Venice and the Cultural Imagination: ‘This Strange Dream Upon the Water’ ed. by Michael O’Neill, Mark Sandy, Sarah Wootton (review)

This collection of ten essays began as what must have been a very enjoyable lecture series on ‘Venice and the Cultural Imagination Since 1800’, hosted by the Institute of Advanced Study and the Department of English Studies at Durham University in 2009–10. The book begins with Byron and ends with Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film version of du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, taking in along the way the Shelleys, Turner, nineteenth-century opera, Dickens, Browning, Ruskin, Wharton, James, Eliot, Pound, Mann and the 1997 film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove. The volume as a whole offers, then, a chronologically broad, interdisciplinary, but also rather conservative, largely canonical, and predominantly (though not exclusively) Anglo-American survey of some of the ways in which Venice has been ‘a site of exchange and dialogue between conflicting imaginings and reimaginings of the city after 1800’. Its premise, as stated in the introduction, is that Venice ‘takes us close to the heart of Anglo-American and European cultural predicaments’ and makes ‘possible a fuller, richer grasp of themes central to Anglo-American and European culture’. The introduction also usefully relates the book to important recent scholarly discussions of the history, mythology and representation of Venice by Iain Fenlon, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, David Rosand, Deborah Howard, and others. However, the principal point of critical reference for many of the essays themselves – and one that they ‘revise and expand’ in a variety of interesting ways – is Tony Tanner’s 1992 Venice Desired, which itself here pretty much joins the canon of Venice literature, quite rightly praised by the editors as ‘the seminal study of the alluring, often treacherous attraction that Venice has held for the imagination since the Renaissance’.

In ‘A “More Beloved Existence”: From Shakespeare’s “Venice” to Byron’s Venice’, Bernard Beatty moves through Byron’s engagements with the earlier Venices of Shakespeare, Pope, Batoni, Radcliffe (offering at this point a splendid reading of Byron’s image of Venice as ‘a sea Cybele’), Sismondi and Daru, among others. The essay shows how Byron, ‘always conscious that he is refashioning previous representations of the city’, both looks back to Venice as a real, ‘thousand-year polis’ and initiates its nineteenth-century reinvention as ‘some “strange dream upon the water”’. In this way, he was ‘the harbinger of the cult of Venice as a place of enchantment which naturally belongs to the world of art rather than as an actual polis which belongs to history’ – a cult that marks, in sometimes positive, sometimes negative but always creatively productive ways, the work of many of the artists discussed in later chapters.

Byron also plays a significant, though unannounced, role in the second essay, Mark Sandy’s ‘Reimagining Venice and Visions of Decay in Wordsworth, the Shelleys and Thomas Mann’. Here Sandy argues that in the work of these writers Venice’s ‘own self-perpetuated, incandescent, eternal myth cast its own shadowy anti-myth of ruin and decay’: in Byron’s poetry through creative ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ that seeks to “‘repeople’” Venice ‘“with the past”’; in P. B. Shelley’s ‘infernally nightmarish vision of a corrupted, and corrupting, yet not utterly fallen Venice’ (in ‘Julian and Maddalo’); in Mary Shelley’s vision of Venice as the ‘symbol of a global apocalyptic crisis’ in The Last Man; in Mann’s Venice ‘“stricken with sickness”’.

Andrew Wilton turns to Byron, too, in his discussion of ‘J. M. W. Turner and the “Floating City”’. Offering a survey of Turner’s engagements with Venice over the best part of 40 years, Wilton concludes that, in the ‘unbroken sequence’ between Turner’s ‘urban, topographical’ depictions of Venice and his ‘vaporous, almost entirely atmospheric evocations of the Lagoon’, we ‘learn that Venice is a unity, in which art and architecture merge with air and light, and that all of these elements inhabit...