the meekest soul feels welcome and protection, the spirit oppressed with the heaviest load of sin might creep nearest to forgiveness, hiding the anguish of its repentance in the temple’s dim cavernous recesses, faintly starred with mosaic, and twilighted by twinkling altar-lamps. Though the temple is enriched with incalculable value of stone and sculpture, I cannot remember at any time to have been struck by its mere opulence Preciousness of material has been sanctified to the highest uses, and there is such unity and justness in the solemn splendor, that wonder is scarcely appealed to. Even the priceless and rarely seen treasures of the church—such as the famous golden altarpiece, whose costly blaze of gems and gold was lighted in Constantinople six hundred years ago—failed to impress me with their pecuniary worth, though I
“Value the giddy pleasure of the eyes,”
and like to marvel at precious things. The jewels of other churches are conspicuous and silly heaps of treasure; but St. Mark’s, where every line of space shows delicate labor in rich material, subdues the jewels to their place of subordinate adornment. So, too, the magnificence of the Romish service seems less vainly ostentatious there. In other churches the ceremonies may sometimes impress you with a sense of their grandeur, and even spirituality, but they all need the effect of twilight upon them. You want a foreground of kneeling figures, and faces half visible through heavy bars of shadow; little lamps must tremble before the shrines; and in the background must rise the high altar, all ablaze with candles from vault to pavement, while a hidden choir pours music from behind, and the organ shakes the heart with its heavy tones. But with the daylight on its splendors even the grand function of the Te Deum fails to awe, and wearies by its length, except in St. Mark’s alone, which is given grace to spiritualize what elsewhere would be mere theatric pomp. 19 The basilica, however, is not in every thing the edifice best adapted to the Romish worship; for the incense, which is a main element of the function, is gathered and held there in choking clouds under the low wagon-roofs of the cross-naves.—Yet I do not know if I would banish incense from the formula of worship even in St. Mark’s. There is certainly a poetic if not a religious grace in the swinging censer and its curling fumes; and I think the perfume, as it steals mitigated to your nostrils, out of the open church door, is the reverendest smell in the world.
The music in Venetian churches is not commonly very good: the best is to be heard at St. Mark’s, though the director of the choir always contrives to make so odious a slapping with his bâton as nearly to spoil your enjoyment. The great musical event of the year is the performance (immediately after the Festa del Redentore) of the Soldini Masses. These are offered for the repose of one Guiseppe Soldini of Verona, who, dying possessed of about a million francs, bequeathed a part (some six thousand francs) annually to the church of St. Mark, on conditions named in his will. The terms are, that during three successive days, every year, there shall be said for the peace of his soul a certain number of masses,—all to be done in the richest and costliest manner. In case of delinquency, the bequest passes to the Philharmonic Society of Milan; but the priesthood of the basilica so strictly regard the wishes of the deceased that they never say less than four masses over and above the prescribed number. 20
As there is so little in St. Mark’s of the paltry or revolting character of modern Romanism, one would form too exalted an idea of the dignity of Catholic worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the sincerity and nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown to the Romish faith of these times, are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell upon the present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith honors the superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition in all its proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the Renaissance churches,—fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming spirit which has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of religion; which has made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has rendered the population ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its friendship to tyranny and its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life of the Church that it may sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of this superstition are the foolish and hideous dolls which people bow to in most of the Venetian temples, and of which the most abominable is in the church of the Carmelites. It represents the Madonna with the Child, elevated breast-high to the worshipers. She is crowned with tinsel and garlanded with paper flowers; she has a blue ribbon about her tightly corseted waist; and she wears an immense spreading hoop. On her painted, silly face of wood, with its staring eyes shadowed by a wig, is figured a pert smile; and people come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs by a chain from her girdle, and utter their prayers to her; while the column near which she sits is hung over with pictures celebrating the miracles she has performed.
These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on most altars of the Virgin, and are no less interesting as works of art than as expressions of hopeless superstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is dressed in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited, is the Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and hopeless sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her interference. You behold a carriage overturned and dragged along the ground by frantic horses, and the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman in the carriage about to be dashed into millions of pieces, when the havoc is instantly arrested by this Madonna who breaks the clouds, leaving them with jagged and shattered edges, like broken panes of glass, and visibly holds back the fashionable lady and gentleman from destruction. It is the fashionable lady and gentleman who have thus recorded their obligation; and it is the mother, doubtless, of the little boy miraculously preserved from death in his fall from the second-floor balcony, who has gratefully caused the miracle to be painted and hung at the Madonna’s shrine. Now and then you also find offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in acknowledgment of good crops which the Madonna has made to grow; and again you find rows of silver hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her intercession has caused to be purged. The greatest number of these, at any one shrine, is to be seen in the church of San Nicolò dei Tolentini, where I should think there were three hundred.
Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna della Salute in pestilent times, I do not take it to be very great when the health of the city is good, if I may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in the church of her name: it is true that on the annual holiday commemorative of her interposition to save Venice from the plague, there is an immense concourse of people there; but at other times I found the masses and vespers slenderly attended, and I did not observe a great number of votive offerings in the temple,—though the great silver lamp placed there by the city, in memory of the Madonna’s goodness during the visitation of the cholera in 1849, may be counted, perhaps, as representative of much collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb church, lording it over the noblest breadth of the Grand Canal; and I do not know what it is saves it from being as hateful to the eye as other temples of the Renaissance architecture. But it has certainly a fine effect, with its twin belltowers and single massive dome, its majestic breadth of steps rising from the water’s edge, and the many-statued sculpture of its façade. Strangers go there to see the splendor of its high altar (where the melodramatic Madonna, as the centre of a marble group, responds to the prayer of the operatic Venezia, and drives away the haggard, theatrical Pest), and the excellent Titians and the grand Tintoretto in the sacristy.
The Salute is one of the great show-churches, like that of San Giovanni e Paolo, which the common poverty of imagination has decided to call the Venetian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many famous tombs and monuments. But there is only one Westminster Abbey; and I am so far a believer in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose that vergers are nowhere possible but in England. There would be nothing to say, after Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San Giovanni e Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them; I only wonder that, in speaking of the bad art which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he failed to mention the successful approach to its depraved feeling, made by the single figure sitting on the case of a slender shaft, at the side of the first altar on the right of the main entrance. I suppose this figure typifies Grief, but it really represents a drunken woman, whose drapery has fallen, as if in some vile debauch, to her waist, and who broods,
