Venice as a Modern City

This piece is adapted from a portion of an academic article I published in 2011, which is based around the photographs that are now included in my novel Push Process. It's therefore a more explicit discussion of some of the themes underlying both the images and the novel's approach to its Venetian setting.

Venice one of the most photographed cities in the world. A study from the early twenty-first century estimated that over a hundred million snaps were taken each year in the city’s historical centre – but this was before the advent of camera phones, which have certainly increased that figure exponentially. Thousands of images of the Bridge of Sighs are created every day, all from exactly the same vantage point. Most of these photographs show a ‘timeless’ landscape of gondolas, fog, and decaying palaces. Of course this is an illusion. Venice is not immune from history. The endless work of conservation is not a battle against time, which would be futile, but an attempt to reach a workable understanding with history as an inevitable process of ageing and change. 

Existing alongside the picturesque city is its less attractive shadow: a postmodern Venice overwhelmed by debased representations of itself. It flourishes despite the fact that, in other respects, Venice’s qualifications for the role of postmodern city seem poor. Venice has no cars, no freeways, no skyscrapers, no industrial parks, no malls, and – perhaps most importantly of all – no suburbs, or at least none physically continuous with the historical centre. Venetian architecture is not composed of anonymous and interchangeable units. On the contrary, its form cannot be understood without reference to its unique history – a history that sometimes seems a crippling burden rather than a rich inheritance, at least to those who are obliged to live there. 

Venice’s principal claim to the title of postmodern city, then, is that its economy depends entirely on mass tourism. The current registered resident population is about 51,000, while the approximate number of tourists who visit the city annually was – again, at the beginning of the twenty-first century – 14,000,000. On the peak weekend of Carnival in 2002 alone, about 270,000 people passed through. Venice has four times as many visitors annually as Florence does and the vast majority are funnelled into the area around Piazza San Marco. Every day during summer, the number of tourists and temporary visitors comes close to or surpasses the number of residents – a situation that surely makes Venice unique among the major cities of the world, as much as its situation and architecture do. 

Through camera phones and the viewfinders of camcorders, most visitors see not a living community, or a complex history, but rather a series of isolated motifs filtered or chosen in advance. In short, it is almost impossible to see a real gondola without thinking of it as a superior version of a plastic one. During Carnival, a tradition with a long history, but one that was artificially resurrected in 1979 and was until recently sponsored by Volkswagen, it is always possible to find a number of people with elaborate costumes wandering around near Piazza San Marco – my strong suspicion is that they are employed by the Commune to dress up and pose. But if you want to take a snap of them, you will literally have to elbow your way through the scrum. There are three or four photographers for every masker. 

There is no local tradition of mask making predating the resurrected Carnival.3 Nonetheless, the mask shops multiplied in the 1980s and 1990s, as did the fast-food outlets. By 2000, ‘Venice could claim the dubious distinction of having more pizzerias than Naples and the highest density of ice-cream shops of any city in Europe’. The two developments are obviously related. Why, then, do the many photo books dedicated to Carnival never show anyone eating a slice of pizza? The answer is obvious: the rules of ‘Carnival photography’ were established almost as quickly after 1979 as the spurious tradition of mask making, and those rules preclude images in which maskers do everyday things like eating (or dropping litter, an activity to which they are also prone). Immaculate costumes, frozen postures, saturated colours, and spaces cleared of spectators – these are the norm in a vision at once idealised and supremely kitsch.

Such images, together with the fog-shrouded gondolas of innumerable coffee-table books, are only the latest manifestations of a long tradition. Venice was the first city to be packaged and prepared for consumption in the form of visual souvenirs. In the eighteenth century, the ‘view’ paintings of Canaletto were mainly sold to British aristocrats, and the painter’s early career was (not coincidentally) sponsored and overseen by the man who later became British consul to the city. Locals did not buy Canaletto paintings. They rather looked down upon the whole view genre. 

The tradition begun by Canaletto and his contemporaries was taken up by early studio photographers in the mid-nineteenth century. Painters had already initiated a process whereby customers could choose from a set of prototypical views, versions of which would then be knocked up in the studio and finished by a team of assistants, but production became more mechanical and industrialised at the same time as modern, industrialised means of transport increased the volume of tourist traffic and changed its character sociologically. A railway bridge to Venice was opened in the 1840s, just as the first photographs of the city appeared. If Canaletto painted for aristocrats, then the new medium was available to the middle classes, but just as locals had not bought the paintings of Canaletto, so they did not buy photographic albums and prints either. A Venetian economist noted in 1870 that the booming ‘sale of photographic work is … in direct proportion to the number of foreigners who come to Venice’.

In the period before the advent of cheap, efficient photo-reproduction, studios still managed to extend massively the process by which production was segmented and depersonalised. They used a complex division of labour to churn out souvenir albums, into which twenty or so individual prints were pasted. Thus the studio owner, whose name was nominally appended to the album, did not necessarily operate the camera; nor did he print the negatives. A large staff of technicians and assistants contributed. The most prestigious of these were not the camera operators, but rather the retouchers, whose manipulations were thought to bring the images closer to the realm of art. The retouchers sometimes worked directly on negatives, but they also hand-coloured, tinted, or otherwise altered prints – for example, to give the impression of a moonlit scene, an effect that was much in demand at the time. Albums produced by different studios are not readily distinguishable from each other or easy to date with precision. This is because the layout, subjects, and points of view were all highly standardised; and particular images were often recycled or even pirated. Most also appear to have been taken at the same time of day: early in the morning, to exclude tourists and other bystanders. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the industry was further transformed by the introduction of the postcard, an object even more inextricably linked with the tourist experience. 

At the same time as the conditions necessary to create the postmodern city were developing, the definitive version of the anti-modern, timeless city came into being. Foreign visitors were also crucial here. As Venetian art and architecture were increasingly consumed by an international audience in the later nineteenth century (partly through photographic reproductions), Venice began to be seen as a city that belonged to the world. It was part of the shared artistic and cultural patrimony that is now called ‘Western civilisation’. As such it needed to be protected from the barbarians who would destroy it, as well as from the elements that threatened to engulf it. These barbarians sometimes included the tourist hordes, from whose grasp a more exclusive or authentic experience of the city had to be snatched. According to John Pemble, in the nineteenth century ‘the idea of a dying city became one of the most potent obsessions of the European and American imagination’, but at the same time ‘a passionate battle was fought and won to fabricate for Venice the illusion of immortality’. The city was in imminent danger of destruction, from decay and flooding; but the city was also inspirational, and somehow above everyday realities and concerns. 

The most representative and influential figure in promoting these ideas was the Englishman John Ruskin, who was one of the first to celebrate the city’s medieval architecture in The Stones of Venice, first published in 1851–3. Although Ruskin strongly opposed restoration projects that removed later additions and weathering in a misguided search for ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ forms, he nonetheless bemoaned the introduction of anything modern into the cityscape. For Ruskin, indeed, industrialisation was the source of all evil, and medieval Venice represented an alternative, superior civilisation. So, in 1845, he complained to his father about the new railway bridge and the recently installed gas lighting:

 

We turned the corner of the bastion, where Venice once appeared, & behold – the Greenwich railway, only with less arches and more dead wall, entirely cutting off the whole open sea & half the city, which now looks as nearly as possible like Liverpool at the end of the dockyard wall. … Imagine the new style of serenades – by gas light. 

A few days later, he added bitterly that the ‘moment you begin to feel, some gaspipe business forces itself on the eye, and you are thrust into the nineteenth century, until you dream … that your very gondola has become a steamer’. 

Under the influence of foreigners like Ruskin, and also local patriots who idealised the Venetian past, an attitude toward the city developed in which it was increasingly treated as an archaeological site, which had to be preserved whole. While unobtrusive improvements to housing and sanitation were welcomed, anything that drastically altered the city’s form or ‘clashed’ with its pre-modern architecture was violently opposed. This attitude reached definitive expression in the so-called ‘Special Law’ of 1973, which forbade demolition or new building in Venice’s historical centre. 

The growing influence of Ruskin’s idea of Venice can be demonstrated by the removal of some nineteenth-century additions to the cityscape. For example, numerous cast-iron bridges were installed by the Austrians, who ruled Venice until 1866. Many of these bridges were built by the English firm of Neville, which had a foundry in the city and was a major local employer of the period. At the time of their installation, such modernisations were a source of civic pride, and the Neville bridges included two over the Grand Canal: one at Accademia, and one near the new railway station. Cast iron, like photography, was a symbol of modern technology that made possible new architectural forms like the Parisian arcades. Thus the Accademia Bridge was praised by the Illustrated London News as a ‘handsome structure’ with ‘elegance of form’. By the early twentieth century, attitudes had changed, and the two Neville bridges were demolished and replaced in the early 1930s by more ‘traditional’ designs. Explicitly modern architecture was henceforth confined to peripheral areas like the Lido, which after 1900 was developed as a holiday resort, where the new craze for sea bathing could be indulged in modern hotels. 

The prevailing attitude was summed up at the time of the collapse of the Campanile, or belltower, in Piazza San Marco in 1902. The original was completely destroyed, and some architects proposed rebuilding in an Art Deco style, but in the end the Campanile was rebuilt dov’era, com’era, ‘where it was, as it was’, as the motto adopted at the time put it. Hence the current belltower is a facsimile, as indeed are many other objects in Piazza San Marco, including the famous horses on the façade of the Basilica and some of the statues on the columns of the Ducal Palace. All have been replaced for conservation reasons. 

This dyad of conservation and conservatism exasperated some people, notably Filippo Marinetti, leader of the Futurists, who visited Venice in 1910 to drop a batch of polemical leaflets from the top of the newly reconstructed belltower. In Marinetti’s philosophy, the future could only realise itself by repudiating the past. Hence the Futurists championed industry and speed, and enjoined the destruction of ‘museums, libraries, academies of every kind’, that is, repositories or tradition and received wisdom. To Marinetti, Venice was one of these stagnant repositories – hence his famous injunction to ‘burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for Cretins’. 

In a way, Marinetti shared Ruskin’s conception of the city, but interpreted it in the light of radically different values, and thus proposed an opposite course of action. However, most people wished to preserve Venice ‘where it was, as it was’. Hence the gondola, which is now used solely for pleasure rides by tourists (apart from the traghetti: ferries, which journey between fixed points on opposite sides of the Grand Canal), nonetheless retains its symbolic power as a fetish of Venetianness for locals and visitors alike. The anti-modern Venice and the postmodern Venice are thus not so far apart, as the facsimiles dotted around Piazza San Marco suggest. Indeed, the idea of the city as museum and the idea of the city as kitsch fantasy are actually symbiotic. For most visitors the entire panorama of Venetian history is part of the same homogenous pastness. Both versions of the city deny change. Both present the city as spectacle, and separate from lived reality. 

The photographs in Push Process are concerned with the connections between the timeless and postmodern versions of the city, along with another, neglected Venice – a place that attempted to come to terms with modernisation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and was an important industrial centre before the creation of Porto Marghera on the mainland. Venetian architects, planners and politicians have long been occupied by the problem of what to do with the city’s past and how to face its future.The places that interest me are those where the response to this question has been most pro-active – for example, the vaporetto stops, elements in the ferry system which is Venice’s typically peculiar attempt to construct a modern transportation network. 

Here’s a short introduction to some of the photographs from Push Process, which highlights the themes broached in this piece: 

 

Select Bibliography 

Robert C. Davis and Garry P. Marvin, Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City, University of California Press, 2004. 

John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered, Oxford University Press, 1996.

 

Margaret Plant, Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997, Yale University Press, 2002. 

Sarah Quill with Alan Windsor, Ruskin’s Venice: The Stones Reconsidered, Lund Humphries, 2003.