7 - Robert Kaplan, "Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (2022)

Robert Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age, New York: Random House, 2022

 

Truly, I travel in order to read. I cannot do one without the other. The weight of clothes in my gear is constraining, the weight of books liberating.

I think that if you live long enough, the process of memory ruthlessly condenses your experiences, consigning much to oblivion. My memories of a few days spent in Venice nearly half a century ago consist of occasional flashes, seconds of recollection really, little more: massive time-blackened arcades, where on the other side of the windows lay sumptuous interiors of shops, cafés, and restaurants, filled with men and women whose clothing intimidated me with its elegance; the luxury granted by the absence of automobiles in the midst of a great city, as I dashed over one canal after another; entering the spawling and cavernous wonder-house of Saint Mark’s, where I was brought face-to-face with my ignorance of art and history. Venice was a delicious put-down, and still is.

The older I get, the more out of reach it seems, though for different reasons. And yet, while my memory of that earlier trip has nearly vanished, I do remember distinctly being generally happy: that is, I was consumed by presentness. I was living in the moment. Now, arriving in Venice’s Santa Lucia station, despite successes, I am consumed by the usual worries and fears of late adulthood, tied to the world beyond Venice as I am by electronic communications, and by so much else that accumulates in the course of one’s life and from which I feel increasingly estranged. Despite my ignorance, I knew Venice back then: I was less lonely. Yes, it is the common problem of too much thinking. Now I must consciously construct an dea of Venice in order to move beyond my inner demons.

I do not recall being oppressed by tourist throngs, though it was September, almost five decades ago. Nowhere were there lines, like at the present. Now it is the end of October, I am with my wife of nearly four decades—yes, I am not that much of a recluse!—and there seems to be no one here except tourists. Venice is the apotheosis of globalization, which along with its cruelties, has also created upper-middle classes in Asia as well as in Europe, which for the first time in their families’ collective histories have the means to travel. If Europe is one big outdoor museum as they say, then Venice is a cross between an amusement park and an archaeological site, with the visitors poking all around the maze of walls and churches, and the indigenous inhabitants seeming almost to vanish, in places, into the ether of time. Venice today is partly an illusion. It represents the legacy of high civilization, which is increasingly global, and which is therefore the ultimate threat and counterpoint to those all over Europe still stuck in the nation-state. The right-wing nationalists want pure ethnic nations, but the metamorphosis of Venice works against that notion.

And yet I must be careful about all this. For I have only my own life span as a means of comparison. As the late Cambridge University scholar Tony Tanner noted, it was “between Byron’s time and Ruskin’s, between the early nineteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century,” that Venice actually became a tourist city, as opposed to an occasional stop on the Grand Tour. So what I notice is not really a new development.

 

At the end of October, the rainy sky and time-battered buildings of Venice appear streaked and blackened by smoke. Weather imprints on brick, plaster, and stone, like time itself, further darkening the Gothic and Renaissance facades into a banquet of ocher and ash. Without the sun, the lagoon and canals are opaque, gaseous, something more introspective and mysterious than color itself. And they are silent, as if you are sliding across them. Even in the most claustrophobic alleys you are uplifted by the briny sea air. I take a private boat around the lagoon. I am struck by the vast and limitless horizontality of madder walls and low domes coming at you from different angles, barely peeking above the dirty pearl waves. I think of the low walls of Constantinople as seen from the sea. The rugged silver dome of Santa Maria della Salute, like that of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, is like a half planed visible from space as the boat slips into the Grand Canal—with each brush of a wave there is the intimation of another faraway conquest. Empire: that all-encompassing and boundless ambition. Water is space incarnate, more expansive and limitless than flagstones. Indeed, there are few more arresting sites than the classical, Istrian stone façade of San Giorgio Maggiore, jutting out as it does at a slant across the water from Saint Mark’s Square. There is the outer world and the intimation of travel every time you glimpse a canal joining the sea. And because the sea indicates the great highways of civilization more than any land route does, the visual logic of Venice is imperial. City and empire have been nearly eternal in the story of humanity, even if the state has dominated in recent centuries. Venice fuses these two older historical constructions, and metaphorically welcomes the Chinese, who are now constructing their own seaborne empire stretching from Asia to the ports of Italy.

 

I am but a tourist in Venice. My whole experience has been prepared form me by the holiday industry. I pass miles of high-end international boutiques, seeing merely what millions have already seen, doing the things that millions already have done. Tourists have the illusion of feeling special, of having moved up a peg or two in the social and economic ladder from their workaday existence. But we are still in the assembly line. It is as if I am being led along by a rope. Venice, I feel, has an element of tackiness reminiscent of Las Vegas. And yet, because I am consciously aware of this, rather than be depressed I believe I can, at least to some degree, counterintuitively render invisible all the other tourists from my mental world. Yes, I can take an interior journey as brilliantly colored as my external one. And I can take this journey only because the books I have read—another case where books liberate. Travel, as opposed to tourism, is only made possible by literature. A landscape must be anchored in books during his time in history when globalization has obliterated much of what is distinctive.

So let me explore Venice, or more properly the idea of Venice, based on the books I have read. I am certainly not special in this regard. Other tourists have done something similar. We appear undistinguished on the outside, but it is our inner lives and thoughts that provide us with the sanctity of individuality.

 

“Passion is like crime,” writes Thomas Mann in Death in Venice: “it does not thrive on the established order and the common round; it welcomes every blow dealt the bourgeois structure, every weakening of the social fabric.” And so Mann’s aged protagonist, however distinguished in his professional life, pursues, as we all know, the young Polish boy Tadzio, with the “head of Eros” and the “bloom of Parian marble,” even as the city falls victim to disease and subsequent chaos. Passion contradicts realism and materialism, ironically the very operating principles of this medieval and early modern city-state. Great art and literature, which are passion incarnate, aspire toward moral significance.

And yet the medieval Venetian mindset was a very hard kind, cultivating as it did communal survival, as well as political and economic moderation and realpolitik, though such devices as a determined emphasis on diplomacy, extreme secrecy, and one of history’s greatest intelligence services (Venice just avoided being a police state). An “aristocratic oligarchy” that perfected the various techniques of torture and assumed “the worst in everyone,” Venice lifted cynicism onto a pedestal, observes the historian James (Jan) Morris. The Venetians, somewhat like the present-day Chinese about to commercially invade these waters, had no ideology or universal values to export to the world. They had no missionary impulse like the Americans; nor were they fanatics like the Spaniards. The result was well over a millennium of independence and, more pertinently, extraordinary wealth, which, grafted upon a constricted real estate veined and crisscrossed by water, made for an overwhelming pre-industrial architectural beauty. Jacob Burckhardt and Marco Antonio Sabellico described Venice as “the jewel-casket of the world,” which, with its cupolas, towers, and marble fantasies is the ultimate compression of splendor. But because art must, in any case, seek out the higher ideal, one that does not actually exist and for which this city’s singular beauty and elegance may qualify as a metaphor, perhaps there is no contradiction with the artists’ love for Venice, after all.

And not to love it is perverse. The artistic style of Venice, exemplified by its greatest painters, is about illusion and execution rather than construction and analysis: thus it appeals more to one’s taste than to one’s intellect. Venice is layer upon layer of pigments, as rich and reddish and decisive as in the work of Titian.

The Venetian aesthetic extends to sound even. Is there any sensation more perfect and refined—a consummate intermingling of faith and sensuality—than the music of Monteverdi, who is associated more with Venice than with any other city? Monteverdi’s music is like to most expensive lace against one’s skin. And then of course there’s Vivaldi, another Venetian, which no amount of elevator music can diminish the sheer buoyant delight of. The sound of Venice may all begin with the sound of the bells issuing from the campaniles. This is the only city where the soft slapping of the water in the canals is the replacement for the painful racket of cars. In how many other cities can you hear the sound of your own footsteps?

[…]

What do I believe is so important about the story of Venice that makes me go on, though? That culture rules all, even while culture is constantly evolving and combining with other cultures. That geography matters. That geopolitics—the battle for space and power—is eternal. That states built on realist and pragmatic principles survive longer than states built on idealistic and moralistic ones. Thus, we must think tragically in order to avoid tragedy. This, in turn, means that order comes before freedom and interests come before values, because without order there is no freedom for anybody, and without interests our values cannot follow and operate. And yet realism requires beauty or else it slips into coarseness and vulgarity: this, too, is the genius of Venice.

Norwich writes: “Venice, alone of all the still-great cities of Italy, was born and brought up Greek… long after she shed her dependence on Constantinople, she continued to turn her back on Italy and to look resolutely eastward; the nightmare tangle of medieval Italian politics, of Guelf and Ghibelline, Emperor and Pope… none of this was for her.” Doges used Byzantine honorifics. The Venetian ruler’s dress was modeled on that of the Byzantine exarch. Byzantine girls were sent to Venice to marry; Venetians sent their sons to finish their education in Constantinople. Venice’s political links with Byzantium helped shield it from the quarrels among the other city-states in Italy, with their rapidly shifting tactical alliances that were the epitome of amorality. Because a rival commercial system, run by Arabs, stretched across North Africa and the Middle East, Venice became crucial to Constantinople as a Byzantine outlet to Europe. The Venetian model of beauty, as exemplified by the low domes and small windows of Saint Mark’s, recalling Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was mainly Eastern.

Of course, the underpinning of Venice’s fortuitous separation from the rest of Italy was at root geographical. That great lagoon, the few miles of shallow water that protected Venice from the mainland in all its aspects, allowed it to focus eastward toward Byzantium, and, in addition, was the savior against Saracens, Magyars, and other invaders in the early centuries of Venetian independence. The lagoon, by confining Venetians to so constricted space, also fostered internal cohesion. “Among Venice’s rich merchant aristocracy,” Nowrich explains, “everyone knew everyone else and close acquaintance led to mutual trust of a kind that in other cities seldom extended far outside the family circle.” The result was efficient administration by which risky trading ventures, involving vast outlays of capital, “could be arranged on the Rialto in a matter of hours.” Neither utopian nor egalitarian, Venice represented the triumph of a closed elite. Optimism was banned, unless it could be grounded in facts and percentages. (It was from such a tightly woven merchant aristocracy that Marco Polo, the late-thirteenth-century Venetian explorer of China and Central Asia, originated—of whom more later.)

Without the lagoon and the canals—without the presence of water, that is—Venice simply would not have had the beauty that endowed its population with such love of their city-state: it was love of the polity, rather than that of one man or king. This, and the internal peace they enjoyed, fostered a “humaneness of feeling” that, as Berenson suggests, made Venetians “the first really modern people in Europe.”

For the “myth of Venice” is that of an exemplary structure—“monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy” in a thoroughly fluid combination, rising, perfectly formed, from the waters. It was Petrarch who equated Venice with “justice” itself. The sixteenth-century canvases of Paolo Veronese in the Doge’s Palace show the city-state’s moral progress from militarism to imperialism to peace. Another painting in the Doge’s Palace, by Domenico Tintoretto (early seventeenth century), has Venice receiving blood from Christ’s side, manifesting a “direct rapport with the Eucharist,” according to the Columbia University art historian David Rosand. Supreme aesthetic beauty is here bound up with the utmost spiritual self-confidence, which, in turn, was built on realistic principles of governance.

What ensues, with its succession of eighty-four doges from 726 to 1797, is a thousand-year history as long, intricate, dense, intoxicating, and overwhelming as that of Byzantium itself, mind-numbing in its constant intrigues and periodic insurrections. It is a comparatively dim and opaque canvas that produced few giants and larger-than-life heroes (Pietro II Orseolo, who governed toward the end of the tenth century, being one exception to this rule), for trade and commerce, dull as these things are, reduce the long-term impact of bloodshed and its accomplice, glory. Because it is so theatrically uninspiring, Venetian history is generally hard to remember, and for the literate, non-expert public is known best through the works of Shakespeare—who uses Venice as a somewhat shameless and cynical backdrop to reveal vulnerability and passion contained in everyone, Moor and Jew alike, people otherwise depicted as one-dimensional and therefore uninteresting in his day.

[…]

Like the United States, though in a very different way, of course, Venice was a republic with a seaborne empire of sorts, the eastern Mediterranean constituting as far-flung a domain in the late Renaissance and early modern periods as the whole globe itself today. The Venetian Republic, when Napoleon finally brought it down with a coup d’état in 1797, had lasted well over four times as many years as the current United States. It did so in part by the shrewdest of foreign policies. For example, it performed what Lane calls the “double balancing act” of playing France off against Spain, and Spain off against the Ottoman Empire. Even though Venice shared in the Christian Leagues’ great victory against the Ottoman Empire in 1571 at the naval battle of Lepanto, off western Greece, Venice mainly gained peace by concessions in the aftermath. The United States would do well to emulate the pragmatic spirit of Venice, which was enlightened by the standards of its day.

Of course, the evolution of European power politics in the early modern and modern eras gradually caught up with Venice. When Spain and France became united kingdoms, as Lane explains, “the Italian balance of power was submerged into the European state system.” Thus, Venice, was besieged both by rivals in western Europe and at sea by the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, as the Industrial Revolution appeared with the emergence of modern capitalism, the Venetian ruling class was insufficiently flexible to admit new wealth and talent into his ranks. The Venetian Republic, as enlightened as it was in earlier ages, could not cope with the new democratic spirit. And so, as all empires do, Venice declined.

 

I see the pinkish Gothic façade of the Danieli Royal Excelsior Hotel and recall the most moving pages from John Julius Norwich’ magisterial A History of Venice. On this spot, now cluttered with kiosks selling T-shirts, postcards, and cheap carnival masks, a member of a mob stabbed Doge Vitale II Michiel to death in1172. For fifteen of his sixteen years in power the doge had directed the affairs of Venice brilliantly, besieged as he was by Frederick Barbarossa in one direction and Manuel Comnenus in the other, with northern Italy unified by the Lombard Leage and southern Italy unified by an alliance between Norman Sicily and the greatest of twelfth-century popes, Alexander III. But in his final year, meaning only to do well by his city-state and not shrinking from moral responsibility, Vitale Michiel raised a fleet of 120 ships and set out south along the Adriatic for the east, on a peace mission to Constantinople. Yet the negotiations with Byzantine officials proved inconclusive, even as plague broke out on the overcrowded ships while his fleet awaited developments on the eastern Aegean island of Chios. Then his emissaries returned from Constantinople reporting complete diplomatic failure.

Doge Michiel returned to Venice having been humiliated by the Byzantines, while much of his navy had been lost to disease, and those that did not perish were close to mutiny. In addition, the doge was seen in Venice to have introduced the plague into the city. Thus was he set upon by the mob. As Machiavelli emphasizes in his Prince, you can advise a leader in virtù, the manly vigor associated with human agency; but as to the other half of the equation, fortuna, luck or fortune, you cannot help him. So we are left with this tragic conundrum: that while man does not have to give in to fate (indeed, must not) and human progress itself depends on such risk-taking, those that do take such risks—and are, therefore, in our eyes quite estimable—are often destined to fail. Venice, besides so much else, teaches us that life is hard.

 

Beauty is a form of truth, as the poet says. One of the great assemblages of modern art is here, in the late Peggy Guggenheim’s palace on the Grand Canal, near where the canal meets the lagoon, not far from where Henry James resided at the Palazzo Barbaro. This prodigious collection, encompassing everything in the field from Picasso and Brancusi to Max Ernst—from Klee and Kandinsky to Andy Warhol—manifests the power and, yes, vitality, of introspection, fear, juxtaposition, decomposition, analysis, and above all abstraction in all its forms. Indeed, because cubism, surrealism, and the like are all so intensely cerebral, and the graceful and sensuous Venetian aesthetic is its very opposite, the relief that Venice offers the eye puts a viewer in a suitably calm state of mind to do the work of contemplating and appreciating modern art.

From the rooted-in-place, Italianate perfection of the Grand Canal as seen from Peggy Guggenheim’s terrace, you turn to admire the cold, universalist abstraction of twentieth-century painters and sculptors, who owe their own inspiration as much to Africa and America—to Freud and the unconscious, even—as to Europe. You can see why she required a villa on this spot to amass such a collection. Her life as a connoisseur of the abstract—even as Bernard Berenson was exclusively preoccupied with the painting of the Renaissance—demonstrates why Venice provides such an inspiration for every kind of aesthetic. This is ultimately why the Biennale for contemporary art finds a natural home here.

 

Leaving Venice: no one has described such a departure better than Lawrence Durrell, at the beginning of his travel memoir, Bitter Lemons, the finest book he ever wrote—greater than all the volumes of The Alexandria Quarter. For his obsession with aesthetics does not deter him from political and moral analysis of the waning British Empire in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1950s.

 

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them… They flower spontaneously out of the demands of natures—and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well…

These thoughts belong to Venice at dawn, seen from the deck of the ship which is to carry me down the islands to Cyprus; a Venice wobbling in a thousand fresh-water reflections, cool as a jelly. It was as if some great master, stricken by dementia, had burst his whole color-box against the sky… Fragments of history touched with the colors of wine, tar, ochre, blood, fire-opal… the whole at the same time being rinsed softly back at the edges into a dawn sky as softly as circumspectly blue as a pigeon’s egg.

 

Durell, a close friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor and a fellow aficionado of Greece and its shadowlands—who doesn’t even make it onto Kames (Jan) Morris voluminous list of writers who have described Venice—is himself, as one is preparing to say goodbye to this city, difficult to match.