In Venice and Venetia Edward Hutton began his exploration of the fabled city and its environs at S. Marco, the incredibly beautiful chapel of the Doges.
If St. Mark’s strikes us first by the Byzantine character of its architecture, its crowd of domes, the vast width of its façade in comparison with its height, it impresses us next, I think, by its strangely lovely colour, the gold and blue and green and red of the mosaics, colour which changes with every change of the sky, which is one thing in the blaze of a summer morning and quite another on an autumn afternoon after rain, when the sky is still full of cloud and the wind comes in melancholy gusts out of the pale gold of a watery sunset. I do not know under the influence of which sky, or at what hour of the day or of the night the church is most beautiful; I only know it is always beautiful: in the golden summer heat or standing amid the winter snow, or in the spring or late autumn when the Piazza has been flooded by the gale in the Adriatic; but I think I love it best when the sky clears in the evening, after a day of rain in early autumn, when some delicate and pure light has suddenly fallen upon the world, and the great façade seems for a moment to be made of pearl and mother of pearl, to reflect every colour and shadow of a beauty that belongs to the sea….
At such an hour in the flagstones of the Piazza, still wet after the day’s rain, the great façade backed by its domes, the flagstaves that stand before it on the pavement, are reflected there as a ship might be at the same mysterious hour to the grey-blue sea; it is as though some vast ship, only by conduct of some star, made her way upon the waters; a ship of pearl in which a thousand vague colours burn and fade and are merged into the grey twilight into the night and it is gone.*
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*Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, 1911, pp. 49-50.
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