Venice: Pure City

the two northern districts of Cannaregio and Castello. One of the oldest churches in Venice, that of S. Giacomo, is situated at the very centre of the Rialto market. It was here that commercial contracts were signed. Machiavelli wrote that “we Italians are corrupt and irreligious beyond all others.” That was not true of the Venetians. They were corrupt and religious.

Where there is the divine, there is always the infernal. One cannot exist without the other. There were many folk stories of the devil walking confidently over the bridges and along the calli of the city. He was reported to have taunted the mason working on the Rialto bridge, for example, with the claim that no one could build so wide an arch of stone. He offered to perform the work in exchange for the soul of the first person who crossed the bridge. It turned out to be the mason’s infant son.

Venice was a sacred text to be read and meditated. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the city was first seen as a totality, to be carefully structured. It had survived, by the exercise of the divine will, and now had to be sculptured. The body of Saint Mark, supposedly preserved in the basilica, was the central point of the configuration between the ducal palace, the market and the Arsenal. This was the sacred geometry of Venetian power.

It is noticeable, in Venetian painting, that the miracles of the Scriptures often take place in a Venetian setting. For Tintoretto the events of the New Testament were seen as an aspect of familiar Venetian life. In a manual of devotion written for young Venetian girls, the Garden of Prayer, the author instructs his readers to “take a city that is well known to you … hold in your mind the principal places where the episodes of the Passion would have taken place.” So the agonies of Christ were to be pictured along the calli and within the campi of la Serenissima.

It was itself a city of miracles. No city in Europe, with the possible exception of Rome, has witnessed so many. Every parish had its own sacred events. The compiler of the Cronica Venetiarum, writing in the middle of the fourteenth century, describes miracles and portents in the same spirit of verisimilitude as more mundane events and actions. Miracles were announced with impressive frequency by the authorities of the city. It was another way of reaffirming its sacred destiny. An angel rescued a workman falling from the scaffolding around the basilica of Saint Mark’s. A holy virgin walked across the water of the Grand Canal. A slave was rescued from condign punishment in Saint Mark’s Square by Saint Mark himself. The same saint, together with his brothers in Christ Nicholas and George, exorcised demons threatening the city with flood. Miraculous events became particularly common in the 1480s, just after the end of the Turkish wars in which Venice lost its domination of the Mediterranean. In these miracles the Virgin became the agent of divine intervention, thus in theory restoring the status of Venice as “Queen of the Sea.”

Carpaccio painted “Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge” when a lunatic was healed by the presence of the relic. There was the miracle at S. Lio in the early years of the fifteenth century, when in the parish of that name a holy relic would not be associated with the funeral of a wicked man. It grew so heavy that it could not be carried over the threshold of the church. Giovanni Mansueti completed a painting of the event in 1494. It is still possible to recognise the site, and certain of the larger houses, in 2009. That is another Venetian miracle.

The sacred sites of Venice can be enumerated. The first of them, by common consent, must be the basilica. It is the umbilicus, the central point, the core. It is the place where the divine and human meet. In the beginning there had been another church on this site dedicated to Saint Theodore but, when the supposed body of Saint Mark arrived in the lagoons, everything changed. As soon as the relics arrived in 829, a church with a wooden roof or dome was raised on the model of the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. The church was largely destroyed by fire in 976, but was subsequently restored. The final reconstruction, vaulted and built in brick, assuming the shape of the basilica still before us, was undertaken in the second half of the eleventh century. The fact that it was based upon a model already five hundred years old was a material blessing. It emphasised the supposed antiquity of the Venetian religious tradition. The city had no true religious history of its own; so it borrowed or adapted what it saw. The undulating pavement of the basilica, for example, was not an accident or a mistake. It was deliberately modelled on the floor of the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Ravenna, built in the fifth century. The pavement was to rise and fall “as if agitated by winds and to present the likeness of a storm.” It was supposed to invoke the position of Venice upon perilous waters.

In the thirteenth century a programme of mosaics was formally introduced, taking their example from the church of the Holy Apostles but introducing specifically Venetian motifs. These in turn were erased, restored only in the seventeenth century. In the fourteenth century the facade of the basilica was partially transformed in Gothic style. So the church arose by a process of accretion and accommodation, encrusted and adapted over the centuries. Marbles and statues—bought or stolen, it made no difference—were attached to it in almost haphazard fashion.

The basilica is unique. To some it has a Moorish air; to others it appears to be a relic of Byzantium; others admire the window traceries and the great screen as miracles of the Gothic style. The derivations do not matter. It is possibly the most beautiful building in the world. It rises from the square like an apparition wreathed in clouds of jasper and porphyry, of opal and of gold. As a piece of chromatic decoration, it is unsurpassed. The pillars and porches and domes rise one above the other, ornamented with mosaics and sculptures that tell stories from the divine and human worlds. The play of light and dark across the facade is increased by the deployment of closely ranged columns. It exudes a kind of barbaric splendour.

Upon entering the interior, the visitor is lost in twilight. It is like some great cavern beneath the sea filled with sunken treasure. It has been shaped in the form of a cross, but there are shadowy aisles and alcoves lit by the flame of a candle or the gleaming of an icon. There are five hundred columns of porphyry, serpentine and alabaster. The roof is a sea of gold. The mosaic work, covering forty thousand square feet (3,700 sq. m), is a skein of iridescence thrown across the walls and arches. Divine light was more significant than natural light. The interior is filled with silks and enamels, gold and rock crystal, as if it were itself a bejewelled reliquary. It is a church of merchants suffering from what one English traveller described as “religious horror,” in the sense of awe and dread. It is a church of material wealth and costly display. It is also a church of rare commodities. Here is the icon of the Virgin painted by Saint Luke. Here is the stone of granite from Mount Tabor, on which Christ preached to the people. Here is the executioner’s block, stained with the blood of Saint John the Baptist. Here are marble columns from the Temple of Solomon. Here, in the chapel of Saint Isidore, lies Saint Mark. It is the perfect stage setting for ritual devotion.

In its present form the campanile or bell tower of the basilica was erected at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, taking the place of an old watchtower that had stood on the site for seven hundred years. There had been an attempt to build a new bell tower in 1008, but the structure had sunk into the ground. The present campanile was used as a vantage point from which to view the city, and a defensive station from which to scan the sea. It was continually being struck by lightning until the introduction of a lightning rod, but there was no disaster worse than that of Bastille Day, 1902, when 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. The largest of the bells, “La Marangona,” fell two hundred feet (60 m) without incurring any damage. It was then determined to rebuild the tower dov’era, com’era—where it is and how it is. Ten years later the campanile rose again, indistinguishable in its outward appearance from its predecessor. That was the Venetian way. It is said that if the visitor arrives in Venice to the sound of “La Marangona,” then that visitor has the soul of some dead Venetian being welcomed back to the city.

The palace of the doge, beside the basilica itself, is the other sacred site of the city. Proust’s grandmother journeyed to Venice, when she was dying, simply in order to visit this place. Proust wrote that “she would not have attached so much importance to that joy she got from the ducal palace if she had not felt it to be one of those joys which, in a way we imperfectly understand, outlive the act of dying, and appeal to some portion of us which is not, at the least, under the dominion of death.”

The original palace was erected at the beginning of the ninth century, but was destroyed in 976 during one of the few civil riots in Venetian history. It was continually enlarged and adapted; wings were pulled down and constructed; halls and passages and galleries were introduced. In the early fourteenth century, according to the narrative of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, the original “Byzantine Palace” was supplanted by a “Gothic Palace,” the latter coinciding with the final triumph of the aristocratic polity. This is the building that faces the bacino or pool. It became the home of government. Architecture has always been a