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A History of Venetian Architecture
The history of Venetian architecture is no less remarkable than the history of the city itself. Ennio Concina's comprehensive survey draws on extensive original research on the cultural history of Venice to offer fresh insights and an energetic approach to the architecture. Beginning with the traces of classical activity found in the territory that became ducal Venice, through its establishment as an urba magna in the Byzantine age, and the architectural glories of the Renaissance and Baroque city, Concina discusses the influence of Venice's extraordinary position in history and geography on the architectural styles to be found there. He overturns many long established theories on the development of the lagoon city, and discusses the work of many of history's most famous architects--Sansovino, Sanmicheli, Palladio, Longhena--this brings the story up to date with an examination of the twentieth-century's attempts to expand the economy, and preserve the city's heritage.
362 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
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December 27, 2022
When in XV century Florence Brunelleschi was developing an architecture that would change the world, Venice remained on a different wavelength, engrossed in developing that hodgepodge we think of as "Venetian Gothic" but which has nothing to do with gothic at all: a compendium of Islamic and Byzantine ideas of urban or interior space, light and shade, and filigree decoration in marble and mosaic. Investigating how Eastern influences have predominated in what remains a western metropolis of the oriental world - her back turned to Europe - Professor Concina’s account of Venetian architecture is all about contamination, eccentricity, and displacement.
With the insight to be expected from a disciple of the late Manfredo Tafuri, Concina is enthusiastic, unorthodox, yet rigorous in a tradition of Italian art history going back to Longhi, combining factual exactitude with impassioned participation. He is not looking for purity in his critical method nor in the architectural bazaar that is Venice, but rather for contradiction, interference, and dialectic. Cutting across chronological categories he locates, for instance, Santa Maria dei Miracoli (Venice’s masterpiece of the high Renaissance) alongside the much earlier St. Mark's in order to suggests its architect was drawing on the same non-Italian Graeco-Byzantine sources. He goes on to chronicle the personalities and power-games behind vast urban transformations like the Arsenal, and investigates the significance of local detail. In this regard his account of the central window on the Ducal Palace, described as a metaphor for Venice’s outward looking, independently republican vocation, seems quite exceptional.
In Venice’s malodorous, dark labyrinth everything is mirror-imaged in the water and undulates gently. The real is indistinguishable from the fanciful, as in the caprices of Canaletto or the “Invisible Cities” of Italo Calvino. Baldassare Longhena’s baroque Santa Maria della Salute is a series of Arabic cupolas that connect the Grand Canal, by intricate jumps and vortices, through to the Giudecca behind, whilst his absurdly extravagant facades of Cà Pesaro and Cà Rezzonico are double layers of colonnade and loggia that simultaneously reveal and conceal each other in a fantastically expensive game of concealment for its own sake. In this topsy-turvy world Concina seems to want to suggest that the domes on Palladio’s Venetian churches, for instance, might quite possibly be Islamic.
Today the Arsenal is empty whilst in the environmental disaster of Porto Marghera, downtrodden immigrants toil to build Disney cruise liners; Venice is a tottering caricature of forgotten greatness. Concina’s insistence on describing modernist architecture as some sort of rebirth, rather than a vast problem in its own right, ignores the work of Venice’s own distinguished architecture critics Dal Co, Rella, Cacciari. He mentions the unbuilt projects by Wright, Kahn, and Corbu and some dignified contemporary work by Gregotti, Valle, De Carlo, but perversely ignores James Stirling, who recently completed perhaps the most significant building in Venice’s modern history. Thus in the end, Concina shows his scholarship to be only a conceit, his account of Venetian architecture - like all others - no more than a caprice.
With the insight to be expected from a disciple of the late Manfredo Tafuri, Concina is enthusiastic, unorthodox, yet rigorous in a tradition of Italian art history going back to Longhi, combining factual exactitude with impassioned participation. He is not looking for purity in his critical method nor in the architectural bazaar that is Venice, but rather for contradiction, interference, and dialectic. Cutting across chronological categories he locates, for instance, Santa Maria dei Miracoli (Venice’s masterpiece of the high Renaissance) alongside the much earlier St. Mark's in order to suggests its architect was drawing on the same non-Italian Graeco-Byzantine sources. He goes on to chronicle the personalities and power-games behind vast urban transformations like the Arsenal, and investigates the significance of local detail. In this regard his account of the central window on the Ducal Palace, described as a metaphor for Venice’s outward looking, independently republican vocation, seems quite exceptional.
In Venice’s malodorous, dark labyrinth everything is mirror-imaged in the water and undulates gently. The real is indistinguishable from the fanciful, as in the caprices of Canaletto or the “Invisible Cities” of Italo Calvino. Baldassare Longhena’s baroque Santa Maria della Salute is a series of Arabic cupolas that connect the Grand Canal, by intricate jumps and vortices, through to the Giudecca behind, whilst his absurdly extravagant facades of Cà Pesaro and Cà Rezzonico are double layers of colonnade and loggia that simultaneously reveal and conceal each other in a fantastically expensive game of concealment for its own sake. In this topsy-turvy world Concina seems to want to suggest that the domes on Palladio’s Venetian churches, for instance, might quite possibly be Islamic.
Today the Arsenal is empty whilst in the environmental disaster of Porto Marghera, downtrodden immigrants toil to build Disney cruise liners; Venice is a tottering caricature of forgotten greatness. Concina’s insistence on describing modernist architecture as some sort of rebirth, rather than a vast problem in its own right, ignores the work of Venice’s own distinguished architecture critics Dal Co, Rella, Cacciari. He mentions the unbuilt projects by Wright, Kahn, and Corbu and some dignified contemporary work by Gregotti, Valle, De Carlo, but perversely ignores James Stirling, who recently completed perhaps the most significant building in Venice’s modern history. Thus in the end, Concina shows his scholarship to be only a conceit, his account of Venetian architecture - like all others - no more than a caprice.
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