Venice: S. Giorgio and the Giudecca

 

In 2010 I presented my paper on Giorgione's Tempest at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America held that year in Venice. The venue was a converted monastery on the island of S. Giorgio Maggiore right across from the Piazetta. Here is part of Edward Hutton's account of his time spent visiting S. Giorgio and the Giudecca. He often toured on a gondola.


Let no one imagine, however, that when he has seen these two churches he has done with the islands of S. Giorgio and the Giudecca or exhausted all that they have to show. No impression could be more false than this, for the wise traveler will find in their byways more of the real Venetian life as it must have been lived by the common people for many centuries than he is likely to come upon anywhere else in Venice, who has not wandered down their deserted alleys along the great sea-wall, or waited there for sunset, looking out over the wide and lonely lagoon to the Lidi and the sea, does not know Venice at all, but has been deceived by a city which more than any other in Italy has become a showplace for Germans and the barbarians and the sentimentalists of all ages.

For me at least the Giudecca has a charm I find nowhere else; for beautiful though the Riva or the Fondamenta delle Zattere can be in the early dawn and morning or in the evening twilight, neither the one nor the other has the gift of quietness or any garden at all, save the Giardino Publica at the Riva’s end, which, as one soon finds, is rather a park than a garden. But in the Giudecca all that you miss in Venice to-day may be found. You cross the often turbulent tide of the great sea lane that divides it from Venice, you creep all up the wonderful great road where the big ships lie at anchor and you may hear on a summer evening so many of the songs of the world, you pass quite by the Redentore and S. Eufemia della Giudecca, which stands up so grandly against the gold of the sky, you come to the Rio di S. Biagio and turn into it, quite full, as it seems, with fishing-boats, its quays laden with sea tackle and nets and baskets and the ropes and gear of the ships, among which the children play the games they have always played, dressed in rags of all sorts of colours, their dear tousled heads bending over toys, as we say, the great symbols of life after all and the affairs of men, a tiny ship or a doll, and I know not what else, intent upon their innocent business.  In the doorways, in the windows, their mothers gossip and laugh softly, awaiting their men, whom you find everywhere on board these many little vessels, mending nets or sowing at a sail or stepping a new mast or splicing an oar or painting a name.

Your gondola passes quite among these humble folk; their wide eyes of the sea gaze almost shyly into yours, you hear the children’s voices, a boy with bare feet runs towards you begging for soldi, a great bare-legged girl of sixteen insolently throws you a flower, the women stop their talk to watch you, the sailors give you greeting, till suddenly you pass out from between the houses, the quays and their various life, the noise and tumult are gone, and before you the great grey lagoon stretches away and away forever … the whole world here is caught in a smiling and serene light, a touch of gold is on the blue and grey of the waters that lap softly or impatiently about your boat as it turns in answer to the oar. As in a dream you glide along the seashore of the Giudecca.

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Venice: Three Churches

 

Edward Hutton's Venice and Venetia is a guidebook although an extremely well-informed and personal one. He walked and boated throughout the city's sestiere or districts, as well as the nearby islands. He loved the lagoons and the hidden byways but paid particular attention to its many churches. Below are descriptions of three out of the way churches that represent three different eras. * 

S. Francesco della Vigna

The Franciscans rebuilt it in 1534 with a façade by Palladio, and an interior by Jacopo Sansovino… It contains several fine pictures… but nothing to compare for a moment with the glorious enthroned Madonna by Frat’ Antonio da Negroponte, painted in the middle of the fifteenth century, which hangs in the right transept. This is a masterpiece I would walk many miles to see, and for which I would leave any sacred picture by the later great masters of Venice. It has everything that their works so conspicuously lack, and in every way is what we have learnt in Tuscany to expect an altarpiece of the Madonna to be. It is as though before our eyes the canticle of the Magnificat had become visible, as though in a vision we had seen our hearts’ desire. (102)

S. Maria dei Miracoli

... close by at the other end of the Campo stands one of the most beautiful architectural treasures of the city--I mean the church of S. Maria dei Miracoli. This was built in 1480 by Angelo Amadi, the nephew of Elena Badoer, "the most beautiful Venetian of her day,"who lived close by in this quarter. He built it to receive a picture of the Madonna supposed to be miraculous, which Francesco Amadi, his uncle, the husband of the beautiful Elena, had painted. ... There is no other Renaissance church in Venice to compare with this; both within and without it is altogether lovely, nor can we sufficiently praise its quadrangular domes choir uplifted above the nave, its beautiful ambones, the fine barrel vaulting with its gilded coffers by Girolamo da Treviso, nor the rich marble and carvings with which Pietro Lombardo adorned it. (117)

 

S. Maria dei Miracoli, interior

S. Maria Assunta, or I Gesuiti.

As one passes along the Fondamenta one presently sees the great statues of the façade of the Church of the Gesuiti up against the sky. It is but a step down a street on the right to the church door. As we see it, the church could, I suppose, have been created by no one but the Jesuits; it is so utterly barbarous in its flaming vulgarity and crude, insolen assurance, its flamboyant splendor. … their society was suppressed in 1773 in Venice and their convent turned into a barracks. They returned, however, in 1844. Like the cancer, to which Cardinal Manning likened them, they are hard to extirpate, yet with perseverance even this will be accomplished, and the church from being a Jesuit sect become once more Catholic. (120)

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* Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia, 1911.

Venice: Piazza and Campanile

I believe it is best to arrive in Venice by train. The view as you exit the station is magnificent. On our first visit my wife and I shared a water taxi with some others down the Grand Canal to the Piazza. It is indescribable but no one has done a better job than Edward Hutton.* 

Canaletto--Eighteenth Century

The Piazza di S. Marco, in fact, is not merely the centre of modern or of medieval Venice; in many ways it is Venice herself. It not only contains the most famous and the most splendid buildings of the city—the Church, the Palace, the Government offices, the Library, the Bell Tower, and the Clock Tower of Venice—but it is the universal meeting place and the principal gateway of the calli, the canals, the lagoons, and the sea. All that is meant by the word Venezia is in truth there summed up and expressed.

These considerations would lead us to regard it, even though we did not know it, as the most famous Piazza in Italy and in the world; the most famous and perhaps the most beautiful. Not one of the spacious Piazzas we know so well in Rome, in Florence, in Siena, in Milan, or in Naples can be compared with it either for renown or for beauty; and as we tell over their names we have to admit that, after all, they are of no importance beside the Piazza of St. Mark. Even in Rome, where it would seem we might surely expect to find something at least to compare with it, there is, in fact, nothing; for the Piazza of S. Pietro is a mere vestibule to S. Peter’s church, and has very little to do with the life of the city; the Piazza Venezia is only a cul de sac and moreover a ruin, while the Piazza Colonna is just a gap in the Corso, the Piazza di Spagna a wilderness of strangers. There is no Piazza in Rome which may be said to be the centre of the city, or, to sum it up and in fact to stand as a symbol for it in the imagination of mankind, as the Piazza of S. Mark does even today sum up and symbolize Venice. (84-85)

 Campanile. 

But the great treasure of the Piazza was the Campanile, which came to so tragic an end in July, 1902…. That tragic day, when the Campanile rather subsided than fell, will never be forgotten by any who witnessed it, The whole of Venice seemed to be assembled in the Piazza, and very many were weeping. Men wrung their hands in frantic helplessness while the noblest tower in Italy sank, as it seemed, into the sea, weary with age. The excavations which were undertaken previous to the rebuilding, now happily nearly completed, and the scientific examination of the debris have shown that it was no insecurity in the foundations that brought the Campanile down, but rather the great old age of the bricks, many of which were little more than dust, blown through and through by the sea wind.

Happily the Campanile is now practically rebuilt—happily for to think of Venice without the Campanile of S. Mark is to us all almost an impossibility. It was not the Piazza alone that the famous bell-tower dominated, but all Venice across whose silent ways that bell, sounded by the watchman on the summit every quarter of an hour by day and night, seemed like an assurance of safety, of our civilization, of Europe, and our Faith. For it was, of course, first and foremost a belfry, and the great bells, that to some extent doubtless contributed by their vast weight to the fall, were the sweetest and noblest voices in Venice. That belfry that Buono made in 1510 was a beautiful open loggia of four arches on each face, which overlooked all Venice and the islands and might be seen from Asolo; for the height of the tower was very great, 323 feet on a base of 42 square feet. (89-90)

Modern view

* Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, 1911.   

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Venice: S. Marco

In Venice and Venetia Edward Hutton began his exploration of the fabled city and its environs at S. Marco, the incredibly beautiful chapel of the Doges.

  

If St. Mark’s strikes us first by the Byzantine character of its architecture, its crowd of domes, the vast width of its façade in comparison with its height, it impresses us next, I think, by its strangely lovely colour, the gold and blue and green and red of the mosaics, colour which changes with every change of the sky, which is one thing in the blaze of a summer morning and quite another on an autumn afternoon after rain, when the sky is still full of cloud and the wind comes in melancholy gusts out of the pale gold of a watery sunset. I do not know under the influence of which sky, or at what hour of the day or of the night the church is most beautiful; I only know it is always beautiful: in the golden summer heat or standing amid the winter snow, or in the spring or late autumn when the Piazza has been flooded by the gale in the Adriatic; but I think I love it best when the sky clears in the evening, after a day of rain in early autumn, when some delicate and pure light has suddenly fallen upon the world, and the great façade seems for a moment to be made of pearl and mother of pearl, to reflect every colour and shadow of a beauty that belongs to the sea….

At such an hour in the flagstones of the Piazza, still wet after the day’s rain, the great façade backed by its domes, the flagstaves that stand before it on the pavement, are reflected there as a ship might be at the same mysterious hour to the grey-blue sea; it is as though some vast ship, only by conduct of some star, made her way upon the waters; a ship of pearl in which a thousand vague colours burn and fade and are merged into the grey twilight into the night and it is gone.*

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*Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, 1911, pp. 49-50.

Venice: S. Zaccaria Altarpiece

 The church of S. Zaccaria in Venice is situated not far behind S. Marco and the Doge's Palace. As Edward Hutton noted it is gloomy inside but when you drop a coin in a box, Giovanni Bellini's masterpiece lights up in dazzling splendor. It is wonderful to see a painting where it was originally meant to be. Notice how Bellini's faux columns match the real columns. Here is Hutton's description.

The present church, with its beautiful façade, dates from the fifteenth century, and is a spacious though rather gloomy building. Eight Doges lie therin, but its great treasure is the famous altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini of the Madonna and Child enthroned with four saints. It is one of the finest of his works. Completed in 1505, it is in the new manner which came to Bellini in his age as a new vision of the world, caught perhaps from the enthusiasm of his young disciples, who were to revolutionize painting. Our Lady and the Holy Child are still enthroned in that niche with which we are so familiar, but there is something new in the picture which assures us, as it did Vasari, that it is a work in the “modern” manner. Perhaps we find it in the figure of S. Lucia, who stands on the right of the throne, her fair hair lying all gold across her shoulders, the lighted lamp in her hand, the curved palm branch, too, the sign of her martyrdom. Beside her is S. Jerome, his Bible open before him, the father of monasticism. To the left stand S. Catherine of Alexandria and S. Peter. *

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*Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, New York, 1911, p. 96.

Venice: Frari

At the time Edward Hutton visited S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in the first decade of the twentieth century, Titian's Assunta had been removed and placed in the Accademia. Nevertheless, two of the greatest paintings of the Venetian Renaissance were still in place. Here is his description.* 

Giovanni Bellini: Pesaro Altarpiece

Here, too, stood one of the great treasures of the church, an altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini, painted in 1488, one of the loveliest of his works. It still carries its original Renaissance frame. In the midst is the Blessed virgin, enthroned, with her little Son, standing on her knee. At her feet are two music making angels of pure delight, while on the side panels are four splendid saints on guard—S. Peter, S. Nicholas, S. Paul, and S. Benedict. Nothing that was ever in the church can have been lovelier than this quiet altarpiece. … (134-135)

Titian" Pesaro Atarpiece

 The great and beautiful thing which recalls us to this aisle of the Frari again and again is Titian’s famous Madonna del Pesaro….Under a vast and beautiful Renaissance arch, through which we see a great sky full of snow-white clouds, between two mighty pillars, the Madonna sits enthroned, her little Son standing on her knee laughing with and blessing S. Francis, behind whom is S. Anthony. Bending a little to her right, Madonna holds her child with both hands gently, firmly, and receives the homage of Bishop Jacopo, who is introduced by S. Peter, beyond whom a bearded warrior, leading a Turk and a Moor in chains, uprears the standard of the Borgia. On the right of the picture beneath S. Francis kneel the family of the Bishop, three old men, perhaps his brothers, a youth, and a fair-haired child who gazes sweetly out of the canvas, while above one of those great white clouds has sailed into the great portico across the height of the pillars, and upon it, like children on a toy ship, are two winged angelini bearing the cross. I suppose there is no other work of Titian in Venice which is so consummate a work of art or so wonderfully original a composition as this. Its humanity and quietness, the beauty of its colour too, its inexhaustible perfection are the chief reasons why one continually returns to the Frari. (134-137)

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Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia,  London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911.

* The Assunta is now in its rightful place above the main altar. It had been removed to the Academmia in 1816 but restored to the Frari in 1916. Its 21 panels measuring 690 x 360 cm were restored in 1994.

Venice: Tintoretto's Paradise.

 On his visit to the Doge's palace Edward Hutton saw Tintoretto's Paradise but expressed his disappointment. *

I confess at once that while in the Antecollegio Tintoretto seems to me to be one of the great painters in the world, a true poet and creator of beauty, here I am altogether at a loss. The vast canvas, almost black and altogether without order or arrangement in its composition, means absolutely nothing to me, it moves me not at all, I get from it no pleasure, nor do I understand it…. For others this picture may be, as I gather it was for Ruskin, a profound revelation of beauty and joy. Me it cannot affect. I am, let me confess it, merely confused and tired by its dim ocean of figures… and if this be Heaven I had looked for a happier place and one full of light. Who for a moment would exchange this our dear world for that far ocean of murky gloom? Let us go to the great window and standing there look at the sunlight lying on the city, the dancing waves of the lagoon, the happy morning joyful along the Schiavone, the shady trees of the gardens, the adventurous Fortuna, the cold magnificent Salute, the joy of S. Giorgio of the rosy tower, the life of the ships at the Zattere quays, the ways of the little people in the Piazzeta. Is not this a heaven of heavens in comparison with that solemn  black chaos within doors?—that pretentious and prideful study in anatomy and movement that has no thought at all of anything in the world or above it save the wonderful capacity of Messer Jacopo Tintoretto? Yet he is but typical of them all. After the Bellini Venice neve possessed a religious painter. Not one of them all, even the greatest, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, is anything but a mediocrity beside Angelico, or Gentile da Fabriano, or Sassetta, or half a dozen Sienese I could name. **

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* I can certainly understand his feelings. Often, I have stood in Museums in Italy and elsewhere and preferred to turn my eyes from the masterpieces on the walls to look our the windows at the scenery. The view from the Uffizi in Florence is one example, as is the view from the Ca' Doro in Venice.

**Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia,  London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911, p. 82. 

Edward Hutton: Venetian Renaissance

 

Below find Edward Hutton's thoughts on Giorgione and other great painters of the Venetian Renaissance. The painting he refers to as the soldier and the gypsy is usually called The Tempest but I believe its subject is the Rest of the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt.

For the truth is that Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto are each an absolutely new impulse in painting. Fundamentally they owe nothing, accidentally even very little, to their predecessors; and if, as we have said, Titian and Tintoretto were able to find full expression because of the work of Giorgione, it is only in the way that Shakespeare and Milton may be said to owe something… to Spencer;… the work of Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto are absolutely new things in the world, the result of a new impulse and a new vision, individual and personal to the last degree, owing little to any school and making little of tradition. (149)

Giorgione: Tempest

For with Giorgione (1478-1510), the pupil of Giovanni Bellini…we have a new creation in Art; he is the first painter of the true “easel picture,” the picture which is neither painted for church nor to adorn a great public hall, but to hang on the wall of a room in a private house for the delight of the owner. For Giorgione the individual exists, and it is for him, for the most part, he works, and thus stands on the threshold of the modern world…. In these short thirty-two years, however, he found time to re-create Venetian painting, to return it to its origins, and to make the career of his great fellow-pupil, Titian, whom he may be said to have formed, possible. ... (160)

 It is almost the same with the Gipsy and the Soldier of Prince Giovanelli, only there, I think, anyone who has ever doubted that Giorgione was born at Castelfranco has his answer, for it is that little towered city beside the Musone that we see in the background, under that gathering storm sweeping down from the hills. (233)

 [Castelfranco] This little city…is the happy possessor of what will ever remain, I suppose, the work that is most certainly his very own—I mean the altarpiece of the Madonna enthroned with her little Son between S. Francis and S. Liberale. This glorious picture…is one of the very few Venetian pictures…which possess that serenity and peace, something in truth spellbound, that is necessary to and helps to make what I may call a religious picture. For something must be added to beauty, something must be added to art, to achieve that end which Perugino seems to have reached so easily, and which almost every Sienese painter knew by instinct how to attain. That quality is serenity, the something spellbound we find here. And Giorgione is the last Venetian master to possess that secret. Is it not the same in music? God forbid that I should claim that Palestrina is a greater master than Mozart, any more than I should claim that Giorgione is greater than Titian. It remains, however, that just as Giorgione, the Sienese and Perugino, to name no others, attained to this effect, while Titian, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, and a host of very great masters  could not, so Palestrina, Byrd, and di Lasso could achieve it, yet Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest never once in all their work--something has gone out of the world of which we are ignorant, only we miss it more and more in looking back on the beauty that was in the hearts of our fathers. (233-234)

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*Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia,  London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911. 

Venice: Piazza and Campanile

I believe it is best to arrive in Venice by train. The view as you exit the station is magnificent. On our first visit my wife and I shared a water taxi with some others down the Grand Canal to the Piazza. It is indescribable but no one has done a better job than Edward Hutton.* 

Canaletto--Eighteenth Century

The Piazza di S. Marco, in fact, is not merely the centre of modern or of medieval Venice; in many ways it is Venice herself. It not only contains the most famous and the most splendid buildings of the city—the Church, the Palace, the Government offices, the Library, the Bell Tower, and the Clock Tower of Venice—but it is the universal meeting place and the principal gateway of the calli, the canals, the lagoons, and the sea. All that is meant by the word Venezia is in truth there summed up and expressed.

These considerations would lead us to regard it, even though we did not know it, as the most famous Piazza in Italy and in the world; the most famous and perhaps the most beautiful. Not one of the spacious Piazzas we know so well in Rome, in Florence, in Siena, in Milan, or in Naples can be compared with it either for renown or for beauty; and as we tell over their names we have to admit that, after all, they are of no importance beside the Piazza of St. Mark. Even in Rome, where it would seem we might surely expect to find something at least to compare with it, there is, in fact, nothing; for the Piazza of S. Pietro is a mere vestibule to S. Peter’s church, and has very little to do with the life of the city; the Piazza Venezia is only a cul de sac and moreover a ruin, while the Piazza Colonna is just a gap in the Corso, the Piazza di Spagna a wilderness of strangers. There is no Piazza in Rome which may be said to be the centre of the city, or, to sum it up and in fact to stand as a symbol for it in the imagination of mankind, as the Piazza of S. Mark does even today sum up and symbolize Venice. (84-85)

 Campanile. 

But the great treasure of the Piazza was the Campanile, which came to so tragic an end in July, 1902…. That tragic day, when the Campanile rather subsided than fell, will never be forgotten by any who witnessed it, The whole of Venice seemed to be assembled in the Piazza, and very many were weeping. Men wrung their hands in frantic helplessness while the noblest tower in Italy sank, as it seemed, into the sea, weary with age. The excavations which were undertaken previous to the rebuilding, now happily nearly completed, and the scientific examination of the debris have shown that it was no insecurity in the foundations that brought the Campanile down, but rather the great old age of the bricks, many of which were little more than dust, blown through and through by the sea wind.

Happily the Campanile is now practically rebuilt—happily for to think of Venice without the Campanile of S. Mark is to us all almost an impossibility. It was not the Piazza alone that the famous bell-tower dominated, but all Venice across whose silent ways that bell, sounded by the watchman on the summit every quarter of an hour by day and night, seemed like an assurance of safety, of our civilization, of Europe, and our Faith. For it was, of course, first and foremost a belfry, and the great bells, that to some extent doubtless contributed by their vast weight to the fall, were the sweetest and noblest voices in Venice. That belfry that Buono made in 1510 was a beautiful open loggia of four arches on each face, which overlooked all Venice and the islands and might be seen from Asolo; for the height of the tower was very great, 323 feet on a base of 42 square feet. (89-90)

Modern view

* Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, 1911.   

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Edward Hutton: S. Zaccaria, Bellini Madonna

The church of S. Zaccaria in Venice is situated not far behind S. Marco and the Doge's Palace. As Hutton noted it is gloomy inside but when you drop a coin in a box, Giovanni Bellini's masterpiece lights up in dazzling splendor. It is wonderful to see a painting where it was originally meant to be. Notice how Bellini's faux columns match the real columns. Here is Edward Hutton's description.

The present church, with its beautiful façade, dates from the fifteenth century, and is a spacious though rather gloomy building. Eight Doges lie therin, but its great treasure is the famous altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini of the Madonna and Child enthroned with four saints. It is one of the finest of his works. Completed in 1505, it is in the new manner which came to Bellini in his age as a new vision of the world, caught perhaps from the enthusiasm of his young disciples, who were to revolutionize painting. Our Lady and the Holy child are still enthroned in that niche with which we are so familiar, but there is something new in the picture which assures us, as it did Vasari, that it is a work in the “modern” manner. Perhaps we find it in the figure of S. Lucia, who stands on the right of the throne, her fair hair lying all gold across her shoulders, the lighted lamp in her hand, the curved palm branch, too, the sign of her martyrdom. Beside her is S. Jerome, his Bible open before him, the father of monasticism. To the left stand S. Catherine of Alexandria and S. Peter. *

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*Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, New York, 1911, p. 96.

Edward Hutton visits the Frari

At the time Edward Hutton visited S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in the first decade of the twentieth century, Titian's Assunta had been removed and placed in the Accademia. Nevertheless, two of the greatest paintings of the Venetian Renaissance were still in place. Here is his description.* 

Giovanni Bellini: Pesaro Altarpiece

Here, too, stood one of the great treasures of the church, an altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini, painted in 1488, one of the loveliest of his works. It still carries its original Renaissance frame. In the midst is the Blessed virgin, enthroned, with her little Son, standing on her knee. At her feet are two music making angels of pure delight, while on the side panels are four splendid saints on guard—S. Peter, S. Nicholas, S. Paul, and S. Benedict. Nothing that was ever in the church can have been lovelier than this quiet altarpiece. … (134-135)

Titian" Pesaro Atarpiece

 The great and beautiful thing which recalls us to this aisle of the Frari again and again is Titian’s famous Madonna del Pesaro….Under a vast and beautiful Renaissance arch, through which we see a great sky full of snow-white clouds, between two mighty pillars, the Madonna sits enthroned, her little Son standing on her knee laughing with and blessing S. Francis, behind whom is S. Anthony. Bending a little to her right, Madonna holds her child with both hands gently, firmly, and receives the homage of Bishop Jacopo, who is introduced by S. Peter, beyond whom a bearded warrior, leading a Turk and a Moor in chains, uprears the standard of the Borgia. On the right of the picture beneath S. Francis kneel the family of the Bishop, three old men, perhaps his brothers, a youth, and a fair-haired child who gazes sweetly out of the canvas, while above one of those great white clouds has sailed into the great portico across the height of the pillars, and upon it, like children on a toy ship, are two winged angelini bearing the cross. I suppose there is no other work of Titian in Venice which is so consummate a work of art or so wonderfully original a composition as this. Its humanity and quietness, the beauty of its colour too, its inexhaustible perfection are the chief reasons why one continually returns to the Frari. (134-137)

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Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia,  London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911.

* The Assunta is now in its rightful place above the main altar. It had been removed to the Academmia in 1816 but restored to the Frari in 1916. Its 21 panels measuring 690 x 360 cm were restored in 1994.

Tintoretto's Paradise

On his visit to the Doge's palace Edward Hutton saw Tintoretto's Paradise but expressed his disappointment. *

I confess at once that while in the Antecollegio Tintoretto seems to me to be one of the great painters in the world, a true poet and creator of beauty, here I am altogether at a loss. The vast canvas, almost black and altogether without order or arrangement in its composition, means absolutely nothing to me, it moves me not at all, I get from it no pleasure, nor do I understand it…. For others this picture may be, as I gather it was for Ruskin, a profound revelation of beauty and joy. Me it cannot affect. I am, let me confess it, merely confused and tired by its dim ocean of figures… and if this be Heaven I had looked for a happier place and one full of light. Who for a moment would exchange this our dear world for that far ocean of murky gloom? Let us go to the great window and standing there look at the sunlight lying on the city, the dancing waves of the lagoon, the happy morning joyful along the Schiavone, the shady trees of the gardens, the adventurous Fortuna, the cold magnificent Salute, the joy of S. Giorgio of the rosy tower, the life of the ships at the Zattere quays, the ways of the little people in the Piazzeta. Is not this a heaven of heavens in comparison with that solemn  black chaos within doors?—that pretentious and prideful study in anatomy and movement that has no thought at all of anything in the world or above it save the wonderful capacity of Messer Jacopo Tintoretto? Yet he is but typical of them all. After the Bellini Venice neve possessed a religious painter. Not one of them all, even the greatest, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, is anything but a mediocrity beside Angelico, or Gentile da Fabriano, or Sassetta, or half a dozen Sienese I could name. **

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* I can certainly understand his feelings. Often, I have stood in Museums in Italy and elsewhere and preferred to turn my eyes from the masterpieces on the walls to look our the windows at the scenery. The view from the Uffizi in Florence is one example, as is the view from the Ca' Doro in Venice.

**Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia,  London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911, p. 82. 

Edward Hutton: Giorgione's Tempest

I first saw Giorgione's Tempest in 2005 in Edward Hutton's Venice and Venetia, originally published in 1911. Here is his description of Giorgione's mysterious painting as he saw it in the Palazzo Giovanelli before it's acquisition by the Italian state. He was describing the art treasures of the palace.*

Giorgione: The Tempest
Accademia, Venice **

Undoubtedly the greatest of these is a picture by Georgione, which has passed under various names--the Family of Georgione, or simply the Gipsy and the soldier--and which in itself sums up all that we mean by the Georgionesque in painting. There we see, in a delicious landscape of green and shady valley, of stream and ruin and towered country town, a woman nude but for a cape about her shoulders giving her breast to her child in the shadow of the trees by a quiet stream. On the other side of this jewelled brook a young man like a soldier--or is it a shepherd? --stands resting on a great lance or crook and seems to converse with her. Close by are the ruins of some classical building overgrown by moss and lichen and half hidden in the trees, and not far off up the stream in the sunset we see the towers and walls and roofs and domes of a little town with its bridge across the stream leading to the great old fortified gate of the place. But what chiefly attracts us in the work is something new we find there, an air of golden reality, something dreamlike too, though and wholly of this our world, an air of music which seems to come to us from the noise of the brook or the summer wind in the trees, or the evening bells that from far-off we seem to hear ring Ave Maria. One of the golden moments of life has been caught here for ever and perfectly expressed. Heaven, it seems, the kingdom of Heaven, is really to be found in our midst, and Giorgione has contrived a miracle the direct opposite of that of Angelico; for he found all the flowers of Tuscany and the byways of the world in far off Paradise, but Georgione has found Paradise itself here in our world. And we must remember that such a work as this was the true invention of Georgione. Before him there was nothing but church pictures. It is to him we owe these pieces which have nothing directly to do with religion, that were painted to light up the rooms we live in, to bring the sun, if you will, into a cabinet and all the sunset and the quiet out-of-doors into a rich man's study. Here, in truth, we have humanism and its essence, and for once perfectly understood and expressed.*

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* Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia, New York, 1911, p. 121-122.

**Note: Giorgione: La Tempesta. In the fall of 2005 I interpreted the subject of the Tempest as “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” In this interpretation all the major elements in the painting are identified. The nude woman nursing an infant is the Madonna. The man standing at the left functioning as an “interlocutor” is St. Joseph with his staff. The broken columns are commonplace in depictions of the “Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” The city in the background is Judea from where the Holy Family has fled but could also be equated with Padua during the Cambrai war. The scraggly plant in the foreground is identified as a “belladonna” a plant associated with witchcraft and the Devil. Even the bird on the distant rooftop is shown to be derived from a famous Psalm. A short essay was published in the Masterpiece column of the Wall St. Journal in May, 2006. In 2010 I presented a paper on the Tempest at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America held that year in Venice.