Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/1028

 Modern Buildings:—In recent times the general prosperity of the city, which is on the ascendant, has brought about a revival of domestic and civic architecture. The architects Rupolo and Sardi have erected a considerable number of buildings, in which they have attempted, and with considerable success, to return either to Venetian Gothic or to the early Renaissance Lombardesque style. The most striking of these modern buildings are the new wing of the Hotel d’Italie, San Moise, and the very successful fish market at Rialto, designed by Laurenti and carried out by Rupolo, in which a happy return to early Venetian Gothic has been effected in conjunction with a skilful adaptation of one of the most famous of the old houses of Venice, the Stalon, or palace of the Quirini family.

Gild Halls.—Among the most remarkable buildings in Venice are the scuole, or gild halls, of the various confraternities. They were pious foundations created for mutual benefit and for purposes of charity. The scuole were divided into the six scuole grandi, so called from their numbers; wealth and privileges, and the scuole minori or fraglie, which in most cases were associated with an art or craft. The scuole minori were usually attached to some church in the quarter where the particular trade flourished. They had their special altar dedicated to the patron of the gild, a private burying place, and a room in which they held their chapter. The six scuole grandi, San Teodoro, S. Maria della Carita, S. Giovanni Evangelista, San Marco, della Misericordia and San Rocco, on the other hand, built themselves magnificent gild halls. We have already mentioned two of these, the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista and the Scuola di San Marco, both of them masterpieces of the Lombardesque style. The Scuola di San Marco is now a part of the town hospital, and besides its facade, already described, it is remarkable for the handsome carved ceiling in the main hall (1463). Other beautiful ceilings are to be found in the great hall and the hall of the Albergo in the Scuola della Carita, now the Accademia. They are the work of Marco Cozzi of Vicenza and were executed between 1461, and 1464. The design of the former is a trellis crossing the ceiling diagonally; in each of the lacunae is carved a cherubim with eight wings; the figures and the trellis are gilded; the ground is a rich ultramarine. But the most magnificent of these gild halls is the Scuola di San Rocco, designed by Bartolomeo Buono in 1517 and carried out by Scarpagnino and Sante Lombardo. The facade on the Campo is large and pure in conception. The great staircase and the lower and upper halls contain the unrivalled series of paintings by Tintoretto, which called forth such unbounded enthusiasm on the part of Ruskin.

Campanili.—Among the more striking features of Venice we must reckon the campanile or bell-towers (see ). These were at one time more numerous than at the present day; earthquakes and subsidence of foundations have brought many of them down, the latest to fall being the great tower of San Marco itself, which collapsed on July 14th, 1902. Its reconstruction was at once undertaken, and completed in 1910. In a few other cases, for example at San Giorgio Maggiore, the fallen campanile were restored; but for the most part they were not replaced. The Venetian campanile usually stands detached from the church. It is almost invariably square; the only examples of round campanile in this part of Italy are to be found at Ravenna and at Caorle to the east of Venice; while inside Venice itself the solitary exception to the square plan was the campanile of San Paternian, built in 999 and now demolished, which was a hexagon. The campanile is usually a plain brick shaft with shallow pilasters running up the faces. It has small angle-windows to light the interior inclined plane or staircase, and is not broken into storeys with grouped windows as in the case of the Lombard bell-towers. Above the shaft comes the arcaded bell-chamber, frequently built of Istrian stone; and above that again the attic, either round or square or octagonal, carrying either a cone or a pyramid or a cupola, sometimes surmounted by a cross or a gilded angel which serves as a weathercock. Cressets used to be kept burning at night on some of the campanile to serve as beacons for those at sea. Among the existing campanile the oldest are San Geremia, dating from the 11th century, San Samuele from the 12th, San Barnaba and San Zaccaria from the 13th. The cam anile of S. Giovanni Elemosinario at Rialto (1398–1400) is called) by Ruskin "the most interesting piece of central Gothic remaining comparatively intact in Venice."

Public Monuments.—Venetian sculpture is for the most part ancillary to architecture; for example, Antonio Rizzo's “Adam” and “Eve” (1464), which face the giants’-staircase in the ducal palace, are parts of the decorative scheme; Sansovino’s splendid monument to Tomaso Rangone is an essential feature of the facade of San Giuliano. The most successful Venetian sculpture is to be found in the many noble sepulchral private monuments. The jealousy of the Venetian republic forbade the erection of monuments to her great men. The sole exception is the superb equestrian statue in honour of the General Bartolommeo Colleoni, which stands on the Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo. By his will Colleoni left his vast fortune to Venice on condition that a monument should be raised to him at St Mark’s. He meant the great piazza, but by a quibble the republic evaded the concession of so unique an honour and claimed to have fulfilled the conditions of the bequest by erecting the monument at the Scuola of St Mark. The republic entrusted the work to the Florentine Verrocchio, who dying before the statue was completed begged the government to allow his pupil Lorenzo di Credi to carry it to a conclusion. The Venetians, however, called in Alessandro Leopardi, who cast the great equestrian group and added the pure and graceful pedestal. The monument was unveiled on the 21st of March 1496. Leopardo was also the creator (1505) of the three handsome bronze sockets in front of St Mark’s which held the flagstaffs of the banners of Cyprus, Morea and Crete, when the republic was mistress of those territories.

By the side of the sea in the piazzetta, on to which the west facade of the ducal palace faces, stand two ancient columns of Egyptian granite, one red and the other grey. These great monoliths were brought as trophies to Venice by Doge Domenico Michieli in 1126, after his victories in Syria. In 1180 they were set up with their present fine capitals and bases by a Lombard engineer, Niccolo de Barattieri. The grey column is surmounted by a fine bronze lion of Byzantine style, cast in Venice for Doge Ziani about 1178 (this was carried off to Paris by Napoleon in 1797, and sent back in pieces in 1816; but in 1893 it was put together again); and in 1329 a marble statue of St Theodore, standing upon a crocodile, was placed on the other column. Among modern monuments the most successful is that to Goldoni at San Bartolomeo near the Rialto. It is the work of the sculptor dal Zotto.

Institutions.—Perhaps the most famous institution of Venice is the arsenal, whose history and activity has continued unbroken from the earliest days of the republic down to the present time. The arsenal was founded about the year 1104 by the doge Ordelap Falier. Before that date Venetian shipping was built at the spot near the piazzetta, known as the terra nova, where the royal gardens now are. The arsenal, which was famous in Dante’s day, received its first enlargement in 1304, when, on the design of Andrea Pisano, new building sheds and the rope walk. or Tana were erected. Pisano’s building sheds, nine in a row, with peculiarly shaped roofs, were still standing intact—one of the most interesting medieval monuments of Venice—until recently, but they have been modified past recognition. In 1325 the second addition, the arsenale nuovo, was made, and a third, the arsenale nuovissimo in 1473; a fourth, the Riparto delle Galeazze, about 1539; and in 1564 the fifth enlargement, the Canal delle Galeazze e Vasca, took place. After the fall of the republic the arsenal continued to occupy the attention of the various governments. In 1810 the site of the suppressed convent and church of the Celestia was added. The entire circuit of the arsenal, about two miles in extent, is protected by a lofty wall with turrets. The main door of the arsenal is the first example in Venice of the purely classical style. It is a noble portal, erected in 1460, apparently from designs by Fra Giocondo, with the lion of St Mark in, the attic. The statuary, with Sta Giustina on the summit of the tympanum, was added, in 1571 and 1578. The whole design was modified in 1688 so as to represent a triumphal arch in honour of Morosini Peloponnesiaco, who brought from Athens to Venice the four lions in Pentelic marble which now stand before the gate. (On the largest of these lions is cut a runic inscription recording an attack on the Piraeus in the 11th century by Norse warriors of the Varangian guard, under Harold Hardrada, afterwards—1047—king of Norway.) The arsenal suffered frequently and severely from tires, the worst being those of 1509 and 1569; yet such was the wealth of Venice that in the following year she put upon the seas the fleet that crushed the Turks at Lepanto in 1571.

The Lido, which lies about 2 m. S.E. of Venice and divides the lagoon from the sea, is rapidly becoming a fashionable bathing-place. The point of San Nicolo del Lido is strongly fortified to protect the new entrance to the port (see harbour). Inside the fortress lies the old Protestant burying-ground, with tombs of Sackville, of John Murray, of Sir Francis Vincent, last ambassador but one from Great Britain to the republic, of Consul Smith, whose collection of books forms the nucleus of the King’s library in the British Museum, and of Catherine Tofts, the singer, Smith’s first wife. At Sant’ Elisabetta is the bathing establishment.

Libraries.—The library of San Marco contains upwards of 35,000 printed volumes and about 10,000 manuscripts; The library is said to owe its origin to Petrarch’s donation of his books to the republic. Most of these have now disappeared. In 1635 Fra Fortunato Olmo found in a room over the great door of St Mark’s a number of books which he supposed to be Petrarch’s gift. He sent a list to Tomasini, who published it in his Petrarca Redivivus (Patavii, 1635). These codices passed to the Marciana, and Zanetti catalogued them as the Fonda antico. It is very doubtful whether these books really belonged to Petrarch. We may date the true foundation of the library to the donation of Cardinal Bessarion. Bessarion had intended to bequeath his books to the Benedictines of San Giorgio Maggiore, but Pietro Morosini, Venetian ambassador at Rome, pointed out the inconvenience of housing his library on an island that could not easily be reached. The cardinal therefore obtained a bull from Pope Paul II., permitting him to recall his