. Or else they hint at the Carnival,
with tumblers performing in the streets, or, as in that superb painting
"The New World" we join the back of a crowd of eighteenth-
century Venetians and with them for ever guess at the mysteries of
the charlatans. . . .

THEN it is, in these upper rooms, among the embroidered waist-
coats, die lace cuffs, the tricornes, the white masks, black lace shawls
and fans, that shadowy figures come to life. . . . Among the rows of
puppets, standing asleep with their eyes open, we are reminded of
the bright scenes of Carnival, the fantastic humour of Harlequin,

Columbine, Isabelle and Scaramouche, Pulcinello and Pantaloon

Here is a picture of Harlequin the artist painting the portrait of a
beautiful kdy. But he dips his brush into ajar of wine and the por-
trait is a bearded kdy. There is Harlequin dressed as a woman, in
bonnet and dress with a rose upon his bosom. He is busy with
bobbin-lace upon a cushion, while beside him stands Columbine
holding her mask. . . . And then, on the way out, we are startled
by the figure of a man, one foot high, on the centre of a mantel-
piece. He has a red coat, white waistcoat, bkck breeches and tricorne.
Standing in a breeze from an open window, his head nods gently,
his mouth opens and shuts, his eyes roll

216

PART THREE

Torcello

HOW easy it is to make a resolution to slip away from Venice,
but how difficult to carry out the plan. For a long time I have
been meaning to go to Torcello, and now, on the very day that I
had planned to go, there is a sirocco which keeps me spellbound in
the dark alleys, moving fitfully in the shade like a cat. (I had almost
said glued to Venice, for on these days one sticks to everything,
almost literally, so humid is the air, so heavy does one become in
body and mind.) But it is not very far from the vortex of heat
around St. Mark's to the boat-station on the Fondamente Nuove
if one sidles easily in the shade of the labyrinth between the Campo
Santa Maria Formosa and the Campo San Zanipolo. Even the
statue of Colleone seems to be glistening on his horse today. On the
canal of the Rio dei Mendicanti a gondola ambulance is leaving
the hospital, painted grey and white with a blue cross on the sides,
with a smart team of men working the blue-and-white oars. I can-
not tell whether the slight smell of disinfectant makes the air more
pleasant or more sickly. On the northern quayside there is some
shade, but it is a kind of hot vacuum, where nothing stirs, and
beyond, the water of the lagoon looks like oil, slow-moving and
yellow. Near the boat-station are the workshops of the monu-
mental masons, where the men are chipping their white marble in

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spite of the heat. The white angels in the dark interior look like snow
maidens, and the slabs of dead white marhle like ice. Groups of
loafers hang round the cafes near the landing-stage, doing little
except wait for the evening, when gossip will be easier and the
air cooler.

The boat to Torcello pushes its way through the oily sea and
Venice sways away southwards, the quayside a shadowy blur,
relieved only by the white statues wriggling on the high cornices
of the Jesuit church close by, and the innumerable bell towers to
east and west that even yet I have not learned to identify. To the
left, on the northernmost rip of Venice, is the Casa degli Spiriti,
lonely now but once a gambling haunt, and where, as at an inn, the
corpses spent their last night before they were taken across the water
to the cemetery. I have never yet made my way towards Murano
or Torcello without passing a funeral on the water, and the morn-
ings seem to be the popular times. On the right, halfway to Murano,
is the Isola di San Michele, the island given over to the dead. This
necropolis is walled all round, completely enclosed to keep the sight
of those white marble tombstones from the gaze of passers-by a
forbidding, efficient-looking island. Our boat slows down as it
passes the large black water hearse. There are golden scrolls on the
prow and stern, and on the prow a huge golden globe with out-
spread wings. The coffin lies under a bonfire of gladioli, flaming
vermilion against the yellow-green sea, and four old gondoliers
dressed entirely in black slowly bring the body to the gateway of
the cemetery. They are met by a scamper of waiting relatives and a
skirted priest. There is quite a holiday atmosphere about the funerals
of SanMicheleinspiteof the obvious sadness of the event, I can think
of no better kind of funeral than to be rowed slowly over the lagoon
under a heap of gladioli to rest on an island in the loneliness north
of Venice.

Murano is quickly reached and we are greeted by the group of
boys who are always swarming around the rocks near the light-
house, in and out of the water all day long. What an odd lighthouse
this is, built of drums of white marble Kke a child's tower out of
cotton reels. A few glimpses up the canals of Murano and we glide
past the backs of the glass factories, most of which seem to be
windowless, and then out into the open along the sea lane marked
by posts between the shallows of the dead lagoons. On either side
are flat little islands, a few inches above water level, yellow and

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TORCELLO

scorched in the sun, looking for all the world like coconut mats
floating on the surface. To the north is a quiet wilderness of water,
with hundreds of posts sticking up, taking the cables and the tele-
phone wires to the mainland and marking out the boat channels.
Behind us are the towers of Venice, to the right the cypresses of the
Isola del Deserto, and ahead the leaning tower of Burano, while
beyond, low on the horizon and scarcely visible, is the solitary
tower of Torcello. There are a few orange sails dotted about the
lagoons, and we pass groups of fishermen dragging their nets;
all looks deserted and absolutely still except for one or two butter-
flies making their way towards the islands. We reach Burano and
pass up the narrow channel between the low-lying gardens, the
verges overhung with- broom and tamarisk, and thence to
Torcello.

By the time the boat reaches Torcello I am the only one to get out,
and I make my way along the towpath that might be, and indeed is,
a country lane, for on either side are orchards, vineyards, maize and
sunflowers. Then over the small bridge and I am on the village

green Rose-pink Torcello ! At last the smell of hay and flowers,

and the sight of green grass after weeks of stewing in Venice!
I had almost forgotten the flavour of the country the sight of
grapes ripening, vegetables growing, poppies and convolvulus in
the hedges. The artichokes had been long gathered in, though one
or two purple heads were left, bearded, mixed up with the silver
knobs of onion flowers on their long, fat stalks. The roses too were
over, but here they are left to drop, hanging like garlands after a
festival. Now is the time in these wild gardens for tiger lilies, huge
globe peonies, dahlias and marguerites growing in the pear and
apple orchards and among the vines.

I have just mentioned the village green, but it is a village green
without a village. Torcello could not even be described as a hamlet,
for there are only four or five buildings left besides the Basilica of
Santa Maria Assunta and the church of San Fosca. For the rest,
apart from an occasional isolated fisherman's cottage, the island is
deserted. The churches are the only visible remains of a once-
flourishing city that existed before Venice was built. A few stones
there are, and well-heads and remains of carvings, but it is an
island that is overgrown with greenery, a quiet garden set in the
lagoons.

Now the boat from Venice always seems to bring visitors to

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Torcello in time for lunch, and for this purpose a restaurant, spacious
and clean, has been prepared, where it is possible to eat as well as
anywhere in Venice. The "Locanda," as it is called, is not as innocent
as it looks, nor as simple, for this restaurant, being the only one on
the island, has been the haunt of visiting kings, princes aad prin-
cesses, film stars, famous authors, and famous artists. Of this we
are made aware quite early on, if we have not already heard of it
before, or glanced at those photographs of mysterious visitors in
dark 'glasses in the glossy magazines of Venice. It is an excellent
restaurant, with tables under a vine pergola, in and out of which
the swallows dart. Though I was the first arrival, an array of inter-
national visitors appeared in no time. Not many, but enough to
know that Torcello does not remain deserted at mealtimes and
enough to observe the behaviour of different nationalities at table.
What do they eat? The Italians, it seems, are particular about
food, as indeed they should be. But this couple are almost what
one might describe as fussy and they behave like soda syphons.
They choose, eventually, fish. There are two Austrians next to
me, crisp-looking, with that odd fixed grin through which they
talk a sign of perpetual pleasure. They choose steak. Behind me
are an English couple, who appear suspicious. They mumble and
choose veal. But by far the most interesting on this occasion are a
group of Spaniards, a group of old ladies straight out of a Goya
painting, with gorgeous jewellery and red claws. Among them is an
extremely beautiful nurse of Moorish lineage, and a completely un-
inhibited youth in a silk suit who talks incessantly at the top of his
voice while the old ladies gaze and nod and shake their bangles.
The ladies eat with the fastidiousness of large cats, the Moorish
girl eats everything with zest, while the youth balances morsels on
a fork, because he has no time to eat between sentences, and adjusts
his hair. The Spaniards choose veal and so much else besides that

they almost have a banquet Later, upon the village green I met

a German student, an architect, whom I found had not enough
money to eat at all. He came from the ruins of Berlin to visit Italy
for the first time in his young life. "What sort of life had he led up to
now? He decided to go for a swim behind the Basilica, a proceeding
which I would have thought would only have increased his hunger.
Better by far to have gone into an orchard and helped himself to
fruit. We met later in the cathedral; he being a German, I knew I
could dispense with my guide-book. But I felt sorry for him, and

222

San Fosca, Torcello

admired the way the young Germans are making their way
Italy this year, most of them as poor as church mice.

into

SANTA MAKEA ASSUNTA and San Fosca form a brave group of build-
ings, and in their present position, surrounded by old trees and
orchards, and flanking the lawn, they look impressively lonely.
San Fosca is built in the Byzantine style and brings the flavour of the
Bosphorus on to this remote island at the head of the lagoons. It is
one of those fascinating exercises of interlocking cubes and octagons
and drums, and originally it was intended to be finished off with a
dome, but like so much else here it was never completed. The
arcades of stilted arches have, however, slim and elegant columns
of Greek marble with capitals in the Venetian-Byzantine style
the only ornaments on a shell that might have presented a surface
as richly encrusted as St. Mark's had not the main stream of history
flowed on to Venice.

The Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta close by is as impressive as

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a huge barn, stark and strong, with a ninth-century campanile of
extreme simplicity, built of rose-pink brick, weathered and powder-
ing. The entry into this basilica must be the opposite to the entry into
that apotheosis of churches St. Peter's in Rome. Entering the latter,
one is immediately thrown into a swoon at the sight of so much
richness, but here one is overcome by an extraordinary sense of
quietness and dignity. It is one of the most satisfactory interiors I
know. Whether this is due to the fact that the church was never
finished, and thus is not encrusted with marbles, or whether it is
an echo in my mind of the simplicity of our northern cathedrals, I
cannot tell. It may well be that it is because it is such a relief to enter
a church where one doesn't immediately have to start sorting things
out. The majority of Italian churches, especially those in cities like
Venice, are so full of the fervour of centuries and the over-enthusiasm
of devotees that they are the most tiring buildings in the world.

One has to work hard in Italian churches But here the simplicity

does all that the elaboration of otters can never do.

The light in this church on a sunny day it would be equally
dark in the winter time is soft and bright, reflected from the
powdery colours of old bricks and plaster. It glows with a kind of
whiteness lit by windows from the south, east and west. The cold
light of the north does not enter. A curious feature of the windows
is that they have huge stone shutters hung upon stone hinges, to be
closed against the winter gales. The walls of the huge nave are plain
brick, completely unadorned, supported on Corinthian columns of
wlite and grey Greek marble. The pavement is of a geometric design
of inlaid marbles, similar to those of San Donato at Murano and
St. Mark's, Venice, but simpler. There is a rood screen of the
fifteenth century with the remains of pictures of the Virgin and
Apostles, and underneath, panels of marble and alabaster intricately
carved with peacocks and lions. The double pulpits are of great ele-
gance, completely made of skbs and drums and knobs of marble, and
the high altar is a mere table of marble. It is as though the builders
of Torcello were taking away their stones to Venice before they had
time to finish their cathedral. It is a church abandoned, and all the
better for it. The city had gone before the plans were carried out,
and most of the marbles and the porphyry, the inlays and incrustations
of mosaic were reserved for St. Mark's. Behind the high altar rise
the tiers of the tribune with a centre flight of steps to the bishop's
throne, reminding one irresistibly of the Roman origins of die

224

TORCELLO

basilican church, and in a chamber under the apse is a baptistry,
sunken it might be, below sea level, like a cave. A huge stone chair
hewn out of a boulder, enthusiastically called "Attila's Throne," and
said to have been brought from the mainland by the early settlers, is
kept in this church. Around the walls of the aisles are four carved
and gilded altars of later centuries, one of which has a painting of the
School of Tintoretto. These altars by no means spoil the effect of the
early church, but four altars to represent five hundred years show
how much Torcello was abandoned. The most valuable possessions
of Santa Maria Assunta are the mosaics of the apses and the great
west wall. But first let us visit the shrine of St. Heliodorus who lies
under the high altar. St. Heliodorus, one-time bishop here, lies
under a perforated marble grill, and we are shown his mummy by a
cheerful ten-year-old boy who is supplied with tapers and matches
for the purpose. Heliodorus is a shrivelled little man, wrapped in a
cocoon of grave clothes, his old brown skull somehow turned the
wrong way round, as though he were sleeping on his face. For some
odd reason his glass-topped coffin is supported on leather thongs
which enable the ten-year-old to swing him to and fro and from side
to side. This is the cheerful spirit in which the corpse of Heliodorus
is shown to visitors. . . .

The mosaics of the right apsidal chapel were being restored and
I could not see them for scaffolding. But soon I fell into conversation
with the artist who was restoring them (with the aid of a large
fiasco of wine and a basket of fruit). He invited me on to the top
platform of his wooden scaffolding, which perilously swayed and
creaked and was full of death-traps, in order to see more clearly what
he was doing. How wonderful it was to be right up against the
mosaics at the top of an apse, to be able to touch their rough, shining
surfaces and to put one's hand into the boxes of new stones and let
them run through one's fingers! Below, through the cracks and
crannies of the planks, was the pavement of the cathedral, along which
were moving the occasional visitors, led by the boy with the lighted
taper to see the mummy of St. Heliodorus. Up here all was quiet
and workmanlike, a little studio in an eyrie, with the great-eyed
figures of saints and angels peering straight into one's face. But all
was not well with the mosaics, for gently feeling them all over we
found many patches which were quite loose. Another year or two
and they would have fallen down, and their drawing would have
been lost. The method of restoration is very simple in principle,

II! 22 5

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

though different from that used in St. Mark's which I have described
elsewhere in this book. A thick coat of gesso plaster is put over the
loose areas, and then when it is dry they are cut out. The pieces are
lifted away from the curved vault intact and the backs of the stones
are picked clean of old plaster. The areas of decayed plaster, which
is in a powdered condition, are completely cleaned away, and new
cement is laid. Into this the mosaics are placed, and when set the
temporary skin of gesso is removed and washed away. It seems that
some of the old plaster was of a quite inferior quality, sometimes
made only of chalk, so the old mosaicists didn't always use the most
permanent of materials after all. Our new grey cements seem hard
enough, and once put back into pkce the mosaics should stay in
position for many centuries to come. Only in very small areas are
the stones picked out and relaid by the restorer himself, and though
there is a danger here of losing the original drawing if it were over-
done, the major part of the restoration is merely a matter of removing
the loose areas intact and putting them back again into sound plaster.
After the mosaics my restorer friend, by now enthusiastic, wanted
to show me the secrets of the pavement, and so we climbed down
into the body of the church. The present pavement, he told me, was
not very old, that is to say, it was laid down about A.D. 1200 modern
as these things go in Italy but underneath he says there exists an-
other, much finer, a figured one in black and white mosaic. So out
came the inevitable box of matches and we poked down holes, and
after scratching for some time in the wet soil, sure enough we came
across the other pavement. But it would be too costly to remove
the present one ; and how do we know that if it were removed we
would find a complete design underneath? The present pavement is
fine enough : let us leave it alone.

The great mosaic of the Last Judgment on the west wall is the
work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and is the only com-
pleted portion of what must have been a scheme to cover the whole
of the interior. We are left to guess what the rest might have been
like. It rises like a glittering cliff of precious stones and gold in an
empty cave. The incidents of the story are laid in with all the vivid,
uncompromising drawing of the period. There is no sentimentality
here, no softening of the blows. Hell is horrid. Paradise is splendid.
Christ is the Universal Master, and the great Archangels are the
guardians of the world. Belief is absolute and crystallized, dogma
reigns supreme. In our scientific century, when we have come to

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TORCELLO

know so much of the terrifying complications of the universe that
men are more bewildered than ever, all this delightful symbolism
seems somewhat oversimplified. But the realities of suffering and the
torments of Hell were ever more vivid than the bliss of Paradise,
so in that respect we have made no forward strides. The scenes of
Hell in this mosaic are full of incident, Paradise overwhelmingly
respectable. A grey and white devil, assisted by fiends and two angels
of fire, are thrusting kings, princes, rich and poor sinners into the
flames. People are sitting naked in flames, unaided by their earthly
power or position, all vaguely suffering, with the expressionless,
timeless faces of Byzantine art. Four naked figures, which must be
ladies, are standing in a stinking pit, holding their noses. A group of
people are immersed in ice-cold water in total darkness. Underneath
them are massed skulls with worms coming out of their sockets, and
finally two panels of assorted heads and skulls, hands, feet and ribs.
This last panel is about the kst word in pessimism. From the
gloom of this side of the mosaic let us go on to the more pleasant
imaginings. On the left are some of those magic creatures, the most
guileless of all the creations of Christian art cherubim and seraphim,
with piquant faces framed in haloes, peeping out of three pairs of
wings, their naked feet held primly together. Above the various
scenes of judgment, in which splendidly drawn angels are trumpeting
and rushing, as it were, from one side of the church to the other, is
a scene of Paradise. Christ is seated in an egg-shaped nimbus of
glory surrounded by saints and apostles and a vast crowd of the
blessed. Like all scenes of Paradise, it is healthy and aseptic, some-
what boring and full of old people. Worms and demons are ban-
ished, and all is bland and placid and gloriously calm. But the most
vivid panel of all is at the top of the mosaic, showing Christ triumph-
ant over evil, with two archangels holding symbols of the world
over which Christianity is supreme. Speaking purely from an
artistic standpoint, the figures of the two archangels are the best in
the whole mosaic. Each is about fifteen feet high, clad in dalmatic
of jewels and pearls, in white, blue, gold and red figures of monu-
mental richness and splendour. The whole mosaic, over the entire
wall, is in coloured marbles and glass on a gold ground.

* * *

i WAS so enthusiastic about Santa Maria Assunta that almost every-
thing seemed delightful, even the heavy chair of Attila such a

227

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

great bull-throne this, a tribal chair as well as the carved and gilded
altars, and the baroque processional crosses leaning in corners.
There is even an old hat hanging from one of the tie beams, left
no doubt as an offering for prayers fulfilled long ago. The Basilica
in our time shows signs of restoration and cleaning up, but here for a
thousand years it has stood, unfinished and almost abandoned. The
stones of the city have disappeared, there are no remains of the once
splendid palaces of Torcello : all has been transported to Venice
except the Basilica itself, and up to our own age it was hardly visited
except occasionally by the more intrepid traveller.

NAPOLEON'S name crops up all over the place in this part of the
world. He is mentioned in connection with the restoration of Santa
Maria Assunta, but I do not know how far his interest went. He was
a great traveller and took an abundant interest in historic places,
mostly for his own glorification, as conquerors do. (Did he not tear
down the far end of the Piazza San Marco and erect that hard-look-
ing building that bears his name? Did he not also steal the Horses
from the front of St. Mark's to grace his own triumphal arch in
front of the Louvre?) After all, it is the privilege of conquerors to
leave their mark upon the scenes of their most glorious victories.
Even today people carve their names upon the old stones in token
of their visits, to show that they have conquered by merely coming
here and suffering the hardships of the journey. Napoleon took a
sightseer's interest in his empire that might have been disastrous for
art had he not fallen before he had had time to really get to work
on "improving" Italy. Paris is city enough for one nation. Let us
hope tint all dictators are short-lived upon the Continent. What
would he have done to London if he had ever got there? He would
have had a fine time, no doubt, driving avenues and putting up
triumphal archways and providing us with Napoleonicas. He
might even have been strong enough to clear away the huddle of
buildings around Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's so that we could
see them better. London might have been more beautiful but cer-
tainly less English. As it is, in the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall,
our best public building, which we use as a military lumber-room,
we have the next best thing to a Napoleonica we have the skeleton
of Napoleon's horse, which the English understand far better.

* * *

228

Garden at Torcello

SITTING here in the late afternoon I cannot help thinking how nice
it is to get away from Venice after wandering for so long about the
alleys and hopping over the stagnant canals. Live in Venice any
length of time and you get used to the smells, but come here to
Torcello among the flowers and hay and you realize what you've
missed. Not that I personally could stand this place for very long,
unless I had some purpose, such as writing a book. Torcello has
been used for that before now. But a group of six buildings and one
of the most perfect basilicas in the world on a flat island growing
nothing but plants cannot compensate for the man-made pleasures
of that exotic old jewel-box over the water. Torcello is, however,
a quiet and secluded spot, as much at the end of the world as any-
where could be, in which to contemplate and collect yourself.
When Venice gets too much for you, glide over the water and live
on this island for a few days. But choose your times carefully, for
mobs of international sightseers, well-meaning hounds of hell, will
follow you. In the early part of the day, or round about early even-
ing, you can have the place practically to yourself. In the evenings
all things turn red and gold, and that little cathedral and church
over there look as though they are made of onyx and amber, and
the birdsong becomes louder than the broken accents of visitors and

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

guides. There is nothing save die sun, the breeze, the endless sky,
die shimmering lagoons, cicadas in the orchards, ducks busy in the
rushes and lizards darting among the stones. A few children play in
innocence on the green lawns, unaware that this was once the forum
of a busy city, where were seen the jewelled dalmatic, the mitre,
the curtained palanquin, and where the conquerors from East and
West milled around in front of the Basilica, even before the first
stones were laid on die Rialto. At the present day everything is
spodessly clean, windswept, sweet-smelling, vast and low-lying.
Come here to make an escape from Venice, from claustrophobia,
from enervating luxury, from enervating poverty, from art, from
architecture, from crowds.

BUT I am never satisfied. In an hour from now my boat will take
me back to Venice. Akeady the sea and the sky are saffron and
purple. . . .

I wiH throw my shutters open, and that coral palace with gilded
tips will be in front of me again, the great tower with its bells, the
thousands of pigeons, the noise, the fine sight of people.

230

Murano: Venetian Glass

\\T 7"HAT a miracle of survival it is that examples of this most
VV characteristic and most brittle of all the arts of Venice should
have come down to us in the twentieth century ! We feel that we must
walk warily on tiptoe through the museum, and not bump into any-
thing; that, big and clumsy as we are, we must scarcely look upon
this glittering array of exotic glass lest we shatter it. For it is as though
the sunlit spume of the sea has splashed and crystallized, as though the
craftsmen had taken handfuls of sea water from the lagoons and
modelled them into fantastic shapes. At first we do not think of the
fire in which the glass was melted, but of water only, for it looks as
if the sea had been playful, as if eddies had stood still, holding for
ever the little monsters and fishes in clear crystal, as, in that other age,
flies and insects were preserved in amber. For here are all the colours
of the sea, in all its moods, and the colours of the water of the canals
of Venice and Murano the pale blue of the sea in the mornings,
the green of the afternoons, the dark green of the canals in the
shade or of deep pools, and the pure, pale glitter of water from the
fountains dripping through the fingers in the sun.

The early glass of Murano 1ir>1cs up the craft of these islands with
the Romans, and it is like taking a walk upon some forgotten beach,
where nobody has trodden for centuries, to see these little lustre
pebbles in rows. How like old shells they are, shining with the
colours of dark pearls remnants of boxes, small vases, fragments
of dishes, a variety of lids. As though they were bits of gkss washed
up upon the beaches from towns that have disappeared under the
waves long ago. Farther back still, if we care to go, are examples of
Greek glass, and rows of beads from Egypt, hinting at the move-
ment of the craft from its remote beginnings in Africa, whence it
came to rest on Murano, and flowered for centuries on these safe
islands away from the marauders of the mainland. The fragments
from the Roman period of Murano are small the large pieces
have long ago been broken up but here wecanseethebe^nnings of
the twists and turns, a slight decoration on a lid, the spiral on a

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THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

handle, die slight undulation on the lip of a drinking-glass. They
are echoes only from the past, but they were prophetic.

The art of glass is a small art. Chandeliers and mirrors were per-
haps the biggest objects made. But it is at its best in the intimate
objects, at its best when concerned with enjoyment. For most of the
glass has to do with the table, with drinking and eating glasses to
hold wine, dishes for fruit, bowls for water. Bottles of all shapes and
sizes, flasks for wine, for oil, bottles for perfumes, small pots for
cosmetics. It is essentially an art of luxury, and as luxury in Venice
meant the exotic, the glass of Murano became the most witty, the
most ephemeral and the most fantastic of all her arts. In Venetian
glass is caught the full flavour of her sophistication, for glass, more
than any other medium, seems to express the character of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries in Venice the unique aesthetic born of her
isolated position in the sea. It is an art born of an intimate knowledge
of the sea, an art of fishermen, of spikes and points and knobs, of
ropes, offish-bones. The glass is strangely phosphorescent, it shines
and glitters with the colours of fish scales, it has all the extreme
delicacy of fishes, all the unusual qualities of seaweeds and sea
flowers. There are the whorls of shells, the spikiness of crabs, the
little cruelties of claws, the array of fins. There is the recurring motif
of the fish's mouth on spouts and openings, the waving tentacles
on handles. Nothing is straight or stiff, everything moves. All the
ellipses of drinking vessels undulate, the lips of cups and wine glasses
are waved and sometimes spiked, as though made of water or as
though floating in water. Glass is splashed about for decoration like
sea spray, it is flecked like foam. Dishes are eddies of glass, small
whirlpools, where strands of white, blue and red whirl around from
the centre. Drinking-glasses become miniature waterspouts, rushing
upwards, as though blown and expanded by the wind, encrusted
with fish motifs which have been sucked upwards and somehow
left there in mid-air. All these little horses, pigs, mice are really
underwater monsters, harmless creatures, grotesque, amusing and
witty, used as bottles on the table for oil and vinegar. The jugs
bristle with spikes like shellfish, they have handles like the suckers
of the octopus, spouts like the waving mouths of eels and sea snakes,
lips like fishes, helplessly open. Nothing is what it seems, for all is
transformed by the imagination and wrought in glass. The mon-
sters are transparent. They shine in the air and glitter in the sun,
but if they were immersed in water they would disappear and

234

MURANO: VENETIAN GLASS

become part of it immediately. The glass of this period, though it
never forgot its basis of Roman shapes, is surprisingly free from
the main interests of Renaissance art. Whereas architecture was
pursuing its course of revivalism, the craftsmen of Murano seemed
to create their own shapes. Admittedly they took the basis of the
urn, the amphora, the classic cup as their first idea, and then seemed
to transform them, as I have said, into something unique and strange.
I suspect that the craftsmen of Murano at this time were always
workmen, for their art always seems to possess a vernacular quality.
It is always spontaneous, free from archaeology, does not rely too
much on prototypes from antiquity.

This was not always so, however, for occasionally they came under
the influences of other crafts and other ideas. In glass reliquaries of
the sixteenth century they echo the rigidities of metal prototypes.
In these glass chambers, made to hold the fragments of saints, the
shapes are rigid and upstanding, fine in themselves, though sober
and dull compared with the mad sea-riot of the tableware. Only on
the little crosses of the lids do they become lively and echo the golden
knobblies on the domes of St. Mark's. At this time too, and in fact
into the seventeenth century, there is a great deal of diamond point
work, where the ornaments of other crafts notably of engraving
are applied to simple dishes, bowls and goblets. On the whole it is
mercifully quite crude, simply a drawing on glass with a diamond
point, a drawing that any one of us might do to idle away an hour.
At first, simple foliations, or a spray of flowers, perhaps with birds
perching among the leaves, all roughly scratched in line with the
solid areas scribbled in. Only kter did this lead to the sophisticated
wheel engraving which had so many abuses and so many mis-
applications at later periods.

The extreme playfulness, the youthfulness of the fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century glass gave way by the eighteenth century to more
sober shapes. The utilitarian aspect seemed to be in the ascendant,
though not for long, as I will show in a moment. They seemed to
develop a large proportion of plain and sensible shapes, sturdy and
strong wine-glasses, pktes, dishes, candlesticks and so forth, as
well as glassware for the apothecary. We might assume that the
majority of the glass at this period was as sensible as in our own day,
for the craft had become skilful almost to a mechanical degree. But
the craftsmen had by no means forgotten their exotic traditions;
and being Venetians they had not lost their sense of humour. So

235

MURANO! VENETIAN GLASS

before long they committed delightful aesthetic audacities, released
themselves from the bondage of utility and classicism, and out of a
general background of good taste they adopted the playful antics
for which their forefathers had been famous. Cruets became nests
of dolphins, sea-horses cavorted on lids or round the bases of candle-
sticks. On the walls were hung glass pistols and fowling-pieces,
gkss trumpets a yard long, glass walking-sticks like sugar-candy,
and on the sideboards were wine barrels made of glass. Further to
add to their jollity they created a range of ships in bottles, and, to
make it more Venetian, bird cages and birds in bottles, and spinning-
wheels in bottles. They created huge compotiers of glass fruits
lemons, tomatoes, oranges, pears, cherries and other fruits of a
dreamy, other-worldly nature that never grew on any tree, except in
the orchard of a Venetian designer's mind, all so succulent, so like
sweets, with crystallized leaves. The idea of sugar and glass takes
over from water and glass. The glass now tempts us to pluck it and
to taste it. As well as compotiers of fruits, they made others to
hold the severed heads of flowers, breeding a very unusual range
of dahlias and carnations, and clusters like artichokes ; and to com-
plete their folly they made knives, forks and spoons in glass. Nor
did their art stop at mere secular application, but spread its gaudy
happiness on to the altars of the church. They developed, most suc-
cessfully, large sprays of everlasting glass flowers and modelled
votive figures in glass paste. For the home though it might well
have been for the churches they made extraordinarily sophis-
ticated holy water stoups, where the rococo element outstrips itself
in delicacy and effeminacy. The sense of fun triumphed at last and
art gave^way to amusement. As in the earlier centuries, when glass
most expressed the attenuated refinement and youthful beauty of
the period, so in the eighteenth century glass once more expresses,
far more than all the other arts, the sentimentality, the decadence
and occasionally the hysteria of Venice. From being the robust art
of the table it had become the art of the boudoir and the dressing-
table.

Though we must assume that most of the glass of the period was
of the more sober variety or it would have been quite useless we
must also assume that most of it got broken, for today only the more
exotic pieces have come down to us intact. Glass which is purely
utilitarian must nearly always eventually be dropped, but die lilies
of the field lived out their lives in corner cupboards, away from the

237
Sixteenth Century Table Glass, Museum at Murano

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

drinking and die eating, thus giving us a slightly false view of the
situation. There were, of course, other semi-sensible applications of
glass ornamentation, as in the very attractive range of decorated
glass handles to real cutlery, as well as to beads and jewellery, in-
cluding the exquisite miniature figures in glass paste called "Lattimi."
Side by side with this there ran other abuses of the craft, which may
have been prompted by economic competition, such as the attempts
to imitate pottery. But whereas real Venetian pottery in the Chinese
style is delightful and sensible, the opaque white glass imitations are
nearly always bad. Extraordinary skill must have been used to
imitate the crisp shapes of porcelain, but the glass shapes still retain
their natural fluidity and the decoration looks uneasy. It was an
attempt to displace porcelain by a cheaper product, and the
vogue has only been equalled by similar imitations in Victorian
times.

The crowning folly of Venetian glass in the eighteenth century
was the production of "gardens" for table-tops. Here at Murano
is a large table, big enough to seat thirty people to dinner. But they
would eat nothing, for the whole table-top is taken up with a glass
garden called, adequately enough, "Un Trionfo da Tavola," from
the Palazzo Morosini. It is a kind of monster epergne that has spread
outwards to the very edges of the table, and it is only a wonder that
they didn't use the underneath part of the table to create a glass
grotto of the underworld, into which guests could crawl after they
had tired of the garden on the table-top. It is in the form of an
eighteenth-century formal garden, with arches, fountains, avenues
and all the more rigid elements so beloved of palace gardens, imitated
with great skill in glass. But having emerged but recently from the
era of the Crystal Palace, and therefore being in a position to judge
enormities of taste with a certain degree of accuracy, I have found a
better one in another room. It is in front of me as I write and it is
only a yard square. On a sheet of glass, sprinkled with glass gravel
and grass, rises a fountain a foot high in six tiers. From a hundred
spouts glass water is in the act of gushing, eventually coining stiffly
to rest in a basin of crushed spun glass. All the water looks frozen,
but frozen out of season, for all over the fountain and surrounding
it are little white urns, each with a rather sticky looking bunch of
miniature glass flowers in it. But what is most alarming are the six
spun glass butterflies with beady eyes which have come to rest on
them. On the verges of this garden are glass balustrades, curving

238

MURANO: VENETIAN GLASS

gaily round the corners, with knobs of clear glass upon them, and
at each side of the table gateposts of clear glass mounted with
white urns.

In quite another category are Venetian chandeliers, unless it is
that I have a weakness for them. These magnificent riots of coloured
glass extend the range of exoticism to its greatest. They are the
apotheosis of things Venetian. They are like firework displays of
glass suspended in mid-air, clusters of flowers showering down from
heaven, made to glitter in the candlelight, magnificent examples of
grandeur and folly. The ones here at Murano are fine enough, but
there is one at the Ca Rezzonico hanging from a painted ceiling
which is better still. This, though no longer fitted with candles, but
wired for electricity, has the instantaneously magical effect that only
electric lights in a Venetian chandelier could give.

The eighteenth-century glass table gardens bring us with ease
into that century of centuries, the nineteenth, where we would
expect astonishing things to happen to the development of Venetian
gkss. Nor are we disappointed, as I will show in a moment, though
we are also surprised, for here at last, if Venetian glass were to come
into its own again, this was the time for it to do so. The nineteenth
century was a period when art looked backwards more with nos-
talgia than with learning. There was always a tear in the eye and a
throb in the voice, and the artists, somewhat bewildered amidst
an array of new and upsetting mechanical inventions, made senti-
mentalised reproductions of the work of their forefathers to grace
the imitation palaces of the newly-elevated middle classes. In England
the bewildered were led by Ruskinbackinto the shadowy briar-patch
of medievalism, but in Venice, true to tradition, they halted them-
selves in a gayer period, namely the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
And thus in the revivalism of nineteenth-century Venetian glass we
find some very pleasant pieces of work. In reviving the ornaments
of the best period of Venetian glass they renewed acquaintance with
the true technique of glass making, a technique which essentially is
surprisingly simple and straightforward. On to the basic shapes of
blown glass they added their ornaments by picking and plucking,
nipping and pinching, stamping, looping and twisting, while the
glass was still in a molten condition. That they pinched, plucked,
twisted and looped to excess in this century goes without saying,
but that joy came back to the industry cannot be doubted.

The characteristic of this period is that individual pieces became

239

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

enormous, as though giants and giantesses sat down to dinner.
There are wine-glasses large enough to hold pints, tureens large
enough to hold whole turkeys at a helping, plates and dishes to hold
the food of the gods. And for the decoration of the home they made
enormous things, which I can only describe as being the equivalent
of the eighteenth-century decorative urn made to stand in some
corner or grace the centrepiece of sideboard or table. These huge
things, some three feet high, are elaborately wrought and decorated,
iridescent growths of glass ornaments in all colours, including gold
useless, grand affairs, nightmare glassware, that must have been the
terror and pride of Italian households. Gaiety and idiocy took over by
turns, but always pleasantly. One is never revolted as by the products
displayed at the same period in the Crystal Palace ; there is nothing
serious about these things, they are all rather charming and exhila-
rating, for glass, mercifully, always remains the master of the
craftsman. Their sole purpose was to impress and to impart splendour
to an already exuberant age. Sometimes the craftsmen became con-
jurors, as it were. They performed a trick which could be repeated
only once, which astonished, and then stood still, as in those examples
of tiers of delicate bowls, which are held one above the other on the
thinnest corkscrews of glass. The bottom dish acted as the base,
and then, suddenly, another would arise, and another and another
and another, and finally a delicate little vase would perch on top,
for all the world like a troupe of acrobats standing on each other's
shoulders with a little girl on the summit. Also there were plates
and dishes inlaid with a hundred portraits, lustre glass bowls with
medallions of religious subjects stamped in them, and glass mosaics
of fantastic and pointless workmanship. There were even suites
of furniture, of gilded wood inlaid with sheets of glass in imitation
of lapis lazuli, while the church once more came in for its share
and used glass altar furniture, concentrating on elaborate kte rococo
tabernacles and crosses of engraved mirror glass, most of which
are rather pleasing, as gkss and rococo go well together.

Finally, what can I say of the glass being made in Murano in our
own century? Alas, very little. It is best left alone. The blowers are
blowing, the pinchers and twisters are performing for tourists. They
are turning out the twee and the kitsch by the thousand pieces. The
shops of Venice will give you indication enough the red, the white,
the gold and silver glassware, either hideously "modern" or,
mostly, pseudo-classical in design, the little animals, taking their

240

MURANO: VENETIAN GLASS

cue from the cartoon films, and all those scores of hybrid applica-
tions to modern uses. The traditions and tricks of a craft which is
two thousand years old die very hard, and most of the traditions of
Murano glass have been good ones in spite of the bizarre changes
of taste down the centuries. But compared with the examples to be
seen in the Museum at Murano, the products of our period are the
very worst. Technically the craft is as alive as ever and nothing seems
to have been forgotten. The repetition of the old movements,
the manipulation of the simple tools, handed down from generation
to generation of craftsmen on the Island, are as skilful and as aston-
ishing as ever. The last outburst, that magnificent spasm of the
nineteenth century, seems to have exhausted the powers of invention
completely, and on the whole all they are doing is to repeat some of
the lesser achievements of that time, but with even less taste than
their great-grandfathers showed. It is somewhat sad to go round the
factories and see the fine workmen turning out such poor work,
most of them lineal descendants, according to the Golden Book of
Murano, of those people who created such miracles in the sixteenth
century. The industry is not dead, and skill there is in plenty, but
taste and purpose are lacking. Today I went to visit a glass engraver,
an extremely skilful young man in his early twenties. His workshop
was full of glittering fragments of glass, engraved or waiting to be
engraved. The ceiling was hung with electroliers, drooping like
huge, tired arum lilies, and the walls were lined with mirrors
reflecting the bright glitter of the glass and the quiet canal outside
his door. But on his wheel he was engraving a set of pseudo-
eighteenth-century designs on a mirror, of swags of flowers and
fruits, ladies and gentlemen in crinolines and knee breeches. It was
a joy to watch him work with such assurance and precision, but it
was sad to see him merely polish up the stocking leg of a peri-
wigged dandy of two hundred years ago or trace the embroidery on
the bodice of a crinolined kdy. The finished panels of engraved
mirror were being screwed down on to square, "modernistic"
fiirniture, and standing around the shop were tables and sideboards,
cocktail and radio cabinets, each covered with the design of the
crinolined kdy and simpering gentleman, repeated time after time.
I have been told that there are examples of good modern glass in
Venice, and though I haven't seen any, I am sure there must be.
Meanwhile, I am also told that Murano is making a lot of very
efficient glass for use in chemical kboratories.

241

Giudecca

chief charm of the Giudecca is that it does not set out to
JL please the visitor. It is a narrow series of islands, half of which
are overcrowded with old and slummy buildings and a tumultuous
waterfront, while the other half are taken up by private gardens
where nobody is allowed to wander. Thus the only chance that
Venice has to look out to the open and empty sea is denied to her
apart from the Lido, where the sea is full of people swimming about.
It is doubtful, however, if the Adriatic is any more attractive to look
at than any other sea, and I for one would much prefer to turn my
back on it and gaze at the busy Giudecca Canal with the Zattere on
the other side. (Does this not also, in a sense, show how the Venetians,
when they developed these islands, seized on the chance of isolating
themselves from the outside world, by building an arrangement of
quaysides, small squares and the Piazza San Marco so that at all rimes
they gazed upon themselves, not so much out of deliberate egotism
but out of a sheer delight in their own very human affairs ? It is this
sense of enclosure, of easy inward-gazing, that makes Venice so
friendly, a quality possessed by many villages and small towns
which have had to face a hostile world though Venice hasn't ever
had to enclose herself with walls, as the sea has been a most efficient
moat, and all her gateways to the outer world have been perman-
ently flooded.)

lie Giudecca, however, has always been a little too far from the
centre to merit any grandiose developments, though at one rime it
was a fashionable resort of the nobles. Today, like most of the
extremities of Venice, it has been allowed to decay and is largely a
slum, where the majority of people who have the misfortune to
live there drag out an existence of "picturesque" squalor that I
find neither attractive nor admirable. (I do not subscribe to the idea
that people are more worthwhile, or better to draw and paint,
because they live in a slum. Slums usually denote a part of a town
in decay, and the one thing that can be said for the unfortunate
inhabitants, who are certainly not there from choice but who '

243
Fair on the Giudecca

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

sometimes resent being moved! is that, having no appearances to
maintain, they are less repressed and achieve an apparently more
rumbustious form of life, or, being occupied in various forms of
manual labour, which are often quiet aesthetically pleasing in them-
selves, they seem to be more "virile" than the mental worker. . . .
So extreme has this attitude become on occasion that I remember a
certain school of art in England where the students were sent out
to scour the streets for the most decrepit and dirty workmen they
could find, because, they, according to the art master, "were more
full of character that way." We must assume, therefore, that clean
people are insipid!) The inhabitants of the Giudecca are mainly
dockers and people who work in the Port of Venice ; and, like dock-
land communities the world over, they possess both the virility
and scenic possibilities that all people have who are in any way con-
nected with boats. Mercifully, they have more to do with loading
and unloading than with fishing, and the Giudecca is spared that
overpowering stench which is ubiquitous in Chioggia. There are,
however, the same glimpses to be had down back alleys draped
with washing and crawling with animals and children, the peeling
walls and heaps of rubbish, the crowded, insanitary conditions, the
same mobs of urchins everywhere, mothers with arms akimbo and
fathers tipped back, taking the sun, against the outer walls on their
wooden chairs. . . . The cloisters of San Cosimo are now used as a
vast back-yard for drying washing, while the monastery buildings
have been converted into tenements, the once placid corridors
festooned with a muddle of electric wires, with gas-meters arranged
among the wall plaques and living-rooms built among the stately
columns of the refectory. . . .

Along the waterfront are the crowded fruit and vegetable stalls,
the shops selling goods at half the price they are in Venice, long, low
bars and trattorie, noisy and full of life, with glimpses through them
into green back gardens on the seaward side. All day long upon the
quayside which for most of the day is in the shade boats are
unloading their cargoes, of flour, coal, lime, wood and other things
being brought into the storehouses of the Giudecca. It is now possible
to move in a scene more reminiscent of Guardi, with his rags blow-
ing in the wind from poles, torn sails and toiling labourers, than of
Canaletto, who preferred the plumes, finery and gentilities of the
Grand CanaL . . . Sailors stretch out among the fruit in the barges
under ragged awnings, fish-wives ply their knives and rattle among

244

GIUDECCA

the shells, the fruit-sellers clang the pans of their weighing scales,
while at intervals, along the whole front, groups of workmen, white
with flour or black with coal, hand over their sacks or wheel their
barrow-loads across the quayside and disappear into the warehouses.
At the far end, among the big cargo ships, a man is smoothing the
mainmast of a sailing ship, littering the ground with shavings ; others
are sitting in the shade mending sails. . . .

VISITORS to the Giudecca are as welcome as anywhere else in
Venice though no allowances are made : we must take the people as
we find them. There is a trattoria where I have been several times
which, though rough and hardly ever ready, provides both good
food and good company. The padrone is always served with patri-
archal pomp, and during his meal he keeps jumping up to pay
personal calls on me to make enquiries about the food, to rearrange
the pot of black pepper, smooth out the salt, replenish the tooth-
picks. . . . Today, while I have been writing part of this upoa his
paper tablecloth, he was having lunch with a newly bereaved rela-
tive, who had a black tab on his kpel, and a six-year-old daughter.
There was endless chatter in dialect, which I couldn't follow,
during which the wan little daughter kept gazing at a photograph
of her dead mother in her bridal dress. They were joined halfway
through by the butcher, his apron covered with blood, who had,
as well, a newly cut finger which he sucked continually, and a
woman who spent a considerable time sticking cardboard soles
into her shoes because they had rubbed her heels sore. A few
tables away sat an old man talking to himself dementedly as he
picked up a small heap of ragged paper money and then dropped
it, several times, in despair. At first he added it up to two hundred
and thirty lire, but as his soliloquy developed he was able to make
it into five thousand. On the floor, among the litter of paper,
a thin cat played; sailors were at the bar by the door, others

asleep, their heads upon the tables The food, which is almost too

ample, comes through a large hatch with a bang and is brought to
table by a stout and homely matron . . . and, too, like most things
here, it is half the price it is across the water.

After lunch, as I wandered around the back streets and in the bit
of spare ground near the Corte Grande, I found a homemade fair
with a row of swings, built in a rather personal bairoque style in

24.5

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

which electric light bulbs and striped amplifiers played a great part.
I fell to talking with the little man who had made it, who was in his
vest and carried two babies. He was only too pleased to show me
around his quite elaborate creation. It had many oddly proportioned
statues, reminiscent of figureheads, holding clusters of electric light
bulbs like flowers, with paintings of Venice upon the swing-boats in
that universal amateur style popularized by the Douanier Rousseau,
and gaily painted animal heads and bits of scroll work. The whole
thing had the same charm as the cork-work cathedrals of Brighton
and those odd palaces of shells and broken crockery made by
French postmen at the weekends. . . .

UPON this narrow string of islands, among these lively scenes,
is one of the chief ornaments of Venetian architecture, the Church
of fl Redentore, somewhat isokted, standing like a strict, sober and
clean-featured dominie among a crowd of urchins. It was started
in 1577 and finished in 1592, by Palkdio, as a thank-offering for
the cessation of the GreatPlague of 1575 (when fifty thousand people
perished in Venice, including Titian, who had already reached the
age of ninety-nine). It belongs to the Capuchins, who were a young
order at the time of building; and though it may be due to the fact
that it has but recently been cleaned inside, it still looks astonishingly
new and has about it a lingering air of the brisk efficiency of the
Counter-Reformation. In this respect the architect was well chosen,
though Palkdio, who brought to life ckssical architecture more
faithfully than any other architect, is about the last person I would
associate with Christianity. How cunningly he used the excuse of a
Christian church to build a pagan temple! It seems to me to be an
architecture of pure learning, of absolute reasonableness. It has none
of the dark oriental sensuousness of St. Mark's, none of the youthful
elegance the almost callow beauty of the fifteenth-century
churches of Venice, or the theatrical and hysterical qualities of the
baroque churches. Il Redeatorq is calm and exquisite almost
appallingly beautiful. . . .

Canova's smooth sculptures though they are on a very much
lower aesthetic plane would be much more suitable than the poor
baroque altarpiece here at the moment, though that might fit else-
where with ease. The modern sentimental statues are extraordinarily
pathetic; in fact, hardly anything will fit into Palkdio's scheme:

246

GIUDECCA

it is a building which should remain for ever empty, to be admired
for itself alone. Even the people coming into this church seem out
of place: so untidy, so human, so imperfect they seem, while the
tonsured monks, with their extremely long beards and brown
frocks stirring in the wind as they scurry by, look quite bizarre
no less absurd than priests from any alien religion would have
looked if they had entered a Greek or Roman temple. What ever
this building could be used for I don't know, but it is certainly not a
church: no human institution seems worthy of its cold beauty. It
seems to be almost a case where art has outgrown its function,
where a final perfect statement in architectural terms has been made
which far outstrips its earthly use, a statement of icy purity, remote
as the tops of the Alps, and with as little relation to everyday life.
Whatever else the Roman Church might be, it is exceedingly
human. Its churches are the dream houses of the people, a dream of
extraordinary complication and beauty which has recurred down
the centuries, and people have entered these buildings generation
after generation to repeat the same comforting formulae. In spite of
the more exotic flights of fancy of mystics and saints, the churches
have always belonged to the people. Building, sculpture and paint-
ing, in the kst analysis, are physical acts, and the churches were
made by stonemasons, painters, carvers and gilders. Byzantine
churches were an artistic melting-pot, a kind of Middle-Eastern
bazaar of religious art, very earthy and noisy, and, in the latter days,
whatever the Baroque achieved of sophistication, it still remained
astonishingly human, a kind of bombastic religious jest. But Palkdio
soars away from all this lowly imagining into intellectual perfection :
his is the ancient dream of classical revival come true . No archi-
tect perhaps has ever had such an exquisite sense of form and line,
such a right grasp of spaces and solids. . . . And what is more sur-
prising, though his work is perfect it is intensely alive. It is purged
of dross, of all impure thoughts, it is as majestic as anything ever
made by man, but we can no longer worship there ; all we can do is
admire our eyes shaded from the glory.

THE Capuchins, dear human people, as though in violent reaction
to the artistic purity of their church, have nevertheless had an orgy
in their private rooms behind the high altar, away from public
view. They have made, in their sacristry, a chamber of horrors

24?

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

almost equal to their famous grotto of skeletons and mummies
in Rome. They bring us back from all the light and purity, the
Olympian calm, back to the dark side of life with a bump. With
all the pleasures of morbidity, in a room no bigger than a fair-
sized drawing-room, with the sunlight streaming in, are dis-
played on shelves all round the room the severed heads of twelve
saints, in glass cases, domed like those. used for holding stuffed
birds on Victorian mantelpieces. The illusion is very convincing
until we find that the heads are made of wax, full size, of aston-
ishingly realistic workmanship, with glass eyes, rolling upwards,
this way and that, gazing into some heaven beyond the ceiling.
Those by the windows are lit by the sun, which shines through
the wax, lending them an unearthly radiance. Their beards, which
are real beards, must have been taken, in all their grisly glory,
from the sacrificial chins of eleven old men long grey beards
applied to the soft wax with loving care and now crushed up
against the glass. The hair too, stuck on to half-bald heads, must
have been sacrificed by somebody. . . . Each head, parting waxy
lips to reveal stumps of dull, dry teeth, has the remains of a brown
habit crumpled around the neck, and so these gentlemen, under their
domes of glass, each lost in his embarrassing private ecstasy and
cramped in his dome of prejudice, are examples of saintly counten-
ances for all the world to see. In their company is the model head of
St. Veronica in a cowl, grimacing from her corner, disfigured by
a skin rash.

Halfway along one wall is an ornate gilt-and-white paper reli-
quary in that favourite shape, a sarcophagus with a window in its
side. This holds the homespun brown mantle of San Lorenzo,
bedecked now with a cheerful garland of paper flowers. There are
other, more happy exhibits two playful baroque reliquaries, made
in an idle hour by an artist of no mean accomplishments possibly a
theatrical designer to house a few bones; a model of a Bleeding
Christ in wax about one foot six inches long ; the shoe of a saint
from Milan ; and a charming wax model of a Flight into Egypt with
a smiling mule. Of greater value artistically is a fine small crucifix
in wood, the feet resting on a cushion of bleached coral a nice
Venetian touch surrounded by the Evangelists, delicately modelled
in wax. Above this display are paintings a Baptism by Veronese, four
small panels by Bassano, a Vivarini Madonna and Child with Saints
kept in a cupboard, and sundry paintings of the School of Bellini.

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GIUDECCA

This sacristy, curiously cheerful in spite of its rather grisly exhibits,
is used as a passageway to other parts of the building, but the living
Capuchins, who rush diagonally across the room from door to door,
apparently in a hurry, do not bear the slightest resemblance to their
archetypes under the glass domes, but look as healthy as the butchers
and stevedores on the Giudecca waterfront. Children, too, seem to
use this room as a passageway on their way to their schoolroom,
passing through with as much equanimity as children do through
the biology room with its specimens in formalin on the window
sills. ... A Capuchin entered with a suitcase, followed by a youth
with a long ladder. ... 1 felt that I was not there at all, standing like
a ghost in the corner with St. Veronica peering over my shoulder.

249

PART FOUR.

Le Zattere

I HAVE crossed over the Grand Canal to live by the Salute
Every morning upon my ceiling are the wriggling reflections
from the canal below, and apart from the proximity of a new set
of church bells so near that I feel almost to be sleeping in the
belfry it is very much quieter here and a great contrast to the
noise that I both suffered and enjoyed while living near the Piazza.
... I swing open the shutters one by one, and there, opposite, are
the giant convolutions of the Salute, die steep domes, the population
of statues. The architecture of the transept is severe and bold;
the pavements are grass-growii ; the side door is occasionally used
by priests, coming and going with their briefcases. It has about it
the air of a stage door. ... In the canal below, gondoliers clean the
sumptuous fittings of the private gondolas magnificent black
boats with shining brasses and bold heraldic colours upon the oars,
colours which later in the day will be repeated upon the liveries,
in the broad sashes, hat bands and rows of brass buttons. There is a
bumping of wood on wood and the swish of water. . . . Further
along the canal other boatmen tinker with the private motor launches,
less ugly than motor cars, twice as wide as gondolas : red against the
green water. Rainbow colours spread around them on the surface
of the canal; there is a whiff of petrol and an occasional angry snort
from the engines. ...

* * *

THE Giudecca Canal on a fine August morning before the sun gets
too scorching is a scene of great activity. In the background are the
long, sprawling buildings of the waterfront with the quiet dome of
the Redentore rising above, while to the right are the wharves with
the ocean-going ships, which appear to list slightly to one side in the
morning haze. The wide canal is busy with boats carrying heavy
loads, moving low upon the water. On the Zattere workmen have
been unloading wood from a .great barge for the last three days
a sailing boat in ultramarine, \vfth red sails and awnings, and

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

gamboge eyes painted upon the prow. Amid a general colour of
red rust, barefoot and naked to the waist, cloths round their heads,
they wheel barrow-loads of logs down the plank and into the store-
house. Close by is moored one of the gay fishing boats from
Chioggia, with an. angel garlanded with roses painted upon the pitch-
black ground, and on the prow a cap of polished brass, embossed
with large eight-pointed stars. The red sails hang limply by the
mast, and the fisherman lies upon his back under an awning of
ochre and pink stripes watching the others unload the wood. . . .
Then past the bathing-pool a large box full of clean sea in which,
by the sound of it, a whole school of children are bathing like por-
poises ; and over the small bridge in full view of the house where
Ruskin stayed, around which lingers a vicarage air, where the
present-day English visitors live in a cultural outpost, protected by
a pkque on the front of the house, a talisman against change.

Titanus the Tug, in black and red stripes, with smoke curling
from his funnel, dashes by among the small craft on the way to
another heavy task. The olive-oil boats come into the quayside and
disturb the cigar-coloured boys at their fishing. Loaded with vege-
tables from the markets, the housewives stand in the crowded ferry
boat on their way back to the Giudecca. ... A graceful schooner
passes by and in the opposite direction come oarsmen out for a
practice, while back and forth in an endless stream the boats loaded
with boxes, mattresses, piles of furniture, sand and cement are
pushed along at snail's pace by sweating oarsmen. ... As if in triumph,
the efficient motor-driven Coca-cola barge rides by, full of glittering
empty bottles the attendants* uniforms, the boat and all the fittings
a bright orange, with the well-known straggle of debased lettering
upon its side for all to see.

Around the news-stand loafers are gazing at the magazine covers
without buying. A group of youth-hostellers, sleepy-eyed and
burdened, have just come over from the Casa San Giorgio : English
boys with shorts down to their knees, looking at a map of the laby-
rinth to plot their way back to the station. At the caf tables, built
out on rafts into the canal, knots of students are poring over their
books in the shade of gaudy umbrellas, and the ubiquitous loungers,
in fine shirts, pressed trousers and milk-chocolate shoes, gossip in
the sun the tedious sunshine of unemployment. They glance at
their fingernails, adjust their hair or make early morning overtures
to die cluster of young girls, who admire themselves in their first

254.

LE ZATTERE

grown-up dresses and unselfconsciously run their hands up and

down their own figures The baker's boy passes by, balancing

his tray upon a cloth ring which pushes his hair down over his eyes.
The postman comes to empty the letter-box; the tobacconist does
a brisk trade ; a wireless pkys in an empty bar while the chromium
is wiped over. . . ,

* * *

HERE I have lingered a whole morning over breakfast, shifting
about lazily under an umbrella, hiding behind my sun glasses,
chuckling at the delightful thought of anonymity. . . . One starts
out with a firm intention to go somewhere, but so distracting is

Venice that one usually finishes up somewhere else I have never

known a place more suited to aimlessness : as though drugged, one
browses the hours away doing nothing, or else, once the wandering
starts, one staggers on for a whole day light-headed with hunger. . . .

It is too late now to alter the pattern of my life here, to thint- of
doing all the things I have left undone. The last few weeks are for
picking up loose ends . . . piece by piece the picture of Venice comes
together. But it could go on for ever : eventually one would have to
become a Venetian. . . . Knowing that time is running short, one
snatches more at pleasure : one's judgments become more personal,
perhaps more fleeting. A strain of melancholy runs through every-
thing. Friends and acquaintances leave one by one The Zattere

is the best place in which to finish up a summer in Venice; the best

pkces for wandering are the streets and squares behind But like

a game, they all finish up at the Scalzi Bridge and then at the
Station just beyond.

255

Fragments: Three

/^lAMBATTISTA TIEPOLO'S rendering of physical
VJT beauty is remarkable. His types are haughty, but that is as
near as they approach to idealism. He got closer than most artists
to the purely sensuous without losing his dignity as a painter. I am
frankly fond of Tiepolo's faces because they are attractive, but they

make bad nuns In The Madonna with St. Clara and Two Dominican

Nuns in Santa Maria Rosario the faces are not merely pleasing but
erotic as well, as though each had spent hours in a beauty parlour
instead of years of soul-searching and midnight vigils. His women
are nearer carnal than heavenly delights : such ladies would never
cloister themselves away from the world. Sometimes his use of
physical beauty is appropriate. In the painting of The Virgin in Glory
Appearing to the Blessed Simon Stock in the Scuola dei Carmini the
element of motherhood is expressed with restraint, refinement and
real feeling. (The Simon Stock part of the painting of the saint
grovelling in a grave is as tiresome as it is gruesome, though the

tale must be told ) On the same ceiling are Faith, Hope, Charity,

Prudence, Innocence and Grace a perfect chorus of virtues Yet

again, the figure of the Bimbo in the Adoration in the Sacristy of
San Marco is really one of the most successful naturalistic paintings
of a baby I have ever seen. Extraordinarily tender painting.
Only his greatness saved him from sentimentalism.

AS Ruskin noted, there are many heads of executed giants hanging
about Venice, but I have so far only seen six whole ones : the two of
bronze on the Clock Tower in the Piazza, and the four on the monu-
ment of Doge Giovanni Pesaro in the Frari. They are next to Can-
ova's monument, but his figures look effeminate when compared
with these monstrous Negroes. The figure of the little Doge sits
startled upon his sarcophagus, which rests on the backs of two more
of those baroque animals crossed between lions, camels and sea
cows. The Negroes act as supporters, carrying the weight on their

256

FRAGMENTS: THREE

shoulders protected by cushions. But they writhe under it, expressing
great pain upon their brutish faces. They are curiously dressed in
flowing, ragged clothing of white marble, through which their
flesh, of black marble, shows at the knees. Over their shoulders are
flung ragged-edged cloaks, and they have striped trousers. They
must be some of the earliest sculptures to wear trousers : perfect
pantomime giants. . . . Between each pair of giants rises a hideous
figure sculptured in the full enjoyment of realism two corpses of
black marble, sightless mummies shrivelled almost down to the
skeletons, each holding a sheet of white marble on which are in-
scribed the deeds of the Doge.

i HAVE reached the conclusion that Canova was a traitor to
Venetian art. ... Nor has Venice forgotten this, for his monument
in the Frari is the most tragical and the most comical in the whole

of the city. It is a subtle, if unconscious, revenge We have noted

Canova's smooth limbs in St. Peter's, Rome. . . . Well, here the
technique is repeated, though not so highly polished. The tomb
which he originally designed for Titian, who sleeps opposite, but
which was mercifully reserved for himselfis in the form of a
pyramid with an open door. A figure in deepest, deepest mourning
slowly drifts up the steps, followed by a small procession three
semi-naked boys carrying flambeaux and two large ladies carrying
a garland of roses. On the opposite side of the door is the Lion of
St. Mark and a figure of Fame. The Lion rests its head upon its
paws and the closed book, with an expression of utter dejection
upon its face. It is definitely the most woebegone lion in all art. ...
The open door of the tomb which incidentally only contains
Canova's heart is for some reason covered with wire netting.
Possibly to keep out tourists It is a bleached and sombre joke.

FOR those in pursuit of die personality of John the Baptist Venice
is particularly rich. There are two by the Vivarini in the Accademia
the one by Bartelomeo is one of the most rarefied figures in the
whole collection. But die most startling of all is Donatello's austere
and elongated wood-carving in the Frari. In spite of its small size,
this figure is utterly compelling. For me the race threatens all the

257

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

horrors of sudden conversion; it is trance-like and exalted. Such a
man one might have found wandering among the blackthorns in
medieval times. . . . John the Baptist is a most fascinating and
enigmatic personality: often of greater psychological importance
than some of his renderings in art would suggest.

SINGLE figures abound : hero Sebastian, Lorenzo grilled, and others.
. . . What square, firm, vacant faces Giovanni Bellini painted : solid-
muscled figures in niches of gold But San Rocco is my favourite !

A fine one in the Accademia by Andrea da Murano, another by
Mansueti (though none so fine as Crivelli's small figure in the
Wallace Collection!). A pensive young man, a type of prodigal, a
vagabond, discovered as the long-lost son he always stands reveal-
ing a wound in his thigh, with stocking down over his boot, holding
staff, bowl, hat and rosary. Sometimes he has a dog. . . . Venice
claims to have his body in the Church of San Rocco but so do
many other places, whole or in parts. ... He may have had a boil
on his leg, for he was said to be efficacious against the plague. . . .

CHINOISEBIE found its greatest expression in furniture, textiles,
wallpapers, pottery, lacquer objects. . . . Few full-scale buildings
have been erected in the style. (Brighton Pavilion is perhaps the
largest example, and that is not wholly Chinese.) Yet the style is
basically architectural in inspiration, for what is a four-poster bed
but a garden pavilion moved indoors ? The chairs, tables, commodes,
mirrors are really all outdoor objects garden furniture overgrown
with weeds and flowers, sometimes grotto-furniture made up of
small rocks and stones. . . . Summerland furniture. . . . But I think
it is more than merely furniture-art: it is really the final dreamlet
of the Renaissance, twitching, ineffectual. It is fairy-tale Renaissance,
a decorative dream that has lingered on from the indigestion of the
Baroque. Though in the main it takes on universal characteristics,
Venetian Chinoiserie has many of its own: especially its colour.
The kgoon landscapes, as might be imagined, were particularly
adaptable to the style : we visit little islands in gondola-junks to find
exotic plants on a spiky land, where the objects of the foreshore
look like fragments of past Venetian styles water-washed and wind-

258

FRAGMENTS: THREE

blown. Acanthus, so fulsome in the Baroque, has become a dry shore
weed growing among the stones. There are small pavilions distinctly
reminiscent of Venetian Gothic; rags still blow on poles. People,
when they appear, are really Venetians dressed as fantasy Chinese ;
the animals those weird pseudo-camels of the Baroque ; and the birds

are Venetian caged-birds let loose All in lacquer, too, a dreamy

medium.

IN the small painting by Longhi in the Accademia there is a party
of men in brocaded gowns and embroidered waistcoats idling away
an afternoon. The man in the centre wears ear-rings. They are play-
ing violins, and their music-sheets are scattered upon an Indian
table-doth and upon the floor. In front of the table is a stool on
which sits a small white dog looking up at her master. She is no
more than nine inches long and has two small teats hanging down.
... In the background a card game is in progress, but the players
are not beaux but clerics, a fat monk in white and a priest in skull-cap.
Behind them stands a young man with a monocle. . , , Monocle,
toy-dog, ear-rings, embroidery and violins. . . . Unlike Pompeii,
which was smothered in hot ashes, Venice languished and faded out
on the note of a violin.

259

Campo Santa Margarita

1C AME out this morning with the full intention of looking
again at the Tiepolo paintings in the Scuola dei Carmini, but I
failed to get farther than the Campo Santa Margarita, unable, as
usual, to resist a market. And here I have been all day. . . . What a
lively square this is! Not a tourist in sight (and I am invisible to
myself except in rather, disappointing reflections in shop windows).
One realizes how much of Venice there is to know near to leaving,
but I can never rush around like a one-man conducted tour : I must
take my Venice slowly week by week. I know I shall go away
having missed half of what the guide-books say it is good for me to
see, but I know I shall have stumbled upon many odd things that
are never mentioned there. Rebelling against their authority, I find
I take an almost perverse interest in trivialities as well as in the
grand and famous things, and to spite the guide-book I will spend
hours among the fruit stalls within a few hundred yards of master-
pieces : I have taken a keen delight in not entering the Palazzo Ducale
this summer. . . . The reality of Venice is for ever elusive, but it is to
be found in the back alley and the side canal as well as in the grand
places. It is hidden away somewhere in this teeming, noisy labyrinth.
" What odd thought has been haunting me all morning in the
Campo Santa Margarita? I did not realize until mid-afternoon that
this square reminds me of Leyburn Market in Wensleydale. But
there is nothing green here, except the vegetables no trees, or
surrounding green hills. Only the shape is the same, little else. But
even in the midst of all this noisy reality Venice makes one dream.
Pictures come floating by, periods mix, like passing one hand behind

the other : how one began, what one has become But oh, the

easy charm of Venice! These sentimental tunes coming from the
cafe and wine shops all day long, the everlasting sunshine, the
fantasy, the decrepitude, the colours ... aU this ripe fruit and barJcs
of gladioli! . . . Piles of fat green melons with red flesh inside,
crescent moons of coconut lying on vine leaves, with litde fountains
playing on them. ... Tins endless parade of people, and, above all,
the friendliness, the accessibility of Venice.

261

(Jampo banta Margarita

Trio

1 I { HRE AT S of farewells come crowding in, but die three of us
-L spend our days as though our life here were permanent. Sun-
drenched mornings on the Zattere, wandering all over Venice from
midday onwards, a leisurely perambulation from one dark wine

cellar to another There is always an inner room, shaded from the

bright sunshine, full of happy people, tipsy groups of musicians and
singers shouting at the tops of their voices, charming each other with
guitar and floods of song. This is where the odd characters gather :
the Carnival still goes on, away from the hotel lounges. Never a sen-
sible word is spoken between us : we have said nothing of any
importance for a week. We go in and out of shops buying unneces-
sary things ; I have signed my name upon postcards to my friends*
relatives in all parts of Italy. Salutations to everybody! In and out
the arcades, in and out famous buildings. This is the way to go
sightseeing. . . . Around and about for hours until it is evening and
time to go to that grape-hung giardino to eat. . . .

THERE is a ceiling of vines, with black and green grapes against
the night sky. Around the garden walls, which are painted viridian,
are pots of ferns on brackets with artificial flowers stuck into them.
There is an underworld of cats, and caged birds by the kitchen
door, and somewhere a wireless in the inner rooms where the
young men of the district are noisily playing cards. Down the centre
of the garden which consists only of vines and paper flowers a
long table has been arranged to take a party of forty-five peasants
down from the mountains, a double row of mixed families, young
and old, dressed in bkck, with weatherbeaten faces. Their priest
is here with them, like a shepherd, sitting with the grandfathers.
Children and babies are at side tables with their mothers, while
among them are tables for the boatmen from the Zattere, bare-
footed, brown, alert The meal progresses, splendid and boister-
ous, and the whole garden seems to bounce with noise. After the

263

Garden, Campo San Vldal

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

earing and drinking they burst out into high-pitched mountain
songs, and the grapes almost fall from the ceiling with joy. One of
the boatmen rises and, standing by the kitchen door, surrounded by
the padrone s family, sings an excerpt from Rigoletto, to the accom-
paniment of a dwarf who dances in front of him making loud
miaows. . . .

our we go along the canal, across the Ponte San Cristoforo, among
the narrow, tree-hung alleys by the British Consulate, to buy
peaches to eat on our way to the Accademia Bridge. Giovanni
starts his nightly diatribe against the English, a nimble satire with
actions, always ending with a list of the world's languages. He starts
with Italian as being the most melodious, then German, which he
apparently thinks is beautiful, then French, Spanish and Portuguese ;
a lesser group of mid-European languages and odd Slav groups I
have never heard of. Then die noise of a machine tool factory and
the noise of cleaning the streets with a snow shovel, and finally

English Having thus relieved his feelings, we find ourselves in a

secondhand furniture shop, where we select odd pieces of scrap
iron, broken pottery and glassware, enormous sideboards and old
spring mattresses as hypothetical presents for our friends. . . . Over
the Grand Canal to the Campo San Stefano to visit a haunt or two,
where we develop a craving for water melon. In a back alley we
meet two cheeky urchins, a girl and a boy, but we threaten to
throw them into a canal when they start to rifle our pockets. They
score again by sending us down a cul-de-sac, and run away laughing
in the opposite direction. . . . Standing upon a bridge, we see the
nightly flotilla of gondoks approaching, lantern trimmed, crowded
with gregarious each-other-loving Americans of all ages, the young,
the fattish and the very fat, gliding along the well-known romantic
route. In one gondola is the little orchestra, one accordion, one
violin and one tenor, who has a fine voice but a bald head, singing
Sole Mio. The occupants of the gondolas clap after each song. . . .
A gondolier winks at us as he passes under the bridge. , . .

For a while we watch the lottery in the Campo Santi Apostoli.
But it is long drawn out and tedious and we are much more pleased
to elbow our way into the crowd to watch the man who changes
pink water into yellow by squeezing lemon into it. Melons we find
at last by the Ponte dei Ebrei, large and red, dripping with juice and

264

TRIO

with pips like beetles. The melon seller entrusts us with his long
knife and we eat the enormous half-moons until we can eat no
more. ... In a bar lined with mirrors we see our back views vanish-
ing into infinity. . . . There is dancing by the Scalzi Bridge, and
trays of pastries. . . . And then to the Station to look up trains, for
Fernando goes tomorrow. . . . The timetables look like frosted
glass to me.

NEXT morning we breakfast quietly on the Zattere, and sit till
almost noon in a pleasant trance. We drift through the day feeling
friendly towards everybody : Giovanni sails over to the Lido, and
I go off with Fernando to help him choose a present for his sister.
He has set his heart upon a Venetian chandelier, so we find a crystal
cave and tread carefully among the stalactites and stalagmites. . . .
I have to bend low to avoid the hanging glassware, but eventually,
after much picking and choosing, he finds what he wants. He is
very pleased and serious about his purchase, but I cannot imagine
an Englishman returning home after a summer holiday with a three-
foot chandelier for his sister. . . .

BY midnight we assemble at the station in hilarious mood, with
the fragile present packed in an enormous bolster of cardboard and
straw, and then I find myself embroiled in one of those fantastic
leave-takings that I have often witnessed with astonishment on
Italian stations. Such commotion, such delightful anguish! Embraces
and handshakes and such dreadful wavings down the platform!
To increase the effect, a heavy thunderstorm comes on and the train

departs in flashes of lightning and blinding rain I felt as though I

had been living in an opera for days. . . .

* * *

BUT the night is not ended yet. Giovanni and I make our way

along the slippery streets after the storm We drop into a bar,

hungry as well as thirsty, but no sooner settle to eat than a workman
enters with stepladder and tools. The place is to be redecorated

although it is one o'clock in the morning The customers shift

around from chair to chair as the flakes fell from the ceiling. The
workman has a newspaper cap upon his head and a cigarette lolling

265

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

from his mouth. He is in his vest and soon becomes covered from
head to foot in white powder like a clown. He behaves as though he
were alone, folding up his stepladder and re-erecting it in one
position after another, and the room is quickly littered with debris.
The customers leave one by one, shaking flakes of old whitewash off
their clothes. . . .

It is two o'clock when we reach San Stefano. In the church door we
fall in with a band of minstrels with a guitar who are singing their
hearts out with broad, broad smiles, laughing and capering in the
moonlight. ... It is surprising how many Italian folksongs one
knows at two o'clock in the morning. . . . Here at last is a real
Harlequinade with all the characters in part, the fat, work-shy
musician who is tipsy all the time, the sly merchant with rings
upon his fingers, the bragadoccio, the know-all, and dancing around
the crowd die old man, pathetic and foolish, with high-pitched,
croaking voice. . . . For an hour we stay with them, and then leave
them, still singing, in the deserted square. We linger for a while on
the Accademia Bridge to look at the dark palaces, the empty Grand
Canal and the black lapping water. . . . Thence down the tree-lined
avenue back to the Zattere. . . . There is nothing but the bobbing
boats and the moon.

266

Fragments: Four

"T yTENI CE washed by the sea, flooded with light Openness

V a sense of radiation, of sea access. Yet it is kbyrinthine. The
narrow alleys and streets produce an intimate atmosphere. There is
an unusual homeliness about Venice, and an honesty. But in the late
summer, the water lanes become mysterious, shrouded in silvery
fog. . . . Hot muffled journeys by water through veils of mist,
slowly parting. Gondoliers rising out of the mist, shouting and
disappearing ; figures hurrying over bridges.

VENETIAN Gothic is Sea Gothic. Originally an architecture of
the northern forests which, when it came over the lagoons,
became an architecture of the coral pools. It is Gothic washed by
the sea, picked clean by fishes, sprouting ornaments like sea-flowers,
festooned with seaweeds. Mosaics are like fish-scales; archways
take on the flowing double curve of the fish's back; parapets are
spiky like white fish-bones ; pavements are pebble beaches.

All colours in Venice are sea colours : the colours of sands, wet
and dry, the light colours of bleached shells, the iridescent colours
of mother-of-pearl. There is a hardness about things Venetian: a
love of stones in the sun of flagstones, balustrades, parapets, mould-
ings, even roofs and chimneys of stone. The same quality is to be
found in rock po'ols by the sea, with floors of many-coloured pebbles,
and ledges, clean and dry in the sun, with fantastic piles of stones and
water-washed knobs strewn over them. Only the hard things remain
on beaches, only the spiky plants survive. . . . Thus St. Mark's might

be an amphibious cathedral It has a peculiar neptunian quality,

and would not look amiss at the bottom of a sunlit lagoon : its domes
encrusted by limpets, seaweed flowing from its cornices and para-
pets, fishes wandering through its glittering mosaic halls, sea-
anemones flowering round the doorways, and the atrium washed
high with coloured pebbles. . . .

269

On tlit> diadeeca. Canal

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

SEASIDE madness that trance condition induced by beaches,
wind-swept, sun-swept was never very far from the surface of
Venetian art, even in the days of the High Renaissance. Then it was

swashbuckling In the days of the Baroque there was an attempt

to return to God and His ways, but it was casino-godliness the
holiday spirit was too strong for it ; Venetian Baroque was altogether
too gay, too sea-infected. So they built Santa Maria della Salute,
which is just as capable of being an amphibious palace as St. Mark's.

The sea-motif came to the fore again towards the end, in Vene-
tian Rococo. Its very name implies sea-grottoes, the spiky fantasies
of coral clusters, and glimpses into exotic shallows on kte summer
afternoons, but by this time the pools were littered with fragments
of broken golden ornaments and jewellery. . . .

VENICE the spell-binder: using air, water, fire, metals, glass,
marbles and precious stones to beguile the senses : to amuse the young,
cajole the wary, titilate the weary, upset those who are only too
willing to be upset, those who are living on the brink of being sub-
merged, those who dare not admit their weaknesses. Sometimes at
night, Venice is like the island of Circe : we walk with masks of
animals. . . . Then in the bleak hours of early morning we drag
home down some foul alley, lost in a maze of shuttered slums and
ruinous palaces. The carnival is over, the brightness gone. It is the
hour when the past jostles with the unreality of the present. ... In
Venice one can be supremely happy or live with thoughts of suicide,
charmed and fascinated or physically nauseated.

VENICE is a hall of mirrors of the emotions, where feelings swell
outwards through luxury and exotism or grow immensely tall and
thin through exposure. But there is laughter always about to burst
out : rather unreal kughter, sometimes sinister laughter. And then
in moods of stillness, when the shudder from the silence of the lagoons
takes one unawares, there is a most dreadful sadness about everything,
and a terrifying sense of decay.

In the Baroque and Rococo setting of Venice at night I feel that
we have come too kte. We are seeing Venice after the event. . . .
We have arrived two hundred years kte for the party. The revellers

270

FRAGMENTS: FOUR

have gone, but the scenery of carnival is still standing. They have
left, in odd corners, their masks, their cloaks and tricornes, their
extinguished lanterns in dusty heaps.

THE real Venice? What and where is it? There is nothing left of
the old Venice now, only this pleasure resort Venice where every-
thing is exhibitionism. When we built our piers out into the sea,
with their peep-shows, orchestras and mad amusement arcades,
though we did not know it, we were constructing miniatures of
Venice. . . . But wait, at night, when the moon shines over the
lagoons and lovers stand on the bridges, the quiet breath of the sea
can be felt. The bells of the Basilica sound within their spiky marble
box, black with Byzantine secrecy, the Giants knock away die hours
on their huge bronze bell and the pigeons sleep. That is one aspect
of Venice that persists down the centuries from one generation of
holiday-makers to the next.

Historical events jostle each other noiselessly in painted chambers.
. . . There are reflections of ghosts in the mirrors, for ever multiplying
human follies in all directions, far away into darkness.

WE accept all things in Venice as events, as things in themselves.
Thus all events here are strangely pointed and contemporary. The
immediate moment is of extreme importance in spite of its acute
historical setting. (But there are undertones of absurdity, remote
fear and decay, that are always disquieting.) The only people who
see things at all in perspective, I am sure, are Venetians born and
bred: the rest of us are uncouth strangers.

VENICE is the pkce for all who love themselves, for here the self
is exaggerated, blown up idealized and scandalized at the same
time. Each one of us unconsciously slips into one of the character
parts of the Commedia M' Arte. .

We perpetually struggle to know the "reality of Venice But
in the end we come to know that we bring our own Venice with us.

Rather shyly it unfolds, week by week, then it blossoms quite
suddenly. Yet to be capable of such blossoming, after so many years

271

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

of grubbing on one's self-made heap of rubbish that is the whole
joy of coining to Venice. It is the visitors' privilege to be taken in,
though the Venetians may smile cynically and think us fools;
but in being taken in we often reveal our true selves. If a man. cannot
find himself here he is lost for ever. Venice brings out degrees of
honesty in most personalities.

MARIESCHI'S prophecy has stiE to come true. The final dream is of
Venice in ruins. One day it must go and it will be no more than the
dead cities of Ancient Rome: rubble heaps, weeds, lizards, water-
fowl and butterflies ... the canals choked and stagnant. . . .

272

Festa della Luce

QUI C KL Y now the time runs out. Though I shall stay another
week I know I shall dream the days away, and be on the
Channel boat before I awake. And tomorrow Giovanni goes.
The summer is slipping by. . . . Tonight is the Festa della Luce, but I
feel that I have had my fill of spectacles for one year, so I do not
approach it in the best of spirits. . . . There are great crowds at the
Rialto, with lights everywhere. Yellow lanterns are strung like beads
on both sides of the Grand Canal, and we have just time to get aboard
a barge before the waterway becomes impassable. The houses and
palaces on either side resemble the bright distemper scenery at a
pantomime and people crowd every window and balcony. . . . The
procession of boats passes slowly under the Rialto Bridge, hung as it
were with incandescent fruit and vegetables. . . . Then comes the
great moment when the Galleggiante moves from beneath the
darkened archway. Under the bridge all was in darkness, but when
it emerges, pronto! all its lights go up, and from the centre an illumi-
nated dome slowly rises. It is an enormous raft built upon barges,
holding a complete orchestra and choir and innumerable friends
and relatives with arches of lights all round and a dome of lights.
After the triumphant entry the music starts, but the noise and
excitement from the hundreds of other illuminated boats make it
quite inaudible. . . . Behind follows the procession of specially
decorated barges. Pride of place is taken by the next largest boat
on the Grand Canal, on which is erected a fifteen-foot Coca-cola
bottle lit up from the inside. ... The phosphorescent stream moves
slowly on its way to San Marco, and so congested does the Canal
become that it would be quite impossible to fill in the water. The
boatmen quarrel for right of way: the merry parties sing and
drink; for a while all is gaiety in our boat. The illuminated palaces
look superb and, in honour of the occasion, allow glimpses of their
sumptuous interiors. And then rounding the bend one of our party
is sick and has to be put a^ore. ... The Galle&ante movesvery
slowly indeed-leaving the Rialto at nine and reaching San Marco

273

THE LION AND THE PEACOCK

at half-past-twelve. The full moon keeps pace, but it becomes very
cold upon the water by midnight. ... By one o'clock I last saw the
Galkggiante moving out across the Bacino towards the open sea,
and as far as my feelings were concerned it could go on and on for
ever Our party dispersed with a shudder, and so to bed.

274

Envoi

"\1T 7"-^ carous ed for dta last time among the narrow lanes beyond
W the Salute, over the Accademk Bridge decorated with
festoons of yellow lanterns from the Festa the night before then
along the route up to the station.

Here for the tourist all things end. The journey over the kgoon

is the return to the future Giovanni left at midnight, and we had

little time to spare except to say goodbye. . . .

The Grand Canal was deserted on my way back. We were the
only boat upon the water. . . . The palaces, the Rialto, the final
splendour of the Salute, still hung with lights or floodlit, looked like
an empty stage when the pky was over.

INDEX TO PAINTINGS AND
PAINTING

Adoration. Giambatrista Tiepolo. Sacristy of San Marco. 256
Annunciation. Veronese. Accademia. 172
Apotheosis of Venice. Veronese. Palazzo Ducale. 172
Assumption of Our Lady. Titian. Church of the Frari. 170
Assumption. Tintoretto. I Gesuiti. 185

Bacchanals, of Titian. 170-171

Baptism. Veronese. Il Redentore. 248

Bella, Gabrielle, fifteen paintings by, from the Cosmorama Veneziana. Querini-

Stampalia Gallery. 197-207
Bellini, School of. Paintings in II Redentore. 248
Bull-waiting. Francesco Zuccarelli. Accademia. 213

Coronation with, Thorns. Giambattista Tiepolo. Sant' Alvise. 208
Coronation of the Virgin. Vivarini. San Pantalon. 182
Courtesans, The. Carpaccio. Museo Correr. 159
Creation of the Animals. Tintoretto. Accademia. 171

Flagellation. Giambattista Tiepolo. Sant* Alvise. 208
Glorification of San Pantalon. Fuminiani. San Pantalon. 183
Isola di San Giorgio. Francesco Guardi. Accademia. 210
Last Supper paintings of Tintoretto. 173
Longhi, Paintings of the. 214-215

Madonna and Child with Saints. Vivarini. II Redentore. 248

Madonna with St. Clara and Two Dominican Nuns. Giambattista Tiepolo. Santa

Maria Rosario. 256

Massacre of the Innocents. Tintoretto. Scuola di San Rocco. 172
Martyrdom of St. Lawrence. Titian. I Gesuiti. 185
Miracle of the Holy Cross. Series by Bastiani, Bellini, Carpaccio, Diana, MansueG.

Accademia. 155-158

New World, The. Giandomenico Tiepolo. Ca' Rezzonico. 216
Nocturnal Apparition. Ricco. Accademia, 212

Portrait Painting. 152, 160, 171, 194, 19<$-I97

277

INDEX TO PAINTINGS AND PAINTING

Removal of the Body of St. Mark. Tintoretto. Accademia. 172
Road to Calvary. Giambattista Tiepolo. Sant* Alvise. 208
Romantic Movement, Settecento. 210-214

San Rocco. Carlo Crivelli. Wallace Collection. 258
Story of St. Ursula. Series by Carpaccio. Accademia. 153
Supper in the House ofLevi. Veronese. Accademia. 173

Tempesta, La. Giorgione. Accademia. 160-162

Veduta Painting. 54, 194-196
View with a Bridge. Marieschi. Accademia. 211
View with an Obelisk. Marieschi. Accademia. 211
View of an Island. Guardi. Accademia. 210

Virgin in Glory Appearing to the Blessed Simon Stock. Giambattista Tiepolo. Scuola
dei Carmini. 256.

278

INDEX TO MOSAICS

Basilica di San Marco : 140-146

Cupola of tie Ascension: Nave.

Cupola of the Pentacost: Nave.

Cupola of the Apocalypse: Baptistry.

Crucifixion, Kiss of Judas, Christ before Pilate, Descent into Hell, Resurrection,

Incredulity of St. Thomas: "Western arches of the central cupola.
Old Testament Scenes Cupola of the Creation, Life of Adam and Eve, Cain

and Abel, the Ark, the Flood, "Increase and Multiply 9 : The Atrium.
Scenes from the lives of: Philip, James, Bartholomew, Matthew* Mary. Rgures

of: St. Hilarion, Paul the Hermit, St. Leonard and St. Clement.
Life of St. Isodore: Chapel of St. Isodore.
Story of St. Mark: Portal of St. Alipio and West Transept.
Paradiso by Tintoretto : Roof above the Atrium.

Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello : 226-227
The Last Judgement: West Wall.

279

GENERAL INDEX

Accademia, 63, 171, 210-214, 257, 258,

259

Accademia Bridge, 20, 264, 266, 274
Adriatic, I, 37, 59, 60, 89, I45 *55

181, 206, 243
Advertising, 18, 20
Alberghi, see Hotels
Alexandria, 79, 141, 145, i?2
Alps, 9, 10, n, 150, 212, 213, 247
Angels, 140, 172, 179, 180, 183, 185,

220, 226, 227
Animals, see under names
Antiques, 83-88
Artists, see under names
Arsenale, 107
Astrologers, 47, 75
Attila, 225, 227
Autostrada, 17-19

Bacino, 274

Bacchanals, 128, 170-171, 208, 212-213

Banks, 35

Banquets, 172-174, 194

Banqueting Hall, Whitehall, 228

Barbaro family, 188

Baroque Style, 4, 7<5, no, 124, 134, 140,

164, 177-190, 193, 200, 2O6, 248, 256,
258, 270

Bars, 25, 255, 263, 264, 265

Basilica, see San Marco, S. Maria

Assunta.
Bastiani, 155
Bath, 124

Baths of Caracalla, no, 213
Battaglioli, 213
Bear-baiting, 199
Beards, 125, 248
Beauty preparations, 159
Belgrade, 12
Bellini> Gentile and Giovanni, 4, 70, 152,

155, 160, i<5i, 248, 258
Bella, Gabriele, 197
BeUs, 20, 38, 99, 109, 190, 230, 253
Bible, 104, 139, 141

Birds, 81, 153, 155, 158, 159, 172

202, 209, 237, 259
Bocca della Piazza, 66
Bonnard, no
Bradford, 69
Brescia, n

Bridge of Boats, 123, 128
Bridge of Paradise, Arsenale, 107
Brighella, 202
Brighton, 76, 103, 246, 258
British Consulate, 264
Browning, 3
Brunelleschi, 135
Buckingham Palace, 48
Bucintoro, 107, 206
Bull-baiting, 198, 213
Burano, 13, 221
Byron, 3
Byzantine Style, 4, 94, 133-146, 164,

165, 223, 227, 246

Ca' d'Oro, 135, 158, 165-166

Cat>ot,John, 2

Cafes, 23, 42, 46, 48, 50, 12, 76, 89, 113,

125, 220, 254
Caligula, House of, 213
Calle del Paradiso, 72
Calle Larga, 50, 53
Cameras, see Photography
Camera obscura, 195
Campanile di San Marco, 13, 37, 42,

69, 70, 125, 128, 156, 200, 204, 230
Campo Daniele Mannin, 109
Campo Sant* Angelo, 199
Campo Santi Apostoli, 264
Campo San Barnabo, 89
Campo San Bartelomeo, 55
Campo della Bragora, 107
Campo Santa Margarita, 261
Campo San Mois&, 180
Campo Santa Maria Formosa, 108, 199,

219

Campo San Stefano, 264, 266
Campo San Zanipolo, 219

280

GENERAL INDEX

Campo San Zobenigo, 123

Canale della Grazia, 23

Canaletto, 69, 195, 196, 197, 210, 211,

214, 244
Canova, 246, 257

Capuchin Fathers, 125, 246, 247, 249
Camionus, Bartelomeus, 190
Carpaccio, 4, 80, 153, 155, 156, 159, 160,

166, 171, 202
Carnival, 26, 155, 157, *93, 194, 197,

201-204, 211, 216, 263, 270
Casa degli Spiriti, 220
Catacombs, 142
Cats, 79-80, 86, 199
Chandeliers, Venetian, 79, 234, 239, 265
Charlatans, 201, 209, 216
Chelsea, 41

Chioggia, 17, 60, 244, 254
Chiesa dei Vecchi, 188-190
Chinoiserie, 238, 258-259
Churches, see under names
Cinemas, no

Cinquecento, in general, 169-174
Civic Hospital, 165, 219
Clocks, 43, 131
Clock Tower, or Tower of the Moors,

37, 43, 128, 131, 156, 199, 204, 256,

271

Colonna, Francesco, 150
Colleone Monument, 72, 219
Columbine, 216
Columns of St. Mark and St. Theodore,

42, 45, 59, 75, 89, 200
Commedia del* Arte, 85, 201, 202, 266,

271

Constantinople, Istanbul, 12, 134
Core///, Marie, 3
Crivelli, Carlo, 258
Crosses on St. Mark's, 43, 49, <$o 153,

235
Crystal Palace, 238, 240

Danielli Hotel, 24

Death, 177-178, 185, 197, 202

Diana, 155

Doctor, The, 204

Dogana, 127, 186, 206

Doge, Doges, 143, *45> U<5, U9-I50,

188, 200, 201, 204, 206, 256
Dogs, 76, 80-81, 155, *5<5, 158, 159,

199, 209
Dolomites, 40

Domes, 60, no, 133, 135, 153, ig<S, 206,

253, 269
Donatella, 257

Dream of Poliphilus, 150, 162
Dublin, 88

Edinburgh, 195

Electric lights, see Illuminations
Elephants, 102, 183
Euganean Hills, 160
Etchings of G. B. Tiepolo, 209
Euston Station, 19

Fair of the Sensa, 201

Facades, see under individual buildings

Festa, Festivals, 47, 123-128, 200, 204

Festa della Luce, 273-274

Festa del Redentore, 123-128

Fireworks, 126, 273-274

Florence, 135, 150, 164

Florian's, 33, 46

Flower Sellers, 47, 50

Flying figures in Art, 139

Fondaco dei Turchi, 134

Fondamente Nuove, 46, 207, 219

Frari, Church of the, 170, 257

Funerals, 202, 220

Fuminiani, 183

Fusina, 17

... . oo ... te, 273, 274

Gambling, 194, 204, 206, 220, 264

Gaspari, 213

George III, Collection at Windsor,

195-196
Gesiuti, Church of the, 184-186, 199,

246

Giants, the Bronze, see Clock Tower
Giorgione, 161-162, 164, 170, 212
Giotto, 112, 138
Giudecca, 31, 123-127, 210, 243-249,

254

Giudecca Canal, 124-127, 243, 253
Glass, in general, 25, 30, 54, 57, 79>

90, 135, 155, 214

Glass Museum at Murano, 233-241
Glass, Venetian, 174
Gondola, Gondoliers, 19, 23, 25-26, 30,

75, 79, 99, no, IJ 3> "THrao, 125-

127, 156, 193, 205, 206, 210, 211, 219,

220, 253, 264, 269

28l

GENERAL INDEX

Gothic Style, Venetian, 63, 69, 134, 152,

166, 259, 269
Goya, 207, 209, 222
Grand Canal, 18, 19, 23, 25, 60, 75, no,

117, 127, 156, 186, 205, 244, 253, 264,

266, 273, 274
Grand Tour, 4, 9. 194
Grotesque, The, 76, 155, 174, i?8, 190,

193, 202, 208

Guardi, Francesco, 85, 186, 210, ,211, 244
Gulf of Venice, 47

Hampstead, 41

Harlequin, Harlequinade, 177, 201, 202,

216, 266

Heaven, 112, 177, 182, 226, 227
Hell, 141, 177, 226
Hell Fire Club, 61
Heraldry, 155, 181, 190
Hogarth, William, 215
Holdemess, 76
Hollywood, 26, no
Horses, 79, 102, 172, 183, 228, 234
Horses, The Bronze, of St. Mark's, 69,

70, 97, 228

Hostels, Youth Hostel, 31, 254
Hotels, and Alberghi, 5, 14, 23-29
Humanism, 135, 149, 152, 160, 162,

164, 170, 171, 188, 194, 271

UlumiTiarlons, 47-50, 123-127, 273-274

Inquisition, 169, 170

Isabelle, 216

Isola di Sant* Elena, 59

Isok di San Francesco Deserto, 207, 221

Isola di San Michele, 45, no, 220

Ispahan, 135

Istanbul, see Constantinople

Istria, 128

Istrian Stone, 71, 74

Jazz, 45, 46, 128, 195
John the Baptist, 257-258
Jolti, 213
Judaism, 135, 142

Kke, Paul, 97

Lace, 53, 202, 216
Lanterns, see Illuminations
Leyburn Market, 261

Libreria Vecchia, 45, 60, 75, 200, 214

Libro d'Oro, 3, 241

Lido, 31, 60, no, 243, 265

Lion of St. Mark, 43, 54, 57, 81, 172,

193, 257

Lions, 107, 165, 193, 224
Loggetta, 50, 200
Lombardic Style, 153, 162-165
Lombardo, Pietro, 162, 164
Lombardy, 10, n, 212
London, 9, 19, 195, 228
Longhena, 4
Longhi, Pietro and Alessandro, 214-215,

259
Louvre, 228

Madonna del Orto, 74

Madrid, 209, 214

Maggiore, Lake, 10

Mansueti, 155, 157, 158, 166, 258

Maps, 30

Marco Polo, 79, 136

Marble, 71, 135, 136, 155, 158, 181,

184-185, 220, 224

Marieschi, Michele, 211, 272

Masks, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 205,
208, 216

Masquerades, see Carnival

Medici Tombs, Florence, 181

Merceria, 41, 199

Mestre, 17

Mice, 79, 80, 234

Michelangelo, 141, 170, 174

Milan, 12, 30, 248

Mirrors, 56, 86, 128, 234, 270, 271

Mohammedans, 145, 146, 153, 156, 158,
165, 174, 200

Molo, 42, 50, 98, 127, 2ii

Monkeys, 81, 157, 166

Moretti, 213

Morosini, Francesco, 193

Morris, William, 150

Mosaic, in general, 30, 54, 151, 225, 269

Mosaics of St. Mark's, 80 et seq, 97,
133-146

Mosaics of Santa Maria Assunta, Tor-
cello, 225-227

Mosaics, Restoration of, 89-95

Moses, 1 80, 182

Murano, 13, 220, 224, 233-241

Murano, Museum at, see Glass

Murano, Andrea da, 258

282

GENERAL INDEX

Music, Musicians, 20, 34, 45-46, 48,
124-126, 156, 187, 193, 201, 213, 264,
273

Napoleon, 2, 43, 228
Napoleonica, 39, 48, 228
Nero's Circus, 70
Newsvendors, 39

Opera, 100-102, 128, 264
Orchestras, see Music
Otello, of Puccini, 101
Owen Jones, 138

Padua, I, n, 17, 30, 112, 188
Pageant Paintings, 152-158
Palladia, 4, 124, 164, 246-247
Palaces, interiors, 83-88, 158, 169, 173-

174, 212, 214-216
Palazzi Loredan e Farsetti, 134
Palazzo Dario, 134, 165
Palazzo Ducale, 37, 45, 69, 70, 98, 112,

125, 127, 134, 146, 152, 169, 172, 198,

200, 201, 211, 214, 26l

Palazzo Rezzonico, 215-216, 239

Palazzo San Silvestro, 156

Pagliacci, 209, 216

Pan, 142, 209

Pantaloon, 216

Pantheon, Rome, 187

Pantomime, 45, 55

Paris, 12, 228

Parthenon, 193

Pavilion, see Brighton

Peacock, 81, 137, 153, 157, 158, 160,

166, 193, 224
Pellegrini, 214
Photography, Photographers, 31, 34,

35-37, 39, 47, <%, 72, 195, 197
Piazza San Marco, 20, 25, 31, 33-50, 60,

70, 71, 80, 102, 123, 131, 145, 155,

160, 194, 198, 199, 202, 204, 228, 243
Piazzale Roma, 19, 23
Piazzetta dei Leoncini, 33, 50, 113, 128,

156

Piazzetta di San Marco, 20, 42-50, 70,

123, 127, 200
Piccadilly Circus, 17
Pier, see Brighton
Pigeons, 20, 33, 35, 37, 74, 230
Pile Foundations, 71, 76
Police, 12, 41, 79

Pompeii, 259

Ponte degli Angcli, 75

Ponte San Cristoforo, 264

Ponte San Fosca, 198

Ponte dei Ebrei, 265

Porta della Cam, 70, 156

Porters, 13, 19, 23

Printing, 142, 150

Processions, see under Festivals and

Carnival

Pulcinello, 201, 202, 204, 208, 216
Pulpits, 136, 224
Punch and Judy, 55, 195, 201
Puppets, 216

Quadri's, 33, 46

Quattrocento, in general, 149-166, 169

Querini-Stampalia Gallery, 197-207

Redentore, Church of the, 123, 164,

246, 253
Regattas, 205
Restaurants, 31, 61-67, 108, 123-125,

222, 244, 245, 263-264
Requiem, of Verdi, 98
Rialto, I, 3, 55, 70, 81, 156, 211, 230
Rialto Bridge, 20, 31, 156, 198, 211,

273, 274

Ricco, Sebastiano, 212, 214
Ridotto, The, 204-205
Rio Santa Maria Formosa, 76
Rio dei Meloni, 81
Rio dei Mendicanti, 219
Rioting, 146, 198
Riva degli Schiavoni, 23, 59, 75
Rococo Style, 140, 237, 240, 270
Roman art, 137, 151, *53, i<56, J 73>

233, 235

Roman Forum, 213
Rome, 73, 74, 102, 140, 150, 174, *77

178, 187, 188, 213, 224
Rjosalba Caniera, 196-197, 214
Rousseau, Le Douanier, 246
Rustin, 3, 69, 7<> 177, 239* 254, 256

Sacred Tribunal, 174
Saint Heliodorus, 225
Saint Pancras Station, 19
Saint Paul's, London, 229
Saint Peter's, Rome, 224, 257

283

GENERAL INDEX

Sala del Senate, 169
San Cosimo, Giudecca, 244
San Donate, Murano, 136, 224
San Francesco delk Vigna, 14.5
San Fosca, Torcello, 224
San Giorgio dei Greci, 70
San Giorgio Maggiore, 23, 59, 123, 210
San Isodoro, Capdla di, 142-145
San Lio, 157

San Lorenzo, 185, 248, 258
San Lorenzo, Canal of, 157
San Marco: St. Mark, 145, 146, 172
San Marco, Basilica di,; St. Mark's,
35-50, 60, 69, 74, 76, 89-95, 97, 108,

113, 127, 128, 133-146, 151, 165, 187,

201, 204, 219, 223, 224, 226, 228, 230,
246, 269, 271
San Moise, 25, 178, 180-182, 184, 188,

246

San Pantalon, 182-184
San Rocco, 258
Sansovino, 4, 87, 214
San Simione Piccolo, 13
San Teodoro: St. Theodore, 145
San Trovaso, 173
San Zanipolo, 188
Sant' Alvise, 208

Santa Maria Assunta, Basilica di, Tor-
cello, 221, 222-230
Santa Maria Formosa, 178
Santa Maria dei Miracoli, 162-165
Santa Maria della Salute, 20, 59, 186-

187, 206, 253, 270, 274
Santa Maria Rosario, 126, 256
Santa Maria Zobenigo, 187-188
Santa Veronica, 248, 249
Scalzi Bridge, 5, 255, 265
Scaramouche, 216
Sculpture, Baroque, 179-190
Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, 112, 138
Scuola dei Carmini, 256, 261
Scuola di Giovanni e Paolo, 173
Scuola Grande di San Marco, 165
Scuola di Sant' Orsola, 153
Scuola di San Rocco, 142, 258
Sebettico, 149

Seicento, in general, 177-190
Settecento, in general, 4, 193-216
Shops, 34, 45, 53-58, 158, 201
Sicily, 40
Singers, see Music
Sirocco, 77, 107, 219

Smith, Joseph, 195

Sottoportico del Arco Celeste, 102

Sottoporrico San Zaccaria, 23

Speedboats, 5, 23, 118, 253

Station, Venice Railway, 13, 254, 255,

265, 274

Studio, Mosaic Workers', 89
Street Vendors, 30, 47, 63-64, 156

Taj Mahal, 135

Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza, 187

Teatro Fenice, 64, 204

Tennis, Indoor, 205

Tessera, see Mosaics, Restoration of

Theatres, in general, 204

Theodora, The Empress, 70

Tiepolo, Giambattista, 4, 123, 207-209,

214, 216, 256, 261
Tiepolo, Giandomenico, 4, 214, 216
Tintoretto, 4, 75, 95, 97, i?o, 171. i?2,

173, 185, 208, 225

Titian, 4, 108, 169, 170, 185, 246, 257
Titus, Arch of, 213
Torcello, 13, 210, 219-230
Tourist Bureaux, 34
Tower of the Moors, see Clock Tower
Toys, and Toyshops, 55-57, 64
Traghetto, 25, no
Trajan's Arch, 70
Trattorie, see Restaurants
Trieste, 12, 66, 67
Turner, 196

Vaporetto, no, 113, 120

Vasari, 161

Verdi, 98

Verona, n, 102

Veronese, 170, 172, 173, 174, 248

Veneto-Byzantine Style, 134

Vespucci, Simonetta, 158

Vienna, Viennese, 45, 47, 97, 99

Vicenza, n

Victoria Coach Station, 19

Villa Madama, 87

Visentini, 213

Vivarini, The, 182, 248, 257

Volcanoes, 126

Wagner, 3

Wallace Collection, 196

Walpole, Horace, 195

284

GENERAL INDEX

Westminster Abbey, 228 Zais, Giuseppe, 213

Windsor Collection, see George III Zattere, Le, 31, 243, 253-255, 263, 265,

Wine Bars, see Bars 266

Wurtzburg, 214 Zianigo, Villa at, 216

Zodiac, Signs of the, 43
Youth Hostel, see Hostels Zucearelli, Francesco, 212, 214

285