Art Holiday to Venice
Many visitors leave Venice detesting it -- the crowds, the pigeons, the tacky souvenirs, the high prices. But this is your experience only if you stick to conventional guidebook “must-sees,” which center upon Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge. In fact, the artistic treasures of Venice are dispersed throughout the by-ways of the city, and even onto its lagoon islands. Invest in a good map that includes every street and canal in Venice -- otherwise, it is impossible not to become hopelessly lost -- and prepare to explore by boat and foot this most unusual of Italian cities. Why does Venice look as it does? Back in the late fifth-century, you would have seen no more than a cluster of small islands set in the saltwater lagoon. On the mainland of Italy the Roman Empire had fallen, and warfare was ravaging the communities of the North Italian coast. Refugees seeking safety fled into the shallow, outlying waters, making their homes among the native fishermen. Eventually, these once desperate refugees grew wealthy through sea trade with the East, particularly with the Byzantine Empire. They enlarged the modest islands through extensive land reclamation, and connected them by means of thousands of wooden, and later stone, bridges. Venice is a wonder, then, of nature and art both: mostly artificial, but set so magnificently in the waters of the lagoon, that it seems to grow organically from its depths.
Vittor Carpaccio, St. George and the Dragon , Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni
One of the often missed art jewels in Venice is a cycle of paintings executed by Vittor Carpaccio in 1509-11 for the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in the neighborhood of Castello. A scuola was not a “school,” but rather, a brotherhood dedicated to the civic good and performing such acts as visiting the sick, burying the dead, and providing for the material needs of their less fortunate members. Many of the over two-hundred scuole in Venice also acted as patrons of the arts, commissioning painters to embellish their meeting houses. The Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni is an example -- unique, however, because it is the only scuola in Venice to retain its original decoration. We enter the scuola building by pushing aside a velvet door hanging that shuts out virtually all of the Mediterranean sun. Inside the room is dark, like a small, holy church, and the paintings become our substitute for the glow of the outside world. But what a fantastical, other world they conjure! Directly to the left of the entrance door hangs a painting depicting St. George Fighting the Dragon. The members of this brotherhood were foreign immigrants from Dalmatia (on the opposite coast of the Adriatic Sea from Venice), and the painting depicts one of their heroic patron saints fighting for the life of a frightened princess in distant Libya.
Carpaccio, a Venetian, had never traveled to such an exotic place as Libya , and instead he had to rely on his visual imagination to convincingly render the scene. With resourcefulness, he looked at cheap woodblock prints of faraway architecture then circulating among the curious-minded in Venice . The imposing gateway on the distant shoreline to the left, for example, recalls an actual gate in the city of Cairo.
But the foreground scene is pure fantasy, and the artist has let his imagination run unanchored. Parts of dismembered bodies, animal skulls and lizards litter the desert landscape. St. George spears the winged dragon right through the mouth, and blood pours down its breast. To the right, the princess grasps her hands in gratitude. We witness an exotic tale of carnage, but ultimately, of saintly triumph over fear and evil. Inspiration, no doubt, to the more modestly heroic acts of this Dalmatian brotherhood in their new homeland of Venice.
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