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THE foreign wars of the city are almost constant, but at a distance; there are no civil wars, a sheltered position affording protection against invasion by sea or land makes possible a continuous development; ten centuries of independence are acquired by fortunate struggle and by easy and living effort this, even more than the water and the sky, is what gives Venice her original character in the midst of an Italy who becomes herself only in moments of crisis, torn by revolutions and mutilated by conquests. Venice seems to be unaware of the fever and the anguish of her search; she gropes but little in order to find her path, travels along it steadily with the wind or against it, slackens her pace to gather up the magnificent fruits that are offered her, enjoys their pulp, becomes intoxicated, and falls asleep to the sound of music, among the fading garlands, the dying flowers, and the lights which the daylight pales in the depths of the old ruined palaces. It is Greece reborn, nude once more, grown heavier, laden with golden grapes, and seen against a background of sleeping forests and stormy twilights. One would say that Venice prolonged the effort of antiquity only that she might affirm—despite her retreats, her necessary reactions, and the apparent contradictions of the world which surrounded her—the continuity of human effort, and to transmit to the modern mind, with the fruits which she holds out to it so ripe that they open by themselves, the seed of constantly recurring harvests.
THE foreign wars of the city are almost constant, but at a distance; there are no civil wars, a sheltered position affording protection against invasion by sea or land makes possible a continuous development; ten centuries of independence are acquired by fortunate struggle and by easy and living effort this, even more than the water and the sky, is what gives Venice her original character in the midst of an Italy who becomes herself only in moments of crisis, torn by revolutions and mutilated by conquests. Venice seems to be unaware of the fever and the anguish of her search; she gropes but little in order to find her path, travels along it steadily with the wind or against it, slackens her pace to gather up the magnificent fruits that are offered her, enjoys their pulp, becomes intoxicated, and falls asleep to the sound of music, among the fading garlands, the dying flowers, and the lights which the daylight pales in the depths of the old ruined palaces. It is Greece reborn, nude once more, grown heavier, laden with golden grapes, and seen against a background of sleeping forests and stormy twilights. One would say that Venice prolonged the effort of antiquity only that she might affirm—despite her retreats, her necessary reactions, and the apparent contradictions of the world which surrounded her—the continuity of human effort, and to transmit to the modern mind, with the fruits which she holds out to it so ripe that they open by themselves, the seed of constantly recurring harvests.
She
herself had found this seed amid the rotten pulp which was fermenting at the
foot of the tree of Byzantium. For five centuries her sailors drained
Hellenized Asia in order that the mounting life of young Italy might assimilate
the ancient spirit of voluptuousness, of magnificence, and of death. The roots
of Venice go deep into the red shadow of Saint Mark's, under the cupolas of
burnt gold where the incense has an odor like that of rotting grain and blood.
This
city of merchants mingled, in its lively activity, Italian passion with the
corruption of the later empire, the tainted Christianity of the Orient with the
barbaric Christianity of the Occident, the spirituality of Islam with the
paganism of Greece ; and from all this it made, with the sustained sweep of its
indefatigable energy, something as personal as its own life hanging between air
and water, something as victorious as the warfare which it carried on upon
every sea to affirm and maintain its dominion. And so it arrived at its
profound, imperious, and unchallengeable harmony, accumulating without choice
or taste, subject to the chance of defeat and caprice, all the scattered
elements whose cohesion and agreement are, as a rule, necessary for the
attainment of harmony. Before it had ripened in the soul of Titian, the harmony
of Venice, imposing itself like a natural force, had arisen spontaneously in
the current of an overwhelming force which unconsciously made use of the vapor
of the water and the light to mingle sea and sky, thereby attenuating contrasts
and sweeping unrelated colors into a single movement.
Only
parvenus, who succeed in everything, who have the fire of audacity and the
habit of victory, could pile up in this manner centuries and styles one upon
another, decorate the gates of a church with nude women, set up a Roman
quadriga above the golden cupolas which they brought back from Byzantium, perch
diminutive lions upon columns too tall for them, and build palaces whose base
is on top. Bad taste displayed with such insolence ends by creating a kind of
elementary and fatal beauty, like a forest in which the roughest and most
delicate forms are mingled, like a crowd in which the brutality of primitive
instincts is blended with the refinement of the spirit and the purest impulses
of the heart. Venice tempered her strength and her grace in a kind of tide of
intoxicated and troubled matter, like a world in which, from the womb of
tropical nature, there should arise alcazars and mosques, Hindu temples,
parthenons, and cathedrals.
In this
atmosphere of an Oriental tale, amid the sound of festivals, of the flapping of
the flags, of the reviews of the ships with the purple sails, and of the
tremendous hum of the docks where three thousand ships poured the whole of the
Orient into the motley crowd, there was born spontaneously an order full of the
energy of Venice, at the moment when this wonderful hearth, absorbing the
warmth of distant lands, sent it back to its sources across the sea, and spread
it over the Occident. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Europe was
torn by the anarchy of feudalism, by the effort of the communes to retain their
life, and by the first attempt at monarchical unity. Venice alone, at the peak
of its development, enjoyed absolute peace within itself; its people were happy
under the iron rule of its commercial nobility which, save in political
matters, allowed them complete liberty and gorged them with the wealth that its
terrible policy of protectionism was accumulating within the city, at the risk
of stifling it. Venice witnessed the fusion of the ideas which its traders and
sailors brought to it amid the tumult in the wake of their ships. The Moslem
world and the Christian world, the two hostile forces which for three centuries
had been contending for the mastery of the Mediterranean, found in Venice the
only territory where they could meet without fighting—a strange, fairylike, and
spontaneous harmony in which Moorish form and Gothic form harmonized without
effort. As in all other places, the rise of architecture preceded the rise of
plastics and of literature. Everywhere else, it was coincident with the great
moment of the collective energy of the people, who first construct the
dwellings which, later on, will be supplied by the energy of liberated
individuals.
But, as
everywhere in Italy, the temple does not respond to the desire of the city.
Here it is the palaces of the merchants which interpret that desire. Wealth did
not destroy the expression of popular enthusiasm, because wealth could not be
maintained and increased except by indefatigably opposing to the brutality of
the peoples a physical and moral force; because all the lower organisms of the
isolated, unique city were perpetuated in its achievements; because wealth was
coincident with the awakening and the burst of Italian passion. Since the death
of the world of antiquity and after the time of the cathedral, our most
powerful symphony of stone is there. It unrolls all along the Grand Canal or at
the edge of the solitary rios where,
in the evening, the lanterns pour into the waters of the night their narrow
pools of blood; it is in the façades of red and gold and verdigris, whose frescoes are
corroded with salt, and above which, over the moldy flight of steps, tiers of
colonnettes sprang out of the openwork of the balconies, to join, at the peak
of the ogival windows, with the trefoils and the embellishments of the flowers
above. In these moments of tremendous vitality the unity which is inherent in
man dictates his gestures and ripens his thoughts; between this mingling of
water and sky, amid this feverish world in which languages, religions, manners,
dress, and blood merge, everything is permitted. Instead of suspending the
lacework of the colonnades in space, old Giovanni Buon will compel it to come
forth from the pavement and will, without crushing it, understand how to place
upon it an enormous cube of pink stone open only in a few places and bristling
with thorns. The architectural paradox is swept away in the triumphal movement
of life and conquest. The fantastic palaces emerge from the shadowy water like
an Oriental night in which story-tellers, on the terraces, evoke the confused
piles of milky bulbs and shafts of enamel that sleep in the moonlight. The long
campaniles which launch upward remind one of minarets. Here, without
imprudence, one can load the ceilings of Gothic palaces with gold. The domes,
which are to come from Rome, gaze without astonishment upon the cupolas from
the Bosphorus. And the three rows of ancient columns, superimposed and framing
the arched windows, above which lie nude statues, alternate, without offending
the eye, from one façade to another, with slender rows of Arab or French
colonnettes. As she will do with the painters, Venice drags into the vertigo of
her glory and her sensuality all the architects who come to her from the
Continent, from Verona, from Vicenza, from Ferrara, from Florence herself, so
different from Venice that the influences of the two cities, seen in their
ensemble and from a distance, appear antagonistic. Fra Giocondo, the Lombardis,
Sanmicheli, Sansovino, and Andrea Palladio are transformed in Venice or even
discover themselves there, and the architecture of the Italian Renaissance
finds in the city a favorable ground for the development of the severe force
which sometimes redeems its lack of logic and its decorative fantasies. The
procession of palaces swings about with the waters, the narrow canals open and
lose themselves amid the inclined houses which bathe their reflections in the
dark pools; Chinese bridges outline their mass like that of an ass's back
against perspectives of dappled and rippling water, of which one gets a
momentary glimpse and loses sight the moment after. The harmony is maintained
everywhere: it has developed from a single ideal of unrestrained abundance,
from a single effort to dominate Oriental lands and seas, from a single history
of victories, and from a single resplendent line of radiances and reflections
that proceeds from the waves to the clouds after having so penetrated the
stones that they have its own color of seaweed steeped in azure and in fire.
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