Читать книгу An Artist in Venice - Adam Van Doren - Страница 7

Foreword

Simon Winchester

Adam Van Doren has a way with light. His painterly calling-card is, in its essence, illumination. It is opalescence, iridescence, brilliance. It is the subtly varied lights of dawn, of noontide, and of dusk. And as these paintings of the Venetian cityscape illustrate so vividly, it is the soft and languid interplay between warm Italian sunshine and the ancient stones and waters of this venerable city on its quiet lagoon.

And yet it is still more than that: for the artist manages to capture this uniquely Venetian phenomenon in a way that is perfectly, poignantly evocative. For me certainly, it conjured up in a madeleine-moment the very first time that I experienced the marvel that is the pure Venice light.

It was thirty years ago, late in a June afternoon of sultry heat, and as the train from Milan squealed across the industrial marshes south of Treviso I remember feeling pessimistically apprehensive about my first journey to Venice.

The auguries were less than perfect. I had flown to Italy from Hong Kong only the night before and was tired, crumpled. I was lugging with me a cache of heavy boxes of papers that I had promised to deliver to someone at the Biennale (this being an odd-numbered year), and the great festival was just about to begin.

I had very nearly missed the train. Smoothly polished and impossibly beautiful men and women in pastel linens – art dealers, I said to myself with a snarl – seemed to occupy all of the first class seats; in second class, a crush of Balkan tourists obliged me to stand all the way. My weariness must have dulled the visions of Verona and Padua as we passed them by, for I gazed out dully at their ancient skylines, unimpressible. I was nervous, too: all I had by way of introduction in the city ahead were two small pieces of paper. One bore a name and an address, untidy and mostly illegible, and, in brackets, the words “near the Ca’ Rezzonico.”

But then, in what seemed no more than an instant, everything became transcendentally different. The train slid effortlessly into Santa Lucia station, an eager porter took my boxes, and I followed him past the ticket offices and the peddlers and down the steps onto the small square. A square edged with water and lined with docks, with boats. I was put promptly into one of them, a water taxi – all varnished wood and the look of mighty expense – and once I handed the slip of paper to the driver, so he swept me away, deep into the thickets of the Dorsoduro. I confess I was briefly alarmed, ducked as we passed under low bridges, felt a need to shrink as we whizzed down a skein of tiny canals – Tolentini, Gafaro, Rio Novo are the names I recall – that zig-zagged, sunless, between ancient, red-washed buildings that were more precariously decayed, tide-marked, and beautiful than I had ever imagined.

After fifteen minutes or so the driver then slowed his motor, stopped beside a bridge, tied on to a stanchion, and helped me up with the boxes. What seemed like a solid brick of lira changed hands. He then pointed me down a mysterious-looking street, and told me, approximately, what to look for: a tall carmine-varnished door with a bell, to be found down an alley off an alley. It took me an age to find it, shifting my boxes along the street, kicking cats out of the way, wondering briefly what all the Venice fuss was about. This was still not quite La Serenissima I had supposed: it seemed more like a back street in Liverpool, or around the tenements of Fulton Street in the old days, only hotter.

But I duly found the door, and pressed the brass button, hearing the sound of ringing from deep within. There was eventually a shuffling and a scuffling, and an ancient man first cracked open the barrier and then revealed his face, smiling broadly and toothlessly as he did so. He was dressed in black and had the weathered face of a cobbler. He gathered me and my boxes into the room – a room that, surprisingly, had a floor that sloped down right into water and that ended in a doorway made of slats through which the sunlight shone and shimmered.

At the room’s upper end, beside the doorway at which Alberto had welcomed me, all was dry, and there was a footway leading to a staircase and up into the house itself. But mostly this was the water-entrance to the house, and so there was a small dingy bobbing in the shallow water inside the room, and which bumped on the half-submerged flagstones. As the tide rose, so the canal water slopped lustily further and further into the bowels of the house, a translucent green and ever-spreading carpet.

Alberto could see I was fascinated. He was a little lame, yet he limped with grave dignity along the side wall and then with a flourish drew back the slatted gates. Afternoon sunlight then flooded in, the ceiling suddenly glittered with the reflection of a thousand golden dapples. He beckoned to me to look, to drink it all in.

It was beyond belief. Before me was the Grand Canal itself, no less, the madcap busyness of its great sinuous waterway spread out like some vast tableau, a private theatrical performance laid on just for me. There to the right was the immense, three-tiered Rezzonico mansion, no more than a few hundred yards away; the Accademia bridge was a little further down, and if I strained hard and leaned out over the water I could see the Rialto, too, a few hundred yards to the left.

There was a strange insistence about these cool waters, lapping as they did right into the heart of the very house where I was staying. You must venture out, they seemed to say. There was a small landing stage, and by chance a gondola was tying up to the striped pole at one end, and by even greater chance there came a sudden cry of welcome from within it – a friend of mine who lay on a cushion near the prow was waving to me, frantically. It wasn’t a total coincidence. She knew where I would be staying and had come to meet me, to take me for an evening drink.

I mentioned earlier that I had two pieces of paper with me. The first was the one I had given to the taxi, and which led me to this exquisite miniature palazzo where I was now staying. The second, which I dug from my shirt pocket, was an introduction written from a mutual friend in London – a please be kind to this man letter, written to Arrigo Cipriani, the man who at the time ran no less a watering hole than – of course – Harry’s Bar.

And this, without the slightest protest from my lady-in-the-gondola, was then where we promptly went. And which is why, as the sun went down on that first Venice evening, there we were: two old friends, sitting beside the tiny tinted windows of the bar, gazing out in a quiet rapture and sipping as we did so, and inevitably, pair after pair of fresh-made Bellinis. We were captivated: by the old palaces and warehouses of Giudecca out on the blue horizon, by the enormous white marble dome of the Basilica Salute just across the canal from us, by all the rest of the irresistible magic of Venice, which was laid out glowing and drowning in that evening’s warmth, on every side.

Serene, eternal, perfect. Venice was at that moment for us what it has become for most who are fortunate enough to be able to stay there for a while, who are lucky enough to be able to drink it all in. Venice, the perfect stage set for an ever-unfolding dream, a place that after that inauspicious moment on the Milan Express became as I had long imagined – place of treasure, of secrets, and the embalming comforts of memory.

And a place whose tincture is all captured, so perfectly, in the lush score of the pages of Van Doren’s Venice that follow.

The Bridge of Sighs, 2008

San Giorgio at Night, 2008. Private Collection

“Venice still lingered on my mind when I arrived at the design studio …”