Renaissance - Andrew Graham-Dixon Chapter 5.

Light and Liberty

Love at First Sight.
If Florence was the Renaissance capital of sculpture then Venice was the capital of painting. A.G-D writes ' Venetian painters looked at the overlooked. They painted sexual desire. They found new ways of depicting death. They painted the human face with unparalleled sensitivity. They painted landscape, and the fall of light. In painting all of those things, they changed the way in which people thought about painting itself'. (p.224)


This chapter is introduced with the painting by Titian (or Tiziano Vecellio c.1485-1576) Bacchus and Ariadne which captures the moment of love at first sight.

Built on Mud

A brief history of the founding of Venice and its long association with independence and practical thinking.

Looking Outwards
Built in the lagoon its feet in the sea, Venice is a world of sailors, voyagers and trading, and into the city came the influences from the Byzantine east. 'The multi-racial, market-oriented, outward-looking nature of Venetian Renaissance society - together with its fondness for textures and colours of the bazaar - is reflected in the surfaces of its art'. (p.228/9).

Vittore Carpaccio (c.1460-1525/6) painted a number of pictures telling the story of St. Ursula's life in which he captures the maritime adventure of Venice with successive panorama's of departures and arrivals, richly dressed delegations, ships, pennants and sails swelled by the wind. (Miss Garnet's Angel!!!).

The Cult of Impersonality
Venice was a republic (a state which continued until its eventual capitulation to Napoleon), and from it's leading aristocrats elected a governing body and a symbolic head of state, the doge. Venetians mistrusted the promotion of self, preferring to belong to corporate groups within their society. In about 1501 Giovanni Bellini painted a head and shoulders portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan. Here we see the fine robes and hat of office, but the face is almost expressionless, and the individual unglorified.

Another artwork within this section is the equestrian monument of Bartolommeo Colleoni by the Florentine Andrea del Verrochio. This monument to a soldier who served Venice was created as a result of Colleoni's will, and he requested that the monument be positioned outside St. Mark's cathedral. This self-aggrandisement however, did not sit easy with the Venetians, who eventually allowed the statue to be erected at the edge of the city.

The corporate nature of Venice is captured by Gentili Bellini's Procession in the Piazza St. Marco 1496, in which all the participants share an equality in fact looking like clones of each other.

Victor Carpatius Fingebat
The comporate identity within Venice was encouraged and developed by the various scuola, centres for devotion and debate within the city and the Republic. The scuola founded by the colony of Dalmatians in Venice in 1451 boasts paintings by Vittore Carpaccio. There is a series of three paintings on the life of St. Jerome including The Vision of St. Augustine c.1502 in which St. Jerome is depicted only as light entering the room and bathing St. Augustine, various objects and his small dog in a naturalistic gentle illumination.
A G-D writes 'This illumination is at once physical and metaphysical, both the light of the everyday world and the light of God. Yet because Carpaccio treated the light naturalisticly, resisting the temptation to place some phantasm of St. Jerome standing in the sun, the gentle glow which bathes the saint's face symbolizes all that we cannot see but can only sense. This light seems to irradiate Augustine from within as well as illuminate him from without, transfiguring him even as it models his features with such objective clarity. Carpaccio signed the picture in Latin, suggesting his own humanistic learning: 'VICTOR CARPATIVS FINGEBAT'. 'Fingebat' not 'pingebat' -created, not painted - as if the artist wanted to hint at his own belief that in making it he had, Leonardo-like, created something magical and even god-like'. (p.236)

Father and Son
The artists workshops in Venice were less competitive that those of Florence, and rather than rejecting what had gone before for something new, sought more to learn from the past and to build upon it. Jacob Bellini one of the unsung heroes of Venetian art was the father of Gentile (1429-1407) and Giovanni (1431/6 - 1516). Jacobo has left two precious albums one in the British Museum, the other in the Louvre which illustrate his own ideas and his wide learning on artistic styles and perspective etc. His two sons built on their fathers foundation, and their work can be seen, Gentile in The Procession in the Piazza St. Marco (as seen above) and Giovanni in his altarpiece The Baptism of Christ. His work recalls that of Leonardo da Vinci, but whereas Leonardo's landscapes display his science and knowledge about the world, Bellini's are more the realms of poetry. Of the 'Baptism' AG-D writes '...it is evident that the picture is not driven by empiricism but by the force of religious emotion'. (p.247)

In Arcadia
In 1505 Giogione painted La Tempesta, a secular landscape which appears linked to the re-emergence in the second half of the 15th Century of the classical literacy genre of the pastoral. In the late 1480's Jacobo Sannazaro had published a pastoral romance called L'Arcadia, which was to influence European literature for the next two hundred years. Both this work and the painting suggest a retreat to the pastoral in the classical and the Renaissance mind alike to a 'lost golden world of untroubled rustic simplicity'. (p.248). Written around 1470 by the Dominican friar Franceco Colonna and printed in 1499 was the pastoral Hypnerotomachia Poliphilli which includes a hundred and sixty-five woodcuts. Part romance, part pastoral, part achitectural fantasy, it seems to take us closer than any other literary source to the meanings of Giogioni's Tempesta. A meditation on the transience of love and all the things of this world. In the lightening and storm in the background 'you may even hear the distant thunder of romanticism'. (p.249)

The Decisive Moment.
This section is primarily about Titian and follows on from the development of the landscape and secular painting. Titian seemed to share a close affinity with the work of Giorgione as can be seen in both their paintings of Venus. Giorgione Sleeping Venus and Titian Venus of Urbino. Titian seems to embody the move of the artist to that of entrepreneur and more than any other artist seems to have created the 'art market'. The buying and collecting of art works saw his work owned by kings, princes and popes. AG-D writes 'More than any other Renaissance artist, he [Titian] shaped the future of painting. Rubens, Poussin, Rembrandt, Veláquez, Watteau, Chardin, Delacroix, Constable, Monet, Degas - all learned to paint in the school of Titian. His painting became the raw material of painting itself'. (p.257)

The Return to the Land

From the mid fifteenth century the Venetians expanded their inland empire with cities such as Vincenza and Padua. In their inland empire know as the Veneto, rich Venetians built a new form of architecture developed by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). In his architecture a notion gathered momentum that a building might itself be as perfectly formed and as covetable as a work of art. Within these buildings they sought to recreate some of the trompe l'oeil images found in Roman villas. Paolo Veronese (c.1528-88) created such scenes and opened up ceilings into skies and peopled the house with figures.

The Uses of Spectacle
The work of both artists and architects embraced the use of spectacle in the second half of the 16th Century. This featured artists such as Veronese. Increased theatricality can be seen in the paintings of Tintoretto (real name, Jacobo Robusti 1519-94) in his cycle of paintings for The Scuola Grande di San Rocco include his powerful twelve metre wide depiction of the crucifixion.


AG-D writes 'The most engulfing of all Tintoretto's works is the vast billowing vision of Paradise which he and assistants created on the far wall of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doges' Palace between 1588 and 1592. It is a cauldron of saints, divinities, angels and the blessed. A painting so large that it cannot be taken in at a single glance, a picture which exceeds the range of the human optic, can seem to swirl us into its very structure. This was a truth on which the greatest artists of the Baroque and Rococo would build. But Tintoretto's painting also seems to look forward further in time, to anticipate the panoramic scale of so much modern painting. Jackson Pollock's 'allover' canvases of the 1940's and 1950's - pictures infused perhaps not with a dream of paradise, but with inchoate pantheist yearning - are variations on a Tintoretto theme'. (p.264)

Venice as Idea
The independence of the Venetian artists can be seen typified in the work of El Greco (real name Domenikos Theotokopoulos 1541-1614), who spent some of his formative years in the city. He rejects the styles of Michelangelo, Raphael and others. AG-D writes 'El Greco spent his maturity in Spain but was always, essentially, a painter formed by Venice. He was the first artist of his kind - a moral rather than geographical Venetian, so to speak - but he was only the first of many. Rubens was to be a Venetian living in Antwerp. Delacroix was to be a Venetian living in Paris. Turner was to be a Venetian living in London. By the end of the sixteenth century and perhaps ever afterwards, Venice was no longer a place. It had become an attitude: a state of mind'.(p.165/6)

Pieta
This chapter closes with Titian's Pieta and highlights the divisions between the artists of Rome and Florence who favoured drawing and the Venetians who favoured colour, but concluded that both are part of the same and that 'The power and the depth of painting comes from the fact that it is, indeed, made by man using his hands'. (p.269)