Gilbert Lloyd Lecture: Venice – City of Pictures by Martin Gayford

A history of Venice through its most important creation: pictures.

In this elegant volume, Martin Gayford takes us on a visual journey through the history of the city known as ‘La Serenissima’, the ‘Most Serene’. But this is not a conventional chronicle of battles, rulers, sieges, and revolutions – though such events sometimes come into the story. It is written in the belief that the most interesting things that have happened in this place were artistic and visual. That is, they were to do with pictures.

Unlike most books on art in Venice, this does not end with the death of Tintoretto in 1594 or the fall of the Republic in 1797. It argues that far from being moribund and sinking, Venice has been remarkable in finding new roles for itself. It remains one of the centres of the world of art, as it has been for 500 years. Nowhere else have so many great artists worked. Venice was a major centre of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm. The achievements of the Bellini family, Vittore Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese and Rosalba Carriera are vividly described, their art, lives and rivalries evoked in the compelling detail for which the author is known.

Nowhere else has been depicted by so many great painters in so many diverse styles and moods. Views of Venice were a speciality of native artists such as Canaletto and Guardi, but the city has also been represented by outsiders: J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Howard Hodgkin and many more. In the 17th century, Rubens, Van Dyck, Inigo Jones and Velàzquez all came to learn from the masterpieces of Venice. Gayford also explores how in the 19th century writers such as Henry James, George Eliot and John Ruskin, and the composer Richard Wagner, were deeply affected by the paintings and buildings of Venice.

Venice: City of Pictures brings the story right up to the present. Yayoi Kusama, Marina Abramović, Sean Scully, Pipilotti Rist, Chris Ofili and Banksy all feature in the narrative. Since the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s, and the arrival of pioneering art collector Peggy Guggenheim in the late 1940s, Venice has become a global centre for contemporary art.

Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include Michelangelo: His Epic Life (Penguin) as well as multiple publications on art and artists for Thames & Hudson, including books co-authored with David Hockney, Antony Gormley and David Dawson. He has visited Venice countless times since the 1970s, covered every Biennale since 1990, and even had portraits of himself exhibited there on several occasions.

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