The Architectural History of Venice

"It is a most erudite, solid and full guide to the buildings of Venice. If you are more interested in buildings than my book tells you, it’s the one to go for. She has all the facts. The architectural history of Venice is extraordinary, not least because it’s built on water. The whole construction of these buildings, the number of piles that were built to make the foundations! So you drive the piles into the mud. Then, on top of that, you set a series of huge, crisscrossing larch planks, which make a raft called a zattera . When you’ve got this semi-stable foundation, you’ve got to build as thin and as light as you possibly can, because the building is sitting on a load of old sticks. So the walls of most Venetian buildings are terribly thin. There’s a 6th-century Roman description of Venice, of a fishing community on an island where everyone is living on alder poles in houses made of rushes in similar poverty. It’s a good foundation myth of people of all estates living equally side-by-side that is absolutely central to the idea of Venice as a republic. Venice’s ruler, the doge, was unbelievably disadvantaged by his role. It was very arcane and famous for the dotty way he was elected, with 20 people choosing 100 and 100 choosing six, and six choosing two and two choosing 40 and 40 choosing 20. They go from one vast room to another and, eventually, I imagine the name of the person somebody wanted in the first place pops out of a hat. But theoretically, people didn’t have such a vested interest and in any case, their rule was often short-lived because it was such a gerontocracy. But those early buildings are, I suppose, genuinely vernacular, built of what’s around, which wasn’t much. Later, bricks had to come from Treviso or somewhere on terra firma and timber had to come first from the pine forest along the coast and from oaks in the hills and then later from further round into Istria. The numbers are astonishing: 500,000 piles were needed to make San Marco and Santa Maria della Salute had millions of acres of forest denuded to make it stand up. Then you make a damp course of Istrian stone, which is incredibly impermeable marble. And as long as the water goes up and down on that, the water doesn’t get into the building. Then you can build with brick on top of that. That’s one of the problems. One of the much-vaunted threats to Venice is the rising water levels which would take the mean water level above the Istrian stone damp course in old buildings. That’s why everybody is concerned about that. “An awful lots of what’s most exciting about Venice is in churches” Deborah Howard’s book deals with not only how things are built, but how the early buildings were very influenced by Venice’s initially belonging to the eastern half of the Roman Empire (when the Roman Empire splits, Venice becomes part of the Exarchate of Ravenna and is answerable to Byzantium) and turning to Constantinople, both culturally and politically, rather than to Rome. One then deals with the effect of Byzantium, whether it’s in terms of mosaic and gold or just the nature of the arches and stilted arches, and then the Gothic develops. Venice is conservative all the way through the Renaissance. It’s very slow and resentful about change. The first Renaissance building, probably by Mauro Codussi, is San Michele on the graveyard island and is 70 to 80 years after Donato Bramante’s building in Rome. It’s even longer after Giotto and Filippo Brunelleschi are building in Florence. One of the tropes is that Venice looks backward because it doesn’t have a past. By 840, a lot of the parishes in the middle of Rialto were already decided, but it doesn’t have an ancient history. So there’s this overriding desire to get the credibility of ancientness. There’s this idea of spolia —stone saved from other buildings—and borrowed antiquity. Take the porphyry sculpture of the Tetrarchs, brought back from Constantinople, probably in the Second Crusade, and embedded into San Marco—as are all sorts of panels and discs of porphyry and other precious stones. Even St. Mark’s remains are famously rescued from Alexandria. It isn’t actually the cathedral until about 1807, but the ducal chapel. Absolutely. It’s dark and numinous and glittering and oriental. Even Ruskin, who loved it more than his mother, hates the cresting that goes around it. He’s full of frightful fury about various people’s work to it. But it’s right up there with Hagia Sophia as one of the great Byzantine, early Christian buildings. When I said that the Gothic was the great export of Venice, probably more unique to the Veneto and Venice and equally pervasive globally, is Palladian classicism. Andrea Palladio was actually called something quite different, but was adopted by a grandee of Mantua, who called him Palladio after Pallas Athena because he was such an amazing god of drawing. He was a stone mason, as was his father, and had these extraordinary ideas. Italy was the cradle of humanism, particularly in Padua and Rome, and the buildings of ancient Rome were being unearthed. People were trying to work out the lost wisdom of the ancients and the architecture was under their feet. Raphael famously recorded the paintings of the Domus Aurea in Rome. Palladio looked at these emerging buildings and, in the early 16th century, developed a new language of classicism which was of huge significance. Sebastiano Serlio had already been tabulating how the orders were used and making rules and people were aware of the work of Vitruvius, who was the first century architect/writer who wrote about defense, beehives, constructing bridges, and drainage. Palladio took this and applied it initially to villas on terra firma , then on a series of church facades in Venice: the Redentore, San Pietro di Castello, San Francesco della Vigna and posthumously—allegedly—the Zitelle and various other smaller works. For example at the Carita, the nunnery that was turned into the Accademia, there’s a cloister inside that was done by him. One of his particular tricks is superimposing one pediment on another, so you end up with two entablatures, one in front of another. But the main thing is that he’s building churches with temple fronts. He’s using the language of non-Christian Greece and Rome to express church architecture. It’s a big dramatic change, and it’s why it comes late to Venice. Then it goes everywhere. After Villa Rotonda appears, you get buildings like Mereworth Castle in Kent, Chiswick House in London, Monticello in Virginia and George Washington’s house, Mount Vernon. I suppose because Venice is a republic, Washington espouses Palladianism as a language of this new country and it takes off. It makes the English country house and is woven back into Dutch and French neoclassicism, which up to then had been based mainly on Dutch copybooks. So Palladianism is for some people the most and for others the second most important architectural export. There’s not much Mantegna, Giorgione’s Tempest is in the Accademia as are several Titians. The Accademia is a very good museum because it hasn’t got much in it. The best Titian in Venice is this extraordinary, bright red altarpiece in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, which is a Dominican, mendicant order Gothic church on the Dorsoduro in St Polo. It does occasionally rain in Venice, so you do need some indoor excursions. For sheer artistic passion, I’d recommend the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which is a bizarre series of Tintoretto paintings. The scuole were guilds, either of craftsmen, or sometimes just of rich tradesmen, who would gather together to do good and get power. They built assembly halls to work in and they were big focuses of non-ecclesiastical resource. They were nominally religious, not either parish churches or monastic orders, but rivals to churches in their spending. There were chapels in each one of these scuole . San Rocco is this extraordinary narrative of St. Roch and the paintings are huge, 20 yards by 15 yards. They’re full of wild, dramatic chiaroscuro and extraordinary blown-up perspectives. You look at them by sliding around the floor with a mirror on a school dinner trolley. It’s absolutely brilliant. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The absolute other end of paintings to go and see would be the Carpaccios in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, which is behind San Marco. They’re almost genre pictures because they are pictures of Venice as it was in 1500. There is this extraordinary, overriding oddity about Venice, which is that because it’s so unchanged whether it’s in Carpaccio or Bellini, Guardi or Canaletto, you’re looking at paintings with a costumed cast that could be you. That’s such an exciting thing. Obviously, things change a bit: the gondolas used to have covers, now they don’t. But, in general, many views, whether medieval or later, are recognizably unchanged. The Correr Museum has also got a lot of wonderful paintings in it. Napoleon was very, very pleased to have got this great bauble, Venice, for his empire and called San Marco the greatest drawing room in Europe. He knocked down the Church of San Frediano, which faced San Marco, and built himself the Ala Napoleonica. It’s a whole series of Empire rooms and big staircases, charmless but grand and with wonderful things inside. Another extraordinary museum, less for paintings but for odd things, is the Naval Historical Museum, which is up by the Arsenale. It’s an extraordinary collection of model boats and shells. One of my favorite things is a series of working drawings for First World War battleships. They’re huge, complex, and very neat, and they did all this without a felt pen. They must have been waiting for the ink to splotch at any moment, and for the whole thing to be wasted. But I think that whereas Rome is about sculpture and big private collections an awful lot of what’s most exciting in Venice is in churches."