Angel in Late Afternoon Light

19 March 2013

Light and Shadow, Basilica Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari

Taken while easing into the city after a trans-atlantic ovenight flight: watching afternoon sunlight pass steadily over the long-immobile figures and false firmament of the 14th century Monumento ad Arnoldo d'Este (16 July 2024)

Chiesa della Santa Selfie, or, Church of the Holy Selfie

23 July 2024

Viewed from afar within the vast space of the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo the object looked liked a  rectangular wood dining room table suitable for a party of eight, its top surface tilted at a 45 degree angle in the direction of the church's stained glass window. Only when I got closer could I see that it was actually a wood-framed mirror, mobile and adjustable like a larger version of the full-length mirrors people use to look at home to check their outfits.

This mirror hadn't been in the church when we moved from Venice years ago, and at first I thought it must have been put there for a similar reason that square-framed hand-held mirrors are available in the Great Hall of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco: so that one admire one of the feature's of the place without straining one's neck. In the case of San Rocco it's the refection of the ornate ceiling high overhead that you study in the mirror (if you're not snorting a line off it, as Geoff Dyer's protagonist does in Jeff in Venice); in Giovanni and Paolo I assumed it would be the stained glass window.

But I quickly realized there was no advantage to looking at the mirror's reflection, as I could easily study the window straight-on with no undue strain on my neck or eyes.

Then I noticed the blue label in one corner of the mirror--just like the one you see above (though that one is reflecting a ceiling painting by Veronese in a side chapel)--and noted how the height of the mirror was such that I could readily position myself before it to take, yes, the perfect selfie. 

Me--nearly all of me!--centered and foregrounded against a brilliant colorful background of stained glass, its sacred subjects reduced to compositional elements and a filtered backlighting that really popped!

But I didn't take that shot. Nor one in the mirror captured above that offered me the chance to appear in a celestial scene with Mary Herself. 

Instead I found myself wondering about a lot of things that I won't bore you with here. If you haven't been in the church yourself lately the news of these selfie mirrors might make you wonder some things of your own. I didn't see them in other churches, but, then, I didn't go into many other churches last month. Perhaps they're in a lot of churches now. 

It was one of the stranger differences I encountered in this new old Venice I returned to after being away for three years--a Venice that had been my family's home for over a decade but wasn't/isn't anymore. Perhaps I can get to some of the other differences soon.  

SS Giovanni e Paolo, Today

 

Chiaroscuro: Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, This Afternoon

We're back in Venice for the first time since we moved (regrettably) almost exactly 3 years ago today, after having lived here full-time for nearly 11. Operating on very little sleep, but wanted to post something. More to follow.

Confessionals, San Marco

8 January 2014

San Giorgio Maggiore

 I've posted this image before, but still haven't gotten it quite right in terms of conveying the day's fog. I took it with a small Canon point-and-shoot held just above the surface of the water in one hand, with my other hand on the tiller of our small light sandolo-sanpierota, trying to keep it under control in the moto ondoso of the bacino of San Marco. (8 December 2016)

Chiaroscuro, Church of San Zaccaria

29 September 2015

 

One of the Most Beautiful Paintings in Venice Costs Nothing to See (Unless You Pay to Illuminate It)

Giovanni Bellini's altarpiece in the church of San Zaccaria, which I somehow missed seeing the first two times I visited Venice, in spite of the fact it's just a short distance from Piazza San Marco (8 July 2013)

San Nicolò dei Mendicoli (10 Years Ago Today)

 

Giambattista Tiepolo in Santi Apostoli

Comunione di Santa Lucia (19 November 2014)

Shadow and Light, Santi Giovanni e Paolo

28 September 2015

High Art: Capturing Giovanni Bellini's Pala Barbarigo in Murano, This Morning

A photographer stands upon a ladder to focus and trigger the shutter of his camera--itself positioned upon a very tall tripod, two of whose legs are just visible to either side of the central column--in the church of San Pietro Martire in Murano.

The Patron Saint of Undisturbed Reading Time

It wouldn't take much effort to properly identify the saint whom the sculpture above is actually supposed to represent, but I must admit I have no interest in that.

Instead, I admire the quiet efficiency with which that sword in the saint's right hand is likely to discourage all comers from disrupting the saint's focus on the book in his left.

Of course since most interruptions of our reading time these days are from our various electronic devices--or our own addiction to such devices--the saint has his work cut out for him. But, then, he would never had been beatified if he hadn't already shown some capacity for performing miraculous interventions.

Pietà, Church of San Simeon Piccolo

For all the intended pathos of this sculpture of Mary holding the dead Jesus, I find the petitions piled up on the floor around it even more moving.

Looking Up, Basilica di San Marco, This Morning

Long Time No See: The Church of the Scalzi

The massive actual appears here to be supported by its two-dimensional image

The church of the Scalzi, or of Santa Maria di Nazareth, as it's officially known, is one of those monumental Venetian sights which is typically rendered invisible to me by the tourist throngs inevitably surrounding it. Foot and suitcase traffic is usually so thick before it that I rush past the church as quickly as possible, noticing nothing except the next opening through the crowd, thinking of nothing except the relief I'll feel when I eventually arrive at a calle with a bit of breathing room.

It's a bad way to go about things, as the day inevitably arrives--as it did just three days ago--when I finally notice what I've been missing.

I've no aesthetic opinion to offer on the Scalzi's Baroque facade; I was just to struck to see it at all, its stone beautifully tinted by the wet weather.

Was this solely the effect of the cleaning efforts just completed, or did the church benefit as well from a certain fleeting peek-a-boo appeal, only half-undraped as it was that moment, the printed image of the facade stretched upon the scaffolding serving as the perfect foil for the thing itself? (Perhaps an ever-more rare inversion of what Henry James, in his great story "The Real Thing," calls the "the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be so much less precious than the unreal.")

Or maybe, like the city of Los Angeles, the church of the Scalzi just simply looks it best right after a heavy rain storm. 

A couple of new figures appear, temporarily, with Mary, Jesus, and other holy sorts amid the first order of the facade

Celebrating 500 Years of Titian's "Assumption" with Monteverdi in Dei Frari, Today

It's been 500 years since Titian completed his famous altar piece for the basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari and this afternoon, on the Feast of the Assumption, the work and its subject were celebrated with an inspired performance of Monteverdi's Ad Vesperum Assumptionis Sanctae Mariae Virginis by I Solisti della Cappella Marciana, under the direction of Marco Gemmani, sung from the top of the 15th century choir stalls, just a stone's throw from the composer's final resting place at the front of the church, and performed as the piece was thought to have been performed on this day in 1640.

Sant Maria della Salute, Seen from the South Lagoon

Details, Details... Moses and Creatine Monohydrate (in the Church of Madonna dell'Orto)

A very fit Moses communes with the Almighty in Tintoretto's Adoration of the Golden Calf (detail)

Combine creatine Monohydrate, a body-building supplement, with the title of Freud's controversial late book Moses and Monotheism and you end up with the title of this post--and what comes to mind when I gaze high up at the figure of Moses in Tintoretto's towering split-level depiction of the delivery of the Ten Commandments and the worship of the Golden Calf in the church of Madonna dell'Orto.

Because these figures are so high up the apse (just below the church's ceiling), you really need binoculars to get a decent look at them in person. But it's worth the effort, as Tintoretto clearly intends this meeting of a mortal with the Almighty, this reception of The Law, to be even more dramatic than Adam's reception of Life on the Sistine Chapel. And, of course, there are a lot of other details to see as well--not least among them, all the horrors of Hell on the wall directly opposite, which supposedly sent Ruskin's frustrated young wife Effie Gray rushing from the church in fright. (Though one can't help but suspect her fear might have been just a pretext to escape for a short time from what one imagines were Ruskin's ceaseless lectures on what they were looking at.)