part 7: Venice
part 7: Venice
nice art, but isn’t this building falling down? (I)
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I feel comfortable with classical music because I’ve spent many years listening and learning.
I feel largely lost with art because I lack broad familiarity with it. A year in Florence (1977) helped, but here in Venice I’m awash and adrift when it comes to knowing my Tintoretto from my Tiepolo.
Still, I owe much to my deceased artist friend Russell, who once upon a time encouraged me: “Just stand before a painting, let it have whatever effect it will have on you—of any kind—and then tell me how you’ve responded to it.”
(To anyone who feels intimidated by classical music: the same idea applies.)
So in the famous Gallerie dell’Accademia here in Venice I’m able to say that I had a great time standing before . . . a work that must be way down the list of tourist draws.
It’s a giant canvas of a Last Supper—though one that’s set in a Venetian noble’s palazzo. There are all kinds of idiosyncratically rendered attendees. I suspect they were recognizable to the art-loving—or maybe I should say the “tabloid-viewing,” that being the function of “guess who this guy is” portraiture—audience of the day. But in this painting, what’s with the dwarves? And the animals all over the place?
Well, the church authorities had something of the same reaction, and they suggested, in their own way, that the artist, Paolo Veronese, make some changes. (An actual question from the Inquisitor: “Does it appear to you fitting that at our Lord’s supper you should paint buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs, and similar indecencies?”)
Instead, he struck a deal to retitle his Venetian Last Supper as (if I may take some license) “Big Dinner at Levi’s,” and the work survived for my philistine enjoyment.
OK, so there’s the art.
But do you know what is the one thing in the entire Accademia that I was compelled to furtively photograph (setting off an alarm, but not getting caught)?
The custodians of this art treasury are keeping track of creep, as cracks in the walls spread!
Elsewhere in the Accademia, a staircase is askew.
All around the city and the lagoon, there are crooked walls, cockeyed façades, and leaning church steeples.
This got me thinking.
(Entry continues in part II. But for now, let me offer condolences to anyone who is German or similarly indecent.)
Veronese image: http://www.wga.hu/art/v/veronese/06/8levi.jpg; inquisitor quote from Ian Littlewood’s A Literary Companion to Venice
Friday, September 18, 2009