Glory of Venice: Masterworks of the Renaissance at the Denver Art Museum
A trip to Venice and a trip to the Denver Art Museum all in one day.
Ahh, Venice. One of the most unique cities in the world. It served as a cultural crossroads during much of its long history and is famed for its architecture, music and art. Now the Denver Art Museum is bringing a little bit of Venice to Colorado with Glory of Venice, an exhibit featuring the heavy hitters of Venetian Renaissance art like Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian. It offers visitors the chance for a small trip to Venice, and you don’t even have to battle airport crowds and the TSA to get there.
Ever since its founding during the Roman Empire, Venice has seduced visitors with its beauty, its light and its sheer improbability. In Glory of Venice, the Denver Art Museum doesn’t just display the artwork of Venice, but recreates the wonder of the city on a smaller scale.
As soon as you enter the gallery on the first floor of the Hamilton building, you’ll see on your right a classic Venetian arched portico looking out over the lagoon with the Campanile di San Marco in the distance. On your left, meanwhile, is The Triumph of Venice by Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, an allegorical painting celebrating Venice’s victory in the War of the League of Cambrai. While most of the symbolism of this allegorical work is obscure to modern viewers, there’s no denying the gorgeous color and light that infuse this piece, with Doge Loredan standing next to a personification of Venice, sitting in a chariot pulled by lions, the symbol of St. Mark, Venice’s patron saint.
The first half of the exhibition is filled mostly with religious works, in particular scenes of the Virgin and Child. Aside from St. Mark, the Virgin Mary was the most important religious figure in Venice because the city was founded on the day of the feast of the Annunciation (March 25th), and because, like Mary, Venice remained inviolate–it had never been invaded in the course of its long history, at least not at the time of the Renaissance.
The story of Venice’s art is usually framed in terms of its role as a gateway between East and West, the last holdout of the Byzantine Empire in Italy and a city perched on a cultural divide. While you can see evidence of that narrative in the gold leaf and iconographic style of the early Renaissance paintings here, Glory of Venice’s main focus is not in Venice’s conversation with the East, but rather with the north, specifically Northern European painting.
Far more so than the rest of Italy, and long before, Venice’s artists were fascinated by the high level of detail, naturalistic landscape and luminous color of Dutch art. Several paintings in Glory of Venice visually quote directly from Northern European art, in particular the work of Albrecht Dürer, who visited Venice in 1494.
An excellent example is Crucifixion and Apotheosis of the Ten Thousand Martyrs of Mount Ararat by Vittore Carpaccio, an enormous, over-the-top painting “inspired by” Dürer’s woodcut of the same subject. Curiously, Carpaccio also painted the piece catty-corner to Apotheosis of the Ten Thousand Martyrs, which shows another chapter in the same story, the apparition of the martyrs to Prior Francesco Ottobon in a vision. This understated, rational composition is nearly the complete opposite of the apotheosis scene in style. You can actually see the altar where the larger painting hung in real life in the background of Apparition, right above St. Peter who is blessing the martyrs as they travel through the church on their way to heaven.
One of the innovations Netherland artists brought to Venice was the use of oil paint, and Giovanni Bellini was a key figure in the transition from egg tempera to oil-based paints. Oil pigments allowed the Venetians to capture light and color in a saturated and layered way they were never able to before, a key point when one thinks of the rich colors of pink, blue, and brilliant gold that’s to be found everywhere in the city. Oil paint also helped Venetian artists become more painterly in their rendering of figures, and less reliant on drawing than their Roman and Florentine counterparts. A good example is Vincenzo Catena’s The Adoration of the Shepherds, where the figures appear softer and more rounded than the figures in, say, Raphael’s Transfiguration, which was painted at approximately the same time in Rome.
Giorgione and Titian, arguably the two greatest Venetian artists in history, were both students of Bellini, and their work is occasionally confused. For instance, the altarpiece with the painting of Christ Carrying the Cross in the last room of the exhibition could have been painted by either artist, although the DAM has decided to attribute it to Giorgione. Not only is this an incredibly dynamic piece filled with emotional tension, as Christ, with a placid and gentle expression, is confronted by an angry man holding a rope; but the Venetians believed it could work miracles, and they would rub the angry man’s head in the hopes it would heal them or help grant their prayers. This is why the man looks bald today. Does the painting’s miraculous power still hold? We’ll probably never know.
Giorgione died of the plague at a young age, but Titian lived well into his 80s and became one of the most important artists in Italy. The DAM has several early pieces by him, painted when he was only in his 20s. The best of these is Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Dominic. While the subject is officially the Virgin and Child, the painting is dominated by the beautiful Saint Catherine of Alexandria on the far left, who holds the sword with which she was martyred. Compare this painting to the earlier Virgin and Child images and you can see how art has evolved in just a few years from the more static, iconographic images of the early Renaissance to scenes that are dramatic, filled with movement and emotion.
From here it is only a short step into the Baroque style, which Venice would embody like no other. But that is a topic for another exhibition.
