Art: It's Biennale Time Again

In Venice, a profusion of flora, fauna and visual metaphors

The theme of this year's Biennale—that vast, sprawling international conspectus of current art that opens at irregular intervals in the public gardens of Venice and is one of the city's main tourist attractions—is "Dalla Natura All'Arte, Dall'Arte Alla Natura" (from nature to art, from art to nature). Appropriately, then, the star of the 1978 press week was not an artist but an animal.

Borrowed from a Lombard farm by an Italian artist named Antonio Paradiso, the beast, a massive bull named Pinco, stood ruminating in...