And so begins the voyage.  The white stone building which forms the thin end of the wedge dividing the Grand Canal from the Canale della Giudecca is the Dogana or Customs House, and the cape is called the Punta della Salute.  The figure on the Dogana ball, which from certain points has almost as much lightness as Gian Bologna’s famous Mercury, represents Fortune and turns with the wind.  The next building (with a green and shady garden on the Giudecca side) is the Seminario Patriarcale, a great bare schoolhouse, in which a few pictures are preserved, and, downstairs, a collection of ancient sculpture.  Among the pictures is a much dam-aged classical scene supposed to represent Apollo and Daphne in a romantic landscape.  Giorgione’s name is often associated with it; I know not with what accuracy, but Signor Paoli, who has written so well upon Venice, is convinced, and the figure of Apollo is certainly free and fair as from a master’s hand.  Another picture, a Madonna and Child with two companions, is called a Leonardo da Vinci; but Baedeker gives it to Marco d’Oggiano.  There is also a Filippino Lippi which one likes to find in Venice, where the prevailing art is so different from his.  One of the most charming things here is a little relief of the manger; as pretty a rendering as one could wish for.  Downstairs is the tomb of the great Jacopo Sansovino.

And now rises the imposing church of S. Maria della Salute which, although younger than most of the Venetian churches, has taken the next place to S. Mark’s as an ecclesiastical symbol of the city.  To me it is a building attractive only when seen in its place as a Venetian detail; although it must always have the impressiveness of size and accumulation and the beauty that white stone in such an air as this can hardly escape.  Seen from the Grand Canal or from a window opposite, it is pretentious and an interloper, particularly if the slender and distinguished Gothic windows of the apse of S. Gregorio are also visible; seen from any distant enough spot, its dome and towers fall with equal naturalness into the majestic Venetian pageant of full light, or the fairy Venetian mirage of the crepuscle.

The church was decreed in 1630 as a thankoffering to the Virgin for staying the plague of that year.  Hence the name—­S.  Mary of Salvation.  It was designed by Baldassarre Longhena, a Venetian architect who worked during the first half of the seventeenth century and whose masterpiece this is.

Within, the Salute is notable for possessing Tintoretto’s “Marriage in Cana,” one of the few pictures painted by him in which he allowed himself an interval (so to speak) of perfect calm.  It is, as it was bound to be in his hands and no doubt was in reality, a busy scene.  The guests are all animated; the servitors are bustling about; a number of spectators talk together at the back; a woman in the foreground holds out a vessel to the men opposite to show them the remarkable change which the water has undergone.