Giovanni C.F. Villa. Venice, the Other Renaissance 1450-1581

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION


Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa
Venezia, l'altro Rinascimento
[Venice, the Other Renaissance]
1450-1581

Torino, Einaudi, 2014

An advice

If you want my advice, please read 'Venice, the other Renaissance' next to a PC or a tablet, and, each time an artwork is cited, take thirty seconds to visualise it. In fact, the only major shortcoming of this volume is to be a book in the traditional sense, while it should be something that does not exist yet, but that will materialise sooner or later: not an e-book, but a book with links (today QR-codes are fashionable) that would allow to observe high-definition images.

In theory, the great risk of 'Venice, the other Renaissance' might in fact be to reinterpret a century in a deterministic way, by applying contemporary interpretation models. None of this happens and the author succeeds in constantly checking his pages against a combination of at least three elements: first, historical facts (for example, the appalling years after the Battle of Agnadello 1509); second, the general framework and the cultural inclination (where one can indeed say that the true "being other" of Venice from the rest of Italy lies, the city being designed by nature to trade, to commerce, to contaminate and to rework) and, finally, the precise examination of paintings, architectures, sculptures, clothes, equipment and so on. Without exploring them (it is true that the final part of the work presents fifty monographic records dedicated to as many illustrated works; however, here we are talking about hundreds, perhaps thousands of pictorial texts) one may lose the train of thoughts. So the book risks being largely unfinished:  a masterful dissemination work, describing however an artistic civilization which the reader should already know by heart.

Like the Frari Tryptich

The volume is divided into chapters, each of which (except in one case) starts and terminates with an artwork that can be considered a crucial juncture in the history of Venetian art civilization. We remember them one by one:

• From the Ovetari chapel to the "Coronation Pala" (1450-1475)
• From the arrival of Antonello to Santa Maria dei Miracoli (1475-1489)
• From the "Miracle of the True Cross" to the "Horse" (1490-1499)
• From "Venetie MD" to the "Feast of the Rosary" (1500-1506)
• From the frescoes of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi to the "Pala Pesaro" (1509-1526)
• From the arrival of Sansovino to the "Miracle of the Slave" (1527-1548)
• From the Ester cycle to the apostolic visit (1553-1581)

Actually, thinking about this sequencing, I have come up to think about an artwork on which Villa (of course) writes in the volume and that seems almost designed in a similar way: the so-called Frari Triptych that Giovanni Bellini composed in 1488 for the Franciscan church of Santa Maria of the Friars (it is still located there).

Giovanni Bellini, Frari Tryptich, 1488, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice

It is a triptych that, at first glance, might not seem "modern" for the time in which it was completed. Already Bartolomeo Vivarini, twenty years earlier, had topped the traditional layout of the altarpiece, in order to switch to a "unified altarpiece" (see the Enthroned Madonna, today in Capodimonte).

Bartolomeo Vivarini, Enthroned Madonna with Saints, 1465, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples

Antonello da Messina has already performed the Pala of San Cassiano (now unfortunately mutilated, and preserved in Vienna).

Antonello da Messina, Pala di San Cassiano, 1475, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

And, above all, Bellini himself has already produced the authentic masterpiece known as the Pala di San Giobbe (Gallerie dell'Accademia), ten years before.

Giovanni Bellini, Pala di San Giobbe, 1478, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Yet there is no painting having a more coherent narrative than the Frari Triptych, in which pictorial text and frame (the latter definitely original and undoubtedly performed on the artist's project) are designed as one unit. The one made for the triptych is "only at first glance a traditional framing, in reality being an absolutely Renaissance-specific masterpiece, architecturally designed to accentuate the prospective view of the side rooms and a unified spatial vision, proportionate to the occupants." (p.252)

Exactly like in Bellini’s triptych, it is undeniable that in this book the breaks do not separate, but unite, and there is such a global overview by the writer that it assumes an unmatched knowledge of the subject, an ability to narrate, and especially a very difficult job of selection and large synthesis (the same work which a sculptor performs in front of a block of marble), which obliges to dig, select, identify and highlight fundamental aspects.

The other Renaissance and Giovanni Bellini

One of the underlying themes of the book is that the Venetian Renaissance is a "other" Renaissance, i.e. different from those of all other Italian regions, because it is not marked by fractures, but by evolution, development and natural maturation: "Even so, a crossing, a generational handover takes place which elsewhere is traumatic, and in other historical circumstances would generate "vanguard" and "rear-guard" movements, and therefore violent disputes between the 'modern' and the 'old '. Instead, in Venice the transition between the old, humanistic manner, and the modern one occurs without trauma, in a mediated and respectful sequencing of seasons"(p. 119). If there is an artist who, with his pictorial work, literally embodies this gradual evolution, is undoubtedly Giovanni Bellini (one of the three main characters of Villa’s book, along with Titian and Tintoretto). On Bellini, Villa highlights the ability to be a great experimenter: during his long life, he moves from Byzantine-like to Mantegna-like accents, demonstrating the openness and the ability to assimilate, rework and revive in a new way, which is typical of the Venetians. He is a reference point, in a polished and respectful contrast, for Cima, Antonello, Dürer, Giorgione, and even the young Titian. The measure of how different the art of Giovanni has been in more than fifty years (a period of time that in Venice is equalled only by Titian) is given by the visual comparison of the Triptychs of Charity (preserved at the Venice Academy), dated between 1465 and 1470, and the Mocking of Noah of 1514.

Giovanni Bellini, Tryptich of St. Sebastian, 1464-1470, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Giovanni Bellini, Mocking of Noah, 1514, Fine Arts Museum of di Besançon

In between, half a century of artistic activity passes. "Bellini displays an amazing mental distance from the early works, crowning a human journey with the treatment of a rather rare subject [...] A text in which one feels the greatness of ‘one of the main poets of Italy’ in Bellini's sublime ability to constantly regenerate his art, never stopping with already acquired facts and passing, in sixty years of career, ‘from first being Byzantine and Gothic, then following Mantegna and Paduan art, then tracking Piero and Antonello, and last being inspired by Giorgione’(Roberto Longhi, Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana [n.d.t. Viaticum for five centuries of Venetian painting], Sansoni, Florence, 1946). This reading is often interpreted as a chronological relationship in which Bellini is traditionally never assigned the role of being the innovator. Paradoxically, this view has long impeded a complete reception of his sublime art, which was certainly the result of a subtle give and take relationship with all main contemporaries with whom Giovanni dialogued, always up to par, and often putting the fundamental premises for further developments. Thus, he established himself as one of the most revolutionary artists of European art history"(p. 280).

A birth-right that is not only detectable in the pictures, but that translates itself into a precocious awareness of the role of the artist, as evidenced by the exchange of letters with Isabella d'Este in 1506, in which Giovanni agrees to create a work for the Duchess of Mantova (without any particular enthusiasm, since the commission by Isabella dated back to 1501), but refuses to be bound by her in the identification of the subject, claiming that the customer should accept the artist's imagination, and the latter should essentially be free to paint at his own will (pp. 110-111). It is a plea that Bellini can advance only because of his success, but that above all corresponds to the awareness of the creative role of an artist. We will find this awareness, repeated and declined for centuries, in Italy and abroad, in the eternal relationship of collaboration and conflict between clients and art makers. To stay within the scope of Venetian art (as Villa notes rightly), it is an extraordinary anticipation of the arguments with which Veronese, in 1573, responds to the Inquisition (of course with a different attitude and in order to apologize for the liberties that he has taken) which convened him later before the court to examine the known events related to the Last Supper (then Feast in the House of Levi) today at the Academy.

Venice: the “other Humanism”

The pages dedicated to Bellini and, more generally to Venice’s fifteenth century, are among the most successful pages in Villa’s book, because keeping the painting of Giovanni, Gentile, and Carpaccio together with the "decorative" architecture and the sculptures of the Lombardo family, he describes impeccably a humanistic environment that finds a kind of idealized incarnation in the figure of a scholar like Ermolao Barbaro. "His admirers and followers are members of the aristocracy, of a group culture which belongs to the society shown in the canvases by Gentile and Carpaccio, as proposal for a noble vision of urban civilization. It all comes from the attention for that naturalistic reality motivating the same motivation as Ermolao’s research: as in Bellini, where the centrality of the landscape is not an idea of ​​geometrization of nature, but an obedience to the sacred, a location full of symbols and a set of bucolic abandonment [note of the editor: see St. Francis receiving the stigmata of the Frick Collection].

Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis receving the stigamta, The Frick Collection, New York

Unlike the paganism and the esotericism of Pomponio Leto’s Roman Academy and of Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Academy, humanism in Venetia remains deeply religious, finding more than one reason for dialogue with the monastic communities of the islands, including San Michele, San Giorgio in Alga, San Giorgio Maggiore and San Francesco del deserto. That generation of humanists always proposes a return to the letter of the classical philosophers, which corresponds to an idea of ​​knowledge as moral habitus, where truth and beauty come together. The Truth sought by Ermolao is a Christian truth [...], proposing a return to a faith lived with a more intimate and profound sense, not as a matter of costume and social liturgy, in a spirit of confidence with the sacred which dominates spirituality" (p. 71). After all, in Venice, also religion is "other."

This is the legacy that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, will be transmitted to Giorgione, Lotto, and Titian. And, from there, originates the great experience of the Golden Age (of Venetian art, not of his increasingly marginal political role). The years of the diaspora after the defeat of Agnadello with artists such as Sebastiano Luciani (Sebastiano del Piombo) leaving Venice for Rome; as well as the years that followed the sack of 1527, during which Roman and Tuscan artists and scholars moved to Venice (two above all: Sansovino and Aretino). And then, again, the triumphs of Titian, which transformed the painting of Venice into a European painting, and those of Tintoretto and Veronese. But we want to leave to the reader the pleasure to discover this story, by reading the work of Villa. We felt however important to examine together a reality (that of Venetia’s fifteenth century) that is often left on the side lines, in the face of the glories of colourism and tonality during the Golden Age, and that instead is culturally its basic premise. 'Venice, the Other Renaissance' allows us to better weigh those years: in our opinion, it is the main merit of a book which is in itself absolutely praiseworthy.