After Titian, Venice Observed

By ROBERT HUGHES

A new show in London is full of 17th century surprises

Some moments in art history used to seem beyond resuscitation. Seventeenth century Venetian painting was one of them. Nobody bothered about it. It was an orphan, huddled between the father figures of the Venetian cinquecento--Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto--and the effervescent grandeur of the Tiepolos in the 18th century. Even today, when scholarship and the art market have opened every mass grave in search of something to write about and sell, the names of painters like Damiano Mazza or Alessandro Turchi do not make the pulse race.

But nothing is unrevivable--as an exhibition of 54 paintings from 17th century Venice which opened two weeks ago at London's National Gallery abundantly shows. Organized by Art Historian Homan Potterton, and composed of paintings from British and Irish collections, it is the first show ever given to this subject in England. It makes a distinct contribution to art scholarship&--and, in an alternately dry and overripe way, provides real visual pleasure as well.

By the 1600s, Venice, once the amazement of the world and the ruler of a considerable part of it, was starting the long decline into the salty tourist trap the city is today. For almost 200 years, starting with the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks had been snapping off the Venetian colonies in the eastern Mediterranean. Portuguese caravels, rounding the tip of Africa in increasing numbers, had taken away Venice's old monopoly of the spice trade. Venice was turning from an imperial power into a cultural artifact. As such, she was one of the most visited cities of Europe. For an artist, a trip to see the Bellinis and Titians was an obligatory part of his education--as necessary, if he wanted to paint murals in the grand manner, as studying the classical ruins of Rome. Painters flocked to Venice from north of the Alps as well as from other centers in Italy, and this gave an eclectic tone to Venetian art. With no dominant brush to impose its presence, as Titian's had, almost anything went --remnants of international mannerism. Venetian color, quotations from Roman or Flemish Baroque, borrowings from the new realism of Caravaggio and his great Spanish follower, Ribera. The city was visited by geniuses, like the young Rubens; but its art colony consisted mainly of third-rate painters turning out ragged marsh peasants, holy Virgins with the rolling eyeballs of mad colts, and wardrobe-like, impermeable nudes.

There is a good deal of visual upholstery in the National Gallery's show. One Palma Giovane is enough, if the stodgy bodies of his Mars and Venus are a fair sample. "A fat red knave," one 17th century Englishman called this Mars; and he was right. But there are some pleasant surprises. Judging from his labored little religious paintings, Domenico Fetti -- a migrant from Rome, who died young in Venice in 1623--does not seem capable of anything as vivid as his portrait of the Mantuan prelate Vincenzo Avogadro, with its knobby, tense hands and burning Van Gogh eyes. Nor are there many more graceful responses to Caravaggio in 17th century Italian painting than the St. Sebastian by Nicolas Regnier, or Niccolo Renieri as he called himself in Venice, being in fact a Fleming. There are plenty of Caravaggesque notes: the dark shadows and sonorous reds, the harshly realistic bruise around the arow puncture in the saint's leg, the general sense of fusion between eroticism and death. But they are veiled by a kind of salon elegance. In Caravaggio, dead bodies are really dead, whereas Renieri's youthful Sebastian is stretched out in a mildly titillating swoon, without a mortal wound visible anywhere on his body.

The best part of the show is a group of paintings by Bernardo Strozzi, a much neglected major painter. Strozzi was a Capuchin friar from Genoa who seems to have wandered out of holy orders after his 50th birthday. He settled in Venice around 1630. His work stands out first and most obviously for its color. The blues and yellows of Strozzi's Personification of Fame have a rinsed brilliance that foreshadows Tiepolo. (The allegory is more complex than it seems to be; the painting is actually about two different kinds of fame. What would now be called celebrity is represented by the gilded trumpet, which is too short to make anything better than a loud squawk. The object in Fame's right hand is a tenor shawm, a more melodious instrument signifying proper reputation.) Strozzi had looked attentively at Rubens, and extracted from his work a fine sense of how to suggest different substances with their "equivalents" in paint. With an effortless rhetoric of the hand, the lathering scribbles of his brush summon up the richness of brocade, the slippery quality of light on silk, or the dense glow of flesh. Strozzi could also work at a deeper and more troubled level, as his best-known painting, the Concert, shows. The nervous hands and concentrated looks of the very unaristocratic musicians tuning their instruments become a metaphor for all disciplined work by artists, including Strozzi's own. Such a painting is, in its own right, a justification for this show.

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