Art: Carpaccio at the Palace

Great are the master painters produced by Venice, but none of them, neither Titian nor Tintoretto, Giorgione nor even Francesco Guardi, to judge from their work, took so much delight in the sights and sounds of that city as did Vittore Carpaccio. He obviously loved Venice’s busy canals, its processions and pageantry, its fairy-tale architecture—almost every aspect of the place, in fact, down to the brightness of its gondoliers’ jerkins and the workmanship of a beautifully wrought bolt on a door. Last week Venice returned the compliment by opening in the Doge’s Palace the biggest Carpaccio exhibition ever held (see color),

Up-&-Down Reputation. In his own lifetime, which spanned the late 15th and the early 16th centuries, Carpaccio’s fortunes fluctuated, much as his reputation has waxed and waned ever since. When he was in his 50s, he was revered, but in the last years of his life he could scarcely find work enough to sustain him in Venice and had to rely on lesser commissions in the provinces. The Florentine art historian, Giorgio Vasari, erroneously considered Carpaccio a mediocre follower of Giovanni Bellini, and that judgment stood until the 18th century, when critics began to see some merit in his sense of fantasy. But the rise of neoclassicism, which abhorred fantasy, cast him into limbo again, and it was not until Ruskin that he found a new champion. His output had been small compared with that of his contemporaries, and his best work has rarely been brought together. It took the current show to strike the total of Carpaccio’s gifts.

Few artists ever paid such close attention to such exactness of detail, but the sum of the details rises far above mere realism. In the Healing of the Obsessed the protagonists and the main action turn out to be not the miracle of the True Cross, which is placed to the far left, but a day in the life of Venice. Yet, instead of a realistic picture of daily activity, Carpaccio has painted something close to a dream. His people goabout their business as if in a trance; their eyes do not meet or stare out at the viewer, for almost every figure seems to be looking in a private direction of his own. No detail of Venice’s rich architecture is overlooked, yet the city, with its innumerable chimneys, seems imaginary. And finally, there is the color—perfectly balanced, magnificently muted, not quite day and not quite night, but, like the scene as a whole, in a twilight region between reality and pure fancy.

“The First Interior.” A master storyteller, Carpaccio recorded not only the facts but the atmosphere of each event. This command of atmosphere is nowhere more apparent than in the Dream of St. Ursula (opposite), which has been called “the first interior of modern painting.” Every detail in the painting is presented to perfection; the scene as a whole is a masterpiece of invention. Though the painting has been cut down in size from the original work, there remains an effect of spacelessness. This is a typical bedroom in a typical Venetian palazzo of that day, but it is also like no bedroom that ever existed. The details and the subject matter absorb the eye only temporarily; in the end, the painting becomes a balance of space and a suffusion of colors.

He painted these two pictures, both scenes from two great series, at the height of his fame. But fashion in art was moving fast in those days, and Carpaccio could not keep up. With Giorgione and Titian, the emphasis switched to naturalism and later on to monumentality. Venetian sophisticates scorned Carpaccio as oldfashioned, not realizing that centuries later it would be to him that people would look to recapture the color and magic of their city in its prime—a busy commercial center endowed with lyric grandeur by the touch of a loving hand.