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

How does anyone say anything new about Venice? The city has had an extraordinary hold on the British imagination for centuries, as writers, artists, and composers have encountered its glorious architecture and plangent history. Repeatedly Venice has been described in polarities of substance and shadow, impermanence and longevity, sensuality and depravity. This collection of essays, drawn from a lecture series at Durham University, brings together detailed studies of different responses to the city. Perhaps it is not surprising that all but one of the essays mentions Lord Byron, who made Venice his home between 1816 and 1820. unlike other artists and authors, Byron learned the Veneto dialect, and after having sex with countless citizens, could lay some claim to being an insider. But even he came to the city under the influence of William shakespeare and Ann Radcliffe. Venice was always already a fully imagined place of feminine beauty and decay; its extraordinary mercantile success as a trader with the East, which underwrote the costly buildings, was largely ignored. As the contributors admit, the voices of Venetians themselves are unheard or so muffled that we can never know what they thought of the invasion of northern Europeans and Americans who gawked and gloried in their city.

Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest in 1797, Venice became a byword for moral and political decline; everyone knew its citizens had partied their way to an ignominious end. Byron, fleeing a judgmental England, reveled in its freedoms and ignored its politics. As Bernard Beatty documents, he became both a great lover and a great poet in Venice. Both he and Robert Browning used the Venetian tradition of amusement and sexual gratification to critique Britain’s Protestant moralizing. Michael O’Neill, in his discussion of “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” (1855), examines the ways in which Browning turned the platitude of moral decline into a defense of art. As O’Neill explains, the poem is filled with characteristic ironies, beginning with a speaker who has never been to Venice, but already knows all about it; he confidently interprets the eighteenth-century toccata as “a funereal judgment on a Venice devoted to money and pleasure” (90). But Browning’s meter and rhyme scheme undermine this verdict, and turn the poem into a lament for a lost culture of pleasure. For O’Neill, Venice was “a screen” on which Browning could “project his self-conflicted, tension-ridden explorations of the fate of the senses” (94).

In contrast, Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Ruskin drew their inspiration, in Andrew Wilton’s words, from Venice’s “vaporous luminosity” and “crumbling palazzi and canals” (43). They ignored Venetians past and present, but paid close attention to its architecture and its uncanny light. Feasting on Venice’s visual delights, they painted, sketched, and wrote some of their best works. Turner’s memories of Venice led to his painting several historical works that do not easily fit into his oeuvre, including Jessica (1830), a portrait of Shakespeare’s Jewish heroine, and Juliet and her Nurse (1836), firmly set in St. Mark’s Square. Wilton links these narrative-like paintings to Turner’s interest in the lucrative keepsake and annuals market, which offered an attractive combination of poetry, fiction, and engravings to a growing upper-middle class. I am not sure that Turner needed this further exposure at a time when he was England’s most famous painter, but Wilton presses his case for its relevance.

If Turner was the least moralizing of visitors to Venice, Ruskin was probably the most. Yet his influence may have been even greater than Bryon’s. Dinah Birch suggests that Ruskin tried to find “a creative balance between public activity and an elegiac and Romantic understanding of how the past continues to act on the present” (96). If Venice initially represented a...