Sights of Venice

What a privilege to spend the inside of a week in Venice! Anne and I decided to follow the 3 day tour leaving 2 days for expansion into writing and drawing. Day by day we alternated tramping galleries with sitting out or travelling round the city or Lagoon islands on vaporettos. Our very reasonable B&B in Mestre was 10 min walk from the train that took us within 15 min to the centre of Venice. The whole experience was expansive somehow due to the way the city is framed by canals, and paintings and exhibits being framed by galleries twice the size in the UK.

Venice’s breath-taking Scuola Grande di San Rocco grew out of compassion for plague victims. Tintoretto (1518-94) spent 20 years painting it after serving as Titian’s apprentice. Such was his painting energy he got nicknamed Il Furioso! Medieval Venice had many Scuola or lay fraternities linked to art, crafts and religious life. Scuola Grande grew into a fully fledged welfare system at first for members and then for all Venetians. Tintoretto’s decoration of this welfare HQ includes a crucifixion thrilling with light and hope under a medallion of St Roche, patron of plague sufferers.

For 1000 years on Ascension Day they’ve thrown a ring into Venice Lagoon to celebrate and renew the city's marriage to the sea. In former days this was done by the Doge, in his distinctive headwear, from his buceintero (golden barge), a model of which we viewed in the Museo Storico Navale at Arsenale. Anne and I just missed the Ascension ceremony, Festa della Sensa 2019. Why Ascension Day? Because of two victories on this Feast, the defeat of Slavic pirates on 9 May 1000 and a favourable end to dispute with the Pope in 1177.

We did a lot of sighing at Venice’s beauty. The view of gondolas through the stone grilled windows of the Bridge of Sighs elicited, they say, last sighs at that beauty from convicts taking a last look at freedom on the way from the Doge’s Palace on St Mark’s Square to their dark cells in the adjacent prison. Hence the name ‘Bridge of Sighs’, Byron’s 19th century translation from the Italian ‘Ponte dei sospiri’. As visitors to the Doge’s Palace and many such tall buildings filled with beautiful works or art we also ‘sighed our way’ up a grand number of Venetian staircases - it was well worth it!

Venice’s beauty has a dark side as its partly the fruit of conquest. The 697–1797 Venetian Republic was a great maritime power and commercial centre linking Europe to the east. Venetian merchants are said to have stolen the relics of Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria which upped the city’s status. The Crusaders sailed from Venice to engage in an infamous power struggle. Our past hierarchical society had no problem with the Christian hierarchy beyond the grave reaching up to heaven and down to hell. Venice’s galleries display scenes in hell with a sprinkling of the powerful on earth for good measure!

A privilege to attend synagogue in Venice’s Gheto Vechio. Anne and I separated for worship following the tradition of the Chabad we stumbled upon taking a shortcut through the city. We were warmly welcomed, Anne by the Spanish speaking wife of a Columbian Rabbi who explained the rituals. Most of my 30 fellow worshippers were from New York, on a visit like us, with a handful of Venice’s 450 Jewish residents present. They were keeping the phone fast required of Orthodox Jews so I took my picture outside. I was lent a ‘kippah’ head covering and a Hebrew prayer book to read backwards. We were welcomed to the ceremonial Sabbath lunch afterwards

You never see so many safe lions - in stone, bronze or on canvas - as you see in Venice. That the city is full of lions speaks of its historic supremacy on land and sea over lesser powers. It also speaks of the city’s patron St Mark whose Gospel starts with the roaring voice of John the Baptist. This patronage dates back in a pious legend telling how two Venetian sailors, Rustico di Torcello and Buono di Malamocco, stole Mark’s body from Alexandria, hid it in a keg of salt pork and brought it to Venice in 829AD where it remains in St Mark’s Basilica. It gave Venice then a status approaching Rome, burial place of leading apostles Peter and Paul. To this day Venice’s buildings witness formidable power yet contain much to uplift the soul.

Anne and I were awed by Sung Mass in St Mark’s Cathedral, Venice where the oriental-sounding chant of the hidden choir filled the Basilica evoking Byzantium whence the Cathedral’s treasures were imported. Venice drew in the spiritual and material heritage of Constantinople so its Cathedral has a Greek cross plan with five cupolas, following eastern architecture, symbolising God’s presence. We visited Venice’s previous Cathedral of Torcello with its glittering interior. When sandbanks blocked boat access the Cathedral rebuild at San Marco had mosaic glitter inside and outside, ‘the real painting for eternity’ (Ghirlandaio)

This eye-catching painting in Museo Correr captures the east-west synthesis so typical of Venice. It presents well as a photograph because of its contrasts. The 16th century painter Giovanni Permeniate is Greek and seems skilled in the traditions of icon painting held to this day within eastern orthodoxy. The subject is Our Lady with John the Baptist and St Augustine. Venice’s joys are much about cross-fertilisation between oriental and western culture linked to a bold seafaring community that readily makes space for immigrants. The mosaic filled churches draw on the east as do paintings such as this linked to the city’s Marian devotion which lives on to the present day.

Did you go on a gondola? we’re asked. When Anne and I discovered it cost £80 a go we thought we’d romance elsewhere! The only entirely man-powered boat still used for commercial purposes, gondolas are world famous. A floor of Venice’s Museo Storico Navale is devoted to their construction and history. They’re built using 8 types of wood: fir, cherry tree, larch, mahogany, walnut, elm, oak, linden with beech and ramin for oars. We’re used to gondolas in say the 18th century paintings of Canaletto but less aware of their asymmetry. This serves following a straight course when the thrust of the oar is on just one side of the boat.

This ‘hypnotised humanity’ work of art from Azerbaijan was part of Venice’s Biennale Arte international exhibition coincident with our May 2019 visit. ‘Bubble Reflection’ by Zarnishan Yusif is a moving life sized image which ‘conveys connection with the social networks and human relations, as well as the impact of media devices on the minds of human beings. The anthropomorphic figures are perfectly aligned… while telematic circuits… have integrated their organisms and are masters of their unconscious and their intimacy... a hypnotised humanity; inhabitants of a planetary metropolis whose empty heads passively welcome virtual reality’.

It was awesome to stumble upon the grave of one of my favourite composers, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) in Venice’s Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari Church dominated by Titian’s Assumption. Monteverdi was in charge of the music in Venice’s San Marco Cathedral for many years. When we attended Cathedral High Mass with its dramatic contribution from the hidden choir in the eaves I imagined Monteverdi thinking out his famous Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary balancing plainchant psalms with operatic antiphons. As Monteverdi’s life straddles 16th and 17th centuries his music bridges renaissance and baroque, a fascinating and inspiring composer.

Our Sunday in Venice ended with a look in at Sacred Heart Church next to our  Bed & Breakfast in Mestre, a 15 minute commute from the centre of Venice by train across the lagoon. Over our week I got the feel of the concrete giant which is Sacred Heart Church where day by day a team of laity say morning and evening prayer. This picture is of evening Mass where a single guitar provided effective backing for congregational singing. The priest led Easter ‘Regina Caeli’ after every service I attended, a short enough bit of Latin to be memorable 50 years after Latin was made optional for Roman Catholics.

‘Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways, women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one’ wrote former Patriarch of Venice, good Pope John XXIII (d1963) born of local peasant stock. He was patriarchal in the warmest non hierarchical way in both roles writing on another occasion: ‘it is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father’. Late 20th century bridge-building across nations was given impetus by his international vision ‘The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone’. Venice has its saints of which he one.

James Bond’s gondola chase in Moonraker begins with a coffin being carried to burial at the island cemetery of San Michelle. Our voyage to San Michelle was less disruptive of canal traffic than Bond’s! It happened as part of a circuit of Venice’s lagoon islands of Murano, Torcello and Burano. San Michelle cemetery is nearest to the city, visible across the water, its walls catching the afternoon sun. We strolled through corridors of vertically stacked graves. Its an awesome repository of mortal remains of the great and the good notably Stravinsky and Diaghilev whose grave we found to be  appropriately covered with ballet shoes!