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“persuade[s] her readers to experience the unknown, to go beyond first impressions . . . extremely witty and well-written . . . for those who savor art”
In general, books in English on Carlo Crivelli (c. 1435-c. 1495) are few and slim, and they often open with an apology for studying this “not great” painter. Yet he elicits instant devotion in those who love Giotto and often becomes a favorite of those who take the time to get to know his work. For example. the catalogue for the Gallerie dell’Accademia, although excellent, unfortunately overlooks this native son. In fact, most guides to the Accademia entirely skip over his three paintings, St. Jerome and St. Augustine, St. Roch (unfortunately now in storage), and the mostly destroyed Sts. Peter and Paul. Crivelli left Venice soon after a short prison sentence to avoid gossip about his 1467 "outrage" against a neighbor. A sailor's wife had accused him of abducting and seducing her with such success that they lived together for a while. He was either ruthlessly charming or extraordinarily naive; his paintings favor either interpretation, as they show both sensuality and innocence.
From Padua, Crivelli adopted the local artists' passion for garlands of fruit and portraying downward-cast heads. Yet he only strayed into Renaissance naturalism and instead clung to Medievalism. His style owes much to his exile, which began in his mid-twenties or early thirties, and to his missing the influence of the brothers Bellini, Giovanni (c. 1426-1516) and Gentile (c. 1429-1507). They were about twenty years older than Crivelli, and they dominated Venice’s art scene during his lifetime. Unlike Crivelli, the Bellini brothers stopped painting with tempera on wooden panels made of poplar and instead experimented in painting on canvas with oil. Oil dries slowly and can be layered much more judiciously than tempera, yet it demands that the linen weave integrate itself into the picture as the smooth panels never did. The native sons’ style lost the graphical precision that had defined all painting since the first cave drawings and gained more humanity than the filled-in cartoons of their contemporaries' fresco paintings. They fundamentally changed the look of Western painting after the fifteenth century. Yet Crivelli missed all of these changes. (To compare, look around Room XXIII at the various Bellinis, especially Giovanni’s Martyrdom of St. Mark, which Vittore Belliniano finished for him, with its play of colors and light against shadows and water.) What Crivelli practiced instead was the last vestiges of Late Gothic Fantasy. His graphical precision reminds one more of his German contemporary Durer than of his paesani, or< fellow citizens, whose work fills Room XXIII's other walls. In his St. Jerome and St. Augustine, the saints’ fingers are elongated, precisely drawn, and exaggerated in their preciousness. The lion-as-kitten can appear in dreams, not in real life. The heads are huge, the bodies diminished, the perspective decidedly old-fashioned. Yet Crivelli can claim kinship with the Bellinis, and can call Paesano! from across the cavernous room. The three painters share the Venetian obsession with cloth and its color. In examining the two saints’ clothing, the patterns are intricately detailed, the brilliant red >riveting. Both Bellinis occasionally unravel a bolt of silk to act as a backdrop to their figures, as Crivelli also highlighted a few of his Madonnas. But the brothers experimented in differentiating how a red silk cap shines above a duller, darker red in cotton tights. For Crivelli, red stays red, whether on a hat or a cloak or a lion's tongue or a book. (And he surpasses all artists when he concentrates his detailed eye on a book’s folios, as one also sees in the Sts. Peter and Paul, or renders an animal’s mouth or a flower in final bloom.) His is a Venetian red, a red still found in the depths of contemporary Venetian glassblowers' jewelry. Crivelli could not join the Venetian cult of experimenting with hues, yet can we call him the poorer for it? |
With its sculpture garden and terrace restaurant, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection transitions between outside and in. Its small collection is the second most visited museum in the city (the Accademia is the first). If you’re not on a tight budget, have lunch at the Guggenheim restaurant and watch the Grand Canal float by.
The Guggenheim catalogue has always been first-rate in providing a detailed and lengthy tour of the museum. If you'd like to acquaint yourself with Peggy, who made her home in the museum for thirty-two years and personally hand-selected each piece, then her autobiography, Out of This Century, which the museum sells, is a must-buy, and Anti-Pope by Max Ernst (1891-1976) a must-see. Ernst painted Anti-Pope from December 1941 through March 1942, during the honeymoon period of his marriage to Peggy. In Out of This Century, she mentions how she and her daughter populated his original small study for the painting, which is also now in the Guggenheim collection. He altered the figures in the large and final version on display in the Surrealist Room.
Most scholars interpret the painting as follows: the horse/owl woman on the
left represents the painter Leonora Carrington, Ernst’s lover before
Peggy and his eternal beloved. Her owl head makes her figure recognizable,
for she bears it also in the Guggenheim's The Attirement of the Bride. In addition,
Carrington was very much a part of Ernst's life while he painted Anti-Pope and
spent long hours walking the streets of New York City with him. She left for
Mexico soon after Ernst completed the work.
The spear that divides the canvas represents Ernst’s and Carrington’s permanent separation. The horse on the right symbolizes Ernst. The pink figure in the middle with the armature of a horse’s head and body that faces over the lagoon is Peggy's daughter, Pegeen Vail. In real life, Pegeen was like Alice in Wonderland: with her cascade of blond hair and petite figure, she lived as an eternally little girl who spent too long traveling down a deep well and found herself the companion of surreal characters who spoke in epigrams. She finally married the Mad Hatter, Ralph Rumney, a New Expressionist painter. Their life circulated around drugs and booze until Pegeen overdosed on both and died of what many assumed was a suicide.
Yet according to Ernst's son Jimmy, the figure on the left is not Carrington but, as in the original study, Peggy. "I can tell by the awkward stance," he wrote in Peggy Guggenheim and Her Friends. Jimmy was also Peggy's secretary and confidant in New York when the brittle triangle of Carrington/Guggenheim/Ernst imploded. Peggy told him that she disliked the monster heads Ernst put on her and Pegeen. If his interpretation is accurate, then the figure in pink tulle on the right must be Carrington, separated by geography but never from Ernst's love. The spear must represent Peggy's inability to enter Ernst's psyche's inner circle. His marriage to Peggy, with whom he was never faithful and barely affectionate, lasted only four years.
The museum allows visitors to Venice to say something original once again. In fact, Mary McCarthy, who complained that everything about Venice had already been said, created a character, meanly named Miss Grabbe, based on Peggy in ‘The Cicerone,’ which appeared in her collection, Cast a Cold Eye. Her portrait of the ‘last Dogaressa’ is merciless, and yet not original. Peggy has been accused more than once of being miserly, often by those whom she supported for years, and sexually promiscuous. Of course she might never have founded a museum if she had not been aggressive, even to the point of being heartless toward her children, fawning her love instead on her Lhasa apsos, with whom her ashes rest in the museum’ s garden. True, when her only daughter, Pegeen Vail, committed suicide in 1967, Peggy stopped dyeing her hair jet black and set up a shrine to display Pegeen’s paintings, but the tragedy failed to soften her maternal heart enough to will her son Sinbad Vail even a single painting, or to request to be buried near him and his children.
What Peggy did leave upon her death on December 23, 1979, cannot be dismissed as a legacy of avarice and vanity. Her collection includes early works by most of the first half of the twentieth-century’s great artists, and a space for them in one of the world’ s most beautiful cities. She lived up to her name in her sexual appetites, in her concern for copper pennies that add up to dollars, and in her wish to preserve American culture at a great moment for future generations. Her initial investment of $40,000 was at her death estimated to have risen by another three zeros. Even with relatively shallow pockets, she proved to be a genuine Guggenheim.
When the Dominicans took over from the Jesuits what is today Santa Maria della Visitazione in 1668, they turned it into a library. It has been a church again since 1825. Venice in Peril as well as some Australian and British organizations have all contributed to its 1990s restoration.  On the outside of the new Jesuit church, a lion’s mouth gapes open, placed there by the Council of Ten, which ran Venice until Napoleon reformed the government. The lion’s inscription claims to be the place for complaints against littering and polluting, yet it seems more ominous when mounted in front of the order that the council had closed down. Could the lion also encourage complaints against the priests who, as confessors, had access to too many state secrets? The Council of Ten was constantly vigilant against all Catholic orders that were not Venetian and that instead allied themselves with Rome. Walk in. Glance around the warm and intimate interior. Feel at home. You’ve been on your feet for a while: lie down. That’s right. If no one is tending the church, lie down on one of the benches with your feet hanging over the edge and stare at the wooden ceiling at your leisure. Umbrian artist Pietro Paolo Agapiti (c. 14700-1540) painted the fifty-eight saints, martyrs, and prophets. In the middle tile is a Visitation; the church is dedicated to the visit that the Virgin Mary paid to her cousin Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. Of all the art in Venice, these simple tiles from the Sassoferrato native could very well be the faces that follow you home. Like Crivelli’s figures, these are not beautiful in a contemporary sense, as are Tiepolo’ s saints and Madonnas, nor sophisticated like Titian’ s Cain and Abel. Their very nature as woodcuts makes them seem like craft instead of art. Their hominess, even homeliness, makes them accessible and credible. After all, do only beautiful people martyr themselves? La Visitazione provides a more Catholic than artistic view of saints: they lie above us, gazing beatifically upon us mortals who throw ourselves supine to contemplate their self-sacrifice. |