Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Lives Among the Leaves at Palazzo Ducale


No matter how many times I visit the Palazzo Ducale, or the basilica of San Marco, for that matter, I can't help but feel that I'm missing more than I'm taking in. Paradoxically, it seems the more I see, the more I notice what I haven't yet seen and don't have time to see during any single visit. If I then return to specifically look at the things I missed during the prior visit, I notice yet other things I'd never noticed before and that I really must return to look at more closely some time in the future.

And so with each visit, against all logical expectations, my list of things yet to see multiplies rather than diminishes.

I trust at some point this will all change: that a sense of the finite will reassert itself and I'll glimpse, however vaguely, a distant day when I might conceivably believe I've seen pretty much all there is to see at the Palazzo Ducale. At least in theory I trust in such an possibility.

In actuality, I suspect that if a place like the Palazzo Ducale can be compared to a vast novel, an edifice in which an entire world view is spelled out in painstaking detail, the best that most of us will ever be able to do is skim it, or flip quickly through its pages, or, in some cases, just glance at its cover.


I only had a little time to visit the Palazzo Ducale yesterday afternoon and I spent all of it (and more than I'd planned) absorbed in the collection of 14th-century capitals displayed just beyond the ticket booth entrance, well short of the main part of the Palazzo and the main reasons people visit it (the grand rooms of the doge's apartment, the even grander council chambers, the prison). Removed from their original places outside among the building's facade during 19th-century restoration and placed inside where their already damaged surfaces might be safe from the elements, these groupings of capitals are fairly easy to blow right past. I usually do.

Each leafy capital is inhabited by its own category of figures: there are representations of the seasons, of the Zodiac, of trades, of foreigners and so on. I'd typically get caught up in such things, but yesterday I paid almost no attention to themes and took each figure as an individual piece: noticing only the way they were carved, the marks and disfigurements of time, the charm of some, the pathos of others.

The figures on the capitals are both literally (at hardly more then 6 inches in height) and dramatically among the most insignificant characters in the grand sweeping narrative of the Republic that the building's architecture and ornamentation are designed to convey, and perhaps for that very reason, considered one-by-one, they struck me as the most absorbingly human: both vaguely familiar and undeniably other, intimate and strange, very much of the past yet somehow nevertheless--arriving after a hazardous voyage of centuries--present.





10 comments:

  1. When I see something so evocative I always wonder who was the person who so skillfully created such faces. If only we could have a window in time.

    I must say, the marble looks so dirty!

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    1. Yes, I find it easier to imagine (however vaguely) the long-gone hands that made such small things than, say, the ones that created the vast history paintings inside the palace.

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  2. An inspired heading...I love this 'lives among the leaves'....! I, too, have noted these small people; I'm going to embrace the idea that "this could be vast novel, ... in which an entire world view is spelled out in painstaking detail" and follow the story more closely now. Grazie mille

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    1. And what a novel it is, pc, and how it does go on and on! Which is a good thing, I think. When I was in grad school "text" was the big term: everything was a "text", even paintings--or dog houses--and it was important (at the time) to remember the word's Latin origins in the act of weaving. Texts were woven like spider webs, said various writers, and the Palazzo Ducale is certainly one grand web--in which it's a pleasure to get stuck.

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  3. I've also photographed these in 2012, last year I've switched to these on the facades of the Palazzo Ducale.

    http://venices101st.blogspot.ru/2014/01/blog-post.html#more

    About "all there is to see" in a more general terms - do you see Venice as an inexhaustible source of inspiring ideas, stories, etc? I often think about Ruskin's last visit to the city when he was looking at all these things he catalogized so avidly and feeling nothing, not a flicker of whatever.

    There are Top 10 sights that are unfailingly entertaining, Top 50 and probably Top 100, but beyond these - as I feel - begins esoterica that can inspire only someone who is firmly on track of learning EVERYTHING about Venice.

    You live there, you see it every day - what are your thoughts on that?

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    1. I tend to think there is a virtually infinite number of things or details to notice in Venice, but only insofar as they happen to strike one, not (at least for me) as something worth necessarily writing about or photographing. In truth, one good thing about living here is that I generally never concern myself with how much there may or may not be to see in some definitive sense: I can do the ordinary things one must do in life, buy groceries and so on, and happen upon things along the way, rather than be aware that I have only 3 weeks or 3 months or even a year to find out everything--or find out that there isn't as much to see as I would have hoped. I hope this is something of an answer to your question.

      That said, I've only ever madly loved one city: NYC when I moved there in '93. I really like Venice, I find it interesting, I like people here, I like living in the lagoon a great deal, I like its history, culture, art & so forth, but I doubt I have the earth-shaking passion for it that others do. Perhaps it's a matter of being older than when I moved to NYC. I don't at all like what NYC now is--a brand more than a city--and I can imagine one day leaving Venice and never wanting to return (unless to see friends).

      As for Ruskin--aside from the fact that anyone can get burned out or disappointed by any place, anything or anyone, I believe he also suffered from severe depression in his later years, which would make it hard to feel anything even for those places once so important to one.

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    2. PS Those are beautiful pics of the capitals, Sasha.

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    3. I spent some time living in NYC in 1997 at the farthest west of 71st Street, also was fascinated so profoundly, that upon leaving the city came up with a formula - "A day spent elsewhere is a day you've failed to live in the New York City (i.e.wasted)" -

      The last time I came there was in 2007, I've celebrated my 40th birthday staying at The Pierre, visiting the Metropolitan Museum, eating out in typical diners, it was all great. But somehow it was also evident that my infatuation with this city is a thing of the past, something cherished but no longer acute.

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    4. If you ever took the cross-town to Books & Co bookstore on Madison Ave between 73rd & 74th, Sasha, I was the bookbuyer/mgr there. Though, actually, it closed in June 1997, when we couldn't get a lease renewal from the Whitney (they ended up renting the space to a furnishings boutique called "Homer"--which was a bit ironic, as one of the things the bookstore was known for was carrying the Harvard Loeb library of Greek & Latin titles in bi-lingual editions).

      The less I say about NYC now the better.

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