Venice: Pure City полностью

But there was also a larger continuity. Bellini is to be seen in the context of the work of his father, Jacopo Bellini; in turn Giorgione learned from Bellini, and Titian learned from Giorgione. Tiepolo was called Veronese redivivio. It is perhaps a familiar pattern of influence and inheritance, but one that takes place more fully and intensely in the small and relatively isolated city of Venice. The conservative bias of the citizens, in all matters of social and political policy, must also have had its effect upon the local artists. The importance of tradition and authority was asserted on all occasions of public discourse. If the mosaics in Saint Mark’s were faded, they were replaced by exact replicas. If the paintings in the ducal palace were damaged or destroyed, they were replaced with images of the same historical or mythological scene. All of the instincts of the Venetian painter were to maintain, or to learn from, the past.

Their methods of working were different from their respective contemporaries in other cities. In Venice artists were characteristically viewed as a particular kind of artisan. In a city noted for its pragmatic tendencies, theirs was a wholly practical training. They were concerned with craft skills. They were not considered heroic, with the possible exception of Titian; they were not filled with the divine afflatus. They were essentially servants of the state. The painters belonged to a guild that was supervised by three magistrates. Alongside Tintoretto and Titian were sign-painters and makers of playing cards. Painters were also expected to practise their expertise in other matters pertaining to the state; they were hired as cartographers or as designers of festive banners and of shields. They made their own tools, like any other craftsman. They considered their work in its material rather than its aesthetic guise. They looked at a canvas as a carpenter might look at a wooden chest or a cobbler look at a pair of shoes.

In Venice, too, there was much greater specialisation of trade than in other cities. That, again, is part of the inheritance of the Venetian merchant tradition. The carvers of frames had their own guild, while the gilders formed a “column” of the painters’ guild. The goldsmiths often practised their art in consortium. There were painters of furniture panels, and painters of chests. There were the ivory carvers, their art first emanating from Byzantium. It was always a question of supply and demand. Painted organ shutters, for example, were a Venetian speciality. Painting, in any case, is bound to be different in a city so attentive to the appetite for luxury goods. Luxury represents the love of the material world. Is that not the quality present in the paintings of Bellini and of Titian?

The imperatives of trade are to be seen in the replacement of wood by canvas as the preferred support for oil painting. The supply of material was guaranteed by the presence of a thriving sail industry. In any case the sea air rotted wood. Canvas was also easier to transport in a city, and a lagoon, notoriously difficult to navigate. The line between aesthetic and economic preference is a fine one. In Venice, of all cities, it is hard to know which of them was predominant. It is also worth noticing that the painters of Venice turned to landscape at precisely the time of the city’s colonisation of the mainland.

So the studio or workshop (known as bottega) of the Venetian painters was created in response to the trading practices of the city. Tintoretto had one of the most efficient studios, for example, based upon the Venetian instinct for familial ties. His two sons were his assistants, and they continued to turn out replicas of their father’s work long after his death. In his will Tintoretto left all of his “property, as far as appertains to my profession” to the sons. His wife was responsible for the finances, and his daughter married a young man on the perfectly acceptable grounds that he had proved himself to be a good artist. As she explained in her will, “if the said Sebastian proved to be an able painter I should take him for my husband; in this way, by virtue of his talent, the Tintoretto name would be maintained.” Indeed the Tintoretto business lasted for more than a century and involved three generations. In a city that was established upon the primacy of family, too, the artists followed precedent. The sons of Bellini were painters. The studios of Tiepolo and Bassano, Veronese and Zuccaro, were family businesses. They were clearly created on the pattern of the merchant families of the city, in which trade was passed from father to son. A man might become a painter for the simple reason that he was part of a painter’s family.