Alan Yentob TV - Simon Schama TV - Tim Marlow TV - Percy Bysshe Shelley - Nostradamus - Daphne du Maurier - Christopher Moore - Lord Byron - William Wordsworth - Waldemar Januszczak TV -
He [Leonardo da Vinci] came here to the Council of Venice not as a painter but as an inventor. Alan Yentob, Leonardo II: Dangerous Liaisons, 2003
Venice: For twenty years off and on Turner made the floating city his soul mate. Turner was spellbound, and conjured from a wisp here or a daub there the gauzy radiance of the place. Simon Schama’s Power of Art: Turner, BBC 2006
He [Turner] looked at Venice and saw death. ibid.
By 1514 ... Titian established his own workshop. His artistic rivals had either left Venice, grown old or been struck by the plague. Allowing his workshop quickly to become one of the most successful in town. Titian had painted a number of commissions in churches but in 1516 he got a big commission that established his reputation throughout Venice and beyond ... The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Great Artists with Tim Marlow: Titian, 2001
By his early thirties Titian was well established as the leading Venetian artist. ibid.
Sun-girt city, thou hast been
Ocean’s child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Liberty will not be regained. It will be occupied by a black, proud, villainous and unjust man: when the matter of the Pontiff is opened, the Republic of Venice will be vexed by d’Ister. Nostradamus, Century V:29
The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone. Their heels made a ringing sound on the pavement and the rain splashed from the gutterings above. Daphne du Maurier, Echoes From the Macabre: Selected Stories
Everything in Venice is just a little bit creepy, as much as it’s beautiful. Christopher Moore
Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy. Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV:3
Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;
And was the safeguard of the west: the worth
Of Venice did not fall below her birth,
Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty. William Wordsworth On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic
I’m hoping to discover why Venetian art was so different from everyone else’s. Waldemar Januszczak, The Renaissance Unchained III: Silk, Sex and Sin, BBC 2016
Giorgione: He was born in Castelfranco in around 1477 – revolutionised Venetian art then died young. ibid.
This is where Tintoretto was born just a 100 feet away from the Madonna dell’Orto. ibid.
Titian painted his enormous altar-piece. ibid.
It was Venice that invented the reclining Venus. ibid.
Another story painted by Titian was Europa and the Bull. ibid.
The cloth-painter supreme among the Venetians was Paolo Veronese. ibid.