A series of encounters with the art of Venice
VENICE City of pictures
MARTIN GAYFORD 464pp. Thames and Hudson. £30.
FOR A WHILE after college I taught art history at A-level. One of the stock exam questions for which we tried to prepare students concerned the various exceptionalities of Venetian art. The points that needed to be made varied between the practical and prosaic (there’s no point having a courtyard in your palace if it’s built on bundles of wooden logs in the middle of the sea) and the oddly numinous: the effects of dappled, opalescent light on the creative imagination, or the harmonious balance Venetian artists managed to strike between the sacred and the profane.
Venetian painters of the later fifteenth century weren’t the only Italians to pick up the new technique of oil painting from their Flemish precursors, but they were the first to realize that you could make oil paint thick and tactile as well as thin and translucent. Seeing this insight bear fruit in the mature work of, say, Titian, might help examinees to back up the opalescent-light and sacred-profane stuff; it might also imply an idea about works of art being things in themselves, as well as reflections of external reality. It’s easy to see how Titian influences Rembrandt, say, or even Monet; it’s also at least credible to say he’s paving the way for Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly.
Then there is the exceptionality of the city itself. Venice’s defining features – wateriness, mercantile wealth and a cosmopolitan culture that accommodated influences from Asia as well as Europe – are not so remarkable in themselves. Other cities on water exist, some of them (St Petersburg, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Wuzhen) opulent and beautiful. There are more Middle Byzantine churches in Calabria; there’s a more pronounced Islamic influence in parts of Sicily. But there’s just something about Venice, as most of us would agree: something unique, precious and, as we must increasingly acknowledge, precarious.
New books responding to that “something” seem to come along like buses: Jonathan Keates’s hefty, suave La Serenissima arrived in 2022, a grand historical narrative decked out with court intrigue, battles, crop failures and so on. Martin Gayford’s Venice: City of pictures follows a more meandering path, with more stops along the way: it is a series of encounters with powerful works of art, taking on board only as much biographical and historical context as seems relevant or interesting. Shortish vignettes illuminate the wider culture around them. When Veronese simply changes the title of his “Last Supper”, rather than painting out all the little elaborations to it that had so displeased the Inquisition, it seems to speak volumes about Veni
