Venezia

When Italo Calvino writes of invisible cities, he is grappling with a conundrum that lies at the core of historiographical inquiry. Calvino is not suggesting that his cities are entirely absent, bereft of any trace that would lead us to discover an entrance; to the contrary, Calvino’s accounts are flooded with traces, those are in fact all he gives to us, sometimes in discursive form and sometimes as an image. Invisible cities are invisible because their traces, the stories that people relay about them, as did Marco Polo to Kublai Kan, obstruct our vision completely. Thus we hear Calvino tell us again and again, though always worded in a slightly different way, that the tale about to unfold is ultimately useless insofar as it can do nothing at all to convey the essence, if there even is such a thing, of the city in question. “Ma con queste notizie non ti direi la vera essenza della città […] la tua fatica che dà forma al desidero prende dal desiderio la sua forma…” (“But with these bits of news I would not tell to you the true essence of the city […] your effort that gives form to the desire takes the desire of its form…” Le Città Invisibili, p. 12).

So why tell the story? Despite the occlusion of our view created by the narrative of the city in question, we are granted a viewpoint of some kind. The viewpoint is always oblique, as if stapled to the periphery of our vision. We are forced, or perhaps we desire, to approximate the city. We keep the oblique viewpoint as our base and then construct a collage around it to fill in the details, a collage composed of fragments, again some discursive and some pictorial. As Calvino knows so well, the oblique viewpoint and the collage we paste up around it only composes part of the experience. That is, we are supposed to do more than construct a two-dimensional representation of the cities. We also have to enter into the narrative and the imagery, or at least create a point of entry for someone else to find, and thereby add the third-dimension, so to speak. We are never dealing with a 2-D image then, but with a type of theatre—a seeing place (from the Greek theatron) in which we perform acts and engage with the traces of the city in question.

Such is the case with Venice, a city most ticklish to the sense of sight and, at the same time, a completely invisible city. I am here, attempting to engage with its fifteenth- and eighteenth-century personality. Traces of it are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. In one way, the views down the Grand Canal greatly resemble the etchings and vedute (i.e. souvenir views) of the great 18th-century engravers; the Scuola Grande di San Rocco may as well be a portal into the Deleuzian-Leibnizian Baroque house; the winding streets carve out a labyrinthine route once traversed by locals and Grand Tourists. In another way, however, so much is gone. This is especially true in regards to the Baroque aesthetic and the world of Venetian theatre. In The Fold, Deleuze lists several features of Baroque architecture: wide lower floors of buildings, low and curved stairs that push into space, matter handled in masses and aggregates with the rounding of angles and avoidance of perpendiculars, limestone used to produce spongy cavernous shapes or to constitute vortical forms, and matter that spills into space. Having been here for nearly two weeks, and having walked all over the place, I can find only a few traces of these Baroque forms. The curves have for the most part been ironed out into more classical designs, and the matter that once poured into space has been collected into more static containers. The Venice of today, in other words, occludes the Baroque Venice, making it invisible and yet present in all its absence. We are in a Magritte painting:



This is not an entirely frustrating phenomenon. This superimposition is the field of historiography. It is as if there were a number of film projections displayed on top of each other. To parse the projections, I have to understand the sense that organizes each totality. I ask: how was space understood in the Scuola Grande? How was time understood by the Council of Ten in the late eighteenth century? What role did the image play in the Baroque world view? How was the sense of sight itself, along with the objects created for visual consumption, constructed by those who produced the images? I can never fully parse the filmstrips, but neither is that the goal. I choose instead to treat each fragment, whether discursive or pictorial, as a world in itself. If the world is indeed within each object, as Walter Benjamin suggests, or if each art object is the writing of history and the record of accumulated suffering, as Adorno writes in the last line of Aesthetic Theory, then I must grapple with the fragments and the simultaneous interplay of a multiplicity of worlds instead of morning the loss of a perceived totality, which, no doubt, was only ever a collage created by somebody else who wished to relay the story of that totality.

Finally, I can say that there is a stunning similarity between the city of Venice and the etchings produced by people like Piranesi, Guardi, and Marieschi. The medium through which etchings are produced is known, in Italian, as Acquaforte. The plates on which the etchers engraved their images were carved by a mix of acid and water. The lines in the plates were produced much like canyons are produced by the flowing of rivers overtime. Strong water, Acquaforte, the mix of acid and water, deployed in a precise manner by the hand of the artist, etched out multiple alleyways in copper plates that, once engraved, became the reverse, something like the photographic negative, of the print that would eventually be created on paper. Once inked, the reverse image on the plate was transferred to the page, and the engraver could reproduce a good number of these things to sell or to hang in his workshop. Amazingly, Venice was created in much the same way. Engineers from the Magistrato delle acque engineered paths through which canals and rios would flow, and, over time, the city of Venice was created out of the lagoon. Like an engraving, the city seems to be the trace of something else. It is the reverse imprint of a master plan, conceived hundred of years ago, by engineers who could foresee the shape of the city. Just as the prints made from copper plates could be improved upon and re-printed every few years, so too has Venice been updated. When the engineers desire to widen a street, or when a building became too unsteady to remain standing, a new image was produced through careful calculation.