Italian Hours | Page 9

of the amenities of
life; the poorest Venetian is a natural man of the world. He is better
company than persons of his class are apt to be among the nations of
industry and virtue--where people are also sometimes perceived to lie
and steal and otherwise misconduct themselves. He has a great desire to
please and to be pleased.
V
In that matter at least the cold-blooded stranger begins at last to imitate
him; begins to lead a life that shall be before all things easy; unless
indeed he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out of humour by
Titian and Tiepolo. The hours he spends among the pictures are his best
hours in Venice, and I am ashamed to have written so much of common
things when I might have been making festoons of the names of the
masters. Only, when we have covered our page with such festoons what
more is left to say? When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the

Tintoret and the Veronese, one has struck a note that must be left to
resound at will. Everything has been said about the mighty painters,
and it is of little importance that a pilgrim the more has found them to
his taste. "Went this morning to the Academy; was very much pleased
with Titian's 'Assumption.'" That honest phrase has doubtless been
written in many a traveller's diary, and was not indiscreet on the part of
its author. But it appeals little to the general reader, and we must
moreover notoriously not expose our deepest feelings. Since I have
mentioned Titian's "Assumption" I must say that there are some people
who have been less pleased with it than the observer we have just
imagined. It is one of the possible disappointments of Venice, and you
may if you like take advantage of your privilege of not caring for it. It
imparts a look of great richness to the side of the beautiful room of the
Academy on which it hangs; but the same room contains two or three
works less known to fame which are equally capable of inspiring a
passion. "The 'Annunciation' struck me as coarse and superficial": that
note was once made in a simple-minded tourist's book. At Venice,
strange to say, Titian is altogether a disappointment; the city of his
adoption is far from containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London,
Florence, Dresden, Munich --these are the homes of his greatness.
There are other painters who have but a single home, and the greatest
of these is the Tintoret. Close beside him sit Carpaccio and Bellini, who
make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The Veronese may be seen
and measured in other places; he is most splendid in Venice, but he
shines in Paris and in Dresden. You may walk out of the noon-day dusk
of Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the
National Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and
weeping at the feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young
Venetian in crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the
cold London twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you
are floating to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where a certain old
beggar who has one of the handsomest heads in the world--he has sat to
a hundred painters for Doges and for personages more sacred--has a
prescriptive right to pretend to pull your gondola to the steps and to
hold out a greasy immemorial cap. But you must go to Venice in very
fact to see the other masters, who form part of your life while you are

there, who illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to express
one's relation to them; the whole Venetian art-world is so near, so
familiar, so much an extension and adjunct of the spreading actual, that
it seems almost invidious to say one owes more to one of them than to
the other. Nowhere, not even in Holland, where the correspondence
between the real aspects and the little polished canvases is so constant
and so exquisite, do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so
consanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian
air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the palaces;
and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions they have
left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance upon the
waves. That is the perpetual interest of the place--that you live in a
certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don't go into the
churches and galleries by way of a change from the streets; you go into
them because they offer