Venice: Pure City

surface of the canal, seem marvellous. There is a sparkling light, on winter days. But the characteristic of Venice is a pale soft light, like a drifting haze, powdered, part wave and part cloud. It is a pearly iridescent light wreathed in mist. It is drawn from the horizon and the sea as much as from the sun. It lends everything unity.

That is why Venetian painters have always been drawn to the gleam of light upon water, of the reflection of figures and of objects. There are many mirrors, of local manufacture, in Venetian painting. The art of Bellini has always been celebrated for its luminosity, for its ability to charge the air with light. The diffuse sky and the bright horizon contain a glowing world. The surfaces of his canvases emit and receive light. As in the streets of the city itself, even the shadows become sources of light. It is a truism that in Venetian painting colour, rather than contour, is the key. Surely this is related to the vision of reflections in the water?

Light was, in every context, a token of splendour and of nobility. In the twelfth-century chronicles, the basilica of Maria Assunta was celebrated for pellucida claritas or admirable lightness. The range of associations is intrinsic to the power of the word. The polished flooring of Venetian houses known as terrazzo, compounded of lime and well-powdered stone, was prized for its ability to reflect light; it was buffed and polished with linseed oil until it shone, as everyone testified, “like a mirror.” Venetian houses were always designed to catch the light. In the sixteenth century it was noted that the windows were made of glass rather than paper or waxed cloth; according to Francesco Sansovino they “were bright, and full of the sun.” There were of course gloomy recesses, dark courtyards, and hidden passages; the Venetians were affected by the chiaroscuro of brightness and shadow. It was part of their nature. It is part of their painting.

There was a passion for artificial light. The chandeliers or lampadari of Venice, seeming to float in the great upper spaces of Venetian apartments, were renowned for the myriad and innumerable crystals that seemed to vie with the sparkle of the water outside the windows. Venice was the first city in Europe to have, in 1732, its streets lit by lamps. London followed in 1736. In this period an English traveller, Edward Wright, noted that “the Venetians are excessively lavish of their white wax tapers, in their processions, at their night-litanies.” When these lights were seen mingling with the jewels, the gold, the crystal and the silver there was “such a glittering, there was scarce any looking upon them.” This is a quintessential Venetian effect, this glittering. It is related to the glittering of the sea all around. Light is the life-giving force. It quickens life. It is an emblem of vivacity and vitality, both associated with the Venetian temperament.

The numinous is luminous. Light is the first created thing. If light is seen as a spiritual substance, then it changes the way we look at the world; the streets and buildings are illuminated by the divine, and are thus themselves sacred. Light has always been depicted as a sign of heavenly grace. There is a light of holiness, and a light of vision. The Renaissance churches of Venice, designed by Codussi and Palladio, exclude any frescoes or mosaics from their interiors; the walls are purely white. In this way the quality of the light was preserved. The Istrian stone of Venice is, in the sunlight, dazzling.

The passion for colour existed, like the veneration of light, as a token of energy and bravura. It was a symbol of being. The harmony of colours was akin to the warmth of the sun. In Venice the term was colorito rather than colore, intimating the active and expressive possibilities of colour. The nineteenth-century English artist William Etty described Venice as “the birthplace and cradle of colour.” In the same century John Ruskin noted that the Venetians resembled the Arabs in “their intense love of colour which led them to lavish the most expensive decorations on ordinary dwelling houses”; in addition they possessed “that perfection of the colour-instinct in them which enabled them to render whatever they did, in this kind, as just in principle as it was gorgeous in appliance.” So they coated their palaces in porphyry and gold, where the northern architects employed oak and sandstone. The inner walls of the houses were hung with painted leather or with green and crimson damask. There is expansive colour in the brilliant polychromaticism of their architectural detail, in marble and in mosaic. The basilica of Saint Mark’s is a hymn to colour. We may also surmise that this was a culture in which sensory experience was deeper and more intense than our own; in which beautiful colour, and beautiful sound, had a more direct impact upon the human consciousness. Taste, and smell, and sight, and hearing were stripped bare. Life itself was altogether more vivid. The world had not lost its aura.

It was not coincidental, perhaps, that the city itself was the centre of the pigment trade in Europe. The painters of the Netherlands and the rest of Italy would purchase their colours from Venice, where there were merchants who specialised in that trade. Here were the finest orpiment and realgar, used for yellow and for orange, as well as vermilion and lead white. There is the famous “Venetian red,” a red earth extracted from the Veneto and characteristically to be seen in fifteenth-century Venetian painting. It was said to be as red as the blood of Christ. The dyeing industries of the city, indispensable in the production of luxury textiles, guaranteed the supply of the pigment known as red lake. The history of fashions in colour—as red lead, for example, gave way to orange at the end of the fifteenth century—would also be a history of human sensibility.

The Venetian painters often pursued the most expensive colours for the sake of their price and rarity. Thus, for example, the profound violet blue of Bellini or Titian was taken from the ground semiprecious lapis lazuli of what is now Afghanistan; red pigments from silver or sulphur were valued very highly. The Venetian republic was the home of saffron imported from the East. In his Grande Dictionnaire de la Cuisine, Alexander Dumas pere remarked that it was “to spices that we owe Titian’s masterpieces.”

What are the colours of the most serene city? There are of course the sacred colours, Bellini’s colours, blue and gold. Many of the public buildings of Venice were decorated with a blue sky of night irradiated by stars of gold. Upon the Pala d’Oro, the richly metalled altar screen in Saint Mark’s, panels of translucent blue enamel were set within golden borders. It was heaven’s colour. Blue is the colour of calm and serenity, adopted in the most serene city. In the paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the most favoured colour was a deep blue. There was the violet blue of the sky, and the greenish blue of the soft distance. The colours of salmon, magenta, orange and white are reflected upon the blue and green waters. The sails of the fishing boats, upon the lagoon through the centuries, were orange or crimson.

There is also green, so much wished for in a city of stone. Bellini luxuriated in deep green. The Venetian builders loved green marble. It was an intimation of the natural world, so that we can speak of forests of marble springing up in the city. It was a reminder of the sap and the leaf, of the miracle of rebirth. Ruskin noted that one of the favourite chords of Venetian colour “was the sweet and solemn harmony of purple with various greens.” There is the pink of dawn, too, and the pink of evening. Henry James described it as “a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in.”

Is this a just description of the water, pale whiteish-green? What is in any case the colour of water? The colours of the sea approaching Venice were once distinguished by the porti into which they issued. Thus the waters from the Lido were red, those from Malamocco were green, and those from Chioggia were purple. What is the colour of the waters in the canals and in the lagoon? They have variously been described as jade green, lilac, pale blue, brown, smoky pink, lavender, violet, heliotrope, dove grey. After a storm the colour changes as the water becomes aerated. On a hot afternoon the waters may seem orange. The colours of the sky, and the colours of the city, are refracted in little ovals of ochre and blue. It is all colours and no colour. It reflects, and does not own, colour. It becomes what it beholds.

25 Pilgrims and Tourists

The city needs people. It demands to be seen. The pilgrims of the Middle Ages were the first tourists. They were given guided tours, and certain state officials had the task of inspecting taverns and checking merchandise sold to tourists. These inspectors were also supposed to lead the strangers to the most expensive shops, where they could buy glass beads or silver crosses. There were other guides and agents known as tolomazi who offered a range of services from interpreting to money changing. The owners of the various galleys set up booths in Saint Mark’s Square, each with the flag of their ship prominently displayed; the masters of these galleys offered snacks of food and glasses of wine to the passing custom while