"Renaissance Venice' at the Morgan in New York

Athens is most often linked with Rome as the symbol of the two great ancient Western civilizations; or with Jerusalem, to denote the contrast between paganism and Christianity. But of course the true comparison is with Venice, like Athens a great and imperial maritime power, as well as a republic, and a center of world culture for much longer than Athens.

Venice was decidedly an aristocratic republic, with little taste for popular experimentation. But it was also remarkably stable, and through many centuries of popes and emperors it preserved its institutions and independence while carrying the tradition of republican government across the long divide between the ancient and modern worlds.

The very surprising ascendance of modern democracy since 1776 is hardly conceivable without Venice. And, of course, though Venice has no single dominant monument like the Parthenon, it is by a long chalk the most beautiful city on Earth.

Venice was a little past its peak, but still a major power, when the Renaissance arrived. Its four great figures were Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Antonio Palladio, the greatest architect since antiquity (a distinction he has yet to yield). All are represented in the Morgan Library's current exhibit of its own Venetian holdings from the late 15th Century to the end of the 16th, which include not only master drawings but also letters and incunabula (the term applied to books printed before 1501). If it's not quite the portrait of an age, it's a very strong sample.

The first paperbacks

You could make a good argument that Venice was the most advanced Western society of the Renaissance. Its representatives have left us the most informed reports and shrewdest analyses we have of European states during that period, and Venice may fairly be said to have invented modern diplomacy.

It became itself the capital of the book trade after the invention of movable type in the 15th Century, and the books it produced were unsurpassed masterpieces of the printer's and illustrator's art. They are the centerpieces of the Morgan's show.

Of course, such works were only for the rich. But the Serene Republic's foremost printer, Aldus Manutius, also enjoyed the distinction of being the inventor of the paperback. In an age that's losing civilization's greatest achievement— the book— to the mindless advance of miniaturized storage, the Venetian incunabula are both a magnificent rebuke and a reminder of past glory.

If the books show Venice, as it were, in its monumentality, the drawings depict an endlessly fertile fantasy. Renaissance drawings fascinate us because never before had the artistic imagination so prodigiously liberated itself and given itself such free rein.

Artists unbuttoned

Even when stock themes and scenes are depicted, they possess an improvisatory quality: the artist unbuttoned and free to catch the random detail or invent the fantastic one. The blank sheet of paper is the ultimate tabula rasa, the slate on which the artist's pen or chalk can conjure a world in a few strokes or many, as bare or elaborate as it wishes to be, as fluid or as fixed.

Often, of course, Renaissance drawings were preparations for large canvases— commissions suited above all to a patron's wishes. But even here, the need to work out compositional details and isolate individual figures led to continual improvisation and experiment. These were not only an artist's first thoughts but, often enough, his most personal ones.

The show's very first work, Vittore Carpaccio's Sacred Conversation, is a kind of primer. Here we have a foreground of saints engaged in the theme of communal meditation, but with a landscape that contains a distant city trailing away behind them on a winding river. Structurally, however, the most striking element in the composition is a rough-hewn stone bridge connecting (to no particular purpose) two rocky elevations that frame the saints and mark off their "sacred" space from the profane one that stretches off beyond.

Saint Paul, disrobed

Of course, one can't think "Venice" and "bridge" without recalling the Rialto, the ultimate symbol of commercial exchange and city life. But it could also refer to the saints' conversation as a bridge of faith— or as a symbol of antiquity, the bridge between their past and the draughtsman's present— or all of it, or nothing at all, a mere "folly." In any case, the bridge throws an element of fantasy and conjecture into the whole scene— the Renaissance gesture par excellence.

Sometimes, the overt theme becomes the pretext for a display of experiment and virtuosity, as in Pordenone's Conversion of St. Paul, in which the saint, thrown violently to the ground and all but disrobed, is surrounded by rearing horses and gesturing figures, a scene whose sense of action is almost cinematic— something no one would attempt in paint until Delacroix.

Then, too, the improvisatory or fragmentary nature of a sketch frequently offers opportunity for the oblique observation and the isolated detail. This was reflected in the Renaissance passion for ruins, in which the hand of time, like the artist's, asserted the privilege of arbitrary selection. Synecdoche— the symbolizing of the whole by the part— could serve a similar function, as in Titian's image of a heroically posed warrior whose solitary figure embodies an entire military ethos.

Foreign visitors

"Character" is indeed the most revolutionary force at work in this art; and although the Venetians scarcely had a monopoly on it, it seems especially prominent here. Renaissance individualism has been a vexed subject since Burckhardt, but the period's vogue for portraiture is undeniable, and the Morgan show offers superb examples by Savoldo, Bordone, Bassano and others, as well as the world-famous Roman Head of Tintoretto, supposedly representing the Emperor Vitellius. Once again, character is a subject especially suited to the draughtsman's art, in which the revelatory glance or expression can be captured in a few strokes.

By no means all of the artists represented here resided in Venice proper, for the city's possessions stretched well into Lombardy and embraced Brescia, Padua, Vicenzo, Verona and several other cities— the lands the Venetians called the Terrafermata. But foreigners also came to visit and learn, including Dürer and El Greco.

The former is represented by a sketch of a kneeling donor, painted during Dürer's residence in 1505-07, and El Greco— possibly— by a huddled figure group in chiaroscuro, cloaked by an angel's outspread wings. Whether it's by El Greco (who spent time in Venice in 1565) or the other candidate, Alessandro Maganza, it's a superb and deeply mysterious work.

Refuge for heretics

Venice was also visited by the Counter-Reformation, whose impact is reflected in Federico Zuccaro's depiction of figures submitting themselves to Popes Victor IV and Alexander III. But the city retained its liberality and independence, and despite the wars of religion that racked Europe for more than a century, no heretic was ever executed there.

Napoleon extinguished the Venetian Republic in 1797, just short of its thousandth anniversary. It's still the longest-lived republic in history, and although few traces of its proud political past can be found in the modern tourist city, its influence can still be felt in Northern Italy and in the Ionian islands of Greece.

Nor, like other empires, is Venice merely a ruin and a memory. You can ply the same canals that Titian and Tintoretto did, look up at the same palaces and churches, and take the sun in the same squares. You can sight your eye down the Grand Canal and see, still intact, the greatest work of art in the world: Venice itself.