The personal tempest

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

IV - Second act: ninth itinerary

A walk along the characteristic Fondamenta delle Zattere and the visit to the Basilica of the Salute are the most interesting  parts of this itinerary, which also passes other churches, important for their art masterpieces as well as for the Baroque and XVIII. century styles of their architecture. 

The Accademia - the church of the Gesuati - the Basilica of the Salute

The ninth itinerary heads for one of the two main bridges which span the Grand Canal, by the Accademia gallery.  Crossing it, you are presented with an alternative view of Venice, quite different from that seen from the San Marco side, the usual vantage point of the tourist.  And yet it is also the version of Venice which most people associate with the city: the series of great palaces, now mostly hotels, leading to the grand sweep of the Molo and the Ducal Palace, with the campanile reminding us of the hidden presence of San Marco itself.  Appropriately enough in this city of mazes, to find the centre you must first move to the periphery.  Along the way, Lorenzetti takes in many fine churches, a token of their omnipresence in the city’s geography, history and art.

Starting from the west end of the Piazza San Marco I walk along one of the most popular thoroughfares in Venice, always thronged with tourists.  Passing alongside a dark building, the narrow street emerges in a light little campo which converges on a small bridge.  I walk to the bridge and then turn.  I am greeted by the wild luxuriant growth which is the facade of San Moisè, for in the independently-minded Venice, even Moses is a saint.

In a city best known for its characteristic Gothic and Classical architecture, the Baroque buildings always come as something of a pleasant surprise.  They delight with their monstrousness, their sheer exuberance. They seem almost too lively for this silent, brooding city as it sits hunched precariously above the waters.  The swags and looping volutes, the unusual palette of greens and greys and blacks, make San Moisè a memorable if not great church.

Over the bridge, I turn left down a small alley.  There is little to see, except a plaque on the wall of a nondescript building, noting it was here that a theatre once stood.  The work performed at its opening was Monteverdi’s ‘Arianna’, widely celebrated at the time as one of the greatest operas ever written.  Today, all we have from that composition is ‘Arianna’s Lament’, an appropriate relic.

I move on to another church, of Santa Maria del Giglio, or Zobenigo.  A double monument, this.  The name Zobenigo comes from the Jubanico family: extinct in the twelfth century, they live on through this connection eight hundred years later.  The present church also commemorates another family, that of the Barbaro, whose statues on the facade are joined by all kinds of naval paraphernalia - arms, trophies, galleys, ships - bearing witness to the military prowess of the family.  Another baroque extravaganza, Santa Maria del Giglio possesses rather more harmony of form than San Moisè.

Inside its compact space, there is a fine organ case carved with musical instruments.  Strangely, Lorenzetti omits to mention this.  Perhaps I am more aware of it because it reminds me of a similar tour-de-force of wood carving which I saw half a continent away in St. Michan’s, which stands beside the Liffey in Dublin, and best known for its ancient preserved corpses, the ultimate in funerary monuments.

The side altars are good examples of Baroque style at its best and worst.  Rounded pediments are rudely broken and encrusted with further shapes and figures.  For artists of this generation, less is less.  In the sacristy there is a rather horrible Rubens; he seems strangely out of place here, his style crude and bombastic.

Outside, proceeding over two more hump-backed bridges, placed close together and forming an interesting ensemble of curves and canals and campi, I arrive at yet another church.  San Maurizio is not what it seems: originally built in 1590, it was completely demolished in 1806 and immediately rebuilt - but with a different orientation.  Another small bridge brings me into the great Campo Santo Stefano.  Turning left I pass the sad form of the decrepit San Vitale to reach the Accademia bridge.

As I climb the wide treads, the wood booming and bending fractionally beneath my steps, I stop in the middle and gaze down the Grand Canal.  Each time I have been in Venice I have come here.  I relive the first shock of seeing a small garden at the foot of the bridge on the northern side, with a huddle of mature, dark trees in it; greenery is such an anomaly in Venice.  I wonder again who owns this daring aberration, this flouting of the city’s rules.

I turn back to the canal.  It is one of the classic views of Venice, with the bend of the water away to the left, the double panorama of palaces, culminating in the majestic sight of Santa Maria della Salute which hovers in the chill, slightly misty air.  Underneath me gondolas and launches pass, joined occasionally by the tubby bulk of the flat-topped vaporetti, packed with people.

Everybody crossing the bridge stops here to look, to take the obligatory photograph.  Everyone who has been to Venice knows this view.  But do we?  As I look east, I can count 19 palazzi from the Accademia to the Basilica. It is hard, however, to tell where one ends and another begins; the growth of Venice has been so organic that the buildings have merged into each other.  Lorenzetti notes only 18.  Whether or not I am right in the number, what do I know of those buildings?  Each one has a history stretching back hundreds of years.  A book could be written about each, its builders, its inhabitants, their lives, their dramas, the events it has seen.  Instead of this variegated detail, most of us see those 19 or so palaces as part of a whole, simply as a view from this bridge.  And this is one of the best-known scenes; what hope then have we of encompassing the byways?

I descend to what was once the church of the Carità, but is now the principal art gallery of Venice.  Strictly speaking this is not part of Lorenzetti’s itinerary.  Instead, he devotes to it a chapter of its own covering some 32 pages of densely-packed information, placed towards the back of the book.  Even this is only a selective tour of the highpoints.

Like the city itself, the gallery’s treasures could each be made the subject of investigation, could each reveal successive layers of incident and history.  But for practical purposes we must pick and choose, concentrating now here, now there, on particular masterpieces.

In many respects, viewing a gallery is like touring a city.  The building itself is laid out according to some pre-determined plan, usually historical, and designed to allow us to move in a reasonably logical and linear way from room to room and picture to picture.  It is a kind of distillation of the whole process of walking round a town.  Where the latter has notable sights which we will stop to contemplate, the gallery has its famous masterpieces which require us to halt a while.  Buildings we encounter as we walk may need detailed inspection.  We my wish to know who worked on it, who lived in it.  In a similar way with a painting, we will want to know the artist, the circumstances of its production, and perhaps the long journey it took through various owners to arrive at the gallery.

There is nothing more shocking than returning to a museum or art gallery to find that the collections have been re-arranged.  It is like revisiting Paris and finding that the famous sights have been moved around.  We get to know a gallery as we get to know a place, certain corners and sights become ours by virtue of the circumstances in which we first saw them.  To lose those places - just as to lose to the bulldozer a treasured spot in a city - is to lose part of ourselves.

So to ascend the marble staircase and enter the first gallery, to confront the tender ‘Madonna col Bambino’ by Paolo Veneziano is for me to awaken all the feelings which I had experienced on my first trip to Venice, and on my first visit to the Accademia.  The painting’s Byzantine-influenced style seems to reach out to the mosaics in San Marco, and back to the origins of Venice.  And the gentle image of the Virgin Mary with the Christ child seem to stand as a symbol of the whole of the city.  However, on this occasion I am struck by the pair of tiny donors placed in the corners of the painting. That eternal human desire for memorialisation once more, the intrusion of the profane upon the sacred.

I encounter it again soon afterwards in Room IV.  A wonderfully stern San Girolamo glowers out of the picture, his scorn directed perhaps at another diminutive donor crouched in the corner, all rendered in the characteristically spare manner of Piero della Francesca.  In particular, I recognise the ochre-green colour of the hills which is so memorably his, a hue which may well be due to some mundane cause such as the ageing of his tints, but which now, irrespective of the reason, has become indissolubly associated with his name.

Piero della Francesca was a Tuscan, but one of the strengths of the Accademia is that its collection is centred around the special glories of Venetian art, although it also acts as a sad reminder of how much the city has lost of its heritage, despoiled time and again - occasionally by conquerors, but mostly by centuries of tourists, often British.

Room V is devoted entirely to Venetian paintings, most of them by Giovanni Bellini.  But for me the chief interest is two works by Giorgione, perhaps the most Venetian painter of them all.  Even his biography seems strangely appropriate.  Dead by the time he was 33 - on account of his love of a lady according to the two legends which have sprung up - his easily-romanticised life seems of a piece with this fragile, unreal city.  Like other geniuses who died young - Mozart, Keats - his work is all the more affecting for what it might have become, for the sense of boundless possibility unmarred by any disillusioning facts.

His pictures reflect this sense of mystery and pregnancy.  Very few authenticated works have come down to us; among those definitely lost, one of the most famous groups, the frescoes on the outside of the Fondachi dei Tedeschi near the Rialto, probably faded soon after his death.  Of those that have survived, most are deeply obscure, and have kept scholars happily in disputation for centuries.  The abiding proof of Giorgione’s genius is that we really do not need to know. The pictures work their own secret magic.

The two pictures in the Accademia are a case in point.  One is simply called ‘The old woman’, and shows a withered old crone.  Lorenzetti chronicles the to-ing and fro-ing of experts over this work’s authenticity. First it was attributed to Francesco Torbido, then it was promoted to Giorgione Manner, until finally literal and metaphorical restoration placed it among the handful of works from Giorgione himself.

This process has happened time and again throughout art history, and not only with Giorgione’s highly unstable oeuvre.  What is curious is that during all these re-assignations, the painting itself changes little.  It is interesting how our perceptions of a work shift according to how great we think we should find it.  Now that ‘The old woman’ is ‘authentic’, we can see it is a great and profound masterpiece; but what was it when attributed to Torbido?  Perhaps this obsession with names and reputation explains the modern tourist’s habit of spending more time reading the information beside the picture - which provides an indication of its ‘official’ greatness, and hence how moved we should be - than looking at the work itself and being moved spontaneously.

Apart from the old woman herself in Giorgione’s painting, there is a scroll with the inscription ‘col tempo’ - ‘with time’.  It is an astonishing meditation on ageing mortality for a young man in his twenties or thirties.  Astonishing too for the brightness which shines out from the eyes of the woman, as if the spirit within remained young while the box of the body aged around it.

The other painting is among the artist’s best-known.  Even if the provenance and attribution of ‘La tempesta’ were not as secure as they are - the work is first mentioned as being in Venice in the first years of the 16th century - it could come from no other hand but Giorgione’s.

It is perhaps his most baffling picture.  It shows a young woman in a verdant landscape suckling a baby on one side of a stream.  On the other, a young man with a spear gazes across at her.  There are no other figures.  Broken columns stand in the middle distance, together with classical ruins, a bridge, and further back a walled town under a stormy sky.  Lightning flashes.  Everything is painted with the soft chromatic burr which was to become the hallmark of the Venetian school, and formed the antithesis to the hard line of the Florentines exemplified by Michelangelo.  Here, colour and atmosphere are everything.

Even Lorenzetti is floored by this work: he offers no less than four possible interpretations of the scene, but in the end seems to accept that mystery is part of the painting’s charm.  For me, there are other reasons why the work is so powerful.  Again they relate to my initial visit to Venice - so strongly are my first impressions stamped on everything thereafter.  Wandering around Venice for the first time, trying to take the measure of the place, I came across the Giorgione quite unexpectedly.  It seemed to be so much of a piece with the city that I spent time in trying if not to understand it, at least to understand my response to it.  This is perhaps the secret of the picture’s enormous power: its rich complexity reflects back to us our own images and thoughts.

In a sense, anything after ‘La tempesta’ is an anti-climax, which is a strange thing to say about a painting as amazing as Veronese’s ‘Feast of Cana’ which fills an entire wall and totally dominates Room X of the Accademia.  Perhaps the work is its own worst enemy: how can we take in a picture constructed on such a gigantic scale?  When we learn to read a painting, we expect certain norms to be observed.  Size is one of them: even the most grandiloquent canvases by Rubens stay within reasonable bounds.  This Veronese does not.

It is no wonder then that each time I see it I discover more and more.  On this occasion, through staring long and hard at details, I spot the dwarf by the stairs - invisible to me before - and the gilt sculptures above the arches.  So what does it mean to say that I know this work if entire elements can escape me?

Our personal knowledge of art is by and large very superficial.  Scientific research has shown how our eyes dart to the principal elements - the faces, the features of people, the trees and road of a landscape.  It can be demonstrated that considerable areas of a picture receive only a quick sweep of peripheral vision.  It takes immense discipline to see rather than look at a picture, to apprehend each patch of colour, each brown, red and yellow, just as it takes great self-control actually to listen to a piece of music, to distinguish its successive notes, harmonies and rhythms, instead of hearing it mindlessly as a background to wandering thoughts.

On this occasion as an exercise I try to count the total number of figures, large and small.  It would be easy to mark them off on a photograph; carried out in the head the task taxes to the limit the mind’s ability to grapple with complex images and to remember unstructured information.  I make the number 64, but I am totally unconfident about the total.  Next time it may change, just as my perception of the work will doubtless be different.

Room XVII is one of the most Venetian.  In it I find images of Venice itself by artists such as Giovanni Migliora, Guardi, Bellotto and Canaletto.  But it is ironic that the latter’s single painting is practically the only work of that artist left in the city which he recorded so lovingly.  Also in the room are works depicting the people of Venice - the soft yet insightful portraits of Rosalba Carrera, the satirical scenes of Pietro Longhi.

I pass on then to Room XX where the great painting by Gentile Bellini hangs showing the procession in front of San Marco.  There are divergences from the present-day scene, but above all there is a haunting sense of continuity.  Nearby is Bellini’s ‘Miracle of the Cross which fell into the canal of San Lorenzo’, a rather strange production, if only because of the people in the canal - something you never see in Venice today.

On the way out I glance down into the courtyard.  My impressions of this have been transformed by knowledge: I now know that the facade opposite is by Palladio; as others felt with ‘The old woman’ when restored to Giorgione, I feel strangely - and wrongly - obliged to take note of it now.  Each time I visit the Accademia it is to renew my acquaintance with old friends; but each time I find things subtly different.  And this is right: without those small changes we would be trapped in an everlasting and repeating past.

Emerging from the gallery, I embrace orthodoxy once more and rejoin the Lorenzetti itinerary. The Rio Terrà Antonio Foscarini feels odd: it passes from one stretch of the Grand Canal to the Giudecca canal on the other.  It is too straight for a road in Venice.  The reason for this is simple: originally it was a canal which was filled in - a rio interrato.  The name of this new street bears witness to the suffering of Antonio Foscarini, a seventeenth century Venetian senator falsely accused of treason and strangled.  Then his innocence was established, his name was publicly exonerated.  However, having a street commemorate you seems poor recompense.

At the end of it I reach the Zattere, the broad promenade which runs along most of the Giudecca canal, and named for the rafts of timber which were moored here.  It is an eerie part of Venice.  Aside from the busy and very different Riva degli Schiavoni, nowhere else in the city has such an extended walkway by the water.  Moreover, the canal here is so wide - hundreds of yards across - that there is a strange feeling of isolation.  It is as if Venice were fragmenting into an archipelago of tiny islands separated by broad waterways.  It is also quiet; there are few tourists, despite the monuments hereabouts.

One of which is the majestic church of the Gesuati.  Externally, the facade is strong and simple.  The interior proves to be in total contrast to this forthright Classical entrance.  It is dark with deep shadows.  As in the best Baroque art, there is a strong sense of the theatrical.  A huge black and brooding altar rears up at the back of the nave.  Lorenzetti tells me that the church is rich in masterpieces of the XVIII century.  Possibly; I can make out swirling Tiepolos on the ceiling.  But I am more impressed by the general atmosphere; you could imagine a great and powerful God dwelling here.

Following Lorenzetti, I go further west along the Zattere, and look down the canal of San Trovaso - a name formed from the combination of Gervasio and Protasio.  There, just as Lorenzetti promises, is a curious boat building yard, or squero, looking quite unchanged from the grainy and indistinct illustration in his book.  Back along the Zattere, over a couple of bridges, I pass the house where John Ruskin, a kindred spirit to Lorenzetti in his love and devotion to the city, lived and worked.

Eventually, following the itinerary, I reach my final destination, the Basilica della Salute, built as thanks for deliverance from a terrible plague.  It was designed by Baldassare Longhena.  Although it took 56 years to complete, Longhena lived to see its consecration in 1687.  Few works on this scale can represent so completely the vision and effort of one man.  For fifty years he dedicated himself to this project; as well as to God, it stands as a monument to its builder.  In this respect, it has much in common with Lorenzetti’s own dedication to the completion of an equally colossal task.

The octagonal form is inspired.  Outside it creates a feeling of massiveness combined with grace; inside the weighty pile seems to float above the huge open space.  The exterior is notable too for the profusion of ornament, both in the form of the huge orecchioni, ear-shaped volutes which act as buttresses, and in the dome’s forest of statuary.  From a distance, it seems that a flock of angels has descended.

The interior is skilfully planned.  The huge octagon gives onto the flattened form of the presbytery.  At the back of this is the massive high altar, designed by Longhena himself, profusely ornamented, yet of a piece with its surroundings.  In its light and spaciousness, no greater contrast with the gloom and foreboding of the Gesuati could be imagined.

And yet as I stand and stare at the great vault rising above me, trying to take in the details, I am troubled.  I have seen so many churches today, how can I hope to hold all their individual details?  Churches at least have certain features in common: naves, altars, apses: they provide you with a basic frame of reference as your eyes pass over the scene.  But it is hard to do justice to the individuality of even one such building; seeing five or six in one day is cultural madness.  At times, walking with Lorenzetti serves to prove that even the most diligent tourist guide is fundamentally wrong-headed: everything must be seen for itself, by itself.

Perhaps Lorenzetti knew this, and his itineraries were merely nominal, ways of threading the pearls of Venice on a string.  Or perhaps he had passed beyond ordinary knowledge; his identification with the city had become so deep, his intimacy with every corner so profound, that his practised eye really could take in everything as he went around the familiar ways.  If so, his work becomes a kind of devotional handbook for lovers of Venice: we cannot hope to attain the beatific heights of the master, but we can use it as an indication of the path that lies before us.

Walks with Lorenzetti

II - First night movement: Allegro più ch'è possible

At night the face of Venice is transformed: she prepares and presents new enchanting beauties.

The first night of that visit to Venice, I went for a walk without Lorenzetti.  Although all of Venice lay before me - magically transformed as if for a carnival outing by the great black cape it wore - there was only one possible choice for my steps: towards the Piazzetta, to sit beneath the lion of St Mark atop his column.  I had spent the last hour of my very first night in Venice here, as well as many others on my subsequent trips.

More than any other spot in the city, it was here that I felt most directly in touch with all my past visits.  It was here that I sat on the cold and uncomfortable steps at the base of the column, looking out through the darkness to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, thinking about all the occasions I had sat and looked and thought in just this way.  There were few people about, so it was easy to map past onto present.  Nothing seemed to have changed as I contemplated Palladio’s bold, almost shocking design for the church’s facade of a low, squat pediment pierced through by a second, higher pediment.

But there were changes.  Even San Giorgio Maggiore was different, though not because of any visible alterations to its design.  Since last visiting Venice I had read several books on Palladio’s architecture.  As a result, I was aware now not only of the lonely splendour of San Giorgio Maggiore but also saw for the first time the echoing forms of San Zitelle and II Redentore on the nearby Giudecca, two other churches designed by Palladio.  Where before I saw only an isolated masterpiece, I was forced by my newly gained perspective to see the start of a series of works, themselves part of a larger body of Palladian-inspired architecture throughout Europe, particularly in Britain.  Cultural ramifications spread out in all directions.  My original vision had been corrupted by knowledge.

Another change: when I looked up, I saw to my astonishment an empty capital - the lion had gone, presumably to be re-gilded.  Once again, my memories had been dashed against reality.  I got up and wandered along the Molo; I gazed across at Santa Maria della Salute.  Floodlit like some huge, baroque spaceship about to lift off, aided by its magnificent setting across the canal which here attained its widest extent, it seemed the only possible conclusion to the complex architectural discourse of the Grand Canal, a full stop in stone.

I joined the few strollers taking their passeggiata along the Riva degli Schiavoni, a waterfront which always surprises by its unvenetian breadth.  I stopped briefly before the Church of the Pietà, undistinguished in appearance, but once the centre of Antonio Vivaldi’s music-making, and thus the home of perhaps the most Venetian music ever written.  Beyond it lay a funfair, eerie in its stillness and silence, and eerie in the grotesque silhouettes its attractions formed against the distant San Giorgio Maggiore.

I turned back towards my hotel, tired from my day’s walking, and from the new and old sights which had pressed in on me.  It is all too possible to suffer from an overdose of experience.  The Piazza San Marco was illuminated by a harsh, other-worldly glare; as I crossed it, somebody was letting off very loud firecrackers which echoed around the square’s impassive stone faces.

Walks with Lorenzetti