The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

choice of pictures are exemplary.
Alastair Grieve Whistler’s Venice
(Yale). Bankrupted after his libel
action against Ruskin, Whistler
took himself off to Venice to lick his
wounds. He ended up staying for a
year, having been inspired by the city
to produce some of his finest work.
Grieve’s methodical and impeccably
researched book – yet another beautifully
produced Venetian title from
Yale – reproduces the fifty etchings
and one hundred pastels that Whistler
created in that year, juxtaposing them
with photographs and other images of
the locales in a way that elucidates the
artist’s way of working, and builds up
an absorbing portrait of the city in the
late nineteenth century.
Paul Hills Venetian Colour (Yale).
Seductive colour has always been seen
as a pre-eminent characteristic of
Venetian painting and applied art, but
this handsome book, subtitled “Marble,
mosaic, painting and glass 1250–
1550”, has some interesting angles
on a subject you might have thought
had been exhausted long ago. Hills
discusses the production of dyes, pigments
and works of art in the context
of the Republic’s mercantile culture,
relating aspects of pictorial style to the
social history of Venetian costume, for
example, and explaining how black
came to be the most luxurious of hues.
First-class illustrations, as is usually the
case with this publisher.
Paul Holberton Palladio’s Villas
( John Murray). Excellent survey of
the architectural principles underlying
Palladio’s country houses, and the
social environment within which they
were created.
Deborah Howard The Architectural
History of Venice (Yale); Jacopo Sansovino:
Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance
Venice (Yale, o/p); Venice and the East
(Yale). The first of these books is a
classic introduction to the subject (and
has recently been elegantly repackaged
by Yale), while the latter’s analysis of
the world within which Sansovino
operated is of wider interest than you
might think. Howard’s latest book,
Venice and the East, is a fascinating and
characteristically rigorous examination
of the ways in which the fabric
of the city was conditioned by the
close contact between Venice’s merchants
and the Islamic world in the
period 1100–1500. It’s a truism that
San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale are
hybrids of Western and Islamic styles,
but this splendidly illustrated study
not only has illuminating things to say
about those two great monuments – it
makes you look freshly at the texture
of the whole city.
Peter Humfrey Lorenzo Lotto (Yale).
Assiduously researched, clearly written
and beautifully illustrated, Peter
Humfrey’s monograph is the only
comprehensive English-language study
of this intense and fascinating painter,
who has been too often overshadowed
by illustrious contemporaries such as
Titian.
Peter Humfrey Painting in Renaissance
Venice (Yale). Spanning
the period from the middle of the
fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth
( Jacopo Bellini to Tintoretto,
in other words), this is the best concise
overview of the subject – lay readers
should start here before going on to
David Rosand’s more exhaustive book
(see p.424).
Michael Levey Painting in Eighteenth-
Century Venice (Yale). On its appearance
in 1959 this book was the first
detailed discussion of its subject. Now
in its third edition, it’s still the most
thorough exposition of the art of Venice’s
last golden age, though it shows
its age in its concentration on heroic
personalities – Giambattista Tiepolo in
particular.
Tom Nichols Tintoretto: Tradition and
Identity (Reaktion Books). Ever since
Vasari wrote his life of the artist, Tintoretto
has been presented as an artist
who flouted all the conventions of
Venetian painting. This in-depth study
overturns that somewhat romanticized
notion, to reveal a figure who was
both a radical and a populist. By far
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