ASIDE from the cathedral of St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace and the Academy or Venetian gallery of old masters, I could find little of artistic¹ significance in Venice—little aside from the wonderful spectacle of the city as a whole. As a spectacle, viewed across the open space of water, known as the Lagoon², the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Santa Maria della Salute³ with their domes⁴ and campaniles strangely transfigured by light and air, are beautiful. Close at hand, for me, they lost much romance which distance gave them, though the mere⁵ space of their interiors was impressive. The art, according to my judgment⁶, was bad and in the main I noticed that my guide books agreed with me—spiritless religious representations which, after the Sistine Chapel⁷ in Rome and such pictures as those of Michelangelo’s “Holy Family” and Botticelli’s “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi at Florence, were without import. I preferred to speculate on the fear of the plague which had produced the Salute and the discovery of the body of St. Stephen, the martyr⁸, which had given rise to San Giorgio, for it was interesting to think, with these facts before me, how art and spectacle in life so often take their rise from silly, almost pointless causes and a plain lie is more often the foundation of a great institution than a truth. Santa Maria didn’t save the citizens of Venice from the plague in 1630, and in 1110 the Doge Ordelafo Faliero did not bring back the true body of St. Stephen from Palestine, although he may have410 thought he did,—at least there are other “true bodies.” But the old, silly progress of illusion, vanity, politics and the like has produced these and other institutions throughout the world and will continue to do so, no doubt, until time shall be no more. It was interesting to me to see the once large and really beautiful Dominican monastery⁹ surrounding San Giorgio turned into barracks and offices for government officials. I do not see why these churches should not be turned into libraries or galleries. Their religious import is quite gone.
 
In Venice it was, I think, that I got a little sick of churches and second- and third-rate art. The city itself is so beautiful, exteriorly¹⁰ speaking, that only the greatest art could be tolerated here, yet aside from the Academy, which is crowded with canvases by Bellini, Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese and others of the Venetian school, and the Ducal Palace, largely decorated by Tintoretto and Veronese, there is nothing, save of course St. Mark’s. Outside of that and the churches of the Salute and San Giorgio,—both bad, artistically¹¹, I think,—there are thirty-three or thirty-four other churches all with bits of something which gets them into the catalogues, a Titian, a Tintoretto, a Giorgione or a Paolo Veronese, until the soul wearies and you say to yourself—“Well, I’ve had about enough of this—what is the use?”
 
There is no use. Unless you are tracing the rise of religious art, or trying to visit the tombs of semi-celebrated persons, or following out the work of some one man or group of men to the last fragment you might as well desist. There is nothing in it. I sought church after church, entering dark, pleasant, but not often imposing¹², interiors only to find a single religious representation of one kind or another hardly worth the trouble. In the Frari I found Titian’s famous Madonna of the411 Pescaro family and a pretentious¹³ mausoleum commemorating¹⁴ Canova, and in Santa Maria Formosa Palma Vecchio’s St. Barbara and four other saints, which appealed to me very much, but in the main I was disappointed and made dreary¹⁵. After St. Peter’s, the Vatican, St. Paul’s Without the Walls in Rome, the cathedrals at Pisa and elsewhere, and the great galleries of Florence, Venice seemed to me artistically dull. I preferred always to get out into the streets again to see the small shops, to encounter the winding¹⁶ canals, to cross the little bridges and to feel that here was something new and different, far different and more artistic than anything which any church or museum could show.
 
One of the strangest things about Venice to me was the curious manner in which you could always track a great public square or market place of some kind by following some thin trickling¹⁷ of people you would find making their way in a given direction. Suddenly in some quite silent residence section, with all its lovely waterways about you, you would encounter a small thin stream of people going somewhere, perhaps five or six in a row, over bridges, up narrow alleys¹⁸, over more bridges, through squares or triangles past churches or small stores and constantly swelling¹⁹ in volume until you found yourself in the midst of a small throng²⁰ turning now right, now left, when suddenly you came out on the great open market place or

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