Venezia, Part One

Venezia – La Scuola di San Rocca

Here we have one of the most amazing environments I’ve ever been in. The scuola (i.e. school) was built in the early sixteenth century as home to the Archbrotherhood of San Rocco (aka Saint Roche: hailed from Montpellier, France, and lived in the mid-thirteenth century-I think). The place is big. Very, very spacious. Like many places in Venice, its appearance from the outside in no way prepares you for the size of the interior. The walls of the first floor and the walls and ceiling of the second floor are completely covered by Tintoretto paintings. (Tintoretto was a Venetian painter from the sixteenth century who got his name from his father’s profession, as one who dyed clothes, plus the common Venetian diminutive.) On the second floor, the strain on the neck is so great from having so many artworks to look at that there are mirrors lying around that you can use to see the highest paintings without looking up. The mirrors are excellent because the magnification you get from the glass makes it appear as though the paintings were directly behind you/over your head. There is a strange effect created by the mirror wherein your reflection merges with the magnified ceiling paintings. Seeing yourself and the paintings framed within the mirror makes you feel like you are in a picture yourself. You become part of the environment for the time you gaze into the mirror. When you unlock your gaze from the reflection, there is a brief moment when you feel yourself return to the “real world” and to the point of view you usually refer to as “your own.”

There is a certain phenomenon I’ve encountered in my studies of Venetian historiography that consists of various modes through which one spatializes time, or, more specifically, modes with which the government of Venice utilized the history of the city to create and control the space of the city and the people who lived within it. The government understood early on, around the fourteenth century if not earlier, that it could use its own history to make the city appear extremely intelligent, magical, and powerful. This, mind you, is not unique for Venice, but in Venice there is a specific spatial history that becomes apparent as soon as you walk through the streets and begin to wonder how in hell this city still exists. Venice and consequently the Venetian government were formed by the domination of nature. The city itself was literally carved out of the swamp by engineers in what would eventually become the Ministrato delle acque (Ministry of the waters), which still exists today with the same purpose of keeping Venice afloat. This act of creating one’s own city was a source of pride for early Venetians, but the city itself was a swampland nonetheless. To make it seem like more of a city and more of a “civilized” place, the beneficiaries of the city began writing about it in a grand tone. The stories of how Venice went from swamp to thriving city were circulated among other “Italian” (in quotes to denote a geographical area instead of geopolitical unit) cities, and slowly a respectable image of Venice emerged. Not only did they circulate those stories, they archived them within their own vaults and generated a desire amongst other inhabitants of the city to work diligently in order to construct a thriving Venice that everyone could be proud of. The image of Venice as a grand and magical place, capable of emerging whole out of boggy marshes, evolved into an ideology of sorts, and the ideology began to infuse each of the structures built. Each new building marked an achievement over nature, and indeed each building signified the pure impossibility that the building could exist. The city, or so it would seem, with its miraculous piazzas and splendid views, must be protected by God’s own hand, or at least the hand of San Marco. Venice chronicled its slow emergence from the swamp and built a story of itself that was incorporated into the functioning and, more interestingly, the spatial planning of the city. Grander and grander buildings were produced until the architecture finally denoted the wealth and power of the sponsors who paid for its creation. This place is ridiculous, and the Venetians know it. Not only do they know it, they’ve been preparing visitors for its ridiculousness for hundreds of years by circulating stories, second-hand accounts, and images that create only one possible reaction for a person seeing the place for the first time: “What the…”

The Scuola San Rocco presents an interesting example of this concept of spatialized history, which is difficult to grasp when speaking generally but much easier to understand when you take a specific instance. The walls of the first floor are covered with eight massive paintings by Tintoretto. From left to right, as you walk in, the paintings narrate a very specific story, that of Jesus’s birth and part of his life on earth. From left to right the story goes: a.) The Annunciation; b.) The Adoration of the three Magi; c.) The Flight into Egypt; d.) The Slaughter of the Innocents; e.) St. Mary Magdalene; f.) St. Mary of Egypt; g.) The Presentation in the Temple; h.) The Assumption. Each picture is like a giant still frame, and when you (conceptually) string the frames together and run through them quickly you have the oft-repeated but always patchy narrative of Jesus’s years as a human. In this way, with the paintings displayed thusly, the space of the first floor of the Scuola San Rocco is coated with, actually swaddled within, the narrative of early Christianity. The story of Christ becomes the support and foundation of the space, a space that, according to the literature I collected at the door, consisted of “striving toward penitence and devotion.” The architecture but also the narrative summoned by the paintings support the second floor.

The second floor, or The Great Upper Hall, continues the along the same narrative lines, but becomes more nuanced. It is there that we begin to see the desired effect of what I will call the building’s pictorial narrative. The Upper Hall and the adjoining Albergo Hall boast an additional fifty-six (that’s right) paintings. The majority of those paintings tell the story of various saints and their lives. The end of the story of the first floor, which showed Mary ascending into heaven, coupled with the multiplicity of saints in the Upper Hall steers the Scuola San Rocco away from talk about the afterlife in heaven and the wonders of re-birth, and toward the labors of man and woman on this planet. To be sure, the umbrella theme is all about Christ, but it is about his human experience, an experience that began in chaos with troops out on patrol looking to throw him down a well and that ended in agony upon the cross. But the one thing absent, and noticeably so, from the rich Baroque imagery of the scuola’s interior is any mention of Christ’s resurrection. Therefore, as far as I’m concerned, the specific viewpoint expressed by the space and the artworks was focused on the lives of saintly humans. The space is created by those narratives. The images in the artworks play off each other, like overtones hanging above a piano concerto. The history of those good deeds and the story of the rewards granted to the do-gooders by God becomes the interior space of the school. All very convenient for a place that would like to garner the attention, praise, and patronage of wealthy Venetians in the sixteenth century, no? It would be easy to support the school because, like the saints on its walls, it existed to instruct and to tell the stories of others who have walked the line of piety and who have devoted their lives to Christ. The Scuola di San Rocco exists today as one of the few Baroque spaces that still exist in this city in which you can feel the way space was constructed with a historical narrative, one that pulled from the Catholic tradition but also from daily life and political interaction in Venice.

Gilles Deleuze talks about the Baroque house as a metaphor describing the Baroque worldview (a metaphor he pulls from the mathematics and philosophy of Leibniz, if anyone is interested). In his book The Fold, Deleuze depicts the Baroque house as having two floors. The bottom floor is where matter dwells, organic and inorganic matter alike. The walls of the first floor are pierced with five windows, depicting the five senses. Thus, as humans, we dwell on the first floor of the house and attempt to use our five senses to make sense of the “outside”. But there is a second floor, and that floor is devoted to the soul. The matter from the first floor may ascend to the second floor. Up there, however, there are no windows. There is no need for windows or for sense(s) because all the world is folded into the soul once it ascends to the second floor (so says Leibniz). Each soul makes up a monad, which is the single cell organism of Leibniz’s monodology (again, only for those who are interested in learning more about this). The Scuola di San Rocco, with its space dominated by Christian narrative and its two floors decked out in awesome artworks by one of the major Italian Baroque painters, is an interesting real life example of this Deleuzian theory/Leibnizian metaphor. On the first floor we see the birth of Jesus. After the birth, our focus Is placed on Mary, his mother, whose arduous life filled with sorrow is rewarded by her Assumption, body and all, into heaven. Her senses filled her with knowledge of life on earth, as it did for Jesus himself. The narrative of the first floor reveals a life rewarded for service to God and a life of learning about the materiality of the everyday. On the second floor, we have the same story told through multiple mouthpieces. St. Sebastian, Jonah, Sampson, Saul, Jacob, Elijah, and many other humans are shown to us living in a single moment wherein they are either tested or rewarded by God. A key figure is San Rocco himself, a man who devoted his life to helping plague victims. His life as caregiver was rewarded with Beatification, and his bodily remains exist as the symbolic foundation of the school itself. All of the souls of the saints belong on the second floor of the Deleuzian house. They each ascended through their life’s work. The moral of the pictorial narrative: your deeds on Earth are the key to your immortal life (in art?) after death. This is an incredibly material and earth-bound understanding of Christianity. Despite the usual description of Baroque art as mystical or ornate to the point of vacuousness, the Scuola di San Rocco offers a space into which we can enter and in which we can learn about the day-to-day dimension of spirituality. This whole message is asserted at the end in the gigantic image of Christ on the cross. It takes up the entire length of the Albergo Hall. In it we see Christ as human; we see him suffering. The top of the pictorial space cuts off directly above Christ’s head so there is no allusion to the heavens or to his salvation or to his escape from the pains of living on earth. The Scuola tell this elaborate allegory through a non-linear pictorial narrative that hits you all at once from every direction as the eyes of the painted figures pierce you through. Amazing.