The Golden Centuries of Venetian Painting [antikvár]

"!Venice}., the whole city is a magnificent painting." (Michelangelo: Dialogues, II) It needs rashness, rather than courage, to attempt to introduce, however briefly, and to describe things that our eyes can barely touch and that we can only really approach with our hearts and our minds. It is such things that make up the history of Venice—a history which the power of sight turns into poetry. Titian called his own paintings "poems". In his last years Goethe, overwhelmed by his desire for painting, and evidently having his Venice in mind, rhapsodised in his Conversations from Weimar: "Painters are the gods of the earth—a poet is nothing!" After these late reflexions of Goethe it is worth reading what he wrote when he first set eyes on Venice: " For it had been ordained on my page in the Book of Destiny that I should see Venice first in the evening, at five o'clock our time, on the 28th September, 1786, sailing from the Brenta into the Lagoon; not long afterwards I was able to set foot on the soil of this marvellous city of islands, this beaver republic, and to spend some time there. Thus, thank God, Venice is for me no longer a mere word, a meaningless name, one that had so often terrified me, so mortal am I an enemy offlowery rhetoric " (Italian Journey). And the next day, the 29th September, the great courtier recorded: "Everything that surrounds me is majestic, the creation of persistent human efforts, the magnificent and outstanding achievement, not of one ruler but of a whole people." In the beginning this creation was a vocation, which later grew into a mission: from being merely the idiom of the Veneto these colours, this painting became a universal language, understood in Madrid and London, Vienna, Warsaw, Augsburg and Dresden. By representing the most interesting episodes in the history and workaday life of Venice, Venetian painting turned material and human decline into eternal glory. And not even the frequent wars and other adversities, not even looting and speculating and the removal of so many works of art could make this unique and invaluable heritage vanish. So much so that as early as 1660 Marco Boschini (1613-1678) in his work La Carta del navegar pittoresco [Map of Pictoral Navigation] was able to state: All our great buildings will crumble to dust And the world, time and death together Will vanquish us, miserable mortals; We shall depart—but painting will live on. The same poet-critic avers that the history of Venice can be told by means of painting which is a brilliant mirror Spacious enough to hold the entire world. 5