The Stonemason’s Yard by Canaletto, 1725-30. Oil on canvas.
Venetian painting has long been famous, and so much has been commented on. Early in the nineteenth century, Hegel, who never got to Italy, offered some evocative notes. Later in that century, Walter Pater published a famously suggestive account of the school of Giorgione. In 1970, Sydney J. Freedberg’s massive volume history of sixteenth-century Italian art offers a closely detailed discussion of painting in Venice, contrasting the development of the Florentine tradition. And right now, in response to recent research it is possible to rewrite that history. Here, then, is a brief outline of such an account.
Thanks to the theft of St Mark’s relics from Alexandria in 828 by enterprising Venetian merchants, that saint’s body is present in the church named after him. Mosaics in San Marco show the scenes in which the body was spirited past the Muslims hidden, so the legend says, under pork, and transported across the Adriatic through a storm to Venice. Nowadays, we can respond in aesthetic terms to Christian images of sacred subjects, but it’s much more difficult for people, at least for secular-minded people, to respond to such relics. Even, leaving aside questions about attributions, it’s not easy to imaginatively reconstruct the pre-modern world view in which they were of immense importance. However, there is full information about relics on line; they are an important part of contemporary religious practice. But you can, so I believe, understand a great deal about medieval Catholicism and still find the belief in relics baffling. And you certainly cannot understand Venice at you know how much they valued their relic of St Mark.
It is impossible to understand the origins of Venetian art without considering its relationship to relics. It was very important for the Venetians to have the authentic relics of the saint. And so it was a civic disaster, so all the histories tells, when St Mark’s relics were lost for one long period. Several later painters depict the scene in which these relics were refound. Nowadays in the touristic guidebooks, which is addressed to a secular audience, you are unlikely to find directions about how to find relics. Indeed, when I reviewed a recent art historical book about the shroud of Turin, I was interested to find that the discussion was entirely about its history, with no account of its potential authenticity. The author is appealing to a secular art historical readership.
Like an icon and a figurative painting, a relic is connected with its subject, some holy person. That’s why icons, paintings depicting saints and relics of saints are all suitable objects for prayer. You can pray before a relic, an icon or a painting because they all make the holy subject, the object of your prayers, present. But where the relic has a literal reference, an icon or an artwork merely depicts its subject. A painting is a forgery if it is falsely claimed to be by some artist; a relic is a fake it is misidentified. That said, the verity of relics is very difficult to establish, encouraging skepticism. No chemical test can reveal with dogmatic certainty that the relics in San Marco are so, to speak, kosher.
Recent scholarship has dealt extensively with icons, what one historian, Hans Belting, usefully calls images before the era of art. Where a figurative artwork presents the appearance of the sacred figures, as they might appear were they present, an icon is a deliberately un or anti naturalistic image. For our present purposes, which differ from those of a believer, icons can be set between relics and sacred figurative images. The figurative painting depicts in a naturalistic way the subject shown in an icon, while the relic is , literally is, the saint. It is his or her physical remains.
The history of Venetian art, from its origin to the Renaissance, can be seen as the development from relics to icons to paintings. The relic of Saint Mark is replaced by the icons and, then, by the sacred scenes set in Venetian settings. In this move towards naturalism, what’s preserved is the reference to the sacred subject. And, also, what this tradition opens up is an interest in the aesthetic qualities of artworks. In his famous letter to Titian of 1544, written in his house on the Grand Canal Pietro Aretino said:
See first the buildings which appeared to be artificial though made of real stone. And then look at the air itself, which I perceived to be pure and lively in some places, and in others turbid and dull. . . . Oh, how beautiful were the strokes with which Nature’s brushes pushed the air back . . . separating it from the places in the way that Titian does when painting his landscapes. . . . Your brush breathes with her spirit, cried out three or four times: ‘Oh, Titian, where are you?’
You couldn’t respond to a relic or an icon in these terms. The creation of aesthetic experience required the development of figurative painting.
In this outline, it’s useful to take this development a stage further, which finds when the artistic imagery drops explicit references to the sacred figures. Here two examples will suffice to sketch our analysis.
As a recent book notes, Giorgione’s The Tempest (1509) is perhaps the most interpreted old master painting. There are innumerable attempts to identify the subject, which perhaps is a mythological scene, a political Venetian theme, or perhaps just the artist’s pure fantasy. The essential ambiguity of this painting arises, then, because it’s difficult to find a textual source that matches every feature of the scene.
Let’s look, finally, at Canaletto’s The Stonemason’s Yard (1725), one of his greatest (and best known pictures). Recent scholars have noted that in fact the artist did not provide photographically accurate images, but actually modified his compositions. And course, in some visible details, Venice has changed. That said, what attracts viewers today, as attracted the English collectors who patronized Canaletto, was that his pictures were authentic souvenirs of their visits on the Grand Tour to Venice.
Venetian painting inspired him to see the city as an artwork. Here, then, without any sacred allusions, as are developed in some interpretations of The Tempest, we have is a to-die-for aesthetically perfect image of the city. As a Venetian believer would claim, God is present in the city itself. Or rather does this painting show that place in his absence? The Stonemason’s Yard is .essentially ambiguous in this regard. We have come here to what may be a purely secular world, an intensely pleasurable image that carries or requires no sacred allusions. Perhaps it demonstrates God’s benevolence, but maybe it shows that he does not exist.
This essay is a trial balloon, a sketch of an analysis I will develop.
Notes:
On Aretino’s letter, :on Icons, ; on Giorgione, Tom Nichols Giorgione’s Ambiguity (2020); on Canaletto,
On the shroud of Turin, my.
