Читать книгу An Artist in Venice - Adam Van Doren - Страница 9

HEAVENLY MANSIONS

Its temples and its palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley²

Idon’t know what civilization is,” the eminent art historian Sir Kenneth Clark famously remarked, while looking at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, “but I do know that I am standing in front of it.”³ The same could be said of the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice, and there is no mystery why. It is a great building, not merely an excellent example of High Gothic – it would be beautiful in any style – but also because its proportions are perfect. Once the home of the Contarini family that supplied Venice with eight doges, the palazzo is not as big as some of its neighbors on the Grand Canal, but it doesn’t need to be. Its façade, a hybrid of Moorish and Byzantine detailing, absolves it. Even its asymmetry beguiles.

I’ve painted the Ca’ d’Oro, or House of Gold, both in oil and watercolor, but I’d be happy just drawing it in pencil. John Ruskin’s The Casa d’Oro, rendered in 1845, is an inspiration. Though better known as an art critic, Ruskin was indeed a superb watercolorist in the finest British tradition, and this work, done on toned paper with gouache highlights, is a master class in technique. To some it looks unfinished – Ruskin left many areas untouched – but to my eyes it intimates just the opposite. Less is more, and he allows the viewer to fill in the rest.

I wondered where Ruskin sat when he painted this unique work. Judging from its perspective, it may have been done from a boat, facing the palazzo. Turner, the Romantic landscapist known as the “painter of light,” hired gondolas to get the angle he wanted. Though tempted, I avoided availing myself of such expedients – and got lucky instead. Late one afternoon, walking near the Rialto, Venice’s most famous bridge, I detected a narrow causeway directly across the canal from the Ca’ d’Oro. There, in the sun, regal, ageless, and just like a postcard, I saw the greatest house in Venice.

I started to sketch rapidly, first drawing the second floor of the palazzo, with its intricately carved balcony and french doors; then adding the delicate finials at the top course. I carefully rendered the fenestration, which looked like tapestry. I used blues for the shade and avoided browns, which might muddy it. I applied one layer of wash for the background, then two. As daylight waned, the race was on. If I faltered now I had no one to blame but myself.

I laid my pad on the ground, stood back, and critiqued my sketch. Reasonably satisfied, I resumed working. Then a vaporetto, the ubiquitous small ferryboat peculiar to Venice, rolled in, heaving its rusty bulk into the dock like a wounded whale. The noise was jarring, an accepted abrasion in a city where waterbuses are the means of public transport. I had no choice but to wait for it to depart. When it finally did, the motor sprayed water all over my picture. My colors started to bleed together: ultramarine, alizarin, and yellow ocher were suddenly one. Miraculously, the picture was improved. Only in Venice!

Nearby, the fish merchants at the Pescheria were oblivious to my creative endeavor. Instead they were busy buying and selling the latest catch in the city’s oldest open-air market. Squid, sardines, skate, sole, and crab lay heaped on long tables under an arched loggia. I took a break to watch them work. The merchants’ sunburnt arms strained to lift the heavy crates; suddenly my backpack felt weightless in comparison. “Scusi!” one fisherman bellowed, as he pushed me aside with an armload of fresh seppioline. I quickly stepped back, and watched the frenetic activity from a safe distance. Then, as if a director had yelled “Cut!,” the hour struck noon and everyone disappeared – mysteriously vanishing like in The Cat in the Hat. Empty cartons and crumpled wax paper lay strewn in piles on the worn stone pavement. The place was empty, ready to begin anew the next day.

Where had everyone gone? Italians in general, and Venetians in particular, savor their siesta, the long afternoon repast they enjoy until as late as four o’clock. Laborers, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers – even artists – rush back to their families and enjoy homemade dishes, freshly prepared from the daily market, of prosciutto and melon, mozzarella and tomato, breaded veal – and of course vino. In the summer, the men take off their jackets, and women remove their high heels. They sit leisurely outside on wooden chairs, and eat and eat and eat. Sufficiently gorged, they refrain from dessert (sweets are less of an obsession than in America) and take a long nap instead. Nothing short of an earthquake will change this ritual. It is as sacred as the altar. Later, when the meal is done, kisses are heartily exchanged on both cheeks and the Venetians stagger back to work – a little tipsy, but restored. Not a bad life, I thought. I could learn something from this. My ambition, to produce as many paintings as possible in the shortest amount of time, sometimes prevents me from truly seeing the city – its atmosphere, its people, its life – which is as inspirational as the architecture itself.

Taking this cue, I created my own improvised siesta, found a comfortable corner between two buildings, and sat on a triangular stone bench built into the wall. These benches exist throughout the city, a gesture by Renaissance architects to provide citizens with a place to rest tired feet. Usually a tiny statue of the Virgin Mary is perched above, suggesting this act of charity had divine precedent. The seat was small, but it was just enough to relish my panini with peppered ham and Bel Paese cheese, smothered in olive oil. A bottle of refreshing Limonata, a sparkling lemonade, topped it off.

After digesting my meal, I wandered nearby to San Giacomo di Rialto, reputed to be the oldest church in Venice. It was built in 1287 for the ancestors of these same fishermen, and its pink stucco façade had three bells at the top, like a Spanish mission. Upon my entering the building and settling in one of the pews, the noise from the street abruptly ceased. The chaos outside was miraculously converted into cool, dim, and soundproof serenity. A cleric closed the heavy metal doors of the entrance and a muted thud echoed throughout the chamber. Variegated light passed through the half-moon window near the nave. I felt as if I had stumbled into the closet in C.S. Lewis’s fantasy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Looking around the church, first at the Renaissance paintings, then at the marble pediments, I was enveloped by one of those discoveries I’ve since come to expect in the dense, history-laden city of Venice. And though London, New York, Paris, and my hometown, Boston, have rich, eminently explorable architectural backdrops, Venice has one great transformative advantage: Mediterranean light. Startling at every turn, it surprises even the most jaded scholar.

Backtracking to the Ca’ d’Oro, I surveyed it with fresh eyes. Its Gothic details are what give Venice its venerable cast. The city, after all, is medieval. Some of these details are specific to the Ca’ d’Oro, but many, such as the pointed arches and fine tracery, are to be found in various incarnations throughout the city’s six sestieres, or districts. A Darwinian evolution is at work here: those decorative motifs that survive have clearly stood the test of time. Ruskin, in his essay “The Nature of Gothic,” organizes these differences into three grandiose categories: Servile Ornament, Constitutional Ornament, and Revolutionary Ornament – each with its own rarefied subtext. Ruskin was a social thinker – a fervent commentator on the economics and politics of his time – and he extended his principles to architecture. Favoring the Gothic style for its organic, human quality, Ruskin felt that “an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dark or dead architecture; and those who love it, it may truly be said: they love darkness rather than light.”⁴

Palazzo Ca’ Rezzonico, 1986. Collection of The Art Institute of Chicago

But Venice, as much as Ruskin would have yearned for it, is not entirely Gothic. There are superb examples of Renaissance buildings, and the Grand Canal is a veritable museum for many of them. The easiest way to see these mansions is by boat. Like an unfurled Chinese scroll, the façades stretch end-to-end, following the canal’s serpentine S curve in a continuous line. Baldassare Longhena, the seventeenth-century architectural genius behind the Salute, was responsible for two fine examples: Ca’ Pesaro and Ca’ Rezzonico, both of which were completed after his death.

Now and again a curiosity appears, like the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, once the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. It has only one floor – the original owners never having completed the building – and was abandoned for centuries before Guggenheim bought it in 1958. Herself an eccentric, famous for oversize eyeglasses that prefigured Elton John, Guggenheim also had discerning taste in art. She thought the half-finished façade looked avant-garde and left it as is. The museum contains notable examples of cubist and expressionist paintings, one of the most celebrated works being the sculpture of a nude man by Marino Marini. He is seated on a horse with arms outstretched, his erect penis facing the Grand Canal. When I was a boy I found this intensely amusing, but the Venetians thought otherwise, and in deference to the Holy Father (or so I was told) they remove the offending appendage, which can be unscrewed, on Sundays.

Farther down the canal is a favorite palazzo of mine, Ca’ Rezzonico. The home of Cole Porter during the 1930s, it has since become Venice’s Museum of Decorative Arts. Clad in chalk-white Istrian stone, a sharp contrast to the weathered red brick structures nearby, the exterior is now discolored by smog. Whole sections blackened with soot form permanent shadows on the façade. (Even though Venice has no cars, the nearby industrial city of Mestre on the mainland, with its ominous smokestacks and refineries, is a constant threat to Venetian buildings – not to mention a blight on the horizon.) Fortunately, these toxic agents do not obscure the fluid lines of Rezzonico’s façade. Divided into three equal stories, one neatly stacked above the other like a bridal cake, Longhena’s structure forms a solid block on the Grand Canal. The arched windows on the first two stories run straight across the façade – a Renaissance version of the Bauhaus ribbon window – and they act to unify the front elevation. They are an excellent example of the classical architecture I’d studied in college, so much so, in fact, that I made Rezzonico the first building I drew in Venice. The palace was originally commissioned by the Filippo Bon family, Venetian aristocrats who went bankrupt trying to finish it. Longhena died in 1682, before it was completed, but the Rezzonico family, who had made their fortune in the Turkish wars, bought the building and hired the architect Giorgio Massari to complete it according to Longhena’s plans. Interestingly, a precise replica of the building, built by Stanford White in 1898 for Joseph Pulitzer, exists at 11 East Seventy-Third Street in New York.

I mused what it was like to go behind the walls of these Venetian mansions. There is rarely an opportunity to see their interiors unless you are one of the owners or are invited to a private party, and this usually requires ties to the Italian nobility, of which I have none. I settled for John Singer Sargent’s excellent 1897 oil, An Interior in Venice, which is the next best thing to being there. Sargent, arguably America’s greatest portraitist, was particularly skilled at rendering figures in a group setting. The painting depicts a distinguished family lounging in a living room at the Palazzo Barbaro, which Sargent often visited. In the background are tapestries, intricately carved Louis XVI furniture, large antique mirrors, crystal chandeliers, and elaborately decorated ceilings. All of the members of the fashionably dressed Curtis family – expatriates who were also Sargent’s cousins – seem unaware of the outside viewer looking in, except for one: the formidable Mrs. Liddy Curtis. She stares out of the painting, composed and vigorous, with a hint of a restrained smile. Light from the outside window highlights her lace dress, while her husband is busy perusing a folio of pictures beside her. An attractive younger couple, standing behind them, exudes sophistication and class. Sargent captures this resplendent scene with rich, lustrous colors, and it is an astonishing group portrait. But apparently Mrs. Curtis felt otherwise: she rejected the painting because she thought it made her look too matronly. From her vanity sprang our good fortune. The picture was returned to Sargent and later found its way to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where it is now on permanent display.

Palazzo Grimani is another Renaissance building that enthralls. Built in the 1550s, it was designed by Sanmicheli, a student of Palladio. The structure resembles Rezzonico in its overall shape but is more muscular and robust. Now the Court of Appeals, Grimani features a triumphal arch at the first floor, a motif repeated in the floors above. It is one of the handsomest buildings in the city and, according to Ruskin, is “composed of three stories of the Corinthian Order, at once simple, delicate and sublime, but on such a colossal scale, that the three-storied palaces on its right and left only reach to the cornice which makes the level of its first floor.”⁵ Observing it by vaporetto once, I noticed the worn steps at the entrance, smoothed and polished by centuries of algae and seaweed. I tried to imagine noblemen from the sixteenth century arriving by gondola, daintily alighting in the high-heeled fashion of the day. It would have required the dexterity of Martha Graham to avoid slipping and falling. But such was the age. The aristocracy rarely, if ever, walked the narrow calle that surround these palazzi. Those passageways, redolent with garbage and worse, were the byways of the lower class and servants. Venice is more democratic now and its seamier side is accessible to all. Pigeons frequently used me as target practice in these back alleys, and I’ve had to clamber over cat ejectamenta in a mad game of Venetian hopscotch (Venetians seem annoyingly complacent about their pets), simply to get from one end of the street to the other. But given the eighteenth-century standard for hygiene, which must have been a sanitary nightmare, I can scarcely complain. Edward Gibbon, visiting in 1765, described the city as “stinking ditches dignified with the pompous denomination of canals.”⁶ Raw sewage was routinely flung into the streets, much to the chagrin of unsuspecting passersby, and the canals were a substitute septic tank, especially vulnerable during acqua alta, or flood tide. It is no wonder the aristocracy sought sanctuary in these palaces. The wealthy not only enjoyed the luxuries of fine art and architecture, they also literally held the higher ground above the teeming masses, remaining relatively free of the unpleasant realities of everyday life. There are good reasons why the second floor of a Venetian mansion is called the piano nobile, or “noble floor.” And as Venice continues to sink – or the sea continues to rise, depending on which dire prediction you choose – this higher ground will be all the more fortuitous.

Not all of Venice’s houses are palatial. Many are nondescript brick structures, held together (barely) by iron braces, with dilapidated balconies and peeling stucco, much like the slums of Naples; and sadly, too, rampant graffiti has taken its toll. Some of these buildings are five hundred years old. A few are older. Cannaregio and the ancient Jewish ghetto, districts where tourists rarely go, are where you will find many such structures. The nineteenth-century artist James Whistler, who loved the underbelly of Venice, was inspired by these picturesque neighborhoods and came to the city in 1879 to draw them. Working mainly with pastels, he returned to London the following year with well over a hundred finished works. When they were exhibited, the critics raved. It took Whistler’s genius to elevate this unknown, often decrepit, side of Venice to the level of high art.

Gothic Fantasy, 2009

The Palazzo Ducale Courtyard, 1986. Collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

“I employed a little traveling watercolor set, the kind Ruskin may well have used … crouched over a folding stool like an archaeologist mapping a pit.”