Three cardinal virtues

Ca d’Oro – the house of gold – On Grand Canal is just the sort of museum I like to visit: small, unhurried, and unvisited. It has one famous masterpiece – Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, his last – and several unrecognized ones, among which several Dutch landscapes, a strange, fairytale-like, night-time adoration of the magi, and a Patener St Jerome in a blue-green landscape. One’s response to the paintings is primed and heightened by a half hour meditation in the courtyard/entry hall of the house, whose walls and floor are laid with the most beautiful marble mosaics outside of Saint Mark’s. This warm up always makes me more sensitive than I normally am in most other museums, with the result that every picture I then look at, however average and unextraordinary, pleases out of all proportion to its objective worth.

In the courtyard is a beautiful pozzo, or wellhead. These were usually displayed in some public space with which the owner was connected and used to say something important about the founder. This one, in red marble, with acanthus and classical heads, features three virtues: Justice, in the middle, with Fortitude and Charity to each side. Justice – the law – is the central virtue in all Venetian iconography; the law was the chief instrument through which the haves controlled the have-nots; it was buttressed by Fortezza – violence, essentially; the tool of compunction; and charity – the bones thrown to the poor. The republic had a vast system of almshouses, poor houses, hospitals and orphanages with which to buy loyalty of the masses. This pozzo says: it is just that I should own the palace and you squat in the poor house. But don’t worry, I will be charitable. Just don’t force me to be firm.