A MONTH AFTER SHE HAD LEFT FOR MALAYSIA, Patricia Curtis sent me a handwritten fax to tell me she was back in Venice and that, as promised, she would be happy to show me Palazzo Barbaro.
What I had learned in her absence about the impending sale of the
piano nobile
had put the palace and Patricia Curtis in a whole new light, and not just for me. Over the years, it had been Patricia, rather than her brother or sister, or all three for that matter, who had come to be viewed as the owner of the Barbaro. She was its
castellana,
and in the eyes of her fellow Venetians, she was now at the center of a sad family drama. The sale of the
piano nobile
would be her loss, and her loss would be nothing less than the loss of the Barbaro itself. Local sympathies were with her, but in varying degrees of kindness. There were those who said, “Patricia must fight for the Barbaro! Who would she be without it?” and others who understood that her passion for the palace had nothing to do with concern about social position but arose instead from an abiding sense of duty to preserve her family’s heritage and the cultural history it embodied.
Patricia greeted me at the top of the courtyard stairs and ushered me into the
piano nobile.
She was cordial and relaxed and did not appear to be, in any sense, embattled.
As before, she was dressed in white, but I could see now that white, for her, was not a uniform white but rather a broad spectrum of whites: creamy white, milk white, linen white, bone white, dove white—her blouse, slacks, shoes, and jewelry were a mix and match of whites in a casual and oddly liberating way. White was, after all, the combination of all colors of light. Her oversize white-framed glasses stood out against her tanned face.
“I understand you’ve spoken with my brother,” she said.
“Yes, I have,” I answered, hoping she would not regard it as a transgression.
“That’s all right,” she said, acknowledging in just three words everything I had heard about her struggles to hold on to the palace and at the same time letting me know she was past caring what her brother might have told me. She turned and led the way into a room with a lacquered Chinese slant-top desk and a view of the courtyard.
“This is the breakfast room,” she said, “which we also call the Henry James Room, because Henry James wrote at that desk.”
In the preface to one of his books, Henry James had described this room as having “a pompous Tiepolo ceiling and walls of ancient pale-green damask, slightly shredded and patched.” The walls appeared to be covered with the same worse-for-wear damask, but James had apparently been mistaken about the ceiling.
“He was looking at that,” Patricia said, casting a glance at a celestial scene painted on the ceiling. “It’s only a copy of the fresco Giambattista Tiepolo painted there in the eighteenth century. The original was peeled off and sold long before my great-grandparents ever came to the Barbaro. It’s in New York now, at the Metropolitan Museum.”
Her American-accented English had European touches. She spoke the word “Barbaro” in the Italian manner, softly rolling the
r
’s.
We walked into the dining room and across a terrazzo floor that had a floral mosaic inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A life-size portrait of a young woman in a silvery pink, off-the-shoulder evening gown hung on the wall in a heavy gilt frame.
“That’s Sargent’s portrait of my grandmother,” she said. Lisa Colt Curtis had been an heiress to the Colt firearms fortune. Sargent had painted her standing with her hands resting lightly on the table behind her, a pose strikingly reminiscent of his controversial, and decidedly less demure, Madame X.
We walked into the long
portego.
At the far end, light poured in through four Gothic windows, casting a glow on the paintings and the stucco ornamentation along the walls. At the windows, which opened onto balconies over the Grand Canal, we turned left into a small drawing room with a fireplace and walls of warm red damask that was as shredded and patched as the green damask in the room where Henry James had worked. The furniture, the paintings, and the gold-leaf frames all had the patina of two centuries or more. A desk with an elegant ivory marquetry of vines and birds was worn at the edges, rubbed smooth, and polished through generations of use. Carved bookshelves were filled with aged volumes. A pride of figurine lions strode across the marble mantel below a creamy white bas-relief of children and musicians carrying flutes and tambourines.
“This is the
salotto rosso,
” she said. “We also call it the Browning Room. It’s where Robert Browning used to read his poetry aloud. When Browning was in Venice, he and my great-grandfather, Daniel Curtis, saw each other almost every day, sometimes twice a day, for three or four hours at a time. They went for long walks on the Lido, and Browning would talk the whole time. As soon as my great-grandfather got home, he would sit down and write notes about what Browning had said, while it was still fresh in his mind.”
Daniel Curtis’s diary had been donated to the Marciana Library, and in the past few weeks, I had read portions of it. He had taken copious notes of his conversations with Browning, possibly with the intention of writing a book about him, although he never did. Browning spoke about things large and small. “I get up always at 6.30,” he told Curtis, “and dress by light of a stout gas-lamp in front. I take an hour and a half for my toilette and get a deal of exercise out of it. I put on my stockings standing up, in uno pede stans. At 8 I breakfast and at 9 I go to my study.”
Browning gave his last public reading for the Curtises and twenty-five of their guests in the
salotto rosso
on November 19, 1889, a month before he died. He read from
Asolando,
a new book of poems that was expected to be released shortly. In the days that followed, Daniel Curtis wrote entries in his diary that chronicled the poet’s final days. Browning was staying at Palazzo Rezzonico, a huge baroque palace on the other side of the Grand Canal, then owned by his son, Pen Browning:
December 1 . . . all this week Mr. Browning ailing and did not go to the Lido . . . dined out and went to the Opera, had taken blue pill and reduced diet and no wine.
December 3 . . . Mr. Browning better: and so continued improving as to bronchitis and breathing, but without strength, uneasy and at times wandering in mind.
December 8 . . . [Browning’s doctors say he is suffering from] “muscular weakness of the bladder”—no disease, no pain, but weakness which makes us anxious on account of his years.
December 9 . . . Went to Pal[azzo] Rezzonico—[Pen Browning] said his father was very weak and heart action weak. He had wished to get up and walk about, also wished to read—neither allowed. Said to his son, “I will not get over this.”
December 11 . . . The English servant said they were up all night, expecting the worst! Dr. Munich called in. Pulse 160 over 130.
December 12 This morning Fernando saw [Pen Browning]—said the doctors give up hope! 6 pm My son just returned from Palazzo Rezzonico—Mr. Browning apparently much better and said to son, “I feel a great deal better and would like to get up and walk about, but I know I’m too weak.” He was without pain of any kind. But at 8.30 pm came a note from Miss Barclay (stays in the house): “Dear Mr. Browning is just passing away. He is still breathing—that is all” and asking my son to do what is necessary for having a cast made of Mr. Browning’s head and hands, which his son feels to be a duty he owes to the public. Pen said that . . . a telegram was read from London reporting the demand already made for his new volume, issued today, [and Browning] said, “Now that, I call good news! I am very grateful.” And so in few hours expires—in that Italy, whose name, he said, was written in his heart. . . .
As Pen Browning requested, Ralph Curtis—grandfather of Patricia and the present Ralph Curtis—arranged for casts to be made of the poet’s face and hands, and he found someone to take photographs of his body in repose. Meanwhile Daniel Curtis gathered branches of bay leaves from the Curtises’ flower garden on the Giudecca, and Ariana made them into a laurel wreath that was placed on top of the coffin over Browning’s head.
“And now we’ll go into the
salone
,” Patricia said as we went from the intimate, denlike Browning Room into the soaring grand-ness of the ballroom. A lavish, rococo frosting of stuccoed leaves, garlands, and putti framed immense paintings by Sebastiano Ricci and Piazzetta, two eighteenth-century masters. Henry James had used this room as the centerpiece in his memorable description of “Palazzo Leporelli” in
The Wings of the Dove.
It was Milly Theale’s rented fortress, a “thorough make-believe of a settlement” that would close her in and protect her from harm:
... she felt herself sink into possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the Southern summer was still in the high, florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard, cool pavements took reflections in their lifelong polish, and where the sun on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played over the painted “subjects” in the splendid ceilings—medallions of purple and brown, of brave old melancholy color, medals as of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all flourished and scalloped and gilded about, set in their great molded and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of the air), and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of smaller lights, straight openings to the front, which did everything . . . to make the place an apartment of state.
That typically Jamesian passage had come to represent the quintessential literary rendering of centuries-old Venetian interiors and the accumulated history that lives within all of them.
This was the room also where in 1898 Sargent had painted
An Interior in Venice,
his enchanting group portrait of the four Curtises—Daniel, Ariana, Ralph, and Lisa—four sunlit figures set into the magnificent gloom. In a few confident brushstrokes, Sargent had captured the spirit of the place as effectively as Henry James had managed to do in a paragraph of well-chosen words.
Sargent had originally presented the painting as a gift to Ariana Curtis in appreciation for her hospitality. But Ariana thought it made her look too old, and she objected to the casual pose of her son, who had one hand on his hip while half leaning against, half sitting on a gilded table in the background. So she refused it. Henry James wrote her a letter, begging her to change her mind. “The Barbaro-saloon thing . . . I absolutely adored. I can’t help thinking you have a slightly fallacious impression of the effect of your (your, dear Mrs. Curtis,) indicated head and face. . . . I’ve seen few things of S[argent]’s that I’ve ever craved more to possess! I hope you haven’t altogether let it go.”
But she had. So Sargent submitted it as his diploma painting to the Royal Academy in London, where it has remained ever since. The irony is that
An Interior in Venice
has come to be recognized as one of Sargent’s small masterpieces, and its value has kept pace with, if not surpassed, that of the entire
piano nobile
of Palazzo Barbaro. If only Mrs. Curtis had accepted it . . .
Ariana Curtis’s social fastidiousness was a well-known phenomenon and occasionally drew comment. After Claude and Alice Monet visited her for tea at the Barbaro in 1908, Alice Monet remarked in a letter, “Tea went better than I would have imagined in spite of the great airs of the mistress of the house.” Matilda Gay, the wife of another painter, Walter Gay, wrote of Ariana that “she is a wonder, this clear-minded and cold-blooded old lady of 80.” The Curtises took especial pride in their many titled visitors. Counts and countesses abounded. Don Carlos, the pretender to the Spanish throne, was a frequent guest, as were Olga of Montenegro and Empress Frederick of Germany (the daughter of Queen Victoria). The queen of Sweden came to tea with her daughter, the crown princess.
But there was never any question that the Curtises were sincere in their appreciation of art and literature. Their dinner parties were built around cultural events: poetry readings, musical recitals, the-atricals, art exhibitions, and tableaux vivants in which guests were costumed and arranged in poses as characters in famous paintings by Titian, Romney, Vandyke, Watteau, and others.
Ariana Curtis had once aspired to be a writer herself. Two of her sisters were published authors: Elizabeth W. Latimer wrote histories and novels, and Katharine Prescott was known for her translation of Balzac’s novels into English.