Edouard Manet, View in Venice - The Grand Canal, 1874.
Art critic and writer Martin Gayford, who has visited Venice countless times since the 1970s, looks at the city through its most important creation: pictures. He takes us on a visual journey - not in a conventional chronicle of battles, rulers, sieges, and revolutions – but in the belief that the most interesting things that have happened there were artistic and visual. That is, to do with pictures!
Venice was a major centre of art in the Renaissance, the city where oil on canvas became the norm. The art, lives, rivalries and achievements of the Bellini family, Vittore Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese and Rosalba Carriera can be vividly evoked. In the 17th century, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck, Inigo Jones and Diego Velàzquez all came to learn from its masterpieces. 19th century writers such as Henry James, George Eliot and John Ruskin, and the composer Richard Wagner, were deeply affected by its paintings and buildings.
Nowhere else has been depicted in so many diverse styles and moods. Views of Venice were a speciality of native artists such as Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, but the city was also represented by outsiders: J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Howard Hodgkin and many more.
Gayford compellingly brings the story to the present day as, since the arrival of pioneering collector Peggy Guggenheim in the late 1940s and the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1980s, Venice continues as a global centre for contemporary art.
Venice: City of Pictures by Martin Gayford is published by Thames & Hudson (5 October 2023). Ticket holders will receive a code for 30% off the retail price of the book via their website. UK orders only.
Proceeds from ARTscapades ticket sales benefit museums, galleries and other arts-based organisations and projects.
This is an online event hosted on Zoom which can be watched live, or on-demand for one month afterwards. You will receive your link to access the event in your email confirmation and the on-demand link after the event ends.