An Artist in Venice. Adam Van Doren

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      Palazzo Ca’ Rezzonico, 1986. Collection of The Art Institute of Chicago

      But Venice, as much as Ruskin would have yearned for it, is not entirely Gothic. There are superb examples of Renaissance buildings, and the Grand Canal is a veritable museum for many of them. The easiest way to see these mansions is by boat. Like an unfurled Chinese scroll, the façades stretch end-to-end, following the canal’s serpentine S curve in a continuous line. Baldassare Longhena, the seventeenth-century architectural genius behind the Salute, was responsible for two fine examples: Ca’ Pesaro and Ca’ Rezzonico, both of which were completed after his death.

      Now and again a curiosity appears, like the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, once the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. It has only one floor – the original owners never having completed the building – and was abandoned for centuries before Guggenheim bought it in 1958. Herself an eccentric, famous for oversize eyeglasses that prefigured Elton John, Guggenheim also had discerning taste in art. She thought the half-finished façade looked avant-garde and left it as is. The museum contains notable examples of cubist and expressionist paintings, one of the most celebrated works being the sculpture of a nude man by Marino Marini. He is seated on a horse with arms outstretched, his erect penis facing the Grand Canal. When I was a boy I found this intensely amusing, but the Venetians thought otherwise, and in deference to the Holy Father (or so I was told) they remove the offending appendage, which can be unscrewed, on Sundays.

      Farther down the canal is a favorite palazzo of mine, Ca’ Rezzonico. The home of Cole Porter during the 1930s, it has since become Venice’s Museum of Decorative Arts. Clad in chalk-white Istrian stone, a sharp contrast to the weathered red brick structures nearby, the exterior is now discolored by smog. Whole sections blackened with soot form permanent shadows on the façade. (Even though Venice has no cars, the nearby industrial city of Mestre on the mainland, with its ominous smokestacks and refineries, is a constant threat to Venetian buildings – not to mention a blight on the horizon.) Fortunately, these toxic agents do not obscure the fluid lines of Rezzonico’s façade. Divided into three equal stories, one neatly stacked above the other like a bridal cake, Longhena’s structure forms a solid block on the Grand Canal. The arched windows on the first two stories run straight across the façade – a Renaissance version of the Bauhaus ribbon window – and they act to unify the front elevation. They are an excellent example of the classical architecture I’d studied in college, so much so, in fact, that I made Rezzonico the first building I drew in Venice. The palace was originally commissioned by the Filippo Bon family, Venetian aristocrats who went bankrupt trying to finish it. Longhena died in 1682, before it was completed, but the Rezzonico family, who had made their fortune in the Turkish wars, bought the building and hired the architect Giorgio Massari to complete it according to Longhena’s plans. Interestingly, a precise replica of the building, built by Stanford White in 1898 for Joseph Pulitzer, exists at 11 East Seventy-Third Street in New York.

      I mused what it was like to go behind the walls of these Venetian mansions. There is rarely an opportunity to see their interiors unless you are one of the owners or are invited to a private party, and this usually requires ties to the Italian nobility, of which I have none. I settled for John Singer Sargent’s excellent 1897 oil, An Interior in Venice, which is the next best thing to being there. Sargent, arguably America’s greatest portraitist, was particularly skilled at rendering figures in a group setting. The painting depicts a distinguished family lounging in a living room at the Palazzo Barbaro, which Sargent often visited. In the background are tapestries, intricately carved Louis XVI furniture, large antique mirrors, crystal chandeliers, and elaborately decorated ceilings. All of the members of the fashionably dressed Curtis family – expatriates who were also Sargent’s cousins – seem unaware of the outside viewer looking in, except for one: the formidable Mrs. Liddy Curtis. She stares out of the painting, composed and vigorous, with a hint of a restrained smile. Light from the outside window highlights her lace dress, while her husband is busy perusing a folio of pictures beside her. An attractive younger couple, standing behind them, exudes sophistication and class. Sargent captures this resplendent scene with rich, lustrous colors, and it is an astonishing group portrait. But apparently Mrs. Curtis felt otherwise: she rejected the painting because she thought it made her look too matronly. From her vanity sprang our good fortune. The picture was returned to Sargent and later found its way to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where it is now on permanent display.

      Palazzo Grimani is another Renaissance building that enthralls. Built in the 1550s, it was designed by Sanmicheli, a student of Palladio. The structure resembles Rezzonico in its overall shape but is more muscular and robust. Now the Court of Appeals, Grimani features a triumphal arch at the first floor, a motif repeated in the floors above. It is one of the handsomest buildings in the city and, according to Ruskin, is “composed of three stories of the Corinthian Order, at once simple, delicate and sublime, but on such a colossal scale, that the three-storied palaces on its right and left only reach to the cornice which makes the level of its first floor.”⁵ Observing it by vaporetto once, I noticed the worn steps at the entrance, smoothed and polished by centuries of algae and seaweed. I tried to imagine noblemen from the sixteenth century arriving by gondola, daintily alighting in the high-heeled fashion of the day. It would have required the dexterity of Martha Graham to avoid slipping and falling. But such was the age. The aristocracy rarely, if ever, walked the narrow calle that surround these palazzi. Those passageways, redolent with garbage and worse, were the byways of the lower class and servants. Venice is more democratic now and its seamier side is accessible to all. Pigeons frequently used me as target practice in these back alleys, and I’ve had to clamber over cat ejectamenta in a mad game of Venetian hopscotch (Venetians seem annoyingly complacent about their pets), simply to get from one end of the street to the other. But given the eighteenth-century standard for hygiene, which must have been a sanitary nightmare, I can scarcely complain. Edward Gibbon, visiting in 1765, described the city as “stinking ditches dignified with the pompous denomination of canals.”⁶ Raw sewage was routinely flung into the streets, much to the chagrin of unsuspecting passersby, and the canals were a substitute septic tank, especially vulnerable during acqua alta, or flood tide. It is no wonder the aristocracy sought sanctuary in these palaces. The wealthy not only enjoyed the luxuries of fine art and architecture, they also literally held the higher ground above the teeming masses, remaining relatively free of the unpleasant realities of everyday life. There are good reasons why the second floor of a Venetian mansion is called the piano nobile, or “noble floor.” And as Venice continues to sink – or the sea continues to rise, depending on which dire prediction you choose – this higher ground will be all the more fortuitous.

      Not all of Venice’s houses are palatial. Many are nondescript brick structures, held together (barely) by iron braces, with dilapidated balconies and peeling stucco, much like the slums of Naples; and sadly, too, rampant graffiti has taken its toll. Some of these buildings are five hundred years old. A few are older. Cannaregio and the ancient Jewish ghetto, districts where tourists rarely go, are where you will find many such structures. The nineteenth-century artist James Whistler, who loved the underbelly of Venice, was inspired by these picturesque neighborhoods and came to the city in 1879 to draw them. Working mainly with pastels, he returned to London the following year with well over a hundred finished works. When they were exhibited, the critics raved. It took Whistler’s genius to elevate this unknown, often decrepit, side of Venice to the level of high art.