Venice: The City and Its Architecture

Citation

Anstey, J. (1998), "Venice: The City and Its Architecture", Structural Survey, Vol. 16 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.1998.11016aae.006

Venice: The City and Its Architecture

Venice: The City and Its Architecture

Richard GoyPhaidon£45

I hate people who muck about with bus routes. Throughout the formative years of my life the 83 bus went via The Burroughs and the 183 via Hendon Central, leaving and joining each other in Brent Street and Station Road. What earthly reason can there have been for changing them? In Venice, Vaporettos Nos. 1, 2, 5 and 8 had pursued their accustomed routes for about 20 years before they changed, all except No. 1, a few years ago. I conscientiously learned the new routes only to find, when I returned recently in order adequately to review this book, that they had all been dramatically revised again. Fortunately, Richard Goy does not try to offer a guide to the vaporetto routes ­ but I will have to re-write a chapter in my as yet unpublished Venice Off the Beaten Track.

What Dr (I think) Goy does do is to provide a most comprehensive guide to the growth of Venice as a city, and to the development of its distinctive architecture. It was his book on Venetian vernacular architecture which really opened my eyes to the characteristic construction, and his monograph on the Ca d'Oro which revealed how one particular ­ and very special ­ palace was built, from site acquisition to final decoration. Frankly, his book on Chioggia and Pellestrina is not so interesting. The present book brings all those themes together, and adds some more for the general reader.

By diligent exploration over a whole week, I managed to find three small errors in Vernacular, but a long weekend only succeeded in confirming one small slip in the present book ­ and probably by an editor rather than the author himself. On p. 268 is shown the picture of St Augustine in his study (at one time thought to be St Jerome) by Carpaccio, and the caption says that it is in the Accademia. It is not. It is in the Scuola di S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni ­ and how pleasant it was to have an excuse to visit the Scuola yet again to confirm a fact of which I was perfectly certain.

Having got rid of that petty carp, let me extol the many virtues of the book. It is divided into three principal parts: the form, the nuclei, and the buildings. In the first part the origins of the city, colonised by refugees from the mainland who gradually consolidated the mud banks of the lagoon, are discussed, and the author describes the way in which building materials were obtained and used. Much of this information appeared in Vernacular, and in my review of that book (SS, Vol. 8 No. 1), but suffice it to say that a contributory cause of Venice's expansion on the terra firma (the mainland) was the need to control building supplies. Buildings were founded on timber piles with lower courses of stone, and brick above. (As a result of the general rise in water level, those stone foundations no longer always keep the buildings free from rising damp, since the tide reaches the brick courses much more often).

The piling system, of close set larch (mostly) beams going down 15ft or more to the firm clay level, seems to have stood the test of time for most buildings, but campanili (bell towers) apparently do not respond so well. Many lean considerably, and some have fallen, notably that of S. Marco in 1902. In an earlier article, I expressed the view that it should have stayed down ­ after all, every painter moves it out of the way to improve the view ­ and was promptly set upon by Lady Clarke and the Venice in Peril Fund, so I will not say anything this time.

The workmen involved in construction were met in the "Ca d'Oro" book, and their trades are discussed in these opening chapters: taiapiera (masons); muratori (bricklayers); marangoni (carpenters); and the glaziers, smiths, painters and terrazo layers. The proto was a cross between an architect and a project manager.

The second part deals with the four nuclei of the city. The Piazza San Marco was the real heart of the Venetian empire, with the Doge's palace and the administrative buildings around the great square. Do not forget that there is only one Piazza in Venice: all the other great spaces are Campi. The Arsenale was the source of Venice's military strength, and the area around was occupied by the workmen, as the names of the streets still make clear. It was a vast place, with a ropeway 1,000ft long, and an oar-making shed large enough to house the Great Council when it was made homeless by a fire.

The Ghetto, which is nowadays a generic word for a Jewish enclave, was in fact the foundry area of Venice, to which the Jews were confined. Because the area was so limited, the buildings there grew taller than anywhere else, and many different groups of Jews built their separate synagogues, of which several can be visited in a guided tour today. The Rialto was actually the first centre to be developed (its name derives from Riva Alto, high bank, so it was the obvious starting point) and became the trading centre, with banks (of the financial kind) and markets.

The final two-thirds of the book deals with specific building types. It is a fascinating task to look for signs of the earliest Byzantine buildings, though I have never detected the fragment alleged to survive from AD 810 hidden in the fabric of S. Marco. Dr Goy examines the development of the architecture of the Piazza, and relates it to other buildings in the city. Many plans helpfully illustrate this section ­ and others.

The great churches are inspected by most serious visitors: S. Marco itself, the Frari, the Salute, S. Zanipolo, S. Giorgio, and the Redentore (if you can work out which vaporetto now stops there for the last two), but I was led to a church which I had never previously found, S. Giovanni Decollato (San Zan Degola in Venetian) which is one of the very earliest, founded in 1007. My favourite church architect in Venice is Mauro Codussi (who came from Bergamo, where there is an exhibition of paintings by Lotto this year: I wonder if it will include the great work from the south transept of Zanipolo?) and his important influence is fully dealt with. The façade of S. Moise (St Moses!) is described, to my delight, as transcending "by a considerable extent, most later critics' limits of acceptable taste".

Again, the great scuole (or Livery Companies/Charitable organisations) are well known to visitors, S. Rocco, the Carita, S. Marco, and S. Giovanni Evangelista, but the Scuole Piccole are also worthy of attention and Richard Goy introduces us to several which might otherwise escape our notice. I found some I'd never seen, and looked more closely at some I had previously merely glanced at.

Theatres, coffee houses, casinos all had their special building types, and although I walked past the ruins of the Fenice, which still smells of the fire which burnt it out recently, I could not find the sole original gambling house of the Ridotto Venier.

The cottages of the Arsenale (and other) workers, which are more fully dealt with in Vernacular, are described, and the difficulty of dating them is mentioned. Their style did not change as much as that of the greater buildings. Terraced housing, however, served more than one level of society, and at the western end of the city are two adjoining canals, on one of which is a row of five contiguous palazzi, each of which contained two housing units, while on the other are 14 modest terraced cottages.

Forty pages are devoted to the architecture of the Palazzi, or great houses, which I cannot hope to summarise adequately here, but the development from Byzantine through Gothic to Renaissance is fully described, and the characteristic tri-partite building form explained.

To bring the story of Venice up to date, the depredations of Napoleon are mentioned, and the modern buildings of the railway station, among others, are examined. By great good fortune, there was an exhibition in the Biennale grounds during my visit, so I was able to see the pavilions by Rietveld, Stirling, Scarpa and others.

Despite the occasional infelicities of style ("expunging it of its republican past" and "the body was lain in state"were two expressions to which I took particular exception), this is an outstanding book in its coverage of Venetian social and architectural history. The beginner can hardly fail to grasp the essential characteristics of the subject, and even the hardened visitor to the Serenissima will find new buildings to admire and fresh insights on their construction, with a greater understanding of their social context.

John Anstey