Venice is the very last refuge on earth for the curious stroller; the free spectacle is a legacy from the Romans; everything offers the opportunity for amusement, the woman at her doorway whipping up mayonnaise, the Englishwoman at her easel, the solitary singer sitting on a gondoliers’ bench, a child kicking his ball among the nibbling pigeons…
Leaving the Labia, the festival extended out on to the square. B— had wanted it to be so; in order to return to our hotel, in the direction of the station, we had to cross the Campo San Geremia; there everything danced, apart from the houses. Acrobats were reconstructing the famous pyramid, known as The Strength of Hercules, after the wooden model in the Correr Museum. The masked beauties had begun to mix with the crowd, who admired them without any envy; for the natural democracy of the Mediterranean people makes no distinction between the piano nobile and the pavement. (The first time I had observed this for myself was in the Appenines, at Vigoleno; the villagers had invaded the castle where Maria passed from the arms of her gardener into those of her chauffeur.)
Above our heads, a tight-rope walker dressed as a bear edged from one rooftop to another; tumblers and acrobats stood in pyramids, balancing at the level of the guttering; the prattle of the street salesmen and the jeers of the circus clowns drowned the splashing of the jousters on the canal and the shouts of the acrobats on their stilts. Jean de Castellane, emerging from a ball at the Hôtel de Ville would mutter wearily: “It’s like the street… with a roof on top.” In Venice, the street is like a palazzo without a roof.
It took twenty years for the Palazzo Labia, which was sold, to become a sad, peninsular administrative building.
Since these lines were written, the moving spirit of the resurgent Venice that evening has also passed on to the land of shadows.
After the tableaux vivants come the still-lifes.
1954 THE GIORGIONE EXHIBITION
GIORGIONE… When I was twenty, people swore by him alone; Berenson and D’Annunzio had just discovered him. Everything was suddenly attributed to this genius who died very young; works by Titian, Cima de Conegliano, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma the Elder and Lotto were seized and ascribed to this great unknown artist. My earliest savings were spent purchasing books by B.B. in which one unexpectedly discovered in Giorgione pre-Poussin landscapes, picturesque music, romanticism (The Tempest), the sensitivity of chiaroscuro, the Debussy-like atmosphere, created by shepherds with their theorbos, and the veils that Isadora Duncan wore; I remember a devout pilgrimage to Castelfranco (not daring to admit my disappointment at seeing his Madonna), in one of the earliest Fords…
Today it is the Mostra in Venice. In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Pietro Zampetti barely conceals his disillusionment. What remains of Giorgione? Three authentic portraits! What a battleground it’s been! The critics can only agree about the Pala at Castelfranco, the Three Philosophers in Vienna and the Tempest from the Ospedale Civile; after one and a half centuries the Judith in Leningrad has been snatched by Raphael and restored to Giorgione for the time being, but doubts persist as to the Young Man in Berlin, the Young Woman in Vienna, the Madonna at the Ashmolean, the Sleeping Venus in Dresden, and the Man with an Arrow in Vienna. As for the Concert, there is talk of a collaboration with Titian… The Sick Man may be by Leonardo. Even the Three Ages in the Pitti Palace are ascribed to Lotto; the most famous paintings by Giorgione are lost… others are attributed to the friend who shared his studio, Titian, with whom he had collaborated when they were pupils of Bellini’s, and who, in his case, was lucky enough not to die at the age of thirty-three.
Everywhere, in Italian art criticism, one hears of nothing but confusione and terreno di nebulosità, of influsso giorgionesco, or derivazione giorgionesca. Giorgione is growing ever more distant…
Max Jacob
APRIL 1964 CRAZY BIDDING
ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning; it might have been dawn, the sky was so murky. This unwashed Venice reminds me of those postcards sent by Max Jacob, in which the cigar ash crushed into the gouache represented suburban fog. There was a biting north wind; we were walking along the Grand Canal, where the surface of the water was being pummelled by the wind, accompanied by the noise of those Italian motor engines that vibrate like a bowstring relieved of its arrow.
The auction began at midday, at the Palazzo Labia. Strapped tightly into his jacket, the forehead of an intellectual and slim as a sub-lieutenant, a precise, ingenuous look in his eye, a partaker of all the good things in life, M.R. had brought me along to the sale at the Labia, the last Venetian palace to disgorge its riches; he knew that all human possessions are nothing more than a warehouse…
Our munificent friend B. had decided to hold out against Time; to rebuild a palace was to reject the abyss, it was like writing the Temps perdu. Once his work was achieved, B. was no longer interested in it.
Even Proust, dreaming about what he would like to do once the Great War was over, imagined himself as the owner of a Venetian palace, where, “like Réjane”, he would have invited the Poulet Quartet to play Fauré for him “as the dawn rose over the Grand Canal”.
The frescoes in the palazzo were so famous in their day that Reynolds and Fragonard made the journey to Venice in order to make copies of them. In the old days, at the turn of the century Labia, when the guide was showing people the paintings on the celebrated ceiling, he used to say: “Signori, PEGASUS PUTS CHRONOS TO FLIGHT.”
Who will ever put Time to flight?
As we were walking along the canal, M.R. told me the history of the Labias: half a century of abusive power, of gold plates being hurled from the windows, of virgin walls being entrusted to the talents of Tiepolo, of Zugno, of Magno, of Diziani; ruined by Napoleon, the Labias had handed over the building to the Lobkowitz family, until a South African tycoon, who, extraordinarily enough, was also called Labia, bought back this house in which he wished he had been born. As they were negotiating the sale, he is said to have made the following play on words: L’abbia o non l’abbia, sarò sempre Labia.2
We had to clamber over barricades of paintings that looked even bigger now that they had been taken down, and over consoles, their gilt fading, which were being carried down the stairs as the rooms that had been laid waste by the auctioneers were cleared. Stripped of their chandeliers, the ceilings revealed rat holes and brickwork in a deplorable condition, its stucco chipped and flaking, held together by worm-infested pillars. Hollow footsteps echoed on the uncarpeted floors. Here, shorn of its former livery — Italian footmen trussed in gold like maritime proveditors — labourers were knocking back flasks of wine.
The Baroque, that exuberance of joy, cannot cope with neglect.
In the main courtyard, the international antique dealers, admired from a distance by the small traders from the alleys of Venice, had taken their places. Experts and dealers, who had flown in from Chelsea or Manhattan, magnifying glasses in hand, were swamped by a stream of noble effigies and horned doges, and mingled together amidst a Capernaum of off-stage operatics. Tax inspectors, Venetian fiscal authorities and spies from the Treasury and Customs and Excise departments watched the future bidders closely.