Venice Founded – 5

As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveler had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows.

Continuing Venice Founded,
our selection from Stones of Venice by John Ruskin published in 1853. The selection is presented in 3.5 easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Venice Founded.

Time: 452 AD
Place: Rialto Island

As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveler had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the Lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north — a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls were reached and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveler’s sight opened the long ranges of columned palaces — each with its black boat moored at the portal — each with its image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier’s cry, “Ah! Stali,” struck sharp upon the ear and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat’s side; and when at last that boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal Palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being.

Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in nature was wild or merciless — Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests — had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea.

And although the last few eventful years, fraught with change to the face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their influence on Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and though many of her palaces are forever defaced and many in desecrated ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect that the hurried traveler, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are little to be envied in whose hearts the great charities of the imagination lie dead and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the importunity of painful impressions or to raise what is ignoble and disguise what is discordant in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the imagination there must be no permission during the task which is before us.

The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of discerning, the objects to which they ought to have been attached. The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that “Bridge of Sighs,” which is the center of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now passes with breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero’s death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from his tomb and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter’s favorite subject, the novelist’s favorite scene, where the water first narrows by the steps of the Church of La Salute — the mighty doges would not know in what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave.

Thomas Hodgkin began here. John Ruskin began here.

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