The ‘Paradise of Cities’
Marie-José Gransard, Venice: A Literary Guide for Travellers
IB Tauris, 316pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781780769837
reviewed by Francis O'Gorman
How long does it take to know Venice? Or – is such a thing possible?
Here is a city peculiarly hampered by myths. It is supposedly the place of intrigue, sex, decline, decadence, cruelty, and death. It is, certainly, an environment that does not long remain itself. Now, yet again, Venice is in a state of transition. This time the cause, and the symptom, is the decline of the resident population. How is it possible to make a decent living on the lagoon now? Certainly, more bars, restaurants, and shops are being taken over by non-Venetians. The day-to-day feel is different from even 20 years ago – blander, more corporate, tidier. Venice is a hard place to visit over a life time because it alters too much. The Venice one first knew becomes the Venice one does not in only a few decades. Here is a city tangled up with elegy and loss, even as John Ruskin – perhaps the most celebrated analyst of the Queen of the Adriatic in the 19th century – knew that she had passed, for him personally, from the ‘Paradise of cities’ to ruin (the female pronoun is Ruskin’s).
Marie-José Gransard has visited Venice for 11 years. It is not a long time. But she records the impressions of many others over a much more extended period, from, roughly, Dante in 1321 to the present day. No-one is sure, as Gransard rightly says, if Dante really did see the Arsenale, which he uses for an image of boiling pitch in Canto XXI of the Inferno. Bizarrely, Gransard quotes the relevant passage from the Divina Commedia, lines from the single-most famous poem from medieval Europe, secondhand from John Julius Norwich. The Literary Guide is bibliographically valuable. Gransard has read a lot. She documents passages from authors who describe Venice, novels that mention the city, journals and letters that recount time spent there. Gathered under a set of conventional themes (‘Haven and Inspiration,' ‘Illusion and Disillusion,' ‘The Grand Tour,' ‘Lust and Love,' for instance), her material is largely described not discussed. She ventures analytical observations only of the most modest kind. Montealegre’s letters ‘make fascinating reading;’ Byron ‘did not live in vain’ because the myth of his life ‘still survives in the city;’ Mary McCarthy was ‘certainly not prepared to repeat stale clichés;’ Proust, ‘a great music lover,’ also ‘had a great admiration for Fortuny;’ Goethe was ‘the greatest of the German thinkers and writers to travel [to Venice].’
The reader can gather a bibliography from Gransard’s survey – and she is occasionally as good at historical vignettes as she is at informing us exactly where many of the objects she describes now are (by no means all in Venice, unfortunately). Sometimes she is opaque. ‘Byron’s antics seem to be remembered indulgently by Venetians nowadays’ is as vague and unsubstantiated a generalisation as one might expect to find. Are the painter John Singer Sargent’s initials engraved on a wall in the Ca’ Rezzonico or not? What was the scandal ‘involving the mayor’s nephew’ that obliged Cole Porter to leave? Was Doge Marino Faliero (1285 – 1355) really ‘treated harshly by the Venetian state’? Whatever one thinks of the reasons for Faliero’s treachery, profound treachery it was. Incidentally, this detailed survey of Venice’s writers omits Algernon Charles Swinburne whose Marino Faliero (1885) endeavoured to turn the rebellious Doge into an admirable – for Swinburne –forerunner of Giuseppe Mazzini.
Gransard tells us about books that we should read for ourselves. And that is an important achievement. She is not, however, an attentive or original reader of books herself. And as she is prone to cliché – ‘Venice [has] captured the imagination of most visitors;’ Turgenev ‘waxes lyrical at the magic of the city’ – she is also prone to repeating disproved rumours and making mistakes. Napoleon did not wish to ‘destroy’ the city of Venice, as she says on page 115, but the state (which he did).The rumours about Rawdon Brown’s suicide have been long ago revealed to be based on confusion between people. And it is hardly true that ‘little is known about him’: see Ralph A. Griffiths and John E. Law’s Rawdon Brown and the Anglo-Venetian Relationship (2005). TS Eliot wrote The Waste Land not The Wasteland. Ruskin and Effie did not ‘divorce’ but had their marriage annulled. Ruskin’s Modern Painters was published from 1843 to 1860, not 1841 to 1846; the young girl whom Ruskin loved was Rose La Touche not ‘de la Touche.’ Ruskin did not suffer from ‘dementia.’ The well-intentioned commemorative plaque for the author of The Stones of Venice outside the Pensione Calcina on the Zattere (the image of which appears on page136) is on a building Ruskin did not know. The revelation that the painting in the Correr known for centuries as Two Courtesans was in fact not of two prostitutes but of two bored, unimpeachable Venetian ladies does not prove that the difference between a ‘respectable patrician woman and the courtesan was difficult to define in fifteenth-century Venice.’ It proves that when a late 15th-century picture is cut into two and the pieces are not recognised as belonging to each other, the individual images are liable to misinterpretation. The other portion of Carpaccio’s image, by the way, now recognised as part of the same painting, is in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (and it only surfaced in 1944). Actually, there may have been an equivalently sized missing panel, to make up a diptych. Who knows how that missing portion would change the meaning of the whole?
Marie-José Gransard repeats established views of Venice. She describes the allegedly cruel nature of the Council of Ten and the supposed terror of its secret denunciations (such denunciations through the Lion’s Mouth, in fact, can be interpreted as the result of a state’s unusual willingness to listen to the views of those who believe they have been badly treated). And she has much to say about the supposedly unusual profligacy of Venice’s sexual life – but without making any comparison with, say, Rome or London, Paris or Marseille, at the same time. The Austrian occupation in the first half of the 19th century is regarded as a torment to the city though a cluster of recent historians has challenged that view as a piece of Venetian mythologising. And there is only gloom in this Literary Guide about the current state of Venice. ‘Today,’ Gransard suddenly says, ‘the decaying fabric of the city, built by centuries of mercantile obsession, is being exploited mercilessly to feed the profits of international vested interests.’ That is the conventional opinion too. It may be right and it may be only partially right. Here, as elsewhere, we need more evidence. On page 285 there is a black-and-white photograph (the book is purposefully illustrated with many images, often apt and expressive) of a carving on the side of marble steps. The caption declares: ‘Putto beneath the Fondamenta at the Salute—powerless in the face of the constant wave of tourists.’
Marie-José Gransard’s book is more than successful as an enumeration of sources we can read and think about for ourselves (by the way, Marino Sanuto, with his 58-volume diary, is not, despite Gransard’s assertion on page six, to be ranked among minor figures). But the interpretive and historical judgments of Venice: A Literary Guide for Travellers are either pale or stale, and sometimes they are wrong. And with that final caption, the book loses its grip.
Here is a city peculiarly hampered by myths. It is supposedly the place of intrigue, sex, decline, decadence, cruelty, and death. It is, certainly, an environment that does not long remain itself. Now, yet again, Venice is in a state of transition. This time the cause, and the symptom, is the decline of the resident population. How is it possible to make a decent living on the lagoon now? Certainly, more bars, restaurants, and shops are being taken over by non-Venetians. The day-to-day feel is different from even 20 years ago – blander, more corporate, tidier. Venice is a hard place to visit over a life time because it alters too much. The Venice one first knew becomes the Venice one does not in only a few decades. Here is a city tangled up with elegy and loss, even as John Ruskin – perhaps the most celebrated analyst of the Queen of the Adriatic in the 19th century – knew that she had passed, for him personally, from the ‘Paradise of cities’ to ruin (the female pronoun is Ruskin’s).
Marie-José Gransard has visited Venice for 11 years. It is not a long time. But she records the impressions of many others over a much more extended period, from, roughly, Dante in 1321 to the present day. No-one is sure, as Gransard rightly says, if Dante really did see the Arsenale, which he uses for an image of boiling pitch in Canto XXI of the Inferno. Bizarrely, Gransard quotes the relevant passage from the Divina Commedia, lines from the single-most famous poem from medieval Europe, secondhand from John Julius Norwich. The Literary Guide is bibliographically valuable. Gransard has read a lot. She documents passages from authors who describe Venice, novels that mention the city, journals and letters that recount time spent there. Gathered under a set of conventional themes (‘Haven and Inspiration,' ‘Illusion and Disillusion,' ‘The Grand Tour,' ‘Lust and Love,' for instance), her material is largely described not discussed. She ventures analytical observations only of the most modest kind. Montealegre’s letters ‘make fascinating reading;’ Byron ‘did not live in vain’ because the myth of his life ‘still survives in the city;’ Mary McCarthy was ‘certainly not prepared to repeat stale clichés;’ Proust, ‘a great music lover,’ also ‘had a great admiration for Fortuny;’ Goethe was ‘the greatest of the German thinkers and writers to travel [to Venice].’
The reader can gather a bibliography from Gransard’s survey – and she is occasionally as good at historical vignettes as she is at informing us exactly where many of the objects she describes now are (by no means all in Venice, unfortunately). Sometimes she is opaque. ‘Byron’s antics seem to be remembered indulgently by Venetians nowadays’ is as vague and unsubstantiated a generalisation as one might expect to find. Are the painter John Singer Sargent’s initials engraved on a wall in the Ca’ Rezzonico or not? What was the scandal ‘involving the mayor’s nephew’ that obliged Cole Porter to leave? Was Doge Marino Faliero (1285 – 1355) really ‘treated harshly by the Venetian state’? Whatever one thinks of the reasons for Faliero’s treachery, profound treachery it was. Incidentally, this detailed survey of Venice’s writers omits Algernon Charles Swinburne whose Marino Faliero (1885) endeavoured to turn the rebellious Doge into an admirable – for Swinburne –forerunner of Giuseppe Mazzini.
Gransard tells us about books that we should read for ourselves. And that is an important achievement. She is not, however, an attentive or original reader of books herself. And as she is prone to cliché – ‘Venice [has] captured the imagination of most visitors;’ Turgenev ‘waxes lyrical at the magic of the city’ – she is also prone to repeating disproved rumours and making mistakes. Napoleon did not wish to ‘destroy’ the city of Venice, as she says on page 115, but the state (which he did).The rumours about Rawdon Brown’s suicide have been long ago revealed to be based on confusion between people. And it is hardly true that ‘little is known about him’: see Ralph A. Griffiths and John E. Law’s Rawdon Brown and the Anglo-Venetian Relationship (2005). TS Eliot wrote The Waste Land not The Wasteland. Ruskin and Effie did not ‘divorce’ but had their marriage annulled. Ruskin’s Modern Painters was published from 1843 to 1860, not 1841 to 1846; the young girl whom Ruskin loved was Rose La Touche not ‘de la Touche.’ Ruskin did not suffer from ‘dementia.’ The well-intentioned commemorative plaque for the author of The Stones of Venice outside the Pensione Calcina on the Zattere (the image of which appears on page136) is on a building Ruskin did not know. The revelation that the painting in the Correr known for centuries as Two Courtesans was in fact not of two prostitutes but of two bored, unimpeachable Venetian ladies does not prove that the difference between a ‘respectable patrician woman and the courtesan was difficult to define in fifteenth-century Venice.’ It proves that when a late 15th-century picture is cut into two and the pieces are not recognised as belonging to each other, the individual images are liable to misinterpretation. The other portion of Carpaccio’s image, by the way, now recognised as part of the same painting, is in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (and it only surfaced in 1944). Actually, there may have been an equivalently sized missing panel, to make up a diptych. Who knows how that missing portion would change the meaning of the whole?
Marie-José Gransard repeats established views of Venice. She describes the allegedly cruel nature of the Council of Ten and the supposed terror of its secret denunciations (such denunciations through the Lion’s Mouth, in fact, can be interpreted as the result of a state’s unusual willingness to listen to the views of those who believe they have been badly treated). And she has much to say about the supposedly unusual profligacy of Venice’s sexual life – but without making any comparison with, say, Rome or London, Paris or Marseille, at the same time. The Austrian occupation in the first half of the 19th century is regarded as a torment to the city though a cluster of recent historians has challenged that view as a piece of Venetian mythologising. And there is only gloom in this Literary Guide about the current state of Venice. ‘Today,’ Gransard suddenly says, ‘the decaying fabric of the city, built by centuries of mercantile obsession, is being exploited mercilessly to feed the profits of international vested interests.’ That is the conventional opinion too. It may be right and it may be only partially right. Here, as elsewhere, we need more evidence. On page 285 there is a black-and-white photograph (the book is purposefully illustrated with many images, often apt and expressive) of a carving on the side of marble steps. The caption declares: ‘Putto beneath the Fondamenta at the Salute—powerless in the face of the constant wave of tourists.’
Marie-José Gransard’s book is more than successful as an enumeration of sources we can read and think about for ourselves (by the way, Marino Sanuto, with his 58-volume diary, is not, despite Gransard’s assertion on page six, to be ranked among minor figures). But the interpretive and historical judgments of Venice: A Literary Guide for Travellers are either pale or stale, and sometimes they are wrong. And with that final caption, the book loses its grip.