Venice (45 page)

Art was seen as a communal, rather than an individual, enterprise. Paintings were worked upon by many hands. A master like Bellini would provide drawings of heads as “patterns” that his apprentices could copy; the same was true, in other studios, of figure and gesture. In a city that had pioneered the model of the production line, in the shipyards of the Arsenal, such enterprise is hardly surprising. So it is that the workshops created the identity and unity of Venetian painting. From the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries it was a distinct and distinctive Venetian phenomenon. There was nothing comparable in the other cities of Italy. Art was pre-eminently a trade, and a profitable one at that, which may explain why artistic change was always slow in Venice.

So by indirection we may be able to provide a rudimentary portrait of the Venetian artist. He or she (there were female artists in Venice) was hard-working and energetic, content to be a member of the larger community and happy to serve that community, concerned not with aesthetic theory but with trading practice, intent upon contracts and profits. It is significant that not one Venetian artist ever completed a treatise on painting. In Florence there were many such works.

It is not altogether surprising, perhaps, that the ordinary Venetian seemed to know nothing whatever about art. There was a great appetite for devotional pictures, of course, but little debate about the quality of such productions. Throughout the centuries there has been a general indifference to the more sublime work of the natives. As W.D. Howells put it in
Venetian Life
, published in the middle of the nineteenth century, “As to art the Venetians are insensible to it and ignorant of it … I would as soon think of asking a fish’s opinion of water as of asking a Venetian’s notion of architecture or painting.” In the modern age of the Biennale, the same judgement may apply.

From the latter part of the fourteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, there were two dominant schools in the city. One emphasised sensuous and decorative effects while the other relied
upon narrative exposition. The former encompassed the Venetian love for opulent surface and gorgeous texture. The latter served the Venetian passion for scenic display. Yet through them both can be traced the same instinct for rhythmic grace, the same flowing line. When the Venetian patrician, Pietro Bembo, described the Venetian dialect as “softer, more imaginative, more rapid and more alive” than any other variant of Italian, he might have been referring to the brushwork of the Venetian painters. There is a sense of movement and of rhythmic display. There has always been a certain sensuousness and voluptuousness in Venetian art, most clearly seen in the female nudes of Titian. Planes and lines are supplanted by curves. When Manet travelled to Venice, he had decided to paint the scene of the annual regatta on the Grand Canal. While sitting in a Venetian café he told a friend and compatriot, Charles Toche, that “there can be no sharp definition, no linear structure in something that is all movement; only tonal values which, if correctly observed, will constitute its true volume, its essential underlying design.” This is also an interesting observation on the nature of Venetian painting itself.

The instinct for narrative is in part the instinct for drama. The Venetian stage was well known for its machines and spectacles. The public spaces of Venice were the home for elaborate processions. The earliest mosaics in the basilica of Saint Mark’s are driven by narrative, and the first great narrative painting was executed by the school of Paolo Veneziano in the spring of 1345. In these early works, human existence is seen as a series of communal events. In that sense it is a public art. In the narrative paintings there are always groups and crowds of people. That would have been the experience of Venice itself. Such art lends coherence and impressiveness to the public record. It imparts significance to the diurnal life of the city. When Carpaccio, for example, depicted the occurrence of miracles in the streets and canals of the city his works were taken as proof positive that such events had in fact occurred.

The artists of the city were concerned with the glory of the city. They were attuned to social, rather than individual, reality. It is instructive that they did not suggest the content of the narrative cycles themselves, but were content to fulfil the demands of the state. If the state was not the patron, then the commissions came from the many social and religious institutions of the city. The patrician statesmen,
also, wished to commemorate the role of their families in the increasing glory of the entire polity. So there is not much self-communing in the art of Venice. This may help to explain the intense conservatism, or rather the reliance on tradition, in that art.

Art was also a form of political life. Everything in Venice has to do with politics, and is enmeshed in the intricate network of power relations that linked state with guild and church. Public art, for example, can be an example of social control. This is as true of sixteenth-century Venice as of the twentieth-century Soviet Union. In Venice the essential notion is one of the underlying unity of the city, in its customs and in its traditions. The death of a doge made no difference to any of the artistic commissions then being completed. The death of a prince in Milan, or the death of a pope in Rome, would have meant absolute rupture.

The paintings of the doges arrayed in solemn lines on the walls of the great council hall are themselves designed to represent calm continuity, one to another, and loyal impersonality. They are images of stability. They bear themselves, and their robes of state, well. Their lucid gaze is not troubled by hesitation or inward meditation. Venice was the first city to preserve images of its rulers, not as individuals but as guardians and representatives of the city. The painter of these state portraits was himself known as
pittore di stato
or state painter; he also restored the paintings in the state collections, designed the banners and stage machinery for the pageants, and designed the mosaics for the basilica. Collectors often bequeathed their acquisitions to the city for the sake of
la patria
.

After two great fires in the 1570s had partially destroyed the ducal palace, a new programme of public art was instituted. So complex was the symbolism, and so significant the interpretation, that in 1587 a book was published under the title of a
Declaration of All the Histories Contained in the Paintings recently Placed in the Halls of the Scrutinio and Great Council of the Ducal Palace;
the long title concludes with an adumbration of the
Most Famous Victories Won over Various Nations of the World by the Venetians
. If history is seen in sacred terms, then historical paintings can become objects of devotion no less than the icon or the triptych. They pre-empt critical enquiry. In funerary monuments, and in sacred paintings, the doge is to be seen in the company of saints—even
in the presence of the Virgin and the crucified Christ. Thus the city is blessed by divine favour and protection.

The “myth of Venice” was therefore, in pictorial terms, endlessly being patched and redesigned. In the work of Giovanni Bellini the image of the Madonna and Child in the landscape was in part a sacred representation of the domination of Venice over the mainland. More than a century later, in the work of Veronese, the Queen of the Adriatic becomes the Queen of Heaven. Almost two centuries after that, Giambattista Tiepolo was depicting the homage of Neptune to Venetia. These images are all part of the same enterprise, a social and political project deeply imbued in the work of the Venetian artists.

We may seize upon the vigour and brilliance of Venetian colour as a token of cultural splendour. Volumes have been written on the subject. The painters of Venice laid one colour over another. They experimented with tonal harmonies, lending the world of the painting vibrancy and movement. It was an intuition about the nature of life. It was also a form of thought. When scarlet and green are joined, then power is created in the world. The words used to describe it are “rich,” “sumptuous,” “glowing,” “radiant.” That is why, from the mid-1470s, the Venetians became pioneers and innovators in the use of oil paint. The idea may have come from Flanders, but it reached its apotheosis in Venice. The Venetian artists worked from light to dark colour, building up layers of oil in which forms shimmered and dissolved. With oils there came light. The colours were said to “participate” one in another, and to produce the effect of harmony. The same might be said of the governance of Venice itself.

Vasari disapproved of the colorism of Venice. He noted that the artists worked immediately on canvas “without making a drawing”; he elucidated the general Venetian rule that “painting only with the colours themselves without any other work of drawing on paper was the best and true method.” Giorgione never drew at all. It was, in abstract terms, the difference between
disegno
or drawing and
colorito
or colouring. Vasari considered
disegno
to be the “father” of art, architecture and sculpture; the Venetians believed
colorito
to be the mother of painting. They enjoyed the bliss of its warm and capacious embrace. Colour was soft and intimate and harmonious. That is why Venetian painting has often been associated with the depiction of the female
nude. The naked woman can be said to be the invention of the Venetian artists of the sixteenth century. Willem de Kooning once remarked that “flesh was the reason that oil painting was invented.” It may not be accurate, but it is suggestive. Where design was the product of intelligence and discipline, colour was the token of emotion and sensory pleasure. That is the setting in which English artists like William Blake and Joshua Reynolds expressed their disapproval of Venetian painting; they couched their criticisms in moral rather than aesthetic terms.

There are certain consequences of this method. It has been suggested that, as a result, the artists of Venice were less concerned with the “inner meaning” of the world than with the variety of surfaces and textures. There was no evident concern for ideality or profundity. But what do these resonant terms mean in the context of paint and canvas? As Wilde said, and Pater intimated, only superficial people do not judge by appearances. Venetian art is never learned, or even historically accurate, but instead elusive and evocative. The emotion and passion of the Venetian painters are to be found precisely in the revelation of the surface. Their profundity lies in the relationship between colours and tones. Are not colour, and light, and shade, the happenstance of the eye? As Aretino said of Titian, “he has the sense of things in his brush.” There is optimism, and exuberance, in the air. There is a lightness of being manifest, for example, in the aerial figures of Tiepolo who skim the empyrean, uplifted by a wind of light. It might be depicted as Venetian gaiety, with the knowledge that eternity is in love with the productions of time. The constant refrain in Vasari’s account of Titian is that the Venetian’s work seems “alive”; it captures the movement and the appearance of life. It captures the effect of the transient moment. It is ardent. It has no sense of calculation or theory. It irradiates and envelops the spectator, so that it seems to acquire more than planar dimensions. It becomes part of the world.

There may on occasions be a certain straining after effect. That is the less pleasing aspect of the theatrical genius. There seems, in Venetian art, to be a taste for the extraordinary. Veronese and Tiepolo were condemned by some for creating vast and exuberant stage sets. There were also less than flattering comments upon the apparent gaudiness and over-elaboration of Venetian art. It was noted that Venetian painters liked to present what were almost inventories of goods, of
fabrics, of ceramics, of furnishings, even of the latest fashions in dress. They had a tradesman’s eye. They display tapestries and cloths and hangings like a hawker in a market. We may speak in almost a literal sense of the richness of the surface. Even the beggars of Tiepolo are sumptuously clothed. Joshua Reynolds concluded that “a mere elegance is their principal object, as they seem more willing to dazzle than to affect,” with many Venetian works “painted with no other purpose than to be admired for their skill and expertness in the making of painting, and to make a parade of that art.” Yet what is Venice but an endless parade?

Who is the woman on the balcony? It is a familiar Venetian motif. In the paintings of the public ceremonies of Venice, the women are to be seen looking down at the processions from a myriad of balconies and terraces. It is a sign, not of their presence, but of their seclusion. They are in the prison of the home. Yet in this ambiguous territory of the open balcony, half public and half sheltered, there are other possibilities. Byron wrote in
Beppo:

The women are perhaps available; therefore they are all the more alluring. Turner painted many Venetian windows and balconies. His “Jessica,” derived from
The Merchant of Venice
, is seen at an open window; the painting is accompanied by Turner’s version of Shakespeare’s text, “Jessica, shut the window, I say.” The window is an opportunity for sexual display. It is a way of showing off the goods. The gaze is intrinsic to Venice. In Marco Polo’s account of social life in China he congratulates the young ladies of that country for their modesty. “They do not,” he wrote, “hang out at the windows scanning the faces of the passers-by or exhibiting their own faces to them.” It is not hard to see the allusion here to his native city.

Venice has been called a feminine city. Henry James noted that “it is by living there from day to day that you feel the fullness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman …” He then expatiates on the various “moods” of the city before reflecting on the fact that “you desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it.” This, from a man who is never
likely to have possessed any real woman, suggests the amount of displacement that Venice can provoke. It was considered to be licentious in action and attitude. It was, after all, the city of touch, the city of sight, the city of texture. It spoke openly to the senses. It revealed itself. The presence of water is also believed to encourage sensuality. Luxury, the stock in trade of the city, represents the apotheosis of sensuous pleasure. The lovers of the world came, and still come, here. It was known to be the capital of unlimited desire and unbridled indulgence; this was considered to be an expression, like its trade and its art, of its power. Venetian conversation was known for its lubriciousness and its vulgarity. The French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, called Venice “
le sexe même de l’Europe.
”