Page 9 - Demo

a Dalmatian family; below our feet a Frenchwoman; at our right, upon the same floor, an English gentleman; under him a French family; and over him the family of a marquis in exile from Modena.’ Another neighbour was a witch, yet another a Duchess of Parma.
During the last year of his consulship, Howells and his wife moved into the Palazzo Giustiniani. Was there ‘any house with modern improvements in America, which has also windows, with pointed arches of marble, opening upon balconies that overhang the Grand Canal?’ Their apartment had six rooms, ‘furnished with every article necessary for Venetian housekeeping. We paid one dollar a day which, in the innocence of our hearts we thought rather dear.’
Unlike so many other writers, he did not aspire to vault suddenly to the near-celestial spheres of high art criticism. ‘I could not, in any honesty, lumber my pages with descriptions or speculations which would be idle to most readers, even if I were a far wiser judge of art than I affect to be.’ A very wise judge of art he was not. When he looked at Titian’s Martyrdom of St. Lawrence on a bitter cold day, he felt envious of the saint’s being poked by a hot fork, toasting comfortably ‘amid all that frigidity.’ He brought with himself plenty of New England Protestant prejudices: ‘there is so little in St. Mark’s of the paltry or revolting character of modern Romanism’; and disliked the baroque: ‘The sight of those theatrical angels, with their shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo facades of the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with despondency and foreboding.’ He called the Church of the Jesuits ‘a dreary sanctuary.’ The very fine English connoisseur James Lees-Milne took him to task for that. ‘How could this jolly American consul be so disapproving of a building calculated to bring beauty and pleasure to a congregation in a poor district who feasted their eyes and senses on the splendour and luxury which they regarded as theirs?’ Still, James (later Jan) Morris, no mean critic of Venice, called Howells’s Venetian Life ‘a charming book.’ Which it is.
It is not possible to ascertain how much of an effect Venetian Life had on American tourism after 1865. But it is ascertainable that soon after 1865 the high period of American Venetophilia began.
Venetian Life Printed Edition