IT is one of the world's wonders that a little community should rise up from the midst of untillable marsh lands—literally out of the sea—and within a few centuries, through its energy, thrift, invention, and sheer ability, should become a world power not only in diplomacy, arms, and commerce, but in architecture, art, philosophy, and belles lettres. And all this, in spite of envy and attacks from without and conspiracies from within.

The power of Venice, "the wealthy republic," was so great in her palmy days that the honor of alliance with her was covetously sought by emperors and popes alike. At a time when, as history declares, a dictum from the Pope, or a threat of excommunication, would have brought almost any other nation of Europe to its knees in groveling terror, Venice laughed at both and pursued the even tenor of her imperial way.

The climax of her independence of dogmatic rule was reached in those glorious and courageous later days when Fra Paolo Sarpi lived and guided her destinies, Sarpi, "the noblest of the Venetians," who realized more fully than any other in that republic the dangers that would threaten should outside influences ever gain a foothold in the chambers of government. Had there been a successor to Fra Paolo, one worthy of his example, one who grasped his purposes, knew the spirit of the teacher that molded them and what beneficent power lay behind, who possessed as well the power to continue Sarpi's work—had such an exceptional soul appeared, Venice would not have decayed. At Fra Paolo's death the decline of Venetian greatness set in.

In the course of her history—and three centuries practically included the period of her undisputed greatness—Venice attained a position of supremacy on virtually every line of activity. In war she was dreaded. Says Yriarte, author of L'Histoire de Venise:

The arsenal of Venice, which still exists, was its palladium; the high organization of this establishment, the technical skill of its workmen, the specially selected body of the "arsenalotti," to whom the republic entrusted the duty of guarding the senate and great council, and its admirable discipline, were for centuries the envy of other European powers.... At the most critical period in its history, when it (Venice) was engaged in its great struggle with the Turks ... the arsenal regularly sent forth a fully equipped galley each morning for a hundred successive days.... At the acme of its prosperity the arsenal employed 16,000 workmen.

It is impossible to touch upon the political life and fortunes of Venice in the short space of a single article. Moreover, information on this is very accessible, for the Venetians themselves were great chroniclers, who firmly believed that their city was building in a strange way for the future and that its foundation stones should not rest unmarked. And though the last thing these old recorders dreamed of was the imminent decay of their proud city—their idol, their divinity, the object of their passionate adoration—they were right. Venice was building for the future—to which seeming mystery Theosophy also has the key.

Suffice it to say that when the inner history of Katherine Tingley's visit to Venice, upon the occasion of her first trip around the world in the interest of Theosophy, is given out publicly, a new interpretation will be given to some of these old records. The spirit of Venice has never died although untoward aims and evils have for nearly four centuries obscured the outer expression of it. But that, like the history of Fra Paolo, is another story, too, and volumes would be needed to contain it.

Venice was in her days the commercial link between Europe and the Orient and her merchants neglected no opportunity. The result was that not only did the city become fabulously wealthy but new trades and wonderful art-crafts sprung up. Rare damasks, glass, tapestries, silks, enamels, metal-work of various kinds, plastic work, mosaics, brought from the countries of the Orient by Venetian merchants, served as models to craftsmen who not only copied but improved upon them in the great industrial centers which sprang up. Venetian art-craftsmanship became throughout Europe a synonym for the ultra, the perfect.

A link between Italy and Greece, Venice afforded an asylum for Grecian men of letters when the light in their own land failed. These men Venice honored. They taught in her universities; they lighted up in the city not only a knowledge of the great literary monuments of the ancients but a love for them; they filled her libraries with translations. Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, Strabo, Xenophon, Homer, and Orpheus, became something more than names. Says Yriarte:

Venice, more than any other town, has the credit of having rescued from oblivion, by editions and translations, the master-pieces of Greek literature.

The art of printing was welcomed upon the very threshold of its discovery and the services of Venice on this line are unique in the history of letters. Her printers were not mere workmen; some of them were scholars. "The Aldine Press" is synonymous with scholarship today as it was in renaissance Italy. Symonds describes the enthusiasm of the elder Aldus (or Aldo) for Greek literature, and his life-ambition, which was "to secure the literature of Greece from further accident by committing its chief masterpieces to type." He relates how Aldo, already a scholar and qualified as a humanist, "according to the custom of the country," spent a further two years in a study of Greek literature. Not a Venetian himself and with no ties in the city, by some "accident of fortune" he selected Venice as the place in which to build up a work whose parallel the world has not since afforded and of which a similar record is not to be found in the past unless possibly in the secret records of ancient China.

At Venice Aldo gathered an army of Greek scholars and compositors around him. His trade was carried on by Greeks and Greek was the language of his household. Instructions to typesetters and binders were given in Greek. The prefaces to his editions were written in Greek. Greeks from Crete collated MSS., read proofs, and gave models of calligraphy for casts of Greek type.

Not counting the craftsmen employed in merely manual labor, Aldo entertained as many as thirty of these Greek assistants in his family.

His own energy and industry were unremitting. In 1495 he issued the first volume of his Aristotle. Four more volumes completed the work in 1497-98. Nine comedies of Aristophanes appeared in 1498. Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus followed in 1502; Xenophon's Hellenics and Euripides in 1503; Demosthenes in 1504.

The troubles of Italy, which pressed heavily on Venice, suspended Aldo's labors for awhile. But in 1508 he resumed his work with an edition of the minor Greek orators; and in 1509 appeared the lesser works of Plutarch.

Then came another stoppage. The league of Cambray had driven Venice back to her lagoons, and all the forces of the republic were concentrated on a struggle to the death with the allied powers of Europe. In 1513 Aldo reappeared with Plato ... in a preface eloquently and earnestly comparing the miseries of warfare and the woes of Italy with the sublime and tranquil objects of a student's life. Pindar, Hesychius, and Athenaeus followed in 1514.

But Aldo's enthusiasm for the classics was not confined to those of Greece. He issued superb editions of the principal Latin and Italian classics as well, in an exquisite type especially cast for his Press and which it is said he had copied from the very handwriting of Petrarch.

There is something very reminiscent of the Orient in Aldo's reverence for beautiful calligraphy. To the Chinese scholar the ideograph is sacred and to write it well demands art and philosophy both. There is an ancient Chinese legend which says that once upon a time certain ideographs "came down from their tablets and spoke unto mankind." Curious, that one should recall it here. But not to know Aldo is to miss a great light upon the spirit that made Venice what it became, the spirit that animated every soul in that wonderful city—devotion to a high ideal, absolute unselfishness and service. Where is the Press today that combines these unpurchasable qualities with the acme of scholarship? We know of one—but only one.

Even in a short article, with Venice herself a subject for volumes, libraries, it is impossible to omit the following—also from Symonds:

Aldo ... burned with a humanist's enthusiasm for the books he printed; and we may well pause astonished at his industry, when we remember what a task it was in that age to prepare texts of authors so numerous and so voluminous from MSS. Whatever the students of this century may think of Aldo's scholarship, they must allow that only vast erudition and thorough familiarity with the Greek language could have enabled him to accomplish what he did. In his own days Aldo's learning won the hearty acknowledgment of ripe scholars.

To his fellow workers he was uniformly generous, free from jealousy and prodigal of praise. His stores of MSS. were as open to the learned as his printed books were liberally given to the public. While aiming at that excellence of typography which renders his editions the treasures of the book-collector, he strove at the same time to make them cheap.... His great undertaking was carried on under continual difficulties, arising from strikes among his workmen, the piracies of rivals, and the interruptions of war. When he died, bequeathing Greek literature as an inalienable possession to the world, he was a poor man.

To touch with any show of justice upon the architecture of Venice would task the eloquence of a Ruskin. But it is possible to indicate a few of the causes that contributed to make Venice the architectural marvel of Europe and her palaces and churches unique in the world.

According to tradition, there were both castles and "churches" in Venice several centuries before the earliest examples that survive. The first "church," it is said, was founded in 432 by one Giacomo del Rialto, but the earliest of which we have tangible evidence—and it is still standing—was built in the eleventh century. Of the eleventh and twelfth century castles or palaces, a number still may be seen.

Venetian architecture, like her literary and industrial life—indeed, like her whole life—was a combination of Oriental and Occidental influences. Her people were discoverers, adapters; they had a perfect genius for appreciation of the artistic, the eloquent, the statesmanlike, the progressive—in a word, "the Good, the Beautiful and the True" in the work of others—and with opportunities strewn along her path thicker than flowers in June, Venice seemed to grasp them all.

Although Venetian architecture was complex and composite to a degree, it is possible to trace the predominating influences as they set their mark upon style after style. Up to the thirteenth century the prevailing style was Byzantine, of which the leading characteristics seem to have been in Venice the semi-circular arch and a prodigal use of sculptured ornament. The method of construction employed by the Venetians—the walls being of a fine hard brick which was covered with stucco, or in the finer buildings with thin slabs of costly marbles and porphyries—permitted no end of surface decoration. And in this the color-loving Venetians reveled. Moldings, carvings, rolls, cavettos, flutings, panels, bands and diapers of flowing scroll work, lent their support to most varied adaptations of characteristic Persian or Moslem design, with its semi-conventional foliage, animals, dragons, birds, flowers, etc. Markedly beautiful, and in a way peculiar, is the effect of the faÇades of many buildings, "studded with gorgeous panels like jewels on a rich brocade."

But in the thirteenth century a period of transition ushered out the round Byzantine arch, and in the pointed Gothic arch of the countries immediately north. Very soon, however, the Early Renaissance style, as exemplified in Verona and other Italian cities, became a dominating influence, this in turn to give way to the Classic, which became the "grand style" of sixteenth-century Venice. After that, the deluge—of mediocrity.

The Venetians, a conquering people by virtue of their navy which was the envy of Europe, made their city the storehouse of rich treasures stripped from the ruined cities of the past, and from other cities made her own by conquest. And her merchants did the rest. Quantities of rich marbles were brought from fallen Aquileia, Ravenna, and Heraclea, cities which in their turn had brought them from Egypt, Greece, and Arabia, and Numidia—

the red porphyry of Egypt and the green porphyry of Mt. Taygetus, red and gray Egyptian granites, the beautiful lapis Atracius (verde antico), Oriental alabaster from Numidia and Arabia, the Phrygian pavonazzetto with its purple mottlings, cipollino from Carystus, and, in great quantities, the alabaster-like Proconnesian marble with bluish and amber-colored striations.

Add to this magnificence a lavish use of gold and color, particularly the warm ochres and earth reds, and the costly ultramarine, and the modern mind, accustomed to uncolored and unstriated marbles and the quiet gray of stone, can hardly imagine the gorgeous luxuriance of color that marked the city in her prime.

The architectural glory of Venice is of course the Church of St. Mark, which, says Professor Middleton,

stands quite alone among the buildings of the world in respect of its unequaled richness of material and decoration, and also from the fact that it has been constructed with the spoils of countless other buildings, and therefore forms a museum of sculpture of the most varied kind, nearly every century from the fourth down to the latest Renaissance being represented in some carved panel or capital, if not more largely....

During the long period from its dedication in 1085 till the overthrow of the Venetian republic by Napoleon, every doge's reign saw some addition to the rich decorations of the church—mosaics, sculpture, wall linings or columns of precious marbles. By degrees the whole walls inside and outside were completely faced either with glass mosaics on gold grounds or with precious colored marbles and porphyries, plain white marble being only used for sculpture, and then thickly covered with gold.... No less than five hundred columns of porphyry and costly marbles are used.... A whole volume might be written on the sculptured capitals, panels, screens.

The use of inlay is almost peculiar to St. Mark's, as is also the method of enriching sculptured reliefs with backgrounds of brilliant gold and colored glass mosaics, producing an effect of extraordinary magnificence.

One of the great glories of St. Mark's is the most magnificent gold retable in the world, most sumptuously decorated with jewels and enamels, usually known as the Pala d'Oro.... This marvelous retable is made up of an immense number of microscopically minute gold cloisonnÉ enamel pictures, of the utmost splendor in color and detail.

Of the architecture and art of the great council hall of the doges, the Ducal Palace, little need be said after the description of St. Mark's, for while not so lavishly ornamented, it is a world in itself in the style of architectural beauty that most appealed to the Venetians.

The original Palace of the Doges was built in the ninth century, but the vicissitudes of war and of fire decreed its rebuilding several times, and the Ducal Palace that we know today dates from the fourteenth century. Says Professor Middleton:

The two main faÇades, those towards the sea and the Piazzetta, consist of a repetition of the same design, that which was begun in the early years of the fourteenth century.... The design of these faÇades is very striking, and unlike that of any other building in the world....

The main walls are wholly of brick; but none was left visible. The whole surface of the upper story is faced with small blocks of fine Istrian and red Verona marbles, arranged so as to make a large diaper pattern, with, in the center of each lozenge, a cross made of verde antico and other costly marbles. The colonnades, string-courses, and other decorative features are built in solid Istrian stone.

Very beautiful sculpture, executed with an ivory-like minuteness of finish, is used to decorate the whole building with wonderful profusion. At each of the three free angles is a large group immediately over the lower column. At the south-east angle is the Drunkenness of Noah, at the south-west the Fall of Man, and at the north-west the Judgment of Solomon. Over each at a much higher level is a colossal figure of an archangel—Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel.

The sculpture of all the capitals, especially of those on the thirty-six lower columns, is very beautiful and elaborate, a great variety of subjects being introduced among the decorative foliage, such as the virtues, vices, months of the year, age of man, occupations, sciences, animals, nations of the world, and the like. On the whole, the sculpture of the fourteenth century part is finer than that of the later part near St. Mark's.

On the walls of the chief council chambers are a magnificent series of oil paintings by Tintoretto and other, less able, Venetians—among them Tintoretto's masterpiece, Bacchus and Ariadne and his enormous picture of Paradise, the largest oil painting in the world.

Up to and during a part of the sixteenth century the state prisons were on the ground floor of the Ducal Palace, but they were finally removed to a new structure on the opposite side of the narrow canal, and a bridge, the "Ponte dei Sospiri" or "Bridge of Sighs," was thrown across the canal, connecting the two buildings.

In the magnificence and beauty of its homes—its palazzi or palaces—Venice is unique in the world. It is said that no other city, then or since, is to be compared with Venice in the loveliness and romantic interest of its domestic architecture. Up to the twelfth century the Byzantine style of architecture prevailed, but the thirteenth and fourteenth century palaces—whose builders were more or less influenced by the design of the Ducal Palace, then nearing completion—are Venetian Gothic.

The climax of splendor was reached in the "Golden House" the wonderful Ca' d'Oro, so named from the lavish use of gold leaf on its sculptured ornamentations. It was literally a "golden house."

No words can describe the magnificence of this palace on the Grand Canal, its whole faÇade faced with the most costly variegated marbles, once picked out with gold, vermillion and ultramarine, the walls pierced with the elaborate traceried windows and enriched with bands and panels of delicate carving—in combined richness of form and wealth of color giving an effect of almost dazzling splendor.

But following close upon this magnificence—which was reflected in nearly all the palaces that were built toward the close of the fourteenth century—came the inevitable reaction toward a less ornate style, the Early Renaissance. Compared with the Ca' d'Oro one writer has described the sixteenth century palaces, which followed Early Renaissance and Classic models, as "dull and scholastic." They certainly must have been a restful change.

So much for the architecture of Venice—

But the visitor to the Venice of today finds his interest in her buildings doubled from the fact that upon the walls of many of them are to be found the works of some of the greatest painters the Occident has known. When we reflect that in the sixteenth century Venice possessed a school of art that for power, technical perfection, and gorgeous interpretation of color, stood pre-eminent in its own day and has not been surpassed in ours, little more need be said. Palma Vecchio, Giorgione, the great portraitist Lorenzo Lotto, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and—Titian! What a galaxy! Surely nothing more need be said upon the art of Venice. As in everything else, the impossible seemed not the exceptional but the mediocre.

In short, to give one the outline of only a few of the activities of the people of this City of Destiny is to drown oneself in superlatives. Her history is as fraught with heroism, with simple dauntless courage, as that of the Dutch Republic; it is as colored with romance as that of Palmyra or Thebes. Karma is the only key to an understanding of the strange destiny which brought to flower such transcendant energy in so seemingly sterile a soil. Reincarnation is the only theory which can hope to throw light upon the quality of effort that marked her citizens as a body of people apart, who must have worked together in the past as they unquestionably will in the future.

Not that Venice was perfect; her citizens made their mistakes; there were the jealous and the covetous, and there were conspiracies within her borders as well as without. Her doges were not all, like Caesar's wife, "above suspicion," her counsellors were not all like Fra Paolo nor all her scholars like Aldo. But there was no apathy and there was a nucleus of impersonal, united effort sufficiently vitalized to hold back the agencies of disintegration during century after century of steady upward effort. And then the Wheel of Destiny turned and the Venice of Sarpi passed.

But the days to dawn will again see Venice whirled upward into the light on the rim of this mighty Wheel. This is inevitable. It is Theosophical teaching. The old clans will gather—and there—and they will work again and aspire again and build again; and in the light of the lessons learned through the failures and successes of the past will rise again to greater heights.

Doge and counsellor, artist and craftsman, scientist and scholar, statesman, philosopher, and poet—as the "whirling wheel of spiritual will and power" brought to you great opportunities in the past, so will it bring them to you again and yet again, in the future.