Vittore Carpaccio (1460 – 1520) was an early Renaissance Venetian painter. Jan Morris published a celebrated book on Venice in 1960, and here she returns to contemplate an artist not always given his due by art historians, but loved by, among others, art critic John Ruskin and novelist Marcel Proust.
Literary style is almost impossible to describe, but Morris has always had it in abundance. Her combination of colloquial friendliness and scholarly knowledge lightly worn makes for a freshness about her writing that’s a constant pleasure. Wit, insight and geniality unite to make for an amiability that is quite unmistakable.
I sometimes wonder who there is to compare Morris to. She has herself displayed an affinity with Virginia Woolf, penning a book on her, Travels with Virginia Woolf (1997), in which she visited everywhere Woolf ever went to by car. But Woolf had a caustic and aloof element in her character that is far removed from Morris’s more congenial personality. I consequently think Jan Morris is essentially inimitable.
At one moment she’ll be referring to the Golden Legend, a medieval collection of saints’ lives, and then in the next will be reminding you how to get to Venice’s Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni (“remember the way? Right at the T-junction?”). I fell over laughing at this point, the delight lying, for me, in the second question mark.
The name “carpaccio” for many people is more readily associated with raw beef (or other) slices, and was bestowed in 1970 by the owner of Venice’s Harry’s Bar on a dish he’d just created because its appearance reminded him of the distinctive red in Carpaccio’s paintings.
You learn a lot about Morris in this short book, and of course even more about Carpaccio. Morris shows herself sitting by a log fire in her home in North-West Wales, magnifying details of the paintings on her computer, watching her grandson drawing a copy of one of Carpaccio’s buildings and thinking about a Venetian boat she owns standing on its slatted base at a nearby harbor.
THE REAL CARPACCIO
As for Carpaccio, the whole book is a search for his innermost essence. She discourses on figures that may be self-portraits, his fascination with hats and horses, his portrayal of women (invariably sober and practical, she says), and the veritable menagerie of small animals and birds that populate the paintings, usually for no discernible reason other than the artist’s love of painting them. Morris fantasizes that one small bird is contacting her directly, and hence replies with the book’s title.
A major ingredient in the book’s delightfulness is its physical nature. It is awash with exceptionally brilliant and clear reproductions of the paintings, first in full, then in detail, and invariably right next to where Morris is discussing them. Moreover, the pictures are “bled,” or printed right up to the edge of the page, without white borders. Seeing that these illustrations constitute half the book, possibly more, this gives the end result an especially sumptuous feel.
Imagine my surprise when I read, as the book’s last words, “Printed in China” — a sign of the times if ever there was one. The only pity is that no individual at Pallas Athene, the London publishers, is credited with the highly intelligent and intensely pleasure-inducing layout.
As for what Carpaccio might have been like as a man, Morris speculates at one point that he might have resembled a “merrier kind of Quaker.” No art historian would ever write that, and it’s typical of the book’s endless attraction that Morris sees fit to do so.
I knew nothing about Carpaccio when I started reading this book. I’d been virtually brought up, as far as art was concerned, on E.H. Gombrich’s masterpiece The Story of Art, and Morris comments that Carpaccio isn’t even mentioned there (he isn’t in Michael Levey’s Early Renaissance either). He was seen as a mirror of Venetian fashion, but little more. Morris adores him, however, and now, after reading and poring over this fascinating book, so do I.
It’s stated by the publishers that this will be Morris’s “last book.” But how can they know? Don’t believe a word of it. Something of the same was said after Morris published Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere in 2001 [reviewed in Taipei Times Dec. 30, 2001]. I find all this rather lugubrious. I’m much happier thinking that the older apple trees become, the sweeter is their fruit. That’s certainly true of this captivating, absorbing, seemingly carefree, but in reality deeply perceptive, book.
BEGUILING VENICE
Carpaccio’s paintings show Venetians, even if the scene is ostensibly Brittany or Syria. They were mostly commissioned by scuole, Venice’s religious and charitable guilds, and often formed sequences telling, for instance, the story of the life of Saint Ursula. These series have sometimes been broken up, with the various parts on show today in far-flung parts of the world. This little book, however, brings them back together via an illustrated checklist at the end, with the majority of the items reproduced in much larger format in the body of the book. It is, as a result, hard to think of anyone interested in Carpaccio not wanting to own a copy of this totally beguiling, but also comprehensive, volume.
All the most perfect works of art, you feel, were made mainly to please the artist. This may be the case here, but I found this book simply adorable. For this reason, and also because it’s such a joy to handle, it would make the ideal gift.
Most of all, though, it displays a marriage of minds. Carpaccio’s precision, his humor and his wry but totally un-malign attitude to the world find an exact echo in Jan Morris’s make-up. The art historians of old may have seen him as a mirror, but this book shows one of our most attractive authors looking at his works and seeing in them, with both happiness and fascination, an almost perfect image of herself.
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