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Stones of Venice [introductions]

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[Illustration: John Ruskin.]

STONES OF VENICE

BY JOHN RUSKIN




THE STONES OF VENICE:

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS AND LOCAL INDICES
(PRINTED SEPARATELY)
FOR THE USE OF TRAVELLERS WHILE STAYING IN VENICE AND VERONA.


BY
JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.




PREFACE.


This volume is the first of a series designed by the Author with the
purpose of placing in the hands of the public, in more serviceable form,
those portions of his earlier works which he thinks deserving of a
permanent place in the system of his general teaching. They were at
first intended to be accompanied by photographic reductions of the
principal plates in the larger volumes; but this design has been
modified by the Author's increasing desire to gather his past and
present writings into a consistent body, illustrated by one series of
plates, purchasable in separate parts, and numbered consecutively. Of
other prefatory matter, once intended,--apologetic mostly,--the reader
shall be spared the cumber: and a clear prospectus issued by the
publisher of the new series of plates, as soon as they are in a state of
forwardness.

The second volume of this edition will contain the most useful matter
out of the third volume of the old one, closed by its topical index,
abridged and corrected.

BRANTWOOD,

_3rd May_, 1879.




CONTENTS.


CHAP.

I. The Quarry

II. The Throne

III. Torcello

IV. St. Mark's

V. The Ducal Palace




THE STONES OF VENICE




CHAPTER I.

[FIRST OF THE OLD EDITION.]

THE QUARRY.


SECTION I. Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean,
three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands:
the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great
powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third,
which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led
through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.

The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded
for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets
of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a
lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning: for
the very depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we
forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and
the sea, that they were once "as in Eden, the garden of God."

Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in
endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final
period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak--so
quiet,--so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt,
as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which
was the City, and which the Shadow.

I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever
lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to
be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like
passing bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.

SECTION II. It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons
which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this
strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of
countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,--barred
with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean,
where the surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries
in which we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but
their results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as
they bear upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind
than that usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may,
perhaps, in the outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to
form a clearer idea of the importance of every existing expression of
Venetian character through Venetian art, and of the breadth of interest
which the true history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have
gleaned from the current fables of her mystery or magnificence.

SECTION III. Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so
during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including
the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing
severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the
change in the form of her government, or altogether as assuredly in
great part, to changes, in the character of the persons of whom it was
composed.

The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years, from
the first establishment of a consular government on the island of the
Rialto, [Footnote: Appendix I., "Foundations of Venice."] to the moment
when the General-in-chief of the French army of Italy pronounced the
Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of this period, Two Hundred and
Seventy-six years [Footnote: Appendix II., "Power of the Doges."] were
passed in a nominal subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially
to Padua, and in an agitated form of democracy, of which the executive
appears to have been entrusted to tribunes, [Footnote: Sismondi, Hist.
des Rép. Ital., vol. i. ch. v.] chosen, one by the inhabitants of each
of the principal islands. For six hundred years, [Footnote: Appendix
III., "Serrar del Consiglio."] during which the power of Venice was
continually on the increase, her government was an elective monarchy,
her King or doge possessing, in early times at least, as much
independent authority as any other European sovereign, but an authority
gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened almost daily of its
prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and incapable
magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the image of a
king, lasted for five hundred years, during which Venice reaped the
fruits of her former energies, consumed them,--and expired.

SECTION IV. Let the reader therefore conceive the existence of the
Venetian state as broadly divided into two periods: the first of nine
hundred, the second of five hundred years, the separation being marked
by what was called the "Serrar del Consiglio;" that is to say, the final
and absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty, and the
establishment of the government in their hands to the exclusion alike of
the influence of the people on the one side, and the authority of the
doge on the other.

Then the first period, of nine hundred years, presents us with the most
interesting spectacle of a people struggling out of anarchy into order
and power; and then governed, for the most part, by the worthiest and
noblest man whom they could find among them, [Footnote: "Ha saputo
trovar modo che non uno, non pochi, non molti, signoreggiano, ma molti
buoni, pochi migliori, e insiememente, _un ottimo solo_." (_Sansovino_,)
Ah, well done, Venice! Wisdom this, indeed.] called their Doge or Leader,
with an aristocracy gradually and resolutely forming itself around him,
out of which, and at last by which, he was chosen; an aristocracy owing
its origin to the accidental numbers, influence, and wealth of some among
the families of the fugitives from the older Venetia, and gradually
organizing itself, by its unity and heroism, into a separate body.

This first period includes the rise of Venice, her noblest achievements,
and the circumstances which determined her character and position among
European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated,
we find the names of all her hero princes,--of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo
Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.

SECTION V. The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the
most eventful in the career of Venice--the central struggle of her
life--stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara--disturbed
by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of
Falier--oppressed by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza--and
distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this
period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs),
Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno.

I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo
Zeno, 8th May, 1418; [Footnote: Daru, liv. xii. ch. xii.] the _visible_
commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the
Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari
followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large
acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in
Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the
battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio. In 1454,
Venice, the first of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the
Turk in the same year was established the Inquisition of State,
[Footnote: Daru, liv. xvi. cap. xx. We owe to this historian the
discovery of the statutes of the tribunal and date of its establishment.]
and from this period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious
form under which it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish
invasion spread terror to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508 the
league of Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the commencement
of the decline of the Venetian power; [Footnote: Ominously signified by
their humiliation to the Papal power (as before to the Turkish) in 1509,
and their abandonment of their right of appointing the clergy of their
territories.] the commercial prosperity of Venice in the close of the
fifteenth century blinding her historians to the previous evidence of the
diminution of her internal strength.

SECTION VI. Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between
the establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the
diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question
at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or
determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple
question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of
individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation, of the
Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the oligarchy
itself be not the sign and evidence, rather than the cause, of national
enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of
Venice might not be written almost without reference to the construction
of her senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the history of a
people eminently at unity in itself, descendants of Roman race, long
disciplined by adversity, and compelled by its position either to live
nobly or to perish:--for a thousand years they fought for life; for
three hundred they invited death: their battle was rewarded, and their
call was heard.

SECTION VII. Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and, at
many periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism;
and the man who exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her king,
sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter, nor to her:
the real question is, not so much what names they bore, or with what
powers they were entrusted, as how they were trained; how they were made
masters of themselves, servants of their country, patient of distress,
impatient of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the change from
the time when she could find saviours among those whom she had cast into
prison, to that when the voices of her own children commanded her to
sign covenant with Death. [Footnote: The senate voted the abdication of
their authority by a majority of 512 to 14. (Alison, ch. xxiii.)]

SECTION VIII. On this collateral question I wish the reader's mind to be
fixed throughout all our subsequent inquiries. It will give double
interest to every detail: nor will the interest be profitless; for the
evidence which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be
both frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of her political
prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual
religion.

I say domestic and individual; for--and this is the second point which I
wish the reader to keep in mind--the most curious phenomenon in all
Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its
deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or
fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to
last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only
aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial
interest,--this the one motive of all her important political acts, or
enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor,
but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her
conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their facility.
The fame of success remains; when the motives of attempt are forgotten;
and the casual reader of her history may perhaps be surprised to be
reminded, that the expedition which was commanded by the noblest of her
princes, and whose results added most to her military glory, was one in
which while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its
devotion, she first calculated the highest price she could exact from
its piety for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement
of her own private interests, at once broke her faith [Footnote: By
directing the arms of the Crusaders against a Christian prince. (Daru,
liv. iv. ch. iv. viii.)] and betrayed her religion.

SECTION IX. And yet, in the midst of this national criminality, we shall
be struck again and again by the evidences of the most noble individual
feeling. The tears of Dandolo were not shed in hypocrisy, though they
could not blind him to the importance of the conquest of Zara. The habit
of assigning to religion a direct influence over all _his own_ actions,
and all the affairs of _his own_ daily life, is remarkable in every great
Venetian during the times of the prosperity of the state; nor are
instances wanting in which the private feeling of the citizens reaches
the sphere of their policy, and even becomes the guide of its course
where the scales of expediency are doubtfully balanced. I sincerely trust
that the inquirer would be disappointed who should endeavor to trace any
more immediate reasons for their adoption of the cause of Alexander III.
against Barbarossa, than the piety which was excited by the character of
their suppliant, and the noble pride which was provoked by the insolence
of the emperor. But the heart of Venice is shown only in her hastiest
councils; her worldly spirit recovers the ascendency whenever she has
time to calculate the probabilities of advantage, or when they are
sufficiently distinct to need no calculation; and the entire subjection
of private piety to national policy is not only remarkable throughout the
almost endless series of treacheries and tyrannies by which her empire
was enlarged and maintained, but symbolized by a very singular
circumstance in the building of the city itself. I am aware of no other
city of Europe in which its cathedral was not the principal feature. But
the principal church in Venice was the chapel attached to the palace of
her prince, and called the "Chiesa Ducale." The patriarchal church,
[Footnote: Appendix 4, "San Pietro di Castello."] inconsiderable in size
and mean in decoration, stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian
group, and its name, as well as its site, is probably unknown to the
greater number of travellers passing hastily through the city. Nor is it
less worthy of remark, that the two most important temples of Venice,
next to the ducal chapel, owe their size and magnificence, not to
national effort, but to the energy of the Franciscan and Dominican monks,
supported by the vast organization of those great societies on the
mainland of Italy, and countenanced by the most pious, and perhaps also,
in his generation, the most wise, of all the princes of Venice,
[Footnote: Tomaso Mocenigo, above named, Section V.] who now rests
beneath the roof of one of those very temples, and whose life is not
satirized by the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor has placed
around his tomb.

SECTION X. There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which
we have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo
Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep, and constant tone of individual
religion characterizing the lives of the citizens of Venice in her
greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and
immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct
even of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a
simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which
a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that
religious feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his
conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy
serenity of mind and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and
a habit of heroism which never fails them, even when the immediate
motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this
spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with
its failure her decline, and that with a closeness and precision which
it will be one of the collateral objects of the following essay to
demonstrate from such accidental evidence as the field of its inquiry
presents. And, thus far, all is natural and simple. But the stopping
short of this religious faith when it appears likely to influence
national action, correspondent as it is, and that most strikingly, with
several characteristics of the temper of our present English
legislature, is a subject, morally and politically, of the most curious
interest and complicated difficulty; one, however, which the range of my
present inquiry will not permit me to approach, and for the treatment of
which I must be content to furnish materials in the light I may be able
to throw upon the private tendencies of the Venetian character.

SECTION XI. There is, however, another most interesting feature in the
policy of Venice which will be often brought before us; and which a
Romanist would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely,
the magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the
temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid
survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama
to which I have already alluded, closed by that ever memorable scene in
the portico of St. Mark's, [Footnote:
"In that temple porch,
(The brass is gone, the porphyry remains,)
Did BARBAROSSA fling his mantle off,
And kneeling, on his neck receive the foot
Of the proud Pontiff--thus at last consoled
For flight, disguise, and many an aguish shake
On his stony pillow."

I need hardly say whence the lines are taken: Rogers' "Italy" has, I
believe, now a place in the best beloved compartment of all libraries,
and will never be removed from it. There is more true expression of the
spirit of Venice in the passages devoted to her in that poem, than in all
else that has been written of her.] the central expression in most men's
thoughts of the unendurable elevation of the pontifical power; it is true
that the proudest thoughts of Venice, as well as the insignia of her
prince, and the form of her chief festival, recorded the service thus
rendered to the Roman Church. But the enduring sentiment of years more
than balanced the enthusiasm of a moment; and the bull of Clement V.,
which excommunicated the Venetians and their doge, likening them to
Dathan, Abiram, Absalom, and Lucifer, is a stronger evidence of the great
tendencies of the Venetian government than the umbrella of the doge or
the ring of the Adriatic. The humiliation of Francesco Dandolo blotted
out the shame of Barbarossa, and the total exclusion of ecclesiastics
from all share in the councils of Venice became an enduring mark of her
knowledge of the spirit of the Church of Rome, and of her defiance of it.

To this exclusion of Papal influence from her councils, the Romanist
will attribute their irreligion, and the Protestant their success.
[Footnote: At least, such success as they had. Vide Appendix 5, "The
Papal Power in Venice."]

The first may be silenced by a reference to the character of the policy
of the Vatican itself; and the second by his own shame, when he reflects
that the English legislature sacrificed their principles to expose
themselves to the very danger which the Venetian senate sacrificed
theirs to avoid.

SECTION XII. One more circumstance remains to be noted respecting the
Venetian government, the singular unity of the families composing
it,--unity far from sincere or perfect, but still admirable when
contrasted with the fiery feuds, the almost daily revolutions, the
restless successions of families and parties in power, which fill the
annals of the other states of Italy. That rivalship should sometimes be
ended by the dagger, or enmity conducted to its ends under the mask of
law, could not but be anticipated where the fierce Italian spirit was
subjected to so severe a restraint: it is much that jealousy appears
usually unmingled with illegitimate ambition, and that, for every
instance in which private passion sought its gratification through
public danger, there are a thousand in which it was sacrificed to the
public advantage. Venice may well call upon us to note with reverence,
that of all the towers which are still seen rising like a branchless
forest from her islands, there is but one whose office was other than
that of summoning to prayer, and that one was a watch-tower only
[Footnote: Thus literally was fulfilled the promise to St. Mark,--Pax
e.] from first to last, while the palaces of the other cities of Italy
were lifted into sullen fortitudes of rampart, and fringed with forked
battlements for the javelin and the bow, the sands of Venice never sank
under the weight of a war tower, and her roof terraces were wreathed
with Arabian imagery, of golden globes suspended on the leaves of
lilies. [Footnote: The inconsiderable fortifications of the arsenal are
no exception to this statement, as far as it regards the city itself.
They are little more than a semblance of precaution against the attack
of a foreign enemy.]

SECTION XIII. These, then, appear to me to be the points of chief
general interest in the character and fate of the Venetian people. I
would next endeavor to give the reader some idea of the manner in which
the testimony of Art bears upon these questions, and of the aspect which
the arts themselves assume when they are regarded in their true
connection with the history of the state.

1st. Receive the witness of Painting.

It will be remembered that I put the commencement of the Fall of Venice
as far back as 1418.

Now, John Bellini was born in 1423, and Titian in 1480. John Bellini,
and his brother Gentile, two years older than he, close the line of the
sacred painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of religious faith
animates their works to the last. There is no religion in any work of
Titian's: there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or
sympathies either in himself, or in those for whom he painted. His
larger sacred subjects are merely themes for the exhibition of pictorial
rhetoric,--composition and color. His minor works are generally made
subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the church of the
Frari is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connection
between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who
surround her.

Now this is not merely because John Bellini was a religious man and
Titian was not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the
school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their
artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own
natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up
in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the
vital religion of Venice had expired.

SECTION XIV. The _vital_ religion, observe, not the formal. Outward
observance was as strict as ever; and doge and senator still were
painted, in almost every important instance, kneeling before the Madonna
or St. Mark; a confession of faith made universal by the pure gold of
the Venetian sequin. But observe the great picture of Titian's in the
ducal palace, of the Doge Antonio Grimani kneeling before Faith: there
is a curious lesson in it. The figure of Faith is a coarse portrait of
one of Titian's least graceful female models: Faith had become carnal.
The eye is first caught by the flash of the Doge's armor. The heart of
Venice was in her wars, not in her worship.

The mind of Tintoret, incomparably more deep and serious than that of
Titian, casts the solemnity of its own tone over the sacred subjects
which it approaches, and sometimes forgets itself into devotion; but the
principle of treatment is altogether the same as Titian's: absolute
subordination of the religious subject to purposes of decoration or
portraiture.

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