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On the 15th October, Camila and I flew to Venice. She had not previously been there, and I had spent two weeks there in 1968, 56 years before. Though I remembered some things in photographic detail such as the wall panel carved as a wooden bookcase at the Scuola San Rocco, and the size and presence of Giorgioni’s The Tempest in the Accademia, most things were hazy or forgotten. I booked hotel rooms for us at the Hotel Messner in Dorsodoro, as I remembered it as a student area, close to the Accademia and the Guggenheim Museum. I had an up-to-date water-proof Michelin city map and a highly opinionated translated sixties Italian guide to the ‘History, art and monuments’ of the city with floor plans of the major churches identifying and explaining all the mosaics and paintings in a degree of detail not found in modern guides. It had originally belonged to Kenneth Tynan and had his annotations. I got it from Kathleen Tynan when I sold some books for her after his death. It seemed that in Venice virtually nothing had changed. The pictures were still in the same rooms of museums or in the same church as in the sixties. Ed Maggs recommended that I read Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, [1888] which I never had done despite enjoying Daisy Miller and his more famous works. It was a perfect choice, not only is it set in Venice, but it is about chasing down a literary archive. I also reread Jan Morris’s Venice [1960] revised but still a bit dated]. It is a beautifully written evocation of the city, often cited as one of the best travel books ever written. There’s not much about the painters and School of Venice but that’s fine as it is a very subjective account of what Morris (who was then a man) found interesting and worth seeing. S/he wrote that it was an impressionistic picture, ‘less of a city than of an experience’, and that is so true of Venice. It has an enormous impact, whichever way you look and whichever lane or square you are on, you are overwhelmed by it. It is unique, overpowering almost; the canals and vistas all demanding the kind of detailed study you just don’t have time enough on Earth to do. Here are a few local streets and the delightful wooden bookcase of the Scuolo di San Rocca.
The next morning we set off down the Zattere, looking for our café. It’s always good to find your café as soon as possible and stick to it. Ours was the Gelati Nico where the café latte was pretty good, and the view across to the Giudecca even better, fortunately they have now banned cruise ships from using the Giudecca Canal. We stopped off next door to see our first Tintoretto at the Church of Santa Maria del Rosario, next door on the Zattere. Inevitably it was a crucifixion [c1565]. Christianity really is a death cult! It was to be the first of very many Tintorettos.
Here’s my café latte and Camila with the view of Zattere as seen from the café’s front door.
We crossed the Canal Grande by the Accademia Bridge and headed for the Piazza San Marco. Quite a few tourists still but these places are too important to miss so you just have to deal with it. In fact the Piazza was mostly empty, it was only around San Marco itself that you had to push your way through. We had jump-the-queue tickets bought on-line some time before so there was no waiting to get into the Doge’s Palace [1300 onwards]. One of the world’s great buildings and utterly unique. Venetian architecture had to be lightweight as the entire city is built on wooden stakes pounded into mudflats in the Lagoon. For this reason they used brick instead of stone, and where-ever they could filigree the marble facings they did so. They are gorgeous. Gothic came late to Venice but their version of it is superb. Here we are on the Accademia Bridge followed by the maze of small canals and walkways, some of which lead to a dead-end canal side, before we arrived at the Piazza San Marco.
Once inside you are in a great courtyard, featuring two bronze wells, from which, on the eastern façade leads the Giant’s Staircase. After consulting the guidebook we just chose to wander, knowing we would see everything of importance. I still worry that the immense 16th c painted ceilings will finally collapse but miraculously they don’t. According to my guidebook the Room of the Great Council is the largest in the world not supported by columns [54m x 25m]. And of course the rooms are filled with all the heavyweights: Veronese, Tintoretto, Tiziano (known to Brits as Titian) and even a room of Hieronymus Bosch. We spent several hours there, pausing only to denounce our enemies by posting an anonymous note in one of the ‘bocche di Leone’ or lion’s mouths. Of course we crossed the Bridge of Sighs to see the prison cells and did the whole thing taking several hours.
And as if that was not enough, we continued, after a pizza near the Rialto Bridge, to the Scuola di San Rocca for another hour’s worth of Tintorettos. This was as I remembered it: you come up the staircase and turn into a room filled with beauty. It is not quite as spectacular as reaching the top of the staircase at Sainte-Chapelle, and entering a huge room filled with light, but almost – because of the insane gilded painted ceiling. This is Tintoretto’s greatest cycle of paintings – there are more than 60 here – but my favourite is a view of The Last Supper seen from an angle so it looks just like a bunch of guys having a drink, a bite to eat and a bit of a natter. They are real humans, if, as usual, a bit distorted. It was hard to see because preparations for a conference had sealed off that end of the room. As his first biographer Carlo Ridolfi wrote [in 1642] Tintoretto sought to synthesize the colour of Titian and the drawing of Michelangelo – only more so. The carved wooden books and bookcase were just as I remembered them. These are powerful works, like standing in a jewel box. I always liked Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay on Tintoretto in Situations IV [1964]. He thought that he opened the way to Modernism and wanted to write a book about him. He completed 963 pages before giving up on the idea. Mind you, he wrote very quickly. All that amphetamine helped. I was exhausted, mentally and physically, by the time we got back to the Messner. And that was only our first day there.
