The Man

The work has been fatiguing and complex, but I do not believe it has been completely in vain.

When I started writing this book, I began researching into the life of Giulio Lorenzetti.  I had intended to sketch the details of his birth, his marriage, his work and his death, to give a framework for the writing of his book which was itself a kind of biography, describing the Venetian Republic’s birth, its marriage to the sea, its artistic achievements, and its eventual decline and dissolution.  I soon drew a blank.  Lorenzetti does not figure in any of the standard art history reference books; even the Italian dictionaries of art I consulted ignore him.  In the catalogue of the British Library, there are just two books of his listed, one of them ‘Venice and its Lagoons’.  I thought of writing to Edizioni Lint, his publishers, or to the Italian embassy: surely somebody would have information on the man?

In the end, the more I read his book, the more it seemed that it contained all I needed to know about him.  Just as it had become his life, occupying more and more of his thoughts and his time, so his life had become the book, which mapped out his paths through Venice, and detailed his interests, his observations, his loves and obsessions. This process of fusion is so nearly complete and neatly dovetailed, that there are few blatant vestiges of the man in his words: the overt ‘I’ became redundant in a book which was all an expression of him.  Occasionally, though, Lorenzetti steps out from behind the scenery of the great theatre he had constructed and directed, and shows himself.

The work is at its most personal at the beginning, but soon fades away into apparently anonymous objectivity.  Lorenzetti’s introduction, a mere page or so, is written uniquely in the first person singular.  Even here he forgoes this opportunity to greet the world face to face.  Like a master of ceremonies, he soon moves out of the spotlight, preferring to introduce the book itself, as he gives a short summary of its shape, its itineraries, and the introductory chapters outlining the historical and cultural background.

In the first of these introductory chapters, there are one or two final glimpses of Lorenzetti peeping through the backstage curtain.  For example, in describing the unique character and romance of the Piazza San Marco, he cannot resist berating “the insupportable café orchestras that never give one a moment’s respite.”  A little later on, he inveighs against the decline in the quality of traditional Venetian workmanship, which he sees “mixed unfortunately with a great deal of rubbish in bad taste that is sold under the name of local curios, or ‘souvenirs of Venice’.”  But such outbursts are rare.

Lorenzetti also shows remarkable restraint in the face of this city of masterpieces; he knows too well that there is nothing more boring than an enthusiast’s endless rapture.  But even he is moved to poetry sometimes, as in his hymn to the wonder of San Marco:  “From this uninterrupted work of centuries a miracle of incomparable harmony and beauty has blossomed, with a beauty of line, colour and wonderful ever changing effects of light, especially at sunset when it assumes the appearance of something seen in a dream.”

This paean occurs in the first itinerary; thereafter, Lorenzetti adopts a far more measured tone.  It is almost as if he had allowed himself a final moment of unbuttoned response before reverting to his self-imposed sobriety.  A tiny crack in this otherwise unbroken surface is occasioned by an apparent triviality.  In a note on an unexceptional series of eight panels in the church of Sant’Alvise, he gives them as works of “a follower of Lazzaro Bastiani”.  But clearly his bile has risen on this issue: he adds a gratuitous and dismissive side-swipe that “Ruskin attributed them, absurdly, to Vittore Carpaccio, then a child of eight or ten.”  Lorenzetti does not suffer fools in his Venice gladly.

The final glimpse the book affords us of the man is, appropriately enough for someone who must have spent much of the time he was not walking around Venice surrounded by books, in the bibliography.  Among the six densely-packed pages there are ten works by Lorenzetti himself.  From the titles which he deemed worthy enough to be included with his sources we can form an estimation of what his principal concerns were, and with which of his other works he was most satisfied.

His interests were wide: as well as a work on the history and art of Torcello, he produced studies of Venetian masks and festivals, together with catalogues on maiolica and lacquerwork of the city.  But as the first of his works listed there, ‘Italian painting in the eighteenth century’ indicates, his main area of study was the final years of the Venetian republic.  This is corroborated by his comment in the introductory chapter of ‘Venice and its Lagoons’, where he says “the eighteenth century marks an awakening of new energies in art for Venice. For the second time she took the lead in all Italy.”  For all its earlier glories, Lorenzetti seems to have felt that the city and its art attained their most characteristic forms during these twilight years.

The book, then, can give us tantalising glimpses of the man; and yet so many fundamental questions remain unanswered - such as where the idea of the itineraries came from, how he ended up structuring the book in exactly the way he did, how his work affected his daily life, what his wife thought, and what hidden messages or secret memories lay buried within.  On all these, the book remains mute.

And yet after reading the book for a while, and walking with Lorenzetti along his paths through Venice, it is easy to feel that the growing acquaintance allows you to guess at some of these things, to extrapolate from the known to the unknown.  One of the defining characteristics of great art is that it grants you a sense not only of the magnitude of the artist’s achievement, but also of its cost.

So from reading the words, taking in the meaning and sharing the experiences, I feel that I know how Lorenzetti felt when he finished this monumental work - the sense of exaltation and exhaustion, of relief and sadness; I know the sense of pride he experienced when he held the first bound copy in his hands, the curious sensation that something he had created now had an existence independent of him; and I can detect too that shiver which must have passed over him as he realised that he had failed to capture fully his original vision, and that the task of revision he was compelled to attempt would end only with his death.

But the image born of my familiarity with his book which I prefer to keep, is different from all of these.  Just as Lorenzetti succeeded in capturing the essence of his city in its last years of glory, so I like to picture him at the close of his life.  He is bent with age and arthritis; he has bright grey eyes, and his hair is brilliantly white, combed back like a mane, receding slightly at the temples.  When he takes his customary walks around Venice, he leans on his metal-tipped cane held in his right hand, and goes tapping along the flagstones.

I imagine him standing in the middle of the Piazza San Marco, facing the cathedral’s facade, with the proud, gentlemanly form of the campanile to his right.  It is early spring, and there is a chill in the air, although the pale sun is out, casting long shadows on the Piazza. Lorenzetti is grateful that it is too early in the season for those terrible café orchestras.  The only sound is of footsteps on stone, and the low murmur of voices.

Lorenzetti is conscious that his task is nearly done; the second edition of his book is almost finished, and he is grateful that though he will soon die, his beloved wife Maria, who has shared so much of his life and his labours, will be able to see the work through to completion.  As he looks at the buildings around him, familiar now for fifty years, he thinks back over his life, of the times he has stood here in the Piazza, of the thousands of paths he has taken through his city, of the hundreds of thousands of words he has written trying to capture those paths and all that he has seen and felt on them.  And he thinks of all the men and women who created Venice, who came to these mud flats in the middle of the lagoon and built the most beautiful city in the world.  He thinks of their lives and the unimaginable details which formed them, and which went into the works they produced.

As he thinks of these artists, he imagines a huge crowd of them gathering in front of him in the Piazza San Marco, a grand and magnificent procession such as Gentile Bellini had recorded in his painting now in the Accademia Gallery just ten minutes’ walk from here.  He imagines them filing past him, smiling and saluting.  He smiles, and raises his cane slightly in recognition.

Now he imagines a different gathering.  These are not artists, but ordinary people, hundreds of them, thousands of them, of all ages and all nationalities.  So many now, that they are beginning to fill the piazza.  Lorenzetti gazes around, and sees all these people; he notices that they are holding copies of his book.  They seem to be waiting for something, waiting for him.  He nods as if in agreement, and begins to walk slowly across the Piazza, tapping his cane.  The crowd parts to let him through.  As he reaches the edge of the square, and is about to enter a narrow alleyway into the maze of backstreets he knows so well, he turns and gazes over the scene.  The crowd has formed itself into a huge procession. He turns back and begins to lead them on a walk through the heart of his kingdom.  We follow him to this day.

Walks with Lorenzetti

The Book

Those who may wish to retrace and know all those testimonies of art and those recollections of its past that Venice preserves in its churches, its palaces, its galleries and in its very streets, may find help here, in this book of mine.

Lorenzetti’s Venice and its Lagoons looks and feels like a bible.  It is dense and compact, and its thousand pages of thin and fragile paper invite a reverential handling.  The resemblance is no accident: this is indeed a bible, the bible of Venice   It is not just a guide to the city, but to its origins, its history, its art, and its traditions.  As befits a bible, it offers a complete cosmology.

The first edition of this monumental work appeared in 1926.  It was 30 years before the second edition was printed - posthumously, but based largely on Lorenzetti’s revisions, and edited by his wife Maria Lorenzetti Ciartoso.  An English translation had to wait another five years.  It has a dark blue dust jacket, while the original Italian version has one of deep red.  Otherwise the format is identical.

After about 100 introductory pages of almost continuous text, the character of the work changes dramatically.  Most striking are the series of fold-out maps which occur throughout the work, like adumbrations of a pop-up children’s book.  The maps show regions of the city: the canals and lagoon are represented by a series of roughly parallel wave-like blue lines, bounded in black, around and over which a thin red line snakes.  Each map has one such line, apparently tracing out an itinerary through the city.  Apart from a few major churches and campi, there are no indications of exact location, just the floating, weaving line.  It is numbered irregularly along its length, starting at the Piazza San Marco from which all but one of the itineraries start, and reaching to anything between 40 and 90 or more.

Except for these maps, and the title page, which uses the dark red colour of the Italian dust jacket, the text is in monochrome throughout. The bulk of the book refers to the maps, structured around the numbers that appear on them.  Each number heads a sentence or paragraph, or sometimes gives rise to sections which run for pages.

Complementing the text are nearly 300 illustrations, the majority of which are photographs from Lorenzetti’s day, while 40 are historical engravings.  The latter are mostly taken from works by eighteenth century view painters such as Canaletto.  The cramped format of the pages, the type of paper, and the reproduction processes available for the first edition of the book imposed great constraints on the resulting quality and detail of the illustrations.  As a consequence, the provenance of an image - its maker and even its medium - is not always clear.

The absence of any sure distinction between engraving and photograph results in a convergence between past and present representations of Venice.  This effect, born of limitations in the printing process, in fact reveals a deep truth about the unchanging nature of the city.  Put another way, the photographs of churches and palazzi look, because of the indistinct outlines and pervading greyness, as if they were taken in the eighteenth century.  Paradoxically, the general absence of people in those same photographs also makes them appear to be from some distant time in the future when Venice has been abandoned for reasons unknown, and become a deserted site of ghostly memories.  Lorenzetti’s illustrations, like the city they portray, are temporally unlocated.

Moreover, disparate as their subject matter and original sources are, the printing process renders the illustrations with a kind of equality which endows them with one viewpoint and style which can best be called Lorenzettian.  Within that essential unity, it manifests itself in many ways.  It can be moody and romantic, like the haunting picture of gondolas tied up on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the setting sun reflects in the waves’ splashed water on the paving stones; or like the magical painting of ships on the Giudecca canal, all diffused light and misty atmosphere.  It can be almost abstractly-classical, like the view of the library on the Isola San Giorgio Maggiore, half Vermeer, half Escher.  It can be powerfully grotesque as in the close-ups of the Colleoni monument or of the Capello effigy.  Or even bleakly expressionist, for example in Tintoretto’s ‘Agony in the Garden’, which is simplified to a harrowing study of black on black.

The illustrations are found throughout the whole book, as if Lorenzetti felt obliged to mirror the city’s visual generosity.  Even where the texture changes at the back of the book, with its 125 pages of indexes, there remain a few leavening images.

In their unvaried columnar format, and their relentlessness, the indexes offer a stark contrast to the main text’s constant variation.  The scale and scope of them are impressive: in all there are 244 books, 1458 artists, 1293 places, 1306 important and historic buildings, 192 monuments, and 298 illustrations meticulously detailed in their respective lists.  Venice seems to demand such obsessive naming and numbering from its devotees: when Ruskin came to produce a popular, abridged edition of The Stones of Venice, his huge sprawling study of the city, indexes still took up a third of the book.

This impulse to index, which Lorenzetti clearly shares, seems born of a desire to capture the sheer richness and multiplicity of the city.  It is as if he had felt that it was not enough for the tens of thousands of facts which he had sought out, hoarded and ordered, to be revealed and detailed on the itineraries which form the greater part of the work: he had to try to provide that information in as many ways as possible.  His indexes are different views of the same facts, like different cross-sections of a deeply complex object.  Together they offer alternative routes through the maze of his words.

The book impresses not just by this exhaustive content, but also by virtue of its sheer physicality.  Its more than one thousand pages, its dizzyingly small point sizes, its profusion of numbers, words, illustrations and lists, and the sheer density of their combination make it feel like a huge tome which has somehow been magically reduced, or, rather, like two or three huge books which have been crammed miraculously into this tiny space.

This feat of compaction, this achievement of a quart’s worth in a pint pot, was no empty act of intellectual virtuosity.  For all its riches, compression lies at the heart of the book, which is one whose form is fully determined by its content.  Its chosen instruments of explanation, the explicated walks through the city, are meant to be followed literally, not just metaphorically; Lorenzetti’s book is designed for practical use - to be carried, like a bible, and as a true guide, wherever you go in Venice.

Walks with Lorenzetti