A Place Without Precedent
- ️Sun Apr 20 1997
April 20, 1997
A Place Without PrecedentBy GARRY WILLS
How the Venetians snatched history to invent themselves
VENICE AND ANTIQUITY
The Venetian Sense of the Past.
By Patricia Fortini Brown.
Illustrated. 361 pp. New Haven:
Yale University Press. $60.
f all the major medieval cities in Italy, only Venice lacked a classical past. It had no Roman foundations to unearth, build on or celebrate. It rose from its oozy lagoon at the time of the Lombard invasions in the sixth century A.D.
This was, at least potentially, a major embarrassment in a culture that established civic dignity in terms of precedents derived from both pagan and Christian Rome. So Venice set about finding ways to show it was older-than-thou. It claimed to be a slightly displaced Aquileia, and then traced Aquileia back to Antenor, the Trojan hero who settled northern Italy while Aeneas was settling southern Italy. Venice was New Troy. It was also a New Jerusalem, by virtue of St. Mark's supposed visit to Aquileia and the eighth-century removal of his bones to Venice. It was also New Constantinople (which was itself New Rome) by virtue of its basilica, patterned on Constantinople's Apostoleion and adorned with precious stones and other spoils from that city.
But in constructing a spurious antiquity, Venice never settled for mere imitation or replication. The city had a sense of its own distinctiveness that made it adapt all classical and biblical endorsements to its own peculiar history. This led to a persistent esthetic of diversity that Patricia Fortini Brown, an associate professor of art and archeology at Princeton, subtly analyzes in ''Venice and Antiquity.'' Even Rome, Jerusalem and Constantinople had to take out new citizenship to be admitted. The arrivals were subjected to one or more of several processes, which Ms. Brown variously calls agglutination, incorporation, amalgamation or transformation. All are seen in St. Mark's, the basilica that set the terms for a Venetian esthetic. Agglutination is apparent in the veined marble thinly sliced in Constantinople and affixed to the walls of St. Mark's. Incorporation is obvious in the roughly 600 columns brought from the East to be re-used in the basilica (only 15 columns came from the Italian mainland). And transformation is most obvious in the change of the bronze horses over the entry, converted from a classical quadriga in Constantinople to the four horses of the Apocalypse, harbinger of Christ's triumphant return.
The Venetian use of borrowed pasts in a context of boasted originality led to continual self-reinvention for the city. Ancient Athenians called themselves ''autochthonous,'' sprung up out of their own soil. Venetians were what might be called ''autothalassous,'' sprung from their own sea. That is why their emblematic lion is doubly amphibious -- at home on sea as well as land (Carpaccio's Lion of Venice has two paws in the water), in the sky as well as the sea (the Lion is winged, with reference to the sails of Venetian galleys). There is something chimerical about this beast of transformation, and Ms. Brown rightly sees a special love for Ovid's ''Metamorphoses'' in the Venetian lore. It is appropriate that the lion on the great pillar of the Venetian Piazzetta is an oriental ''monster'' fixed up with wings and a book by the metamorphizing magic of the Venetians. The Sea City, like the sea itself, alters things ''into something rich and strange.'' The lions on Leopardi's flag-stands before the basilica are sphinxlike.
Stated baldly, Ms. Brown's theme may not seem either new or profound. But she shows, in sensitive detail, how the perpetual reinvention of Venice made the city reinvent the Rome, Constantinople and Jerusalem over against which it was defining itself. This led to a peculiarly shifting and illusionistic view of the past, undergoing subtle changes like the light of the city's own watery atmosphere.
No wonder Venetians were entranced by the vision of the past as a dream sequence in the mysterious ''Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,'' printed in Venice (1499) and written (probably) by a Venetian friar, Francesco Colonna. Ms. Brown rightly gives this Ovidian ''book of changes'' her close attention -- but she could have traced even further its impact on Venetian art if Luigi Stefanini was right in seeing it as a source for Giorgione's ''Tempest'' (c. 1505) and Walter Friedlaender was right in seeing it as the key to Titian's ''Sacred and Profane Love'' (c. 1514).
Ms. Brown also helps us see why the city of surfaces (of ''agglutinations'') does not have to be considered shallow. She constructs a paradoxical esthetic of surface profundities, the stable values revealed in a readiness to ''remember'' the new as the old. She sees that the very conservatism of the city made it creative, constantly adapting other things to its own serene continuity, showing a confidence in its own identity even in the stress of changes forced on it by political and economic setbacks. No culture was ever more clever at escaping the anxiety of influence.
There was an imperial and opportunistic side to this cultural subjection of others, which Ms. Brown does not play down. Indeed, one of the two symbols she threads through the narrative is that of ''Occasio'' (Opportunity) as something to be seized by the hair as it tries to slip away. This and ''Chronos'' (Time) happen to be the earliest classical images discovered in reliefs on the island of Torcello, and Ms. Brown shows a clever opportunism herself in putting them to good use for organizing her wide-ranging study of Venetian attitudes. At times, she seems to wander far from her theme -- into maps and coins made by non-Venetians, for instance -- but always she plucks the material back (with an urgent tug, in places, on the forelock of ''Occasio''). We may wonder, for instance, why she is spending so much time on the antiquities collected and described by Cyriacus of Ancona; but if we just trust her long enough, we find her unearthing images from Cyriacus' collection in Jacopo Bellini's drawings and Andrea Mantegna's paintings -- evidence of Cyriacus' two visits to Venice.
Unfortunately, Ms. Brown ends her study just as the more systematic classicism of Serlio and Palladio was being introduced to Venice in the 16th century. Did the city continue to work its transformative magic on the past when that past was imported on such a massive scale? One suspects she would think so, but it is a position that would take some careful arguing. Meanwhile we can be grateful for the story as far as she has told it. No one can revisit familiar scenes in Venice, after reading the book, without seeing new aspects to the Venetian performance, that sleight-of-hand that deceives even as it delights.
Garry Wills's latest book is ''John Wayne's America.''
