Saturday 5 March 2022

Musings in Venice

Of all the architectural delights of Venice, if I had to choose a favourite it would have to be the basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, whose iconic dome looms across the Grand Canal. There are several echoes of this basilica with our present day, as it was built as a votive offering for deliverance from the plague. 
It was different in the 17th century, when such magnificent basilicas were built to commemorate the end of pandemics. I doubt our generation will leave a similar monument to future generations commemorating our pandemic of 2020-21.

While English speakers may instinctively think Santa Maria della Salute means Saint Mary of the Salute, from my rudimentary research on an online dictionary, Saluti is a declension of the Latin word for health, salus. So really, it was an offering of thanks quite literally to the Madonna of public health. 

Here's a description of the Santa Maria della Salute, freely excerpted from Wikipedia:

While its external decoration and location capture the eye, the internal design itself is quite remarkable. The octagonal church, while ringed by a classic vocabulary, hearkens to Byzantine designs... The interior has its architectural elements demarcated by the coloration of the material, and the central nave with its ring of saints atop a balustrade is a novel design. It is full of Marian symbolism – the great dome represents her crown, the cavernous interior her womb, the eight sides the eight points on her symbolic star.

The interior is octagonal with eight radiating chapels on the outer row. The Baroque high altar arrangement, designed by Longhena himself, shelters an iconic Byzantine Madonna and Child of the 12th or 13th century, known as Panagia Mesopantitissa in Greek[4] ("Madonna the mediator" or "Madonna the negotiator") and came from Candia in 1669 after the fall of the city to the Ottomans. The statuary group at the high altar, depicting The Queen of Heaven expelling the Plague (1670) is a theatrical Baroque masterpiece by the Flemish sculptor Josse de Corte.
(As an aside, I love the word "hearkens")
 
Looking back at photos of Venice I remember the rush of beauty I was surrounded by, but after having all my senses saturated with it, I also started to wonder, what do I do with all this beauty? 
 
What does it mean to admire beauty, particularly works of art and architecture? Is it to learn more about them to be able to understand and appreciate them intellectually? Or is it to simply observe them and allow them to cast their spell of attraction and wonderment at us? 
 
Particularly with paintings and architecture, I have been yearning for an introductory guide to art – its periods, key protagonists, movements, the meaning the painters wished to imbue their work with. As a dilettante I feel I have gathered some scattered knowledge about art and artists that moved me, and wish I could better order it in my mind. 
 
Or is it mere intellectual vanity to know about a painter and get a thrill of recognition when you come across a work bearing his name? A reassurance that unlike the uncultured masses, I actually know of this painter and something about her. 
 
This thought troubled me as I went through the Galleria Academia, anxious of how little I knew of the Venetian school of painting beyond a few famous names like Titian, and impressions I had gleaned from art documentaries on YouTube. Yet I was haunted by the anxiety that I was merely a more decorous version of the hordes of hungover cruise ship tourist walking through the rows and rows of Madonnas in singlets, achieving little more than being able to tick a box and tell people at dinner parties that yes, I’ve been to that gallery, and appear cultured and well-travelled. 

Even so, there is something in Venice that awakens the artist in us. I wished I could paint the hues of the sunlight as they dance and play with the lagoon all day, express them in poetry, or set to music the swinging rhythms of the gondola the gentle lapping of the waters in the canals like Vivaldi and the other composers did in this excellent album.
 
Another difficulty I have noticed is absorbing, processing and retaining everything you see and learn in museums and art galleries. A few weeks earlier, after an enjoyable visit to the Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin I wanted to compare the experience to my first visit here 4 years ago. It was illuminating if not somewhat disconcerting to discover that I was attracted to exactly the same paintings as 4 years ago, but had forgotten that I had ever seen them. In my defence, I had probably seen thousands of paintings since and had few occasions to revisit my memories of the art of Schloss Charlottenburg. 
Perhaps someone needs to write a How-to guide on being a respectable dilettante... 

Photos below in order: approaching Santa Maria delle Salute from San Marco Square by gondola; its octagonal dome from the inside; The Queen of Heaven expelling the Plague (1670);  the basilica seen during sunset 










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