«VAenezia is the most splendid city I have ever seen, and the one that does the most honor to ambassadors and foreigners and that is more ruled. (…) They led me along the main road, which they call the large canal and which is very wide. The galleys pass through it and see near the houses of the ships of four hundred tons and more; I believe it is the most beautiful road that is around the world and the most well built, and crosses the whole city. The houses are very large and high, of good stone and the ancient ones all painted, those made for one hundred years in here all have the facade of white marble, which comes from Istria to a hundred miles beyond, with large pieces of coil and porphyry. Inside they almost all have at least two rooms with golden ceilings, rich carved marble fireplace hoods, golden beds, painted knots and large copy of furniture ».
So says Philippe de Comynes in his Mémoireswritten in the same year (1495) in which Vittore Carpaccio works on the canvases of Sant’Orsola dedicated in part to the reception of the ambassadors. They were times when Venice appeared, even with foreign eyes, the first naval power of the Mediterranean and the strongest state of the peninsula.
The words of Comvynes remain the most effective literary testimony on the appearance of Venice between the ‘400 and’ 500. Although it can be said that the descending parable of the Venetian history begins with the fall of Byzantium (1453), the patronage of the arts in the city not affected by the event. The political folding towards the West promotes, on the contrary, between the following decade and the early 16th century, the extraordinary interest of the local ruling classes towards all those forms of “decorum” that contribute to giving an adequate role to the prestige of the “State de Mar”.
In the De good Instituta Republica by Domenico Morosini (1497), the author states that the dignity of Venice would also have to measure itself through the beauty of the buildings. The anxiety of pomp, the showing off luxury that occurs in the lagoon during these years affect the attention of travelers, ambassadors and illustrious writers. And the request for works of art becomes so high that the Venetian painters rarely manage to work outside local borders.
The construction site of Palazzo Ducale is the most representative civil building of the Marciana Republic. His decoration assumes the meaning of the maximum exaltative form of the civil glory of Venice and the historical myth that it represents, and becomes the point of reference and the place of formation of the great Venetian painting.
Giovanni Bellini’s “Portrait of Jörg Fugger, 1474. It is at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California (photo Norton Simon Art Foundation).
The decoration of the room of the Maggiore Council at Palazzo Ducale It is the most relevant of the Venetian commissions of the moment. Entrusted in 1474 to Gentile Bellini to replace the depotries of Guariento frescoes (about 1365), It involves the major artists of the period between the two centuries: Giovanni Bellini, Alvise Vivarini, Carpaccio and then Tiziano, Pordenone, Tintoretto, Veronese. The cycle of the room is unfortunately celebrating the role of mediation of Venice in the dispute between Federico Barbarossa and Pope Alexander III (1177), was lost in a fire from 1577.
Despite this accident, we can see its enormous relevance on Venetian painting, limiting ourselves to highlighting a contribution: it inaugurated the great season of local narrative painting, “invented” by Jacopo and Gentile Bellini in the Grande school of San Marco (1466-1467), e The affirmation of the oil technique on canvas (the famous “Telers” with large dimensions) sanctioned, the most suitable for particular lagoon climatic conditions.
According to Vasari, Antonello da Messina, in the Venetian stay of 1475-1476, was the one who imports the painting that uses the oily binder, typical of the Flemish masters of the early 400s. Actually, Since the middle of the century, many Flemish works circulated in the city who had soon conquered the admiration of the Bellini. Perhaps the importance of Antonello for Venetian painting must be sought elsewhere.
At 1474, the year of the first works for the room of the Maggiore Council, thethe first Venetian document that witness with certainty the use of the new technique still in the form of “oily temperature”: the Portrait of Jörg Fugger by Giovanni Bellini. It is therefore credible that Gentile and Giovanni Bellini were preparing to make the paintings of Palazzo Ducale with the intention of using oil painting from the beginning, evidently already experimented enough to be used in such an important assignment. At Palazzo Ducale is about to start a new world.