The Golden Fleece: Essays

by Muriel Spark

  I have never been to Venice in summer time, nor in Festival time, nor at the time of any of the cinema and great art shows. My Venice belongs to late autumn and winter, the Venice of meagre tourism, the Venetians’ everyday city.

  I have never known Venice to be crowded or hurried. Perhaps for this reason, when I published a novel set in autumnal Venice, someone was puzzled by the facility with which some of my characters encountered each other in the street. It transpired he had only been in Venice during the crowded and stifling tourist seasons, when you couldn’t very likely meet the same face two days running. In the winter it’s quite different. After a week of walking around Venice – and one does have to walk a lot – or of waiting at the landing-stage for the diesel-run vaporetto, the same laughing students are there, the same solemn goodwives with their shopping bags and well-preserved fur collars, the same retired gentlemen with righteous blue eyes and brown hats. This is everyday Venice where the passers-by are sparse, where eventually they say good-morning.

  My first visit to Venice was on a cold, bright morning in February, with a friend who had been there before. However much one has read and heard about the visual impact of Venice, it never fails to take one by surprise. After five visits I still gasp. It isn’t merely the architecture, the palaces, the bridges and the general splendour, it is the combination of architecture with water, space, light and colour that causes amazement; especially I think the element of water. The first impression of the waterways of Venice is acoustic, so that normal sensations subliminally cease and new ones take their place. Voices, footsteps, bird-cries, a cough from the window on the other side of the canal – all are different from the sounds of the land one has left. The traffic is entirely watery. A greengrocer’s shop piled high with colourful vegetables is a ship floating past your window. After a few days of this estrangement from normal life I begin to feel at home with it. Some people tell me they can never settle down to a feeling of familiarity with Venice. Sometimes those are people who frequent the super hotels where everything is done to comfort and console the visitors who come with their usual bag of worries. I don’t say that this isn’t a very good thing for a holiday. But the very nature of Venice is such that the things that usually preoccupy us, from which we are attempting to get away, undergo a shift of perspective after about three days.

  I have known Venice in a mist and drizzle, where everything is depressed and soaking, every bridge is a bridge of sighs. But it is not the usual personal depression one is experiencing, it is something else, something belonging to Venice, it is collective. I think this is something the reverse of Ruskin’s ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ in which he holds that artists and poets tend to attribute to nature our human responses; Venice would be ‘brooding’ or ‘smiling’ according as we feel. On the contrary, I think we are sad when majestic Venice is in gloom; and if we are depressed already the fine thing about those gloomy days of Venice is that you forget what you are personally depressed about. Venice is a very good place to be sad. On days of mist, it is like a trip to the Shades. But winter often sparkles and these are the days one can sit warmly in Florian’s café while outside the hardy musicians perform their nostalgic palm court pieces.

  Venice has been declining for some hundreds of years. Decline is now of its essence, and I don’t think it would be anything like as attractive to ourselves if it were on the way up in the modern sense and flourishing. The Venetians themselves talk little about Venice, never unless you ask. They are proud of their native city and attached to it, but it doesn’t go to their heads as it does with the rest of us.

  There was a time when wealthy foreigners like Milly in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove could take on a romantic palace, and play at princesses. Poor Milly got what she demanded, and this was, of course, how James made fun of his contemporaries in Venice:

  At Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but if it can be at all managed – you know what I mean – some fine old rooms, wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty of them, too, and the more interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves, with a cook, don’t you know? – with servants, frescoes, tapestries, antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlement.

  Byron thought seriously of settling permanently in Venice to spend the winters there. Permanently is not a good idea; it’s bad for our bones, and also, the sort of infatuation a foreigner feels about Venice cannot last. Henry James’s American girlfriend, if one can stretch a phrase, settled in Venice only to throw herself out of a window one dark night, to her death. Byron’s Venetian girl, who threw herself into the canal, was careful to be rescued.

  However, it is difficult not to be romantic about Venice. Myself, I arrived on one of my visits – it was early in November – nearly midnight. All the river traffic, including the taxis, were on strike in solidarity with the gondoliers who had notices up demanding that gondoliers’ claims should be dealt with ‘globally’. There was a squall blowing in from the lagoon. It was quite a plight for me, there on the landing-stage, for my luggage was heavy with some reference books (I was correcting the proofs of my Venetian novel Territorial Rights). But it was really exciting to strike a bargain with some men on a coal barge which rocked and plunged in the wind and surge, with me and my books among the sooty cargo, up the Grand Canal where doges and dowagers were once wont to ride in state. The night porter at my lodgings showed no surprise; he merely came down to the landing-stage to collect me and my goods, dripping rags that we were, and to make sure that the men had not overcharged me. I will always remember that midnight journey through the black water, and the calling of the bargemen, wild sea-bird noises, as every now and again they passed another laden vessel. The palaces were mostly in darkness with the water splashing their sides, the painted mooring poles gleaming suddenly in the light of our passing; the few lights from the windows were dim and greenish, always from tiny windows at the top. Nobody walked on the banks, and yet a strange effect that I can only describe as water-voices came from those sidewalks and landing-stages. Perhaps they were ghosts, wet and cold.

  I usually stay at a charming, fairly old pensione near the Accademia, which sits on an angle of the Grand Canal and a side canal. In time, after I had taken in day by day all the sights and spectacles of Venice – the incredible St Mark’s church, the happy square with its shops full of expensive junk, the Tintorettos, museums and galleries and all those already hyper-described stones of Venice, I began to form a Venice of my own. It is rather as one does with acquaintances when one goes to live for a length of time in a new country – eventually one whittles them down to an affectionate few. These I visit again and again in my winter walks and excursions, well wrapped up and wearing boots like everyone else. Most men and women wear warm hats, too.

  Since one of the advantages of an off-season visit is that there are no crowds, it is possible to sit without interruption almost alone in the church of the Frari looking at Titian’s Assumption. I love to walk round the Ducal Palace, to see those four charming Tetrarchs, timid and proper and quietly influential, modestly embracing each other in a formal half-huddle. Giorgione’s mysterious Tempest in the Accademia is another of my best-loved familiars. And I remember a sunny winter trip, and also a cold bleak one, with a friend in the ferry-boat to Torcello, one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon where very little goes on now except the magnificent Cathedral, part Gothic, part Byzantine. There is a vast biblical narrative done in seventh-century mosaics at one end, and a golden-backed mosaic of the Madonna behind the altar, hypnotically radiant. But going behind the altar to snoop we waded into a deep pool of water which had seeped into that glorious building. We were glad of our boots. In winter there are no restaurants on the smaller islands, no bar on the ferry-boats. But sweet visitors don’t care, and the sour ones don’t matter.

  The art-treasures apart, what I return to again and again are the more homely friends of my walks through th
e windy calles and the placid, sometimes leafy squares of Venice. These include a men’s hat shop standing all alone in a small square house on the canal near Santa Maria Formosa; in the windows, and piled up inside, is a vast variety of men’s hats; straw boaters, Breton sailors’ berets, felt hats, black velour hats, fedoras, Stetsons, hats for hunting and hats for going to funerals.

  Funerals in Venice, of course, are a stately procession. The city lays on a great show, with gilt-edged barges and coffins carved within an inch of their lives. In vain have the last two Popes set the example of being buried in plain pinewood boxes, there in St Peter’s for all the world to see. Venice sails on regardless. In Venice the ambulance service too is interesting: it provides a sedan chair to run a less than stretcher-case down to the boat.

  Often, in Venice, getting lost, as everyone does, I have come across a type of that high blank wall of The Aspern Papers:

  … a high blank wall which appeared to confirm an expanse of ground on one side of the house. Blank I call it, but it was figured over with the patches that please a painter, repaired breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick that had turned pink with time; and a few thin trees, with the poles of certain rickety trellises, were visible over the top. The place was a garden and apparently it belonged to the house.

  I like the term ‘apparently’. Because, in Venice, anything can or might lie behind those high blank walls. It is well to say ‘apparently’. One never knows.

  It is true that, for myself, I never cease to feel a certain amazement that all that sheer visual goodness and aural sublimity was in fact based on commerce. Culture follows gold, somebody said. Indeed, in Venice, it apparently has done so. To-day in Venice you could never live and follow a culture in the sort of style that gave birth to it. In a Venetian palace you could never live a modern life, you would have to be serving the walls, serving the servants, giving orders for your private motor-boat to be repaired, the mooring-posts to be painted, the crystal chandeliers to be cleaned piece by piece. To own a Venetian palace must be simply awful. Some people still do it.

  It was comparatively late in a much-travelled life that I made my first trip to Venice. That was in 1975. I was vaguely saving it up for a romantic occasion. Special and romantic occasions were not wanting in my life but they never coincided with the possibility of a trip to Venice. So in the winter of 1975 I suddenly went. Venice itself was the romantic occasion: the medium is the message.

  [1981]

  Istanbul

  Istanbul is what I imagine the cellars, crypts and warehouses of the great art museums – the Tate, the National Gallery – to be like; full of discarded rubbish amongst which can be found, without a doubt, occasional treasures beyond price, sometimes badly framed or in need of restoration, but lying there in wait for their moment to arrive, for a discerning mind to make them flower. It is not that much of Istanbul is not already on display or that much remains to be exploited. It is rather that what is on show is not yet, in a sense, truly itself.

  The first impact on Western eyes is surely the element of shape and of spatial harmony. Suleiman the Magnificent’s mighty mosque, the great architectural triumph of the sixteenth-century Ottoman regime, sprawls like a round and bulging sultan and his court, with its minarets rising like maces and spears.

  The Blue Mosque, or the Mosque of Sultan Achmet I of the early seventeenth century, is quite wonderful. It is doubtfully reputed to have been built by a music-master turned architect, and the legend is understandable: the sheer harmony of the exterior, its domes upon domes, its six minarets, have a symphonic rhythm and flow. The glowing decorative ceramic tiles of the interior are particularly lovely. The principal dome rests on four massive pillars rightly called ‘elephant legs’. And yet these give a curiously airborne effect to the building, rather reminiscent of the bulky Pantheon in Rome. The Blue Mosque struck me as a place of great holiness.

  Different as were the religions of the Christians of Constantinople and the Turks who conquered in 1453, the outward sign of change is very slight; evidence of the abrupt takeover is mainly to be seen in the interiors of the former churches.

  Kemal Atatürk had the genius to secularise the Hagia Sophia. ‘It has been a church,’ he said, ‘it has been a mosque, and now it is a museum.’ This made it possible for the plastered-over Christian mosaics of Justinian and Theodora and their descendants to be uncovered. But to have done so in style the city would have needed the means of the sixth-century Emperor and his fabulous bride; and this Istanbul has not got.

  Hagia Sophia still has an air of punitive religions hanging about the place. In those colossal halls I shivered with a sense of cruelty and fear as I do in the Colosseum in Rome. Standing in the women’s gallery one can see in one’s mind’s eye, as did the women of former days in actuality, the barbaric hordes of crusaders and invaders below, wrecking the place and liquidating the worshippers.

  The Byzantine element lingers in the vastness of the architectural conception, and the impassive quality of those glorious mosaics which have been uncovered. Justinian and Theodora embodied the Byzantine state of mind. In Hagia Sophia, and in the great site of the Hippodrome I kept thinking of that couple, who stand immortally preserved in mosaics in the Church of St Vitale in Ravenna, on opposite walls, flanked by their respective courts, observing each other placidly as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth. And yet it was Theodora herself, the story goes, who won over the generals to loose the army and put to death her thirty thousand best friends who had foregathered in the Hippodrome to massacre her and her munificent husband.

  Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque are both in the old city. Nearby are the third-century Hippodrome from whence the famous horses of St Mark’s in Venice are looted, and in the same area the Palace of Topkapi, which houses the world’s grandest collection of china, precious stones, jewelled daggers, diamond-embedded jars, gilded furnishings, burnished thrones, tapestries, and vestments, painted miniatures, manuscripts – all of which testify to the residence in these sumptuously decorated rooms of the learned, artistic and treasure-loving sultans of the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

  This plethora of wealth and dazzle at Topkapi must always in a sense have constituted a mighty museum: a house of the sensual arts, a showplace of the all-powerful, all-sufficient and all-possessing life of a single potentate, his family and his court.

  While anxious to see as much as I could of Istanbul, I was specially on the look-out for mosaics, an art-form dear to my heart. They are like the suddenly halted images of modern film – stills of a special moment frozen in time. It was from Constantinople that the mosaic material went by sea-route to Venice and Ravenna. We owe St Mark’s in Venice and the jewel-box of mosaics that make up the churches and baptisteries of Ravenna, to the Byzantine genius.

  Nothing at all in Istanbul can now compare with the Italian wonders that reached their peak in the sixth century. What has been uncovered in the Hagia Sophia can give only a small indication of what the dazzling whole must have been up to the conquest of Constantinople and the immediate plastering over of all Christian art.

  The interior of St Saviour in Chora is a decorated whole, following a definite iconographic design and a planned narrative. It is thanks to the Byzantine Institute of America that the extensive fourteenth-century mosaic picture-sequence has been uncovered. These late pictures are more expressive and humanised, and at the same time more sentimental, than the still and stylised early Byzantine examples, but their portraiture, movement and colours are truly superb. A genealogy of Christ is depicted, and a legendary life of Mary from her infancy to her death (‘the Dormition’). This latter mosaic picture, beautifully constructed, is of great mystical-theological interest. The Virgin is shown lying in the sleep of death, watched by Christ who also holds Mary as an infant in his arms so that the images of Mary as mother and daughter of Christ appear simultaneously. In another mosaic, the Virgin and child are placed in a central position within a flu
ted dome, with ancestral figures of the House of David portrayed on each rib.

  Another church with beautifully restored mosaics is St Mary Pammakaristos (The All-Beatific Virgin). This church is in the Fener district, difficult to find through teeming slumland, but well worth the search. It was said to been used by the Christians for some years even after the Turkish conquest, but by the late sixteenth century it had been converted into a mosque like other Byzantine churches. The restored mosaics are in a side-chapel which has been set apart as a museum. The main building is still used as a mosque.

  Portions of the sixth-century mosaic pavement of the Great Palace, home of the Byzantine Emperors, belong to the great and lovely period of Byzantine art. The Mosaic Museum, as it is called, is an excavated section of the Great Palace, entered through a door in a back street near the Blue Mosque. These mosaics represent secular hunting scenes. What pictures remain are full of fun and movement. A bear, a stag, a donkey, a wolf, a tiger, a horse, a camel with two children taking a ride, a man falling from a horse loaded with fruit, and, best of all, a wonderful green-bearded man of the woods with a ruddy face and bright eyes, his hair and beard blending into the foliage.

  From the historical point of view, nearly every single item of interest in Istanbul would be worth going specially to see: the city walls date from Theodosius II in the fifth century. They have been well restored in recent times, and dramatically stretch over six kilometres from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. Most of the sites and monuments deserve far more attention than the average visitor can give. The Archaeological Museum is worth many visits for many reasons, not the least being the presence there of the famous sarcophagus of Alexander. The reality of this much-photographed tomb with its dramatic battle and hunting scenes carved in great movement and detail is one of those treasures which alone it would be worth going to Istanbul especially to see.