A Week in Venice
A week in Venice is worth a lifetime in Disneyland– the sensation of un-reality is the same, but more marvelous in La Serenissima as– there– it contradicts actual facts, creating that frizzante called cognitive dissonance, a shiverof sophistication.
The near absence of wheels is basic to the sensation of having floated away from the world. Even the sound of motors is limited to the quite different growl of boat-engines– a thirty-foot vaporetto pulling away from the landing. And such axle-bound devices as exist, say the big-wheeled, narrow carts of trash collectors, disappear with a jink and a jog down alleys-passing-for-streets under the power of young men. It smacks of another plane, one where labor is cheap and available to manage collection of refuse daily. That the men are largely young is another distinguishing feature of the city. Every item bought, used, eaten or discarded is carried from the mainland or the depths of the sea and back again in the bottom of a boat, which adds considerably to the price of a day’s living. The singularity of Venice attracts more tourists, even in October, than there are native residents, while more affordable housing on the mainland continually lures away long-time residents.
After a few days, we began to welcome the sight of one of the typically well-dressed children. Hairy, little dogs were more common. And a great deal can be learned about people by meeting their children and pets. In Venice, as in the rest of Italy, both pets and children seem charmingly engaging and engaged, quietly happy and lovingly groomed. Camarieri– the waiters– are boisterously cheerful, without regard for their customers’ receptivity, or sullen and impatient– symptoms of what happens in a slow economy when well-loved children go out on their own to meet the indifference of fortune. On the city islands, one can notice, there are fewer of women, of the old and of the very young. Familiarly to an American, the city’s native population is coming to resemble immigrants– young and male– those hardy enough to have made the journey from their distant homes.
Someone has uncouthly called the masterworks of western civilization left so plentifully about Venice "cartoonish." A point well taken, for all it’s barbarity, and that adds to the Neuschwanstein-ish-ness. It is probably safe to assume that there is hardly a building in Venice-proper constructed later than a very long time ago, by American standards. Only fish in the market are more recently brought in from the wild than citizens of gli Stati Uniti. Forced by circumstance into the role of reverent ignoramus, we hardly dared lean against a wall for fear of de-frescoing some crumbling stucco or mis-aligning a mosaic of merchandise hung according to patterns traditional ante-Columbus (Ante columbi! any Venetian will gride, that is, groan and sigh simultaneously, in disappointed hope at the thought of a pigeon-free city).
Enter a public place and there find art enough to bankrupt a tycoon, dwarf any later career and raise spider-veins on the greedy eye. It was the whilom practice of city fathers to demonstrate their power and wealth through the commission of works from artists of reputation. Cause and effect and feedback are clear to any observer and we will not see their like again, if only because one of the favored funding mechanisms– pillaging a foreign capital and devoting a healthy part of the loot to monumental art– is, not so sadly, out of fashion. While beaverboard and drywall have a lot to answer for, they will not be around in a century or three to do the answering. Plastic sheathing and fiberglass insulation will be around, in a century, in a millennium, after an age, an eon or a kalpa. It is not clear that the tale of slump and dissolution they have to tell will find listeners for the full term of their span.
La Grande Scuola di San Rocco, a pre-rococo edifice, is home to one of many collections of paintings which draw tourists as moths to the rococo grillwork of a Chevy. San Rocco, was born St. Roche, in his native Montpellier, France. Perhaps his mother did not call him Saint. His tale is one of wasted youth and a life destroyed by idealism– stirring to the heart of any social worker. Arising from medical studies in his native place, he was drawn to help victims of the plague, then ravaging northern Italy. At the time, there would have been little or nothing beyond good will and a glass of water poor Roche could have brought to a sufferer of plague. Medicine had not advanced to the point of germ theory or an understanding of communicable disease. Inevitably, he fell ill himself..., but recovered. This was the miracle which earned him sainthood– no one recovered. Creeping back to his prosperous home in the south of France, he presented a wasted and un-welcome figure to his relatives, some of whom may have planned on inheriting in his stead. They refused to acknowledge his identity and, lacking Ulysses’ faithful old dog, clever wife and vengeful strength, he was cast into prison, where he died. It must have made an interesting bill of indictment: "St. Roche (a.k.a. Rocco) vs. the City of Montpellier, being charged with helping the dying without obvious means of support and impersonating himself. Appearing to testify against the saint: his mother, his father, his sister and his brother, all of whom deny knowing him."
Venice was plagued with the...um, it had an on-going plague problem and a history of body-snatching (the remains of St. Mark having been stolen from Alexandria at an earlier point), so it probably surprised no one that a later doge saw fit to lift the remains of St. Roche from their resting place and re-plant him in Venice as San Rocco. The theory was that as a half-trained medical student, San Rocco may have been entirely useless against the black death, but on the positive side, no one was worse off for his ministrations, either; so perhaps, if he were located in Venice, he could do as much for that city. In any case, it couldn’t hurt. Events validated the hypothesis: it did not hurt; and it became fashionable for wealthy second sons to become monks devoted to the memory of San Rocco (so as not to dilute the family fortune by marriage and the multiplication of lines of inheritance) , a privilege for which they made handsome payment.
The institution of holy name they founded was a school in the same sense that a number of monkfish would be. Their building was a church with subsidiary chapels in which members could while away their days prayerfully or plotting politico-militarily, according to their holy bent. Funds collected from applicants were used, first to build the edifice, and then to ornament it’s lofty walls and ceilings. Beating out Veronese for the contract, Tintoretto devoted the next 23 years to creating pictures for the Grande Scuola. No space on wall or ceiling is bare, suggesting a contract which specified payment by the cubit square. As is common in much of Venice, a rather small painting, one answering to angular constraints of ceiling architecture, would be about six-by-eight-ish. On the walls, where he could really poke his elbows out, Tintoretto erected a series of diligent canvasses, any one of which would provide the modern living room with floor, three walls and a ceiling-full of tasteful covering, though used in that way, the necessary perspective would be lost and one would doubt the work could be appreciated properly, plus legs of tables and chair would tend to poke holes (not that re-sale would ever be considered). Titian, Giorgione and Tiepolo managed to squeeze in pieces here and there, wherever a wall looked neglected. Works dealing with the Old Testament are to be found on the ceilings, which are so spacious and high, that it must have been quite a problem in days past, confraternity members belly-bumping as they craned and rotated to pious dizziness in appreciation. The problem is now solved by a supply of mirrors, which Old Testament fans carry tray-wise at waist-level, staring down to see what lies above– as above, so below. It presents its own strange appearance and leads to encounters of muffled surprise and incoherent apology. "Scuzi, scuzi!" "Entschuldigen!" "Niente." "Machts nichts." The number of paintings is uncountable, but the guide book somehow knows Tintoretto contributed over 50 paintings. Their worth is also incalculable and one assumes only their size has prevented theft through the centuries. The world must hope (devoutly) that the Catholic Church never fails; responsibility for so many buildings and their art treasures would then descend all over the world on the communities that surround them. For any visitor, be he ever so devoted and capable of appreciation, the mass of artwork in this one collection alone is far too great, too rich, too various and demands a scholarship too comprehensive for less than a lifetime’s effort to grasp..., if then. The city is full of such museums. The rest of Italy is almost as well provided with greatness and it really is overwhelming.
An excellent fall-back activity can be found at the local pasticceria. And it should be stressed that there is always a local pasticceria. You can’t blame them either. The real question is why America does not have such little shops full of tiny tables at which patrons may rest their eyes from Virginal blue and Carpaccio red on delicious morsels of baked goods, intensely chocolate and cream in character, downed with potent tazzine of cafe. Donuts (krapfen in local parlance, which gives some idea of how they must rate) just do not enter into comparison. A tray of chocolate brownies really does pale next to the bite-sized charges loaded into such blunderbuss displays. Buy a few to carry off, and they will be folded into a package as elegant as cloisonne.
A very long time has passed since artists of significance stood in such open support of the rich and powerful. The modern artist generally lacks for a patron, in any event, and expresses his views in the emotions which black and scarlet abstracts evoke or passively in floral pastels if not via the faux obscurity of sardonyx, irony and unflattering comparison. But for the medieval and renaissance painter, a commonly used setting would place the male members of a well-to-do family in brocade robes before the Virgin, introduction being made by a Pope or three. They were not embarrassed to employ several saints as spear-carriers to such an operatic scene. Subjects of portraiture were most often grey-haired, at least the primary figures, though younger generations might be allowed to trail away from divinity toward the frame. Respect for institutions, authority, family and the status quo fairly radiate from the canvasses. That all was well, can not be doubted from this evidence. Those for whom all was not well were, in fact, numerous in that age, but they did not appear in paint. It can not be gotten around that many saints earned their haloes the difficult way, but somehow, pierced by arrows though St. Sebastian may be, it is usually only two arrows and they only winged him, nor is he bleeding in unsightly fashion; in fact, he seems to be adjusting to his situation with tranquility.
It was a cruel age; they are all cruel ages, human nature being still human nature, from century to century, however much civilization may inch forward. Much of religious art is devoted to denials– facts such as that being pierced with arrows hurts, crucifixion hurts, sacrificing one’s son on a mountain-top (even if stopped at the last moment) leaves permanent scars on the soul–both souls. Who could deny the natural tendency to avoid dealing with the anguish and guilt of these historical or literary accounts? If you were an artist constrained within the field of religion, the impulse to prettify is not incomprehensible. But it does diminish the work. Here and there, a drier eye portrays suffering on the cross or saintly martyrdom and it always seems a dramatic lapse of taste, if not actual sadistic reveling, something akin to a dog rolling in carrion. The lesson learned about human nature (that, whether fallen or not, it can be cruel) is too obvious.
In the period of greatest artistic activity, Psyche was still an minor goddess, and neither sadism nor eroticism had been identified among her component parts. The acres of saintly flesh, holy breasts, suffering nudity and infant bottoms being presented to the public as worthy of attention suggests a great reservoir of otherwise unsatisfied normal lust, homoeroticism and pedophilia, with poor differentiation of the erotic and aggressive drives. Well, society is still a sick man living in a glass house.
Modern appreciation of this inflorescence of art focuses on technique and historical development– the use of color, brushwork, materials, the tale told by damage and restoration, insights into a patron’s ascendancy and very meta interactions between crafts such as painting, sculpture and architecture.
Glancing up from a menu provides a much more accessible perspective on the Renaissance. The Venetian painter, Carpaccio, was noted for his use of a certain, beefy shade of red. Perhaps he had been hungry in his youth, but for whatever reason, it is found five places, at a minimum, in every work by his hand. An appreciative restauranteur created the dish of thinly sliced, raw beef which he named in honor of the artist, or to honor his own creation. Now, any paper-thin raw protein is called a Carpaccio– fowl, fish, game, liver, lights and pluck..., and Carpaccio of tofu can not be impossible to find somewhere among the barbarians. The owner of Harry’s Bar in Hemingway’s time, one Cipriani (there never was a Harry), mixed the yellow local wine (prosecco) with peach nectar (juice) to produce a Shirley Temple substitute, which he dubbed the Bellini, after, but having no connection with, the famous painter. Well, the wine is bubbly, perhaps it could be said that the artist was, too, or even peachy. Hemingway may have had his fine American hand in here.
In preparation for Venice, guide books fill out extra pages in the back with lists of novels one could read, all set among the canals. Hemingway’s "Over the River and Through the Trees," will never go out of print while Venice remains above water– another fifty years or so, at a guess. Perhaps intimidated by the author’s reputation, I had scarcely allowed the body of his work to cross my field of vision. Taking up the book, a reader is readied by the critics for crisp, clean, newspaper prose, devoid of romantic distortion. Blurbs on the back cover had overlooked the juvenile wet-dream motif, which pairs a tough old soldier with a nineteen year-old depressive ragazza of noble, Venetian birth. If the reader were to follow the protagonist’s itinerary, he would have two drinks a page and never kiss or indulge in the most pleasant of human weaknesses. The crusty soldier, he says, would marry her in two seconds, if he were just a few decades younger. The principessa acknowledges that some day she must marry– one has the duty– but she will not sully their relationship with baseness. I arrived at one scene where they shared a blanket in a drafty gondola, but the gimlet-eyed gondolier was sure to gossip and Hemingway never suggested that so much as their little-fingers may have secretly linked.
Setting that permanently aside, in favor of Thomas Mann’s, "Death in Venice," after the experience of, "Buddenbrooks," one did not expect a rollicking sort of a read, nothing action packed, but perhaps perceptive and philosophically insightful. Lo, another wet dream, this one scented with pedophilia, in which a socially isolated, old, male, German author cranes and peers at the blond beauty of a boy child from his beach chair on the Lido . The old fellow follows him into the dining room of the hotel he shares with the boy and his mother and sisters. He eaves-drops on words of conversation with the avidity of a starved sparrow, foraging for crumbs of interpersonal nourishment. The author perseverates on smooth limbs and yellow hair, on the unfortunate youth, as if he were a landscape. Being a gifted author, Mann was able to inject the tale with an emotional intensity which seemed improperly (in an entirely Victorian sense) focused and drove this reader away in the early chapters.
On a rail trip to Florence, previously, we met an earnest American clergyman escorting several generations of the females of his family on a cultural tour of that city. Recollection of a well-thumbed copy of the Maine Seed Potato Guide to Florence, led to the suggestion that he might enjoy reading "A Room with a View," by E. M. Forrester, his situation being parallel to that in the novel. He asked for the spelling (R-o-o-m...) and may quite possibly have followed up on the suggestion after arriving home. Experienced now with tourist-written literature of Italy, and in recollection of E.M.’s something more than polymorphous orientation, it evokes wincing to think what the Reverend may have discovered. Perhaps I should read things to the end before recommending them, but as they say, art is long, life is short and the forwarder I go, the behinder I get.
Napoleon connected the city with the mainland, obliterating the protective isolation Venice had always enjoyed. The railway now deposits its human ballast canal-side every twenty minutes. No invasion was ever more thorough. Still, old attitudes remain. Venice became an empire in the late medieval period, earning the ill will of its neighbors, on whose heads it stepped to raise itself out of its obscure swamp. If a reason is to be found, that may be why funding was never made available to connect the city by rail with the airport, though it is one of the largest in the northeast of Italy. To be sure, a bus will bring those travelers who find it to a vaporetto-landing in fifteen minutes, otherwise a few minutes walk will permit boarding of a private ferry line between the airport and Piazza San Marco. Both options seem difficult from the distance of an armchair at home. Neither bus nor boat runs at night, though flights are scheduled in the same way as the birth of babies: often enough in the small hours to give the impression that it is that way always. It is a source of prosperity for tassisti (that is, those who drive the tassi), which can not really have been the prime consideration. But this is Italy–Venice, who can say?
Construction has been on-going for centuries. Salt water climbs beneath fresh stucco by capillary action, popping plaster into the canals in almost no time. A constant bustle of restoration and maintenance makes ownership of a building very costly. The problems are all made worse by the rising of sea level and simultaneous sinking of the stone city. The massive weight of stone on a foundation of tree-trunk pilings is a miracle of levitation. Many of those pilings were set in the medieval period. And beneath this weight, collapse of the strata below is made worse by extraction of water for domestic use in Venice and on the mainland. Always useful, Mussolini gets the blame for creating or at least encouraging the burgeoning city of Mestre, just across from Venice. Water pumped out of the ground to meet the city’s needs did lasting damage to the substrate supporting Venice. Such water extraction has been made illegal now, but the sinking it caused can not be un-done. As a result, they calculate that sea level is six feet above what it was when Venice was first constructed. Marble foundations are impenetrable to water, but the brickwork above them is now regularly submerged and holds salt water like a sponge.
Alta acqua, high water, is a regular occurrence, particularly in autumn, and Venetians are adept at predicting it. They lay out trestles by means of which pedestrians may cross Piazza San Marco dry-shod, but the tide lapping through doorways is not good for either the furnishings or artworks which history has piled up therein. Something more is clearly called for and plans have been made for great sea-gates, to block the three channels between the barrier islands through which rogue tides charge the city. These submersible gates would fold down like trap-doors on the sea bottom in normal times. When an angry wind would get behind a springing tide, these gates could be pumped full of air to rise above the surface, blocking out the flood. If the project ever emerges from the welter of committees, interest group inputs, historical impact studies, environmental concerns and sheer italianismo, they would rival the pyramids for their size and ingenuity. One problem which has yet to be overcome is that several small rivers empty into the lagoon of Venice. With the gates raised, river water would build up, creating flood risk of their own. Rivers might be diverted, but their flow is all that prevents the silting up of the canals and their injections of fresh water maintains the ecological balance on which many things depend, most prominently commercial fish-farms which occupy so much of the lagoon.
Left to run its course, nature would fill in the swamp which protected Venice from its enemies for all these years and which draws the tourists which are its present source of wealth. Efforts to guide the unseen hand of fate have worsened the situation for the city more than they have helped. On the mainland, resentment is strong for the resources of money and talent which the old town is thought to draw away from more deserving parts of the nation. Still, Venice has its defenders and they will not allow la Serenissima to silt up or go beneath the wave of history without trying every Machiavellian ploy that wealth and desperate ingenuity can contrive.
So, if you were thinking of putting off a visit to Venice, on the whole, don’t.
The near absence of wheels is basic to the sensation of having floated away from the world. Even the sound of motors is limited to the quite different growl of boat-engines– a thirty-foot vaporetto pulling away from the landing. And such axle-bound devices as exist, say the big-wheeled, narrow carts of trash collectors, disappear with a jink and a jog down alleys-passing-for-streets under the power of young men. It smacks of another plane, one where labor is cheap and available to manage collection of refuse daily. That the men are largely young is another distinguishing feature of the city. Every item bought, used, eaten or discarded is carried from the mainland or the depths of the sea and back again in the bottom of a boat, which adds considerably to the price of a day’s living. The singularity of Venice attracts more tourists, even in October, than there are native residents, while more affordable housing on the mainland continually lures away long-time residents.
After a few days, we began to welcome the sight of one of the typically well-dressed children. Hairy, little dogs were more common. And a great deal can be learned about people by meeting their children and pets. In Venice, as in the rest of Italy, both pets and children seem charmingly engaging and engaged, quietly happy and lovingly groomed. Camarieri– the waiters– are boisterously cheerful, without regard for their customers’ receptivity, or sullen and impatient– symptoms of what happens in a slow economy when well-loved children go out on their own to meet the indifference of fortune. On the city islands, one can notice, there are fewer of women, of the old and of the very young. Familiarly to an American, the city’s native population is coming to resemble immigrants– young and male– those hardy enough to have made the journey from their distant homes.
Someone has uncouthly called the masterworks of western civilization left so plentifully about Venice "cartoonish." A point well taken, for all it’s barbarity, and that adds to the Neuschwanstein-ish-ness. It is probably safe to assume that there is hardly a building in Venice-proper constructed later than a very long time ago, by American standards. Only fish in the market are more recently brought in from the wild than citizens of gli Stati Uniti. Forced by circumstance into the role of reverent ignoramus, we hardly dared lean against a wall for fear of de-frescoing some crumbling stucco or mis-aligning a mosaic of merchandise hung according to patterns traditional ante-Columbus (Ante columbi! any Venetian will gride, that is, groan and sigh simultaneously, in disappointed hope at the thought of a pigeon-free city).
Enter a public place and there find art enough to bankrupt a tycoon, dwarf any later career and raise spider-veins on the greedy eye. It was the whilom practice of city fathers to demonstrate their power and wealth through the commission of works from artists of reputation. Cause and effect and feedback are clear to any observer and we will not see their like again, if only because one of the favored funding mechanisms– pillaging a foreign capital and devoting a healthy part of the loot to monumental art– is, not so sadly, out of fashion. While beaverboard and drywall have a lot to answer for, they will not be around in a century or three to do the answering. Plastic sheathing and fiberglass insulation will be around, in a century, in a millennium, after an age, an eon or a kalpa. It is not clear that the tale of slump and dissolution they have to tell will find listeners for the full term of their span.
La Grande Scuola di San Rocco, a pre-rococo edifice, is home to one of many collections of paintings which draw tourists as moths to the rococo grillwork of a Chevy. San Rocco, was born St. Roche, in his native Montpellier, France. Perhaps his mother did not call him Saint. His tale is one of wasted youth and a life destroyed by idealism– stirring to the heart of any social worker. Arising from medical studies in his native place, he was drawn to help victims of the plague, then ravaging northern Italy. At the time, there would have been little or nothing beyond good will and a glass of water poor Roche could have brought to a sufferer of plague. Medicine had not advanced to the point of germ theory or an understanding of communicable disease. Inevitably, he fell ill himself..., but recovered. This was the miracle which earned him sainthood– no one recovered. Creeping back to his prosperous home in the south of France, he presented a wasted and un-welcome figure to his relatives, some of whom may have planned on inheriting in his stead. They refused to acknowledge his identity and, lacking Ulysses’ faithful old dog, clever wife and vengeful strength, he was cast into prison, where he died. It must have made an interesting bill of indictment: "St. Roche (a.k.a. Rocco) vs. the City of Montpellier, being charged with helping the dying without obvious means of support and impersonating himself. Appearing to testify against the saint: his mother, his father, his sister and his brother, all of whom deny knowing him."
Venice was plagued with the...um, it had an on-going plague problem and a history of body-snatching (the remains of St. Mark having been stolen from Alexandria at an earlier point), so it probably surprised no one that a later doge saw fit to lift the remains of St. Roche from their resting place and re-plant him in Venice as San Rocco. The theory was that as a half-trained medical student, San Rocco may have been entirely useless against the black death, but on the positive side, no one was worse off for his ministrations, either; so perhaps, if he were located in Venice, he could do as much for that city. In any case, it couldn’t hurt. Events validated the hypothesis: it did not hurt; and it became fashionable for wealthy second sons to become monks devoted to the memory of San Rocco (so as not to dilute the family fortune by marriage and the multiplication of lines of inheritance) , a privilege for which they made handsome payment.
The institution of holy name they founded was a school in the same sense that a number of monkfish would be. Their building was a church with subsidiary chapels in which members could while away their days prayerfully or plotting politico-militarily, according to their holy bent. Funds collected from applicants were used, first to build the edifice, and then to ornament it’s lofty walls and ceilings. Beating out Veronese for the contract, Tintoretto devoted the next 23 years to creating pictures for the Grande Scuola. No space on wall or ceiling is bare, suggesting a contract which specified payment by the cubit square. As is common in much of Venice, a rather small painting, one answering to angular constraints of ceiling architecture, would be about six-by-eight-ish. On the walls, where he could really poke his elbows out, Tintoretto erected a series of diligent canvasses, any one of which would provide the modern living room with floor, three walls and a ceiling-full of tasteful covering, though used in that way, the necessary perspective would be lost and one would doubt the work could be appreciated properly, plus legs of tables and chair would tend to poke holes (not that re-sale would ever be considered). Titian, Giorgione and Tiepolo managed to squeeze in pieces here and there, wherever a wall looked neglected. Works dealing with the Old Testament are to be found on the ceilings, which are so spacious and high, that it must have been quite a problem in days past, confraternity members belly-bumping as they craned and rotated to pious dizziness in appreciation. The problem is now solved by a supply of mirrors, which Old Testament fans carry tray-wise at waist-level, staring down to see what lies above– as above, so below. It presents its own strange appearance and leads to encounters of muffled surprise and incoherent apology. "Scuzi, scuzi!" "Entschuldigen!" "Niente." "Machts nichts." The number of paintings is uncountable, but the guide book somehow knows Tintoretto contributed over 50 paintings. Their worth is also incalculable and one assumes only their size has prevented theft through the centuries. The world must hope (devoutly) that the Catholic Church never fails; responsibility for so many buildings and their art treasures would then descend all over the world on the communities that surround them. For any visitor, be he ever so devoted and capable of appreciation, the mass of artwork in this one collection alone is far too great, too rich, too various and demands a scholarship too comprehensive for less than a lifetime’s effort to grasp..., if then. The city is full of such museums. The rest of Italy is almost as well provided with greatness and it really is overwhelming.
An excellent fall-back activity can be found at the local pasticceria. And it should be stressed that there is always a local pasticceria. You can’t blame them either. The real question is why America does not have such little shops full of tiny tables at which patrons may rest their eyes from Virginal blue and Carpaccio red on delicious morsels of baked goods, intensely chocolate and cream in character, downed with potent tazzine of cafe. Donuts (krapfen in local parlance, which gives some idea of how they must rate) just do not enter into comparison. A tray of chocolate brownies really does pale next to the bite-sized charges loaded into such blunderbuss displays. Buy a few to carry off, and they will be folded into a package as elegant as cloisonne.
A very long time has passed since artists of significance stood in such open support of the rich and powerful. The modern artist generally lacks for a patron, in any event, and expresses his views in the emotions which black and scarlet abstracts evoke or passively in floral pastels if not via the faux obscurity of sardonyx, irony and unflattering comparison. But for the medieval and renaissance painter, a commonly used setting would place the male members of a well-to-do family in brocade robes before the Virgin, introduction being made by a Pope or three. They were not embarrassed to employ several saints as spear-carriers to such an operatic scene. Subjects of portraiture were most often grey-haired, at least the primary figures, though younger generations might be allowed to trail away from divinity toward the frame. Respect for institutions, authority, family and the status quo fairly radiate from the canvasses. That all was well, can not be doubted from this evidence. Those for whom all was not well were, in fact, numerous in that age, but they did not appear in paint. It can not be gotten around that many saints earned their haloes the difficult way, but somehow, pierced by arrows though St. Sebastian may be, it is usually only two arrows and they only winged him, nor is he bleeding in unsightly fashion; in fact, he seems to be adjusting to his situation with tranquility.
It was a cruel age; they are all cruel ages, human nature being still human nature, from century to century, however much civilization may inch forward. Much of religious art is devoted to denials– facts such as that being pierced with arrows hurts, crucifixion hurts, sacrificing one’s son on a mountain-top (even if stopped at the last moment) leaves permanent scars on the soul–both souls. Who could deny the natural tendency to avoid dealing with the anguish and guilt of these historical or literary accounts? If you were an artist constrained within the field of religion, the impulse to prettify is not incomprehensible. But it does diminish the work. Here and there, a drier eye portrays suffering on the cross or saintly martyrdom and it always seems a dramatic lapse of taste, if not actual sadistic reveling, something akin to a dog rolling in carrion. The lesson learned about human nature (that, whether fallen or not, it can be cruel) is too obvious.
In the period of greatest artistic activity, Psyche was still an minor goddess, and neither sadism nor eroticism had been identified among her component parts. The acres of saintly flesh, holy breasts, suffering nudity and infant bottoms being presented to the public as worthy of attention suggests a great reservoir of otherwise unsatisfied normal lust, homoeroticism and pedophilia, with poor differentiation of the erotic and aggressive drives. Well, society is still a sick man living in a glass house.
Modern appreciation of this inflorescence of art focuses on technique and historical development– the use of color, brushwork, materials, the tale told by damage and restoration, insights into a patron’s ascendancy and very meta interactions between crafts such as painting, sculpture and architecture.
Glancing up from a menu provides a much more accessible perspective on the Renaissance. The Venetian painter, Carpaccio, was noted for his use of a certain, beefy shade of red. Perhaps he had been hungry in his youth, but for whatever reason, it is found five places, at a minimum, in every work by his hand. An appreciative restauranteur created the dish of thinly sliced, raw beef which he named in honor of the artist, or to honor his own creation. Now, any paper-thin raw protein is called a Carpaccio– fowl, fish, game, liver, lights and pluck..., and Carpaccio of tofu can not be impossible to find somewhere among the barbarians. The owner of Harry’s Bar in Hemingway’s time, one Cipriani (there never was a Harry), mixed the yellow local wine (prosecco) with peach nectar (juice) to produce a Shirley Temple substitute, which he dubbed the Bellini, after, but having no connection with, the famous painter. Well, the wine is bubbly, perhaps it could be said that the artist was, too, or even peachy. Hemingway may have had his fine American hand in here.
In preparation for Venice, guide books fill out extra pages in the back with lists of novels one could read, all set among the canals. Hemingway’s "Over the River and Through the Trees," will never go out of print while Venice remains above water– another fifty years or so, at a guess. Perhaps intimidated by the author’s reputation, I had scarcely allowed the body of his work to cross my field of vision. Taking up the book, a reader is readied by the critics for crisp, clean, newspaper prose, devoid of romantic distortion. Blurbs on the back cover had overlooked the juvenile wet-dream motif, which pairs a tough old soldier with a nineteen year-old depressive ragazza of noble, Venetian birth. If the reader were to follow the protagonist’s itinerary, he would have two drinks a page and never kiss or indulge in the most pleasant of human weaknesses. The crusty soldier, he says, would marry her in two seconds, if he were just a few decades younger. The principessa acknowledges that some day she must marry– one has the duty– but she will not sully their relationship with baseness. I arrived at one scene where they shared a blanket in a drafty gondola, but the gimlet-eyed gondolier was sure to gossip and Hemingway never suggested that so much as their little-fingers may have secretly linked.
Setting that permanently aside, in favor of Thomas Mann’s, "Death in Venice," after the experience of, "Buddenbrooks," one did not expect a rollicking sort of a read, nothing action packed, but perhaps perceptive and philosophically insightful. Lo, another wet dream, this one scented with pedophilia, in which a socially isolated, old, male, German author cranes and peers at the blond beauty of a boy child from his beach chair on the Lido . The old fellow follows him into the dining room of the hotel he shares with the boy and his mother and sisters. He eaves-drops on words of conversation with the avidity of a starved sparrow, foraging for crumbs of interpersonal nourishment. The author perseverates on smooth limbs and yellow hair, on the unfortunate youth, as if he were a landscape. Being a gifted author, Mann was able to inject the tale with an emotional intensity which seemed improperly (in an entirely Victorian sense) focused and drove this reader away in the early chapters.
On a rail trip to Florence, previously, we met an earnest American clergyman escorting several generations of the females of his family on a cultural tour of that city. Recollection of a well-thumbed copy of the Maine Seed Potato Guide to Florence, led to the suggestion that he might enjoy reading "A Room with a View," by E. M. Forrester, his situation being parallel to that in the novel. He asked for the spelling (R-o-o-m...) and may quite possibly have followed up on the suggestion after arriving home. Experienced now with tourist-written literature of Italy, and in recollection of E.M.’s something more than polymorphous orientation, it evokes wincing to think what the Reverend may have discovered. Perhaps I should read things to the end before recommending them, but as they say, art is long, life is short and the forwarder I go, the behinder I get.
Napoleon connected the city with the mainland, obliterating the protective isolation Venice had always enjoyed. The railway now deposits its human ballast canal-side every twenty minutes. No invasion was ever more thorough. Still, old attitudes remain. Venice became an empire in the late medieval period, earning the ill will of its neighbors, on whose heads it stepped to raise itself out of its obscure swamp. If a reason is to be found, that may be why funding was never made available to connect the city by rail with the airport, though it is one of the largest in the northeast of Italy. To be sure, a bus will bring those travelers who find it to a vaporetto-landing in fifteen minutes, otherwise a few minutes walk will permit boarding of a private ferry line between the airport and Piazza San Marco. Both options seem difficult from the distance of an armchair at home. Neither bus nor boat runs at night, though flights are scheduled in the same way as the birth of babies: often enough in the small hours to give the impression that it is that way always. It is a source of prosperity for tassisti (that is, those who drive the tassi), which can not really have been the prime consideration. But this is Italy–Venice, who can say?
Construction has been on-going for centuries. Salt water climbs beneath fresh stucco by capillary action, popping plaster into the canals in almost no time. A constant bustle of restoration and maintenance makes ownership of a building very costly. The problems are all made worse by the rising of sea level and simultaneous sinking of the stone city. The massive weight of stone on a foundation of tree-trunk pilings is a miracle of levitation. Many of those pilings were set in the medieval period. And beneath this weight, collapse of the strata below is made worse by extraction of water for domestic use in Venice and on the mainland. Always useful, Mussolini gets the blame for creating or at least encouraging the burgeoning city of Mestre, just across from Venice. Water pumped out of the ground to meet the city’s needs did lasting damage to the substrate supporting Venice. Such water extraction has been made illegal now, but the sinking it caused can not be un-done. As a result, they calculate that sea level is six feet above what it was when Venice was first constructed. Marble foundations are impenetrable to water, but the brickwork above them is now regularly submerged and holds salt water like a sponge.
Alta acqua, high water, is a regular occurrence, particularly in autumn, and Venetians are adept at predicting it. They lay out trestles by means of which pedestrians may cross Piazza San Marco dry-shod, but the tide lapping through doorways is not good for either the furnishings or artworks which history has piled up therein. Something more is clearly called for and plans have been made for great sea-gates, to block the three channels between the barrier islands through which rogue tides charge the city. These submersible gates would fold down like trap-doors on the sea bottom in normal times. When an angry wind would get behind a springing tide, these gates could be pumped full of air to rise above the surface, blocking out the flood. If the project ever emerges from the welter of committees, interest group inputs, historical impact studies, environmental concerns and sheer italianismo, they would rival the pyramids for their size and ingenuity. One problem which has yet to be overcome is that several small rivers empty into the lagoon of Venice. With the gates raised, river water would build up, creating flood risk of their own. Rivers might be diverted, but their flow is all that prevents the silting up of the canals and their injections of fresh water maintains the ecological balance on which many things depend, most prominently commercial fish-farms which occupy so much of the lagoon.
Left to run its course, nature would fill in the swamp which protected Venice from its enemies for all these years and which draws the tourists which are its present source of wealth. Efforts to guide the unseen hand of fate have worsened the situation for the city more than they have helped. On the mainland, resentment is strong for the resources of money and talent which the old town is thought to draw away from more deserving parts of the nation. Still, Venice has its defenders and they will not allow la Serenissima to silt up or go beneath the wave of history without trying every Machiavellian ploy that wealth and desperate ingenuity can contrive.
So, if you were thinking of putting off a visit to Venice, on the whole, don’t.