Original subtitles

Good afternoon.

It's hardly surprising that a city as astonishingly situated as is Venice,

with its multitude of smaller canals framing the long serpentine of the Grand Canal

and its numerous smaller piazzas complementing the vast Piazza San Marco and the adjoining Piazzetta,

should be addicted to public ceremonies and processions, both on water and on land.

All the cities of Italy had such public occasions and recorded them in paintings.

But nowhere outside of Venice did the state and its leading citizens so compulsively commission artists

to paint so many and such large canvases to trumpet the beauties and virtues of their city.

The physical splendor of Venice and the close identification of the state with religion

combined to foster the desire for grand ceremonial paintings, often in ensembles or cycles.

May I take just a moment to show you the map again?

We have seen it, the Grand Canal again, the Rialto Bridge halfway down.

And as you enter the basin of San Marco, you come to the Ducal Palace, the Piazzetta,

the Basilica behind it, the great Piazza San Marco in front of the Basilica.

This, the largest public space, but far from the only public space in Venice.

And I didn't point out that further down, you see ships grouped here,

where we have the Arsenal, the Arsenale, this famous area obviously for defense

and into which ships could sail and sail out of as well.

It is a dense, a large, dense area, but with many small pockets of piazzas

and many smaller waterways, and there is a constant feeling of the movement

of the Venetian populace in the city and on the water around and through the city

in such celebrations.

In order to continue, in a sense, the tour of Venice that we began in the last lecture,

I want to consider this very special and notable category of Venetian art.

It will briefly take us ahead of our story, to the end of the 15th century.

The category in question is cityscapes, paintings of urban settings and daily life.

Large Italian cityscapes had been painted before the Venetian scenes of the 15th century.

The most important of those was probably the enormous fresco in the town hall of Siena,

the Palazzo Publico, called The Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country

by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, about 1340.

But those are occasional efforts, whereas in Venice, the obsession with public ceremonies

and processions, religious and civic, on land and on water, resulted in a more comprehensive

body of cityscapes, usually conceived as narrative cycles, than was produced in any other city-state.

Two of the principal painters of this subject were Vittorio Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini.

Carpaccio was much the younger, but I'm going to discuss him first anyway,

in order to place Gentile in closer proximity to his brother Giovanni in our next lecture.

When Vittorio Carpaccio, who was born about 1465 and died about 1526, was at the pinnacle

of his career, he was commissioned in 1516 by officers of the Republic to paint an imposing

Lion of Saint Mark for the Ducal Palace, where it has remained and has become one of the best

known, perhaps the best known, of the hundreds of images of this symbol of Venice.

In fact, it's a virtual billboard of the symbol of Venice.

It's about 12 feet wide.

The winged lion, we've seen it before in sculpture, the winged lion is the symbol of Saint Mark.

It derives from the Book of Revelation, from Chapter 4 in Revelation, as do the other symbols

of the evangelists.

It depicts a winged lion, his right paw on an open book with the words,

Pax tibi marke evangelista meus, peace be unto you, Mark my evangelist.

Words divinely spoken to Mark on the eve of his martyrdom in Egypt, in Alexandria.

Behind the lion, to the left, is the city itself.

We are on the mainland, and you're looking past the lion and his book, and you see the

Ducal Palace, alluding to the city, and you can also see the Piazzetta in the top of the

Campanile, the bell tower there as well.

And at the right of the lion, you have the ships, a number of the ships, and a reference

to the arsenal, to the arsenale, the Venetian naval power here.

And I notice that the lion's back paws are in the water of the basin as well.

Well, the narrative cycles that Carpaccio and others composed were commissioned by

scuole, S-C-U-O-L-E, singular S-C-U-O-L-A, scuola, scuola, or scuola, literally schools,

a Venetian institution.

They were in fact confraternities organized under religious institutions, and their activities

were often charitable as well as social in character.

Their meeting halls, whether they were small or large, were often decorated with paintings

dedicated to their patron saints, and were a focal point of Venetian artistic activity,

and they were of the greatest importance for artistic patronage.

I want to put this image up and talk to you about the great cycle, one of the greatest cycles

of Carpaccio.

Among Carpaccio's patrons was the Scuola di Sant' Ursula, St. Ursula, for whom he produced

an extensive narrative cycle in the 1490s.

The paintings are now in the Academia Gallery.

The legend of St. Ursula is fascinating, to say the least, since it involves the daughter

of the King of Brittany, the son of the King of Britain, the Pope, and not least 11,000 virgins.

It is more like a fairy tale than a Christian epic, but it allowed for a great play of pictorial

imagination.

Carpaccio's large paintings relate in vivid detail the legend of that mythical saint, and

once again one turns to the golden legend for the details.

In brief, the pagan son of the King of Britain wished to marry Ursula, daughter of the Christian

King of Brittany.

She agreed, on condition that he convert to Christianity, and that there should be a three-year

hiatus so that she might make a pilgrimage to Rome.

She did not travel alone to Rome.

She traveled with ten female companions, and each of the young women was accompanied by 1,000

virgins.

It is not only the modern male mind that finds this scene piquant.

The golden legend relates, quote, that from all sides, then, the virgins flocked together,

and men, too, hurried to see this great spectacle.

Well, they reached Rome, the 11,000, via Basel, but on the return, they were besieged at Cologne

by the Huns, who slaughtered all 11,000 Christian women.

The painting you've been looking at is the arrival of the English ambassadors at the court

of Brittany.

This canvas, set up in three parts, as we've so often seen, a kind of tri-part organization

here, this canvas is nearly 20 feet wide.

They arrive, the ambassadors arrive at the left, in the arcade by the water's edge, and

then in the center, they're received and they present the proposal of marriage in the center.

And behind them, by the way, is a wonderful, centrally planned temple, which was not to

be found, I assure you, in Brittany or Britain, but very much to be found in Italy.

And that is true of the architecture which one finds here.

It is, of course, recognizable, the Italian and often Venetian architecture.

On the right-hand side of this, you see a room, an elevated room here.

It's Ursula's bedchamber, and her father has joined her there, and she is telling him the

conditions under which she will accept this offer of marriage.

And I have to say that her father looks just a little dejected here, as though this is probably

going to cause a war or something.

He doesn't seem quite happy with this.

And I won't have a chance to follow through on this.

Nonetheless, this woman with a cane who sits at the steps outside and at the feet at the

lower part of this elevated room, is an invention of Carpaccio's, which you will see again in

Venetian art, including in that of Titian.

It's one of those little inventions, little footnotes, as it were, that fascinated other

painters and got quoted.

Now, although this doesn't take place in Venice at all, Carpaccio's cycle constitutes what has

very nicely been called a fantasy on the theme of Quattrocento Venice.

Architecture, decoration, costume, custom, and above all, the light, all reflect the city

that Carpaccio knew.

For example, I show you a detail that in this large painting is tucked way over here.

If you look out the arcade, you can see a gondola out here, and I will show it to you

now.

It's so charming.

I mean, it's almost lost in the detail, but it's purely Venice, of course, nothing like

this in Brittany, and it is an exquisite scene.

And seeing this is just this gondola scene, with the figure seen from behind, the foreshortening

of it is also charming.

There's a kind of wit that runs throughout these paintings, regardless of the seriousness

of their subjects.

The departure of the English ambassadors, with the news that the son of the king will be accepted

as a groom for the daughter of the king of Brittany, and they're ready to depart, and this is simply

a departure scene, as it were.

They say they bid their respects to the king.

But what a scene.

It's the most wonderfully memorable, elegantly decorated architecture that you can imagine,

with great paneled inlaid walls here, and wonderful color in the costumes as well, the oranges, many

of the costumes, oranges, reds, greens, and also for the unity of space and light.

I mean, this opens up into another area back here with the staircase, very tall, high staircase,

with a view through an archway beyond that, and even though it's dominated by the foreground,

that foreground is flooded with light from a window that we don't see out of to the left,

and that light floods across the space.

It is a wonderful space for the ambassadors to take their leave in.

The meeting of Ursula and Etherius, the young man's name, is part of this scene,

and the other part is the departure of the pilgrimage.

It's another 20-foot canvas divided into more or less equally by the two sections by the flagpole here.

Britain is on the left in the background here, very elaborate castle back here,

and also a hill with a fortification on the top of that hill.

In the left foreground, we have Etherius bidding farewell, kneeling and bidding farewell

to his father, the king of Britain.

On the right side of that pole, we have two scenes, essentially.

First, you should identify everything on the right-hand side as Brittany,

with a more colorful or at least lighter in tone architecture,

an architecture which is more clearly in North Italian style

than the more medieval architecture on the left.

Aetherius is seen here greeting Ursula,

and then the two of them, to the right, kneel before her father.

Behind them, back in this area clear across the water here,

some of the endless procession of virgins begin to enter boats.

There are long boats here which will ferry them out to the ships,

and from thence they will take sail, and in a sense they already have.

That's the indication of the ships moving into the distance.

And by the way, the kind of thing that fascinated Carpaccio

is to be found here in this ship, which is tipped,

not accidentally, but intentionally.

You tipped, or I think the word is careened, a ship in order to prepare it.

No dry dock, but you could get it in the shallow area,

tip it over and caulk the bottom,

do whatever you had to do to repair the ship.

And this fascinates him.

I mean, remember, this is 20 feet wide,

so he can show quite a lot of detail here,

and if one is in front of the fresco,

one in front of the painting, pardon me, not fresco,

if you're in front of the painting,

you can very much enjoy the details of the men

who are working on this repair.

It also sets up a wonderful diagonal, doesn't it?

Just cutting across the architecture here,

and that diagonal is echoed, in a sense,

by this diagonal running up the perspective,

the buildings on the right-hand side,

very carefully constructed.

Let me show you yet another scene from this.

It's not precisely a narrative scene.

It's the dream of St. Ursula,

and it occurs at a moment later in the story

when an angel appears to her in her dream.

It's a kind of enunciation, I suppose.

The angel comes in from the right

to inform her of her imminent martyrdom.

So she is aware of this before they are attacked by the Huns.

She is aware of this,

and that means, of course,

she's given an opportunity to escape this.

So are the others,

and the golden legend says one,

one only of the 11,000 hid in her room,

and then the next day got up the courage to sacrifice herself.

And so the meaning of martyrdom is clear enough here.

This is one of the most lovely paintings in Venetian art.

This cube of a room, this beautiful space,

geometrically clear and subdivided into geometric units,

the cupboards, the windows, the bed,

the way the light falls in very sharply defined ways,

but falls very softly in terms of its atmospheric effect.

It's a cube of space which melts in that light.

The colors are delicate.

The range of grays and blued grays

playing against the bedspread and so forth.

The descriptive details are everywhere here.

We have her shoes at the side of her bed here.

At the foot of her bed is a crown.

It's, of course, the crown of martyrdom,

not merely the crown of a princess,

but the crown of martyrdom placed there.

And the angel is carrying a palm of martyrdom,

a martyr's palm with her.

You can feast your eyes on the details of things

that would have been in such a room.

And there are a couple of odd details here

that haven't been really explained.

These are both classical statues over the doorways,

nude classical statues,

one of some sort of a water carrier

and the other one of a Venus.

And their significance here has not, I think,

really been explained.

But what doesn't need explaining

is the sense of wholeness

brought by a wonderful understanding

of the architecture

and suffused with this very poetic light.

A much more modest scuola

than that of St. Ursula

also engaged Carpaccio.

That scuola is San Giorgio degli Schiavone,

and it secured Carpaccio's services

in the first decade of the 16th century.

It's a very small confraternity

in a small building,

and the paintings that he made for it

are smaller and have a greater poetic quality.

They are lighter in meaning, in a sense.

The confraternity is a confraternity of Slavs

from Dalmatia.

The word Schiavone means Slav,

and that, again, shows you

that the Dalmatian community in Venice

from across the Adriatic

was a very important one,

as indeed it was.

This cycle,

actually two different subjects here,

three different subjects,

were originally on the second floor,

but they were moved in the 16th century

to the ground floor where they are today.

And they include scenes of St. Jerome

and scenes of St. Augustine

and one scene of St. George.

They range from whimsical drama

to a wonderful kind of spellbound meditation

that we found also in St. Ursula's dream.

In this case, it is a lion

that is limped into the monastery

where St. Jerome is,

terrifying all his fellow monks,

the brothers,

and they all flee.

And these are just spectacular images of flight,

just the way he's designed them

with their cowls and their capes.

It is just a beautiful forward moving

as they rush off to the right-hand side.

And the elderly, obviously saint,

is trying to say,

it's all right.

He's injured.

He's not dangerous.

You should help him.

And of course, they do help him

and they tend to his foot,

which usually the story is

a thorn is in it,

but in fact it's torn by thorns.

And of course,

the reference is to the Passion of Christ

and the Crown of Thorns

in something like this.

In any event,

the lion is tended to

by St. Jerome and his fellow monks.

Wonderful little sense

of the monastic community here

and the buildings that go with it.

A scene which is very reminiscent

of the dream of St. Ursula

is this vision of St. Augustine,

signed and dated 15-2,

signed and dated right here

on this cartelino,

an illusionistic piece of paper

fallen on the floor in the foreground.

This painting was thought

for a long time

to represent St. Jerome,

but they have agreed

that it is to be interpreted

as St. Augustine,

writing a letter to St. Jerome,

and they did have

a real life correspondence.

And while he's writing,

he receives a visitation

from Jerome in the form of light,

telling him that he, Jerome,

has died.

And the Golden Legend,

there's also a somewhat related line

in the Golden Legend

where it's reported

that Augustine wrote about Jerome,

by the nobility of his discourse,

he shone from the east to the west

like the light of the sun.

And I think that plays into this as well.

But like Ursula's room,

this is the most astonishing cube

of light-filled space.

And the expectancy of the saint

as he pauses in his writing,

and no saint could be more associated

with writing,

he pauses and looks up,

startled by what is apparently

a flood of light

that has suddenly illumined the room

and entered the room,

a room which is very large

and I think has to be understood

as a monastic study almost.

It's certainly not a small room,

but a large one in a monastery

with all sorts of details,

which one would love to go into,

but I'll sure resist the temptation.

In addition to the cartellino down here,

we have this utterly charming dog

who sits there.

Dogs in Carpaccio are de rigueur.

He liked them,

and he brings them into his paintings.

Venetians in general

introduced animals and dogs in particular

into their paintings.

Carpaccio loved them.

But the way he's placed it

is what's wonderful,

right at the apex of that triangle of shadow

that comes in.

The shadow reaches across,

the dog is lit,

he looks up expectantly,

and it starts a long diagonal

moving right up through the arm

of the saint as well.

It's a beautiful piece of picture making.

It's full of love and gentleness as well.

The scuola, another scuola,

the scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista,

Saint John the Evangelist,

had owned since 1369

an important relic,

a piece of the Holy Cross.

And several artists contributed

to a series of ten paintings

over a period of years

dedicated to this relic.

I'm showing you Carpaccio's,

The Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross

of about 1494,

which is a rich portrait,

on the one hand,

of a particular quarter of the city.

I mean, you see real buildings,

many of them can be identified,

a bridge which had been built

about 40 years before,

a wooden bridge,

which would be replaced by the stone bridge,

which is still there today.

A wooden bridge, by the way,

which separated in the middle,

is a drawbridge to allow larger ships

to pass through on the canal.

A wonderful gathering of gondolas

on the lower part of this.

And on this loggia at the top,

a miracle is taking place,

and the miracle is the healing of a man

who was obsessed with a demon,

was possessed by a demon,

by touching him or, in some way,

using the relic of the Holy Cross to do so.

And, of course, there are many people

who have gathered to witness this,

and by that I mean members of the confraternity

who are paying for it,

are down here in portraits at the lower part,

and perhaps in the upper one as well.

And the gondolas have brought many people

to enjoy it,

and here's a dog in the gondola as well,

in the foreground of this painting.

Here is a detail of that area at the bottom.

And there you look back under the bridge

and see much more going on on the far side.

It's a wonderful, wonderful image.

I turn now to Gentile Bellini, 1429-157,

an artist who had a remarkable

international reputation,

which led to his summons to Constantinople,

where he was painter to Sultan Mehmet II

for two years.

We actually don't know much what he did then.

Things had been claimed and dropped,

but he was there.

Home in Venice, he turned his attention

to large cityscapes with narratives

and produced some of the best-known examples.

One of them is from the same cycle

of the Scuola di San Giovanni.

It's a miracle of the cross

at the Ponte San Lorenzo,

a St. Lawrence bridge.

And at the St. San Lorenzo bridge,

somebody, quite carelessly,

as they were in procession going across the bridge,

dropped the relic into the canal.

Actually, one wonders if this sort of thing

didn't happen a lot during processions,

but it's dropped into the canal,

and so everything stops until they are able to rescue it.

And as you see,

a number of people have gone in bathing

in order to find it.

There's a very, what must have been,

a very exotic touch of an African over here

who is about to dive in

and do his best to find it.

But it's been found.

Essentially, it didn't sink very far,

and this friar has found it

and floats through the water,

almost levitates with the reliquary,

which he has, reliquary and relic,

which he has recovered.

Once again, we have portraits over on the left

and in this group of people in the foreground.

We don't know whether they're from the confraternity

or whether possibly Gentile Bellini

put in his own family members here.

That's also a possibility.

This painting was painted in 1500.

It's similar to Carpaccio's Fuller of Incident,

in a way, because of this wonderful diving scene.

The event had occurred between 1370 and 1382.

The wonderful water here,

kind of, it's really aqua,

a greenish water which lends itself,

it gives a tone,

a kind of suspended tone,

meditative tone,

to the whole of the painting.

It really keys the painting quite beautifully.

Unquestionably, his most famous canvas

is the vast procession in Piazza San Marco of 1496.

It is nearly 25 feet wide.

It was painted for the same squalor

that we've been looking at.

And as a document,

just as a picture of what it includes,

it is of inestimable value

since it shows the piazza and the basilica

in precise detail as they were when he painted it.

For instance, if you look at the mosaics,

these are the original mosaics.

Only one of them still survives.

The rest have been replaced

by 16th and 17th century mosaics.

But this is the gold that you see here

and the glow is of the basilica at its height,

the third basilica,

the one that survived

with its original decoration.

And you can see the horses

and you can see they too are gilt,

quite strongly show in their gilding at the top.

The event which this procession chronicles,

which this painting chronicles,

is a procession on the feast of Corpus Christi in 1444.

Now, it's painted half a century later,

but in 1444, the procession,

which took place every year on the day of Corpus Christi,

carrying the relic here underneath this canopy

and carrying it through, of course,

Piazza San Marco.

And you can see how long this procession is.

They're clear down here.

They've come up this point, down and continuing on.

This, and that particular day in 1444,

a miracle occurred.

A merchant from Brescia

had successfully invoked the aid of the relic

as it passed to save the life of his son,

who was dying.

And the son's life was saved.

I must say they don't make much of the Brescia merchant,

only really of this wonderful procession

with the centerpiece below of the relic

and above of the Basilica San Marco.

The placing of these figures through space, though,

is wonderful.

Well, before I let this go, though,

look at the corner of the palace,

the Ducal Palace over here.

And this is, of course, the Campanile.

Today, there's nothing on this side of it

that's been torn down.

But then it had a building right up to the side of it.

But I thought I'd show you a detail

of the piazza in this painting,

where you get an idea of how carefully

he's placed his figures,

much as Perugino, in the painting

which keeps gracing us here behind me,

as Perugino did,

placing figures in the middle distance

in order to establish that space

and doing it just as effectively

and just as gracefully.

These people are talking their daily talk

while the procession goes on around them.

Gentili Bellini was at work on another huge canvas,

the St. Mark preaching in Alexandria

for the hall of the governing council

of the Scuola di San Marco,

when he fell ill and died in 157.

The confraternity of St. Mark

for which this painting was made

was influential, obviously,

precisely because it was dedicated

to the patron saint of Venice.

When some Venetian merchant adventurers

brought back the supposed body

of the evangelist to Venice,

they set in motion an extraordinary,

self-sustaining phenomenon.

From the moment that the relics

were in Venetian possession,

they were regarded as the sacred

and civic justification of the state.

First, it was another act

in the long-running dramatic conflict

between the Muslim and Christian worlds

over the status of Jerusalem

and also of Constantinople.

Second, it underscored the long reach

of the Venetian Republic

and its dominant navy.

The adoption of Mark's symbol,

his zoomorphic symbol of the lion,

and, of course, signified power.

But it also announced

the pacific intentions of the republic

since Mark, after all,

was an apostle, a missionary,

and the bishop of Alexandria.

The relics of Mark were to Venice,

as I have said what those of Peter

were to Rome,

and considered second only to Rome

in the dignity that they conferred

on the city.

The life of Mark,

but especially the posthumous liberation

of his uncorrupted body,

as pious legend had it,

was the iconographic centerpiece

of Venetian art and architecture.

In his will, he specified

that his brother Giovanni

finished the painting,

as in fact he did.

The softly fused colors

of so many of the figures

are in Giovanni's style.

But the most striking feature

remains the fanciful

Alexandrian architecture

here in the background,

which is surely owed

to Gentile Bellini.

Thank you for your attention.