V is for Venice

V

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't want to go to Venice.   Really.  Part of my History of Art degree involved spending three months in Venice and I fought tooth and nail to avoid this horrible fate.  Quite why I was so against the idea is now lost to me, but if I had the chance to go back I'd smack the 20 year old me pretty hard and tell her not to be such a daft baggage.  Luckily, I had no choice.  Got off the train at Santa Lucia station, looked across the canal and fell in love.  Reluctantly and irrevocably.  My telegram home to let my mother know I'd arrived safely was short and to the point.  "Damn."

So, what's to love so much?

Well, it's so practical for one thing.  For all the glamour of the palaces lining the Grand Canal, at bottom they are just flashy docks.  You can trace the history of Renaissance and Baroque architecture in those buildings.  All of them were built by great Venetian families with two purposes in mind.  Showing off outrageously and allowing easy access to storehouse space.

It hasn't really changed.  I think of Venice as a kind of hermit crab.  It is built on the sound principle of accretion.  Bits get stuck on here and there, but since the city can't expand, the basic structure and layout are the same as they were 900 years ago.

The Rialto Bridge is a comparative newcomer on the scene.  Prior to the stone one opened in 1591, there had been a wooden structure.  This eventually collapsed under the weight of a major procession, but can be seen in the picture below.

By Carpaccio (painted around 1490)

The replacement was the familiar thing still around today.

By Canaletto (c.1750)

Present day, courtesy of the Italian Tourist board

All of Venice is like this.  The street map would be just as familiar to Tintoretto as it is to any baffled tourist.

The hermit crab analogy holds up in another way too.  The Venetians were notorious as pickers up of unconsidered trifles to send home to La Serenissima.  A bronze horse here, a gold pillar there.  There is no particular rhyme or reason to it.  If it looked pretty, or was valuable or could show the world that Venetians had been there and done that, home it went.

Unlike, say, the beautifully organised Renaissance perfection of Vicenza down the road, Venice lacks any kind of unifying theme.  The result should be a mess, but like the hermit crab, it has a style all its own.  San Marco is the perfect representation of this and prompted Mark Twain to say that the basilica looked like a "vast bug taking a meditative walk."

Piazza San Marco (Canaletto again).  Note the magpie effusion of the basilica in the background.  Note also the huge campanile.  It fell down in 1902 and was lovingly rebuilt to recreate the 1514 original.  Amazingly nobody was hurt in the collapse and no buildings were destroyed.

It wasn't just pretty objects either.  Venice was well known as a melting pot of ideas and technology as well.  Many of them were picked up from the dangerous east and the Serenissima was regarded with permanent suspicion by rest of Europe.  Venice has been a haven for many outcasts as long as they were useful outcasts.  Practicality has always taken precedence over any need for orthodoxy.  Indeed,  the Venetians gave their real devotion to the Serenissima - that mythic aglomoration of ideas and place that combined government and city in one.

For the first time visitor, Venice is a hideously confusing city.  Although it is very small indeed (you can walk it end to end in an hour), it is also, without question, the easiest place in the world to get lost in.  Helpful signs on the walls mean nothing at all.  Wide (by Venetian standards) calle* peter out entirely or end in canals.  Narrow calle with no apparant exit open abruptly onto small unlabelled campi*.

At this point you can either consult your map and get even more confused or take the Red Queen's advice and walk in the opposite direction to the one you think you should be going in.  Doing so results in you finding your destination almost immediately.  If you're lucky, you may end up at Paolin, purveyers of the best ice cream I have ever tasted.

I've long wanted to build a campaign around Venice.  It is the perfect amalgam of the an urban setting with dangerous areas, Byzantine rules and mysterious people.  Writing this has reminded me of it and once Mikelmerck is slightly more concrete, this is where I will turn my attention.

Beautiful Venice.  You bizarre product of extreme pragmatism and magpie instinct.  I'd go back in a heartbeat.


* - calle.  The Venetian term for a street
* - campi.  Plural of campo (small square)

H is for History of Art

H

I've written a little before about my dawning love affair with painting.  In due time, I took an A level in History of Art and went on to do a degree in the subject at the University of Warwick.

It was, as everyone warned me, completely useless as a job qualification.  Much like a BA in English, it opens doors to not very much.  This is unfair.  Any academically rigorous degree should really carry the same weight as they tend to hone the same skills.  Whinging aside, I don't regret my degree choice at all.  In fact, I adored it.

People are often quite confused about History of Art as a subject.  It suffers from being seen as a soft option, requiring an ability to draw and little mental rigour.  Neither is true.  While I know some art historians who can paint and draw (often very well), it is far from compulsory.  What I find less forgiveable is the pitying looks I get when I reveal that my degree is in this supposedly soft option subject.

Consider this for a moment.  If analytical skills are required, you could do a lot worse than consult an art historian.  Most of us have spent long hours analysing very small samples in a lot of detail.  Take a look at this:

Detail of the Adoration of the Magi by Giotto.  Part of the cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel

Note that from this detail you can tell an enormous amount.   The figures are solidly placed in space and have depth to them.  The shading and colour take advantage of fresco (wet paint on three layers of plaster - sinking in and giving a virtually indestructable painted surface.  Only applicable in dry climates).  Giotto may not have seen a real camel, but he knows enough about anatomy to create something believeable.  Notice how the halos are in slight perspective.  Look at the solid anatomy in the figure of that reaching man.

The artist is living in a time and place where curiosity and innovation are encouraged.  He's living in a world where stories matter and painting is the main medium for that.  He's living in a place where fresco survives well and he's been given carte blanche to create a story cycle.  We know this must be so from the arrangement of the figures and from the style and colour of the painting.  It is part of something much larger.

That something larger is  a whole chapel.  This chapel:

Scrovegni Chapel facing the altar

This is a building commissioned by the very wealthy Enrico Scrovegni.  Enrico and his whole family were money lenders.  At the time, usury was a deadly sin and the chapel is a plea for absolution for the sins of the father, as well a pre-emptive plea on the part of Enrico himself.  It tells the whole story of Christ and the Virgin Mary in a series of panels running down both walls. The whole astonishing building was completed in around 1305 and has survived intact ever since.  Even when Padua was bombed in the war,  the chapel somehow survived untouched.

In 1305, the artistic tradition was still firmly rooted in Byzantine art.  Cimabue and Duccio were evolving the style from the extreme formality of the icon to something warmer and more approachable, but Giotto (one of Cimabue's pupils) brought about a complete revolution.  It is possibly fair to say that without Giotto there would have been no Renaissance.

Take a look at the Cimabue altarpiece below and while you can see the very strong Byzantine influence in the gold background, the elongated anatomy and the relative sizes of the figures, there is a real sense of humanity in the relationship between the mother and child.  There is even a slight sense of depth emerging, rather than the Byzantine focus on surface decoration.

Cimabue's Maesta

Returning now to the Scrovegni Chapel, there is a fascinating Last Judgement on the wall opposite the altar.

Last Judgement in the Scrovegni Chapel

Ugh.  So annoyed I can't find bigger images, particularly of the last one.

What you're seeing here is the crossover moment in western artistic tradition.  That Last Judgement is formal and Byzantine in construction (note Christ in the mandorla and the linear representation of the souls of the dead.  Note as well the geometric arrangement of the risen Christ above the crucifixion at the bottom.  Also Byzantine is the size difference between Christ and everyone else.  He's bigger, so he must be more important. 

But ...  look closer:

Despite the gold background, flat decorated halo and the large size, this Christ is a solid body in space.  He is definitely sitting on that throne, not pasted across it (as Cimabue's Madonna is doing).  The drapery follows his body and gives definition to the shape of the limbs, adding to the illusion of solidity.  Here is where the path branches.

Art History is entirely about how people percieve the world in different places and at different times.  Look closely at those paintings and a whole way of seeing opens up.  I've never got over the shock of it.