individuals, as is usually the case when a valuable product is made out of cheap materials by processes which are secret, and therefore have the effect of a monopoly.

As early as the fourteenth century the government had understood the immense importance of the art, and the glass-blowers of Murano were protected and favoured in a most especial way. As in one part of France, a sort of nobility was inherent in the occupation, and an early law sanctioned the marriage of a master

glass-blower’s daughter with a patrician by allowing their children to be entered in the Golden Book.

The glass-works were all established in the island of Murano, as their presence in the city would have caused constant danger of fire at a time when many of the houses were still built of wood, and the whole manufacture was subject to the direct supervision of the Council of Ten, under whose supreme authority Murano governed itself as a separate city, and almost as a separate little republic. Not only were the glass-blowers organised in a number of guilds according to the special

branches of the profession, such as bead-making, bottle-blowing, the making of window-panes and of stained glass, each guild having its own ‘mariegola’ or charter; but over these the Muranese had their own Great Council and Golden Book, in which the names of one hundred and seventy-three families were inscribed, and their own Small Council, or Senate. The Ten gave Murano a ‘Podestà,’ but he had not the power which similar officers exercised in the other cities and islands of the Dogato, and it is amusing to see that the people of Murano treated him very much as the Venetians themselves treated their Doge. He was required to be of noble blood; he was obliged by law to spend three days out of four in Murano; he was forbidden to go to Venice when important functions were going on; he could not interfere in any affair without the permission of both the Councils of Murano, and altogether he was much the same sort of figure-head as the Doge himself. On the other hand, Murano supported a sort of consul in Venice with the title of Nuncio, whose business it was to defend the interests of the island before the Venetian government.

Neither the Missier Grande, the chief of the Venetian police, nor the ‘sbirri,’ were allowed to exercise their functions on the island. Offenders were arrested and dealt with by the officers of the Murano government, and were handed over to the Venetian supreme government only in extreme cases, most trials taking place on the island.

The heraldic arms of Murano displayed on an azure field a cock with red legs, wearing a crown of silver.

In the sixteenth century the population was about thirty thousand souls, and the little city had a great reputation for the beauty of its churches and especially of its gardens, in which quantities of exotic plants and flowers were cultivated.

The two most powerful families amongst the glass-blowers were those of Beroviero and Ballarin. I have told at length in the form of a romance the true story

of Zorzi Ballarin and Marietta Beroviero, availing myself only of the romancer’s right to be the apologist of his hero. The facts remain. Angelo Beroviero, a pupil of Paolo Godi, the famous mediæval chemist, worked much alone in his laboratory, noting the results of his experiments in a diary which became extremely valuable. By some means this diary came into the hands of Zorzi Ballarin, so-called by his comrades on account of his lameness. He loved Marietta, and she loved him, but he was poor, and moreover, as far as I have been able to ascertain, he was of foreign birth, and could therefore not become a master glass-blower. When he found himself in possession of the precious

secrets, he used his power to extort Beroviero’s consent, he married Marietta, obtained the full privileges of a master, lived a highly honourable life, and became the ancestor of a distinguished family, one of whom was a Venetian ambassador, as may be read in the inscription on his tomb in Murano. Beroviero’s house, with the sign of the Angel, is still standing in Murano, and I think the ancient glass-works nearly opposite were probably his. As for Zorzi Ballarin, I daresay that the process by which he really got possession of the diary was not strictly legal, but love has excused worse misdeeds than that, and Beroviero does not seem to have suffered at all in the end. If there had been any foundation for the spiteful story some chroniclers tell,

a man of Beroviero’s power and wealth could have had Zorzi imprisoned, tortured, and exiled without the slightest difficulty.

Venice was almost as famous for her lace as for her glass. On the admittedly doubtful authority of Daru and Laugier, Smedley gives an anecdote of the Emperor Frederick III. for what it is worth. It at least illustrates the fact that all foreigners did not esteem Venetian glass as highly as the Venetians themselves. When Frederick visited the city on his way to Rome, he was most magnificently entertained, and amongst other presents offered to him was a very beautiful service of Murano glass. The Emperor was not pleased with the gift, which, to his barbarous ignorance, seemed of no value; he ordered his dwarf jester to seem to stumble against the table on which the matchless glass was set out, and it was all thrown to the ground and smashed to atoms. ‘If these things had been of gold or silver, they could not have been broken so easily,’ said the imperial boor.

In contrast with this possibly true story of the fifteenth century, I find that the lace collar worn by Louis XIV. at his coronation was made in Venice, and was valued at an enormous sum. He afterwards bribed Murano glass-blowers to settle in France.

In those times, more or less as now, women made lace at home, and brought the results of their long and patient labour to the dealers, who bought and sold it at a fabulous profit. A few specimens of the finest lace of the sixteenth century are still in existence, and are worn on great occasions by Italian ladies whose ancestresses wore them more than three hundred years ago; but the art of making such lace is extinct. Glance only, for instance, at a picture by Carpaccio, in the Museo Civico of Venice, representing two patrician ladies of the fifteenth century, one of whom wears white lace on her gown. It is of the kind known as ‘point coupé’ or cut point, and is the same which Francesco Vinciolo taught the French a hundred years later when it was no longer thought fine enough, in Venice, for ornamenting anything but sheets and pillow-cases. It is inimitable now. Or look at the exquisite lace of network stitch with which Gentile Bellini loved to adorn the women he portrayed. Yet in the sixteenth century still further progress had been made, and the ‘air point’ was created, which surpassed in fineness anything imagined before then, and for which fabulous prices were paid. The collar of Louis XIV. was of this point, and it is said that as no thread could be spun fine enough for it, white human hair was used. There is also a story to the effect that the Emperor Joseph II., who ascended the throne in 1765, ordered a set of air point worth the improbable, though not very great price of 77,777 francs. As neither Austrians nor Venetians used the franc, the story is most likely of French origin.

Another lace greatly valued in Venice was the ‘rose point,’ which is probably the best known of the ancient laces. It was preferred, for collars, both by high officials and great ladies, and the Dogesses often used it for their veils. The Doge Francesco Morosini possessed some wonderful specimens of it, which I am told are still in the possession of his descendants.

One more stitch was invented in the sixteenth century, which oddly enough obtained the generic name of ‘Venetian point.’ There is a pretty story about it. A sailor, says the legend, came home from a long voyage and brought his sweetheart a kind of seaweed known to botanists by the name of Halimedia Opuntia, of which the little branches were so fine that the people called the plant ‘Siren’s hair.’ The man sailed again on another voyage, and the girl, full of loving and anxious thoughts for him, occupied herself by copying the dried plant with her needle, and in so doing created the Venetian point.

The minister Colbert introduced it into France a century later, under Louis XIV., and gave it his own name; and the King and the Republic quietly quarrelled about this French infringement of a Venetian monopoly. In the end, the Inquisitors of State issued a decree which was intended to recall errant and erring Venetian lace-workers and glass-blowers to the security of their homes:—

‘All workmen or artisans who carry on their trade in foreign countries shall be ordered to come back; should they disobey, the members of their families shall be imprisoned, and if they then return, they shall be freely pardoned and again employed in Venice. But if any of them persist in living abroad, messengers shall be sent to kill them, and when they are dead their relations shall be let out of prison.’

The glass-blowers who were to be murdered were men, but the lace-makers were women, and the decree, which was made about 1673, is a fine instance of Venetian business principles, since the killing of men and women by assassination was a measure introduced solely for the protection of trade.

Coloured bobbin lace was also made in Venice, with dyed silk thread and threads of gold, in the fifteenth century, and Richard III. of England desired his queen to wear it on her cloak at their coronation in 1483.

The modern Burano lace was first made after the

end of the Republic, and is almost the only sort which is now manufactured in any quantity. Some of the finer points are imitated, it is true, and are vastly advertised, advertisement having taken the place of assassination in business methods as a means of creating a fictitious monopoly; but in spite of some really good pieces of needlework wrought with great care—as advertisements—the mass of the work turned out is of a cheap and commercial character.

The policy of Venice with regard to her manufactures was one of protection, as has been seen, and the result was on the whole very satisfactory to the people as well as to the great merchants. Very heavy duties were levied on almost all imported articles, and among the very few excepted were the silk fabrics from Florence known by the name of ‘ormesini.’ This material was in such common use in Venice that the local silk weavers could not meet the demand for it. One of the reasons why the working people of Venice were always satisfied was that they were almost always prosperous; the price of labour was high, while that of necessities was relatively low, and the people accordingly lived in comfort without excessively hard work.

On the other hand, some of them were always extravagant, as some of the nobles were, and some were unfortunate; and though there was no pauperism, there were many families of hopelessly poor persons. In a measure the hospitals, hospices, and orphan asylums provided for those in want, but in Venice, as in modern cities, the candidates for charity were always just a little more numerous than the shares into which charity could divide herself.

There were also those who, if not exactly poor, were in difficulties, the class that for ever feeds the pawnbroker and the small money-lender. The Republic exercised the strictest supervision over these industries, and few cities in the world ever turned a harder face against the inroads of the Hebrews. It was with the greatest unwillingness and with many precautions that Jews were ever admitted into the city at all, and a special code provided the most extraordinary and cruel penalties for the most ordinary misdemeanours when committed by them. They were forced to wear a special dress with a large patch of yellow on the chest, and they could only follow the meanest occupations. In mediæval Rome it was the business of the Jews to bury the Christian dead, but it often happened that the Pope’s private physician was a Hebrew. I do not find that in Venice they were ever forced to be gravediggers for the poor, but they were forbidden to act as physicians except for their own sick. Both Church and State rigorously forbade their intermarriage with Christians, and, so far as the happy ending of the love story is concerned, Lorenzo and Shylock’s daughter could never have married. More than once, before the sixteenth century, the Jews were expelled from Venice and made to live in Mestre, which seems to have been their regular headquarters, but they were allowed to come into the city during the time of certain public fairs. If they prolonged their stay beyond the limit, however, they became liable to fine or imprisonment. Some of these measures had been partly relaxed by the middle of the sixteenth century, but the Jews never enjoyed anything like equality with the other citizens.

Oddly enough the money-lender of the lower classes in Venice was the wine-seller, whom the people called the Bastionero. In the wine-shop it was customary to pawn objects for wine and money

simultaneously, one-third of the value being given in wine, which was generally watered. If the pledge were not redeemed within three months, the amount to be paid for getting it back was increased, and again at the end of the next three months, and so on, until,

at the end of the year, the original sum lent was doubled. If it was not paid, the wine-seller had a right to sell the object for what it would bring.

A modern Eastern proverb says that one Greek can cheat any ten Jews, but that one Armenian can cheat ten Greeks. Considering that Venice had a distinctly oriental character during the Middle Ages, and since we know that the small money-lending wine-sellers were not Jews, I suspect that they were principally Greeks and Armenians, the more probably so as we know that great quantities of Greek and Armenian wine were imported into Venice, and that those wines will bear a good deal of watering. The latter is an important point, for it is manifest that when the pledge was redeemed within the first three months, the lender’s profit was the difference between the nominal and the real value of the wine which formed one-third of the loan.

The government which tolerated this ignoble occupation exhibited the most extraordinary prejudice against the government pawnbroking offices which were common in other Italian cities. Historians have in vain endeavoured to discover why this prejudice went so far that, in 1524, the Council of Ten published a decree threatening with death on the scaffold any one who should even propose the creation of such an establishment. Without entering into any ingenious speculation, it seems possible that the Venetians, who were wise if not virtuous, considered that while it was impossible to prevent the poor from borrowing small sums on their little possessions, to authorise such borrowing by making the government the lender would greatly increase the temptations of that more shiftless class to whom borrowing seems to be a prime necessity of existence.

The centre and heart of all this activity, good and bad, was the bridge of the Rialto. We find it hard to realise that until near the end of the sixteenth century it was still built of wood with a movable drawbridge in the middle to admit the passage of larger vessels. Carpaccio, who lived in the fifteenth century, has left us a faithful representation of it as it remained for nearly a hundred years afterwards. It would be interesting to place beside that picture Turner’s lost painting of the same subject, a very beautiful canvas which I have twice had the good fortune to see in the course of its more than mysterious peregrinations. I last heard of it, though not certainly, as being in the south of France.

The present bridge was begun after infinite hesitation in 1588, and was built after the designs of Antonio da Ponte, whose name was certainly prophetic of his career. Twelve thousand elm piles had to be driven into the soil on each side of the canal to a depth of sixteen feet to make the foundations of the arch. The construction occupied three years, and is said to have cost 250,000 ducats, presumably of silver. The bridge as it stands is a remarkable piece of work, and would be beautiful if the hideous superstructure of shops could be removed. It is interesting to note that fifty years before its completion, Michelangelo offered the Doge Andrea Gritti a plan for a bridge, as is amply proved by the existence of a picture in the Casa Buonarotti in Florence representing the subject.

V

CONCERNING SOME LADIES OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

as ‘woman’ in the abstract. In other words, ‘women’ are a fact, but ‘woman’ is a myth. Though this may be a little paradoxical, there are certainly distinct types of women in each class of life. The smart society woman of to-day and the labourer’s wife, like the Venetian patrician lady of the sixteenth century and the fisher-wives of Chioggia, have in common only their sex, their weaknesses and their sufferings; there is very little resemblance between their virtues, and none at all between their joys.

The noble ladies of Venice in the sixteenth century were as idle and frivolous as Orientals. The fact must be admitted by any one who studies the times; and if it is not of a nature to please those who idealise that period, it may be partly excused by the consideration that the Venetian nobleman treated his womankind very much as a Turk treats his harem. He was not jealous, as lovers understand jealousy; granted a certain degree of beauty and a dowry of a certain value, he cared very little whom he married. When Kugler, the famous art critic, says of Titian’s picture of the Schiava, the Slave, in the Barberini Gallery in Rome, that the name is utterly meaningless, he shows that he knew nothing of Venetian life. The slave in the sixteenth century not seldom meant everything, where the wife meant nothing; and if the wives were idle and frivolous, we must remember that when they were young and good-looking, they often found themselves in competition with beautiful Georgian and Circassian women for their masters’ favour. Where women are plentiful, beautiful, and not clever, the men who love them are rarely jealous. But those grave and magnificent Venetians, who had not a scruple in politics, nor in matrimony, were excessively sensitive about anything which touched their technical honour, and it seemed to them altogether safer and wiser to teach their wives and daughters what they were pleased to call ‘habits of domestic seclusion.’ To be plain, they encouraged them to stay at home; and sometimes, by way of making obedience easier, they locked them up. M. Yriarte says with partial truth that their ‘seclusion’ was that of the harem, not that of the classic gynaeceum; he did not realise that the latter was nothing but a harem too, and that if the Greeks kept their wives at home, it was that they might sup undisturbed in the society of Phryne.

The influence of the East on everything connected with private life in Venice increased with the Renascence, and is even more perceptible then than during the nominal domination of the Byzantine Empire, when Roman traditions still had great force, and new currents of thought reached Venice from the Lombards.

Yet in one respect there was nothing oriental about the Venetian noble of the sixteenth century. When he ordered his women to appear in public at all, he sent them out adorned like those miraculous images which are covered with ‘ex voto’ offerings, and they mixed in the crowd that filled the Piazza of Saint Mark’s, shoulder to shoulder with the shameless free.

The Venetian gentleman, so sensitive about his technical honour, was not even displeased when the chronicler, the reporter of his day, confounded ladies and courtesans in pompous praise of their beauty and dress. One of the nobleman’s principles seems to have been that a woman was never in danger in public, nor when her door was locked on the outside and the key was in her husband’s pocket, but that any intermediate state of partial liberty was fraught with peril.

At home the Venetian ladies suffered the pains of boredom in common with the Georgians and Circassians, who not infrequently lived under the same roof, but who presumably saw something more of their masters. The young mother had not even a resource in her children, for it was necessary that the latter should be brought up to be precisely like their fathers and mothers, and in order to accomplish this the fathers kept the boys with themselves, and made them serve in the Senate when they were still quite small; whereas it seems that the girls were brought up largely in convents, such as that of the Vergini, lest they should learn too well from their mothers what it meant to be the wife of a member of the Great Council.

Does any one remember, in all the portraits of Venetian ladies by Carpaccio, Tintoretto, Veronese, or Titian, to have seen a mother accompanied by her little child? There is the conventional flower, there is the jewel, there is often the lap-dog; but the child is as conspicuously absent as the effigy of Brutus at Junia Tertia’s funeral. Children were born and were splendidly baptized; but after that they had no part in their mothers’ lives. And the ladies themselves had no great part in Venetian social life, except on its great occasions of baptisms, marriages, and funerals, or in public ceremonies, when they appeared in a body, by order of the Ten, in their richest clothes and as a part of the decoration. It is no wonder that they had few friends and were bored to extinction.

As a specimen of what a young and noble Venetian girl could become if emancipated, one cannot do better than take Bianca Cappello. She was

born in 1548 in the magnificent palace which her father, Bartolommeo Cappello, had built for himself near the Ponte Storto. Her mother died when Bianca was a little child, a misfortune which probably had no very great influence on the girl’s education or character, seeing how little the Venetian ladies occupied themselves with their children. She received the usual teaching, and learned to read and write after a fashion, and such of her letters as have been preserved show that her writing was anything but good. No doubt she had the usual number of pet birds and lap-dogs to play with, and plenty of sweetmeats, and when she was sixteen she was very like other girls of her class and age.

In Italy young girls are taught not to look out of the window in town. Bianca was terribly bored, and she looked out of the window. Opposite her father’s palace was a house occupied by two Florentine burghers, uncle and nephew, Bonaventuri by name, who represented the great Tuscan banking-house of Salviati.

Bianca looked out of her window, dreaming, no doubt, of the dancing lessons which she would be allowed to have when she should be married, and of other similar and harmless frivolities; and young Pietro Bonaventuri also looked out of the window, neglecting his ledgers.

The girl was very lonely and excessively bored. She never left the palace except to go with her father

to their villa in Murano for a few weeks in the fine season. She was not even taken to church, because, some eighty years, earlier, a young girl called Giovanna di Riviera, when going to mass with her mother on the morning of the third of March 1482, had been picked up and literally carried off by a too enterprising lover. After that, young girls of good birth were not allowed to go to church, and mass was said for them in a little chapel at home.

Bianca was so terribly bored that she began to make signs to Pietro from her window. She had nothing else to do. One of her most important occupations was to sun her hair on the high ‘altana.’ That was a real pleasure, for the palace was gloomy, though it was new, and her room felt like a prison cell; but she could not be always sunning her hair.

The young banker’s clerk responded to her signals of distress with alacrity, and a dumb love affair began, apparently highly approved by the youth’s uncle, who was a man of business. On the night

between the twenty-eighth and the twenty-ninth of December the two eloped and got away from Venice without being caught.

Bartolommeo Cappello’s appeal to the Council of Ten is extant. I give the most interesting part of it:—

‘I shall here expose, and not without tears, the cruel and atrocious deed of which I was the victim on the night of December the twenty-ninth. The scoundrel Pietro Bonaventuri, with the consent of his uncle, Giovanni Battista, and of accomplices whom I know not ... entered my house, which is almost opposite his, and carried off my only daughter, sixteen years old; he first took her to his house and then hid her from place to place, to my great dishonour and that of all my family.’

The document goes on in a strain of lamentation, and ends with the request that the Council of Ten should set a price on the head of the seducer, and bring the girl back to be locked up in a convent; and the unhappy father offered a prize of six thousand lire to any one who would bring him Pietro Bonaventuri, alive or dead. The letter expresses more hatred of the lover than sorrow for the lost child.

The Ten proceeded in the matter without delay; Pietro’s uncle was thrown into prison, and died there soon afterwards of a putrid fever. Bianca’s woman-servant and the latter’s husband, who was a gondolier, and who had, of course, both been acquainted with the plan of her flight, were arrested and tortured; as for Pietro and Bianca, they had been already some time in Florence, where they learned that they had both been condemned to death by default. The Ten had proceeded against the insignificant banker’s clerk with terrible energy.

But Bianca, who had been so dreadfully bored, now had too much to do. Pietro’s affairs did not prosper, and after selling the jewels she had brought with her, she was obliged to work with her hands in his house, which was not at all what she had bargained for. Chance favoured her, however, and she helped chance as well as she could, and succeeded in attracting the notice of Francesco de’ Medici. He was the son of Cosmo, the Grand Duke, and the brother of Isabella, then not yet drowned in her own basin by Paolo Giordano Orsini, and of Cardinal Ferdinando, who afterwards poisoned his brother and became Grand Duke. Francesco lost his heart to the beautiful Bianca, and she had no objection to winning it; Pietro Bonaventuri, who was a man of business instincts, but not sufficiently cautious, had no objection either. But old Cosmo, the Duke, was much scandalised by his son’s behaviour, though he himself had been accused of nothing less than loving his own daughter Isabella, and he remonstrated with Francesco.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘that I do not wish to weary you with preaching, but when things go too far you must learn what I think of you.’

Francesco learned, but does not seem to have been much affected by the knowledge, for he presently installed Bianca and her complaisant husband almost under the same roof with his wife. Pietro, however, was really so superfluous that he was soon suppressed, after which his widow occupied an official position in

the court of Tuscany as the acknowledged mistress of the heir to the throne. Francesco now attempted to get a reversal of the sentence passed on Bianca by the Council of Ten, and employed an influential person to plead the cause; but it was thought improper that such a case should be treated in the name of old Cosmo while he insisted on ignoring Bianca’s existence. Cosmo died in 1574, but still nothing was done.

It may be doubted whether any woman in Bianca’s situation ever went to such extremes of treachery and effrontery. Her victim, the gentle Archduchess Giovanna of Austria, Francesco’s wife, died at last in 1578, possibly without being helped out of the world, and Francesco married Bianca secretly two months later; but the marriage was not announced to the people until the year of mourning was over. Bianca was Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

The effect of the news in Venice was magical. The Senate made the following curious declaration:—

‘The Grand Duke of Tuscany having deigned to choose as his consort the lady Bianca Cappello, of noble Venetian family, endowed with such great qualities that we judge her worthy of that dignity, it is but right that our Republic should exhibit its satisfaction at the honour conferred upon it by this important and prudent decision of the said Grand Duke. We therefore decree that the aforesaid illustrious and puissant lady, Bianca Cappello, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, be declared the adopted and beloved daughter of our Republic.’

Bianca’s father, who, being a good Venetian, was almost as good a man of business as Salviati’s murdered clerk, and much more prudent, wrote a letter full of touchingly tender feeling to the daughter whom he had cursed so loudly and so long; he and his sons, Bianca’s brothers, were made Knights of the Golden Stole, and all the records of the scandalous trial that had taken place fifteen years earlier were burnt. Bianca’s public marriage and coronation took place on the twelfth of October 1579, and the Republic sent two ambassadors and the patriarch Grimani to show the Grand Duchess that all old scores were forgotten. She was thirty-one years old.

We know even more than is necessary of Bianca’s life and intrigues. She survived her triumph eight years, till she and her ill-gotten husband died of poison within a few hours of each other; but whether the drug was administered by the Cardinal Ferdinando, Francesco’s brother, or whether the two meant to give it to him and took it by mistake, is not clear. He himself declared that he had not poisoned anybody. It is at least certain that he would not allow Bianca to be interred in the Medici vault, but had her privately buried in the crypt of San Lorenzo.

The Venetian Republic did not go into mourning for its ‘well-beloved adopted daughter,’ since it was best not to quarrel with the Cardinal Grand Duke, who had probably suppressed her, though his physician made an autopsy and assured the public that she had died of frightful excesses of all sorts.

The moral of this unpleasing tale is that the manner of bringing up Venetian girls in the sixteenth century was not of a kind to develop their better instincts, for there is nothing to show that Bianca Cappello was very different from other girls of her time, except in the great opportunities for doing harm which fell to her share.

Probably the most enjoyable weeks of a noble Venetian girl’s life were those which preceded her marriage, and were chiefly spent in the preparation of her wedding outfit. The age was eccentric as to dress; it was the time of the huge Elizabethan ruffle and hoops; in Venice it was especially the time of clogs.

The latter had been introduced in the fourteenth century on account of the mud in the still unpaved

streets, and they continued to be worn and grew to monstrous dimensions after their usefulness had very much decreased. It became the rule that the greater the lady was, the higher her clogs must be, till they turned into something like stilts, and she could no longer walk except leaning on the shoulders of two servants. In China, the Chinese men, as distinguished from the Tartars, encourage the barbarous breaking of girls’ feet, because it makes it impossible for them to gad about the town when they are older, and still less to run away. The Venetian noblemen approved of clogs for the same reason.

M. Yriarte tells how a foreign ambassador, who was once talking with the Doge and his counsellors in 1623, observed that little shoes would be far more convenient than the huge clogs in fashion. One of the counsellors shook his head in grave disapproval as he answered: ‘Far too convenient, indeed! Far too much so.’

The civic museum in Venice contains two pairs of clogs, one of which is twenty inches in height, the other seventeen. Some were highly ornamented, and the Provveditori alle Pompe made sumptuary regulations against adorning them with over-rich embroidery or with fine pearls. At the same time, shoemakers were warned that they would be liable to a fine of twenty-five lire for any pair of clogs not of proper dimensions and becoming simplicity. Yet they continued to be worn of extravagant size and excessively ornamented till the end of the seventeenth century, when they suddenly sank to nothing, so that a clever woman of the time complained that the Venetian ladies were beginning to wear shoes no thicker than a footman’s.

They were especially affected by the nobles, for the burgher class wore them of much more moderate size. Altogether the life of the burghers’ wives was far more enjoyable; they occupied themselves with music and painting; they held gatherings at which men and women really exchanged ideas, and ‘academies’ at which women with a turn for poetry or science could compare themselves with the most gifted men of Venice.

The most alive of the noble women of the sixteenth century, the one of whom we have the most vivid impression, was assuredly Bianca Cappello, who was a monster of iniquity. The others, who had not her opportunities for great crime, all seem like lay figures, or common odalisques, who lived a sensuous existence that was never disturbed by an idea. But the burgher women amused themselves, and thought, and wrote, and sometimes even allowed themselves a little sentiment.

As for the women of the people, we know nothing about them, as there are no documents regarding them, but it seems probable that they were, on the whole, both happy and honest.

There was one more category of women in Venice, as elsewhere, a class that numbered eleven thousand six hundred and fifty-four members, towards the end of the century, all young, many of them fair, all desirous of pleasing, and all, strange to say, present at every public festival—the class of those who were outside of class, the gay and shameless free. A Venetian of those days made a catalogue ‘of all the chief and most honoured courtesans of Venice ... their names ... the lodgings where they live ... and also the amount of the money to be paid by noblemen and others who desire to enter into their good graces.’ This list is dedicated ‘to the most magnificent and gracious Madam Livia Azzalina, my most respected patroness and lady ... the princess of all Venetian courtesans.’ Moreover, at the end of the pompous dedication, the writer, who signs only his initials, adds that he kisses the gay lady’s ‘honoured hands.’

Some authors, taking this for a catalogue made out by the government, inform us that the Venetian Senate always gave courtesans the title of ‘deserving.’ Lord Orford refuted this calumny in a curious pamphlet quoted by Mr. Horatio Brown in his valuable and delightful Venetian Studies. The catalogue contains two hundred and fifteen names; at number two hundred and four stands the name of the famous Veronica Franco—‘that skilled writer of the sonnet and curiously polished verses which say so little and say it so beautifully,’ says Mr. Brown.

Tassini tells an anecdote in point. Two gentlemen were walking one day over the bridge near the Church of Saint Pantaleo, and they were confiding to each other their conjugal troubles. ‘Do you know who is the only honest woman in Venice?’ asked one of them. ‘There she is!’ He painted to a little marble head which is still visible in the front of a house below the bridge. The story went the rounds, and the bridge itself was re-christened ‘Il Ponte di Donna Onesta.’

The elegance of the gay ladies was incredible, and it was in order to be distinguished from them that respectable women little by little adopted the black silk gown and veil which they wore to the end of the Republic. The veil was black for married women and white for young girls.

I find in some statistics for the year 1581 the following statement as to the women of the better classes. There were 1659 patrician ladies, 1230 noble girls, 2508 nuns, and 1936 women of the burgher class. What could they do against 11,654? The note adds that all the others were women of the people.

VI

A FEW PAINTERS, MEN OF LETTERS, AND SCHOLARS

According to some trustworthy authorities, Raphael, Martin Luther, and Rabelais were born in the same year. The fact that they were certainly contemporaries with each other and with many other men of genius of contradictory types is one of the principal features of that most contradictory age. Signor Molmenti compares the gifts of Carpaccio and the two Bellini to rays that warm and gladden, those of Titian and Tintoretto to lights that dazzle but give no heat. In two centuries that immense change in art had taken place; from having spoken to the soul it had come to appeal to the eye.

The best painters of the fifteenth century touch us, and remain impersonal to us. What do we know, for instance, of Carpaccio’s dreams or struggles or sufferings while he was painting his great picture of Saint Ursula and her maiden company? We gaze upon those virgin faces, those crowns of martyrdom, those tenderly smiling women’s lips, those almost childlike gestures, and they touch us deeply. Perhaps we should like to ask them the secret of Carpaccio’s melancholy soul. But the lips move not, nor do the eyes answer; the eleven thousand maidens seem rather to beckon us away to that place of refreshment, light and peace, where we may hope that the great painter’s sadness ended at last. They tell us not of him, nor of themselves, but of heaven.

A hundred years have gone by, and still artists paint pictures; but they tell us no longer of anything but their own selves, their own lives, their own passions. It is the world that has changed; perhaps it is not faith that is gone, faith the evidence of things unseen, but most assuredly belief has taken flight and left men sceptical, the belief which is the mother of all bright dreams, and which must see in order to believe, if only in imagination, and, believing, cannot fail to see.

The time had come when the artists were interesting for their own sakes as well as for what they did, and when the reporter-chronicler thought it worth while to note every anecdote of their daily lives, to put down the names of their models, to tell us who sat to them for their Madonnas. And those names are mostly names of good and honest women, and we know to a nicety why they chose this face for one purpose and that for another. There is an end of all the legends of saintly heads begun by the artist and finished before morning by an angel’s hand. There is an end, too, of dreams of refreshment, light and peace. The artists of the sixteenth century are the most human of mankind, the most subject to humanity’s passions, its weaknesses and even its madness, and their works bear the stamp of the sensuous naturalism in which they lived.

The patrician Alvise Pisani possessed a beautiful house at San Cassian, standing on a tongue of land called Biri Grande. From the embrasured windows Murano could be seen, and the island of San Cristoforo, and of Pace; beyond these, in the distance, rose the tall tower of Torcello, and a dark line along the water marked the forest of the distant island called Deserto; to the left rose the Euganean Hills, to the right stretched a long beach of gleaming sand. The fishermen used to say that when the mysterious glow spread over the waters of the lagoon at night, the Fata Morgana had floated up the Adriatic and was bathing in the dark.