Piazza San Marco and the structures that surround it, the major Palladian designs, and Santa Maria della Salute. Among the non-“vedute” painters, he is particularly drawn to Tiepolo. This may be a short list, but it is formidable, especially when one realizes that the buildings and canvases he identifies represent a tiny fraction of the countless masterpieces of art and architecture produced in a place whose population was probably never larger than 150,000. When faced by such riches, all one can do is sample.
What is amazing is how regularly one’s own “Venice” overlaps with those of other people. I might put the Carpaccios in the Scuola degli Schiavoni nearer the top of my list, or the tombs of the early doges in San Zaccaria; but I wouldn’t argue over the architecture, nor press the case that the altarpiece in San Alvise is Tiepolo’s finest painting. Even more noteworthy are the small coincidences. When my wife and I first visited Venice, we stayed in the Calcina, as did Van Doren – and as did one of his inspirations, John Ruskin, more than a century before. It also happened that we got to know Regina Resnik and Arbit Blatas, and visited them on the Giudecca. Indeed, I spoke at a gathering in memory of Arbit in New York shortly after he died. Most remarkable, however, is the way that Van Doren’s memoir conjures up – as only an artist can – the very feel and mood of a city that, in his evocation, seems so familiar that it is almost a part of one’s family.
In his fourth chapter, for example, he writes of the beauty of Venice at night. For Mark Twain, too, there was a special magic when darkness fell. As he described it in The Innocents Abroad, under the harsh sunlight the city appeared crumbling and decayed. He even compared it to a small Arkansas town. But then came the revelation:
I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed forever. But I was too hasty. In a few minutes we swept gracefully out into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry and romance stood revealed…. In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old city seems crowned once more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago.
Twain’s most popular lecture, in his tours across America, was “Venice by Moonlight” (he told his mother he felt “a few inches taller” because they went so well), and its fame may well have been one reason his countrymen began to flock to the city in the late nineteenth century.
Van Doren’s chapter, entitled (in a nice operatic reference) “Queen of the Night,” also suggests that this is a different city after dark. And he makes the case, as did Twain, through its music and its glinting lamps as much as through the specific reactions of a painter. In this case Whistler is the muse, but the effect is the same: to bring the image of a glowing scene of lights, water, and indistinct shapes vividly to mind.
For in the end it is because of the sensibilities of the painter that this book does so much to awaken our own thoughts about Venice. We may not share the peculiar problems of finding just the right spot from which to paint the Ca’ d’Oro, or needing to stop and set up an easel in the Piazza San Marco just because the sun is hitting the Basilica from a revealing angle. But the emphasis on the play of light, on the unusual colors that fill the shadows, and on so many of the difficulties and delights that the artist encounters when trying to capture an evanescent scene – all these make one recall the breathtaking moments its visitors experience when Venice seems to become unearthly. My wife and I were once across the Grand Canal from the Salute on a morning so misty that we could not make out the church, less than 100 yards away. Over the next half hour though, the mist slowly evaporated, the sun began to beat down, and Longhena’s enchanted building gradually grew and took shape in the mist. It is these moments of near-fantasy that define the city, and that Van Doren’s art and prose summon up into consciousness.
What is also clear is how much an awareness of Venice’s past, and of those who have traversed these waters before us, helps define our understanding of its beauties. Van Doren’s book is full of tributes to those he treats essentially as his guides: not just artists like Sargent or writers like Ruskin, but also the family members and teachers who have shaped his engagement with the city. There is no doubt that, beyond the sheer exhilaration that is aroused by towers and domes rising out of the sea, surrounded by a constantly changing play of light upon the waters, it is the thought of all those who have been moved by these very sights that validates the wonder of the setting. If we enter the lagoon from the Adriatic, the scene that unfolds before us tells us forcefully how unique the delight of Venetians must always have been when they returned home. By reading these pages, and contemplating these pictures, we can follow Van Doren as he moves us yet again with the astonishment that is Venice.
Foreword
Simon Winchester
Adam Van Doren has a way with light. His painterly calling-card is, in its essence, illumination. It is opalescence, iridescence, brilliance. It is the subtly varied lights of dawn, of noontide, and of dusk. And as these paintings of the Venetian cityscape illustrate so vividly, it is the soft and languid interplay between warm Italian sunshine and the ancient stones and waters of this venerable city on its quiet lagoon.
And yet it is still more than that: for the artist manages to capture this uniquely Venetian phenomenon in a way that is perfectly, poignantly evocative. For me certainly, it conjured up in a madeleine-moment the very first time that I experienced the marvel that is the pure Venice light.
It was thirty years ago, late in a June afternoon of sultry heat, and as the train from Milan squealed across the industrial marshes south of Treviso I remember feeling pessimistically apprehensive about my first journey to Venice.
The auguries were less than perfect. I had flown to Italy from Hong Kong only the night before and was tired, crumpled. I was lugging with me a cache of heavy boxes of papers that I had promised to deliver to someone at the Biennale (this being an odd-numbered year), and the great festival was just about to begin.
I had very nearly missed the train. Smoothly polished and impossibly beautiful men and women in pastel linens – art dealers, I said to myself with a snarl – seemed to occupy all of the first class seats; in second class, a crush of Balkan tourists obliged me to stand all the way. My weariness must have dulled the visions of Verona and Padua as we passed them by, for I gazed out dully at their ancient skylines, unimpressible. I was nervous, too: all I had by way of introduction in the city ahead were two small pieces of paper. One bore a name and an address, untidy and mostly illegible, and, in brackets, the words “near the Ca’ Rezzonico.”
But then, in what seemed no more than an instant, everything became transcendentally different. The train slid effortlessly into Santa Lucia station, an eager porter took my boxes, and I followed him past the ticket offices and the peddlers and down the steps onto the small square. A square edged with water and lined with docks, with boats. I was put promptly into one of them, a water taxi – all varnished wood and the look of mighty expense – and once I handed the slip of paper to the driver, so he swept me away, deep into the thickets of the Dorsoduro. I confess I was briefly alarmed, ducked as we passed under low bridges, felt a need to shrink as we whizzed down a skein of tiny canals – Tolentini, Gafaro, Rio Novo are the names I recall – that zig-zagged, sunless, between ancient, red-washed buildings that were more precariously decayed, tide-marked, and beautiful than I had ever imagined.
After fifteen minutes or so the driver then slowed his motor, stopped beside a bridge, tied on to a stanchion, and helped me up with the boxes. What seemed like a solid brick of lira changed hands. He then pointed me down a mysterious-looking street, and told me, approximately, what to look for: a tall carmine-varnished door with a bell, to be found down an alley off an alley. It took me an age to find it, shifting my boxes along the street, kicking cats out of the way, wondering briefly what all the Venice
