I will thus have helped to make my city more known, which is as much to say to love it more.
Not far from the west end of the Piazza San Marco, in Via 22 Marzo, there was an antiquarian bookshop. In its window were displayed a number of engravings of churches and I in Venice. On my last day in the city, driven by an old obsession with these survivors from the past, I went in to take a closer look.
It was like something out of a Dickens novel or a setting for a second-rate film: the archetypal old bookshop in which crucial discoveries are made, or terrible, long-buried secrets revealed. Around the walls were glass-fronted bookcases. Within and on top of them, piled up to the ceiling, there were heavy tomes covered in a characteristic orange-brown leather, many of them cracked with age. There were also numerous prints showing aspects of Venice, mostly of the more popular tourist sights. The tables and chairs in the room were from a previous age, dark and heavy, with generous proportions and swelling forms.
The scene was presided over by one of those grand old Italian ladies, probably in her early sixties, who looked as if she were a contessa reduced by a tiresome quirk of history to selling off family heirlooms. Her proud bearing informed you that whatever price you paid for a book or print, it could never be enough to recompense her ineffable condescension in selling it to you. Her Italian was of such a cut-glass clarity that it seemed you saw rather than heard the words, as if they were chiselled in some fabulously rare marble or basalt which hung in the air before you. Her name was Signora Liliana Forreto Cassini, presumably the widow of the original proprietor, Giocondo Cassini, whose name the shop still bore.
I asked whether she had any engravings of the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Her patrician features softened into a friendly smile; she seemed genuinely pleased that I wanted something off the beaten track, something which would allow her to show her stock’s depth which was otherwise lost on the tourists who, like their forebears, were often rich but indiscriminate.
She dug among tightly-packed drawers and neatly-tied folders until finally she came up with a small collection of engravings of the more obscure corners of Venice. Among them were two copies of precisely the scene I sought: the church of Santa Maria Formosa and its square. According to the Signora Cassini, one of the prints was an original from the eighteenth century, the other a later pull from the same plates. I opted for the latter, which was indistinguishable from the other except for its price.
The artist’s name was not identified on the print. I assumed it was some anonymous eighteenth century figure. I asked the woman whether she knew anything about the draughtsman and engraver. To my surprise she said it was after an original painting by Canaletto, engraved by Antonio Visentini.
Back in England, I began to discover more about the work. The print of the Campo Santa Maria Formosa formed number eight in the third series of engravings first published in 1742. There are several paintings which show very similar scenes. One is in the collection of the Duke of Bedford, at Woburn Abbey; another is owned by the Earl of Cadogan; and a third is in a private collection in Italy. The exact viewpoint and lighting is different in all of them, and it is the last of the three which seems to be the original of the etching.
The scene is taken from the northern end of the campo, looking straight across at the church and its campanile. The viewpoint is about twenty feet off the ground, possibly from one of the windows of the building opposite. However, Canaletto habitually painted his scenes from positions which would have been completely inaccessible to him, for example twenty or thirty feet above the Grand Canal, so it would be an unwarranted assumption to suppose that Canaletto drew this exact scene from life. Canaletto frequently made sketches from the ground and reconstructed the particular viewpoint he needed. Indeed, a sketchbook in the Accademia contains five views of the campo, sketched right to left, taken from the level of the square. There are also two drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor which show a very similar scene, but from a higher vantage point.
In the engraving it is a very spacious view, with the campo pushing the buildings to the back and sides of the picture. The parallels with the last scene in the third series, which shows the Piazza San Marco from the west, are striking. There is the same head-on view of the church, the same flanking buildings with exaggerated perspective which seem to channel the viewer’s eye towards the facade. The sense of openness which the broad view of the campo produces is reinforced by the empty expanse of sky overhead: apart from a few patches of light haze, Visentini has drawn his characteristic thin straight lines across most of the sky.
To the left are the Dona and Vitturi palaces. At the back, next to the church, is the Palazzo Malipiero-Trevisan. Many of the palaces’ balconies bear pots of flowers. From behind a shutter in the top corner of the building furthest to the left, a stray curtain blows in the wind.
The church roof is under repair. There are piles of wood leaning against its eastern apse and on the well-head nearby. Shops on the left display some of their wares outside. From Canaletto’s annotations to his sketches, we know that the shops were those of a mattress-maker - a sample is clearly visible in the shop opening - a grocer, a fruitier, a mirror-maker (again with some oval examples evident) finishing up with a rag and bone shop the other side of a small alleyway. In addition, under the campanile on the right, though barely visible because of its size in the engraving, is the stall of a greengrocer. Most of these are reproduced with surprising distinctness, a testimony to Visentini’s skill as an engraver. With its concentration on the everyday rather than the conventionally grand, the view of the Campo Santa Maria Formosa is one of Canaletto’s most intimate works.
Between these shops and across the square, people mill everywhere in what is a surprisingly busy scene - far busier than it is today. There are 69 people in the picture, more than any of the other engravings in the series except those views of the Campo di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and of the Piazza San Marco. There are numerous children, and three dogs - one of Canaletto’s trademarks. People cross the campo carrying vegetables; some carry pails to draw water from the central well-head. A man enters his house on the right, while a young woman on the left looks out from one of the palace windows, perhaps waiting for a handsome young gentleman to bow to her.
Judging by the consecutive pages in his sketchbook, it is reasonable to suppose that Canaletto planned this scene in a single day. From details in the picture we can guess more exactly the time of year and the hour. There is a chill in the air: people wear thick cloaks which they hold close around themselves. Early spring perhaps. It is mid-morning, judging by the sun, and the shops’ activity indicates a weekday. We know that the scene was painted before 1742. It could well have been sketched around 1735, when the first series of etchings came out; as they started to sell Canaletto may have turned his mind to a second series and begun making a few sketches.
In the foreground, in front of all the others, two figures seem to be engaged in a heated conversation. The man behind, older and in a wig, is talking to the younger man in front who wears a tricorn hat and is wrapped in a cloak. The latter seems a little disdainful. The older man is Vivaldi, the younger, Goldoni. Canaletto has caught them as they cross the square discussing the details of their collaborative opera ‘Griselda’ shortly to produced at the theatre of San Samuele during the Ascensiontide fair.
Canaletto certainly knew Vivaldi; he painted scenery for some of his earlier operas. He probably knew Goldoni, if only by sight and reputation, since the young dramatist was the talk of Venice as Vivaldi’s comments reveal in Goldoni’s report of their first meeting. All three knew the Campo Santa Maria Formosa: Goldoni visited the nearby Grimani palace, and Vivaldi was born and lived in the vicinity. Canaletto clearly knew it. All three men were in Venice in the spring of 1735. The conjunction could have happened.
But I am alike indifferent to the scholar’s quibbles and the statistician’s probabilities. For me, that brief moment one cold spring morning has its own reality. The abiding facts are that Visentini’s engraving of Santa Maria Formosa hangs on my wall, that I have understood, however imperfectly, the congruent wisdoms of Vivaldi, Goldoni and Canaletto, that I have been to Venice.
When I remember the scene, I do not see the second edition of a competent representation of a little-known corner of Venice, with some conventional and anonymous figures thrown in to populate the composition. Instead, I see a tiny shaft of light issuing on the left from a narrow alleyway between the mirror-maker’s and the rag and bone shop; the long, narrow street leads to the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, passing on the way over a small bridge set at an angle over a canal which girdles a nondescript palazzo. I see that light leading from the alley into the campo, in which for one instant, Vivaldi, Goldoni, Canaletto and everything that lies at the end of that alley are caught up together in a unity; and that instant and unity will endure as long as the image of that scene, and these words which are a counterpoint to it, also endure. Together, they are my memento of Venice.
Walks with Lorenzetti
It is either an incident from Stazio’s ‘Tebaide’ or a myth regarding the birth of Paris or again an interpretation of philosophical naturalistic concepts in a composition in synthesis of the eternal force of rebirth of creation in the world by nature or of human beings, or lastly the ‘dream of Polyphilus’ (hypnoerotomachia).
Anyone who sees Venice for the first time is fortunate; but in the circumstances of my first visit, I was particularly so. A friend had given me the address of a foresteria - a kind of hostel - near Santa Maria Formosa. My initial steps in Venice were therefore purposive; as I followed the signs to the Piazza San Marco, crossed that great open space, and then dived into the warren of streets, it was not as someone who wandered helplessly from beauty to beauty, but more as one who could assign each new sight some provisional, personal meaning by virtue of my journey past them. The monuments of Venice became my milestones.
The foresteria was hidden away in one of the less frequented parts of Venice, between Santa Maria Formosa and Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Tourists seldom strayed there, and I was able to begin to colonise this corner for myself, uncorrupted by any previous knowledge, and to get to know Venice from the inside rather than through one of its more formal set pieces.
The foresteria lay at the bottom of one of those long, narrow alleys which abound in Venice, with high shuttered houses on each side. At the end of the alley, you crossed a small humped bridge at an angle. The path turned off to the right past a high and forbidding wall, and then snaked left. In the wall were a pair of massive doors, and next to them an entryphone. The wall formed a small courtyard, completing the empty corner of a high L-shaped building. This was the foresteria.
It was run by a religious organisation, and used as a permanent hostel for university students in Venice. Spare beds were rented out to travellers. I rang the buzzer, explained that I was looking for a room, and was admitted to the courtyard. Weeds grew among the broken flags, and flower pots and bicycles lay against the wall.
The front door was opened from above, and I went up to the first floor where the warden lived. The small flat was furnished in a typically heavy Italian style of many years ago. The man was in his fifties, short, balding and uncommunicative. A woman, presumably his wife, stood behind the door of an adjacent room talking quietly to someone, perhaps their child. The warden took my passport and then showed me to my room upstairs on the next floor.
As might be expected in a hostel run by a religious institution, there were separate dormitories for men and women. My room had three double bunk beds, only one of which was already taken. On the ceiling there were crude frescoes of pink, chubby putti; ancient cracks cut through them. Otherwise the room was bare. To reach the bedrooms you went through a low doorway from the main hall, past a tiny bathroom.
The hall Itself was magnificent. It was about twenty feet high, with dark rafters overhead. A long trapezium in shape, it looked out onto water on two of its sides: the small canal, over which the diagonal bridge from the alleyway passed, curved round to the left, girdling the building for much of its perimeter. The foresteria had clearly once been the palazzo of a comfortably wealthy Venetian family, probably built in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Despite the characterless, institutional furniture - a few metal and canvas chairs and trestle tables - it was easy to imagine the hall’s former days of glory. Perhaps as the last vestige of that time, a huge and incongruous black grand piano stood to one side of the room.
One end of the hall was filled by a high window of leaded lights reaching to the ceiling. When the sun shone upon the canal outside, its hundred fractured images were cast upon a nearby wall. At the other end there was a small kitchen, and in the middle of the wall opposite the door to the bedrooms was another door leading to the separate rooms of the Venetian students.
There were currently two of them, both female. One was slightly built, with the fair hair and slightly aquiline nose which suggested a Roman heritage; the other was formed on an ample scale, a shapely young woman with long black hair, a rounded face and piercingly dark eyes. Her name was Manuela, short for Emmanuela, and she spoke with a slight Venetian lisp.
My first visit to Venice was short and intense, just three days. I devoted each day to wandering around a different area of the city. At this stage I had not yet discovered Lorenzetti, so though my itineraries were often directed at a particular landmark - Santa Maria della Salute, the Arsenale - the paths were random and unformed, and along the way I missed the subsidiary details and the significance of the whole. To begin with, Venice was beautiful but undifferentiated.
In many ways, this was probably fortunate. Just as the great masters of literature presuppose basic reading skills, so Lorenzetti is best understood after a grounding in the grammar and vocabulary of the city. His is an advanced course: he teaches you how to weave together the weft of art and the warp of history into a tapestry that is Venice. But without those first self-taught lessons, the visitor is simply overwhelmed with information. The first visit is a kind of cultural vaccination, a prophylactic against the Lorenzetti disease - aesthetic exhaustion - in its most virulent form. It also allows the tourist a chance to form a few personal opinions before being confronted with the almost inarguable weight of Lorenzetti’s lifelong scholarship.
The first day I visited the Accademia Gallery, the next I went out to the Isola San Giorgio Maggiore, and my final day was spent travelling out to the island of Torcello. I walked along countless alleys, crossed innumerable bridges and courtyards, visited churches, palaces and galleries, but without the thread of Lorenzetti’s itineraries on which to hang these experiences, I can no longer recall when I went where. As Venice itself appeared to me then, my first impressions formed a huge, insoluble labyrinth.
But my Venetian trip as a whole, with its great unstructured cargo of memories, remained with me vividly. I had visited the city as just part of an extensive Europe-wide tour which took in France, other parts of Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and Holland; but it was the multi-faceted image of Venice which burnt fiercest in recollection.
So much so that I knew I would eventually try to preserve these memories in writing. It did not happen immediately; I went to Venice for the first time in 1979 and returned there in 1981. But it was not until 1984 that I felt ready to attempt the translation of some of those images and experiences on to paper. Ideas had been growing within me all this time, often deeply hidden and rising only occasionally to the surface in the form of a sudden memory; but it took certain crucial events of that year to cause everything to come together into a coherent whole.
At this time in my life I wrote with pencil and paper. Corrections, especially of a major nature, were difficult. As a result, I tended to plan out in my head my writing in a comprehensive fashion, and then tried to capture it on paper in one sitting. This extreme approach meant that I was forced to wait until I felt the pressure of concentration - if not inspiration - sufficiently strong to carry me through what was necessarily a long and intense process.
I remember that it was a Sunday in April, almost exactly six years after the events, that I started to plan out a short story based on this first visit to Venice. For two hours I paced around the room, advancing the story with my advancing steps. In trying to hold all the facts and feelings in my head at once, I felt like one of those circus performers spinning more and more plates on sticks: there was the same sense of elation, and growing panic, as more plates - more words - were added; the same knowledge that the greater the success the nearer the failure.
Then, at 11 am, I started writing. Nearly twelve hours and seven thousand words later, I finished, mentally exhausted but feeling as if delivered of a great burden. There was a sense of achievement in that I had written the story I had set out to capture; but joined with this was the omnipresent sense of failure, the sense that once again the work had slipped away in the act of creation. For this reason I found it impossible to read the story once finished, and it was years before I was able to approach it with sufficient objectivity to lessen my natural distaste.
It is always a curious experience to read writing from deep in your past, especially if that writing embodies strong experiences. The words and images have a strange resonance: they are clearly of you - the lineage is manifest; and yet they are also equally clearly distinct from you, since the you which exists now has moved so far from its earlier incarnations. This explains the ambivalent feelings such re-discoveries tend to excite: you squirm over the gaucheries, and yet are touched by the simple charm, surprised and moved by the innocence and ingenuousness - long since unattainable.
The short story is derived almost entirely from my first trip to Venice; its form is based now loosely, now more closely, on my itineraries, and likewise its plot on my experiences. There is the journey across Venice to the foresteria, the visits to the Accademia, the excursions to the islands. More importantly, it is about an emotional path, a journey to knowledge.
The main character is a student of art history whose approach to his discipline is essentially academic, and therefore necessarily limited. He himself is similarly callow. One of the intersecting themes of the story concerns his search for a painting, the ‘Assunta’ of Titian, one he knows well from illustrations, and one that has always impressed and moved him. Eventually, and unexpectedly, he discovers the picture in the course of his wanderings through the city. But he finds it curiously unsatisfying. In the meantime he has come across another painting, one which proves initially more mysterious than the other, but ultimately far more potent: Giorgione’s ‘La tempesta’, which gives the short story its title.
Through his slight acquaintance with Manuela, a young Venetian studying at the university and living at the foresteria, and with another young Briton staying there who loves her - eventually to self-destruction - he comes to understand what qualities and meanings that picture may hold. As a result, he gains a far deeper - because intuitive as well - understanding of both Venice and himself. The identification of Venice with the emotional, so-called feminine aspect of life is simplistic and unoriginal, but it provided me with the central equation necessary for making sense of the disparate elements of my own experiences in Venice and back in England.
Re-reading ‘La tempesta’ now, I am struck by how much effort I wasted trying to describe Venice. It is foolish to attempt what so many others have done well, though never well enough. To endeavour to capture that overpowering but elusive city with words - or indeed in images or music - is clearly folly. If it were possible to reduce the essence of Venice to anything which can be caught in this way, the city itself would not exert the unique fascination it has. After more than 500 years as a byword for harmony and beauty of form, the mountain of words, images and sounds Venice has generated still stand only as pale shadows of our own experiences amidst the city’s reality.
I am also struck by how the narrative shifts between fact and fiction, between the true details of my first visit to Venice, and the added elements which somehow help make sense of those details. Indeed, at this distance I can no longer securely distinguish between some of the facts and some of the fictions. I kept no notebooks on that trip; in many respects, ‘La tempesta’ is the only record I have, together with my memories. Reading it again, some of it is immediately familiar, while some strikes only faint chords; but are these memories of reality, or memories of the creation of an alternative reality?
In the end, it does not matter. Reality only exists in our flawed perceptions and even more untrustworthy memories. What matters is the value of what I retain and create from those experiences. Art, or least my writing, allows me to sift and select, modify and add, until I have recreated a version which in its contemplation today and, I hope, tomorrow, allows me to feel that something remains of my past, that out of my life something exists which will be able, however imperfectly, to transcend me and all the irrelevant details I have lived through. It means that some of my travels - in the broadest sense - were not random wanderings, because here at least I have imposed a sense of form on them.
Walks with Lorenzetti
I make no claims whatsoever that my work is free from errors, deficiencies or inexactitudes.
Lorenzetti’s last itinerary is rather different. All are collections of noteworthy sights, arranged into convenient paths. One obvious grouping is the great sequence of constantly varied masterpieces along the banks of the Grand Canal. Clearly these works had to be included in any conspectus of Venice; and yet access by land would be immensely long and tedious. Lorenzetti’s solution, a metaphorical walk down the Grand Canal, is an apt compromise and fitting conclusion to the whole series.
But even by such initiatives Lorenzetti was not able to encompass everything he wanted to include, still less everything the city has to offer. He therefore adds at the back of the book chapters on the major art galleries, the lagoon and its islands, even information on the nearby mainland. His knowledge continually spills out beyond the confines of his self-imposed structures.
Knowledge and experience are ever thus, refusing to fit neatly into the predetermined shapes of science and art. Much of the artifice of art lies in accommodating this inchoate experience in as compact and coherent a form as possible. Lorenzetti’s book exemplifies both the power and the problems of that accommodation.
Lorenzetti’s itineraries do not purport to be exact records of his own experiences as he created and travelled round them. They are composites, built up from years of research, years of painstaking investigation on the ground. By contrast, my own itineraries as I followed in his footsteps are essentially literal reports of what I found and felt as I walked with Lorenzetti on successive days.
But not quite literal. Just as Lorenzetti himself was forced to relegate some of his experiences and knowledge to a twelfth chapter, and still more to later, unnumbered sections, so I too have incidents and experiences which, for various reasons, are not contained in my descriptions above.
First of all there are the large-scale re-arrangements. Life makes no allowances for the Lorenzetti walker. Churches hold services, galleries are closed, and other quotidian details prevent you from following the master as literally as you might like. For example, I went on my second tour - the Ninth of Lorenzetti’s itineraries - in the afternoon of the day I followed his Eighth. The Accademia gallery was closed by the time I got there, so I went the next day. Similarly the Gesuati church was not yet open. By the time I had continued with my walk and returned to the Gesuati, the church of La Salute was closed, and had to wait to the following day too.
On that same first day another important deviation from the Lorenzetti path occurred. When I arrived on the Zattere and found the Gesuati closed, I decided to go across to the Giudecca. I had often stared across at this ghostly vision, this thin strip of land floating uneasily on the waters. As I took the vaporetto, I was struck by just how wide the Giudecca canal is: it felt quite unnerving leaving behind the safety of Venice proper. Moreover, I have had this lingering distrust of vaporetti, as if they were possessed of mischievous minds of their own, ever since one took me far away into the lagoon only hours before I was due to leave Venice. It had all felt so symbolic.
Now, however, I found myself on the fondamenta of the Giudecca, looking back across at the Zattere. It was a very strange experience, seeing those familiar sights - the Dogana, the Doge’s palace and the rest - so far away. It was as if I were in some doppelgänger world, parallel to yet separated from the other. Moreover, by some trick of light or perspective, that distance seemed to increase the longer you stared at it, as if the two side were drifting apart. I was surprised to learn from Lorenzetti that Michelangelo lived here for a while during his exile from Florence. Somehow it is hard to imagine the ultimate exponent of the hard outline surrounding flat tints in this city of soft edges and peacock colours.
I went into a tiny café there, its minimalist decor offering odd juxtapositions: a garish photo of San Giorgio Maggiore, a faded print of Italy’s football squad, a pennant for Florence, and a still-life oil painting. The clientele were similarly dour: old men with thick glasses and stern-faced women, one with mad eyes clutching huge blue boxes. They stared suspiciously and silently at this invasive tourist.
Afterwards I went east further along the fondamenta to the church of Il Redentore - another church in commemoration, this time of deliverance from the 1576 plague. The facade is very like that of the nearby San Giorgio Maggiore, unsurprisingly since they are both by Palladio. But this is a cooler version, not so aggressively thrusting as the other. From its steps the facade is particularly impressive as the edges of the pediments throw deep shadows.
The interior is completely different from the austerely classical S. Giorgio. Il Redentore looks homely and comforting. The fact that it was Christmas, and there was an ornate crib with candles and lamps everywhere, and saccharine Italian hymns playing softly in the background, added to this effect. It was also dark now, so Palladio’s design slipped into the shadows leaving only a general feeling of warmth and a safe space.
I went outside again into the dusk. I passed along to the church of Zitelle, which was closed. The facade looked like derivative Palladio, flat and without energy. The view from here was stunning: San Marco lit up but half obscured; the Dogana glaring with its golden ball; La Salute rising proud at the end of the Grand Canal; L’Ospedale della Pietà illumined too. San Giorgio Maggiore had been lit with an eerie glacial glow, and now floated on the black waters; tiny pink lights appeared along the Zattere and Riva degli Schiavoni. The bells of the city were ringing: not peals but four distinct notes, played according to some impossibly complex rhythm.
On that same eventful first day I also visited the Peggy Guggenheim gallery. On previous trips to Venice I had sought in vain for this collection which is hidden away around the back of La Salute. It was a pleasure to find it now, and not just for the sense of satisfaction its final discovery gave. It was warm, and after a morning and afternoon spent wandering a bitterly cold Venice, such warmth was welcome.
It also offered a much-needed cultural respite. My eyes had surfeited on ancient images cargoed with history and meaning, so the sight of Jackson Pollocks with all their abstract energy and disregard for representation came as a relief. At the same time, their intricate web of lines seemed at one with the city’s own fine mesh of alleys and waterways. It refreshed my exhausted senses - so much so, that I returned here the next day too, for much the same reason.
The Guggenheim collection was situated on the Grand Canal. From its galleries you could walk out onto a small balustraded area and watch the boats pass by. But this grandstanding of Venice and of material and artistic wealth also had its melancholy side. As well as the permanent collection there was a temporary exhibition of photographs showing Guggenheim herself with famous twentieth-century artists. She looked desperately unhappy. Even with all this art, all this visual namedropping, even with this collection to preserve her name, the photos said she was living a sham, that her collecting like that of so many other great collectors was obsessive and defensive, and that her great public munificence was born of a terrible personal loneliness.
On my last day, after following Lorenzetti’s fourth itinerary, I went to another collection, that in the Correr Museum. This is one of my favourites. First, its location along the south side of the Piazza San Marco means that the view from its windows alone is worth the price of admission. But more importantly, this is a museum of Venice’s past: it is Venice’s memory of itself.
As if to emphasise the continuing relevance of that past to the present, at the start of the museum there was a painting of the city made around 1650; barely a building has changed. A little further on, I was greeted by another image which seemed strategically placed, a striking ‘Portrait of Amedeo Svajer’ by Antonio Canova. The subject weighed around 30 stone, and had what looked like a skinned rat on his shoulder. In its monstrous secularism it offered to my eyes a pointed contrast to the thousands of pinched and worthy images of saints which fill the churches of the city. This was, after all, the civic museum.
There seemed little overall organisation to the place, which only added to its charm, to the sense that it was a kind of artistic lumber room for the city. Each room seemed to have a theme, but any links between successive rooms and themes were recondite, relating perhaps to ancient and arcane mysteries.
One room was full of superannuated lions of St Mark, another had nothing but portraits of apprehensive looking Doges - with their wigs and hats they looked like sheep in fancy dress. Yet another displayed row upon row of commemorative coins, a sight made the more melancholy by the sense that each of these thousands of coins had been cast specifically to preserve the memory of a notable person or event; now, people and events had been reduced to fading words on dusty and yellowing labels. A room was hung with ranks of third-rate madonnas, redundant in this city filled with masterpieces on the same theme, but touching because of their redundancy, their third-rateness, their exile here like cloistered gentlewomen. One of the final rooms was filled with cases of Urbino maiolica, the unforgettable blues and yellows and greens falling peacefully like a balm upon the eyes.
My other major divergence from Lorenzetti occurred in the morning of my last day. I had been wandering around the back of the Accademia Gallery, in a part of Venice which is picturesque, but which attracts few tourists. I was walking without any real goal, and without Lorenzetti, when I found myself by San Pantalon. Passing along the salizzada of the same name, I came to the church of the Tolentini. It had been around just here that I had stayed during my second trip to Venice. I looked along the doorways, and there, just as I had remembered it, was the entrance to the Locanda Stefania.
I recall many years ago ascending the long narrow staircase to the top floor, and entering through double doors to the reception area. There was a heavy, late middle-aged man with thick grey hair who showed me his one remaining room, a tiny single costing 10,000L. The use of opaque green glass everywhere made the locandia very light and rather cold, and lent it a sub-aqueous air, as if submerged in a canal.
Finding the locanda was hardly of great moment to me, unlike revisiting the foresteria near Santa Maria Formosa, where I stayed during my first visit to Venice, which unleashed powerful emotions. But it did offer a further link with my past, strengthening the feeling of continuity in this city, the sense that nothing is ever lost here, that every memory is held and endures. Finding the locanda was like discovering and opening up a casket which had been buried years before, and retrieving small, personal objects of no great value in themselves, but interesting because of their unlooked-for survival.
These, then, were the places I visited outside Lorenzetti’s itineraries. They were part of my biography, but were not assimilable in his larger scheme. Just as important to me were the places which I did not visit this time, but which figured strongly in my personal mythology of the place, and whose absences I regretted.
Chief among then was the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. For anyone passing along the Riva degli Schiavoni, it hovers as a constant presence across the waters. The first time I went to Venice, I was soon drawn out to it, taking the No.5 vaporetto from one of the cluster of floating stops a little way along from the Ducal palace.
It is a strange feeling being marooned on that small paved space in front of the church. There is always the momentary fear that the boat will not come back. The sight of the church’s interior is enough to dispel such minor considerations. It must be one of the most perfect buildings ever created in terms of the balance of its constituent parts. The lack of ornament contributes enormously: everything is smooth surfaces, clearly articulated spaces and cool colours. In this context its physical isolation outside becomes an inevitable correlate and extension of a spiritual one inside.
It comes therefore as something of a relief to ascend in the lift to the top of the campanile, away from all this control and rigour. The view from here is one of the best in Venice. You look across to the set pieces of the Ducal Palace, San Marco, the Piazza; you see the whole of the city laid out before you like a map. The varied hues of the roofs, the oranges, the browns, the reds, the yellows, create a rich quilt of colours which is spread over the city. Dark grooves seem to be cut in this cloth, tell-tale signs of the criss-crossing canals below. From up here, Venice looks like neither a city of streets, nor of canals; it is of a third kind, which is related to both, but distinct.
Where the Isola S. Giorgio to the south of Venice seems to be watchful, with its vigilant bell-tower keeping guard over the city, the Isola San Michele to the north - which I also did not visit - seems to be quite apart, ignoring all that happens there. San Michele is the island cemetery of Venice, a kind of deathly version of the city: where everything there of ordinary life happens amid the unreal world built on water, so here death too operates as usual, but in its own watery world.
The isolation is reinforced by the high wall which surrounds the cemetery. As you approach on the vaporetto which stops on its way to the outer islands of the lagoon, you can see only the church of San Michele, and the walls, and above the latter, a few dark cypresses.
Even more than with the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, stepping off here feels like leaving this world for the next. Perhaps, you think, dying is like this. Inside, the cemetery is both peaceful and beautiful. The eye is struck by the regular rows of graves and monuments, a regularity all the more impressive for being so alien to Venice with its perpetual corners and curves. Also notable are the flowers everywhere which make the solemn scene a mass of colour. But even the blooms speak of death: they are all cut flowers, withering daily.
At one end of the cemetery there is a gate opening out on to the lagoon. It faces the city, and through the gate’s bars you can gaze as if at another land, just as the dead gaze across at our island of the living perhaps. It feels like an immense privilege that, unlike the dead, you are permitted to leave this cemetery island and return to Venice.
The final destination I failed to reach on this occasion lies beyond San Michele. Beyond even the nearby island of Murano, the so-called island of glass, which in form is a miniature version of Venice itself, in its bridges and churches and narrow streets, and even down to the serpentine main canal which cuts it in two.
It requires a journey on the vaporetto deep into the lagoon, out past all the nearby islands, out through the guiding rows of splintering wooden staves placed to mark the channels through the mud. Venice soon disappears into the haze and the mists, and you are alone on the waters.
Eventually two towers emerge; one belongs to the island of Burano, the other to Torcello. Isolated, and little known to the tourist, Torcello is an extraordinary place. Today, all that remains of its former glory is the Romanesque cathedral, probably built in the tenth century. It is most famous for the well-preserved mosaics which date from 800 years ago. Once, though, Torcello was Venice itself: it was here that those fleeing from the invasions on the mainland first built their homes and their churches, their palaces and cathedrals. Most of the island today is mud covered with grass and reeds; but it is the mud from which Venice arose, and on which it still stands. To visit Torcello is to step back to the origins of Venice.
These, then, were the places I visited but did not record, or those that I did not visit but remembered. But even incorporating these events, my itineraries are still the barest bones of my time in Venice, just as Lorenzetti’s work, for all its ungraspable detail, is only a fraction of what he saw and learnt in a lifetime.
Above all, whole areas of experience are missing in both. For example in Lorenzetti’s itineraries, and in mine, no mention is made of food: it is assumed that the tourist is sustained by spiritual and cultural nourishment alone. Nor is there any reference to the need for pauses, rest or sleep. Instead, Lorenzetti’s Venice is a place of pure and unremitting aesthetic experience, one in which the city’s spatial concentration of artistic riches is mirrored in a temporal compression which omits all of life’s more mundane moments.
Rest and sustenance are not the only aspects of common humanity apparently glossed over in the book. Throughout, Lorenzetti remains almost as impassive as the stones of the city he describes. He seems to proceed everywhere with equanimity, walking through a landscape undifferentiated by emotion. His eulogies are temperate, his condemnations measured. If he makes a judgement, you can be sure it is the fruit of decades of experience and rumination, and is not the unconsidered reaction of a moment.
In the end his willed objectivity, his abstention from emotionalism, become almost frightening in their success, so at variance are they to our own feelings when confronted by the same masterpieces. It could be argued that our whole response to Venice is in some sense emotional since the overpowering richness of its experience passes beyond the bounds of logic and categories. Throughout its history, Venice has been a city for sensualists, hedonists and aesthetes, never for rationalists.
However, it would be a mistake to characterise Lorenzetti as unfeeling. The whole of Venice and its lagoons bespeaks a profound love for every aspect of the city, its art, its history, and its people. Its intensity is manifest not overtly in glib exclamations, but in the dedication it took to produce over 1000 densely-packed pages; in the major part of a life it consumed - as only a passion can consume; in the self-sacrifice of its quiet tone and its perpetual self-effacement.
When, as a shorthand, we refer to this book as ‘Lorenzetti’, we are more correct than we know, in that the man gave so much of himself to produce it that in effect he became his book. But the final result of those labours is something quite different, something quite antithetical to the self-glorification that implies, something far more precious. Lorenzetti’s ‘Venice’ is a true distillation of Venice itself.
Walks with Lorenzetti
Even without letting oneself go in romantic dreams, a tour in a gondola on a moonlit summer night in the Pool of San Marco, or in the deep shadows of the internal canals, is always profoundly moving.
On the eve of my departure from Venice, I did not have time to take one final walk. Instead, I packed, left the hotel and boarded a motor launch which took me first into the depths of the city, into that other maze, then out above the Fondamente Nuove into the wider waters. As dusk fell, the air grew chill.
Night is a good time to leave Venice. By day, there is no way to extract yourself painlessly from the scenes around you: as you are forced to move away from the city, the eyes linger now on this detail, now on another, until each in turn is torn from sight. The descent of darkness casts a deadening pall over the buildings and canals and campi; like a half-anaesthetised patient, your gaze passes over the shadowy forms without feeling the full anguish of imminent loss. More importantly, as night falls, Venice itself disappears, to be replaced by another, more ghostly vision.
As proof of the disjunction between these two cities, even that passport to the Venice of light and colour, Lorenzetti, lies useless in your hands after twilight. The world he describes is a world of distinct images; the paths he maps out for you are signalled by visual clues. Venice by night does not recognise either the images or Lorenzetti’s definitive capture of them. By night you can walk down the most familiar of alleys, cross the best-loved of campi, linger on the most memorable of bridges, and they will all be strangers to you.
Venice by night is a deeply claustrophobic city. The lanes are dimly-lit, the campi are invisible without lights to show their extent, and canals are simply seamless rolls of the blackest cloth, pierced occasionally by the reflected moon. In the darkness and the silence, the coffin-shaped gondolas seem to come into their own. By day they look skulking and incongruous amidst the snub-nosed barges, the roaring motor launches and the brisk vaporetti; by night they are the undisputed aristocrats of the waters.
To be lost by day in Venice is richly rewarding: you discover unsuspected by-ways, secret corners. Ultimately you will find a busy street, or at least a signpost to the Piazza San Marco. After dark, no street is busy, and the signposts seem to be invisible. To be lost in Venice by night brings out all the irrational fears in you, makes you too aware that this is an impossible city, great palaces and cathedrals built on rotting wooden stakes driven into the mud of a rising lagoon.
If you must leave Venice - and you must or you will be poisoned by its richness - leave it by night. Then you are losing the dubious half-sister of the Venice you know; the other, daylight Venice remains intact, waiting for you. Its uniqueness makes it paradoxically easier to leave than cities of lesser attractions: the least acquaintance engenders the certain knowledge that you will always return.
So in leaving this Venice of the night, I was not sad. As the motor launch pulled away north, into the darkness, I gazed back. The lights of that crazy, magical world gradually disappeared; it was as if the money were running out in a thousand coin-operated lighting systems all over the city.
Walks with Lorenzetti
This itinerary passes through the characteristic lower class Sestiere of Castello. It includes the Church of Sta. Maria Formosa.
Santa Maria Formosa - San Lorenzo - Santa Maria Formosa
The fourth itinerary is quite unlike the rest of Lorenzetti’s walks in character. It strikes out into the relatively unknown eastern reaches of Venice. This is no longer a guided tour of a city you wish to know better; this is another city altogether, though clearly a sibling. The itinerary culminates in the intimate surroundings of Santa Maria Formosa. For most tourists this is likely to be as strange and unfamiliar as the rest, even though it lies only a little way off from the Piazza San Marco. For me, though, reaching it is like coming home.
For once, the initial stages of the itinerary repeat those of another. I leave the Piazza San Marco under the clock tower, and pass along the bustling Mercerie to the Campo San Zulian. The previous itinerary had also reached this point, but there Lorenzetti had hurried on with other goals in mind, leaving full contemplation to another time.
Now he stops and points out the curious facade, a window in the pediment, its stones covered with grime and soot, easily missed by those rushing past. It is as much a monument as a religious building. There are inscriptions in Greek and Hebrew extolling the virtues of the church’s benefactor, and there is a small relief by Sansovino depicting him.
But Lorenzetti has dived down a tiny alley by the side of the church, and passed over a couple of bridges. Following him, to my surprise I find myself already in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa; for a moment I feel lost, disoriented: Santa Maria Formosa was supposed to be the conclusion of our walk, and to form the climax of my stay in Venice. Its sudden, unexpected presence here is like a small but frightening betrayal of all that Lorenzetti’s ordered itineraries stand for.
But I am over-reacting: in fact we are just skirting the campo. To be more precise I am in the Campiello Querini-Stampalia, near the gallery of the same name. As is often the case, Lorenzetti makes this gallery a small itinerary of its own, which he places at the back of his book. Today the gallery is closed, so I have no choice but to follow the main itinerary rather than make a diversion.
I pass over the Fonte Ruga Giuffa, then down the Ruga Giuffa itself. To the left there is the Palazzo Grimani. A left turn takes me down the beautifully named Salizzada Zorzi, a transformation of the name Giorgio. After a bridge and a long, straight road, I emerge in front of the Lorenzetti’s own church of San Lorenzo or St. Lawrence - Lorenzetti means ‘the family of the little Lawrences’. The saint’s death was particularly horrible: he was martyred by being slowly roasted alive on a griddle.
His church is situated at the bottom of a deep courtyard, surrounded on two sides by high buildings, which reaches down to the Ponte Lorenzo where I now stand, a spot little changed from its appearance in Gentile Bellini’s ‘Miracle of the Cross which fell into the Canal at S Lorenzo’ in the Accademia Gallery. The church facade is very simple, built of dark bricks, but very strong. It is also rather melancholy. As Lorenzetti writes, the church was damaged in the First World War; he also wrote - in 1926 presumably - that it was in the process of restoration. It still is, a sad state for what is an impressive building.
Once more Lorenzetti takes a small turning which no tourist would ever find except by chance, and having found it would certainly never take. After passing the Scuola of San Giorgio Schiavoni with its fine collection of Carpaccio paintings - also closed today - I move on and enter a real warren of backstreets.
There is the Campo Ugo Foscolo, commemorating where that brooding poet lived. Once it was called dei Gatti - of the cats - apparently a wonderful mangling of the phrase ‘i legati’ - the legates - since the latter used to live here too. The names generally have a certain charm round here: there is the Ponte della Scoazzera - the bridge of rubbish - and the Campo a Fianco della Chiesa - the square alongside the church.
Lorenzetti’s maps are hard enough to follow when he gives detailed instructions on how to find the well-known streets. There is no indication of distance either in the text or from the maps, and exactly when you turn left or cross a bridge is unclear. Around here things are even worse. I reach the Calle del Cimitero - Cemetery Avenue - but search in vain for Lorenzetti’s next marker, the Calle dietro il Campo della Confraternità - itself named for its relative position. Uncharacteristically for Venice, there seems to be a large open space, or several smaller ones connected together, with blocks of houses dotted around like islands of an archipelago, making it hard to sense overall direction. For a period I am lost.
At last I find the exit, which takes me to the Church of San Francesco della Vigna, so named after the vineyard which was left to the original friars in 1253. The facade is familiar, not because I have seen it before - which I may have done in my previous wanderings in Venice - but because it is a typical Palladian design, with his favourite twin pediments, one piercing the other. It is built on a massive scale, and unlike San Giorgio Maggiore, or his church of Il Redentore, you can move back from it and take in its proportions in a way that you cannot with those other churches, built as they are on the edge of the sea. But even with this building, Palladio has been unlucky: the right-hand side is obscured by a block of flats built too near.
The interior is rather four-square, and done out in the same grey and white as Santa Maria della Salute. It is light and airy, and according to Lorenzetti’s description, packed with works of minor artists.
From there, I pass along more backstreets, and then to Barbaria delle Tole, an interesting street which emerges alongside the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. It is a busy and bustling thoroughfare, clearly one of the shopping centres for the district. The sounds carry strangely; as I walk along I can hear a woman’s voice from one of the upper stories of a house beside the road. She shouts and screams unremittingly. No one else takes any notice.
Before reaching the end of this street, the path turns left down a small side alley, over a couple of small bridges, and then suddenly I find myself in the Calle Lunga, a narrow alley I walked down many times every day during my first visit to Venice. As past maps on to present, my feet remember the paving stones. True to its name, the alley is long, and at the end it opens out into the attractive Campo Santa Maria Formosa - the Square of Shapely Mary.
The name of the church derives from the legend of the visions of the seventh century San Magno, Bishop of Oderzo, to whom the Madonna appeared in the form of a shapely matron. According to the tradition relayed by Lorenzetti, Santa Maria Formosa was one of eight churches built by the saint. Whatever its origins, we know that it was rebuilt at the end of the fifteenth century to a design of one Mauro Coducci, a prolific architect who was responsible for many of Venice’s famous landmarks, including one side of the Piazza San Marco. Aptly enough, then, Santa Maria Formosa was designed partly in imitation of the central part of San Marco.
The connection goes deeper, as if the architect had been haunted by the image of San Marco and its campanile in the great piazza. Viewed from the north end of the Campo Sta. Maria Formosa, the church and its campanile bear a striking resemblance to San Marco seen from the west end of its piazza. It is more a similarity of spirit than details; the styles are quite different. Santa Maria Formosa is transitional between late Renaissance and early Baroque in its two main facades, facing west and north. The latter is the more ornate.
It has an elaborate doorway - not used at present - with two columns supporting a broken circular pediment. Above it, there is a lunette window, and above that, a further small pediment. The broad roof passes via two volutes to four simple arches which flank the doorway, each of which is separated by ionic pilasters. There are three portrait busts of the Cappello family, one above the doorway, and two either side above the nearest arches, and five statues along the top of the pediment. The high dome has been rebuilt several times, once after an earthquake in 1688 and again after an incendiary device damaged the church and its contents in 1916.
The campanile is more boisterously Baroque, and was built in 1611. The belfry and pinnacle are wildly ornate, and over the entrance there is a grotesque mask which moved Ruskin to write in his ‘Stones of Venice’ one of his eloquent splutterings which seem so disproportionate to their occasion. Indeed, he characterises Santa Maria Formosa as one of the first examples of what he calls ‘grotesque renaissance’, given over to the glory of Man not God, and cites San Moisè and Santa Maria Zobenigo as other offenders.
It all seems a bit much for this quiet little church. Though as Lorenzetti and Ruskin note, Santa Maria Formosa was once an important place of pilgrimage for no less a person than the Doge himself. On the occasion of his annual visit to commemorate the rescue of Venetian brides from the hands of Slav pirates by the local makers of marriage chests, the Doge would receive a straw hat. This ceremony took place for centuries - possibly seven of them if the legends are true - until the fall of the Republic itself in 1797. As a sad reminder of this lost continuity, the last hat ever given is kept in the Correr Museum.
I enter the church, and am greeted by what looks like a typically unpretentious seventeenth or eighteenth century interior, and moreover a living parish church. With his customary meticulousness, Lorenzetti details each work of art to be found there, including the altarpiece of Santa Barbara which won Palma il Vecchio great renown in his day. Appropriately enough for this church, the female saint is what Lorenzetti calls “a splendid type of buxom female beauty”.
Every time that Lorenzetti launches into one of his extraordinarily detailed descriptions of a church’s interior, its architects, sculptors and artists, I am amazed at the effort expended, the doggedness with which he seeks out every work, consults every authority on its attribution, its quality. I feel embarrassed that I cannot do justice to this dedication, this diligence, even on a site which is of such great personal significance to me. I can only wander around, looking at as much as I can, flicking through his book, then stumble out into the cold open air again, saturated with facts and images, my head buzzing.
Outside, Lorenzetti is still eagerly dragging me forward, imparting information. He tells me about the beautiful private houses in Campo Santa Maria Formosa: the Palazzo Malipiero-Trevisi, Palazzo Vitturi, Palazzo Doria, Palazzo Priuli. Lorenzetti could doubtless tell me even more: the names suggest rich and complex histories; constraints of space alone preclude it.
Some other things he does not tell me. He omits any mention of the palazzo wall opposite the church, beloved of the Venetian children who pound a plastic football against it again and again, causing arrhythmic, hollow thuds to echo around the square. He says nothing of the well-head in the middle of the campo; he never mentions my favourite café on the corner of the Calle Lunga, with its dog-eared copy of the pink Il Gazzettino dello Sport on the counter and screwed-up paper napkins on the floor like gross confetti; nor refers to the pizzeria where, as an early customer in a hurry, I ate my last meal before leaving Venice for the first time, and which has since turned into a popular restaurant called ‘Il burchiello’. He even remains silent about what lies at the end of the Calle Lunga. But I expect too much: such a book would be a personal Lorenzetti; the one he left us is universal.
So, almost reluctant to leave this magic square, I follow in the footsteps of the master once more. He is taking me round the back of the campo, over a bridge from which I can see the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, reminding me how near I am to that landmark. He leads me down a calle and over a bridge or two, to the Ponte delle Bande, so-called as one of the first bridges to have parapets, and then to the Calle della Guerra, leading to the Campo della Guerra via the Ponte della Guerra - clearly a place of strife, this - where one of those daft Venetian street battles took place between rival factions in the city. The losers of these melees on bridges still without parapets ended up in the canal, often as not with broken heads and bones to boot.
And all this a stone’s throw - and a few probably were thrown in these little wars - from the august and dignified San Marco. Once more my guide has brought me safely home to the haven of the Piazza. And yet however glad I am to have accomplished my itinerary, to have reached my goal, I am still a little sad to part from Lorenzetti, to have left behind all the hidden corners of the city. Leaving them and striding across the open space in front of San Marco is a little like leaving the claustrophobic world of Venice for the ordinary world outside. We will always hanker for those special, secret places - like the tiny backstreets way out east, like the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, like Venice itself.
Walks with Lorenzetti
Of Canaletto, most of the best paintings went to England where he himself also went to work.
For the rest of the world, to think of Canaletto is to think of Venice; but for the British, to see Venice has been, for two hundred years, to see the embodiment of a Canaletto.
The unparalleled quantity of Canaletto’s work acquired through Grand Tours left examples in many English stately homes; there they soon formed part of the eighteenth century’s cultural backdrop. Anyone with the means to undertake a trip to Venice would have frequented one or more of these houses, would have seen and admired the Canalettos, and so, imperceptibly, would have assimilated his vision. Today, with the democratisation of culture, the dissemination in Britain of the quintessential Canaletto scene is even wider, through access to originals in museums, or through reproductions and books. Now it is almost impossible to see the city without first experiencing Canaletto’s mediation of it.
Such a cultural colonisation is probably unique. Think of any of the great cities of the world: London, Paris, New York, Leningrad, Delhi, Beijing or wherever: no one name springs to mind as capturing the essence of that place in the way that Canaletto does Venice. Certainly, many other painters have been drawn to Venice in an attempt to capture its spirit; but when Turner, for example, produces his extraordinary chromatic fantasies of the Lagoon, they are first and foremost Turners. A Canaletto scene seems Venice pure and simple.
When we arrive in Venice, then, we unconsciously follow in Canaletto’s footsteps. What is familiar and what is unfamiliar is partly determined by how much it figures in Canaletto’s work. His magnificent set pieces of the Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal define these scenes as the visual high points of our visits. On the other hand, a spot unrecorded or rare in Canaletto’s output strikes us with a freshness born of personal discovery. Paradoxically, the most familiar Venice is the least real: for reality we have to look in the squares and canals which the painter left for us to see for ourselves.
It was the British nobility’s desire for souvenirs of their Grand Tours which was largely responsible not only for the creation of that city which we know as Canaletto’s Venice, but also of the mature style we associate with his name. Before the flow of commissions for these acquisitive aristocrats became a source of regular income, Canaletto’s approach was moody and dramatic - and quite unsuited to the grand but untroubled picture postcards the tourists wanted. Perhaps the most dramatic example of Canaletto’s early approach is his first surviving painting of the Piazza San Marco, looking east in what would become one of his staple views. It was painted before the present paving of 1723 had been completed, and shows a scruffy, rather provincial square with stalls clustering around the arches of San Marco. Broken blinds hang askew over windows, and there are lines of washing clearly visible. Hardly the noble and majestic scene which is so familiar from the many later versions.
It may have been the purses of the British nobility who paid for these pictures, but the credit for stimulating the demand and encouraging Canaletto to satisfy it belongs to one man: Joseph Smith. Although not the first to act as a conduit between the painter and his culture-hungry clients - that honour belongs to a rather dubious character called Owen McSwiney - it is Smith who dominates the whole of Canaletto’s productive life, and who is probably at least partly responsible for shaping the idealised Venice of Canaletto - and hence our own vision of that city.
Smith is one of those figures who seem to stand on the sidelines of history; although hardly significant in themselves, these characters play indispensable roles in supporting the leading players, or recording their deeds, Perhaps for this reason they often live to a great age - Smith died in his nineties - and are part of a great tradition of witnesses.
Smith is particularly important because he acquired paintings from Canaletto for his own collection throughout his life, as well as drawings and sketches. The bulk of them were bought by George III, and they form the basis of the unmatched wealth of Canaletto’s works in the Royal Collection - 48 paintings and 143 drawings. He was also responsible for commissioning the two important series of prints of Canaletto’s paintings.
These engravings were probably the most influential means of disseminating Canaletto’s canonical vision of Venice, In commissioning them, Smith doubtless had a purely pragmatic end in view - drumming up new business for the painter - but their effect in the long-term was more significant. Increasing numbers of them began to turn up not just among the British nobility - who in any case would be able to afford originals - but among humbler travellers from the British Isles, enabling Canaletto’s Venice to reach an even wider audience.
The man who facilitated that propagation was the engraver Antonio Visentini. Although he too lived to a great age - he was born in 1688 and died in 1782 - he remains a shadowy figure, best-known for his connections with greater artists. As well as working with Canaletto, he is probably most famous for his invaluable architectural designs of buildings and copies of plans by Palladio. Like Canaletto’s works, many of Visentini’s drawings found their way back to Britain with the returning Grand Tourists, often through the offices of Consul Smith, his friend and patron.
At the front of the first book of engravings of Canaletto’s paintings, there is a portrait of Visentini, together with the only authenticated image of Canaletto himself. Visentini, dressed in an artist’s smock, looks steadily at the viewer with a frank and open gaze. Canaletto, wearing a formal frock coat and wig, averts his eyes. Canaletto is described as ‘citizen of Venice’, while Visentini contents himself with just ‘Venetian’; the images maintain the subtle class distinction.
The two men collaborated on three sets of engravings of Venetian scenes, published in two parts in 1735 and 1742; a second edition of all three sets followed in 1751. The original designs were produced at the height of Canaletto’s powers and popularity, and they constitute a uniquely systematic investigation of his primary subject matter.
The first set, published in 1735, consists of 12 views of the Grand Canal, plus two additional scenes. They are all based on pictures by Canaletto now in the Royal Collection at Windsor. The paintings and engravings of the first set offer a tour of the Grand Canal, proceeding from the Rialto bridge, first towards the entrance, ending with two views of Santa Maria della Salute, then back from the Rialto to the very start of the canal, past where the railway station now dominates the scene. The series ends with views of a gondoliers’ Regatta, and of the Bucintoro, the state barge, aboard which the Doge has just carried out the traditional marriage of the city to the sea by casting a gold ring into the waters of the Adriatic.
The second and third set add twelve more scenes each. Ten of the second set show further scenes of the Grand Canal, this time proceeding from its start, and moving on past the Rialto bridge to the mouth. They are followed by two larger views, one of the Riva degli Schiavoni, looking east towards the Ospedale della Pietà, the other looking west along the Molo in front of the Piazzetta.
In all, 23 of the 38 engravings in the three sets show the Grand Canal, along with some 100 of its palaces. The preponderance of such views obviously reflects in part the desires of Canaletto’s customers for a memento of the unique experience of the famous waterway. Given the hundreds of other paintings of similar scenes by Canaletto, it is also an indication of his own preoccupation with the enormous variety and detail offered by the Grand Canal along its length.
The third set shows twelve of the campi of Venice, some famous, some of them comparatively unknown. The series starts with the grand church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which is followed by the obscure San Nicolo in Castello, hidden away in the east of Venice, and now demolished. There are views of Santa Maria Zobenigo, the Campo Santo Stefano, Santa Maria Formosa, and the narrow campo in front of the Gesuiti church. The series - and the collaboration - ends appropriately enough with two views of the Piazza San Marco: one from the east, and one from the west showing the most famous view in Venice, the great facade of San Marco itself.
For the first series at least, and for some of the second and third, it is clear that Visentini was very faithful to the spirit and details of Canaletto’s images. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that even for those views where there are several closely related versions among Canaletto’s paintings and drawings, none of which matches the engraving in all points, Visentini was following another original, now lost. There is no evidence that he took any substantial liberties with Canaletto’s images. Indeed, his forte seems to have been copying. Although he was an architect in his own right - he designed two palaces for Smith - much of his work consists of engravings after other artists, or else plans of others buildings.
There is one exception to this general fidelity, attributable perhaps to Visentini’s architectural background. The fifth engraving of the third series shows the Scuola di San Rocco, famous for its collection of paintings by Tintoretto. To the right of the Scuola is the church itself. In the 1720s, the original facade was removed, and until a new one was built in 1771, the church showed the rough brickwork underneath. In Canaletto’s painting for the engraving, he replaced this with a simple pedimented design. When Visentini came to make his drawing and engravings, he seems to have felt at liberty to try his own - admirably qualified - hand at the facade, which appears in a rather more ornate form than Canaletto’s.
The way in which Visentini translates Canaletto’s unique representations of Venice from painting to engraving is interesting. One model that it is unlikely that he was able to follow was Canaletto’s own work as an engraver. Canaletto took up engraving as a way of reaching a wider audience only in the 1740s, when the market for his paintings among the travelling English nobility seems to have dried up, partly as a result of the War of Austrian Succession. His one book of etchings was published in 1745. Unusually, all but two of his works in this medium are of scenes outside Venice: it is therefore hard to make direct comparisons of Canaletto and Visentini as etchers. But the former’s work is superior in all respects: it offers greater subtlety and detail, and above all it is full of an atmosphere which is totally lacking in Visentini’s efforts.
Nonetheless, Visentini’s images have a consistency and charm of their own. They may lack the distinctive surface of Canaletto’s scenes, but their rather basic cross-hatchings and unvaried vertical and horizontal rules mean that we can accept them as successful re-interpretations and simplifications of Canaletto’s vision, rather than as failed attempts at literal reproduction.
It is symptomatic of this process that two of the key elements of Canaletto’s compositions - the water and the sky - are radically altered. Visentini never quite matched Canaletto’s apparently naive but totally effective rendition of the waves of the canals. Visentini tried a number of approaches. One consists of broken horizontal lines; another, of a series of tiny arcs; and a third, of lines with tiny tremors along their length. They all tend to make the surface of the water look like a deep pile carpet. If nothing else, they help us appreciate again Canaletto’s mastery in depicting this crucial element in his scenes.
Gone too in Visentini’s world is the smooth creamy pale sky which is the characteristic light of Canaletto’s Venice. Instead we have hard straight lines drawn with a ruler, with Canaletto’s subtly modulated clouds turned into patches of white or the odd swirl of marks.
Nearly all of the paintings which form the basis of the engravings found their way to England at some point; many remain there. The original series of 14 stayed with Smith until his collection passed to George III. The additional views of the second series were drawn from a group of paintings which was dispersed to a number of English collectors: the Duke of Bedford had - and still has - 24 of them, the so-called Harvey collection, now broken up, had 23, and there were odd pairs of paintings obtained by the Duke of Leeds, and the Earl of Fitzwilliam. This group of fifty or sixty paintings, all passing through the hands of Smith, form our most complete and systematic record of Canaletto’s Venice; that they all spent most of their existence in Britain underlines the unique role of that country in the history of the painter’s output, reputation and subsequent influence.
That English connection is in fact even stronger. Scenes of Venice naturally dominate Canaletto’s work; but another large group are representations of London and England, fruit of Canaletto’s visits to the country whose patrons had served him so well.
Canaletto arrived in London in 1746, at the end of his most successful Venetian period which had seen the creation of the series of masterpieces handled by Smith as well as a host of other, sometimes inferior paintings. He now set about recording London as he had Venice. Almost inevitably, it was the Thames which attracted him, its broad curves reminding him of his own city’s main waterway. He also painted a number of London street scenes. These are particular fascinating, for Canaletto’s meticulous technique presents us with an almost photographic record of what Charing Cross and Whitehall looked like in the 1740s. It is ironic that most of his works depict Venice, the major European city which has probably changed least over two centuries, and therefore stands in least need of such a pictorial documentation. Of London, which has altered beyond recognition, we have only these few tantalising glimpses.
Because of the obvious surface detail of Canaletto’s work, we often take for granted its accuracy. Yet closer examination shows that few of his views are literalistic; most have been subtly and artfully recomposed. The more we look, the more discrepancies we find, and the more disconcerted we become by this skilful deception. It strikes at the very root of our conception of the artist.
In some cases, the violations are minor. For example, the views of the Grand Canal which formed the basis of the first set of engravings published in 1735 correspond so closely with our memories or expectations of Venice - largely because both have been highly coloured by Canaletto’s pervasive influence - that we tend to overlook the basic fact that with a few possible exceptions, all of the vistas are physically impossible to achieve. That is, they are painted from viewpoints only obtained from a ship’s crow’s nest or perhaps by a hovering bird. They are therefore totally factitious scenes; neither Canaletto, nor indeed anyone else, ever saw them. Instead, the artist’s invention drew on his experience and synthesised the affecting scenes we know - or think we know - so well. That we are oblivious of this innocent deceit is in part a measure of the triumph of Canaletto’s art.
Some of the other deviations from reality are more drastic. From his earliest pictures Canaletto did not hesitate to alter, move or ignore inconvenient shapes, in order to improve the overall composition. The first version of the Piazza San Marco, referred to above, artfully tapers the Campanile more than reality, and makes San Marco itself slightly higher and less squat. An early view of the entrance to the Grand Canal from the Piazzetta outside the Palazzo Ducale omits the Column of St Mark altogether and transplants the Column of St Theodore much closer to Sansovino’s Library - all for the sake of balance.
Another dramatic re-arrangement of reality occurs in a painting used in the second set of engravings. The church of Santa Maria Zobenigo stands in a narrow street which blocks any clear view of its facade. Canaletto simply removes the offending buildings, and shows the church standing in a spacious campo, its Baroque facade laid bare in all its ornate glory. Increasingly then, Canaletto was starting to re-create Venice from the elements which were so familiar to him.
These variations on reality culminated in a series of 13 paintings commissioned by Smith in the mid 1740s from a by-now impecunious Canaletto, to act as decorative pieces for his house. They show familiar locations, but with unfamiliar and indeed non-existent buildings. For example, there is a view of the Rialto bridge - not the design of Antonio da Ponte which stands to this day, but Palladio’s suggestion of one hundred and fifty years earlier. Another version of the same scene shows an apparently wholly imaginary bridge, together with a massive but fictitious rotunda. A third fantasy shows the real Rialto bridge but with San Giorgio Maggiore transplanted from its island and placed at one end.
Even the Piazza San Marco was not immune to these re-workings. An eerie scene depicts the piazza at the western end of San Marco. In front of it stand the famous four horses, plucked from the cathedral’s facade down to the piazza and raised on massive plinths. It is disconcerting to see such a well-loved scene painted with all of Canaletto’s familiar stylistic fingerprints - the pale blue sky, the deftly characterised figures, the ubiquitous dog - but containing such a blatantly counterfactual element. By creating a totally realistic view of a scene which never existed, Canaletto effectively undermines all our confidence in his other scenes which hitherto we have taken to be trustworthy representations.
These capriccios, as Canaletto called them, seem to have been produced throughout his life. All of them have a strangely melancholy air, as if the artist were expressing a desire to escape from the prison of reality he depicted so meticulously in his mainstream works. They hint at a darker, more mysterious side to a painter whose works are usually seen as the epitome of bright and sunny optimism.
As with so many artists, there are indeed mysteries surrounding Canaletto. The perfect surface of his works acts as an effective barrier which prevents us from probing too deeply. But sometimes personal elements creep through. For example, there is a pair of drawings which show views over some nondescript roofs. Unremarkable in themselves, they gain in interest when we know that they are precisely the outlook which Canaletto had from two of the windows of his house - the scene is practically unchanged to this day. We are used to seeing Venice through Canaletto’s eyes, but to see Canaletto’s personal Venice comes as something of a shock, as if an eighteenth century statue had reached out and touched our hand.
A late painting has a similarly personal feel, though the evidence is more circumstantial. It is small, very intimate view of part of the Piazza San Marco, looking east from half-way down the south side. Unusually for Canaletto, it is the figures which dominate the scene: three men, two sitting and one standing, in the long arcade outside the Florian café.
The seated pair talk while the man stands holding an elegant cup and saucer. He listens intently, as does one of Canaletto’s dogs seated at the feet of the other men. In the background are San Marco and the Campanile, but they are both overshadowed by the extreme perspective view of the arcade full of bustling Venetians. It is an everyday human scale which prevails here, rather than the usual grand architectural one which informs most of Canaletto’s masterpieces.
Aside from the unusual concentration on the figures, the highlights of their forms picked out with Canaletto’s familiar blobs of light paint, which suggests that the scene had a particular significance for the painter, there is an anecdote which seems to be apposite.
In 1760, two Englishmen were walking across the Piazza San Marco. They saw a little old man sketching the Campanile. Going over to observe the work, one of them, called Hinchliffe, recognised the artist’s style familiar at even this early date - and murmured his name. ‘Mi conosce’ - you know me - the old man said. A commission resulted, and we can identify the painting Canaletto produced from that sketch the Englishmen chanced upon.
This story was passed on from father to son and recorded by Hinchliffe’s grandson in 1856. Taken together with the sizeable group of works from this period all based around views of the Campanile from the south side of the Piazza, it is tempting to imagine the old Canaletto, sunk now into relative obscurity, sitting by the café, drinking from the same elegant cups as the standing man in the painting, listening to the conversations while he sketched variations on his favourite Venetian scene. No longer were these works for eager tourists - though the occasional encounters with Englishmen like Hinchliffe must have provided a welcome boost to his finances - but for himself, as he continued to record and recreate his Venice.
Canaletto allows one more brief glimpse of the man behind the inscrutable artist. In his last recorded work, a pen and ink drawing of the crossing and north transept of San Marco with musicians singing, Canaletto has added a short inscription. In a neat and flowing hand are the words “done without spectacles at the age of 68”. It is the only information we have about him for the last five years of his life.
For most of that life, running through his work like a hidden message, there is one curious personal quirk which probably goes unnoticed by the millions who look at Canaletto’s paintings each year: after a certain date in the mid 1720s, there are no birds in any of his paintings. His skies remain undisturbed by untidy flocks or lonely stragglers. Instead we have the creamy pale blue, and the thin veils of high cloud which lend an air of eternal early summer to his scenes,
Perhaps it is simply for reasons of design and overall effect: Canaletto may have wished to preserve the smooth surface of his skies to balance and frame the rich detail of his buildings. Interestingly, his drawings continue to show birds, but these are never translated into paint. Some might be tempted to read more into this unnatural absence, just as Freud read so much into Leonardo da Vinci’s childhood memory about a bird. But would-be interpreters of such tiny events in artists’ lives would do well to remember that Freud’s impressive edifice - his study runs to some 80 pages - is founded on an error, a crucial mistranslation, the correction of which destroys his whole argument.
We are left therefore with little that we can be sure of in the external details of Canaletto’s life. We know that he was born in 1697, the son of a theatre scenery painter, and that he himself began by designing scenery for opera composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti; we know when some - but only a few - of his paintings were finished; we know odd scraps about him as related in letters from Englishmen abroad; we know that he died in 1768. Of his thoughts and feelings as he translated his Venice into the images we have today, we know nothing.
Yet we trust those images, we believe in Canaletto. We look through his eyes at a strange and beautiful world that is and is not a real Venice, and is neither past nor present. Perhaps his art succeeds today for the same reason it succeeded when it first appeared. Canaletto has the gift to extract the essence of Venice, the familiar scenes bathed in the steady sunlight, the bustle of the campi, the colourful busyness of the canals, the steady march of the palaces and churches, and to place all those elements in a harmonious whole which skilfully encapsulates our own response to Venice. It is a Venice of serene perfection, a city which is a masterpiece, a city of joy and pleasure. If the reality is somewhat different - a rather dirty, smelly city full of tourists, the weather variable, the buildings crumbling and covered in bill posters, no matter. We know, as Canaletto knew, that underneath all this grime there lies that other eternal Venice. It is Canaletto’s enduring achievement that he managed to recreate and fix that glorious, shimmering city for us to recognise as soon as we step onto its streets or travel along its canals.
Walks with Lorenzetti
