The church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (the Frari) was established in the 1230s. Within the church the three motifs threading through the lagoon’s history unite to reveal the uniquely Venetian aspects of death, religion and family.
Linked to the Frari collection is Titian’s Pièta in the Accademia Galleries in Venice. The Pièta is not only the culmination of a life of artistic work but a profound reminder of the transience of life and of the basic fear upon which the republic was founded.
Heliodorus the fourth century Bishop of Altinum retired with St Marcellus to live out his life on the lagoon island of Marcelliana. Heliodorus was only one of the many early Christian recluses who sought isolation on those low islands which offered a space for contemplation and prayer in the everchanging light between sky and sea, between East and West.
The hermits were followed by two waves of refugees fleeing death at the hands of invaders.
Settlements built in swamps are vulnerable to disease and environmental hazards.
In the centuries following the first refugee settlement in the lagoon, flooding destroyed some of the islands and silting of the channels encouraged mosquito borne disease. Outbreaks of malaria forced whole communities to relocate to other islands. When the settlers regrouped the communities which today make up Venice were established.
The hermit tradition encouraged a separation between Church and State. Wealthy families supported the work of monks and nuns, and the building of churches. As the Venetian community grew, political authority was developed so that no one family controlled the State.
However Venetian wealth and power was built on fragile foundations.
No sooner were the ravages of malaria brought under control than the first plague pandemic swept through Europe in 1346.
For the following 333 years Europe was subjected to waves of plague outbreaks. By 1400 the continent’s population had been halved by the disease which attacked in three forms. The most common form was bubonic which killed 80% of sufferers. The other two forms, septacemic and pneumonic, had almost a 100% death rate.
Albert Camus in his allegorical novel about the Nazi occupation of France describes the symptoms of bubonic plague:
Between 1361 and 1528 (part of the period of the second plague pandemic) there were 22 outbreaks of plague in Venice. During an outbreak between 1575 and 1577 fifty thousand (one third) of Venice’s inhabitants were killed by the disease.
At the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth as another plague outbreak began to spread through Europe, ten year old Tiziano Vercellio (Titian) and his brother Francesca set out from their home village of Pieve di Cadore high in the Dolomite mountains to begin apprenticeships with the Bellini family in Venice.
By 1516 Titian was recognised as the master of Venetian painting, a position he maintained for the next sixty years.
His work for the church of the Frari was the foundation upon which his reputation was based.
Behind the plain, imposing late Gothic facade of the Frari is a classic Latin cross-shaped space filled with light.
Within the gilded frames and marble niches of the church are no idealised portraits of semi-divine creatures immersed in religiosity but strong, determined people existing in an uncertain world.
The saints are grounded in the reality of the artist’s times. Bernardino Licino’s group in Virgin Mary and Saints (1524) in which St Clare, austere and observant and St Francis, ironic and knowing, flank a concerned Bonaventura are good examples. Giambatista Pittoni’s Hagar, vulnerable and weeping in Hagar in the Desert (18th Century) is another.
In Titian’s Assunta (1516-1518) the virgin, her body thickened by childbearing, her tragic life stamped on her features is absorbed, afraid yet resigned, into the afterlife. She may be being elevated to the divine but she remains a woman of the earth.
Titian’s touchingly young Madonna of Ca Pesaro (1519-1526) struggles to restrain her rebellious infant and, interrupted in her maternal duties, turns, polite yet impatient, to acknowledge the obeisance of the retinue of Jacopo Pesaro.
In the chapel of the Milanese Alvise Vivarini (1503) shows St Ambrose’s careworn face imbued with gentle concern. Bartolomeo Vivarini’s St Mark (1474) is alert to events beyond the frame as he raises a hand in an admonitory blessing.Donatello’s statue of an emaciated St John the Baptist is formidable. Transfigured by self-mortification and dressed in animal skin John the Baptist raises a hand that does not admonish the viewer. It merely draws attention to this embodiment of the illusory nature of earthly reward, the fragility of body and mind, the inevitability of death and of whatever lies beyond.
Beyond the Presbytery and Chapels inside the Frari, the massive funerary monuments that line either side of the aisle are a reminder of how important death has been in Venice.
Titian was the only plague victim to be buried in a church, but his funerary monument was not erected until the 1850s.
His Pièta, unfinished when Titian died on 27th August 1576 was intended for the Frari. It is now in the Accademia and is a magnificent, awe inspiring work.
Gone are the glorious skies, the vivid colours of the Frari Madonnas.
Within the ruined claustrophobic space of the Pièta man confronts death at the outbreak of plague. Reduced by age and the depredations of disease, he begs for eternal salvation, while Mary Magdelan gestures furiously at an inevitable fate. The Venetian lion, helpless and turned to stone, grimaces in fear.
This is the end of the Venetian blogs for the time being. Dante, a Florentine, who used the image of the Venetian Arsenal to help describe Hell, will have the last word.
Observer
Sunday, 25 July 2010
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References:
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1879, Project Gutenberg.
F. C. Hodgson, An Early History of Venice, 1901, Project Gutenberg.
Albert Camus, The Plague, Penguin Books 1947.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), The Inferno, www.worldofdante.org
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