by Jan Morris
This is an old story. There are many places in Venice where columns and doorways, once at ground level, are now well below it – the entrance to the Basilica, for example, which was originally flat with the Piazza, but is now down a couple of steps. When they remove the paving-stones for a drain or a water-pipe, they often find the remains of another street about a yard below, built in the Middle Ages when the lagoon was lower. You could no longer store your damasks in the ground floor of a Grand Canal palace – the damp would ruin them in a week. The Piazza floods are a modern excitement, caused by the rise of the water: in February 1340 the waters ‘rose three cubits higher than had ever been known in Venice’ – but the Piazza remained dry. The pillars of the Doge’s Palace have often been criticized as ‘gouty’ and ‘dumpy’, but they were much more elegant, and a good deal taller, before the level of the Piazza had to be raised around them – five older pavements lie beneath the present one. All over the city you may see such evidence of the rising water – pillars that have been successively heightened, stone lions whose whiskers are washed by the tides, damp rot on a hundred palace walls. Venice has often hitched up her skirts to keep clear of the wet, but the water is always gaining on her.
It is mainly a natural phenomenon, but is partly humanly induced. The dredging of deep-water entrances into the lagoon has increased the flow of the tides and affected the natural balance of the waters. So has the deepening of canals inside the city, and the constant scouring of the water-ways. The diversion of the rivers that used to pass through the lagoon has apparently raised the level of the water rather than lowered it. Earthquakes have contributed to the subsidence of the mud-flats, but so have various industrial activities on the mainland, and drilling for methane gas and fresh water under the lagoon floor.
Since the great flood of 1966, the worst in living memory, the whole western world has concerned itself with saving Venice from extinction, and the first thing that now enters most people’s minds, when they hear the name of Venice, is the prospect of her submergence. Restorers and engineers from a dozen countries have offered their solutions to the municipal problems. From Naples to Vancouver charity balls, esoteric auctions and excruciatingly fashionable fêtes have raised funds to patch the crumbled noses of Venetian statuary, touch up the faded colours of Titian and Tintoretto and cure those leprous palaces. An international conclave of hydrologists has decided that Venice can be saved from future flooding by the building of lock gates at the lagoon entrances. Teams of visiting restorers have set to work upon the city churches – Frenchmen at the Salute, Britons at Madonna del Orto, Germans at Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Americans almost everywhere else – citizens of Los Angeles, for instance, unexpectedly assuming responsibility for the hitherto almost totally ignored San Pietro di Castello. The Italian Government has voted a large subsidy for the city, and UNESCO has produced its customary folio of answers to everything. Nobody could call Venice neglected today. Art and ecstasy may enter her presence more warily than of old, but ecology has made her all its own.
I write sourly, for disliking artificially conserved communites I have tended to see the salvation as more distressing than the threat: but in my more rational moments I do recognize that letting Venice sink, my own solution for her anxieties, is a counsel of perfection that cannot be pursued. She will be saved, never fear: it is only in selfish moments of fancy that I see her still obeying her obvious destiny, enfolded at last by the waters she espoused, her gilded domes and columns dimly shining in the green, and at very low tides, perhaps, the angel on the summit of the Campanile to be seen raising his golden forefinger (for he stands in an exhortatory, almost an ecological pose) above the mud-banks.
16
The Bestiary
Somebody once won a handsome prize from the Republic for suggesting in a laborious sonnet that Venice was divinely founded. I am myself often reminded in this city (though nobody is going to reward me for it) of the old tag about those whom the gods destroy. Venice went half-mad in the decades before her fall, reeling through her endless carnival with such abandon that one disapproving observer said of her that ‘the men are women, the women men, and all are monkeys’. The mass lunacy of it all reached such a pitch that you sometimes saw a mother giving her baby suck, both wearing dominoes. Today Venice is relatively sober, except for the ostentatious aliens who sweep in during carnival and the high months of summer: but I sometimes fancy among its buildings – the megalomaniac palaces of the Grand Canal, the dark elaborate churches, the contorted back streets – some seeds or droppings of insanity.
Take, in particular, the myriad carved animals that decorate this city, and contribute powerfully to its grotesquerie. Often these figures conform to old animal symbolisms – the hare for lust, the fox for cunning, the pelican for loyalty, the lamb for meekness, the crane for vigilance, the spider for patience. Sometimes they represent family emblems – riccio the porcupine, for instance, for the house of Rizzo. Others, though, seem to portray degeneracies, cruelties, horrors and freaks with a perverse and peculiar relish. There is no zoo in Venice, but a mad-cap menagerie is carved upon its walls, for wherever you go these unhinged creatures peer at you from the masonry: dogs, crocodiles, birds, cockatrices, crabs, snakes, camels, monsters of diverse and horrifying species. There are innumerable eagles that seem to be made out of pineapples. There are some very queer dromedaries (the Venetian artists never could do camels, and the two on the façade of San Moisè seem to have the heads of turtles). There is a misshapen porcupine on a well-head in Goldoni’s house, and a skew-eyed ox in the church of Sant’ Aponal, and a long-necked imaginary bird peers myopically over the Rialto end of the Merceria.
Most of this monstrous bestiary seems to be malignant, from the contorted dragons on the church-cinema of Santa Margherita, who are grappled in a dreadful death-struggle, to the arrogant cocks on the floor of San Donato, in Murano, who are carrying a fox upside down on a pole, as you might take a hapless grizzly back to camp. An entire column-head in the arcade of the Doge’s Palace is devoted to animals gorging their prey – a lion with a stag’s haunch, a wolf with a mangled bird, a fox with a cock, a gryphon with a rat, a bear with a honeycomb. The stone animals of Venice all seem to be gnawing, or tearing, or wrestling, or biting, or writhing, or embroiled in a mesh of limbs, teeth, hair, ears and saliva. If you look at the mosaic of Christ’s baptism in the Baptistery of the Basilica, you will discover that even the sacred Jordan is infested with swordfish. Nothing could be sweeter than the little animals of Venetian painting, from Carpaccio’s curly dog to the ironical donkey in Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, sadly chewing withered palm leaves behind the Cross: but the Venetian sculptors infused their animal life with a streak of paranoia, progressively declining in delicacy and originality until they reached their nadir in the hideous head, half-human, half-beast, that stands on the wall of Santa Maria Formosa, its eyes bulging and its tongue a-lick.
An altogether different, gentler kind of derangement informs the sculptured lions of Venice, which stand grandly apart from all these degradations. The lion became the patron beast of Venice when St Mark became the patron saint, and for a thousand years the lion and the Serenissima were inseparable, like China and the dragon. Pope wrote contemptuously of Venice in her degeneracy as a place where
… Cupids ride the lion of the deeps;
Where, eased of fleets, the Adriatic main
Wafts the smooth eunuch and enamoured swain.
In earlier times the lion had more honourable roles to play. He rode rampant upon the beaks of the Venetian war-galleons, and fluttered on the banner of St Mark. His friendship for St Jerome automatically elevated that old scholar high in the Venetian hagiarchy. He stood guard beside thrones and palaces, frowned upon prisoners, gave authenticity to the State documents of the Republic. His expression varied according to his function. In one Croatian town, after a rebellion against Venetian rule, a very disapproving lion was erected: the usual words on his open book, Pax Tibi, Marce, were replaced with
the inscription Let God Arise, and Let His Enemies Be Scattered. In Zara, which revolted seven times against Venice, and withstood thirty-two Venetian sieges, a lion was erected, so the chroniclers tell us, ‘with a gruff expression, his book closed and his tail contorted like an angry snake’. In a seventeenth-century map of Greece the lion is shown striding into action against the Turk, his wings outstretched, a sword in his paw, and the Doge’s hat on his head. The Venetians respected him so much that some of the patricians even used to keep live lions in their gardens. A fourteenth-century writer reported excitedly that the pair in the zoological gardens beside the Basin of St Mark’s had given birth to a couple of thriving cubs: they were fed, like the pelicans of St James’s Park, at the expense of the State.
I cannot help thinking that the old Venetians went a little queer about lions, for the profusion of stone specimens in Venice is almost unbelievable. The city crawls with lions, winged lions and ordinary lions, great lions and petty lions, lions on doorways, lions supporting windows, lions on corbels, self-satisfied lions in gardens, lions rampant, lions soporific, amiable lions, ferocious lions, rickety lions, vivacious lions, dead lions, rotting lions, lions on chimneys, on flower-pots, on garden gates, on crests, on medallions, lurking among foliage, blatant on pillars, lions on flags, lions on tombs, lions in pictures, lions at the feet of statues, lions realistic, lions symbolic, lions heraldic, lions archaic, mutilated lions, chimerical lions, semi-lions, super-lions, lions with elongated tails, feathered lions, lions with jewelled eyes, marble lions, porphyry lions, and one real lion, drawn from the life, as the artist proudly says, by the indefatigable Longhi, and hung among the rest of his genre pictures in the Querini-Stampalia gallery. There are Greek lions, Gothic lions, Byzantine lions, even Hittite lions. There are seventy-five lions on the Porta della Carta, the main entrance to the Doge’s Palace. There is a winged lion on every iron insurance plate. There is even a sorrowing lion at the foot of the Cross itself, in a picture in the Scuola di San Marco.
The most imperial lion in Venice is the winged beast painted by Carpaccio in the Doge’s Palace, with a moon-lily beside his front paw, and a tail four or five feet long. The ugliest pair of lions lie at the feet of a French Ambassador’s tomb in the church of San Giobbe, and were carved, with crowns on their heads and tongues slightly protruding, by the French sculptor Perreau. The silliest lion stands in the Public Gardens, removed there from the façade of the Accademia: Minerva is riding this footling beast side-saddle, and on her helmet is perched another anatomical curiosity – an owl with knees. The eeriest lion is the so-called crab-lion, which you may find in a dark archway near the church of Santʼ Aponal, and which looks less like a crab than a kind of feathered ghoul. The most unassuming stands on a pillar outside San Nicolo dei Mendicoli; he holds the book of St Mark in his paws, but has never presumed to apply for the wings. The most froward stands on a bridge near Santa Chiara, behind the car park, where a flight of steps runs fustily down to the canal like a Dickensian staircase in the shadows of London Bridge, and this unlikeable beast glowers at you like Mrs Grundy.
The most pathetic lion is an elderly animal that stands on the palisade of the Palazzo Franchetti, beside the Accademia bridge, bearing listlessly in his mouth a label inscribed Labore. The most undernourished is a long lion on the south façade of the Basilica, three or four of whose ribs protrude cruelly through his hide. The most glamorous is the winged lion on his column in the Piazzetta, whose eyes are made of agate, whose legs were damaged when Napoleon removed him to Paris, and whose Holy Book was inserted neatly under his paws when he was first brought to Venice from the pagan East, converted from a savage basilisk to a saint’s companion.
The most indecisive lion is the creature at the foot of the Manin statue, in the Campo Manin, whose creator was evidently uncertain whether such carnivores had hair under their wings, or feathers (as Ruskin said of another pug-like example, which has fur wings, ‘in several other points the manner of his sculpture is not uninteresting’). The most senile lions are the ones on the Dogana, which are losing their teeth pitifully, and look badly in need of a pension. The most long-suffering are the porphyry lions in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, north of the Basilica, which have been used by generations of little Venetians as substitutes for rocking horses. The frankest lions, the ones most likely to succeed, are the pair that crouch, one dauntless but in chains, the other free and awfully noble, beneath the fine equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel on the Riva degli Schiavoni.
The most enigmatical is the floridly maned lion, outside the gates of the Arsenal, whose rump is carved with nordic runes. The most confident is the new lion that stands outside the naval school at Santʼ Elena, forbidding entry to all without special permission from the commandant. The most athletic looks sinuously past the Doge Foscari on the Porta della Carta. The most threatening crouches on the façade of the Scuola di San Marco, his paws protruding, ready to leap through the surrounding marble. The most reproachful looks down from the Clock Tower in the Piazza, more in sorrow than in anger, as though he has just seen you do something not altogether creditable beneath the arcade. The jolliest – but there, none of the lions of Venice are really very unpleasant, and comparisons are invidious.
They provide an essential element in the Venetian atmosphere, an element of cracked but affectionate obsession. It is no accident that in the very centre of Tintoretto’s vast Paradise, in the Doge’s Palace, the lion of St Mark sits in unobtrusive comfort, nestling beside his master amid the surrounding frenzy, and disputing with that saintly scribe, so Mark Twain thought, the correct spelling of an adjective.
Bestial, too, were the men of Venice, when the madness of politics or revenge caught hold of them. If you have a taste for Grand Guignol, Venice has much to offer you: for here, to this day, the spirit of melodrama lives on in shrouded triumph, if you care to rap the tables and seek it out. To the early Victorians Venice was synonymous with tyranny and terror. The hushed and sudden methods of the Venetian security agencies, controlled by the Council of Ten and the Council of Three, cast a chill across all Europe, and have left behind them (now that we are quite safe from the strangler’s cord) an enjoyable aftermath of shudder.
They worked in a ghastly secrecy, but it was part of their technique to surround themselves with an aura of unspeakable horror, so that the French essayist Montesquieu, jokingly told one day that he was ‘being watched by the Three’, packed his bags that very morning and fled helter-skelter home to Paris. The Ten send you to the torture chamber,’ so the Venetians used to whisper, ‘the Three to your grave’ – and they would cross themselves, as a pious but not always infallible insurance. Even foreign embassies were not immune: every diplomatic household contained at least two State spies among its servants, and the agents of the Three examined each envoy’s house for secret passages or hidden chambers.
Enemies of the State were precipitately strangled, beheaded between the two pillars of the Piazzetta, or hanged between the upper columns of the Doge’s Palace (two of them still stained, so tradition wrongly says, with the blood of traitors). Sometimes malefactors were publicly quartered, and the several parts of their bodies were exposed on the shrines of the lagoon: as late as 1781 this happened to Stefano Fantoni, who had helped his mistress to kill her husband, chop him in bits, and distribute him among the canals and wells of the city. Sometimes it was all done without explanation, and early morning passers-by would merely observe, on their way to work, that a couple of fresh corpses were hanging by one leg apiece from a rope suspended between the Piazzetta columns. If a wanted man ran away from Venice, hired assassins of dreadful efficiency were almost sure to find him. If he stayed, he invited the attentions of the terrible Venetian torturers, the most advanced and scientific of their day.
The dungeons of the Piombi (the Leads, or attics) and the Pozzi (the Wells) were horribly celebrated in their time, and even more so after Casanova’s escape from them – engineered, so some people think, because he was really a sec
ret agent of the Three. ‘I see, sir’ (said the gaoler to the great adventurer, in the most famous chapter of his memoirs), ‘that you want to know the use of that little instrument. When their Excellencies order someone to be strangled, he is seated at a stool, his back against the wall, that collar around his neck; a silken cord goes through the holes at the two ends, and passes over a wheel; the executioner turns a crank, and the condemned man yields up his soul to God!’
Most ingenious, Casanova thought it; and a sense of hooded contrivance still hangs murkily over the prisons of the Doge’s Palace, assiduously though the tourists chew their gum, as they peer through the peep-holes of the dungeons. (‘Your tickets also entitle you to visit the Dungeons,’ says Mr Grant Allen in his Historical Guide, 1898. ‘I am not aware of any sufficient reason why you should desire to avail yourself of this permission.’) Horror runs in the blood of Venice: not just because the Venetian gaolers were crueller than the French or the English, or because the Pozzi were more dreadful than the cells of the Tower, the rats more noisome or the strangling machines more meticulous – but because Venice was so small a place, her symbolisms were so compact, and all the apparatus of medieval autocracy, gorgeously gilden and embellished, was established within a few hundred yards of the Doge’s Palace.