LINGERING IN VENICE.

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Charles Warren Stoddard in the Role of a Devotee.

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MORNING, NOON AND NIGHT IN THE CATHEDRAL OF
SAN MARCO.

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A Poetical Description of the Lights and Shadows
of a Wonder in Architecture—Gorgeous Rites and
Ceremonials in a Venetian Church.

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NUMBER LVII.

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[Correspondence of the Chronicle.]

There is a temple in Venice so stored with Oriental treasures that to see it is like breathing cassia and musk. The facade of this queen of churches is burdened with ornamentation; there is a barbaric splendor in its outward decoration that is not in keeping with the exceeding solemnity of the interior. Within everything is so rich that it can well afford to make no display. It is the most harmonious, the most worshipful, the sweetest, most solemn retreat for the world-weary that can be conceived of. You may select your own chapel, and it shall be rich or plain, ablaze with flaming tapers or lit by a single lamp that swings like a great jewel hung by a golden chain to the summit of a deep golden dome; you may, if you choose, meditate before an antique byzantine crucifix, or a lot of stained sculpture, almost as old as Christianity; or, if you will, sit for a time under one of the sad-faced Madonnas, at whose feet the votive offerings are heaped in strange confusion. But come in, away from the glitter and glare of the exterior, where the four bronze horses prance and the eyes grow weary with seeking some point to rest on in all that tropical, rare garden.

morning.

It is nine-thirty by all the towers in Venice. Ten thousand iron tongues have uttered their call to prayer; the bell in the Campanile of San Marco has clanged twice for the two quarters of the half-spent hour; the bronze Vulcans on the roof of the orologio have repeated the solemn strokes with the utmost deliberation; first one of these monstrous twins, the slaves of time, swings his heavy sledge-hammer and beats the rim of the huge bell, and then the other follows his example with the greatest gravity; they never change countenance, these watchmen, but gaze fixedly before them, awaiting orders from the mysterious chamber of the clock-tower, where every moment is numbered from year’s end to year’s end. The second Vulcan has scarcely struck his final blow when it is echoed by one of the silver bells of San Marco, hidden away in the fantastic ornamentation that Ruskin says “breaks into foam” over the façade of the Cathedral. It is the very moment to enter for the first time this marvelous sanctuary. In the entrance-hall the eye is at once gratified by a flood of subdued light, which seems to be a part of the church itself; it is richer, mellower, more religious than any other light that I have basked in even in Italy, the land of all lovely light. A multitude of frescoes look out at you from the dark walls; saints with wide, calm eyes, and angels with great white wings. The first moment in this entrance-hall affects the spirit much as the prelude to a chant does; it is the key-note of the whole harmony and in a breathless and listening mood you enter the nave of the Cathedral. The light grows deeper, richer, more religious; it seems to glow and pulsate as if it were self-begotten and immortal. Softer than sunlight, more satisfying than moonlight, you feel its warmth without comprehending the source from whence it springs. A wilderness of mosaics float above you and about you in

a haze that is tinged with gold.

I cannot single out any one figure of the thousands that are assembled there. I doubt that I could locate more than two or three of them if I were to have them described to me. I would as soon think of numbering the flowers of the field that give color and character to the landscape. I feel their presence, and would deplore their absence, but to me they are as the rays of the sun that burst through clouds of glory, parts of a whole, which it were better to accept in their entireness than to seek to analyze. All the colors under heaven are blended in the soft but radiant complexion of the interior, but the effect is as if the first perfect day, the day of God’s rest, were just fading into twilight, wherein its utmost beauty reached perfection. Can you compass in one thought a tabernacle as intricate and as perfect in its plan as the hive of the honey bee; wherein five hundred columns of carved marble are so placed that not one obtrudes itself; where multitudes of statues are congregated, yet, of the many, no one seems prominent? And, after you have been again and again in the shady silence of the temple, you come upon some serious and solemn saint lost in an eternal ecstasy that marble only is capable of preserving to the world. The statue has been there for ages; you have passed and repassed it a hundred times, but never until this moment have your eyes rested upon it, and its sudden discovery reawakens the delicious surprise you felt when you looked for the first time into the somber depths of the nave. As I dream over the inexhaustible riches of this wonderful church I can compare its interior to nothing save

a primeval forest at sunrise.

Does this seem extravagance? It is not so, I assure you. There are no straight lines in San Marco; its very pavement is as uneven as a heaving sea; everything seems to have been beaten into shape by great mallets in the hands of skillful artisans, or let me add that everything looks as if it had grown so; not in a season, not in a single century, but like a flower it opened leaf after leaf, or like the forest it put forth its imperishable branches and has grown perfect with time. Every arch of the three-score and upward is full of expression and differs from the rest as one bending branch differs from another; you might say of San Marco that it has no architectural plan, for in it all laws of architecture are set at defiance; and you might say of it, if you dared, that it is the most perfect creation of man, because it is the most natural, the most inexhaustible, the most satisfying. It is thus the coral insects rear their ocean palaces, by an instinct which is above and beyond all art; it is thus the bee builds its golden cloisters. San Marco is the realization of a thousand changeful moods. You see evidences of this yearning after something that is unattainable in the variety of its nooks and corners. It is the aspiration of the finite after the infinite; it appeals to every one in every hour; it is the immortal symbol of the immortal soul. In the morning hours, while the sun streams through the windows that give their light like a fountain that hides its source, a sudden burst of music floods the nave and the aisles; it is as if the sunbeams had each a voice and some curtains had been drawn apart admitting a choir of them. You don’t at first think of locating the sources of the melody any more than you would wish to follow a gurgling stream to its fountainhead; it is enough that you have found the singing shores and for a time, at least, you are content to pause and listen. As the umbrageous wood at morning is suddenly filled with music and the rustle of leaves and

a thousand fluttering wings,

So San Marco resounds with chorals and the low whisper of the kneeling worshipers. You follow the flood of melody through the aisles, under the flying galleries, into the lofty nave and see that the high altar in the midst of the choir is twinkling with lights, while the priests in gorgeous vestments pass to and fro before it. There are small chapels on either side of the choir, from which, through clusters of columns, you see the splendid ceremonial of the mass from a little distance, as you seem to see a pageant in a dream. It is like a dream, the subdued light, the mellow music, the worshipful atmosphere of the church—is it not, friends, you who have known this hour yourself? But out of this dream you waken; the vailed chalice has been borne into the inner sanctuary; the priests withdraw in solemn procession; the purple-robed cardinals rise from their antique stalls, and follow with bowed heads and venerable demeanor; the music dies away like a sun-gleam beyond a cloud. There is nothing left but the perpetual harmony of marble and gold and bronze, and overhead that vaulted roof of gold and its five golden and lustrous domes!

noon.

It is not the brightest hour; the sun is overhead and there are no misty beams of light slanting through the arches and separating the wilderness of columns into broken and detached groups. A hundred brazen lamps hang before the several altars, with the smallest possible flame twinkling at the top of each. These lamps, of brass and bronze, are marvels of exquisite workmanship. Like everything else in San Marco, they seem a very necessary part of the whole that, though they do not catch the eye at first, would be sorely missed were they removed or suffered to burn out. You will perhaps find a half-a-dozen artists at work in various corners of the building; it is a famous resort of painters, their joy and their despair. The color of the interior is inimitable; time alone has added this crowning grace to a church which has been pronounced “the most beautiful in the world.” At noon, after the glory of the morning is spent and before the glory of the evening has come, you leisurely examine the marvelous riches that are gathered here—Oriental marbles most delicately carved, white marbles and alabaster that have all the ripe tints of autumnal leaves—the whole church is ripe to the very core; it has absorbed the wealth of nine centuries of Venetian sunshine, and the walls are full of sun. The pavement is mostly of such intricate pattern that it were useless to search for any two parts that resemble one another; the foundations have sunk in many places; you go up and down the undulated surfaces of variegated marbles and begin to believe that the floor was laid on virgin soil that had never been broken. The effect is delightful after the novelty of the first impression has worn off. The stranger is strongly advised to enter the gallery and wander over its narrow bridges, under its low arches that are like grottoes; to cross the lofty columns that support these airy avenues and pass under the great domes, and from one part of the building to another on a pilgrimage replete with picturesque adventure and discovery. But I liked it not so well as loitering under these high and winding trails and wondering where they led to. Would you, if you could, plunge into the heart of a honey-comb for the sake of learning its plan; or bury yourself in a rose that you might get a new joy from it? I entered the gallery at the most favorable moment, and have regretted it ever since. The great nave was filled with the gorgeous paraphernalia of

a venetian funeral.

An enormous catafalque stood in the center of the church, draped with crimson velvet and crowned with tall plumes of black and white ostrich feathers. Fifty robed acolytes and torch-bearers were marshaled on each side of the nave. Every one held a candle or a torch of colossal proportions. There were banners, and emblems, and swinging censers; there was the chanting of the choir, cherubs in snowy surplices; all that wealth could summon to mourn the untimely decease of the son and heir of a noble family was there. It was high noon in San Marco. I alone stole through the labyrinthine gallery and peered down upon the scene through clouds of incense that seemed to take fantastic shapes of great angels with unfolded wings, hosts of them soaring hither and thither. But I wish that gallery were still a mystery to me—something for me to wonder about and aspire to, in spirit only. I feel as if I had taken advantage of hospitality, and I am glad now to hide myself in the most secluded chapel of the cathedral and repent my thoughtlessness.

night.

The vesper bell has ceased tolling; the psalms have been sung; the Magnificat is ended and the solemn benediction has been given from the high altar by a Cardinal in trailing robes. There is a dead silence in San Marco. A few worshipers are kneeling before the great bronze crucifix under the central dome; a few others are scattered about the church watching intently the last rays of the sun that seem to have sought the sacred edifice that they might die there in a glory that almost rivals their own. This is, perhaps, the most exquisite hour of all in which to enter the sanctuary and learn the full perfection of its beauty. The lower half of the church is in shadow; a shadow that deepens every moment and rises slowly like the inflowing tide that will presently submerge the world. But before this deluge there is a festival of light, so inexpressibly lovely that to attempt a description of it would result in a copy that would appear like a blot in comparison with the original. It is beyond analysis; it is almost beyond conception. The great central window in the facade faces the west; through it a flood of glory pours in and is distributed through the nave, the aisles, the transepts; it is turned again and again from its course and reflected hither and thither by the golden walls above the galleries. The five golden domes glow like hollow hemispheres of fire; they are fed from the girdle of windows sunk deep in their dazzling walls so that no glass is visible, only the broad shafts of light that slant into the body of the church like

the dream-ladders of jacob.

The light begins to fade rapidly. The shadow-tide submerges the stained columns of antique marble; it has reached the capitals that tell strange histories in this quaint sculpture; it has kissed the feet of the bronze Christ, and is slowly climbing the marble screens of the choir, above which the fourteen statues of marble, almost as dark as ebony, are watching, seven on each side of the wonderful old crucifix. Over the high altar the canopy of verde-antique, with its curiously carved pillars, looks as black as night, and the twin columns of alabaster that once adorned the temple of Solomon, and through which the flame of a candle flickers as through clouded icicles, are lost in the deepening shadow of approaching night. Here and there among the domes, or on the rounded corners of the arches, gleams of light are caught and held for a moment—gleams that remind you of a cloudy day with the sun struggling through it. At last there is but one ray of sunshine left; it, like its short-lived fellows, is softer than any light that comes to us in the outer world. It flushes with the delicious agony of death; it seems to be swimming through blood; it is the soul of a blush rose, shriven and translated. It has sought refuge on the breast of the Madonna; it is the apotheosis of the Sacred Heart—a revelation, a miracle! You can almost hear a sigh when that rose withers, when that heart is consumed with flame, and the silence that follows after is as the silence of the grave.

It is evening. The shadow has engulfed the infinite riches of this treasure-house. The glory is gone from the golden walls and the five golden domes, supported by half a thousand pillars of rare marble. The echo of a gun floats in from the Lagune, and the bronze doors of the Cathedral are closed and bolted. Such is sunset in St. Marks!