Art: Tale of Two Cities

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From the resources in Venice it would have been easy to put together a glamorous exhibition aimed at the Volpone in every tourist: much dazzle, little information. But for Art Historian Sergio Bettini, who chose the objects and wrote a provocative catalogue essay, "Venice and Byzantium" offered a less obvious opportunity: chiefly, that of presenting early Venetian art as a paradigm of its city, the incomparable Serenissima. There was, he proposes, a sort of aboriginal will-to-form that pervaded all Venetian design from chalices to campanili, and he treats the art on view as "emblems of the city's period of formation," their look determined as much by environment as by the imported canons of Byzantine style.

Paolo Veneziano, the greatest Venetian artist of the 14th century, was manifestly not a Byzantine, though he may have studied in Constantinople. In his Discovery of St. Mark's Body in San Marco the figures have lost their frontal stiffness, they are united by a wonderfully rhythmic and supple line. For all the impacted geometric splendor of costume and marble inlay, this is a painting and not an icon. But why should Venetian art up to and including Paolo have been so exclusively preoccupied with flatness, arabesque and color, instead of following Giotto's path toward monumental solidity and the "real world"?

Visual Experience. Because, Bettini suggests, the Venetian world, though just as real, was different. The entire visual experience of the Venetians, living on low mud islands and gazing across sheets of water whose colors shifted under that immense dome of Adriatic sky, predisposed them toward color and flatness.

Even in architecture, the classical Italian experience of solid and void does not quite apply to Venice: the Doges' Palace, no less than its contents, is a construction of colored surfaces. One of the pleasures offered by "Venice and Byzantium" is to step outside the gallery and see the ideas of the art replicated and magnified in its macrocosm, the city itself. Both reveal a unique and now lost way of giving shape to the world.

Venice was always revealing its curiously heteroclite taste. At first, one might suppose a device like the 12th century perfume burner from the Treasury of St. Mark's was the very essence of Byzantinism. Given the chance, the Byzantines would certainly have built their churches in gold and silver to emulate the Bible's description of the New Jerusalem. So one might read this perfume burner, with its Greek plan and five pierced and bubbling domes, as a fantastic architectural model for the greater fantasy of St. Mark's Basilica. Even the plaques in its base, depicting centaurs, sirens and griffins, suggest the antique bas-reliefs that remain embedded in the walls of St. Mark's. Yet the domes and the sinuous palm-leaf decorations are not Byzantine in form but Arabic, and the whole thing was made in southern Italy. The Venetians made a church out of it by soldering crosses to its conical towers.

Piling use on use, like layers of Adri aticsilt left by successive tide-flows, it self the prototype of civic eclecticism, Venice lent its rich, illusory profile even to the works of art it imported. They, like everything else in the city, have endured sea changes.

∎ Robert Hughes