TIMES
Peter Ackroyd: from the Thames to Venice
Despite his love affair with London, Peter Ackroyd let water draw him to the city of light, he tells Megan
Walsh
Just so you know, this isn't the end of the affair. Peter Ackroyd has not abandoned London. He is already
working on a six-volume history of England.
So why the fling with Venice? "Because it was a challenge," he says, rather abruptly. Then he adds: "You
could say that the Thames led me there."
When Ackroyd finished his book Thames: Sacred River, his meditations on water flowed from London's main
artery to the city built on a lagoon. He began research in the usual way, reading "every voluminous tome
available" - 198 to be exact - and with Ackroyd you know that he's read them.
He turned every building, every passageway, into a chattering chorus of history before he even arrived. "I
sometimes think books are a better way of knowing a place than going there." But he did visit, eight or nine
times, to wander around and "find things by accident".
And it's this combustible mix of scholarly rigour and instinct that brings his inimitable words to life. "Upon
entering the interior," he says of St Mark's Basilica, "it's like some great cavern beneath the sea filled with
sunken treasure."
That is, of course, what Venice could be. It has always been under threat from the sea and Ackroyd
suggests that the battle against transience might explain the prolificacy and vivacity of Venetian artists and
composers such as Tintoretto and Vivaldi, "I can't think of another city that has marked its artists so much in
the same way". (Although his myriad books about London make him and his own city worthy contenders.)
It's hard to pin down his more mundane experiences of Venice. Do you have a favourite place? "No, I don't
think I do." A restaurant you liked? "Yes, but I couldn't tell you where it is, it's hard to find the same place
twice." But then, it's not his city. It isn't home to many people at all: "It's a city for the wayward and lost, it was
built by exiles in the 6th century and has attracted exiles ever since."
There are only 60,000 Venetians hosting an estimated 20 million visitors annually at present. "It will be the
first postmodern city," he says, "a city without residents." And what of the character of the soon-to-be extinct
Venetian? "I don't know them well enough."
Although, for his accompanying TV series, not only can you see him exploring "the most visually seductive
city in the world" but his meetings with Venetians also reveal a mutual understanding of the need to protect
and preserve the place in which you are born.
He loves Venetian light: "It changes everything, it changes endlessly - the atmosphere of Venice is never
quite the same, it is perpetually iridescent." His favourite season is winter, when it snows. And he likes how
easy it is to trace the city's history "from its seeds to its maturity" - he believes that this makes Venice a
better test of urban living than London. However, he couldn't live there. "Oh no, I couldn't endure it. All that
walking, all those steps!" And the water taxis: "I don't like having to jump."
In the end all routes lead to his true home. "London is a very solid, serviceable immensity, it seems to have
always been there. Venice is a more fleeting and elusive presence."
Peter Ackroyd's Venice, a new four-part series, starts on Sky Arts 2 HD and Sky Arts 2 on September 6
TIMES
Peter Ackroyd's Venice
In an extract from his new book, Venice: Pure City, the author turns his gaze upon Italy’s most seductive city
It was known as Venezia la bella, an incomparable union of art and life.
A Byzantine historian of the 15th century compared it to an exquisitely proportioned sculpture. In its setting
upon the waters, it was born to be painted and engraved.
Some have even suggested that it looked better on paper and on canvas than it ever did in the light of day.
In the drawings and paintings of Venetian life, from those of Jacopo Bellini in the middle of the 15th century
to those of Francesco Guardi in the latter part of the 18th century, the setting and architecture of the city take
precedence over the activities of its inhabitants.
The physical space, and the stone face, are pre-eminent. Who can remember any of the human figures in
Canaletto? In the many images of the public processions of Venice, the spectators and the participants
become part of the architecture; the buildings themselves seem to embody the harmony and joy of the
people.
The stone is a monument to human will but, in the process, the stone itself becomes revered. The presence
of stone — walls, stairways, balustrades and alcoves — is very noticeable in Venetian painting.
The city might have been composed by a painter seeking symmetry and contrast, weighing the vertical
against the horizontal, combining shapes and colours in the most harmonious whole. Latin elements are
balanced against Greek elements, Gothic against Byzantine, in order to symbolise the sway of different
empires.
The sight lines are perfect, as in the stage scenery for a play or for an opera, and the perspective subtly
diminished. The details and motifs are carefully mingled. The co-ordinates of the public buildings were
appraised in the light of Renaissance theories of numbers, so that the vistas have a mystical or magical
enchantment. It was another form of power.
The light of Venice is as important as its space and form. The light on the water casts illumination upwards
and outwards. The sunlight plays upon the walls and ceilings, with an incessant rippling effect; it stirs the air
and makes everything dance. What is solid is diffused. Buildings shimmer against the surface of the water.
Stone becomes colour on the water. It can make the battered marble and the weather-stained brick, the
slime on the surface of the canal, seem marvellous.
There is a sparkling light, on winter days. But the characteristic of Venice is a pale soft light, like a drifting
haze, powdered, part wave and part cloud. It is a pearly iridescent light wreathed in mist. It is drawn from the
horizon and the sea as much as from the sun. It lends everything unity.
That is why Venetian painters have always been drawn to the gleam of light upon water, of the reflection of
figures and of objects. There are many mirrors, of local manufacture, in Venetian painting. The art of Bellini
has always been celebrated for its luminosity, for its ability to charge the air with light. The diffuse sky and
the bright horizon contain a glowing world. The surfaces of his canvases emit and receive light.
As in the streets of the city itself, even the shadows become sources of light. It is a truism that in Venetian
painting colour, rather than contour, is the key. Surely this is related to the vision of reflections in the water?
Light was, in every context, a token of splendour and of nobility. In the 12th-century chronicles, the Basilica
of Maria Assunta was celebrated for pellucida claritas or admirable lightness. The range of associations is
intrinsic to the power of the word. The polished flooring of Venetian houses known as terrazzo, compounded
of lime and well-powdered stone, was prized for its ability to reflect light; it was buffed and polished with
linseed oil until it shone, as everyone testified, “like a mirror”.
Venetian houses were always designed to catch the light. In the 16th century it was noted that the windows
were made of glass rather than paper or waxed cloth; according to Francesco Sansovino they “were bright,
and full of the sun”. There were of course gloomy recesses, dark courtyards, and hidden passages; the
Venetians were affected by the chiaroscuro of brightness and shadow. It was part of their nature. It is part of
their painting.
There was a passion for artificial light. The chandeliers or lampadari of Venice, seeming to float in the great
upper spaces of Venetian apartments, were renowned for the myriad and innumerable crystals that seemed
to vie with the sparkle of the water outside the windows.
Venice was the first city in Europe to have, in 1732, its streets lit by lamps. London followed in 1736. In this
period an English traveller, Edward Wright, noted that “the Venetians are excessively lavish of their white
wax tapers, in their processions, at their night-litanies”.
When these lights were seen mingling with the jewels, the gold, the crystal and the silver there was “such a
glittering, there was scarce any looking upon them”. This is a quintessential Venetian effect, this glittering. It
is related to the glittering of the sea all around. Light is the life-giving force. It quickens life. It is an emblem of
vivacity and vitality, both associated with the Venetian temperament.
The numinous is luminous. Light is the first created thing. If light is seen as a spiritual substance, then it
changes the way we look at the world; the streets and buildings are illuminated by the divine, and are thus
themselves sacred. Light has always been depicted as a sign of heavenly grace. There is a light of holiness,
and a light of vision.
The Renaissance churches of Venice, designed by Codussi and Palladio, exclude any frescoes or mosaics
from their interiors; the walls are purely white. In this way the quality of the light was preserved. The Istrian
stone of Venice is, in the sunlight, dazzling.
The passion for colour existed, as did the veneration of light, as a token of energy and bravura. It was a
symbol of being. The harmony of colours was akin to the warmth of the sun. In Venice the term was colorito
rather than colore, intimating the active and expressive possibilities of colour.
The 19th-century English artist William Etty described Venice as “the birthplace and cradle of colour”. In the
same century John Ruskin noted that the Venetians resembled the Arabs in “their intense love of colour
which led them to lavish the most expensive decorations on ordinary dwelling houses”; in addition they
possessed “that perfection of the colour-instinct in them which enabled them to render whatever they did, in
this kind, as just in principle as it was gorgeous in appliance”.
So they coated their palaces in porphyry and gold, where the northern architects employed oak and
sandstone. The inner walls of the houses were hung with painted leather or with green and crimson damask.
There is expansive colour in the brilliant polychromaticism of their architectural detail, in marble and in
mosaic.
The Basilica of Saint Mark’s is a hymn to colour. We may also surmise that this was a culture in which
sensory experience was deeper and more intense than our own; in which beautiful colour, and beautiful
sound, had a more direct impact upon the human consciousness. Taste, and smell, and sight and hearing
were stripped bare. Life itself was altogether more vivid. The world had not lost its aura.
It was not coincidental, perhaps, that the city itself was the centre of the pigment trade in Europe. The
painters of the Netherlands and the rest of Italy would purchase their colours from Venice, where there were
merchants who specialised in that trade. Here were the finest orpiment and realgar, used for yellow and for
orange, as well as vermilion and lead white.
There is the famous “Venetian red”, a red earth extracted from the Veneto and characteristically to be seen
in 15th-century Venetian painting. It was said to be as red as the blood of Christ. The dyeing industries of the
city, indispensable in the production of luxury textiles, guaranteed the supply of the pigment known as red
lake. The history of fashions in colour – as red lead, for example, gave way to orange at the end of the 15th
century — would also be a history of human sensibility.
The Venetian painters often pursued the most expensive colours for the sake of their price and rarity. Thus,
for example, the profound violet blue of Bellini or Titian was taken from the ground semi-precious lapis lazuli
of what is now Afghanistan; red pigments from silver or sulphur were valued very highly. The Venetian
republic was the home of saffron imported from the East. In his Grande Dictionnaire de Cuisine, Alexandre
Dumas père remarked that it was “to spices that we owe Titian’s masterpieces”.
What are the colours of the most serene city? There are of course the sacred colours, Bellini’s colours, blue
and gold. Many of the public buildings of Venice were decorated with a blue sky of night irradiated by stars of
gold.
Upon the Pala d’Oro, the richly metalled altar screen in Saint Mark’s, panels of translucent blue enamel were
set within golden borders. It was heaven’s colour. Blue is the colour of calm and serenity, adopted in the
most serene city. In the paintings of the 14th and 15th centuries the most favoured colour was a deep blue.
There was the violet blue of the sky, and the greenish blue of the soft distance. The colours of salmon,
magenta, orange and white are reflected upon the blue and green waters. The sails of the fishing boats,
upon the lagoon through the centuries, were orange or crimson. There is also green, so much wished for in a
city of stone. Bellini luxuriated in deep green. The Venetian builders loved green marble.
It was an intimation of the natural world, so that we can speak of forests of marble springing up in the city. It
was a reminder of the sap and the leaf, of the miracle of rebirth. Ruskin noted that one of the favourite
chords of Venetian colour “was the sweet and solemn harmony of purple with various greens”.
What is the colour of the waters in the canals and in the lagoon? They have variously been described as
jade green, lilac, pale blue, brown, smoky pink, lavender, violet, heliotrope, dove grey. After a storm the
colour changes as the water becomes aerated. On a hot afternoon the waters may seem orange. The
colours of the sky, and the colours of the city, are refracted in little ovals of ochre and blue. It is all colours
and no colour. It reflects, and does not own, colour. It becomes what it beholds.
© Peter Ackroyd 2009. Extracted from Venice: Pure City, to be published by Chatto & Windus on September
3 at £25.