Venetian Paintings

from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation

The following is an electronic version of the brochure published in conjunction with the exhibition held February 12 through September 3, 1995, at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with subsequent venues at the San Antonio Museum of Art; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Saint Louis Art Museum; and the El Paso Museum of Art.

A checklist and reproductions of the works in the exhibition follow the text. For more information on individual works, click highlighted titles either in the text or in the checklist.

The Venetian paintings belonging to the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation are part of a larger collection of Renaissance and Baroque art that has been gathered in the last twenty years for the benefit of the people of Texas. The goal of the foundation is to collect and preserve masterworks of art, and to present this collection for educational purposes. Special attention has been given to producing comprehensive collections that reveal the breadth of subject matter and genre of painting in any given period or region. The paintings selected for this exhibit, although few in number, both represent the considerable variety of subjects depicted by Venetian artists and reveal the continuity as well as change of Venetian art across several centuries.

In praising Venice in the fourteenth century, Petrarch, himself an Italian, called it "another world." Given its extraordinary situation on hundreds of islands in a coastal lagoon, Venice is still one of the most remarkable cities in Europe. Unlike other major centers in Italy, Venice is a medieval rather than an ancient city. Its heritage was not so much that of classical Rome, but rather that of the Byzantine East, with which it had long-standing political and commercial associations. Fiercely independent and culturally self-aware, Venice was, from the fourteenth century onward, an internationl power with extensive mainland possessions and a far-reaching mercantile empire. Called "The Most Serene Republic," Venice enjoyed a remarkable political stability for more than a millenium, resisting both external forces and internal turbulence.

In the visual arts, Venice was likewise exceptional and separate from the rest of Italy. By the early seventeenth century several "schools," or regional traditions, of Italian painting were recognized: primarily the Tuscan or Florentine, Roman, Lombard, and Venetian. The Venetian school was perhaps the most distinctive. On the one hand, Venetian painting always had ties to painting elsewhere in Italy and is recognizably Italian compared to the painting of other countries. On the other hand, there is a considerable stylistic variety among the works of Venetian artists. But already in the middle of the sixteenth century the fundamental qualities of the various schools were articulated and the differences between them were noted. While significant changes occurred in Venetian painting across its two periods of greatest florescence (roughly the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries), a consistent approach, often self- conscious on the part of later artists, links eighteenth-century painters such as Sebastiano Ricci (1659 - 1754), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), and Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) to Venetian Renaissance masters, especially Titian (c. 1488/90- 1576), Jacopo Bassano (c. 1510/15-1592), Tintoretto (1519-1594), and Veronese (1528-1588).

In recognizing the differences between Venetian and Central Italian painting, Renaissance writers often debated the qualities that seemingly made one school superior to the other. Since the fifteenth century the Italian Renaissance has been conceived as primarily a Central Italian phenomenon; just as Tuscan dialect became a standard for the Italian language, Tuscan and Roman painting, sculpture, and architecture also were considered the highest Italian artistic expression. Central Italian writers and artists, from Alberti in the fifteenth century to Vasari in the sixteenth and Bellori in the seventeenth centuries, were consistently more adept and forceful in articulating the goals and achievements of the artists of Florence and Rome. As a result, they marginalized and sometimes belittled the work of artists from other centers, including Venice. Yet, even in these negative appraisals, one can discern a gruding admiration of Venetian painters and recognize the key elements of their art. Occasionally, too, Venetian writers would engage in the debate, generally in a less systematic and more discursive way, but in doing so would confirm the differences between Venetian and Central Italian art.

The most influential writing on Italian art was Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, published in 1550 and again, in expanded form, in 1568. Vasari, a Tuscan artist, knew little of Venetian art and treated it minimally in his massive book, but his choice comments are both indicative of the Central Italian bias of much of the Renaissance literature on art and suggestive of the essential qualities of Venetian painting. Vasari believed the Venetians were at a disadvantage because, coming from a medieval city, they were not surrounded by the glories of ancient Roman art and architecture (and indeed one can recognize that the Renaissance, insofar as it entails the "rebirth" of classical culture, is adoptive rather than native in Venice). Furthermore, Venetian artists did not make extensive use of drawing, as did Central Italian artists. Vasari wrote that the Venetian painter succeeded only because he tended to "conceal under the charm of colors his lack of knowledge of how to draw."

In a famous anecdote, Vasari recounts Michelangelo's comments after visiting the studio of Titian, who was in Rome for a brief sojourn in the mid-1540s: Michelangelo supposedly praised Titian, "saying that his coloring and style pleased him very much but that it was a shame that in Venice they did not learn to draw well from the beginning." Vasari thus identifies the essential distinction between Central Italian and Venetian art: while no Italian artist or critic would deny the importance of both drawing (disegno, which includes good design) and coloring (colorito, which implies the act of applying paint to canvas), Central Italians privileged the former and Venetians the latter. From early in the sixteenth century the Venetians-- especially Giorgione and his followers--avoided the use of clear, precise outlines in favor of softer, more atmospheric effects, as in the Circle of Giorgione Allegory and Pietro degli Ingannati's Madonna and Child with Saints Peter and Paul, and they created compositions based on color rather than line. Venetian colors were not more brilliant or varied than those used by Florentine artists. Rather, in Venetian art the arrangement of colors, their tonality, and the tactile quality of the paint itself were more a fundamental part of the image than an embellishment of a drawing.

As the sixteenth century progressed, the Venetian artist's brushwork became increasingly visible, breaking through contours, animating the surface of the pictures, and obscuring minute details. For the principal support of Venetian painting, rough- woven canvas replaced smooth wooden panels. The texture of the canvas further exaggerated the painterly effects. The opposition between Venetian colorito and Tuscan disegno is clear in Vasari's comments on his Venetian contemporary Tintoretto, whose work he was scarcely able to understand: "He has at times left as finished works sketches so laboriously rough-hewn that the brush-strokes may be seen, done more by chance and vehemence than with disegno and judgment." Marco Boschini, a seventeenth-century Venetian writer, rejected Vasari's criticism, arguing that the Venetians excelled in design and even calling Tintoretto the "Monarch of Disegno," but he agreed with Vasari that colorito, which "adds blood to the flesh" and "brings [disegno] to life," was of primary importance to the Venetians. Even without the bias of either Vasari or Boschini, one recognizes Tintoretto's bravura brushwork, typical of much Venetian paitning, which is especially evident in his late The Mocking of Christ.

Florence and Rome were considerably ahead of Venice in understanding painting as a liberal art rather than a craft, and the dichotomy between Central Italian and Venetian art transcended style and method. Vasari implies that Venetian art was, unlike that of Central Italy, not a fundamentally intellectual enterprise but rather merely an exercise in imitating nature through manual skills. Venetian colorism was long associated with naturalism, since the softer style was deemed more appropriate for depicting nature. But Central Italians belittled the "mere" imitation of nature and believed their art surpassed nature in aiming for an ideas beauty. Thus works of the Bassnao family, such as the Christ in the House of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, with their inclusion of--even emphasis on--mundane details, still-life elements (incuding dead animals), and peasant figures, were viewed as indecorous and ignoble, worthy neither of the higher aims of the artist nor of the holy figures represented. Even after Venetian brushwork became so animated that it was virtually independent of the objects represented and was thus actually antinaturalistic (a fact recognized by Boschini), Venetian paitning maintained a reputation for realism.

Like the Tintoretto, many Venetian paintings are profoundly moving spiritual statements. At the same time, the paintings' emphasis on surface texture and brilliant effects of light and color gives them a sensuous quality that suggests the sheer decorative potential of Venetian painting. Veronese's Portait of a Lady as Saint Agnes, for example, revels in the rich textures of flesh, lace, and lambswool, the varied patterns created by fabric and flora, and the luminescence of gold. The Venetian tradition of colorito, with all that it entailed--painterly brushwork, opulent textures, radiant light effects, and a naturalistic approach to a subject--is upheld in Antonio Bellucci's grand Adoration of the Magi. Exuberance and facility in the handling of paint are evident equally, although with very different subject matter, in the paintings of the eighteenth- century artists Ricci and Guardi.

While eighteenth-century Venetian painting sustained earlier traiditions, some change naturally occurred, in keeping with broader Italian and European artistic developments. By the end of the sixteenth century Venetian painting had already made a considerable impact in other parts of Italy. In the seventeenth century, through painters such as Rubens and Velazquez, who were captivated by Venetian painting, this art helped shape the far- reaching international style termed the Baroque. In the second half of the seventeenth century and continuing in the eighteenth, Italian art became more decorative and less structured, lighter in tone with a broader range of soft colors and an increasing emphasis on the diffusion of light through airy expanses. In the early eighteenth century Venetian artists again rose to international prominence; many of them (including Ricci, Bellucci, and Tiepolo) worked in other European countries, and their paintings were disseminated to collectors everywhere. The greatest and last significant Italian practitioner of what is called Rococo art was Tiepolo, whose Juno and Luna perfectly embodies the artistic sensibilities of the age while also demonstrating the continuity between Venetian painting of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

In the sixteenth century Venetian painters were in the vanguard in developing landscape as a new subject for painting (see the Allegory from the Circle of Giorgione). In these new works, landscape was no longer relegated to the role of mere backdrop to human action. Instead, artists rendered the mood of land and atmosphere and elevated them to virtually the status of protagonist. A subgenre of landscape painting, the view painting, or veduta, was refined and popularized in the eighteenth century, and the Venetians excelled in its production. Venice was an extremely popular destination for foreign visitors, especially Englishmen, who recognized its unique charms. Thus paintings such as Michele Marieschi's View of the Dogana and S. Maria della Salute and Francesco Guardi's Regatta at the Rialto Bridge were generally sold as elaborate souvenirs. These works represent the culmination of the Venetian tradition of shimmering light and color. In addition to a view of the city, Guardi's painting also portrays one of the many public festivities that enhanced Venice's uniquely charming character. Similarly, Pietro Longhi's curious The Display of the Elephant of 1774, depicting the elegant elite who have gathered for an unusual spectacle, is set during Venice's Carnival, when the city was at its most exotic, entertaining, and picturesque.

By the middle of the eighteenth century Venetian artists and their patrons, expanding a centuries-old tradition, had become increasingly concerned with the literally superficial beauty of paint, with the dazzling effects of light on water, and with the pageantry of pleasurable life in the "Most Serene Republic." It was a period of the highest aesthetic achievement but also of increasing social decadence and political impotence. With the death of Francesco Guardi in 1793, Venice's Second Golden Age of Painting concluded. Only a few years later, in 1797, the Republic collapsed in the face of Napoleon's conquests.

James Clifton
Director
Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation
Houston, Texas