Posts Tagged Venice
In praise of the British art staycation | Jonathan Jones
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 4, 2010
You don't have to go abroad to find beautiful art and architecture. Much of what you see in Italy and France is mirrored right here in Britain
The ideology of art today, according to most artists, curators and critics, is one that values the familiar. Ordinary objects, everyday pictures, and accessible artists who seem not that different from ourselves are praised, endlessly. The artist next door whose work portrays the average life in the average town is what we are told to admire.
This is why I never can content myself with the modern British art scene. I want art to be elsewhere, I want to travel in search of it. I need it to be exotic, and to show me other worlds, other lives, other times and places. The first exhibitions I saw were in France and Italy, on childhood holidays. Maybe that's why I associate the best art experiences with travel. But what happens in times like these, when many people can't afford to travel abroad? Can there be an art staycation?
I recently heard a talk about John Piper by art historian Frances Spalding . This British painter started as a fully paid up international modernist before turning inward, to the English landscape. In the 1940s he portrayed, eloquently, the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and other bombed churches . Spalding illuminated the reasons – at a time of national crisis, with war blazing overhead – for Piper's choice of a consciously parochial art.
As a journalist I can see Piper's point. Britain is full of hidden beauties. The talk I heard about Piper was at Dartington Hall in Devon, an amazingly well-preserved medieval hall. It would also be possible to argue that much of what you see in Venice can be mirrored in Britain. The glories of Venetian Gothic are much-praised – but what about the English perpendicular? I mean, you can go to Canterbury, visit the cathedral, see all the gothic and Romanesque you like, and then go to the beach in Broadstairs – what more could anyone want?
Palladio’s Redentore: an architect’s dream
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 3, 2010
Palladio's church in Venice glistens like a pearl set in an exquisite shell – but the real star is the architect and his vision
I saw a lot of great art on a recent trip to Venice. But the masterpiece I can't get out of my mind is not a painting, a mosaic, or a sculpture. It is a church. Palladio's Redentore glistens on the horizon when you look across to the long strip of land called the Giudecca. Take the boat there and you discover a pearl set in an exquisite shell. As clean as the sky, the facade of Palladio's 16th-century temple (architects then thought of their churches as "temples") seems not so much to have been built as sculpted: as if it were a model of a building, exquisitely carved from a single piece of marble. Niches for statues, and the statues themselves, are as perfectly calibrated to the overall design as are the rusticated stones around the base of the building.
Inside, the beauty accelerates to Stendhal syndrome extremes. Every detail is a part of the whole, and the whole has a perfection that seems absurdly elegant: the rim of the central dome is not just a circle. It is an absolutely precise geometrical circle – it does not appear to wobble at any point. How can a line cut by masons and suspended in the sky be so exact?
Renaissance architecture is astonishingly modern. In the works of Palladio and Michelangelo, the architect becomes a self-conscious creative star. The Redentore exhibits not just fine craft but, unmistakably, a tightly organised, intense and supremely confident artistic vision. This "auteur" quality (to borrow a term from film critics) is what makes the Redentore so gripping and dramatic.
Palladio and Michelangelo both in their different ways anticipate the architecture of today. Should architects be able to define the ways museums present art? The question often asked of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim and its offspring was first raised by Michelangelo's master plan for the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Should an architect's personal dream be imposed on the skyline? Can that be good for a city? The Redentore says yes. Modern architecture starts here.
