Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [55]
Morse received a rebuke of sorts himself, from news that the uprisings in the Papal States had been squashed. He had welcomed Gregory XVI’s rumored disposition to end the tumult by granting a constitution. On the contrary, the Pope requested military aid from Austria, which sent some 15,000 troops to Rome. They quickly restored order, the rebels having no forces that could hold out against them. In foreseeing liberty triumphant over despotism, Morse had also put too much faith in declarations by France that it would block any Austrian intervention. The French failed to act, unwilling to be dragged into a war against the powerful Hapsburgs.
Headed ultimately for Paris, Morse left Florence in the middle of May for a two-month stay in Venice. Approaching from the sea and being poled through the Grand Canal, he thought the place a wonder: “we seemed to be rowing through an inundated city.” Yet another world of art opened up for him, the Venetian school of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese that in subordinating drawing to color had deeply influenced Allston. The city was friendly to artists. The Accademia and the gallery of the Palazzo Ducale stayed open from six in the morning until dark, “so that an artist can spend all his time to advantage, which is not the case in Rome or Florence.” He spent much of his time at the Accademia, copying on a small canvas Tintoretto’s monumental Miracle of the Slave.
Morse enjoyed the strangeness of Venice, not least the gondolas, “very like our Indian canoes.” Drinking his coffee each day in Piazza San Marco, he watched the Austrian officers promenading with their ladies, and the exotically costumed Greeks and Turks seated under awnings outside the cafes, smoking nonstop. His life was made the more agreeable by the British consul general and his family, devout Protestants with whom he often spent evenings singing hymns, praying, and reading Scripture.
But as Morse stayed on in Venice, he came to detest the place. The Venetians of the north began seeming no less indolent than Neapolitans of the south: “how many hours and days are wasted by this people in perfect sloth, in a dreaming, dosing reverie, or in actual sleep; the bustle, the restless activity, the enterprize so conspicuous with us is wholly unknown here.” The all-day lounging in San Marco was not merely an “empty heartless enjoyment,” either, but something darker, repressive. People socialized under surveillance, “surrounded by police agents and soldiers, to prevent excess.” In a bloody-walled dungeon of the ducal palace he saw and sketched a machine for strangling prisoners. He began to feel languid himself, a result of the sirocco-swept climate and, perhaps, the odoriferous canals—“excessively offensive,” scorpion-breeding.
It became evident to Morse that Venice was moribund, a place without a future: “No one can conceive without visiting Venice, the melancholy dullness of a decaying city, every thing going to ruin trade languishing, and the leaden hand visible everywhere; it is truly … a città morto.” In this it typified much of the rest of Italy, a stricken wasteland of reliquary bones, catacombs, and vats of stinking corpses. He passed July 4th with the only two other Americans he could find in Venice, talking about home, grateful to have been born in the United States—“the happiest of countries…. one bright spot on earth.”
Before heading for Paris, Morse crammed in the aesthetic and historic sights of other northern cities, taking notes on works by Carpaccio and Crivelli, quick sketch-copies of Velázquez and Brueghel (“small figures exquisitely finished”). In Ferrara he inspected the cell that had confined the mentally ill Tasso, noticing on an arch the large autograph of a previous sightseer, Lord Byron. He visited the geometric classical villas of Palladio in Vicenza, and Leonardo’s nearly ruined Last Supper in Milan—the disappointing “tameness” in the faces and “clumsiness” in many