Venice (25 page)

A pair of baby seagulls, perhaps, lives beneath the poop of one boat, stamping angrily about on their infinitesimal webbed feet, and sometimes plodding across to the courtyard fountain for a dignified circuit of its pool – four times round precisely, no more, no less, before returning to their nest beneath the protruding eyes of one of the lesser-known philosophers. A young duck inhabits a nearby sarcophagus. In a wire cage in the shadow of Titian two green snakes are moodily coiled, and huddled beneath the earth of a wooden box are three leathery salamanders. Upstairs the Museum of Natural History, impeccably organized, breathes the spirit of rational inquiry:
but there is something delightfully hare-brained to the courtyard below.

The naval museum at the Arsenal is similarly intriguing, with its bits of ships, banners, figure-heads, lions galore and remains of the Bucintoro; so is the Scuola di San Giovanni, with a beautiful Renaissance courtyard and staircase, and a main hall that is half museum and half carpenter's shop; so is the tiny Oratory of the Annunciation, twenty feet square, in the Campo Santʼ Angelo; and the carved stone girl on the Zattere who has tied her long hair beneath her chin, like a muffler; and the boatyards of the city, and its innumerable cloistered courtyards, its unsuspected churches, its quirks and idiosyncrasies of architecture, its topsy-turvy street plan.

There is a column-head among the arcades of the Doge's Palace that tells, for no apparent reason, the sad life story of a child – love at first sight between its mooning parents, courtship, conception (in a double bed), birth, childhood, early death, tears. In any other city this sequence of images might strike you as perfectly inexplicable, bearing as it does no relation to anything else in the palace, containing no apparent historical or religious allusion, and conveying no recognizable moral. Here, though, it does not seem untoward: for when you have wandered around this city for a time, and examined a few of its crooked displays, and inspected some of its paradoxes and perplexities, you will realize that much the most curious thing in Venice is Venice herself.

If you imagine Venice as an oil painting, then the basis of its colour is provided by this twisted gnarled ambience of the city, crowded, aged, nonconformist. Before the highlights of the place are grandly daubed upon it, there is a gentler layer of fine tinting, giving richness, variety and strength to the composition. This is provided by a multitude of modest but wonderful monuments in the city, well known but not world-renowned, which are as essential to its flavour as are the picture postcard marvels.

Consider first the ward of Cannaregio, the northernmost section of the city. Here is the entrancing Gothic church of Madonna dellʼ Orto, named for the miraculous image found in a neighbouring garden and now lumpishly deposited in the right transept: there is a radiant Cima Baptism in this building, and a Giovanni Bellini altar-piece, and Tintoretto's admired Presentation, and a photograph (in a side-chapel) of a recent vicar of the church who seems to me to have one of the finest faces in Venice. Very near is the church of Sant' Alvise, almost ignored by the mass itineraries, with Tiepolo's mighty
The
Way to Calvary
, and the appealing little knightly pictures known as the Baby Carpaccios – which do look as though they might have been painted by some artist of genius in his nursery days, and in fact bear (not altogether convincingly) Carpaccio's signature.

To the east is the church of the Misericordia, with two cherubs on its façade so genuinely mournful that their small faces are swollen with tears; to the south is San Giovanni Crisostomo, with its lovely Bellini altar-piece and a picture in which the elusive Giorgione is thought to have had a hand. The monumental Gesuiti has its mock draperies and Titian's awful picture of the martyrdom of St Lawrence. The exquisite funeral church of San Michele stands on its island in a perpetual obsequial hush, like a very aristocratic undertaker.

On the Grand Canal stands the Ca' d'Oro museum, which possesses Mantegna's wonderful
San Sebastiano
, and also Guardi's well-known picture of the Piazzetta, more often copied, perhaps, than any other landscape painting on earth. Not far away is the Labia Palace, the scene of many voluptuous celebrations, which is decorated in apposite magnificence with Tiepolo frescoes depicting the career of Cleopatra. The three dismal courtyards of the Ghetto stand among their tenements. The church of San Giobbe is tucked neatly away near the slaughter-house. If you arrive by aircraft or car, it is worth visiting the railway station, if only to marvel at the ingenuity by which so lavish and functional a building can be designed without providing a single place for the weary traveller to sit down without paying for the privilege.

Consider secondly the ward of Castello, the eastern part of the city.
The church of Santa Maria Formosa contains an altar-piece by Alvise Vivarini that is startlingly reminiscent of Stanley Spencer, besides Palma Vecchio's renowned
Santa Barbara
: and almost next door, in the Querini Stampalia gallery, is a fascinating collection of eighteenth-century Venetian genre paintings, illustrating everything from a bull-baiting to a nun's reception room. The main altar-piece in San Giovanni in Bragora is a masterpiece by Cima, now well displayed, once so badly placed that, as one old English guide book robustly advises, ‘the best way to see it is to stand upon the altar'. There is a famous Giovanni Bellini in San Zaccaria, and a glister of ikons in San Giorgio dei Greci, and an ornate but gentle Madonna by Negroponte in San Francesco della Vigna.

Above the main door of Sant' Elena is a masterly figure of a man in supplication, by Antonio Rizzo. The Scuola di San Marco, the hospital, contains some of the most opulent assembly rooms in Venice. Hidden away in the heart of the
sestiere
is the church of the Knights of Malta, San Giovanni, with elegant quarters for the Grand Prior of the order, and a cosy house for the chaplain. Among the plane trees of the Public Gardens there stand self-consciously the elaborate pavilions of the Biennale, and the whole eastern region of Castello is dominated by the grim uncompromising walls of the Arsenal, blocking many a quaint vista, and bringing to this poor neighbourhood a vision of the city's iron days.

Consider third, in this survey of second-class sights, the ward of San Marco, clustering around the Basilica. Here is the Correr Museum, with famous pictures by the Bellinis, Lotto and Carpaccio, not to speak of the original blocks for Barbari's famous Venetian map, and many surprising curios of Venetian life and history, like banners from captured Turkish warships, and shoes with twelve-inch heels. Around the corner in the Piazzetta, the Marciana Library displays in a glass case the illuminated Breviario Grimani, one of the most beautiful and valuable of books, the pages of which are turned over daily, with infinite caution, by a permanently awestruck curator.

The Baroque extravaganzas of San Moisè and Santa Maria Zobenigo are both in this
sestiere
. So is the church of San Salvatore, which has a Renaissance interior of great distinction, and a white marble
image of Pius X, and in Easter week is transformed by the brilliance of a magnificent silver altar-screen. Santo Stefano has a big comfortable nave and a haughty campanile, San Giuliano a good Sansovino carving above its door – it represents the rich physician from Ravenna who paid for the church. The Fenice Theatre has a delightfully evocative series of eighteenth-century banqueting rooms, still echoing to the clip of buckled shoes and the swish of crinolines. If you walk up a side alley from the Campo Manin, on the southern side of that square, you will come across the fine spiral staircase, said to defy all the proper constructional laws, which is called
Scala dal Bovolo
– the Staircase of the Snail. If you wander down the dazzling Merceria, the Venetian Fifth Avenue, you will come in the end to the statue of Goldoni the playwright, which stands in the Campo San Bartolomeo, gently and quizzically smiling, and seems to me as happy a memorial as any man could ask for.

Consider next the southern ward of Dorsoduro, the ‘Hard Back', with its attendant island of Giudecca. It extends from the Dogana at one end, with the bronze figure of Fortune holding his sail of chance, almost to the car park at the other. The Salute is its most ponderous monument: in this vast church, besides its Titians and its Tintorettos and the pillars brought from the Roman amphitheatre at Pola, you may notice that the great lamp hanging on a chain from the centre of the dome is two or three inches out of true. Near by is the quaint little cluster of buildings around San Gregorio, from where, in the war-like days of the Republic, they used to throw a defensive chain across the Grand Canal. The factional church of San Trovaso is in Dorsoduro; its real name (in case your guide book is of pedantic leanings) is Santi Gervasio e Protasio, far too large a mouthful for the Venetian vernacular. Near it is the church of the Gesuati, on the Zattere waterfront, which has a gay Tiepolo ceiling, floating with pantomimic angels.

In the church of the Carmini you may see another entrancing Cima, one of the rare Venetian pictures of Lorenzo Lotto (who deserted the city, driven out by jealous rivals), and some interesting bas-reliefs of ships, near the main door. The neighbouring Scuola dei Carmini glows, and sometimes shrieks, with the talent of Tiepolo.
There are organ-shutters painted deliciously by Guardi in the church of Angelo Raffaele, besides two agreeable saints, one on each side of the altar, whose haloes are tilted rakishly at opposing angles to give symmetry to the
ensemble
. San Sebastianeo is magnificently decorated by Veronese, who is buried there. San Pantaleone is notable for a gigantic painting, as much engineering as art, that covers its concave ceiling. The Ca' Rezzonico museum has a quaint little puppet theatre in its attic, and out towards the docks there is a weird, shadowy, barbaric, gleaming, candle-lit church called San Nicolo dei Mendicoli – it has a solemn figure of the Virgin in a dark red velvet dress, and two cherubs of herculean measurements. Across the waters on Giudecca there broods the famous Palladian church of the Redentore, an antiseptic fane that nobody loves.

Consider fifthly San Polo, the district that lines the Grand Canal between Ca' Foscari and the Rialto – or, if you are of modernist tastes, between the fire station and the Post Office. Here are the vivid splendours of the markets, bustling around the law courts and San Giacomo di Rialto, and the meshed networks of old houses, converging upon the Rialto, that used to be the stews of Venice. The church of San Rocco is in this ward, and so is the café of Nini the cat: and on the left-hand wall of San Giovanni Elemosinario, near the Rialto, there is a wonderful old Chartres-like carving of the Nativity, rescued from the ruins of an earlier building, with a gentle recumbent Madonna and an ox who gently licks, in a manner of dreamy devotion, the little face of the Christ-Child.

Sixthly Santa Croce, the westernmost
sestiere
, whose pace and atmosphere is increasingly dictated by the presence of the Piazzale Roma, buzzing with buses and ablaze with neon signs. If you knock on the door of a convent near Campo San Zan Degola, a very old nun will produce a very large key and take you into the church of her order, San Giovanni Decollato: and leading you carefully through its damp and peeling nave, she will show you, high on the wall of a side chapel, the remains of some Byzantine frescoes that are said to be the oldest works of art in Venice, and which, though not in themselves very beautiful, have a certain hypnotic allure to them, like the goggle-eyes that peer at you out of the middle of cuckoo-spit.

In San Giacomo dell' Orio there is a queer and beautiful green pillar, made of Greek marble, and a wooden roof built precisely like the hull of a boat. Santa Maria Mater Domini is an unjustly neglected Renaissance church by the Lombardi brothers, of clean but gorgeous line. San Cassiano has a noble Titian Crucifixion. The back of San Nicolò da Tolentino looks like an Edwardian battleship, with barbettes, bulwarks, flying bridges and catwalks. In the church of San Simeone Grande there is a breathtaking statue of St Simeon in death, in the chapel to the left of the high altar: his mouth is slightly open, his eyes stare, his hair is long and tangled, and the whole is carved with such strength and certainty that you may feel the presence of that dead saint lingering beside you still, long after you have left the dark little church and joined the crowds that press perpetually towards the station.

What depth and richness and variety of colouring these minor monuments of the
sestieri
contribute to the masterpiece of Venice herself! There are palaces to see everywhere, and precious churches, and bridges, and pictures by the thousand, and all the criss-cross pattern of antiquity that is picturesque Venice, mocked by the materialists, sentimentalized by the Romantics, but still by any standards an astonishing phenomenon, as fruity as plum pudding, as tart as the brandy that flames about its holly.

But when all is said, and nearly all is done, it is the diapason sights you come to see. You may meander through your curiosities, your shy churches and your unobtrusive geniuses. You may follow the wandering canals from San Giobbe to Sant' Elena. You may inspect the dustbin barges, and wonder at the leaning campaniles, and tickle the cats' whiskers, and sample the roast eel, and sniff the burnt straw of the boat-yards, and breathe the spices of the Orient, and listen to the tread of the great ships' screws, and count the trains on the causeway, and attend an Armenian Mass, and look a dozen lions in the eye, and hold your nose beside a drained canal, and examine the Archives of the Republic, and haggle with the gondoliers, and buy an Afghan flag, and peer over the wall of the Servite convent, and ride the
vaporetti
like a connoisseur, and wave a brisk good morning to
Signor Dandolo, as he leans from his window with a commanding presence, like a generalissimo speeding a parting fleet. The time will necessarily come, though, when you obey the injunctions of the generations, and follow the stream of traffic to the superlatives of Venice. They will be as familiar to you as the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China: but the most marvellous of the Venetian spectacles are still the ones that get their well-worn stars in Baedeker.

No little building in the world is more fascinating than the Renaissance church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, hidden away behind the Rialto like a precious stone in ruffled satin. It has all the gentle perfection, and some of the curious dull sheen, that marks a great pearl from the Persian Gulf, and it seems so complete and self-contained that it might be prised from the surrounding houses and taken bodily away, leaving only a neat little church-shaped cavity, not at all unsightly, in the fabric of the city. Its choir stalls are decorated with adorable figures, its altar is raised high and holy above its congregation, and the miraculous picture that it was built to honour is still reverenced inside it. I cannot imagine the most truculent of atheists failing to remove his hat as he enters this irresistible sanctuary.

Nothing anywhere is more piquantly charming than the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, which Carpaccio decorated, long ago, with a small series of masterpieces. It is no bigger than your garage, and its four walls positively smile with the genius of this delightful painter, the only Venetian artist with a sense of humour. Here is St George lunging resolutely at his dragon, which is surrounded horribly by odd segments of semi-digested maidens; and here is St Tryphonius with a very small well-behaved basilisk; and here the monks of St Jerome's monastery, including one old brother on crutches, run in comical terror from the mildest of all possible lions; and here, in the most beguiling of all these canvases, St Jerome himself sits in his comfortable study, looking out of his window in search of a deathless phrase, while his famous little white terrier sits bright-eyed on its haunches beside him.

No art gallery in Europe is more exuberant than the Accademia, the distillation of Venetian civilization. There are better collections of
pictures elsewhere, grander Titians, finer Bellinis, more numerous Guardis, Canalettos and Giorgiones: but the glory of the Accademia is that all this grand variety of beauty and taste, ranging from the toy-like to the overblown, has been inspired by the small city that lies about you, from the crystal Cimas and the quaint Carpaccios to Tintoretto himself and Veronese's tremendous
Feast at the House of
Levi
, to my mind the most endlessly fascinating picture of them all. You are standing in the middle of the paintbox. You can see one of Titian's studios from the window of the building, and Veronese's house is 200 yards away across the Grand Canal.