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Preface

Theodore K. Rabb

Most people can remember how it felt when they first saw Venice. It’s not quite like the “where were you when …” moment, associated in every generation with traumatic events, such as those of 9/11. This one is not only more pleasurable, but also evokes many senses rather than a solitary stab of memory. And it tends to be followed by a stream of images and recollections, resolving finally into an overall impression that each one of us can sum up as “our” Venice.

This book tells us about one such Venice – Adam Van Doren’s – which crystallizes through the eyes and hands of an artist. It is not a common Venice, and in fact its precedents can be found only in the past three hundred years, even though the city itself can trace its origins back to the fifth century. For the notion that Venice’s buildings and urban spaces are worthy subjects in and of themselves is a relatively new idea. We can see them in the background of famous paintings, such as Gentile Bellini’s Corpus Christi Procession in Piazza San Marco, but they only became a focus of artistic interest in the years around 1700.

Why that happened we are not entirely sure, but in the late seventeenth century pioneers like Carlevaris and Vanvitelli began to find a market for “vedute,” or views, of the city, and in the following century, in the work of Canaletto, Bellotto, and Guardi, these subjects became enormously popular. They appealed especially to tourists, who had been flocking to Venice since the Middle Ages, and who wanted to return home with colorful souvenirs of their visits. Eventually, though, the challenge of capturing the shimmering city on paper or canvas became the preoccupation of a galaxy of foreign artists as well as natives. Some of them, such as Turner and Sargent, are among Van Doren’s heroes, and he makes sure we realize how aware he is of the footsteps in which he is treading.

That he has a few favorites is inevitable, and there will probably not be many who demur from his choices: the Ca’ d’Oro, the Piazza San Marco and the structures that surround it, the major Palladian designs, and Santa Maria della Salute. Among the non-“vedute” painters, he is particularly drawn to Tiepolo. This may be a short list, but it is formidable, especially when one realizes that the buildings and canvases he identifies represent a tiny fraction of the countless masterpieces of art and architecture produced in a place whose population was probably never larger than 150,000. When faced by such riches, all one can do is sample.

What is amazing is how regularly one’s own “Venice” overlaps with those of other people. I might put the Carpaccios in the Scuola degli Schiavoni nearer the top of my list, or the tombs of the early doges in San Zaccaria; but I wouldn’t argue over the architecture, nor press the case that the altarpiece in San Alvise is Tiepolo’s finest painting. Even more noteworthy are the small coincidences. When my wife and I first visited Venice, we stayed in the Calcina, as did Van Doren – and as did one of his inspirations, John Ruskin, more than a century before. It also happened that we got to know Regina Resnik and Arbit Blatas, and visited them on the Giudecca. Indeed, I spoke at a gathering in memory of Arbit in New York shortly after he died. Most remarkable, however, is the way that Van Doren’s memoir conjures up – as only an artist can – the very feel and mood of a city that, in his evocation, seems so familiar that it is almost a part of one’s family.

In his fourth chapter, for example, he writes of the beauty of Venice at night. For Mark Twain, too, there was a special magic when darkness fell. As he described it in The Innocents Abroad, under the harsh sunlight the city appeared crumbling and decayed. He even compared it to a small Arkansas town. But then came the revelation:

I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed forever. But I was too hasty. In a few minutes we swept gracefully out into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry and romance stood revealed…. In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old city seems crowned once more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago.

Twain’s most popular lecture, in his tours across America, was “Venice by Moonlight” (he told his mother he felt “a few inches taller” because they went so well), and its fame may well have been one reason his countrymen began to flock to the city in the late nineteenth century.

Van Doren’s chapter, entitled (in a nice operatic reference) “Queen of the Night,” also suggests that this is a different city after dark. And he makes the case, as did Twain, through its music and its glinting lamps as much as through the specific reactions of a painter. In this case Whistler is the muse, but the effect is the same: to bring the image of a glowing scene of lights, water, and indistinct shapes vividly to mind.

For in the end it is because of the sensibilities of the painter that this book does so much to awaken our own thoughts about Venice. We may not share the peculiar problems of finding just the right spot from which to paint the Ca’ d’Oro, or needing to stop and set up an easel in the Piazza San Marco just because the sun is hitting the Basilica from a revealing angle. But the emphasis on the play of light, on the unusual colors that fill the shadows, and on so many of the difficulties and delights that the artist encounters when trying to capture an evanescent scene – all these make one recall the breathtaking moments its visitors experience when Venice seems to become unearthly. My wife and I were once across the Grand Canal from the Salute on a morning so misty that we could not make out the church, less than 100 yards away. Over the next half hour though, the mist slowly evaporated, the sun began to beat down, and Longhena’s enchanted building gradually grew and took shape in the mist. It is these moments of near-fantasy that define the city, and that Van Doren’s art and prose summon up into consciousness.

What is also clear is how much an awareness of Venice’s past, and of those who have traversed these waters before us, helps define our understanding of its beauties. Van Doren’s book is full of tributes to those he treats essentially as his guides: not just artists like Sargent or writers like Ruskin, but also the family members and teachers who have shaped his engagement with the city. There is no doubt that, beyond the sheer exhilaration that is aroused by towers and domes rising out of the sea, surrounded by a constantly changing play of light upon the waters, it is the thought of all those who have been moved by these very sights that validates the wonder of the setting. If we enter the lagoon from the Adriatic, the scene that unfolds before us tells us forcefully how unique the delight of Venetians must always have been when they returned home. By reading these pages, and contemplating these pictures, we can follow Van Doren as he moves us yet again with the astonishment that is Venice.