The Legacy of La Serenissima

By ROBERT HUGHES

In London, a remarkable survey of 16th century Venice

Over the past five years or so, a revitalized Royal Academy of Arts in London has mounted some of the best historical art shows in living memory. The current one is "The Genius of Venice, 1500-1600," a survey of 144 paintings, 100 drawings, maps and documents, 42 sculptures and 65 prints, which has been on view at Burlington House since December. Do not walk to this one; run or fly, if you can. It will not travel; when it closes on March 11, a diorama of the energies that constituted one of the great moments in Western imagination will vanish. And the ritual of visiting Venice itself would be an imperfect substitute.

It is necessary, of course, to adjust one's feelings about Venice before entering this show. Today's visitor thinks of the city as a tottery invalid, preserved by the skin of the teeth from the ravages of tide, effluent, mass sightseeing and economic slump. One's awe at Piazza San Marco is mingled with pity and even impatience, and the child in the tourist impertinently wonders how soon the whole peeling confection, gold, Istrian stone, gelati and all, will be swallowed at last in the lagoon.

Four centuries ago, no body imagined that La Serenissima, the most serene republic, would come to this. In 1550, when much of Rome was a rubbish heap and wild pigs rooted in the Forum, Venice had never been invaded; its form of government -- by council and committee, hardly a democracy in the modern sense but a vast improvement, in point of rights and liberty, on the feudal or city-boss regimes that prevailed elsewhere in Europe -- had scarcely changed since the 14th century, and would continue until 1797, when Napoleon abolished it.

After the crushing of the Turk at Lepanto, Venice had no challengers of any size left in the Mediterranean. Its empire, secured by an invincible fleet of galleys, ran from the northern Adriatic to Crete, and its trade embraced half the world, reaching as far as China. It was the richest, the most socially coherent and the most formidably armed state south of the Alps. Its doges and merchants were cunning and civil-minded, and its women notable for beauty if one could get used to their obsession with the vagaries of chic: "They weare very long crisped hair," remarked the 17th century English diarist John Evelyn, "of severall strakes and Colours, which they artificially make so, by washing their heads in pisse."

Cinquecento Venice also boasted the man whom every European of taste regarded as the greatest painter in the world, Tiziano Vecellio di Cadore, Titian for short. The culture over which Titian presided for most of his long life--he died, probably of the plague, still painting, in 1576, when he may have been anything from 90 to 95--boasted an unusual number of master artists: Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo, Lorenzo Lotto, Jacopo Bassano, Giovanni Battista Moroni. If one includes the architects and sculptors, such as Jacopo Sansovino and the Lombardo brothers, the decorative artists, the printmakers, then the scale of the Venetian flowering is obvious.

Unfortunately, the superlatives it evokes have a soporific effect; they dull the edge of the art with ritual noises.

The marvelous thing about the Royal Academy's exhibition is the freshness and intelligence with which so much work is placed before the eye. This show is no routine "blockbuster," no flabby "Gold of the Gorgonzolas." It has been meticulously chosen by a committee of leading English and Italian scholars. It will open up areas of Venetian art that few but specialists were aware of. One is the print, part of the legacy of the 16th century publisher Aldus Minutius. The skill and beauty of the Aldine editions of illustrated works like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili fostered an unsurpassed quality in Venetian woodblock cutting. Indeed, Titian's twelve-sheet print The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red tonal vigor and grandeur of notation, is to woodcut what the Sistine Chapel is to fresco.

Inevitably, though, the big draw of the exhibition is the prints nor the admirable selection of drawings, but the paintings.

Their selection seems to have been shaped, as far as possible, by the desire to get away from the too familiar masterpieces. In this case, familiarity ought to mean immovability, since one would not want to imagine the Scuola di San Rocco lending its Tintorettos to England, or the Frari, in a fit of lunatic generosity, contributing its Titian Annunciation.

The outstanding painting in the exhibition has been all but lost to view for generations. It is Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas, normally tucked away in a former episcopal palace in Kromefiz, Czechoslovakia.

This enormous late work casts its ghostly and turbulent shadow over the whole gallery where other Titians, Veroneses and Moronis hang. Its subject is probably the most repulsive in the classical lexicon: the implacably vain Apollo has beaten the satyr Marsyas in a music contest judged by the nine Muses; now he collects his forfeit, which is to skin Marsyas alive. Renaissance humanists turned this myth into a fable of reason triumphing over darker instincts, and it was in that sense that Titian meant to paint it.

It is hard to decide which is more horrible, the matter-of-factness of the Venetian lap dog, familiar from many a Carpaccio, licking up the satyr's blood, or the prim, detached attentiveness of Apollo as he peels the skin. Yet the whole unlikely scene is anchored by one riveting device: Titian must have seen boar hunts in the woods around his native Cadore, and the satyr is strung on the tree like a wild pig ready for dressing, every stiff hair on his matted legs contributing its realism to the myth. On the right is another of Apollo's victims: Midas, the Phrygian king who voted against Apollo in another music contest and was given ass's ears by the angry god. His face is Titian's self-portrait.

So much for the dignity of age. The marsh light that flickers over the figures, their darting, angled geometry of posture and gaze, the colors--lead, bronze and dirty raspberry--are all beyond praise.

Titian got wilder as he grew older, and his range, well represented in this show, now seems a wholly epic form of human character. It moves from the tenderness of his child portraits and the demure, precise eroticism of early works like Salome through the powerful confidence of his portraits and the majestic diction of the Escorial's recently cleaned Christ on the Cross, and so on to the late works.

Yet Venice was generous to all its artists, and one of its gifts was light, that clear, mutable ambient light of the lagoon, a continuous tissue, indulgent to color and eager for sensuous reflection in paint. Light and color in the Venetian cinquecento are all of a piece; they rarely separate into the more schematic divisions of Florentine painting, and the didactic starkness of the idealized body is always softened by its atmospheric envelope. It is the action of light, more than any other first impression, that one remembers from Veronese's Venus and Adonis, for example, with its rosy flesh and red tunic perfectly set against the cool, remote blue-greens of forest and sky.

Sometimes a dominant color, like the striking of a great gong, will fill a whole painting as surely as it does a Matisse: so with Moroni's extraordinary Portrait of Gian Gerolamo Grumelli. The picture has its allegorical furniture. The ivy clinging to the ruin suggests clan loyalty, the broken statue (whose foot remains in the niche) symbolizes the passage of time, and the motto on the bas-relief, "Better the follower than the forerunner," is a manifesto of conservatism. Yet what counts visually is the brocaded red figure, glowing with arrested vitality against the gray ground of the past. Moroni did not overplay the tension between this expansive youthful red and the cool stasis of his drawing; he did not need to.

The show is full of surprises like this:

unusual paintings by well-known artists, or superb "mainstream" humanist works, like Giovanni Cariani's Portrait of Giovan Antonio Caravaggi, by artists less familiar to the general viewer. It digs up paintings from unexpected sources. Who would have imagined that Tintoretto's The Washing of Feet, a masterpiece of large-scale spontaneity, would appear from a church in, of all places, England's New-castle-upon-Tyne, where it was long assumed to be a copy? Best of all, one sees the art in depth and in context: a full room of Lotto, another of Bassano, 13 Tintorettos, 20 Titians, 15 Veroneses, and so proportionately on.

To see Lotto's The Annunciation on its own is a joy. It is one of the strangest lyrical effusions of the High Renaissance, a painting that almost (but not quite) ruptures its own decorum in the interests of poetry: the Virgin, momentarily out of her wits, cringes before the prospect of divine insemination, while God makes ready to descend from the sky like a high diver; the ethereal angel, pale blue and ivory, gestures threateningly; a tabby cat arches its back in terror, as well it might.

To see the painting in the context of other Lottos, and to find how the peculiar magic of its imagery is distilled from the elegant claustrophobia of his more "normal" work, is not just a pleasure but an education.

In sum, "The Genius of Venice" is not merely a remarkable exhibition. It will be remembered as one of the great cultural events of the 1980s. It is a model of how to present high art to a wide public, despite the fact that, in this case, the public is English and has stayed away in droves. With such exhibitions, the Royal Academy, once despised by modernists, becomes as useful to the late 20th century as it ever was to the late 18th. --By Robert Hughes