VENICE is heaving with classical art – being there, said Truman Capote, is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go – and sensory overload is an occupational hazard for the visitor. There is so much of it – a microcosm of Italy’s artistic surfeit – that the idea of distributing this wealth more fairly around the world becomes a fanciful, extremely implausible notion.
There’s the practical problem of trying to remove the paintings from the places they adorn. If not painted directly onto walls and ceilings, the canvasses are often too huge to be safely dismantled and transported.
Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice
This is the blessing that comes with the absence of choice: you have to go to Venice and view them in situ and Tintoretto: The Artist of Venice is a fine new art publication to consult beforehand. The book celebrates the artist who was born in Venice and whom no other painter matched for the sheer number of pictures he provided for its buildings.
Tintoretto’s paintings at La Scuola Grande Di San Rocco are the most unmissable. The artist spent more than twenty years decorating the Sala Superiore (Upper Hall) and art historians distinguish a ‘San Rocco style’ for Tintoretto. He was given free rein by his patrons and could express himself freely, less bound by the need to compete with Veronese, the other principal Venetian artist of the decorative at that time.
Tintoretto, Visitation
Tintoretto began with magnificent ceiling painting and, aware of the prestige he would achieve, offered to paint the sala’s walls for a modest annuity. The result is an astonishing torrent of exuberant inventiveness and extravagant theatricality. Tintoretto: The Artist of Venice covers the iconography of these paintings, draws attention to the play with light in incomparable wall paintings, like The Adoration of the Shepherds and The Flight into Egypt and the homely naturalism that still seems shockingly daring in his Last Supper.
Tintoretto: The Artist of Venice covers the entirety of the artist’s career, with essays by an international group of scholars exploring many aspects of his achievements in depth. With 228 colour illustrations, including his stunning The Crucifixion in a two-page spread, this is a book to treasure and learn from in your home.
Titian and the Renaissance in Venice
When Tintoretto enrolled as an apprentice with Titian, the master was thirty years his elder and indisputably acknowledged as the supreme artist in Venice. Relations soon became strained – within a matter of days, legend has it – and Tintoretto left his workshop to strike out on his own. The influence of this short-lived encounter could not be so easily left behind. Titian had turned from tempera to painting with oils on panel or canvas and the significance of this is covered in Titian and the Renaissance in Venice. This handsomely produced book, published in conjunction with an ongoing exhibition in Frankfurt’s Städel Museum, quite rightly gives pride of place to Titian.
Titian and the Renaissance in Venice provides an informed and lavishly illustrated account of Renaissance Venice. To see paintings by Titian in the city that cannot be transported abroad, a visit to Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari will prove deeply rewarding. Pride of place there goes to Assumption, a masterpiece of his early work, hanging in the original position chosen for it by the Franciscans for their Gothic church. The angels Titian paints look like humans, the apostles like poor fishermen and Mary is depicted as a woman and not some ethereal being.
Looking at Tintoretto with John Ruskin
It was the bodily sensuality of Titian that disquieted John Ruskin, the hugely influential English art critic of the 19th century. He did more than anyone else to broadcast the artistic and architectural magnificence of Venice and rated Tintoretto as “the top-top-top” of all Renaissance painters. In his own top-selling The Stones of Venice, he urged travellers to ‘give unembarrassed attention and unbroken time’ to the marvels of Tintoretto. This year is the quincentenary of the artist’s birth and the bicentenary of Ruskin’s, making Looking at Tintoretto with John Ruskin a timely publication. Not just an essential item in a collector’s library of books about Venetian art, it is a book small enough to squeeze into your luggage and use in the city. Ruskin’s index, listing Tintoretto’s works by way of their locations, is enriched by quality reproductions and other writings of his on the painter.
Giotto by Francesca Flores d’Arcais
From Venice, the 15-minute train ride to Padua is a mandatory pilgrimage for art lovers. Admission to see frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel can be booked online and the book to enjoy before and after a visit is Giotto by Francesca d’Arcais. The text is informative, the superb, enlarged images are a joy to gaze and wonder at and – this is what Italy does to the traveller – set you planning a new trip to Assisi to see more of Giotto.
Giotto, Joachims Dream
Giotto and His Works in Padua is an invaluable modern edition of Ruskin’s work on the frescoes in the 14th-century jewel box that is the Scrovegni Chapel. It usefully replaces the original black-and-white reproductions of woodcuts with colour photographs. Complementing this little book, the first chapter of Heaven on Earth is a tour de force, 21st-century reading of Giotto’s frescoes in Padua by Ruskin’s successor as England’s foremost art historian, T.J. Clark.
Appreciating Venetian art needs a small library of books and when you’re in the city itself, specialist art tours provide helpful introductions. A Guide in Venice offers small group and private tours while Roberta and Carla’s Walks Inside Italy includes a Titian & Tintoretto ‘Tale of Passion and Power’ walk that can be warmly recommended
by Sean Sheehan