hellovenezia

Sloth, wrath, pride, gluttony, greed, envy and lust: where will they lead us? Whom will they get us to meet in Venice?

In the summer of 2003 the well-known ice-cream manufacturer, Algida (nomen omen), put a limited range of products on the market inspired by the seven deadly sins. So since we have more time in Venice than it takes to eat a lemon sorbet, we’ll try and snatch up the chance of going to seven micro-destinations associated with the deadly sins. But what are these deadly sins and who invented them? According to the philosopher, Aristoteles, who was the first to mention them, they are the “clothes of evil”. Like the virtues, the vices arise from the systematic repetition of actions that form a kind of garment for the person that performs them, inclining him in a certain direction. In the Middle Ages St. Thomas Aquinas reviewed Aristotelian logic for theological purposes, applying it from a Chrstian point of view, also including the deadly sins.
Wrath, sloth, lust, greed (radix omnium malorum, Dante, Inferno I), envy, gluttony and pride. In the Middle Ages sorrow was also among these vices, which were seen as human will in opposition to divine will.
Subsequently modified in the course of the centuries, they are seen by Kant as an expression of human types or a part of man’s character, becoming the manifestation of his psychopathology. The deadly sins therefore became illnesses of the soul, while the Christian viewpoint is that they remain the factor that differentiates nature (humanity included) from God. Sin is error, setting imperfect beings apart from the perfect being, God.

SLOTH, or ACEDIA. The term in Classical Greek indicates negligence, indifference, not caring about and not being interested in something, and also, in more modern terms, human beings’ dejection, discouragement, prostration, tiredness, boredom and depression with life.
We will tackle sloth going to the Accademia Galleries (Actv Accademia stop, services 1 and 2) to see a very famous painting, Giorgione’s Old Woman,

painted between 1506 and 1510 (the critics are divided), probably for Gabriele Vendramin, who lived in the area of Santa Fosca, Cannaregio, while the painter’s studio and home were in Campo San Silvestro 1022 or perhaps 1091, “on the other side of the water”, as the Venetians say when they are talking of somewhere to get to on the other side of the Grand Canal.
Then the painting passed from the Vendramins to other proprietors until it was included, together with The Tempest, another masterpiece, also initially owned by Vendramin, in the catalogue of Girolamo Manfrin, who had a gallery in the palace at the foot of the Ponte delle Guglie overlooking the Rio di Cannaregio. Finally, it entered the Accademia Galleries collection towards the end of the nineteenth century.
This painting, the portrait of an old woman leaning on a parapet, pointing to herself with her right-hand index finger and drawing attention to a piece of paper with the words Col tempo (“with time”) written on it, may be interpreted in more than one way. The simplest leads us to think of the damage wrought by time, which, regardless of the life we have led previously, even the most pristine and virtuous, pitilessly condemns a human being to a miserable existence. Hence the dejection, frustration and depression that the subject is expressing may be more than justifiable and can be read very clearly in the picture.
In fact, however, the enigma of Giorgione’s painting is more complex to make out. It goes beyond what we can see and mingles with aspects that lead us on to discover references to astrological and esoteric theories. The very frame, designed by Giorgione himself according to some, provides a number of elements and possible keys; then there are the colour combinations and the way the hand is represented, its three dimensions clearly in the manner of Michelangelo and its pose in that of Leonardo, while, mysteriously, it is younger than its old owner.
One of the ways we can read the painting, seen literally as an anagram relating the words on the piece of paper to the iconography, would indicate a solution laden with elements that are not only esoteric but even heretical, aspects that were certainly not a novelty for Giorgione and his circle, and, apparently, were dear to them.
The solution of the anagram? According to E. Guidoni’s article in Studi Giorgioneschi, it is in a sentence that goes Col tempo vedrà sol d’Indica terra. What does it mean? Well, somewhat slothfully, we’ll leave it to you to work it out yourselves.

WRATH. We’re in the year 1570, approximately. There is great tension in the Greek island archipelago, in the Ionian and the Adriatic. Turks and Christians are preparing for a general showdown. While the Venetians are getting a big fleet ready and working on the details of a great alliance to face the Turks at Lepanto, Cyprus is attacked. There are not many men available and help is out of the question. Famagusta, the capital, is under a ferocious siege. Lala Mustapha (Mustapha Pasha) is in command of the besiegers, while Marcantonio Bragadin, with Lorenzo Tiepolo and Astorre Baglioni, coordinate the defence. The Venetians are a handful against an army estimated at 200,000 strong, well armed and equipped (in the end 52,000 were left on the field). The walls stand against the hammering bombardment, stratagems and deeds of heroism follow each other in quick succession. There are surrender talks, but Bragadin rejects the idea in the end. He goes back on his decision, however, when the populace is at its last gasp, and asks to negotiate.
Mustapha agrees and on 1 August 1571, on more than honourable terms, all are given a chance of safety. Marcantonio Bragadin and the other Venetian commanders present themselves at Lala Mustapha’s tent for the symbolic ceremony, according to knightly usage, of handing over the keys of the city. They are given a friendly welcome, but the situation degenerates very quickly. In a burst of rage Mustapha bites off one of Bragadin’s ears and a soldier of his guard cuts off the other. Baglioni and the other leaders were decapitated on the spot. Mustapha showed Baglioni’s head to his troops: “Here’s the champion of Famagusta,” he shouted at the top of his voice.
This was the sign for the breaking of the truce. The city was sacked, the inhabitants slaughtered or reduced to slavery, the soldiers were decapitated and their heads were put in a great heap.
On 17 August Bragadin, now weakened by an infection, was loaded together with panniers full of stones and taken round the walls of the city. Then he was hoisted onto the flagstaff of a galley, tied to a post and brutally flayed alive.

His arms and legs were given to the dogs to eat. His skin, stuffed with straw and sewn up again, was made into a dummy that was put on an ox and taken all round Famagusta as a memento of Turkish wrath. A macabre altar was made out of Bragadin, Tiepolo and Martinengo’s heads and skin that sailed along the coasts of the Adriatic until it got to Constantinople. Bragadin’s skin was stolen from the dockyard at Constantinople in 1580 by a young Venetian sailor, Girolamo Polidori, taken to Venice and kept in the Church of San Gregorio; afterwards it went to Santi Giovanni e Paolo (Actv stop Fondamenta Nove, services 41-42 and 51-52), where it is still now, cared for in a gilt urn beside Giovanni Bellini’s magnificent San Giovanni Ferreri altarpiece.
Turkish ire was followed after a few months by that of the fleet of the Holy League (Spain, Genoa, the Papal States, Savoy, the Knights of Malta and Venice) led by John of Austria, which swept away the Turkish fleet at Lepanto on 7 October 1571. The champion of the battle was the seventy-five year-old Venetian Captain-General, Sebastiano Venier, who shattered the enemy front line with his ship, La Capitana. The opposing commander, Ali Pasha, was beheaded and hanged from the main mast of the Spanish flagship while the battle was still raging, in revenge for what had happened to Bragadin.
80 Turkish galleys were sunk, 117 captured, 27 galliots were sunk and 13 captured, 30,000 men were either killed or injured, 8,000 prisoners were taken and 15,000 Christians were freed from slavery in the oarsmen’s galleries.

Venetian wrath is commemorated on a plaque at Campo Santa Maria Formosa 6129, a few minutes’ walk from Santi Giovanni e Paolo, affixed to a fine yellow Gothic palace where the Admiral of the Venetian Republic was born that won the battle of Lepanto.

PRIDE. Can you imagine a life devoted to one thing alone? A life spent cultivating a place in which your fame will be celebrated, you hope immortally? Well, you’ll say, nothing new under the sun, seeing that we need forty years of our lives - and this does not seem to be enough any more - in order to enjoy the privilege of having a pension. But if we move the hands of time back four or five hundred years, we’ll see that then the concept of retirement was a little different from ours.
What we have in common, in any case, is the affirmation of our identity: it is similar, as is the desire to shout it out to the entire world. Perhaps this is why great artists spent long years inside a church or some other institution, leaving a long series of works there, not without a touch of pride.
We have Jacopo Tintoretto in mind, and his paintings for the Church of the Madonna dell’Orto or his Scuola di San Rocco cycle, Veronese, who worked for many long years, for very particular reasons, in the Church of San Sebastiano and Carpaccio at the Scuola dei Dalmati e Schiavoni in the Castello district.
But perhaps the example that is most fitting for our purpose is the work of Giovanni Antonio Fumiani for the Church of San Pantalon, near Campo Santa Margherita (San Tomà or Cà Rezzonico waterbus stops). San Pantalon, an enlargement of a pre-existing church, was built between 1668 and 1686 and never finished. From the outside a large crack is to be seen, starting from the roof and running along the bare brick façade, giving the impression of a structurally unsound building. The original design was by Francesco Comino; the interior was conceived with a single nave and a line of side chapels. The nave is entirely covered by a ceiling composed of a single oil-painted canvas, so colossal that it constitutes a picture that could be entered in the Guinness Book of Records.
The painting tells of the episodes leading up to the martyrdom of Saint Pantaleon. Fumiani spent no fewer than twenty-four years of his life on it, jumping from one scaffold to another and portraying a fantastic world of characters and producing wonderful effects with perspective derived from the fanciful conceptions of Roman Baroque painters but also heralding the majestic themes handled by the Tiepolos in eighteenth century Venetian art.
Saint Pantaleon lived and worked at Nicodemia, in Asia Minor, in the fourth century. The son of a Christian mother and a pagan father, he was instructed in medicine and was illuminated by a beam of faith after looking after a Christian. He became so enamoured of the precepts of Christianity that he declared that the real medicine is faith itself, thus being a curious precursor of homoeopathic medicine. He continued practising as a doctor after he was baptised, acquiring miraculous qualities that also had the result of the conversion of grateful patients to Christianity. He was sentenced to death by Emperor Maximilian, who took a poor view of Pantaleon’s additional activities as a propagandist. After unsuccessfully trying to hang the future saint, the Romans tried to eliminate him by throwing him into the sea with a heavy stone around his neck, and after he was saved from this too they left him to be eaten by wild beasts.

Pantaleon came through this as well; it was only by divine intercession and because he may have been tired out by so many ordeals that he was beheaded in the end.
And so Fumiani spent twenty-four long years on his work and on the trials of martyrdom, completing a painting that is so superbly majestic that it turned everyone’s head a little, including that of our painter himself, who put an end to his existence by throwing himself off his scaffold, flying to the ground like an angel, but without wings.

GLUTTONY. The rather cynical but apposite saying, “Great eaters dig their graves with their teeth”, coined by Henri Etienne, a painter born in Paris in 1528, helps us to broach the theme of a tour associated with gluttony. It isn’t only the aphorism that comes to our assistance, but its author’s year of birth, which takes us back to a time when Venice was at the height of its splendour.
In the first part of the sixteenth century, Venice was such a political, social and artistic melting-pot that it was an absolute Babel of characters that dazed those that had the chance of living in the city and is even bewildering for those who study it in our own days. In the field of painting, vying in prowess and in obtaining public and private commissions, were Bellini, Giorgione, Carpaccio, Lotto, Sebastiano Luciani, Cima da Conegliano, Savoldo, Leonardo da Vinci, Pordenone, Palma the Elder, Titian, Dürer and many others. The results were plain for all to see: not only were the churches and confraternities rich in works of art, but even the Grand Canal was a never-ending parade of magnificent palaces, additionally decorated by frescos painted by great masters.
Among the many, a Dutch painter, Hieronymus Bosch, was also in Venice from 1500 to 1504. This unusual artist was born in about 1450 near Tilburg. A large part of his town of birth was destroyed in a fire when he was thirteen. This was a catastrophic event that troubled him so much that it influenced his artistic development. Bosch invented a fantastic genre that stimulated the most mysterious and terrible chords of religious teaching, reinterpreting heaven and hell by representing them in a new way or presenting popular sayings and legends with almost sadistic irony.
Among other themes, Bosch also handled the deadly sins, as shown by his The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things at the Prado, Madrid. In Venice he executed some works for the Doges’ Palace, such as the Martyrdom of St. Julia tryptich, which has been lost, and the side panels of another work. TheTerrestrial Paradise, Ascent of the Blessed, Fall of the Damned and Hell, all hanging in the Doges’ Palace, can be considered important works in their own right. 

Hell in particular, with its torments, will certainly provide all of us with an opportunity to consider well before falling into the deadly sins (gluttony not the least of them) and their terrible, everlasting consequences.

GREED, or AVARICE. A woollen cap, a red cloak, breeches held up by a belt from which hang a sword, a handkerchief and a bag; a black cloak with a red lining and a pair of Turkish slippers with the toes pointing upwards. This is Pantalone, avarice personified. This character was created in the Commedia dell’Arteunder the name of Magnifico, an old merchant assisted by his servant, Zanni. The personage took shape towards the middle of the sixteenth century and started to take on its present form. Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), the Venetian playwright, drew his “modern” character in two memorable comedies, I Rusteghiand Sior Todero Brontolon.

Pantalone is a depraved and licentious old man that seduces young maidservants and makes avarice his boast and his way of life, also transmitting it, or trying to do so, to his children by means of marriages of convenience.
Carlo Goldoni was born of a good-class family but, probably the antithesis of his father, squandered all his goods in trying to emulate his grandfather. He thus became a young wanderer in search of experience and adventure: he lived at various times in Perugia, Rimini, Friuli, Modena, Pavia and Padua, where he completed his law studies. After returning to Venice to launch a reform of drama, he very soon had to flee, overwhelmed by debts, in 1743. He went on writing for the theatre, however; the turning point came when he was awarded a contract with the Sant’Angelo Theatre in 1748, which gave him fame, honour and a triumphal return to Venice in the same year.
After this there was a long series of ups and down and plays produced in torrents, increasingly developing comedy, with Venice as the scene and popular illuminism as a theme, meaning criticism of hypocrisy and the middle classes and the populace’s growing consciousness of their own dignity with respect to the nobility.
Goldoni died in Paris, struck down by the most banally practical effects of the French Revolution, which cost him the suppression of his court pension and made him utterly and miserably poor.

Our tour in search of avarice takes us to the house where Carlo Goldoni was born at the foot of the Ponte dei Nomboli in the district of San Polo (Actv San Tomà stop), Cà Centanni, a fine Gothic building where in addition to the splendid four-arched window on the canal side there is a picturesque inner courtyard with a well and a very handsome staircase with Istria stone columns. The building holds period furniture and is the headquarters of the Goldoni Studies Centre with a small museum devoted to the playwright, a library and collections of literary works.
As we shall see with our own eyes, the borderline between avarice and splendour is certainly very faintly drawn.

ENVY. There may be a lot to say about the personality of Peggy “Margherita” Guggenheim: she is said, for example, to have had only one telephone in her Venetian home at Cà Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal (a coin-in-the-slot one, what is more), but certainly not that she is our example of the sin of envy. The envy, however, we will contribute ourselves, envy of a life spent for art and envy of her excesses and extravagances, which enabled this American billionaire to put together the extraordinary collection that bears her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York in 1898; her father Benjamin, a steel, silver and copper magnate, went down with the Titanic and her mother, Fiorette Seligman, came from a very prominent and very wealthy banking family. When she came of age, she acquired her father’s fortune but this did not prevent her from working in a New York bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, which opened up the world of avant-garde artists to her.
She led such a frantic life that it cannot be described in a few words, but the focal point was always her capacity to bring together avant-garde American and European artists: in fact, “Peggy Guggenheim’s great talent as a collector lay in her capacity, with remarkable intuition and without any dogmatic prejudices, to collect works that bear witness to both the variety of expression and the unity of modern art” (from the Museum catalogue).
Among the many works permanently exhibited at Cà Venier dei Leoni (Actv stops Accademia, Zattere or Salute), which are often decisive for the history of art, we choose L’Empire des Lumières by René Magritte, if only because it places the Surrealist movement directly into a relationship with the supremacy of the unconscious, committing the sin, and not concealing it all that much, of trying to redraw reality, at least the reality we know or pretend we know. This picture, very well known also because it is often reproduced on book covers or used as a poster, shows a dark road at night with a house surrounded by trees and a street lamp that lights it up in the middle, standing out against a pastel-blue sky, luminous and laden with snow-white, vaporous clouds.

A fundamental element is violated: the separation of day and night. The light of the sun, which usually brings brightness, is here, on the contrary, charged with mystery and anxiety, making the nocturnal landscape even more impenetrable and inscrutable.
This is a painting that makes us shiver when we realise the bewildering simplicity of the intellectual reconstruction behind it.
But this, as René Magritte would say astutely, “is not envy”.

LUST. “The root of the word lust is the same as that of the word luxury, which indicates an exaggeration, and that of the word luxation, which means a deformation or division. The meaning of lust therefore becomes clear: it points to something exaggerated or partial. This is to say that a lustful person is inclined to concentrate only on some aspects of his or her partner (the body or a part of the body), which becomes the centre of erotic attraction; all the rest is excluded, wholeness is rejected.” Yes, that’s right, it’s Wikipedia talking.
Let’s console ourselves with what Woody Allen thinks: “Sex is the most enjoyable thing I have done without laughing” and we think that lust may be the sin that best and most represents the city of Venice. Is it not the most romantic city in the world, with all the consequences involved? Is it not the capital of Carnival with all its transgressions? Is it not the city that still commemorates its red light districts, giving streets and bridges names like Ponte delle Tete (tits) and the nearby Ponte delle Carampane (old whores)? Is it not the city that glories in its champions of eros, such as Veronica Franco, Giorgio Baffo and, a head above all the others, Giacomo Casanova?
Right, as you have now realised, lust is to be found everywhere in Venice, even, obviously, in the museums.
If you’re looking for a work that will remind you of this, or a pleasurable suggestion for a visit in line with this subject, we suggest you get a ticket to the Museum of Modern Art at Cà Pesaro (Actv service 1, San Stae stop). You will find a most sensual Judith or Salomè by Gustav Klimt awaiting you. Klimt was an Austrian painter, born in Vienna in 1862 of a goldsmith father and a mother that was an opera music fan. He was the second of seven children. Considered one of the leading representatives of Art Nouveau, he was one of the founders of the Viennese Succession movement and one of its leading lights. He hung two paintings at the Modern Art Biennale Exhibition in Venice in 1899, passing almost unobserved. He was presented at the 9th edition in 1910 in a completely different spirit, however: he had a room to himself with no fewer than twenty works including Judith II or Salomè, painted the year before and perceptively and shrewdly bought by the Cà Pesaro Gallery for nine thousand lire of the time.
The painting is in oils on canvas, measuring 178 x 46 cm, put into a gilt vertical frame with slightly bombé bands designed by Klimt himself, returning to a theme he had already handled some years earlier.

The shape this time, however, is very different, much bigger and “Kakemoto”, namely long and narrow in homage to Oriental art and Japanese style, which was very fashionable in modern art at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The artist tackles the symbolic complexity of the myth: Judith/Salomé dangles the severed head of Holofernes/John the Baptist from her fingers and is depicted in a trance-like state between wakefulness and sleep, highly sensual with a bare breast, immersed in decorations with some abstract features in a transgressively lustful atmosphere and suspended between life and death.
Just like the Venice of our day.

Alessandro Rizzardini (riproduzione riservata ©)