Venice Observed

As I've mentioned in some past post, I first became acquainted with Mary McCarthy during my sophomore year at college in a course on Renaissance history, when we were given a series of articles she had written in the New Yorker about Florentine life, history, and art.  The articles were consolidated into a book, The Stones of Florence, published in 1959.

"How can you stand it?"  According to Ms. McCarthy, this was the first question every visitor to Florence asked.  The town was dry, unattractive, business-oriented.  When the traffic momentarily stops, she wrote, one heard two characteristic sounds:  "the clack-clack of a sewing machine and the tinkle of a young girl practicing on an old piano."  The closest American analogy she could think of was Boston.

A year after taking my Renaissance history class, I attended school for six months in Florence.  I loved it.  "How can you stand it?" was certainly a question I never asked. Visit today and you'll discover that Florence has become virtually loved to death.  Read Mary McCarthy's book, and you realize that she loved it as well.

All this is prelude to my thoughts about an earlier book by Mary McCarthy, written in 1956, Venice Observed, a volume some regard as a warm-up for her better known study of Florence.  In both books, she combines reportage on the present day city with a much more extensive study of each city's history, commercial development, politics,  artistic achievements, and collective personality.

If Florence appears, at least at first glance, dry and withdrawn, business-oriented, old money aristocratic, somewhat off-putting for the casual tourist -- building after building being plain and brown on its exterior, hiding from prying eyes an often beautiful and lavish interior -- Venice, on the other hand, is all exterior, all beauty and ornamentation displayed openly as proof of the importance and commercial success of its owners. 

McCarthy describes how the cantankerous, nineteenth century British art critic John Ruskin loved to prowl around the city, finding statues and buildings that had been finished only on the side facing the public. The implication being that Venetians, unlike Florentines, cared little for artistic integrity as opposed to the impression they made on their neighbors. American readers may squirm a bit.

Venetian art, she argues, is beautiful but derivative.  All the important artistic advances had been made in Florence and other Italian and Northern European cities; Venice used those advances to entertain its own people and attract what had begun very early -- tourism.  When the sailing routes around Cape Horn opened up, Venice lost its commercial advantage as the provider of ships and transport across and about the Mediterranean.  Tourism quickly took its place.

And there is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities -- Rome or Florence or Naples.  The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian's Quadri's, Torcello, Harry's Bar, Muriano, Burano, the pigeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto.  Venice is a folding picture-post-card of itself.

But before then, Venice, more than other cities, had long looked to the east for its income and its cultural influences.  Its ships carried the products of the Spice and Silk Roads from the Levant to Western Europe.  Its ships had carried the Crusaders from Western Europe to the Holy Land, and raided the Christian cities of the East to ensure a profit.  (McCarthy describes the disgraceful sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.) 

Venice's art, as a result, was heavily influenced by Byzantine art, with the improved techniques of the Italian Renaissance a subsequent development.  But while Byzantine art and architecture were heavily spiritual in their development, Venice's adaptations were the adaptations by a society of businessmen who were celebrating their own status and success.

A wholly materialistic city is nothing but a dream incarnate.  Venice is the world's unconscious: a miser's glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon. … The Venetian mind, interested only in the immediate and the solid, leaves behind it for our minds, clear, dawn-fresh images out of fairy tales.

Mary McCarthy, in addition to her other talents, is a student of art.  In Venice Observed, she often overcomes the casual reader with her discussions, analyses, and conclusions regarding Venice's artistic origins and lasting heritage.  The book certainly will most interest readers with some background in the history of the region and the basics of Italian art.  But those passages that seem overly detailed can be skimmed, without losing much of the value of her commentary.

McCarthy does not claim to be original, though many of her conclusions struck me as new.  She modestly suggests:

One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her fur piece and jeweled pin.

Don't let her kid you.  This book has much to offer.  And it demands that some day soon, I must return once more to the City of the Doges.