Not long after getting re-married in 2014, I took my new husband Chris up to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. I was excited to share my favorite picture in the collection, Carpaccio’s late 15th century “Hunting on the Lagoon.” The museum purchased the painting in 1979 from Metropolitan Opera basso, Luben Vichey. “Hunting on the Lagoon” shimmers in atmospheric effects. Painted in azurite, yellow ochre, and lead white, there are touches of costly ultramarine used for the sky and mountains, while vermilion is used on the servant's jacket. “Hunting on the Lagoon” depicts a group of aristocratic gentleman hunting from a small boat on the water.
“Hunting birds with a bow and arrow?” Chris wondered.
When I married a Caltech physicist, I struggled to understand what he was thinking about at times. I know he can build things that go into space. I know he teaches quantum mechanics to undergraduates and can do multivariable calculus. He can even make a cat die and not die at the same time. Most of this is lost on me, which is why I love looking at art together. It’s something we can share. And this is why almost from the very beginning of our relationship, we started taking what we call our art pilgrimages.
Standing in front of the picture at the Getty, I told him that it was apparently the custom to hunt birds in this way so not to damage their pelts.
“But what about those black birds with the serpentine necks sitting one to a boat?” he said. And then I see his eyes move to the same birds posing on pillons in the water.
Unmistakably, cormorants. And the theory is that the birds were used for hunting fish.
In Japan, you can still see this traditional way of fishing, called ukai. I am always so excited to share something of my life in Japan with Chris, even though it was in the days before we met. I tell him how I watched this kind of fishing with birds years ago.
“It was at night by lamplight on boats that ply the Inuyama River, in Gifu Prefecture.” The birds, held by spruce fiber leashes, were trained to dive for sweet ayu fish and deliver them back to the fisherman on the boats. “It was very beautiful to see,” I say, wishing I could show him.
In contrast to what one finds in China, where it is also practiced, a formality entered the Japanese version, as it came to be practiced by the Japanese elite. To this day, ukai fishing is continued by the Imperial Household.
“Do you think the custom came to Europe from Japan?” he wondered.
“I think it arrived from China, where it also became a hobby of the elite. In the 17th century, King James I was known to have kept a large—and very costly-- stock of cormorants in London, which he took with him hunting.”
It was then that Chris noticed the strange, oversized lilies protruding from the water in the foreground of the painting.
It took him long enough to notice, I thought. Those flowers haves driven art historians crazy for generations.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, “There must be another picture? One with a missing vase, right?”
Right he was!
There is an even more famous painting, “Two Women on a Balcony,” hanging in the Correr Museum in Venice. We went to see it a few years later. And sure enough there is a pretty majolica vase sitting on the railing of the balcony, which seems ready and waiting for those lilies. Yes, the two works (painted on wooden panels) fit together one on top of the other.
Before this was figured out, art historians believed the two bored-looking women in the Correr panel to be courtesans, with their platform clogs thrown off in the corner of the picture, surrounded by luxury on a Venetian verandah. Sitting with their two pups, one hound and a lap dog, the ladies lounge amidst doves, those symbols of love, a large pheasant, and what looks like a magpie or a starling.
Like pieces of a puzzle, looking at the paintings as a set, art historians now believe that these "ladies"-- rather than bored courtesan-- are probably the wives of the "fishermen," who are themselves no longer believed to be fishermen but rather aristocratic Venetians out hunting waterfowl for sport on the lagoon.
It was this painting that was described by 19th century art collector John Ruskin as being "the best picture in the world." And yet, it is a troubling image. And a sad thing indeed that the bored women were thought to be courtesans or prostitutes but then turned out to be wives in waiting. What could it mean? Jan Morris found the picture subversive.
For the exhibition, the two paintings are reunited for the first time since 1999 when they were displayed together in a show held in Venice. For years, I tried to imagine how the two would fit together, but nothing could have prepared me for the way they appeared one on top of the other—the bored housewives on their verandah waiting, waiting for their men to come home. When put together, my beloved idyllic Getty painting of men fishing the lagoon, suddenly became an unsettling juxtaposition of women waiting. Waiting as if imprisoned. Bored and not even looking out at the water, my favorite painting becomes an enigma.
Not much is known about Carpaccio. But we do know that he was a native son of the city. He shared this with the Bellini brothers with whom he was a contemporary. In fact, he probably studied under or alongside one of the Bellini brothers or perhaps with Antonella da Messina. Carpaccio, however, was not of high birth, as he is now believed to be the son of a fur and hide trader.
His early work, such as “Two Women on a Balcony” dates from around the time that Columbus first arrived in the Americas. But Carpaccio had little interest in matters happening outside the lagoon; for to him, Venice was the center of the world.
And so it was.
For some five hundred years, his paintings have represented the marvel that is Venice—from its costumed pageantry and religious miracles to its marble palaces, saints, relics, and canals. Carpaccio, in the words of John Ruskin, depicted a magical mirror onto that world. A master storyteller, he created massive pictorial cycles to tell the spiritual and material history of the city. And his vision was endlessly charming.
Henry James, in his book Italian Hours, took pains to draw attention to an aspect of the painter that has long won the hearts of his viewers: Carpaccio’s love of the human world. James wrote of the “throb of affection” that people come to feel as they spend time with Carpaccio’s paintings. This affection is something that goes beyond the mere chronicling of the splendor of Venice in its Renaissance heyday; for Carpaccio captures the very wonder of the world.
Jason Farago in his review of the exhibition in the New York Times, rightly suggested that rather than Ruskin’s “gassed up” opinion that “Two Women on a Balcony” is “the best picture in the world” that – “Really, it’s not even the best Carpaccio of a woman on a balcony.” Far more engaging, he says, is Carpaccio’s “Virgin Reading.”
I agree. This is one of three works by the artist in the National Gallery’s permanent collection. One of the earliest Carpaccio paintings to be purchased by a foreign collector, “Virgin Reading” was acquired by John Cecil, the Earl of Exeter, during his art collecting buying spree on his Grand Tour around Europe in the mid-to-late 18th century. It is thought that he bought the painting thinking it the work of another artist, who was better known at that time in England. The painting later found its way into the National gallery collection in Washington DC. Stripped of its original context—and indeed the painting has been cut so as to obscure its intended composition—the work exists in a vacuum in just the way Kant envisioned art to exist: as an end in itself.
“Virgin Reading” is a unique vision of the Virgin, seen in the dress and hairstyle of a Venetian lady during Carpaccio’s day. Sitting on a balustrade reading, she is shown from the side in profile. Intent on her book, a slim devotional bound in red leather, she is a singular vision. Just as Henry James suggested, the work pulls at the heart. I wonder how anyone could look at it without experiencing a throb of affection, for it is as unforgettably sweet as it is unconventional.
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For the rest of the essay, please see: Ciao Carpaccio on 3 Quarks Daily
A shock to see the two paintings together! Your descriptions really bring the atmosphere(s) to light, Leanne. You write about paintings so skillfully, allowing the reader in and out of the field both with you and by wandering in the mind's eye. And a real affection for the granted tenderness rendered just as it is shown off the canvas of the painter's brush. Gosh, so beautiful!