Tale of Two Cities

By ROBERT HUGHES

There can hardly have been two distant cities whose fate was, for good and ill, more intimately linked than Venice and Constantinople. Soon after the Emperor Constantino the Great established his new Christian Rome by the Bosporus in 334 A.D., Constantinople, the fabled golden city of Byzantium, became the matrix of European civilization. During Constantinople's rise, Rome was a tract of ruins and Venice only a cluster of wattle huts on a lagoon mudbank.

In the 6th century, Venice allied itself with the Byzantine Empire, and from the 9th to the 13th centuries the emerging Venetian culture was saturated with Byzantine prototypes. Venice, in fact, was the main valve through which Byzantine influence in art, architecture, literature and scholarship was pumped into Italy. By one of the treacherous ironies of politics, it was a Venetian doge who, in 1204, diverted the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople from end to end, destroying the Byzantine hegemony forever.

The ancient and Oedipal bond between the two cities is the subject of what must be the most beautiful exhibition to be seen anywhere in the world this summer. "Venice and Byzantium," a collection of some 130 works ranging in date from the 4th to the 17th centuries, is on view at the Doges' Palace in Venice until Sept. 30.

Aloof Abstraction. The material is mostly drawn from Italian museums and churches, and it has its gaps, caused by the inimitable pigheadedness of Italian art bureaucracy. Thus Ravenna would not lend the most important single Byzantine object in Italy, the 6th century ivory throne of Maximian. All the same, one could not wish for a better introduction to Byzantine influence in Italy--not only the works made in Constantinople and then imported or looted, but also the ones made by the artists of the Adriatic coast. All the canons of Byzantine style are there: the liturgical stateliness of form, the encyclopedic richness of ornament and material (gold, silver, precious stones, enamel), the sublime monotony of pose and gesture by which the human figure was depicted only as the dwelling place of a thought or a doctrine, the flat mantle of peacock colors, the linear arabesques. An ivory carving like the 10th century Apostles John and Paul--their long-toed feet, under the prismatic ripple of drapery, as articulate as hands--shows the almost neurotic tenderness that the Byzantine style could muster. But the more usual tone of high Byzantine art was an aloof abstraction.

Such figures as the majestic green-feathered angel and the rigid Madonna on the lunette fresco from Sant'Angelo in Formis (see color overleaf) are flesh-made-geometry. Even when a mosaicist tried to be more "naturalistic," as the Venetian artist who executed a Head of an Apostle in Rome around 1218 seems to have done, the medium itself--thousands of glass cubes like colored teeth--automatically formalized the work.

From the resources in Venice it would have been easy to put together a glamorous exhibition aimed at the Volpone in every tourist: much dazzle, little information. But for Art Historian Sergio Bettini, who chose the objects and wrote a provocative catalogue essay, "Venice and Byzantium" offered a less obvious opportunity: chiefly, that of presenting early Venetian art as a paradigm of its city, the incomparable Serenissima. There was, he proposes, a sort of aboriginal will-to-form that pervaded all Venetian design from chalices to campanili, and he treats the art on view as "emblems of the city's period of formation," their look determined as much by environment as by the imported canons of Byzantine style.

Paolo Veneziano, the greatest Venetian artist of the 14th century, was manifestly not a Byzantine, though he may have studied in Constantinople. In his Discovery of St. Mark's Body in San Marco the figures have lost their frontal stiffness, they are united by a wonderfully rhythmic and supple line. For all the impacted geometric splendor of costume and marble inlay, this is a painting and not an icon. But why should Venetian art up to and including Paolo have been so exclusively preoccupied with flatness, arabesque and color, instead of following Giotto's path toward monumental solidity and the "real world"?

Visual Experience. Because, Bettini suggests, the Venetian world, though just as real, was different. The entire visual experience of the Venetians, living on low mud islands and gazing across sheets of water whose colors shifted under that immense dome of Adriatic sky, predisposed them toward color and flatness.

Even in architecture, the classical Italian experience of solid and void does not quite apply to Venice: the Doges' Palace, no less than its contents, is a construction of colored surfaces. One of the pleasures offered by "Venice and Byzantium" is to step outside the gallery and see the ideas of the art replicated and magnified in its macrocosm, the city itself. Both reveal a unique and now lost way of giving shape to the world.

Venice was always revealing its curiously heteroclite taste. At first, one might suppose a device like the 12th century perfume burner from the Treasury of St. Mark's was the very essence of Byzantinism. Given the chance, the Byzantines would certainly have built their churches in gold and silver to emulate the Bible's description of the New Jerusalem. So one might read this perfume burner, with its Greek plan and five pierced and bubbling domes, as a fantastic architectural model for the greater fantasy of St. Mark's Basilica. Even the plaques in its base, depicting centaurs, sirens and griffins, suggest the antique bas-reliefs that remain embedded in the walls of St. Mark's. Yet the domes and the sinuous palm-leaf decorations are not Byzantine in form but Arabic, and the whole thing was made in southern Italy. The Venetians made a church out of it by soldering crosses to its conical towers.

Piling use on use, like layers of Adri aticsilt left by successive tide-flows, it self the prototype of civic eclecticism, Venice lent its rich, illusory profile even to the works of art it imported. They, like everything else in the city, have endured sea changes.

qed Robert Hughes

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