Veniceblog

Giorgio Vasari Online

Over dinner in Rome in 1546, a certain Cardinal Farnese asked artist and architect Giorgio Vasari to assemble what came to be known as "The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects."

It was a a gift to art historians that still shines today. Vasari knew many of his subjects personally, and his first-hand and near-first-hand account of their genius, virtues and mortal frailties has an almost journalistic feeling at times.

There are English translations of Vasari's work online in several locations, but here's one notable place to have a look (new translations that are growing week by week). Venetian artists and architects, as well as outsiders who have important works in Venice are well represented, including the Bellini's, Sansovino, Michele Sanmicheli, and Palladio, among others.

Remains Of Original Campanile Found?

A tiny squib in the Gazzettino suggests that the remains of the Campanile of San Marco has been found in the water about three miles "from San Nicolo'" on the Lido. As you likely know, the original collapsed in 1902 (as oft-seen in the famed but mostly fake photo you see everywhere). Perhaps the rubble was tossed in the Adriatic.

I'll watch to see if there's more on the story. Interesting.

Glass Magic Made Venetian Painting Shine

In an effort to unlock the riddle of how it was that the paintings of Venetian Renaissance masters had a "special glow" about them, Barbara Berrie, senior conservation scientist at the National Gallery of Art, trained an electron microscope on works by Tintoretto and Lotto. The secret revealed: glass mixed into the pigments.

Barrie had developed the hypothesis after Louisa Matthew, an art historian at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.,  did some sleuthing around in the Venetian State Archives. There she found some curious inventory records dating to 1534 taken from the shop of  Domenico de Gardignano, a Venetian color merchant. The documents suggested that some of his pigments had contained ground glass, something modern scholars had absolutely no clue about.

I guess if anyone were to use glass innovatively this way, it would be the Venetians, given their mastery of art glass. The pre-Venetians  -- the Roman subjects of places like nearby Aquilea -- were likewise glass geniuses, and the speculation is that they brought their secrets to the lagoon when they fled the mauraders in the early part of the first millenium. Perhaps glass in pigments was one of them.

Want to learn more? Follow this link to a story in Science News Online.

Lasse Hallstrom's Casanova To Premiere at the Venice Film Festival

Veniceblog reader J. has just sent word that Lasse Hallstrom's Casanova will be unveiled at the Venice Film Festival on September 3rd. It should be released in the US around Christmas. (UPDATE: the reviews are trickling in. See this post.)

We've been tracking this production ... folks have sent me pix of the filming in progress, sets, actors in costume and the like (see this link, for example). The Casanova production company actually contacted me and used some of my ambient audio recordings of the city to guide sound design for the film

Some interesting blurbs from press material:

Casanova is, after an interval of almost 30 years, the first film by a major production company to be filmed entirely in Italy (and more importantly in Venice).

"We have been courting the producers of this film, which shows off Venice as an extraordinary movie set, ever since last year", declared the Festival's Director, Marco Müller. "It is the perfect film for a festive occasion; it is a fun, unrestrained work, like the classic Hollywood cloak-and-dagger films, but with a robust dose of modern, irreverent modernity."

(That's a relief. I hate old-fashioned, out of date modernity.)

The film stars Heath Ledger as the title horndog himself, along with the long-suffering Sienna Miller (Jude .. dude ... how could you?) as his love interest. You've also got  Jeremy Irons, Lena Olin and Oliver Platt to round out the cast.

I've got my fingers crossed on this one. I'll follow the early reviews and let you know.

By the way, if you're in town during the Film Festival, by all means go. It's a total trip, and not at all difficult to navigate. Tickets are reasonably easy to get, and available in convenient places throughout the city.

Astounding British Library Engravings of the Regatta Storica

I remembered reading somewhere that the British Library had been quietly scanning in the pages of rare books in its collection and posting them on the net. I was stuck for an hour at the SFO airport a couple days ago, waiting for a plane, so I fired up the notebook, latched onto a wireless network, and poked around the British Library. I stumbled into a section called Treasures in Full, containing miracles like an ultra-high-res scan of the Magna Carta and manuscripts from Chaucer. Down the page there was an intriguing link called Renaissance Festival Books: “253 books about festivals and ceremonies in Europe from 1475 to 1700”.

Since they knew how to throw some hellacious parties, I figured maybe there would be something in there about the Venetians. I banged a few times on their search engine. Up came 11 books about Venice ... mostly texts in Italian, with sparse illustrations … fancy initial caps … flourishes, but nothing graphically dramatic.

Except, that is, for a book titled “Visit to Venice of Ernst August, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg”, published in 1685. Sounds like a colossal snore, but oh baby.

Deep inside were a series of unbelievably detailed, incredibly large engravings of the Historic Regatta (Regatta Storica). I’ve seen Guardi, Canaletto and other paintings and illustrations of the Regatta before, but these pictures completely reset my vision of what the pageant was all about. Honestly, it looks like sci-fi.

The first illustration is a panoramic fold-out that takes in the Canal Grande from Ca’ Foscari all the way to the end of the Riva degli Schiavoni. The page is at least 20 feet long, and depicts all the major architecture along the Canalazzo along with dozens, perhaps hundreds of boats. Be warned, the file is huge. Thankfully, the British Library’s servers are zippy and the image appears via broadband in seconds. The link to the file is here. (Remember, Windows Internet Explorer usually resizes/shrinks super high-res images in the browser window. To see the full hi-res pix, double click on the image until you see a little orange square in the corner, then click on the orange square. Zoom. Big.)

Below are a couple reduced, tiny fragments from the massive panoramic ... though you really have to see the full image to appreciate it.

After the pan are a series of engravings of details of individual regatta barges (called peotas) that seem to have sailed out of a baroque psilocybin dream/nightmare.

To see the full-up image of the sea-monster-peota  shown above, click here.

There are 9 other killer engravings, all linked below.
The peota di Venere
The peota di Marte
The peota di Glauco
The peota di Diana
The peota di Giunone
The peota di Pallade
The boat -- a Margherota -- that carried Ernst August
15 other peote that took part in the regatta
A later illustration by Andrea Zucchi of a peota from the regatta of 1716 (somehow bound into the book.

This year, by the way, the annual Historic Regatta takes place on Sunday, September 5th along the Canal Grande. It’s a wonderful spectacle, but it looks downright folksy next to the old-school pageants of the Serenissima.

Resist the Urge

In the 1955 film, Summertime, set in Venice, there's a scene where Kate Hepburn takes a step backward  while posing for a photo and falls into a canal in Campo San Barnaba. She later blamed the dip for an eye infection that is apocryphally said to have plagued her for the rest of her life. But according to author Kevin Brownlow, La Hepburn used to routinely swim in the canals after dusk, and  "her attempt to blame the film company for her ailment was just a bluff" .

Bluff or not, swimming in a rio is massively bad idea. Plainly put: the canals are Venice's toilet. While there are plans under consideration to change this, raw sewage mainlines right into the acqua, as it has for centuries. The tide sorta scrubs the waterways clean (in theory) twice a day ... but still ... you get the picture.

I've seen kids on Sacca Fisola in the middle of a heatwave jumping in the Canale Della Giudecca. But that's essentially a deep-channel river, so most of them likely lived to tell about it. Take a dip in a slow-running, shallow canal, however, and you're splashing and follicking with leviathan quantities of your good pal Escherichia coli.

Lord Byron used to prove his manliness with epic nude swims from the Lido to the end of the Canal Grande. Then again, he died at 36.

Despite all this, occasional crank tourists, amazingly, still strip down to their Speedos and make like vaporettos. Veniceblog reader David, from the UK, just drew my attention to a recent news report from the Italian press agency ANSA which descibed a  31-year-old Australian tourista who:

"was apparently an excellent swimmer and quite ready to cover the half kilometre between the Rialto bus stop and his hotel in Piazza San Marco in the water - even if it was 4 o’clock in the morning."

Sober, no less.

The cops fished him out. He was supposedly looking for a shortcut to his hotel.

Orwell's Guide to Venice

Last July Antonio Benacchio, or the “Mad Hammerer”, as he came to be called, pulverized art and architecture at three sites in the historic center of Venice: a couple capitols on the Doge’s Palace, statues of St. Mark and St. Francis on the façade of Il Redentore, and statues of the Madonna and St. Peter at San Pietro di Castello.

Antonio was nabbed after a few days and was sent to a mental institution. It’s amazing it took as long as it did to find him. Hardly a master criminal, he walked right up to the Doge’s Palace at 10:30 PM and wailed on it in front of witnesses at the peak of tourist season.

I had mistakenly believed that, at least in the Piazza, there were surveillance cameras in place that would have captured the action. Not so. At the time, I wrote that it appeared that the Pringles cans at your local 7-11 are better watched over and protected than some of humankind's greatest works of art.

That is about to change. The first of 17 security cameras are due to be installed this week, and Venice will have electronic anti-nimrod technology for the first time ever. It may be as much about terrorism as it is about art. In recent weeks there have been a number of alerts and false alarms regarding bombs and the like. That the cameras are finally going up on the heels of the London subway bombings may not be a coincidence, given the phenomenal role that video played in the apprehension of the failed second-wave attackers.

By the way, my civil-libertarian self and my acutely paranoid self had an argument about all this. My acutely paranoid self won handily (as it always does).

Un Bagno di Folla

I got a fair amount of email about my post on new/old Venice mayor, Massimo Cacciari, specifically his apparent distain for Venice’s mass tourism. It’s the total opposite of what we expect mayors to do in the US. Here, in towns large and small, mayors are generally indiscriminate boosters of the “assets” of their cities, from fitness to hold the Olympics, the joy of local artichokes, the marvel of world’s tallest thermometer, or the wonders of a new industrial park built on a toxic dump.

If you’re looking for a balanced, objective picture of a city, look elsewhere. A mayor is the last person you should ask. They have to get re-elected.

Tourism is business, and business fuels jobs, and jobs mean votes. So it’s almost unheard -- politically suicidal — for a mayor to advocate less tourism. Is Cacciari a crank? After all, the tax revenues from the tourist trade no doubt pay a good chunk his salary.

And nobody wants to feel bad about visiting a place they love. I know you probably don’t feel like a scourge. Most days, neither do I.

I think that’s what rubbed some Veniceblog readers the wrong way: the implication that tourists (i.e., us) are a blight. Little Attilas, sacking and marauding in Nikes and fanny packs. Are we the enemy of Venice, for God’s sake? Impossible. We love the place. Excuse us for wanting to visit the most beautiful spot on the planet. We’ll just summer at the lake instead.

Let me set the record straight: Venice needs tourism. Most Venetians know this, including Cacciari, and do not see tourists as locusts. But there is a growing feeling that character of tourism in Venice is something needs to change, a feeling I share.

To oversimplify, it’s about too many people in too little space. You know the drill. Put forty kids in a classroom designed for twenty. Put ten people in a life-raft that accommodates five. Overfill a prison. Oversell a rock concert. We all agree this is bad. Anytime you cram too many living things into too small a space, you’ve got trouble on your hands. Often a fight.

If you have spent much time in Venice, you know that there are many, many occasions when the rising tide of humanity out-rivals the rising Adriatic. Endless queues that look like depression-era breadlines leading into the Basilica. The wide Paglia Bridge (overlooking the Bridge of Sighs) so jammed with humanity that it is all but uncrossable. Vaporettos that seem like refugee escape crafts, riding with their gunwales inches above the water, every nanometer filled. Calles so overfilled, city officials are forced to turn them in to one-way streets on an emergency basis.

There’s a phrase in Italian: “un bagno di folla” … essentially, “bathing in people”.

Now it gets tricky. If there are too many people, who, exactly, should be prevented/discouraged from coming in? And how? It’s not us, of course. Right? We’re the good guys. What should the city do? Field a lottery? An entrance exam? First come, first served? Charge an entrance fee? Reservations only? What?

My opinion, and that of many Venetians, is that there is a type of tourist the city could do without: ignorant ones. The day-trippers, many or most of who arrive in massive cruise ships. To many, many of these folks, Venice is merely another port-of-call. An amusement park that is there to entertain. They come to live the clichés … to say they’ve done it. Their knowledge of where they are -- their interest for understanding the context and history of the city -- is non-existent. They consume Venice like a box of bon-bons, in a single gluttonous session. They become the temporary majority population, and drown out the authentic character of the place. Venetians and travelers who came for enrichment seem like anonymous extras on a set. It’s morphed into Disneyland alright, complete with costumed characters, concessions, lines and rides.

This is why we loved living on La Giudecca. It was not a “popular ride”. Venetian life plays out there still (though like all things authentically Venetian, it’s endangered.) We tended to avoid the “bagno di folla” in San Marco during the day. To tell you the truth, we often laid low during the amateur hour of Carnevale, as did many Venetians we knew. Likewise, it’s one of the reasons I was compelled to buy a boat in Venice: to see the city authentically through the eyes of a pilot and to feel it from a hand on the tiller. I love the city in the dark hours of the morning, when you wander the calles with the ghosts and the cats. Or in the fog of November, when sensible hedonists are in Jamaica or Hawaii. That’s when the city springs back from the crushing weight of the mobs and you’ll see and feel something real.

Now perhaps Cacciari’s “don’t come to Venice” campaign begins to make more sense. (For the record, the campaign, which hasn’t been in place for years, was somewhere between tongue-in-cheek and half-serious.) He wasn’t telling us to leave the city alone. He was trying to repel those who were trying to make the choice between Knott’s Berry Farm, Great Adventure, Disneyworld or Venice.

And I’m with him.

Comments?