Walks with Lorenzetti: Venice, Memory, Tourism

Just as A Partial India was a re-working of my travel notebook for India, so Walks with Lorenzetti re-visits a 1988 trip I made to Venice.  A Partial India and the notes it is based on try to capture the unrepeatable impact of seeing India for the first time.  Walks with Lorenzetti is quite different.  Although it was a particularly intense few days in Venice, it was far from my first trip there.  I brought with me other memories of the city and elsewhere, as well as various kinds of relevant knowledge built up over the years before.

Walks with Lorenzetti therefore goes beyond simply re-working one of my travel notebooks.  It weaves in other major strands, including three of the city's greatest creators and their art: the music of Vivaldi, the paintings of Canaletto, and the writing of Goldoni.  Above all, it follows in the footsteps of another book: Guido Lorenzetti's Venice and its Lagoon, a forgotten masterpiece that deserves to be better-known.  I hope the following pages will help to achieve that.

Foreword

Preamble

Introductory Chapters

The book
The itineraries
The man

The Twelve Itineraries

I - First act: eighth itinerary
II - First night movement: Allegro più ch’è possible
III - First portrait: Antonio Vivaldi
IV - Second act: ninth itinerary
V - Second night movement: intermezzo
VI - Second portrait: Carlo Goldoni
VII - Third act: third itinerary
VIII - Third night movement: capriccio
IX - Third portrait: Antonio Canaletto
X - Fourth act: fourth itinerary
XI - Fourth night movement: finale
XII - Fourth portrait: itinerant biographies

Recollections

The personal tempest

Venice and its Lagoon

Souvenir

Venezia Nuova - sonnet sequence

Pensione Calcina

Picture Postcard

L’Indipendente

San Giorgio Maggiore

La Dogana

Among The Celts

Premises

Canaletto’s House

Walks With L.

Speaking Of Venice

La Tempesta

Invisible Citizen

The Seasoning

Monteverdi’s Flowers

Souvenir

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

IX - Third portrait: Antonio Canaletto

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

VIII - Third night movement: capriccio

A long, closely packed, dark train of boats and gondolas with tiny trembling lights like fireflies, follow behind and as this luminous, magical train passes, the Grand Canal comes to life as if by enchantment, pulses briefly with life and then returns once more to its usual silence and shadow.

On my last night in Venice I decided for no reason to move outside my usual realm - and the heart of Lorenzetti’s - towards the railway station.  As I passed the Campo dei Santi Apostoli I felt that I was crossing the frontier into another world, a different Venice.  The shops became noticeably tawdrier, the streets less attractive, the canals more functional, the further I went.  The essential unity of Venice masks its diverse districts.

The transformation of the city was an apt preparation for the sight of the Ferrovie dello Stato terminus.  It sat on the side of the canal, a huge, unadorned, squat slab of light like a slot punched through the darkness. Shockingly in this cramped and confined city, a clear space stood squandered in front.  Of all the Venetian scenes preserved by Canaletto, this area had changed the most in the intervening two centuries.  In place of the church and dyeing works he recorded at this spot, the brashly modern station looked as though some alien spacecraft had landed.  And it had: this was not just a railhead, but a beachhead for the mainland, for the outside world, for the mundane and quotidian.

As I stood with my back to the silent, eerily illuminated station, I gazed across at the church of San Simeone Piccolo, its green dome dimly visible against the sky.  It had been my first sight of Venice.  Tugged perhaps by those memories I crossed once more the bridge by the church of the Scalzi, and stepped again into the narrow back alleyways.

In many respects they were unrepresentative.  The way was poorly signposted, as if trying to put off the fainthearted; the streets were narrow.  There were no churches, no picturesque campi, not even any canals. You wondered if this were really Venice.  Finally a square, Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio; this too deceived the newcomer: it had trees.

I drew closer to the Rialto bridge, the goal of this route.  And yet even near this crossing point, there were no people evident.  Venice had become a ghost city.  I stood amidst the empty market place, surrounded by arcades and columns.  I moved to the bridge, observed the graffiti there, the attempts at immortality, names, dates - some stretching back to the turn of the century.  I stood and watched the quiet river traffic pass beneath me.

I decided to take the vaporetto back to the Molo.  A No. 1 soon appeared and was moored with a swirl of ropes to the swaying Rialto pontoon station; I boarded it.  This was how the Grand Canal should be seen.  I had the boat practically to myself, the water too.  Gazing out, I could watch the great palazzi float by, the two majestic panoramas unfolding each side of me.

By day, like the aristocrats they were, the facades were silent and impassive, an inscrutable wall of architecture.  At night they were more human and vulnerable.  In all I saw perhaps 20 lit windows, tiny spots of yellow light in the otherwise dark surface.  Behind those windows were people.  Who were they?  And why was nothing happening behind the hundreds of other windows?  What histories lay there?  Unmoved by these scenes, the vaporetto chugged steadily on through the cold winter air, leaving behind the palaces, and the windows, and the lights.

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

III - First portrait: Antonio Vivaldi

The famous composer and violinist Antonio Vivaldi

The Ospedale della Pietà was founded in 1346 as a charitable institution for orphaned, abandoned or illegitimate girls.  In 1663 it had over 400 children; by 1738 this had risen to 1,000.  The Pietà was supported by the state and run by a board of governors appointed by the Venetian Senate.  As time went on, it augmented this income by giving increasingly popular concerts in its chapel, until the stage was reached when it had in effect become a musical conservatory.

Naturally there were performances of sacred choral works: among the duties of the music director was the composition each year of a minimum of two new masses and vespers settings, at least two motets each month and other occasional works.  But it was chiefly for its orchestra that the Pietà became famous.  Perhaps as a result of the competition from the other ospedali in Venice which also offered concerts, by the early eighteenth century the Pietà seems to have begun specialising in unusual instruments.  In addition to the normal orchestral complement there were lutes, theorboes, mandolins, chalumeaux, viole d’inglese, psalteries, clarinets and transverse flutes; the last two, though common enough today, were novelties in the early 1700s.

As has been true for audiences throughout the ages, one of the surest ways of pleasing was the showcase concerto.  Regular concerts meant that many such works were needed, including some for the unusual combinations of instruments which the Pietà could offer.  They were provided by the maestro de’ concerti, who was the leader of the orchestra, conductor and house composer.  For some twenty years at the beginning of the eighteenth century, that post was filled if only unofficially by Antonio Vivaldi.

The music of the early Baroque which preceded Vivaldi was based on the solo voice.  Indeed, the creation of the early Baroque style was largely the result of the evolution of opera, itself a rediscovery of the power of the voice declaiming a clearly audible text, with music that follows closely the rise and fall of speech, accompanied by spare and simple textures.  This was in stark contrast to the late Renaissance style which was polyphonic, with thick unbroken textures obscuring multiple and overlapping texts; the emphasis was on smooth part-writing, and there was little rapport between words and music.

In this respect, the traditional labels of Baroque and Renaissance are misleading.  During the three or four centuries these periods encompass, just as for the two which followed, the large-scale stylistic shifts in music tended to occur one or two cultural cycles later than for the other arts.  Nor is this surprising, any more than the fact that literature tended to be in the vanguard.  The composition of music presupposes an elaborate apparatus for its performance.  The cost and complexity of its implementation necessarily make it the most conservative of the arts in terms of uptake of new ideas.  Words, on the other hand, require minimal mediation - a copyist or printing press suffices.  Almost as soon as a new way of looking at the world has been conceived, put into words in the mind, it can be written down and put into words on the page   But converting that idea into music can take centuries.

Thus so-called Renaissance music is in fact the perfect expression of an earlier medieval society: each part is strictly circumscribed both in range and material, compositions tend to be homogeneous throughout their duration, and the overriding concern is with a harmonious whole.  The concept of soloist does not exist except as the topmost level of the hierarchy.

Similarly, early Baroque music represents the first genuine stirrings of the Renaissance spirit in the medium: it is centred on the individual not the group, it prizes passion over passivity, and contrast over continuity - all dangerously subversive ideas in a rigidly feudal world.  Matching its implicit humanism is a new-found and explicit enthusiasm for the pre-Christian era’s myths and history in all their rawness and vigour, marking a distinct break with the previous medieval obsessions with generalised pieties and anaemic hand-me-down notions of chivalrous love.  All this occurred fully two hundred years after the other arts had started to turn their thoughts in a similar direction.

Words provided the natural scaffolding for this anthropocentric style. Without them, it proved hard to write extended compositions, and purely instrumental music lagged behind the achievements in opera, whose peaks included such classically-inspired works as Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo’ and ‘L’incoronazione di Poppea.’  One of Vivaldi’s central achievements was the part he played in the development of extended compositional strategies, and of a viable instrumental idiom in which to implement them.

When he started composing his concertos, it was natural that Vivaldi should draw on the well-established and highly effective tradition of vocal writing.  His earliest works in the form are almost choral in their melodies and textures.  The solo instruments take the place of the singers, while the orchestra supports their line as it would voices.  At the same time, as a virtuoso violinist himself, Vivaldi was able to introduce many strictly instrumental figurations into his music, and so to move away from the purely vocal shape of melodies while retaining their soloistic nature.  In fact it is clear that he tended to think almost exclusively in violinistic terms: even his concertos for wind instruments show the same continuous line, with little thought given for the soloists’ breathing.

Once Vivaldi had established a workable model for this new kind of concerto writing, his duties at the Pietà provided him with daily opportunities for refining it and exploring its potential.  He stripped away all the superfluities of the early Baroque style which tended to clutter the music of his contemporaries, and arrived at the characteristic Vivaldian sound and structure we know today.  It is a style based on the simplest elements of music, on arpeggios, scales, sequences and repeated notes.  In effect, Vivaldi was establishing the basic vocabulary of Classical music, a vocabulary we take for granted today, but one which needed to be extracted from the developments of the seventeenth century, and which was as radical and fundamental for its time as Wagner’s innovations were for his.

Although we tend to think of Vivaldi as a quaint byway in the history of music, his importance is pivotal.  On Bach, his influence is well attested: as a young man Bach transcribed for harpsichord ten of Vivaldi’s concertos, and it is clear how the later composer first built on, then surpassed the Venetian’s achievements.  But Vivaldi’s influence goes much further than that.  His first published set of concertos was probably one of the most important collections of instrumental works of the eighteenth century. Vivaldi largely defined the Baroque concerto as we know it.

More importantly, he had a tremendous impact on those shadowy composers whose works form the transition between the late Baroque and early Classical, the composers who were to create the environment which made the central achievements of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven possible.  In a very real sense, Vivaldi is the grandfather of that Classicism, and it was the unique circumstances of the Pietà which acted as the catalyst in its evolution.

And yet this Vivaldi of the musicologists is not the Vivaldi the world knows.  That Vivaldi is the Red Priest - so named for his flaming mane of hair; it the Vivaldi of the ‘Four Seasons’, the Vivaldi whose music is the soundtrack of Venice.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born on 4 March 1678, not far from the Pietà which was be the centre of his life.  His father was a musician who played in San Marco as a violinist; him it was, presumably, who gave young Antonio his first music lessons.  The future composer took the tonsure at the age of fifteen, and became a priest just after his twenty-fifth birthday in 1703.  For someone of his humble background, this was a sound career move. His association with the Pietà can be dated back to around the same time, when he was taken on as violin teacher.

His first publication, a set of trio sonatas, appeared in 1705, followed by a set of violin sonatas.  His earliest concertos were published in 1711 as Op 3, and bore the inscription ‘L’Estro Armonico’, a phrase referring to the flights of harmonic and poetic invention to be found in the series. The originality is indeed striking.  Where the earlier violin and trio sonatas sound like journeyman works, somewhat conventional and tentative, the concertos of ‘L’Estro Armonico’ offer us the first view of Vivaldi’s emerging style.

Inevitably the set looks both forward to the works of Vivaldi’s maturity, and back to the models it grew out of.  Thus over half of the concertos are written in the form of the old four-movement concerto grosso which alternates slow and fast sections, and pits the full string orchestra - the ripieno - against the lighter grouping of players known as the concertino. The latter are not true soloists: their material is often very similar to that of the ripieno and rarely virtuosic; instead, they act as a dramatic counterpoise to the larger body, and offer the possibility of typically baroque effects such as dynamic terracing, rhythmic intensification and melodic juxtaposition.

The actual thematic material reflects this conservatism.  The figurations are rather conventional, the overall structure episodic and the total effect less than the sum of its parts.  Even the middle slow movements - soon to be a hallmark and highpoint of the mature Vivaldi style - function less as freestanding melody than as rhetorical questions and answers between the two contrasting groups, a kind of musical stichomythia.

At the same time, the Op 3 set does offer four works which are clearly of quite a different cut.  Numbers 5,6 8 and 12 - two double concertos and two for solo violin - are three-movement works, cast in what soon became the norm for concertos of fast-slow-fast.  Structurally they are better organised, melodically they are more economical, and there is an unobtrusive but effective integration between different sections and different voices.  The solo line is more truly soloistic, with the first appearance of Vivaldi’s characteristic wide leaps and across-the-strings arpeggios.  Equally striking are the intense slow movements which have blossomed into arresting cantilenas for the solo violin over varied accompaniments.  The Vivaldi concerto was born.

That breakthrough was consolidated and extended in the composer’s next published work, another set of 12 concertos - 12 would be the canonical number for musical publishing for many decades more.  The most successful and forward-looking of Op 3 moved away from using the cumbrous full concertino group towards the more supple resources of one or two violins; the concertos of Op 4 take that development a stage further by concentrating exclusively on the solo violin.  Once more, there is a sobriquet: ‘La Stravaganza’, a love of the unusual and exciting which could be equally well applied to the composer as to the works themselves.

In Op 4, that extravagance is limited to the violin part itself, now more demanding than ever, and beginning to explore the then limits of the instrument’s technique.  For the rest, the concertos represent a simplification and rarefaction of earlier ideas.

All the Vivaldi fingerprints are there: the powerfully motoric arpeggios, often based around sequences; themes formed from scales or chords; the long pedal notes; the use of the most basic harmonic progressions as musical punctuation, sometimes played in unison by the whole orchestra; the fascination with simple repeated chords played slowly and without ornament, either on their own, or acting as the barest of accompaniments to long, flowing melodies on the solo instrument; the steadily chugging walking basses; a childlike delight in the strength of the dominant seventh chord; the relentless chromatic sinking of the bass-line from tonic to dominant in minor key works; and the consistent use of a style which is essentially homophonic rather than contrapuntal.

Between publishing his Op 3 and Op 4, Vivaldi produced his first opera, ‘Ottone in Villa’.  Together with the concerto, opera forms one of the two poles of his creative life.  The origins of his mature style as a fusion of vocal and instrumental approaches to melody meant that he could move easily between the two.  Of the 50 or so operas we know about, 18 were written for the Sant’Angelo theatre in Venice; the others appeared in Venice at the San Moisè and San Samuele theatres, as well as at Rome, Verona, Vicenza, Florence, Milan, Mantua and elsewhere.

In Vivaldi’s day, it was opera, rather than instrumental music, that offered a route to fame and fortune. Instrumental music was usually printed at the composer’s expense, and unless patronage had been secured in advance therefore represented a highly speculative approach to composing.  Opera, on the other hand, provided guaranteed fees which could be substantial for an established composer.

The operas of Vivaldi which have come down to us are unremarkable as far as their subject matter is concerned.  Titles include many classical subjects, works based on Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’, plus exotica like ‘Montezuma’, and ‘Guinevere, Princess of Scotland’.  Librettists included the omnipresent Metastasio, the popular Zeno and the Venetian dramatist Goldoni.   Although the latter only worked with Vivaldi on two works, the second occasion is of more than passing interest because both librettist and composer wrote under anagrammatical pseudonyms, respectively Grolo Candido and Lotario Vandini.  The fact that the name of a musician called Vandini occurs in the accounts of the Pietà in 1720 has led some scholars to read more into this than coincidence.

Opera was particularly important to Vivaldi, and not just for the financial rewards or popular acclaim it brought him.  Vivaldi seems to have had an extramusical interest in the genre on account of a certain Anna Maddelena Giro.  She became his pupil, and the leading interpreter of the contralto roles in his operas.  Vivaldi once declared that it was impossible to put on a performance of one of his operas without her, since there was no comparable singer to be found.  Evidence other than Vivaldi’s partisanship suggests that she was, indeed, a very fine singer.  Just how partisan he was is an intriguing question, one that takes us to the limits of our knowledge of the composer.

We know, for example, that he travelled for some 14 years around Europe with both Anna Giro and her sister.  We also know that in 1737 the Cardinal of Ferrara refused to let him enter that city, partly on account of his friendship with Giro.  It is hard in these cynical times not to suspect that there may have been some justification for the rumours which were obviously circulating.  But it is frustrating that on such a key issue one which would necessarily change the entire mythology of the Red Priest there can be no certainties.  Against the odd letter or report and lingering tittle-tattle from the time, we have the vast and impressive body of his works which speak directly to us, and act as a powerful advocate of Vivaldi as the sublime and poetic genius dedicated to his art rather than as a fornicating priest who wrote concertos for a living and operas for profit.  The fact that the latter is probably nearer the truth is an indication of how little the music tells us about the man.

It would be interesting to know which of the two categories - instrumental and operatic - Vivaldi prized the most, or would have wanted to be remembered by.  The question probably never even crossed his mind.  Both genres had their attractions: the operas brought him immediate and rather ephemeral fame throughout the main operatic centres in Italy, but it was his published concertos which established his European reputation.

It is ironic that of all Vivaldi’s works, the most famous today should be in many ways the least characteristic.  ‘The Four Seasons’ form the first concertos of a set of 12 published as his Op 8.  As with the earlier Op 3, and Op 4, but unlike the rather nondescript Op 6 and Op 7 sets of violin concertos which followed, the Op 8 set was given a subtitle: ‘Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Invenzione’ - that is, the contest between compositional order and poetic inspiration.  This could easily stand as an epigraph to most of Vivaldi’s works, which combine an enormous fluency and variety of ideas with a rigorous application of Vivaldi’s own brand of the Baroque concerto form.

The collection’s subtitle is a particularly apt description of what Vivaldi attempted and achieved in the first four concertos of the set, now known by the names of the seasons.  These are not the only works with such nicknames: as well as ‘La tempesta del mare’ and ‘Il piacere’, both from the Op 8 set, there are concertos known as ‘Il sospetto’, ‘L’inquietudine’, ‘Grosso mogul’, ‘Il favorito’ and ‘L’amoroso’. But none of these attempts to follow an explicit programme in the way that the first four of Op 8 do.

Those programmes take the form of rather slight descriptive sonnets by an unknown poet, probably Vivaldi himself, printed at the head of each concerto.  Moreover, the appropriate phrase appears over the music which represents it.  Vivaldi’s skill lies in the way he adheres to the simple programme while working within the conventions of the concerto form - a true contest between ‘armonia’ and ‘invenzione’.

The concertos progress from spring through to winter.  Along the way we hear birds singing, dogs barking, fountains murmuring, summer and winter tempests, and the chattering of teeth.  It is fascinating to observe how Vivaldi marshals his favourite compositional and instrumental tricks.  Thus his rapid scales and repeated notes become storms; his languid slow movements depict the calm which comes before them, and the peaceful days spent beside the hearth while the rain - represented by pizzicato arpeggios - falls steadily outside; violin pyrotechnics act out the awkwardnesses of the drunken harvesters, the scurrying of the winter winds, the sudden falls on the ice; and even the athematic, chordal slow movement based purely on subtly shifting harmonies puts in a turn as the deep, porcine sleep of the drunkards.

Just why Vivaldi produced these concertos is a complete mystery.  There are no other works quite like them in his output, and although programmatic music had been produced by many earlier composers, this does not address the central question of why Vivaldi chose to write these concertos in precisely this way at this point.  The whole issue is bound up with a larger question about the creative process itself: what causes work x rather than work y to be written, and what determines the particular artistic path it chooses to follow?

This is a problem which is particularly acute for music, of all the arts. For literature, subject matter provides a ready starting point and structure, as does pictorial reality in representational painting; but music seems to exist outside of any such easy correlations.  Walter Pater recognised this in his famous essay on ‘The School of Giorgione’ when he wrote that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”  That is,  the other arts strive to free themselves from their literalistic roots, to blur the distinction between form and content - a distinction which does not exist in most music.

It is relatively straightforward to understand where a painter such as Canaletto would have found his inspiration for the scenes of the Grand Canal - presumably on such and such a day a particular scene struck him by its compositional possibilities - and what the occasion of such a painting might be - a commission, say, for a ‘typical’ Venetian scene.  Most poets, novelists and dramatists ultimately draw on their own personal experiences, their memories and the knowledge they have accumulated, to provide them with the basis and initial impetus of their works.  But we have no such clear points of departure for Vivaldi’s music.

The operas are easier to explain.  Vivaldi sought commissions, the libretto was often given, as were the requirements of the singers.  He then set about finding music which in some sense matched the words and the scenes and the voices.  Of course the central mystery of where he found that music remains; but at least a framework for its creation can be guessed at.  It is true that works in concerto form were required on a regular basis for his pupils at La Pietà; once more the individual needs of the players would have helped limit the range of compositional possibilities.  But not much.  Each time he set to work Vivaldi would be confronted by the blank music paper with only his past compositions as a guide to where he had been, and as a hint of where he might go.  Each work was potentially the exploration of a new region of his compositional world, a filling in of an empty part of the map.

The greater part of that map - and certainly the most important historically and the most familiar to present-day audiences - is occupied by the concertos.  In all there are around 480 works which can be so described.  The majority of them - 329 - are for solo instruments; 45 are for double instruments, and the remainder are a mixture of string orchestra concertos and those for other combinations of soloists.

Some of those combinations can be quite extraordinary.  The concerto ‘per la solennita di San Lorenzo’ - one of two written for that saint’s feast day - uses two oboes, two clarinets, two recorders, two violins, a bassoon - and a lute in the slow movement.  The solo and double concertos embrace most instruments of the baroque orchestra - violin, viola d’amore, cello, recorder, flute, oboe, bassoon, horn and trumpet.  But the vast majority of the solo concertos - and indeed a significant part of Vivaldi’s entire output - are for the violin: around 220 have come down to us.

Of these, about a third were published in Vivaldi’s lifetime.  After the Op 8 set, came three more collections,  Those of Op 11 and Op 12, like those of Op 6 and Op 7, were probably put together by the publisher rather than the composer.  They are not works of the first order.  Most of them feel like pieces born of contractual obligations, not inner necessity, Vivaldi’s weekly concerto for the Pietà.

Happily the same could not be said about the Op 9 set.  It too bears a subtitle, perhaps indicating that the composer took the same trouble in collecting these works as he did with the other named sets.  Op 9 is called ‘La cetra’ - the lyre - and, aptly enough, a kind of Apollonian ease and mastery pervades the set.  The twelve works represent perhaps the furthest point of Vivaldi’s development in this form.

Not all are of the highest quality; but the last three concertos are as good as anything he wrote.  They are also interesting for the way in which they seem to reach out towards the future.  For example, the final movement of number 10 has a distinctly Rococo feel about it.  Even more striking are the levels of virtuosity demanded.  Rapid execution and extremely high notes are called for routinely - skills Vivaldi himself is known to have displayed to the admiration of his listeners.  Extended passages of arpeggiation across all the strings are also deployed to brilliant effect throughout.

Of the three, the last is the best.  The thematic material manages to be both distinctively melodic and yet highly integrated within the larger design of each movement.  The textures are unusually rich - thanks, in part, to the soloist’s scordatura, the retuning of the violin to allow important harmonies and figurations to be played on the resonant open strings.

But amidst all this wealth, there is one passage in the work which stands out, one which etches itself into the memory.  Towards the end of the first movement, the solo violin starts up one of those figures which are born of Vivaldi’s deep knowledge of the instrument.  It is a wide-ranging arpeggio with a tiny rhythmic kick at the end of each beat.  Its effect is quite hypnotic as the ear locks into its particular pattern which slowly shifts across the harmonies, supported by the steady quaver throb of unison violins and violas in the orchestra.

There is nothing remarkable in this: Vivaldi has used the same device with great success many times, and will use it again in the last movement of this same work.  But on this occasion something extraordinary happens: a melody emerges, a very still and wistful melody played by the first violins.  Supported by the soloist, this tiny line grows and grows, moving with the harmony as the arpeggios slowly shift.  It is one of the longest melodies Vivaldi ever wrote, and one of the most beautiful.  The moment is exquisite in its sense of total equipoise.

It is almost inescapable to regard passages such as these as personal statements.  Indeed, as Vivaldi developed the violin concerto, he seems to have stamped it with more and more of his personality.  Vivaldi was a considerable virtuoso of the violin, and these works delight in brilliant and idiomatic writing for the instrument such as only an accomplished player could produce, and such as the same player would relish to the full.  It is equally hard not to see the frequent adoption of a minor key in the slow movements of these concertos, together with the characteristic solo cantabile line supported by a very simple pattern of  orchestral chords, as further expression of Vivaldi’s deeper feelings.  They indicate a man of powerful emotions, mostly of a melancholy cast.  That they could only really find expression in this coded and covert manner probably goes some way to explaining their existence.

Yet today, listening to his music, it is not so much the man we tend to hear as his milieu.  For Vivaldi’s works seem to speak to us directly of Venice.  But trying to pin down in exactly what this Venetian quality resides leaves us floundering; it is hard enough defining the spirit of a place, still harder trying to translate it into another medium.

At the very least, the hints of an underlying sadness to Vivaldi’s music, especially in his slow movements, chime with many people’s experience of Venice.  There is something abidingly wistful about this city built on water, a city which was once the greatest maritime power in the West, and which now is struggling just to stay above the seas it once dominated.  The glories of its architecture serve only to remind us of what Venice has lost - both in terms of its empire, and the thousands of works of art which fill foreign museums.  And out of season, when the tourists have gone and the bitterly cold wind blows along the narrow lanes and canals, Venice can be one of the loneliest places on earth.  As you walk down those empty streets it is almost inevitable that it is one of Vivaldi’s bleak and forlorn slow movements that comes to mind.

In the end, as with all music, our response to Vivaldi remains a mystery.  But unlike many other composers, including lesser ones, the man, his life and his feelings remain mysteries too.  Insufficiently appreciated in his own lifetime, and soon forgotten after it - though the influence of his music continued - little was thought worth preserving in the way of letters or memoirs of the man.  His figure emerges only sporadically from the darkness which crowds in around the small, weak lamps of history.  When he does step forward, it is only into the half-light.

For example, of the few anecdotes which have come down to us, one stands out for its oddness, its surreal disjunction from the image of Vivaldi we construct from his ordered and often serene music.  Johann Georg Pisendel was a virtuoso violinist from Dresden who was a pupil and friend of Vivaldi.  Once they were walking in tile Piazza San Marco, when Vivaldi broke off their conversation and dragged the bemused Pisendel home.  There Vivaldi explained that he had seen city constables following them, and he questioned the younger man about anything he might have said or done to warrant these attentions.  Pisendel could think of nothing, so Vivaldi went to the authorities for an explanation, and discovered that they had mistaken Pisendel for someone resembling him.  The incident is so strange and pointless that the story is surely true.  It says much about the atmosphere of Vivaldi’s Venice, and gives us a disconcerting glimpse of the man behind the music.

Even our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Vivaldi’s death is frustratingly incomplete.  Often on the move following promises of lucrative commissions, Vivaldi left Venice for the last time in the first few months of 1740.  He then disappears from view until the summer of 1741, when he was in Vienna.  And it was there, in Mozart’s final resting place, that he died.  We still have the cathedral records which list the nugatory expenses of Vivaldi’s funeral.  It is easy to imagine some clerk entering the foreign-looking name of Vivaldi in his accounts book.  As these details show, like Mozart, Vivaldi was buried in a pauper’s grave.

This unexpected link between the two composers is more apt than it might appear.  Goldoni claimed that it was through his collaboration with Vivaldi that he first gained experience in writing comedies and intermezzi which were the forerunners of the Italian opera buffa, which in turn reached its culmination in Mozart’s great trilogy of works.  The case for Vivaldi’s direct influence on Mozart is perhaps less obvious.  It is based on two factors: on the leading role Vivaldi’s concertos, known throughout Europe, took in preparing the way for the Rococo and early Classical forms which led to the creation of the symphony and the symphonic style, and on his achievements in crystallising what we now regard as the key components of the Classical vocabulary.  Without both, Mozart’s music would have been very different.  A world without Vivaldi is a world without ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’, ‘Don Giovanni’ and ‘Cosí Fan Tutte’.

But Vivaldi is important not just as a forerunner, as one who prepares the way for even greater things.  As we now recognise, his body of music is one of the most consistently impressive of the middle Baroque period.  And as anyone who has been to the city will attest, by some mysterious alchemy it also provides us with one of the most enduring though intangible records of his - and our - Venice.

Walks with Lorenzetti