Volume 29, Number 17 · November 4, 1982
How Venetian Is Venetian Painting?
By Charles Hope
Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto
by David Rosand
Yale University Press, 346 pp., $50.00
Historians of Renaissance painting in Italy generally make a very sharp distinction between Venice and the other major centers of artistic activity, notably Florence and Rome. Venetian painters, so it is said, may have borrowed elements from their contemporaries in central Italy, but they worked for patrons with different requirements and their own preoccupations were correspondingly different. To some extent this is certainly true. In Venice the major commissions usually came from corporate bodies rather than from rulers and courtiers, and because the climate was unsuited to fresco even the largest pictures were executed in oils. This meant that unlike painters trained in fresco the artists were accustomed to making changes as they worked, so they attached relatively little importance to sureness of draftsmanship and the use of elaborate preparatory studies. To use the familiar terminology, the Venetian specially was colorito, which does not mean specifically coloring, but rather the whole activity of painting as distinct from drawing. In Florence, by contrast, the emphasis was on disegno, the ability to represent and then elaborate by means of drawing any idea that the artist has conceived in his mind.
Review, 3788 words
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