Venice is no longer the supreme city of music, as she was in the eighteenth century, when four celebrated conservatoires flourished there, when her choirs and instrumentalists were unrivalled, and when the priest Vivaldi, suddenly inspired with a melody in the middle of celebrating Mass, instantly rushed off to the Sacristy to scribble it down. Music, nevertheless, often sounds in the city. The strains of great symphonies rise, in the summer season, from breathless floodlit courtyards; twelvetone scales and electronic cadences ring from the International Festival of Contemporary Music, which recently brought Stravinsky himself to conduct an opera in the Scuola di San Rocco; the noble choir of St. Mark's, once trained by Monteverdi, sings seraphically from its eyrie among the high mosaics of the Basilica. The gondoliers no longer quote Tasso to one another, or sing old Venetian love songs (most of the popular tunes nowadays are from Naples or New York): but sometimes an ebullient young man will open his heart and his lungs together, and float down the canal on the wings of a throaty aria.
To hear the bells of Venice it is best to come at Christmas, when the air is mist-muffled, and the noises of the city are deepened and richened, like plum-duff. A marvellous clash of bells rings in Christmas morning, noble bells and frenzied bells, spinsterish bells and pompous bells, cracked bells and genial bells and cross reproving bells. The bells of San Trovaso sound exactly like Alpine cowbells. The bells of the Carmini sing the first few notes of the Lourdes hymn. The bells of Santa Maria Zobenigo are rung 'with such persistency', so one Victorian visitor recorded, 'that the whole neighbourhood must be driven almost to distraction'. The bells of the Oratory of the Virgin, near San Giobbe, so annoyed the monks of the neighbouring convent that in 1515 they went out one night and razed its little campanile to the ground: they had to rebuild it at their own expense.
The great bell of San Salvatore rings in an exciting dissonance, its notes being, so I am assured, E flat, D flat and B flat. The great Marangona bell, rescued from the ruins of the old Campanile of St. Mark, no longer sounds, but hangs there in the belfry looking frail and venerable: but the big new bell of St. Mark's is alone permitted to sound at midnight, and also rings, to an erratic timetable, at odd intervals during the day. There is a little bell that strikes the hours on the north-western corner of the Basilica, beneath a small stone canopy; and this seems to act as a kind of trigger or stimulus to the two old Moors on the Clock Tower, who promptly raise their hammers for the strike. All these bells, and a hundred others, welcome Christmas with a midnight flourish, and for long echoing minutes after the hour you can hear them ringing down again, softer and softer across the lagoon, like talkative old gentlemen subsiding into sleep.
And there is one more sound that evokes the old Venice, defying the motor boats and the cacophony of radios. Sometimes, early in the morning, as you lie in bed in the half-light, you may hear the soft fastidious splash of oars outside, the swish of a light boat moving fast, the ripple of the waves against the bulwarks of the canal, and the swift breathing of the oarsman, easy and assured.
Showing posts with label St. Mark's mosaics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St. Mark's mosaics. Show all posts
Venice The Sands of Time
It was from Byzantium that the taste for refinement and sensuous luxury came to Venice. "Artificiosa voluptate se mulcebat," a chronicler wrote of the Greek wife of an early doge. Her scents and perfumes, her baths of dew, her sweet-smelling gloves and dresses, the fork she used at table scandalized her subjects, plain Italian pioneer folk. The husband of this effeminate woman had Greek tastes also. He began, says the chronicler, "to work in mosaic," importing mosaic workers -- and marbles and precious stones -- to adorn his private chapel, St. Mark's, in the Eastern style that soon became second nature to the Venetians.
The Byzantine mode, in Venice, lost something of its theological awesomeness. The stern, solemn figure of the Pantocrator who dominates the Greek churches with his frowning brows and upraised hand does not appear in St. Mark's in His arresting majesty. In a Greek church, you feel that the Eye of God is on you from the moment you step in the door; you are utterly encompassed by this all-embracing gaze, which in peasant chapels is often represented by an eye over the door. The fixity of this divine gaze is not punitive; it merely calls you to attention and reminds you of the eternal, the Law of the universe arching over time and circumstance. The Pantocrator of the Greeks has traits of the old Nemesis, sweetened and purified by the Redemption. He is also a Platonic idea, the End of the chain of speculation.
The Venetians were not speculators or philosophers, and the theological assertion is absent from St. Mark's mosaics, which seek rather to tell a Biblical story than to convey an abstraction. The clothing of the story assumes, in Venice, an adventitious interest, as in the fluffy furs worn by Salome in the Baptistery mosaic. The best Venetian mosaics are not in St. Mark's, the doges' showcase, but in Torcello, which was an episcopal see in its own right and owed political allegiance to the Greek exarchate of Ravenna.
Torcello is supposed to have been founded by a direct order from God to the Bishop of Altinum. This is a legend one can believe. Unlike Venice, which was the product of necessity and invention, Torcello does indeed appear to be the result of a divine imperative. Only God, you feel, would have commanded a city to be set here on this flat, mournful prairie, barely afloat in the marshy lagoons -- an island that was abandoned in the more rational eighteenth century because of the noisome malarious vapors that had reduced the population, once numbering 20,000, to a skeleton crew.
Torcello is healthy enough now and a favorite rendezvous with tourists. A private motorboat runs twice a day in season from Harry's Bar in urbe to Harry's Bar in Torcello, a pleasant rustic tavern set in a ragged garden, surrounded by festoons of grapevines. You have an hour and a half to lunch or dine on Harry's specialties (lobster and scampi and fish soup and lasagne) and half an hour to inspect the two churches, buy souvenirs and postcards and Burano lace doilies, before being sped back to Venice. There is a boy in the Cathedral who explains the mosaics.
If I sigh over this, it is because I have read the accounts of earlier tourists, who used to cross from Burano by gondola and walk alone on the pestilential island, musing on the fate of civilizations in the mood of Shelley's "Ozymandias." That is how Torcello should be seen. But now to the melancholy of its widowed Cathedral and orphaned daughter-church, Santa Fosca, a new, modern element has been added -- the melancholy of desecration and of the tomb's solitude invaded. All sacred spots today possess this freshened sadness. A double "Never more" echoes over the tomb of Theodoric at Ravenna, the temple at Sunium, where Byron carved his name. Not being sacred, Venice is happily free from these gloomy reverberations. But once you embark on the lagoons, it is another matter; the voices of guides and of other touristic parties become suddenly insupportable.
It is still possible, however, to go the old way to Torcello, taking the Murano-Burano vaporetto from the Fondamenta Nuova, lunching at Burano, and continuing by gondola to the sluggish canals and reedy landing-place of Torcello. If you dally in Burano long enough, you will miss the Harry's Bar parties, who will be on their way back to Venice, and there will only be the souvenir-vendors and the postcard people and the lace-women and the custodians, lined up to speak to you in a babel of tongues.
The Byzantine mode, in Venice, lost something of its theological awesomeness. The stern, solemn figure of the Pantocrator who dominates the Greek churches with his frowning brows and upraised hand does not appear in St. Mark's in His arresting majesty. In a Greek church, you feel that the Eye of God is on you from the moment you step in the door; you are utterly encompassed by this all-embracing gaze, which in peasant chapels is often represented by an eye over the door. The fixity of this divine gaze is not punitive; it merely calls you to attention and reminds you of the eternal, the Law of the universe arching over time and circumstance. The Pantocrator of the Greeks has traits of the old Nemesis, sweetened and purified by the Redemption. He is also a Platonic idea, the End of the chain of speculation.
The Venetians were not speculators or philosophers, and the theological assertion is absent from St. Mark's mosaics, which seek rather to tell a Biblical story than to convey an abstraction. The clothing of the story assumes, in Venice, an adventitious interest, as in the fluffy furs worn by Salome in the Baptistery mosaic. The best Venetian mosaics are not in St. Mark's, the doges' showcase, but in Torcello, which was an episcopal see in its own right and owed political allegiance to the Greek exarchate of Ravenna.
Torcello is supposed to have been founded by a direct order from God to the Bishop of Altinum. This is a legend one can believe. Unlike Venice, which was the product of necessity and invention, Torcello does indeed appear to be the result of a divine imperative. Only God, you feel, would have commanded a city to be set here on this flat, mournful prairie, barely afloat in the marshy lagoons -- an island that was abandoned in the more rational eighteenth century because of the noisome malarious vapors that had reduced the population, once numbering 20,000, to a skeleton crew.
Torcello is healthy enough now and a favorite rendezvous with tourists. A private motorboat runs twice a day in season from Harry's Bar in urbe to Harry's Bar in Torcello, a pleasant rustic tavern set in a ragged garden, surrounded by festoons of grapevines. You have an hour and a half to lunch or dine on Harry's specialties (lobster and scampi and fish soup and lasagne) and half an hour to inspect the two churches, buy souvenirs and postcards and Burano lace doilies, before being sped back to Venice. There is a boy in the Cathedral who explains the mosaics.
If I sigh over this, it is because I have read the accounts of earlier tourists, who used to cross from Burano by gondola and walk alone on the pestilential island, musing on the fate of civilizations in the mood of Shelley's "Ozymandias." That is how Torcello should be seen. But now to the melancholy of its widowed Cathedral and orphaned daughter-church, Santa Fosca, a new, modern element has been added -- the melancholy of desecration and of the tomb's solitude invaded. All sacred spots today possess this freshened sadness. A double "Never more" echoes over the tomb of Theodoric at Ravenna, the temple at Sunium, where Byron carved his name. Not being sacred, Venice is happily free from these gloomy reverberations. But once you embark on the lagoons, it is another matter; the voices of guides and of other touristic parties become suddenly insupportable.
It is still possible, however, to go the old way to Torcello, taking the Murano-Burano vaporetto from the Fondamenta Nuova, lunching at Burano, and continuing by gondola to the sluggish canals and reedy landing-place of Torcello. If you dally in Burano long enough, you will miss the Harry's Bar parties, who will be on their way back to Venice, and there will only be the souvenir-vendors and the postcard people and the lace-women and the custodians, lined up to speak to you in a babel of tongues.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)