The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (48 page)

He ended up in Venice in the mid-1720s, back living once more off his wits and his winnings at the tables in the Ridotto. Law was by now famous throughout Europe: never before had the gambling of one man – not even royalty, not even an aristocrat – bankrupted the coffers of a major European nation. Back at his old haunt, he began to gamble on a more modest scale,
gradually building up his assets. Yet he was unable to resist cashing in on his celebrity. He would sit behind a table, at his elbow a pile of coins worth 10,000 gold pistoles.
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Law knew that many tourists, especially from France or England, would not be able to resist the temptation to gamble with him, so that they could boast of this fact when they returned home. He extended an open invitation to all-comers: for an outlay of one golden pistole, he was willing to gamble his entire 10,000, if his opponent could roll six dice and get each one to come up a six. Well worth a bet, they thought, even at odds of 10,000:1 – and one by one the extra gold pistoles came rolling in. (Law was well aware that the real odds were in fact an even more unlikely 46,656:1.)

This side-show provided him with a small but regular income, which he augmented many times over at the tables with his astute gambling. A lightning-quick mathematical mind, particularly with regard to probability theory, as well as an all-but-flawless memory, remained his main assets. These had survived the colossal responsibilities and mental pressure of his years in Paris, which had by all accounts several times brought him to the brink of complete nervous collapse. But now, once again, he knew that he was just playing the odds. It was during this period that Montesquieu made his visit to Venice. Previously, Montesquieu had been so incensed by what Law had done to his country that he had written a bitter satire, characterising Law as the son of Aeolius, the god of wind, travelling over the world accompanied by the blind god of chance and an inflated bladder. But when he actually encountered Law, Montesquieu could not help but be impressed, recognising that Law was ‘more in love with his ideas than his money … his mind occupied with projects, his head filled with calculations’. He still believed in the concept of paper money, and remained convinced that – introduced under the right circumstances – his project would succeed: there was still a future for it. Others were less impressed, recognising that the immense strain had taken its toll. The handsome womaniser was now but a shadow
of his former self, his features haggard, racked by an increasingly disfiguring tic.

The end was not long in coming. One frigid night, towards the end of February 1729, as Law was returning home on a gondola through the dark misty canals, he was taken ill. Over the coming weeks his weakened frame succumbed to pneumonia. The French ambassador, the Comte de Gergy, and Colonel Elizeus Burges, the British Resident (senior diplomatic representative), were both frequent visitors to his bedside. Law was known to have been working on a book setting forth his monetary ideas, and both men wanted to gain possession of this document the moment he died. The French had no wish for the secrets of the 1729 financial debacle to become public knowledge; while the British had their own opposite motives. At the same time, both men suspected that at the height of Law’s power in France he must have secretly stashed away a vast fortune, and were keen to discover where this was hidden. But neither Burges nor Gergy would succeed in their aims. On 21 March 1729 John Law died at the age of just fifty-four, taking with him any secrets that might have definitively damned or exonerated him in the eyes of history.

During Law’s last years, he appeared to lose faith in the permanent value of currency, preferring instead to invest his surplus winnings in paintings. Here too he was ahead of his time, impervious to the ridicule of Burges: ‘No man alive believes that his pictures when they come to be sold will bring half the money they cost him.’ During the course of his few years in Venice, Law accumulated a collection containing some 500 paintings, including works by Titian, Tintoretto, Holbein, Michelangelo and even Leonardo. There is a suspicion that some of these were secretly despatched from Paris by his ‘wife’, Lady Catherine Knowles, before they could be seized by the authorities. Even so, Law is certainly known to have bought works by artists who were alive and working in Venice during his time there. And the greatest of these was undoubtedly the young Tiepolo, who in the latter half of the 1720s began to produce his first masterpieces.

Gianbattista Tiepolo was born in Venice in 1696, in the working-class Castello district close to the Arsenale. He was the sixth child of a local sea captain. However, the Tiepolo family had a long and illustrious history,
including a thirteenth-century ancestor who was Duke of Crete and was later doge for an exceptional twenty years. Despite such former glories, Tiepolo’s father was no longer of noble rank. Around the age of fourteen, the young Tiepolo was apprenticed to the studio of Gregorio Lazzarini, an accomplished but ultimately undistinguished artist who was much influenced by Veronese. Tiepolo would absorb this influence, yet his major influences came from outside Lazzarini’s studio, with his style taking on baroque and even rococo flourishes. His exceptional talent was immediately apparent, exhibiting an entirely original sense of energy and spectacle. From the beginning he appeared to draw in light and paint rather than outline, and as a result his works took on a blaze of colour and tone.

The quality of Tiepolo’s work set him apart, but there also seems to have been an element of psychological ‘apartness’ in his character. He bore an illustrious name, yet he was not a member of the ruling class, while his talents set him apart from the people amongst whom he had grown up. Furthermore he had never known his father, who had died just a year after his birth, and there would always remain in his work an element of display that acted like a mask to protect, or distract from, a sense of inner emptiness. In 1719, at the age of twenty-three, he married the sister of the painter Francesco Guardi, and they would eventually have nine children, yet it seems that he was not in the habit of taking his family with him when he went to work abroad, often for years at a time. Even so, two of his sons would be sufficiently inspired by the example of their father to become painters themselves.

Shortly after his marriage Tiepolo would paint his first masterpieces, a cycle of vast paintings to decorate the large reception hall of the Ca’ Dolfin, a palazzo on the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge, and he then went on to paint a series of spectacular frescoed ceilings. It quickly became apparent that he had found his medium. Fresco enabled him to transform ceilings into luminescent sky where brilliant mythological figures floated amidst clouds and architectural structures, seen from below in complex and often differing, yet always convincing perspectives. Yet these were all achieved with a lightness and brilliance that harked back to the traditions of an earlier Renasissance.

Tiepolo’s fame quickly spread, and he began travelling Italy to fulfil
commissions. His style, in the eyes of many experts, represented the last great flourishing of the Italian Renaissance, and Tiepolo was soon in demand all over Europe. Here was yet another creative spirit who felt drawn to leave his native city in order to fulfil his talent in exile. He spent the years 1750–3 in Würzburg in Germany, and although he returned to Venice to fulfil commissions from as far afield as Poland and Russia, he still spent much time away from home travelling the mainland.

Yet despite Tiepolo’s international appeal, in many ways his art was Venetian through and through. His technique of building up his figures with colour upon colour echoed that of Giorgione, while his theatricality and flesh tones were reminiscent of Titian and Tintoretto. But his work also very much reflected the Venice of his own time. This was an art which delighted in spectacle, which chose above all else to dazzle and delight with its sheer brilliance. It was an art whose essential qualities lay in its surface. There was no straining after meaning or profundity. Its figures may have been fully realised and even recognisable in their individuality, but they had little in the way of psychological depth. The dazzling spatial effect of his ceilings, which frequently spilled out of their stucco frames, were sufficient to induce vertigo in the spectator below. They evoked wonder, rather than inspiring contemplation. Like the city itself, they were a carnival of colour and form played out against a background of almost unbelievable beauty.

In 1761 Tiepolo travelled to Madrid, where he was commissioned by Charles III to cover the ceiling of the throne room with frescoes depicting in mythological form the glories of Spain when it had dominated the globe as an imperial power. The arrival of the sixty-four-year-old Tiepolo would incur the jealousy of the thirty-three-year-old German-born painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who was already established as a court painter. But the conflict between the remote Tiepolo and the learned and earnest Mengs was more than just personal. The young Mengs was a champion of the up-and-coming neoclassical school, whose restraint and austerity of style were in marked contrast to the flamboyance of Tiepolo. A year later, following the cold early months of 1770, Tiepolo suddenly collapsed and died. He was buried in Madrid, far from Venice and his family. In his native city, and indeed across Europe, many recognised his death as the
end of an artistic era. The Renaissance was long past, and Venice’s tradition of great artists who extended its political influence was now over. Such surface display and brilliance were no longer fashionable: the power-centres of Europe required a more realistic art to mirror their increasingly modern and enlightened world. Tiepolo’s mythological gods in the sky were to be replaced by the more realistic down-to-earth humanity to be found in the likes of Mengs’ neoclassical works.

And in Venice the human figure all but disappeared, becoming a mere cipher amidst the meticulous beauty of the city itself, as depicted by its finest copyist, Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto. Here was an artist who reflected his city as no other, an artist who was all but created by his market – the rich tourists who wished to take home a souvenir of their visit to the most delight-filled city they had ever seen.

Canaletto was born in Venice in 1697, the year after Tiepolo. His father Bernard Canal was also a painter (hence his son Giovanni being given the diminutive of the family name). The young Canaletto would receive his initial training in his father’s studio, which specialised in painting theatrical scenery for opera – a form that in many ways echoed the style that Canaletto himself would raise to the highest level. Sometime in his early twenties Canaletto travelled to Rome, where he was particularly struck by the street scenes (which were in certain ways an evident novelty to a Venetian). This inspired in him an interest in painting urban landscape, and on his return to Venice he began producing scenes of life in the streets of his own city. Initially these tended towards depictions of ordinary back-street, back-canal life – such as his early masterpiece
The Stonemason’s Yard
, painted between 1726 and 1730. This includes several small but realistic figures, as well as sheets hanging out to dry from the windows and a general sense of the shabbiness that characterised the more typical life lived by ordinary citizens behind the tourist façade. In such scenes his paintings became a symphony of muted colours, with precise renderings of peeling stucco walls and shabby balconies, and glimpses of the familiar towers and spires far away across the rooftops beneath faded skies. At this early stage it was the play and juxtaposition of surfaces that he sought to convey, as much as the image itself.

At the same time, he also began producing pictures of the better-known
sights and grand events for which the city was famous. Typical of these was his 1732 work
The Return of the Bucintoro to the Molo on Ascension Day
, with the great golden hulk of the doge’s barge, along with the Doge’s Palace, the Campanile and Sansovino’s Library in the background, all conveyed with meticulous attention to detail, forming a play of different textures. As one critic put it, ‘He paints with such accuracy and cunning that the eye is deceived and truly believes it is reality it sees, not a painting.’ However, as Canaletto’s biographer J.G. Links perceptively observed of the artist’s work at this juncture, ‘They were pictures painted in Venice, rather than pictures of Venice; pictorial quality always took precedence over topographical accuracy.’ The emphasis on precise verisimilitude came later, though even then Canaletto frequently ‘remodelled’ the scenes for proportional effect.

Canaletto’s paintings soon began to attract the attention of rich buyers, mostly tourists, and he quickly outshone his established competitors who supplied this lucrative market. However, when it came to the actual sale of his works there were often difficulties. By all accounts Canaletto was not an easy man to get along with. He would remain a bachelor, and continued to live in the modest family apartment where he had been born. Although his creative output was high, even higher demand meant that delivery was not always certain; on occasion he would accept advances for commissions he could not fulfil on time, requiring a third party to sort out the consequent misunderstandings. He was soon commissioned to produce works for the agent Owen McSwiney, a gregarious Irishman based in London, who wrote of Canaletto:

The fellow is whimsical, and vary’s and his prices, every day: and he that has Mind to have any of his Work, must not seem to be too fond of it, for he’l be y
^e
. worse treated for it, both in the price, & in the painting too.

He has more work that he can doe, in any reasonable time, and well.

McSwiney may have been an amiable character, yet unfortunately for Canaletto he developed the habit of going bankrupt. It was thus lucky
that around this time Canaletto came into personal contact with the Englishman Joseph Smith, who resided in Venice for many decades. Smith was a collector-cum-artists’-agent, who purchased all manner of
objets d’art
and bric-a-brac for himself, as well as buying up paintings for trans-shipment to London, where they would be sold on to wealthy clients, many of whom had passed through Venice on their Grand Tour. Smith was not a pleasant man, being regarded by those who met him as a bumptious, egotistical snob – one contemporary even going so far as to describe him as ‘literally eaten up with vanity’. But although he may have been essentially self-serving in his dealings, Smith was also a man of perceptive taste and business acumen, all of which worked to Canaletto’s advantage.