What Made Venetian Art Different

Venice was a major center for art in the Renaissance, yet it produced a style of art and architecture markedly different from that of other Italian cities like Rome or Florence. It owed this uniqueness to a thriving commercial empire: between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, Venice gained control over Mediterranean shipping and so became the most important market for goods from all over the known world. Because of the presence of traders and immigrants from far and wide and the experiences of its own merchants and diplomats, Venice benefitted from a huge range of cultural influences on its art and architecture.

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Perhaps the biggest external influence on Venice was the East-Byzantium and the Islamic lands- seen especially in the architecture of its two most prominent buildings, Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s (Duke’s) Palace. The basic interior plan of St. Mark’s was derived from the sixth-century Church of the Apostles in Constantinople, and so, unlike most ltalian churches of its time, it is in the form of a Greek cross, with four extensions or“arms” of equal length. The arrangement of domes above the arms is similar to that in Islamic architecture in Egypt. However, the architecture of St. Mark’s is not a simple imitation of Eastern antecedents. Although the four arms of the church are of equal length, they vary in height and width, and the domes were raised and enlarged in the thirteenth century to make them more prominent in the city’s skyline. The adjoining Doge’s Palace, which was the political center of Renaissance Venice, is mostly an example of the Gothic style, which originated in northern Europe. Yet it too has Eastern elements. The details of its roof ornamentation, the patterns of its pink and white marble facing, and its pointed arches are reminiscent of major buildings in Egypt, one of Venice’s most important trading partners.

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St. Mark’s interior has unusually fine examples of Byzantine ornamentation, especially its gold mosaics. Mosaics are decorations or images made up of small, colored pieces of glass, stone, or tile, called tesserae. Venetian tesserae were primarily made of glass,which was easily available from Venice’s advanced glass workshops, like those on the island of Murano. An important effect of glass is that the color changes as the light in a room changes. This effect, combined with the curving surfaces of domes and vaults (arched ceilings), and the deliberate setting of tesserae at different angles to catch the light, produces a striking shimmering quality to St. Mark’s. The heavy use of gold had long been established for religious images in Byzantium, but in Venice it was extended beyond the mosaics of St. Mark’s to other artistic media. Textiles were often produced with gold thread. Painters such as Giovanni Bellini (C. 1430-1516) used gold in their paintings, and artists came from other regions of Europe to learn the techniques for using powdered gold. The Ca’ d’Oro, a famous Venetian palace whose name means“House of Gold,” even had substantial areas of gold on its exterior.

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Eastern influences were not all that made Venetian art special. The city’s commercial connections resulted in its being among the first to adopt new techniques of oil painting that were developed in Flanders (modern Belgium) in the late fifteenth century. Venice went on to become famous for its great oil painters, such as Veronese (1528- 1588), Giorgione (1477/1478- 1510), and Titian (C. 1488/1490- 1576). These painters adopted some stylistic elements of northern European painting, including the conventions of portrait painting and the use of mountains and forests in landscapes that typified German painting. At about the same time that the Flemish were making advances in oil painting techniques, Johannes Gutenberg (1395- 1468) was perfecting the technology of movable type in Germany. Venice quickly became one of the most important cities for book manufacturing in Europe. It had already produced a limited number of prints, but now the resulting upsurge in publishing created a greater need for illustrations, so there were increased opportunities for artists to produce woodcuts and engravings for books.

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?Venice was a major center for art in the Renaissance, yet it produced a style of art and architecture markedly different from that of other Italian cities like Rome or Florence. It owed this uniqueness to a thriving commercial empire: between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, Venice gained control over Mediterranean shipping and so became the most important market for goods from all over the known world. Because of the presence of traders and immigrants from far and wide and the experiences of its own merchants and diplomats, Venice benefitted from a huge range of cultural influences on its art and architecture.