Venice: Lion City by Garry Wills

Author:Garry Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press

VERONESE

The Venetian painters favored the perturbed Mary over the serene one. She is often spun around, with a wrenching of her body, by the angel’s appearance from behind her—a theme the painters took from the twelfth-century mosaic in the north transept of their beloved San Marco ( D 1.132), which shows the angel interrupting Mary as she is taking water from a well. 3 In the early 1560s Veronese painted a ceiling Annunciation in oval form, one now seen in the restored Rosary Chapel of the Church of Saints John and Paul ( P 1.213–14). Mary turns again at the dramatic incursion of the angel, who drops straight down from heaven as if his wings were acting like a parachute. The abruptness of his plunge lifts the skirt of his gown up his calves, swirling it out into columnar form—echoing the heavy and twisting baroque columns on either side of the picture. Mary is framed in a soaring arch between the columns, a stunning use of Mary’s symbol as heaven’s portal ( janua coeli ). The suddenness of the Virgin’s turn has swirled her robe out, too, in a columnar shape. Speed and architectural form blend in a paradoxically constructive moment of sudden drama. Both of Mary’s hands are thrown out with a responsiveness that blends surprise and acceptance. The columns’ busy swirls are interrupted in the middle by a band of bas-relief that gives a pause and permanence to their drama, as if these reliefs were “wombs” of quiet within the restive columns’ writhing—expressing what is about to occur in the agitated Virgin’s womb. In Veronese, much of the meaning of any picture is carried by its architecture. Here, by literally giving Mary no “grounding,” we see an architectural complex built in air (appropriate to a ceiling painting), an adumbration of the heavenly Jerusalem glimpsed through the janua coeli.

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