In Venice

— We had bought down with us into Italy from Dresden the remembrance of a certain picture that hangs in one of the smaller cabinets of the gallery there, opposite the long - haired, pink-smocked boy of Pinturicchio, — a picture, namely, by Cima da Gonegliano, of the Virgin ascending the steps to the Temple. The clearness of the coloring, the brightness of its light, had been notable, together with the careful painting of the steps the Virgin is mounting, of the high wooden bird-cage standing on the lowest one of them, and of the white portico in the background. It may have been the recollection of this picture, of the gentle gravity of the Virgin, or again the pleasant cadence of Cima’s name that led us, my friend and myself, during our first days in Venice, to seek out in the Academy and the several churches other pictures that are said to have been painted by him. We went very often across the city in our gondola, through the narrow side-canals that are shady even on a fine morning because of the height of the houses on either side, to the remote church of the Madonna del Orto where there is, in a dark corner, a picture by Cima of John the Baptist standing in the midst of four saints, within a crumbling and circular - shaped marble arbor. Between the pillars that form the arbor, and are cut in a Renaissance pattern, is to be seen a distant hill with a turreted wall running along its side and a village of towers encircling its base, — a landscape that lends a kind of worldly charm to the otherwise extremely serious picture. And always as we lingered before Cima’s Madonnas, or before a bright-colored picture representing Tobias holding a fish in his hand and walking over a bill in company with the archangel Raphael, the same green landscape attracted us, painted in behind the figures, and composed, we were told, of the mountains that edge northern Italy, until one day we were impelled to go and see for ourselves this country with which we had become so strangely familiar in the Venetian galleries.

The way from Venice to Conegliano led through a continuous stretch of vineyards and broad-topped hedges, from the midst of which, after an hour’s journey, we shot out suddenly into a wide plain bordered far away to the north by a line of hazy blue hills covered with sunlight. It was at high noon that the train, making a sharp curve in the plain, reached Conegliano ; and the town we discovered to be nothing else than a half-circle of crookedly built houses closing around the foot of a hill, — the very hill, in fact, that we had set out to find, peaked, with a yellow brick wall winding up its side, and on top a small, square-towered castle, near which two cypress - trees stood like wands against the sky.

There was, however, a certain difficulty in making our way to the hill, since the streets were full of men and women holding a market, and bawling to one another over the backs of their cattle or across the tall baskets of figs. Halfway from the station we reached a rambling inn with flapping awnings, behind which several men were sitting at round-topped iron tables reading journals and drinking liqueur. Inside we got some luncheon in a bare room with a high ceiling, where a group of persons talked noisily behind us, and there came to sit on the opposite side of the table a maid-servant with a dull face and dark eyes, who stared at us and devoured her macaroni and grapes fitfully. Afterward, walking along under the arcades at the side of the stone-paved street that curved about with the hill, we lost the din of the market, and came very soon upon the Duomo, a bare, yellow-faced, and ugly church, set in closely between the houses. An old man, the sacristan, who had been reading out of a large book on the other side of the street, came across with a bronze key in his hand to unlock the doors. Going before us into the church, he led the way, his heels clicking repeatedly against the stone pavement as he went, to the high altar at the back, above which the picture hung on a blank space of wall. With some muttered praise he pulled back the crimson curtain from before the Madonna, and then seated himself stiffly in one of the stalls to continue his reading. We were grateful enough at being left to ourselves to look at the picture that is said to—be the mosr remarkable of all Cima’s works. Our attention was drawn almost immediately from the simpled-faced Madonna to the saints, two women with curling yellow hair, who stand on either side of her throne, and embody in themselves the worldliness land extreme joy in life and all splendors that is characteristically Venetian. A certain robustness and ample beauty of form there was about them, a stateliness of bearing suggestive of the women of those later painters, Palma V ecchio and Sebastiano del Piombo.

And again we remarked the landscape of the background, whose vivid sky and clear air were in part made actual to us when, on leaving the church, we returned to the town and began trying to find a pathway up the hill. We had attempted several passages that led nowhere save into the midst of a group of shrill voiced-women, or up a flight of steps to an old house with faded frescoes on its façade, before we came finally to the light-colored wall that wound along the hillside. In its shelter we climbed up, growing nevertheless very weary under the hot sunshine before we reached the summit. Here the wall came to an end by running round the peak of the hill until it met itself, shutting in a space of uneven grass together with the castle and black cypress-trees. The castle was closed and barred, and the place deserted, except by an old man who sat, bent over his stick, on the edge of a well, never noticing our coming, and by some children who ran back and forth across the grass with their dog at their heels.

We remained there through the long afternoon, leaning against the wall and looking out over the Venetian plain that stretched dimly, in the bright light, across to the horizon, or, on the other hand, toward the mountains at the north. It was all curiously suggestive of the different landscapes we knew, of those backgrounds with which the various Venetian painters were used to decorate their pictures. The distant blues, the heavytopped trees, seemed but the setting for a Holy Family of the Bonifazios, or for the Sante Conversazione — the groups of saints, shepherds, and sacred persons — that Palma Vecchio liked to gather, for no especial purpose, indeed, in a pleasant hilly country, at the foot of a tree near which a flock of sheep were feeding. And before all we observed, in the brown smooth slopes of the hills, in an occasional ruined castle or a wooden tower with a slanting roof breaking down into scaffolding at the back, certain suggestions of the Venetian Pastoral. We remembered then that there was in this part of Venetia, no more than an hour’s journey distant, an altarpiece of Giorgione’s, and, recalling copies of it that displayed behind the Madonna and saints a marvelous effect of dim distance, we determined to go on in the late afternoon to Castelfranco.