VENICE
Venice is one of the unique cities in the world. It keeps
its own history, built on a series of low mud banks in thetidalwater
of the Adriatic which regularly cause the flood. Venice
extended its power and influence through the Mediterranean
to constantinople during the Middle Ages and became as
a powerful part of the world aroud 12 to 14 centuries thanking
to the riches of St.Mark. The immense wealth of the ancient
city is seen by art and architecture as the hotels, apartments,
shops and museums in the city nowadays. This miraculous /magical
place whose "streets are full of water" is impressed/succumbed
by more than 12 million visitors a year.
Despite its peculiar characteristics, nobody
arrives in Venice and sees the city for the first time. Depicted
and described so often that its image has become part of the European
collective consciousness, Venice can initially create the slightly
anticlimactic feeling that everything looks exactly as it should.
The water-lapped palaces along the Canal Grande are just as the
brochure photographs made them out to be, Piazza San Marco does
indeed look as perfect as a film set, and the panorama across the
water from the Palazzo Ducale is precisely as Canaletto painted
it. The sense of familiarity soon fades, however, as details of
the scene begin to catch the attention - an ancient carving high
on a wall, a boat being manoeuvred round an impossible corner, a
tiny shop in a dilapidated building, a waterlogged basement. And
the longer one looks, the stranger and more intriguing Venice becomes.
HISTORY AND ART
At the fall of the Roman Empire barbarian hordes descended from
the north of Europe, bringing death and destruction. The inhabitants
of the Venetian cities, to escape from the ferocity of the Huns
and Vandals, took refuge in the islands of the Adriatic lagoon:
thus it was that around 450 AD Venice was born, the "city of
islands," subjected to Byzantine influence and governed by
a duke, or Doge, elected by a popular assembly.
Wise use of diplomacy and arms soon led to Venice taking control
of the coasts of Istria, Dalmatia and Puglia and to becoming a true
power, increasingly independent of Byzantium. The splendor of what
came to be called the "Serenissima" Republic, however,
only began in 1202, when the Doge Enrico Dandolo furnished important
help to the knights of the fourth Crusade in the conquest of Constantinople.
From the division of the Byzantine spoils, the Serenissima gained
immense riches, allowing it to expand its own commercial horizons:
its ships dominated the Mediterranean as far as the Middle East
and returned to the lagoons laden with precious merchandise not
found in Europe.
Venice reached the heights of its power at the beginning of the
fifteenth century, after having defeated the Duke of Milan and having
conquered many cities of northeastern Italy, becoming along with
Milan and Florence one of the principal powers of the Italian peninsula.
From this time began the slow but inexorable descending spiral of
the Serenissima. From 1415 the Turks conquered the Venetian colonies
in the Middle East one by one, while at the end of the century the
Portuguese, circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope, opened a new
route to the Indies, taking from the Venetians commercial primacy
in those areas.
The final blazing military victory was that of Lepanto, in 1571,
against the Turkish fleet. Then the descent became unstoppable.
In 1797 Venice lost its independence. It was conquered by Napoleon
Bonaparte who successively ceded it to the Austrians. The Serenissima
Republic didn't exist any more. Only seventy years later, in 1866,
the Venetian territories would become part of the emerging Kingdom
of Italy.
Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance are the
principal reference points for the artistic development of Venice.
The Byzantine style characterized the first centuries of the city.
Marbles and columns arrived from the Middle East at the lagoon city,
where projects for the construction of the first great buildings
were directed by masters from the East and from Ravenna. The Basilica
of San Marco - the mausoleum of the city's patron saint - is a masterpiece
of Romanesque-Byzantine style, the center of Venetian life for all
times. Today few buildings remain from that period and their locations
demonstrate clearly the early lines of the city’s development:
from San Marco to Rialto and, along the borders of the Grand Canal,
from San Zan Degolà to San Polo. Beginning in the second
half of the thirteenth century the Gothic style affirmed itself
in Venice, as it did in the rest of Italy's cities. Among its most
vivid testimonies are the Doge’s Palace and the Ca' d'Oro
(House of Gold). In the sixteenth century the Renaissance style
left a strong imprint (Rialto Bridge), followed by Baroque, Rococo
and Neoclassical. Throughout the city the testimonies of great Venetian
masters are revealed in paintings from the fifteenth, sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Every parish rewards exploration, though
- a roll-call of the churches worth visiting would feature over
fifty names, and a list of the important paintings and sculptures
they contain would be twice as long. Two of the distinctively Venetian
institutions known as the Scuole retain some of the outstanding
examples of Italian Renaissance art - the Scuola di San Rocco ,
with its dozens of pictures by Tintoretto, and the Scuola di San
Giorgio degli Schiavoni, decorated with a gorgeous sequence by Carpaccio.
Although many of the city's treasures remain in the buildings for
which they were created, a sizeable number have been removed to
one or other of Venice's museums. The one that should not be missed
is the Accademia , an assembly of Venetian painting that consists
of virtually nothing but masterpieces; other prominent collections
include the museum of eighteenth-century art in the Ca' Rezzonico
and the Museo Correr, the civic museum of Venice - but again, a
comprehensive list would fill a page.
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