Venice was a city of bells, all of them pealing together at the time of processions. They also had a more practical use. The bells rang out at precise times of day to coordinate the activities of the populace. (photo credit i2.8)
A showroom with lamps and vases. For many centuries Venice has been famous for its glass-making, now the preponderant industry on the island of Murano. What is the attraction of glass for the city of the sea? Glass is material sea. It is sea made solid, its translucence captured and held immobile. (photo credit i2.9)
Lace workers on the island of Burano, photographed at the end of the nineteenth century. Burano has been for many centuries the home of lace-making in Venice. Lace is a Venetian specialty; like the mosaic it is an art of elaboration and intricacy. (photo credit i2.10)
A Venetian courtyard at the end of the nineteenth century. Venice is a city of dead-ends, and of circuitous alleys; there are twisting
A photograph of a funeral gondola, taken at the beginning of the twentieth century. Venice has always been associated with death, and the gondola itself has often been viewed as a floating hearse. (photo credit i2.12)
The new railway bridge over the lagoon, depicted in the middle of the nineteenth century. The bridge represented perhaps the most radical change in the history of Venice. It became connected to the mainland. The city was no longer an island, and had lost its hallowed status as a refuge from the world. It meant, too, that the prime significance of the water had gone forever. It became a city of mechanical, rather than of natural, time. (photo credit i2.13)
The remains of the campanile, which collapsed on 27 July 1902. It buckled and folded upon itself, neatly imploding into a large pile of rubble. It fell, as the Venetians said at the time, “like a gentleman.” There were no fatalities, except that of the caretaker’s cat. (photo credit i2.14)
An illustration taken from
6
Against Nature
There were once many gardens in Venice. In the sixteenth century there were five hundred of them nestling within the city, spreading their own refreshing and aromatic life. Yet by the eighteenth century Casanova remarked that “a garden is a rarity in Venice.” In the middle of the twentieth century it was estimated that there were sixty remaining. That number may have since been revised. Yet there are still gardens, secluded and still, protected by walls and gates, creating little pockets of green in the stony life of the city. In previous centuries the smaller gardens might have shrubberies of larch or cypress or laurel. The larger gardens were planted with flower-beds and avenues of fruit-trees, complete with cages of singing birds to maintain the illusion of nature. There were also, in the largest of them, temples and fountains as well as elaborate loggias. The fugitive scent of fruit and jasmine and banksia roses trailed through the
The Venetians evinced a great love for flowers, matched only by their love of buildings. There were itinerant sellers of gladiolas and tuberoses, and other blossoms harvested from the mainland. On describing these merchants in 1623, Sir Henry Wotton coined the English word florist. It entered the vocabulary effortlessly. On Saint Mark’s Day it was the custom for each young Venetian man to offer a rosebud to his sweetheart. In painted representations of Venice in the fifteenth century, there are innumerable pots of carnations cluttering the window-sills. But tastes change. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the aspidistra became the flower of Venice. There was, however, one native flower. It was the flower of the lagoon,
On the lagoon itself there were garden islands. In the fifteenth century there were vineyards and monastery gardens. The island of Giudecca was until recent years a paradise of gardens. The island of Torcello was the home of the vine and the pomegranate, the oleander and the acacia, the fig and the elder tree; it also provided the rich soil for maize and artichoke. Once there were olive trees all over Venice. The island of Castello, where the cathedral of the city stands, was once known as Olivolo. Olive oil was a profitable commodity.
Yet in the city itself there is no sense of regeneration or rebirth that accompanies the presence of flora and foliage. It has been said that the Venetians prefer marble to vegetation. In Venice architecture must take the place of nature. It must allude to nature in a pious and consolatory manner. It is one of the secrets of Venetian building. The stone of the buildings is sculpted with leaf and branch. The hundred columns of Saint Mark’s comprise a solemn forest. The wood becomes stone. The stone becomes wood. The great houses have also been compared to coral reefs.
It needed art to re-create nature. There was a fashion among Venetian painters of the early sixteenth century for pastoral scenes. But the natural world is pictured without life. It is not worked or populated. There are sheep. There are picturesque rustic buildings. There are groves and springs. There are nymphs and shepherds in the foreground. The inner reality of rural life is not understood. The grass is depicted as if it were velvet, for example, just as in Venetian manufactories velvet was created to resemble grass.
The natural life of the city must be imagined rather than seen. It must be intuited beneath the layers of stone. Byron called Venice “the greenest isle of my imagination,” a paradox only he could sustain. George Aschenbach, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s
And what kind of animals prowl in this city of stone? There were once sheep and oxen. There were foxes, and even wolves. There were horses and mules in the streets of Venice. In 1177 a mule carried Pope Alexander III through the streets of Venice, and in 1361 the doge and eleven patricians entered the city on horseback. The Veneti of early time had been known for their skill on horseback, and the latter-day Venetians continued their practice. Eighty horsemen were deployed in Saint Mark’s Square, in 1310, to maintain public discipline after the discovery of a conspiracy against the state. There were tournaments in the square, and at one such display in 1364 Petrarch was moved to remark that the Venetians demonstrated horsemanship and weapon-handling enough to equal “the fiercest fighters on earth.” There were horse-races across the Rialto bridge until they were banned by edict in 1359. It was a city where one of the principal sounds was that of the clangour and neighing of horses. This did not endure, however.
In 1611 the English traveller, Thomas Coryat, reported seeing only one horse in the entire city. Horses were eventually barred from the streets. There was simply not enough room, and the spread of stepped stone bridges was a further impediment. Such was their rarity that, in 1789, Mrs. Thrale noticed a line of Venetians queuing to marvel at a stuffed horse. Indeed by the eighteenth century the patricians of Venice were ridiculed for their inability to ride on anything except gondolas. It shows that a native skill may disappear from sheer lack of practice. The only horses now to be seen in the city are those with the rigid composure of metal. The four bronze chargers panting on the facade of Saint Mark’s, the spoils of war looted from Constantinople, are a token of a city where natural life is coming to an end.
Cats and dogs were, and are, popular in Venice. Once the city was filled with watch-dogs and hunting dogs for deployment in the lagoon. But over the centuries they have become more discreet. They are relatively small and domestic. They consort well with the spaces of the city. The dogs in particular enjoy the savour of old stone.
