Late Afternoon Light, Stairway of Ca' Rezzonico

This has always been one of my favorite interior spaces in which to find myself in the late afternoon: this image is from just a couple of days ago. But Ca' Rezzonico is always worth a visit, even at a time like this, when it features an exhibition by one of the most consistently awful artists regularly shown (and even celebrated!) in Venice over the last 15 years or so. That's a topic for a later discussion, when I return back to the US, but my gosh, this particular artist might be a wonderful human being, with many admirable qualities (besides having a very famous father), but what always strikes me--even staggers me (sometimes with actual laughter)--is how his work is inevitably and irredeemably unimaginative and vapid--regardless of scale or materials used. I suppose this might be considered something of an achievement in itself: such persistent and indefatigable (though self-important) dullness. He doesn't so much seem to come up with an idea as simply stub his toe against one or another well-worn and widely-and-cheaply-available commodity, as a near-sighted person would bump into one or another mass-produced item in a dimly-lit warehouse packed with Ikea furniture. 

Chiaroscuro: Scuola Grande di San Rocco

17 April 2011

Sunday Afternoon in the Museo Fortuny

7 March 2014

Afternoon Light, Stairway to Ballroom of Ca' Rezzonico

21 January 2018

Young Canova at the Museo Correr

Campo San Cassiano, or, Thinking of Giacometti

"In Venice," Gabriele D'Annunzio writes in Il fuoco, "one cannot think except through images."

With the image above I found myself thinking of a work of Alberto Giacometti's from the late 1940s entitled Piazza that you can see at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum here in Venice.

The museum's website provides Giacometti's own explanation for the work's (or series of works') inspiration:

In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, then they approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity. . . . It’s the totality of this life that I want to reproduce in everything I do. . . .

One of the things that is lost to mass tourism is the dynamism of the public space, whether piazza or campo, as described by Giacometti. Mass tour groups simply clump or trudge, volitionless; tourists, needing to be nowhere in particular, and not knowing how to get there in any case, merely drift, washing up on steps, clotting in calli, adhering to any brightly lit display window, like sea wrack.

But sometimes, and in some places, on brisk fall or winter nights (or mornings), you can still see what Giacometti had in mind. 

All In The Family at the Querini Stampalia

The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, by Giovanni Bellini (left) and Andrea Mantegna (right)

Until 1 July you can still catch the Querini Stamplia's beautifully designed presentation of Andrea Mantegna's and Giovanni Bellini's parallel depictions of The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple. Mantegna and Bellini were brother-in-laws, and the wife of the former and sister of the latter is presented just to the left of Mary in both paintings. There are competing conjectures about the other peripheral figures in each painting as being some combination of family portraits and self-portraiture. Bellini painted his version about five years after Mantegna's (which is dated 1455).

In October the two paintings will be part of the major Mantegna/Giovanni Bellini exhibition that opens in London, before moving to Berlin in March 2019 (which is where Mantegna's Presentation can usually be found).

But there's something to be said for seeing these two paintings as they are presented here in Venice, apart from other works, as there's a great deal to take in, and a great deal that can't help but be missed when they become a pair of masterworks among many other masterworks.

Of course you couldn't ask for a more dramatic scene, though it's not one I'd ever given much thought to before, not least of all because the word "presentation" in the title can be misleading. Neither painter depicts Mary as presenting the infant Jesus in the way we commonly use that word today, with its suggestion of a certain open-handedness.

On the contrary, Mary, her hands bent at the wrists around the infant, clutches the infant close to her, even as the figure of Simeon (simply described as "righteous and devout" in the passage in the gospel of Luke from which this scene is taken, but by the time of Mantegna and Bellini often conceived of as a Temple priest) reaches out for the child.

Mantegna's Presentation is protected by glass (hence the white spots in this image)

In an informative and well-presented antechamber to the two paintings themselves, the curators of the exhibit point out that although it was common for children to be swaddled in the 15th century, in the belief that doing so prevented bone deformation (a practice, they note, which continued into the 20th century despite arguments as early as the 17th century that it was harmful), the wrapping of the infant Jesus in these depictions also foreshadows the winding sheets in which both artists (and countless others in the Christian tradition) will depict the dead adult Jesus after his crucifixion.

In Luke 2:34-35, the holy figure of Simeon "prophesied to Mary: 'Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword will pierce through your soul also), that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.'"

These aren't the easiest of lines to unpack, but in short I take it that he's basically saying, This child will do great things, but he'll also be subject to great scorn, and you as a mother will be subject to great pain. 

I take it, in other words, that once again the figure of Mary is called upon to do some heavy lifting for the Church as a representative of, and role model for, we mere mortals who look upon these paintings. Heaven knows (one might say) that the figure of Jesus will have no end of suffering to go through, suffering that will test the limits of his human endurance. But of course Jesus, to Christians, is not merely human.

Mary is only human, though, and like ancient figures before her (Agamemnon and Iphigenia come to mind, Abraham and Isaac), she's being asked to hand over her child to be sacrificed in the interest of a greater good. Agamemnon and Abraham both go along with this request with what can strike one as a dismaying alacrity, a canine obedience. But Mary, even as she submits to this higher calling, suffers visibly, humanly, and in doing so represents what have sometimes and in some places (not in Trump's America, not in Lega Nord's Italy) been valued as the most profound of human capacities (regardless of one's religion or lack of it): love, compassion, mercy, humility, and the fortitude to bear those "swords through the soul" from which no human can escape: all that frailty, pain, and loss we can only avoid feeling not by becoming gods but by becoming inhuman.

On a more earthly level, while looking at these two paintings I found myself wondering if the fact that Mantegna outfits his Holy Family in clothing in keeping with what was expected of patricians and nobility had anything to do with this painting being particularly aimed at that class of viewers, from whom both the Church and the State were certain to demand certain sacrifices (as Venetian depictions of Mary in her enclosed garden are said to have been intended to remind patricians not to marry outside of their class). But I'm no art historian, so who knows?

In any case, if you can't see these two paintings here in Venice perhaps you'll be lucky enough to see them in London or Berlin as part of those larger exhibitions. But if you're really lucky, you'll see them both here and there.

Sunday in the Park with Tong, Today

Actually, it's within the walled garden of the Querini Stampalia Museum where the Chinese artist Tong Yanrunan is painting an open air portrait. An exhibition of Yanrunan's portraits entitled Face to Face serves as the compelling centerpiece of a broader exhibition of contemporary Chinese art (Splendors of the Sun and Moon) which is running at the Querini until 20 July. Today was the last day that the artist was scheduled to be there painting portraits (something, alas, that I only found out about today), but the portraits themselves, built up from thick graceful brushstrokes, are definitely worth a look whether the artist is around or not.

Of course the Querini Stampalia is always worth a look (though I think it's still the rare tourist who actually makes his or her way there, though it's located just a short distance from Piazza San Marco). And until 1 July you can still catch the fine exhibition of two twinned paintings by Giovanni Bellini and his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna--an image or two of which I'll put into the next post.

A wall of portraits by the Chinese artist Tong Yanrunan (exhibited on the Querini Stampalia's Carlo-Scarpa-designed garden level)

Tong Yanrunan at work today

Titian's "Sapienza" in the Antechamber of the Biblioteca Marciana

Painted in 1560, Titian's Sapienza (or Wisdom) was situated on the ceiling of the antechamber some 30 years before it became the Statuario Pubblico discussed in my last post, when the room still served as a classroom for the study of rhetoric, philosophy and ancient Greek.

Do Look Now: In the National Archeological Museum of Venice

A 16th-century bust of a sober man in the classical style is haunted by a Hellenistic sculpture of the dionysian figure Silenius from the 3rd century BCE

The National Archeological Museum is part of the Museo Correr (though it hasn't always been: I remember it having its own entrance and ticket when I first visited in 1991). The core of the collection dates back to the 16th century, and to what was originally the private collection of two Grimanis: Cardinal Domenico Grimani, patriarch of Aquilea in the first half of the century, and Giovanni, who in 1587 donated the whole thing to the Venetian Republic in the interest of insuring that its citizens would forever have the “memoria delle cose antiche.”

By 1596 the collection was installed in the very room where the images of this post were taken: in the grand antechamber of the even grander Biblioteca Marciana. It was one of the first public museums in history, and though there is no record of exactly how the works were initially displayed, in the 1730s Anton Maria Zanetti il Giovane made a very detailed and illustrated inventory of the collection as it existed at that time--with a very precise illustration of the works' arrangement in the antechamber.

After the fall of the Republic in 1797, the collection was moved more than once from its original location. But in the 20th century it was returned to its original home in the antechamber and, having grown through other significant donations, was expanded into rooms of the Procuratie Nuove, which it still occupies.

All of it is worth a long look. But on the day I took these images I mostly limited myself to the antechamber which, with the exception of a very few sculptures now displayed in the rooms of the Procuratie Nuove, appears just as it did in Zanetti's illustrations of the space from over 250 years ago.

I imagine some might say that the identification of these works is not quite up to contemporary museum standards. Though each work is in fact identified, they aren't arranged according to any obvious categories such as historical period.

But it's precisely the absence of the contemporary categories to which we're accustomed that makes the experience of looking around this antechamber so interesting. All around you are the kinds of classical works from which the Renaissance took its inspiration and ideas; all around you is the literal embodiment of a certain period's ideas about what could or should be done with antiquity, how it should be thought about and looked at and arranged, how it could be used (or, as Nietzsche pointed out, abused). And though we can draw a line from the 18th century notions of history and scholarship on display in this room to those of our own time, it may not be as straight or as simple a line as we are prone to imagine it. It may not be a single line at all. It may split off into any number of directions. It may dead end.

In this room I'm struck, as I so often am in Venice, by juxtapositions--and the imaginative (and perhaps idiosyncratic and useless) play that they can inspire.

Of course, as one's visit to the Correr usually starts all the way at the distant other end of the Procuratie Nuove, by the time you make your way through everything else there is to see in the museum to the Biblioteca Marciana you may be too mentally exhausted to take in much of anything else. I find that I often am. And for this reason I suspect a fair number of visitors may not even make it all the way to the grand room of the Biblioteca, one of the city's exemplary spaces, with its paintings by Tintoretto, Veronese, et al.

For this reason, there may be something to be said for walking the whole length of the Procuratie Nuove to start your visit with the Biblioteca Marciana. Especially if you're visiting in the morning or noon hours, when the marbles in particular benefit from the fugitive sunlight coming through the windows.

And when you're done admiring the sculptures in the antechamber of the Biblioteca Marciana, don't neglect to look up above you at Titian's painting Sapienza, which really deserves a post all its own--the next one. 

A Greek statue of Demeter from the end of the 5th century BCE stands before a Roman grotesque

A large Roman candelabrum base from the last quarter of the 1st century CE

This ancient Greek head from one of the rooms in the Procuratie Nuove seems best seen in sunlight

Details, Details... Palazzo Grassi

Gaudy as the handles to the French doors of the piano nobile of Palazzo Grassi are (see an example of one above), I recently turned to them--and really noticed them for the first time--as a respite from the massive display of kitsch filling the center of the palazzo's exhibition space: Damian Hirst's Andromeda and the Sea Monster (detail below), which is a comically overwrought combination in bronze of, among other things, woman-in-peril pulp fiction and comic book covers of a half-century ago with the unconvincing rubber sharks that surfaced in popular films of around the same era (and then, most famously and profitably, in Spielberg's Jaws).

So much has been written about the Hirst show that I've never felt any need to bother with it myself. You can still catch it until December 3. There is no time limit on when you can have a look at the flashy door handles, about which, I must admit, I know nothing. 

Sometimes a piece of art, no matter how spectacular it aims to be, only becomes interesting in the presence of viewers.

Among the Treasures of the Accademia

A detail from one of the great large works by one of the giants of Venetian painting on display in the Accademia--which I won't identify in case any one wants a bit of a challenge

I visit the Accademia far too infrequently, as I was reminded once again by a visit a few days ago. The attendance at the city's museums has come nowhere close to keeping pace with the rise in tourists to the city as so many of the tourists (a full 75%) are in town for only a few hours, and spend that time traipsing along behind the elevated little flag or closed umbrella or some other ersatz staff of office in the hand of a tour guide.

This is a shame, as my visit to the Accademia Gallery the other day made me think that to visit Venice without visiting the Accademia is to miss out on one of the most striking overviews of the history and culture of the city--and of the West.

And for another week, until June 19, this overview includes a nicely curated exhibit devoted to the great Venice-based printer Aldo Manuzio (or Aldus Manutius), whose efforts at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th Century not only exerted a profound influence upon his own era, but continue into the present day: http://www.gallerieaccademia.org/aldo-manuzio. (I've been told the available audio guide to the exhibit is quite good, too, but didn't have a chance to try it myself.)

But regardless of when you visit the Accademia Gallery, and no matter what temporary exhibit is up, there are single works among the permanent collection that in themselves are worth the price of admission.

Details, Details... From Around the City

Reflections of Heaven in Palazzo Loredan

Every time I happen into Palazzo Loredan, the beautiful exhibition space of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti located on Campo Santo Stefano, I always see something that makes me wonder why I don't make a point of visiting the place more often.

The palazzo itself is worth a visit (especially considering one can do so free of charge), and until April 19 you can see the exhibition Within Light/Inside Glass (http://www.glass-light.org/), the latest in a series of exhibitions there that stand out for the inspired interplay between the art on display and the rooms in which they're located (or for which they've specifically been created).

The work pictured above and below is "Room of Angels, 2015" by the Finnish artist Anna-Lea Kopperi, in which the pavimento veneziano of the palace's rear stuccoed room is mostly covered by irregularly-shaped pieces of recycled glass. The original pavimento of the floor mimicked in its mosaic design the painting on the room's ceiling, but Kopperi's site-specific work quite literally mirrors the ceiling, creating a new kind of mosaic that both reflects the ceiling more accurately than the original stone floor and provides an entirely different sense of it--even as it also evokes the reflective qualities and movement of the water in the city's famous canals and lagoon.

And it's just one of a number of works on display by an array of international artists that are worth a look.

Men of Stone and Some Capital Oddities

February Flashback: Campo della Carità Revealed

The job of these four models was to go all ga-ga over the crystal or gem or whatever the little commodity they're holding was, but when I took this picture and the one below last February 12, 2014 I was excited to find that after many years the pleasant campiello in front of the Accademia museum was finally completely clear of construction  material. By now the absence of the work site and the crane that long towered above it is no longer news, but I still appreciate the view every time I pass. Even without the models.

Artists of Light in Palazzo Grassi

Though it makes for an interesting backdrop, Doug Wheeler's "D-N SF 12 PG VI 14" really must be seen in person

You can take a boat far out into the lagoon to escape from the crush of tourists around Piazza San Marco or you can simply go to one of the city's museums or galleries and be surprised rather sadly, considering how many thousands of people fill the city each day at this time of year, by how few other people you encounter there.

Last Wednesday I went to the Pinault Foundation's Palazzo Grassi intent on seeing the Irving Penn exhibition now on view only to find myself completely absorbed by the other show now going on there entitled "The Illusion of Light."

Of course it's hard not to be struck upon entering the palazzo by the artist Doug Wheeler's transformation of the courtyard into a brilliant space of white light seemingly devoid--at least on two sides--of any dimensions. It's a startling experience, but not the only one in the show.

There are other notable pieces by Latifa Echakhch, three Gerhard-Richter-meets-film-noir paintings by Troy Brauntuch, and a wall-sized projected group portrait of Shell oil workers in Nigeria that I hope to write a future post about in relation to some other much older depictions of Africans one can see in Venice.

And of course there's the pretty extensive Irving Penn show on the top floor entitled "Resonance" that's worth a visit by itself.

Both shows run until the last day of 2014, and more information and images can be found here: http://www.palazzograssi.it/

Philippe Parreno's "Marquee" lights up the palazzo's 18th-century frescoes attributed to Alessandro Longhi in irregular flickering and pulsing bursts

"Fantome (Jasmin)," in foreground, and "A chaque stencil une révolution", on wall, by Latifa Echakhch

Dora Maar, and Much More, at Palazzo Fortuny

Prominent among the other works of Mariano Fortuny in this image is one of his famous classically-inspired gowns, while two glass pieces by contemporary artist Ritsue Mishima are visible on the large table at left

Yesterday, March 8, marked the public opening of the spring exhibitions in Palazzo Fortuny: chief among them an extensive show of photographs by Dora Maar, an artist in her own right, though, as the title of the exhibition--Nanostante Picasso or In Spite of Picasso--suggests, still often better known as a model and muse for others. (One of Picasso's famous portraits of her is among the many pieces on display, and another by Man Ray). Also newly on view is Le ammazzoni della fotografia: a selection of photographs from the collection of Mario Trevisan, ranging from the 19th-century work of Juliet Margaret Cameron, through Dianne Arbus, to the unsettling child portraiture of contemporary German artist Loretta Lux; and other exhibitions of works by Ritsue Mishima, Anna-Karin Furunes, and Barbara Paganin. A complete description of the currents shows, which run until the middle of July, may be seen (in English or Italian) at: http://fortuny.visitmuve.it/

I had the good fortune to attend the preview of the spring shows on Friday, the first time, I'm rather embarrassed to say, I've actually visited Palazzo Fortuny--a couple of previous intended visits went awry. I did so in spite of a bit of a fever and some kind of virus that still hasn't gone away, and that has for the most part deprived me of the ability to put one sentence after another in any coherent fashion. So I'll leave this post mostly to some dozen photos, some captions, and the encouragement not to wait so long to visit Palazzo Fortuny as I did. It's one of the truly singular interiors of Venice, and still infused with the spirit of the painter, sculptor, photographer, designer of textiles, stage sets, fashion, and lighting who created it all.  

In the foreground is Sante Benato's and/or Giovanni Gloria's immense model of Villa Pisani in Stra, constructed around 1716

Léonor Fini allongée sur un planché jonché vetements by Dora Maar, from 1936

Portrait de Dora Maar de trois quarts ou fume-cigarette by Izis (Israel Bidermanas) from 1946

Some contemporary women take in the images of anonymous women of the past that make up the exhibition Shadows by artist Anne-Karin Furunes

Another work in glass by Ritsue Mishima amid various works by Fortuny

Fortuny's large model of the Bayreuth Theater, constructed in 1903

Another of Fortuny's stage designs, from 1908

Above and below: the frescoed walls of the room which now holds Fortuny's theatrical models and scenic studies

An anonymous death mask of Beethoven

Long Time No See: Ala Napoleonica, Piazza San Marco

I believe it was less than a month ago that I saw two headlines in a local newspaper about the large billboard covering much of the Ala Napoleonica wing at the western end of Piazza San Marco. The larger of the two announced what everyone in Venice has long known: that work behind it was completed and the scaffolding was (over)due to come down. A second slightly smaller headline a bit further down the page declared that the director of the Museo Correr had suggested that the scaffolding and billboard might remain anyway, as the museum needed the revenue it provided.

The first headline gave me a few moments of hope that after four years of being hidden behind ugly advertisements the western end of the Piazza would finally be uncovered. The second was enough to reaffirm my belief that in spite of vocal and ongoing objections to the billboard by prominent groups and individuals, it would remain forever.

So imagine my surprise when I entered Piazza San Marco this morning and saw the above sight. I imagined at first that they were simply in the process of changing the billboard from one gross garishness to another, but, no, upon closer inspection I found the scaffolding really was being taken down.

Though I've lived here since November 2010, and visited at the beginning of that same year, I hadn't seen the Piazza without the billboard since my prior visit to the city, way back in the early 1990s. Jen and Sandro, having first seen the Piazza during that February 2010 visit and having lived here for over 3 years, had never seen the Piazza without a billboard.

After so many uninterrupted days of rain, the long-awaited reappearance of the sun today seemed almost miraculous--but nothing compared to the reappearance of the western end of the Piazza San Marco from behind its massive billboard. The rain is forecast to be back tomorrow; here's hoping that all billboards in the Piazza are gone for good.

One can finally see the empty spot at the center of the Napoleon Wing where a statue of the French conqueror was supposed to go

A worker lowers a piece of the scaffolding to his colleagues below