CounterPunch+ Exclusives

CounterPunch+ Exclusives

The End of Venetian Painting: A Very Short Story

In an earlier essay, “Relics/Icons/Paintings: A Very Short History of Venetian Painting,” I traced the origins of Venetian painting. Here, continuing the story, I take that account into the present, offering a brief explanation of how this visual tradition developed and, also, why it died. In the prior account, I argued that the demand for fuller visibility of the sacred figures led from relics to icons and then on to paintings. In Venice, this pictorial tradition can be understood as providing a support for prayer. What believers wanted was not just to be in the presence of the relic or to be accompanied by an icon, but to have a visual representation of the sacred figure. Hence, the creation of naturalistic sacred paintings.

Giandomenico Tiepolo Hawk Swooping onto the Flock of Sparrows in Flight

Now, extending that narrative, I show how, in a dialectical fashion, this development of sacred subjects meant to accompany prayer had a truly unexpected consequence: the creation in Venice of modernist secular visual art. Once believers gathered relics, it was natural—so I have suggested—that they make icons and then paintings, seeking to support their religious activities. But what was surprising, then, was that once these sacred pictures were made, the aim became to create images of naturalistic subjects. The Venetian Republic required these subjects to support its communal religious life. That development is, of course, the story told in the very many familiar histories of painting in Venice from the Bellinis to Tiepolo. And this search for more realistic sacred images led to art with secular subjects, to what I would call modernism. This came about because when figurative art was developed in Venice, it turned out that it need not contain sacred subjects. As I have indicated in an earlier essay, Aretino’s fascination with the aesthetic pleasure of appearances, viewing Venice as if the city were an artwork, marks this transition.

In some places, the colors were green-blue, and in others, they appeared blue-green, finely mixed by the whims of Nature, who is the teacher of teachers. With light and shades, she gave deep perspective and high relief to what she wished to bring forward and set back, and so I, knowing how your brush breathes with her spirit, cried out three or four times: ‘Oh, Titian, where are you?’

He only regrets that this natural picture “did not last longer,” as its painted replica would have.

Compare another invention that was very influential in Venice at this time: guns. Once the cannon and rifle were invented, warfare at sea and on land was transformed. The military didn’t need any bookish analysis to see that these technologies were superior, and so permitted dominance in warfare. Without any need for theorizing, battles on land and at sea were changed dramatically. Like the Christians, the Muslims took up guns.

The invention (or discovery) of painting in a culture familiar with relics and icons also introduced a number of institutions familiar in the present American art world. But so far as I know, this development hasn’t ’t been presented in these exact terms. A market system in visual art replaced the traditional town-down system of patronage. The essential role of connoisseurship is to measure aesthetic (and also economic) value, allowing merchants to distinguish Giorgiones from Titians, studio replicas and forgeries. Dealers and collectors needed to know what they were purchasing. And art writing permits us to articulate these aesthetic values, and explain the aesthetic judgments. Titian’s early masterpiece The Assumption (1516) in the Frari was a commissioned work whose visual novelty perplexed the clerics, but pleased the artists. But then his late works for the Habsburgs were admired by his patrons for their radical originality. In this art world, connoisseurs made critical judgments about the comparative value of paintings, dealers sold these works, and collectors purchased them. This tradition, inaugurated by Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and their successors, thus transformed the Venetian visual art world.

One important modernist art world institution didn’t develop in sixteenth-century Venice: the public art museum. In France, in 1793 the Royal collection became the national museum, the Louvre, which was the ancestor of our present public at museums. There was no equivalent public institution at that time in Venice. (There were important private collections.) And of course public museums are linked to historical consciousness of art’s development, which creates the concerns of art history writing.To have modernism, you need a market economy in this art. A market system, not the top-down financial system as under the old regime market. In Venice, the art market for late Titian, as later for Canaletto and Tiepolo, moved abroad. Modernism needed economic support, which, by the late years of the Venetian Republic, could no longer be provided by that economically declining country. This, ultimately, is why after an impressive beginning, modernism couldn’t develop in Venice. By stages, the Venetian Republic became enfeebled. The art world thrived on development, but the Venetian political structure did not. The small state of Venice could not compete with Napoleon’s empire. And so, modernism had to be reborn in mid-nineteenth century France and, then of course, in twentieth-century New York, where it found the necessary economic support system. Without a market economy, you can’t have modernist art. And so, although the artistic development of Venetian painting was far ahead of the political structure of the Republic, the potential for modernism was not realized in that state.

Has art’s history ended? A generation ago, numerous critics dealt with this question. The most subtle, far reaching account was due to Arthur Danto, who argued that after Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) the history of art had ended. More recently, however, many commentators have questioned that claim, pointing out ways in which new art forms are developed. With relation to Venetian art, the comparable question is easy to answer: When the Venetian Republic died in 1797, so too necessarily did the history of Venetian art.

This essay offers a reading of Walter Pater’s famous Hegelian essay “The School of Giorgione,” updated and adapted to the contemporary art world. And, also, I use that account to explain why modernism did not develop in Venice after what seemed a promising beginning. What the failure of this Venetian tradition says about contemporary American modernism, that is a question which I hope to take up in another, future essay.

This essay extends my “Relics/Icons/Paintings: A Very Short History of Venetian Painting”;” Why Giorgione Matters” and “Museum Skepticism Revisited: the Lessons of Venice” all in this journal. Dennis Romano, Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City (2014) is a complete recent economic and political history.

David Carrier is a philosopher who writes art criticism. His Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art and Lawrence Carroll (Bloomsbury) and with Joachim Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins/ The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (Penn State University Press) were published in 2018. He is writing a book about the historic center of Naples, and with Pissarro he conducted a sequence of interviews with museum directors for Brooklyn Rail. He is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic.

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