The Mentor: Venice, the Island City, Vol. 1, Num. 27, Serial No. 27
TekstEach structure has its interest. Each bend of the canal reveals new beauties. Across the beautiful waterway are three bridges – the name of one is familiar the world over.
THE BRIDGE OF THE RIALTO
For many years this was the only bridge across the Grand Canal, and it stands for much of the past glory of Venice. It is made of marble, and is over 150 feet long. It was built between the years 1588 and 1592, and is today, as it was in early times, a place of shops. Here Shylocks have bargained and Bassanios have met their friends these many years. More literally speaking, it was not the Bridge of the Rialto that Shylock refers to in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice,” but the district nearby.
It is difficult for anyone who has visited Venice to select single points for comment or description. The city appeals to him as a whole, and each object of beauty in it is a part of the wonderful whole. The essence of Venice is a dreamy, poetic charm, – a charm of light, color, and form, not of sound. Mrs. Oliphant writes:
“Venice has long borne in the imagination of the world a distinctive position, something of the character of a great enchantress, a magician of the seas… She is all wonder, enchantment, the brightness and glory of a dream.”
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
VENICE
St. Mark’s Cathedral
ONE
The Church of St. Mark’s is unequaled in the whole world for richness of material and construction. It was originally the private chapel of the Doge or ruler of Venice. One reason for its being so richly adorned is that there was a law in Venice which required every merchant trading with the East to bring back some material for the decoration of the church. Thus it became the final resting place of the adornments from countless other buildings, both in the East and in Italy. The building has been compared to the treasure den of a band of pirates. It forms a museum of sculpture of the most varied kind, from the fourth century down to the latest Renaissance.
In 828 a little wooden church was built to receive the relics of the Apostle Mark. The Moslems had pulled down the church where he was buried in Alexandria; so his remains were brought to Venice, and Saint Mark became the patron saint of the city in place of Saint Theodore. In 976 this wooden church was burned, along with the ducal palace, in the insurrection against Doge Canadiano IV. The church was rebuilt on a larger scale by Pietro Orseolo and his successors. It was a very simple church, in the form of a Greek cross, built of brick in the Romanesque style. It was adorned with lines of colored brick, and brick set in patterns here and there. On it were five low cupolas. St. Mark’s grew in wealth as Venice became rich and important.
Doge Contarini remodeled the cathedral in 1063. Byzantine and Lombard workmen were employed, and the two styles of architecture were joined. The low brick cupolas were covered by high domes of wood roofed with metal. Parts of the walls were sheathed with slabs of alabaster. Incrusted marbles and mosaics were used further to decorate the outside. Then in the fifteenth century the Gothic pinnacles and other florid adornments of the exterior were added. The final result is the finest piece of many-colored architecture in Europe.
The Cathedral of St. Mark is in its present form a Greek cross, surmounted by a dome at each end and one in the center. The west front has five great porches opening upon the Piazza di San Marco. The church contains five hundred columns, mostly in oriental style, with richly ornamented capitals.
The top of the narthex (that part of the church nearest the main entrance) forms a wide gallery, in the center of which stand the four great bronze horses which are said to have belonged to some Greco-Roman triumphal quadriga, and to have been brought to Venice by Doge Enrico Dandolo after the fall of Constantinople in 1204. In 1797 Napoleon carried them to Paris; but they were restored by Francis of Austria in 1815.
The pala d’oro, or retable of the high altar, is one of the chief glories of St. Mark’s, and is one of the most magnificent specimens of goldsmiths’ and jewelers’ work in existence. The famous treasury of St. Mark’s contains a precious collection of church plate, jeweled book bindings, and other artistic treasures of the early Middle Ages.