The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed by Mary McCarthy

Author:Mary McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141913445
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

Venice Observed

1. Venice Preserved

‘Venice at 8 to 9; went to Danielli’s [sic]. Saw St Mark’s, the Piazza, the Grand Canal and some churches: fine day – very picturesque – general effect fine – individual things not.’ Herbert Spencer in his diary, 1880.

‘Il disoit l’avoir trouvée autre qu’il ne l’avoit imaginée, et un peu moins admirable… La police, la situation, l’arsenal, la place de S. Marc, et la presse des peuples étrangiers lui sem-blarent les choses plus remerquables.’ – Michel de Montaigne in his Journal du Voyage en Italie, 1580–81.

The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous – poets and honeymooners. Montaigne, his servant recorded, ‘n’y trouva pas cete fameuse beauté qu’on attribue aus dames de Venise, et si vid les plus nobles de celles qui en font traffique’. That famous beauty – The Frenchman sceptically sought it among the vaunted courtesans, who numbered 11,654 at the time of his visit. He had supper with the pearl of them all, no. 204 in the Catalogue of the Chief and Most Honoured Courtesans of Venice. ‘Le lundi à souper, 6 de novembre, la Signora Veronica Franco, janti fame venitiane, envoia vers lui pour lui presenter un petit livre de Letters qu’elle a composé.’ It was evidently a literary evening. The Aspasia, at thirty-four, was retired from her profession and kept a salon frequented by poets and painters; she composed sonnets and letters and terza rima verses and had it in mind to write an epic poem. Henry III had visited her and brought back a report of her to France, together with two of her sonnets. But Montaigne was more impressed by the police and the high cost of living. ‘Les vivres y sont chers come à Paris.’

That famous beauty – three hundred years later, the British philosopher, a bachelor, cocked a dubious eye at it in the touted palazzi. Everywhere he detected a ‘striving’ for the picturesque. He was particularly unimpressed by the leading examples: the little, leaning Palazzo Dario, in the Lombard style, with insets of porphyry and verdantique, the Corner-Spinelli, by Mauro Coducci, with its remarkable balconies, and the Ca’ Rezzonica, the baroque grey-columned prodigy begun by Longhena, in which the poet Browning was shortly to die. The Doge’s Palace exasperated Spencer to the point where he felt it necessary to hint bluntly at some general principles of architecture: ‘Dumpy arches of the lower tier of the Ducal Palace and the dumpy windows in the wall above… the meaningless diaper pattern covering this wall, which suggests something woven rather than built; and the long row of projections and spikes surmounting the coping, which remind one of nothing so much as the vertebral spines of a fish.’ So much for the Doge’s Palace. ‘And what about St Mark’s? Well, I admit that it is a fine sample of barbaric architecture.’

Among Venice’s spells is one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic’s breast.

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