A Toccata of Galuppi’s

Yesterday snow was falling in the Piazza.  Just a little snow, very fine and grainy, scattering along the cobbles in wind-driven eddies.  A bit like sugar. The basilica’s domes were topped with white and so were the bobbing gondolas and the tourists in them. Clearly they intended to take that long-dreamed-of ride and frostbite be damned.  The gondolas, gondoliers, passengers, even pedestrians crossing the square looked curiously like little sugar-coated cake decorations fallen from the enormous confection that is the church of St. Mark.

Venice inspires artists, even in the snow.  At the edge of the Piazzeta, near the water, someone had sculpted a little snow-turtle, complete with a furrowed shell and an amused smile on its face.  A few windblown tourists drifted by, seeking inspiration or at least shelter in the church or the Correr Museum or the Doge’s Palace. 

I can testify that anyone seeking warmth in the Doge’s Palace was destined for disillusion.  The enormous rooms were every bit as cold as the Piazza.  People often complain about the crowds in Venice, but yesterday I would have welcomed a crush of tourists, just so their combined body heat could temper the frigid rooms.  In the wintry vastness of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, (the Grand Council chamber), despite the golden glow of the magnificent carved ceiling, the chill seemed to trigger a feeling of loss and regret.  Here I was, surrounded by the portraits of all the doges, under Veronese’s central painting of Venice bringing peace to all her people, gazing at the multitudes in Tintoretto’s enormous oil painting called Paradise.  But a fragment of long-forgotten verse came to me, and I was assailed by a grey melancholy, thinking of the storied greatness of the Venetian Republic, in the days of her wealth and glory.  The poet Robert Browning, who loved Venice (he died in an apartment in Ca’ Rezzonico) engaged in an imaginary complaint with an eighteenth century Venetian composer named Baldassare Galuppi.  As he plays, or perhaps just reads the sheet music of a Toccata by Galuppi, he imagines the music representing the frivolity and heedlessness of Venice in decline.

Here you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,
Where Saint Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?

One of the Doge of Venice’s ceremonial duties was to throw a wedding ring from the State Barge, Bucentaur, into the Adriatic every Ascension Day to renew the city’s dominance of the sea, its historical source of wealth, inspiration, and power.

A Question of History

Who knows when Venice’s slow decline began?  Was it in 1453 when the Turks took Constantinople? Or from 1494 when constant conflict and the shifting alliances of the Italian Wars dragged on for sixty years, involving France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Turks, the Papacy, and virtually all the Italian city-states?  Or in the 16th Century, was it the opening of new trade routes to the east, and across the Atlantic to the Americas?  By the mid-18th Century, when Galuppi was composing, Venice was no longer a great power, and despite her traditional gaiety, the end of the Republic was fast approaching.

Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?

Baldassare Galuppi was born on the island of Burano in 1706 and died in 1785.  He’s buried in the Church of San Vitale in Venice.  He was a celebrity composer in his day, and composed over 100 operas as well as many religious and concert pieces.  He even worked in England for a time, writing and directing operas for the King’s Theatre in London, before returning to Venice.  His music had largely faded from public notice until Browning wrote “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” in 1855, after which there was a brief period of interest.  In recent days some of his works are performed in concert and a couple of his operas have been recorded – including, confusingly, La Clemenza di Tito, which shares a title with the more famous work by Mozart.

Well, and it was graceful of them - they’d break talk off and afford
- She, to bite her mask’s black velvet - he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?

Musing on Galuppi and his many operas put me in mind of another, much earlier, Venetian composer, Claudio Monteverdi.  He wrote far fewer operas than Galuppi, but considering that he was busy inventing the genre, his lack of operatic output is understandable – especially since he wrote a lot of other music.  Only three of the ten or more operas he is thought to have written have survived in their entirety – L’Orfeo, L’incoronazione di Poppea, and Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria.  A fragment of another opera, Arianna, also survives.  All three of the complete works are still performed today, with Poppea perhaps most solidly in the repertoire.

Monteverdi is a particular hero for opera lovers, so I decided to go and visit him in the grand and fascinating church of the Frari.  (Frari means ‘the friars’, and refers to the followers of St. Francis.) I could have walked, and perhaps the exertion would have kept me warmer than the cold and windy vaporetto ride.  I would have had the thrill of crossing the Rialto bridge, too – if I could have found it.  Wandering around in ever-narrowing circles is only too easy to do in Venice, at least for me.  However, I alighted from Vaporetto number 1 at the San Toma stop and found the church without mishap.

The Church of the Friars

Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, to use the official name, appears, as you approach, to be appropriately plain, since it is a Franciscan Basilica.  Constructed of brick, it is one of the few gothic churches in Venice, completed in 1442, and a second look reveals a graceful, soaring design.  It is the second largest church in Venice and the Campanile is the city’s second highest, after the bell tower of St. Mark’s.  But its great glory is the wealth of Venetian art and history it contains; it is like an abridged but brilliantly illustrated guide to the city’s glories – and some of its failures, too.

I’ve heard people describe the interior as gloomy, but as I entered and saw in the distance the chancel, with light streaming from the tall, four-tiered gothic windows, it seemed anything but depressing.  And in the center, almost like a red-gold jewel embedded in a glowing silver filigree setting, there was Titian’s enormous early masterpiece, the Assumption of the Virgin.  Somehow I felt suddenly warmer – was it the light from the chancel, glowing despite the grey day?  Was it imagination?  Perhaps it was just because I was out of the cold wind, but why opt for the prosaic explanation?

In the church is some of the best work of two of the city’s most storied painters, Titian and Giovanni Bellini. Titian’s tomb, fittingly, is there.  A famous painted wooden statue of John the Baptist by Donatello is in the church.   There are ornate tombs of three doges, Nicolo Tron, the powerful Francesco Foscari, who was in office more than thirty tumultuous years, and Giovanni Pesaro.  The latter’s tomb is often described as ugly or vulgar.  I won’t take sides – except to assure fans of wretched excess that they won’t be disappointed.

Who’s Buried in Canova’s Tomb?

Antonio Canova’s heart is in the Frari and the rest of his remains are interred in Possagno, where he was born.  His monument in the Frari was constructed after his death by his followers, using a design by the great Venetian sculptor himself.  It’s in the north aisle.  Canova intended the design for the Frari, but not for himself.  He meant it for Titian, who’d rested in the church under a plain slab since he died in 1576.  Canova never installed the tomb.  The political crises of the 1790’s and the end of the Republic in 1797 shelved the project.  So in 1798 Canova went to Vienna where he adapted the design for a monument to Archduchess Maria Christina, which he finished in 1805.

Titian did eventually get a monument, a rather grand marble arch topped by a winged lion, courtesy of the Emperor of Austria in 1856.  It’s just across the nave from Canova’s heart, which is in an urn you can see through the open door of a large marble pyramid.  The pyramid, like Titian’s arch, is also guarded by a Venetian winged lion, and attended by sculpted angels and mourners.

I heard long ago that it’s unlucky to circle a church widdershins.  I don’t know if this applies inside the church, but just to be safe I proceeded along the north aisle to keep my path clockwise.  A few steps from Canova is Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro, a marvel of sumptuous color and revolutionary composition, with the Virgin and Child well off-center.  Jacopo Pesaro was the donor, in celebration of a naval victory over the Turks in which he commanded the Venetian fleet.  He and his family are being presented to Mary by Saints Peter, Francis, and Anthony of Padua.  Quite an assemblage, to be sure.  The red-orange flag on the left is the standard of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, who was anything but a saint, and the father of the justly notorious Cesare Borgia and the (probably) unjustly notorious Lucrezia.

Continuing up the north aisle, I swerved into the nave, through a marble screen by Pietro Lombardo to peer into the late gothic, marble monks’ choir and its intricately inlaid stalls, the beautiful work of Marco Cozzi.  From there, across the north arm of the transept, there are three chapels.  The leftmost is the Chapel of St. Ambrose, and in front of the altar there is a simple stone slab set into the floor.  Here Claudio Monteverdi rests.  Despite the season, there were flowers on the stone.  I should have heard music, but instead Browning kept chattering in my head.

Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.

Titian and his Teacher

Fortunately, it’s only a few steps to something truly uplifting, quite literally (at least for Mary) – the great painting over the high altar, Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin.  This huge, three-tiered composition, complete with Titian’s incomparable colors, seems to pull you in and upward, as if you are one of the apostles gazing up in astonishment as Mary, impossibly beautiful, ascends on her cloud toward God the Father, who soars on the diagonal above her, waiting to welcome her.  The painting was quite controversial when it was unveiled; it was said that Mary was too beautiful, that the painting was indecent.  But to me, her beauty is informed with great dignity.

Two doges’ tombs flank the altar, those of Tron and Foscari. In the first chapel to the right of the chancel is the Florentine Chapel, for which Donatello carved his life-size, wooden John the Baptist in 1438.  John is emaciated and appears exhausted but the painted colors of this statue were touched up in the 1970’s, so he looks set to stand there for a few more centuries at least.

Titian was a student of Giovanni Bellini, another master of Venetian color.  In the sacristy is his Pesaro Triptych, in its original gilt-wood frame.  In the center, a lovely Mary, enthroned, balances a very convincing Christ-child on her knees.  She is in a domed niche, so realistic in perspective that you think you can reach into it to shake hands with the little angels supporting her throne. 

It is astonishing to think of all the history found in the Frari, either in the works inside the church or represented by them.  In the realm of art, there is the great influence Giovanni Bellini had on Renaissance painting in both Italy and beyond.  The use of the oil paints (which he probably learned from Antonello da Messina) was a profound change.  His mastery of the new medium was hugely influential.  Titian, his pupil, popularized the technique far and wide.  In politics and warfare, the doges buried in the church played important parts, especially Francesco Foscari, who, in the mid-15th century, led Venice in a long conflict with the Visconti of Milan. 

Goodbye to All That

There are many other works of art and notable tombs in the church, and I could have lingered more, for the beauty of the Frari had indeed lightened my mood.  Perhaps if the skies were not so low and dark as I left the church, I wouldn’t have listened to Browning’s continued plaint against poor Galuppi:

As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

In 1797, the Maggior Cosiglio, meeting in their huge and ornate hall in the Doge’s Palace, under Veronese’s painting of Venice dispensing peace to her people, declared the end of the Venetian Republic, and French troops occupied the city.  That same year, Napoleon turned the city over to the power Venice had resisted for two centuries, Austria.

‘Dust and ashes!’ So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too - what’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

The Sun’ll Come Up …

Ah, but that was yesterday. Today the sky is blue; the sun is positively blazing, though it’s still chilly.  The canal is glistening like a Canaletto canvas. The air is scintillating.  The dreamers in the gondolas are bundled up, but smiling.  It seems unlikely, but I thought I heard a gondolier singing.  The decaying pilings and rotting foundations no longer seem squalid, but romantic.  Just think – the whole fascinating panoply of treasures is mine today.  I think I’ll stroll the Accademia and tip my hat to Canaletto and Carpaccio, Giorgione and Mantegna.  Should stop by San Zaccaria to pay my respects to John the Baptist’s father and admire St. Lucy in Giovanni Bellini’s glowing altarpiece.  Maybe I’ll bundle up and try the Doge’s palace again, and afterwards go to Caffe Florian for a cup of hot chocolate.  Must check out La Fenice – slim chance of a ticket, but you never know.  Or a boat ride at sunset for the views – that would be a treat. Venice lives!  Well, until she sinks, of course.

Text © 2013 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2013 by Patricia Gartman. First published as Venice in Winter, in Italia! Guide to Venice and the Veneto, Autumn 2013)