A Venice of Shadows

Brodsky traveled to Venice in winter. He recounts and explains this in his own way in Watermark, but also in his conversations with Volkov.

When asked why he always chose that season, so unfriendly to travelers, he asks a question that could be considered insulting to a Russian—in Russia, winter is a general in many wars—and feels that he cannot be understood. Choosing December or January has to do with feelings, perceptions, private areas of the imagination. He talks about the aqua alta, the gray tones of the windows, the silence and the morning blanket covering the faces of newlyweds, the statue of Querini, an unfortunate traveler to the North Pole… The answer he chooses is disconcerting: “It’s like watching Greta Garbo swim.”

The key must be sought in his dialogue with Volkov. It was during the break between classes at the American university where he taught, the Christmas break, the best time to make the trip. But there is something else. Brodsky mentions a French novelist, Henri de Régnier, now forgotten, who lived in Venice. He had his house near the Salute, as Pound did years later. De Régnier’s novels, translated into Russian by Kuzmin, were set in a frozen, wintry Venice. A later iconography, produced by Life magazine, would complete the work.

The fact that Brodsky had Garbo in mind should confirm that Venice is entirely a film set, a stage for cinema. It would not be wrong to say so now, when we have traveled in the late summer and the Mostra has brought actresses and celebrities of all kinds. A film by Almodóvar opened the festival, and a French film (Happening, Audrey Diwan) won the Golden Lion, but none of this distracted us. 

It all seemed to be happening somewhere else, in a parallel world, or in one where we had no place, or perhaps it was we who had no time or interest in it.

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The first time someone mentioned Venice to me, the name Tintoretto came up. It was the 1990s, I was very young, fresh out of college. A certain writer visited the publishing house where I worked, and I heard him say that he had traveled to Italy and slipped away to Veneto just to see that painter’s frescoes. I hadn’t seen much of the city’s iconography at the time, and I don’t know why I imagined that those frescoes were outdoors, like murals.

Since then, Venice has been Tintoretto for me. And Tintoretto is the painter of writers, as Mary McCarthy said. He was the son of a Venetian dyer, which perhaps explains his austerity and diligence. Unlike so many painters in the history of art, he was not very fond of travel. He never left Italy, and it has not even been verified whether he ever visited the Sistine Chapel. 

Venerated by Velázquez, despised by painters such as Picasso, the list of writers who have taken an interest in his work and written about him is extensive: from Aretino to Sartre, who dedicated a beautiful and memorable essay to him; Vasari, Moratín, Gautier, Ruskin, Taine, Henry James, Wilde, Cunqueiro, Malraux, Thomas Bernhard…

We didn’t have time to visit all the churches that display his frescoes. But in the Doge’s Palace, I got my fill, which was an overdose. I arrived at the final room almost crawling due to jet lag and exhaustion from walking and climbing stairs. I was also a fallen angel, but I knew that only those rooms, with their walls full of faces and bodies, deserve to be called “spaces,” perhaps “river spaces,” as all the movement and dark light in those paintings had left me exhausted. I had finally thrown myself into a channel of murky waters, letting myself be carried away by the current.

“The Old Masters tire quickly,” says a character in Bernhard. He is talking about a bench in the Bordone Room, placed there to look at and admire the painting of the ‘Man with the White Beard,’ the great portrait, what stature of a painter, in a Viennese museum.

Overwhelmed by that totality, especially that of “Paradise” in the central hall, suffocated by so many readings that weighed on my shoulders, I had been swimming as I hadn’t done in a long time, since I realized that accumulating years was beginning to sap my energy, but it was leading me to a certain calm, to a certain assimilation.

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There is a Venice of shadows. Sometimes dogs died of hunger and men of plague. Théophile Gautier arrived there in search of it in the fifth decade of the 19th century. The island of San Servolo was home to an insane asylum, now converted into a museum. The way Gautier recounts that visit in his book Venecia. Impresiones de un viajero (Fórcola, 2015) is like that of Dante venturing on a reverse journey, from light to night, from paradise to the hell of madness. “The fantasy of Rabelais’ humorous dreams,” “the Apocalypse transported to the house of beasts.” All madness is expressed in the singular. “We had only seen Venice in its blue and pink guise, with its flat sea sparkling in small green squares, as in Canaletto’s paintings, and we did not want to miss this opportunity to see it through a stormy effect.” On leaving, tired of searching for the specter of the three-faced jester, good weather and the pleasure of the Lido sand, the memory of a place where Byron used to gallop his horses. The women, to undress, take refuge “behind fragile fabrics held up by masts.” For Gautier, Italy is the country of the sun, but the journey begins and ends in a storm.