Art -- Italy -- Venice; Venice (Italy) -- Description and travel
The Scalzi--The Labia Palace--The missing cicerone--Tiepolo and
Cleopatra--S. Marcuola and Titian--A maker of oars--The death of
Wagner--Frescoes on palaces--The Ca' d'Oro--Baron Franchetti--S.
Sebastian--The Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne--A merry tapestry--A
cardinal's nursery--The Palazzo Lion--The Fondaco dei Tedeschi--Canova,
Titian, and Byron.
Beginning at the Railway Station and going towards the Ducal Palace, the
first building is the church of the Scalzi, by the iron bridge. The
church is a very ornate structure famous for its marbles and reliefs,
which counterfeit drapery and take the place of altar pictures; but
these are an acquired taste. On the ceiling the brave Tiepolo has
sprawled a vigorous illustration of the spiriting away of the house of
the Virgin to Loreto, near Ancona.
Next come a row of shops, and, at the corner, the Lido hotels'
motor-launch office, and then several negligible decayed palaces. The
first of any importance is the tall seventeenth-century incomplete
Flangini with Michael Angelesque figures over the door. Then the Scuola
dei Morti with its _memento mori_ on the wall, and then S. Geremia:
outside, a fine mass of yellow brick with a commanding campanile;
inside, all Palladian coolness. Against the church a little house has
been built, and at the corner of the Grand Canal and the Cannaregio is
the figure of the Virgin. The great palace a little way down the canal
which branches off here--the Cannaregio--is the Labia, interesting
chiefly as containing the masterpiece of Tiepolo, unless one agrees with
Symonds that his picture of S. Agnes in SS. Apostoli is his greatest
effort. So far as I am concerned, Tiepolo painted largely in vain. I can
admire the firm decision of his drawing and his skill in composition,
but I can never lose the feeling that his right place is the wall of a
restaurant or a theater curtain. Still, since at the Palazzo Labia we
find him decorating a banqueting hall with a secular subject, all is
well.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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