Palazzo Ducale | Venice: I am not making this up

I brake for justice

April 23, 2021 4 Comments

Another great lion of San Marco, this time painted by Donato Bragadin, also known as Donato Veneziano, in 1459.

This lion is holding a book, as usual, but the message is not the traditional “Pax tibi Marce Evangelista Meus,” etc. It reads: “Legibus quibus immoderata hominum frenatur cupiditas quenpiam parere cogatis.” “Compel everyone to obey the laws by which one restrains the immoderate greed of men.”

What great ideas! Make everybody obey the laws! And put the brakes on greed! Looking at the lion’s expression, however, one intuits that he knows this is a battle that he’s not only losing, but lost. I’ve made an effort to discover what was significant about the year 1459 to inspire this painting, but haven’t found anything out of the ordinary, which is a disheartening realization: The “ordinary” is exactly the situation that the statement was referring to and it has been valid every year since the Cambrian Explosion. To review: Need for brakes, need for laws that will apply brakes, need to force people to obey the laws. Find me one person (or lion) who would disagree with that.

The Sala dell’Avogaria is fairly small, especially compared to the magnitude of the tasks the three avogadori had to deal with. The room is decorated not only with pithy sayings, but with portraits of the trio of avogadori, decked in Venetian scarlet and ready to mete out justice and pump the brakes. (Pere Garcia, on Wikipedia)

The painting was originally placed in the Sala dell’Avogaria in the Palazzo Ducale. The Avogaria de Comùn was an ancient magistrature composed of three members elected from the Great Council who were responsible for the maintenance of constitutional justice. Hence the paintings in the room were intended to reinforce the principles of good government.

So our rainbow-winged lion above is flanked by two Doctors of the Church: St. Jerome on the left of the image, and St. Augustine on the right. St. Jerome holds a white banner that says “nihili quempiam irati statuatis,” or “Do not sentence anyone for anything when you’re angry.” St. Augustine, complete with bishop’s mitre and crozier, displays this thought: “hominum uero plectentes errata illa non tam magnitudine peccati quam uestra clementia et mansuetudine metiamini,” or “In reality, in punishing the errors of men (you must) measure not so much the size of their sins as of your clemency and goodness.”

There was a marble plaque in the Sala dell’ Avogaria incised with the following reminders: “‘First of all, investigate always with diligence, sentence with justice and charity, and do not condemn anyone without having first held a fair and truthful judgment, do not judge anything on the basis of arbitrary suspicions; instead, first test and only afterward utter a sentence inspired by charity; THAT WHICH YOU WOULDN’T WANT DONE TO YOU, REFUSE TO DO TO OTHERS.’

Essentially the same simple dicta that have been expressed over the centuries and that are often inscribed in courtrooms and City Halls and anywhere else that people and the law are destined to meet.

But the lion says it best: Hit the brakes already.

“*Venezia in veste di Giustizia*” — Venice attired as Justice, a role she often played in decoration as well as life. The sword and the scales held in her hand are fine on their own, but she is often buttressed by lions. To keep order in the court? (by Jacobello del Fiore).

Venetian-ness

Just glimpsing

January 16, 2018 No Comments

One could do very well here not reading or listening to the news — though eventually one would miss something good — but there would be no point in living in Venice if you couldn’t wander around just looking at things. And things there always are, needing no introduction and often no comprehension. If you require that the world make sense, don’t come here. Go somewhere logical, like Naples, or Lagos. I speak from experience.

But back to Venice:

This building has clearly led several useful lives. You don’t need that archway anymore? Brick it up and punch out a window. But the arch presented problems for later revisions; the owners had to slice a corner off the panel on the wall near its arch ring to accommodate it. And what to do with that fireplace hovering above it? That fireplace has become a small obsession of mine. Its floor should be parallel to the street, one would think, but the arch has left it to fend for itself.

Speaking of trying to fit things into a squeezy space there is this barge, which needed to park here. No room? No problem! Just let the part that doesn’t fit stretch out into the street. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a truck parked like this in some city on the mainland, so why should it make me blink here by the canal?

This is a very happy scene. A few whiles back, somebody smashed the plaque and offering box to bits. In a cit y where everything is tending to fall to pieces that might not merit much attention. But the inscription has always intrigued me: “Acknowledging Archpriest Giovanni Cotin 1915 1918 the inhabitants of Quintavalle. Offerings.” Quintavalle is a little lobe of land behind the church of San Pietro di Castello, and it is truly the back of beyond. What Giovanni Cotin did to merit the love and gratitude of its residents is something I AM going to find out. But meanwhile, by some miraculous hand(s), the damage has been repaired. The story could end here, but I am fascinated by the fact that they installed an awning to protect the relief image of the Madonna and Child from the blazing sun. The image is of bronze, for heaven’s sake. Does bronze need protection? I wouldn’t have thought so, but perhaps they think it’s the mother and her baby, and not the art work itself, that need some shade, which is enchanting, and somehow shows as much reverence and affection as the plaque. Quintavalle, I underestimated you.

Let’s move indoors. There is an art to managing the superstitions involving the number 13. We were invited to a festive lunch in a popular and crowded place where they tape a piece of paper by your table to indicate the time and number of people to be seated. (Also the name of the person who made the reservation, which I have removed.) It is known to be desperately bad luck to write that there are 13 people in a group — as I understand it, which I mostly don’t — so they have cleverly written the number of diners as 12 + 1. It doesn’t seem that there BEING 13 people is a problem, you just can’t write it. But the time is 1300 hours, or 1:00 PM. Obviously “13” gets all kinds of waivers in the luck department.

More messages, and chalk is just as good as carved stone if the sentiment has that lapidary character. On the bar at a cafe by the Rialto market: “The client is always right … is a concept invented by a client…The person who is right is one who is polite, courteous and understanding of whoever is working.” If you don’t agree, by all means feel free to get out and go elsewhere. That’s written in invisible chalk.

On the door to the restroom of a bar/cafe. Speaks for itself.

I’m on this staircase in the Doge’s Palace only once a year — it’s closed to the public — so I have to make the most of it. Late afternoon makes so many things look good.

Events

Lugash on the lagoon

January 9, 2018 2 Comments

The exhibition poster: “Treasures of the Mughals and the Maharajahs.” This piece alone gives a glimpse of the insane gorgeousness of the collection belonging to Sheik Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani of the royal family of Qatar.

Imagine a large room in a world-famous palace/museum, in which a lavish assortment of five centuries of dazzling Indian jewelry has been on display for months. This palace is in a famous, small, cramped, waterbound tourist city, a place not especially conducive to rapid escape. Imagine also that on the last day of the exhibition two men stroll in at 10:00 AM, deftly open a case, and mere seconds later just wander off, out of sight, with a pair of earrings and a brooch valued at 3 million dollars.

You can stop imagining. It happened on January 3 in the Doge’s Palace, and the jewels were not called the Pink Panther, but they might as well have been. The thieves are two men, caught on surveillance video, who didn’t even use a picklock, crowbar, bobby pin, small explosive; it appears that the case had already been slightly opened to facilitate the theft. It also appears that they had an electronic device that delayed the sounding of the alarm. Certainly it went off. Just too late to do any good; by then, the two thieves were lost in the crowd and gone.

The Sala dello Scrutinio doesn’t need any help in looking fabulous, but the dressing of this set, if we want to call it that, was worthy of the 270 pieces dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries displayed for the first time in Italy. It was as if Faberge’ had gone to India and came back to Venice. (Photo: Mattinopadova)

The city is agog, as you might suppose, and none more so than the parties directly involved in ensuring that this kind of thing doesn’t happen. Did the thieves have inside help? And how clever they were to plan this exploit for the last day, when the atmosphere was certainly that of the party being over.

There have already been pages and pages written in the press about this most unpleasant start to the New Year. Sparing you every speculation so far, may I merely note that the display cases were made by the Al Thani Foundation, as was the security system used. That certainly complicates the directions in which fingers might be pointing.