Venice is a kind of pun on itself, which is another way of saying that it is a mirror held up to its own shimmering image -- the central conceit on which it has evolved. The Grand Canal is in the shape of a fish (or an eel, if you wish to be more literal); on the Piazzetta, St. Theodore rides the crocodile (or the fish, if you prefer). Dolphins and scallop shells carry out the theme in decoration. It becomes frozen in the state ceremonial; the Doge weds the Adriatic in a mock, i.e., a punning, marriage. The lion enters the state myth in the company of the Evangelist and begets litter on litter of lions -- all allusions, half jesting, half literary, to the original one: the great War Lion of the Arsenal gate whose Book ("Peace be with you") is ominously closed, the graduated lions from Greece below him, in front of the Arsenal, like the three bears in the story, the King of Beasts with uplifted tail in trompe-l'aeil on the Scuola di San Marco, the red, roaring lions on the left of St. Mark's who play hobbyhorse for children every day, the lion of Chioggia, which Venetians say is only a cat, the Venice is a kind of pun on itself, which is another way of saying that it is a mirror held up to its own shimmering image -- the central conceit on which it has evolved. The Grand Canal is in the shape of a fish (or an eel, if you wish to be more literal); on the Piazzetta, St. Theodore rides the crocodile (or the fish, if you prefer). Dolphins and scallop shells carry out the theme in decoration. It becomes frozen in the state ceremonial; the Doge weds the Adriatic in a mock, i.e., a punning, marriage. The lion enters the state myth in the company of the Evangelist and begets litter on litter of lions -- all allusions, half jesting, half literary, to the original one: the great War Lion of the Arsenal gate whose Book ("Peace be with you") is ominously closed, the graduated lions from Greece below him, in front of the Arsenal, like the three bears in the story, the King of Beasts with uplifted tail in trompe-l'æil on the Scuola di San Marco, the red, roaring lions on the left of St. Mark's who play hobbyhorse for children every day, the lion of Chioggia, which Venetians say is only a cat, the before they were gathered to their fathers? Jacopo Bellini (70 years), Gentile Bellini (78), Giovanni Bellini (86), Lorenzo Lotto (76), Tintoretto (76), Palma Il Giovane (84), Tiepolo (80), G.D. Tiepolo (77), Pietro Longhi (83), Alessandro Longhi (80), Piazzetta (71), Canaletto (71), Guardi (81). And among the sculptors and architects, Pietro Lombardo (65), Sansovino (93), Alessandro Vittoria (83), Palladio (72), Longhena (100). This makes Venice, the nourisher of old men, appear as a dream, the Fountain of Youth which Ponce de Leon sought in the New World. It brings us back to the rationalist criticism of Venice, as a myth that ought to be exploded.
"Those Pantaloons," a French ambassador called the Venetian statesmen in the early seventeenth century, when the astuteness of their diplomacy was supposed to be the wonder of Europe. The capacity to arouse contempt and disgust in the onlooker was a natural concomitant, not only of Venice's prestige, but of the whole fairy tale she wove about herself: her Council of Ten, her mysterious three Inquisitors, her dungeons, her punishments, "swift, silent, and sure." Today, we smile a little at the fairy tale of Venetian history, at the doge under his golden umbrella, as we smile at the nuns entertaining their admirers in Guardi's picture in the Ca' Rezzonico, at the gaming tables and the masks; it is the same smile we give to the all-woman regatta, to the graduated lions, to Carpaccio's man-eating dragon. If we shiver as we pass through the Leads or as we slip our hand into the Bocca del Leone, it is a histrionic shiver, partly self-induced, like the screams that ring out from the little cars in an amusement-park tunnel as they shoot past the waxworks. For us, Venetian history is a curio; those hale old doges and warriors seem to us a strange breed of sea-animal who left behind them the pink, convoluted shell they grew to protect them, which is Venice.
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