Day 5: Grand Canal: Art, Memory, and the Ghosts of Venice
We arrive early to Museo Correr, a quieter repository of Venetian grace. Painted over five centuries ago, Vittore Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies—once titled Two Courtesans—formed part of a larger panel. John Ruskin saw in it a scathing critique of societal vice and proclaimed it unmatched: “I know no other picture in the world which can be compared with it.” Henry James deemed it “ridiculous” to evoke Venice “without making [Carpaccio] almost the refrain.” Marcel Proust, in turn, wove the artist’s name over ten times through In Search of Lost Time.
Bellini’s sacred works, Transfiguration have an inward light Ruskin described as “the gift of the Gothic spirit—the mind’s obedience to the laws of divine order.” Proust’s character Swann—art connoisseur and collector, delighted in tracing the faces of Old Masters upon the living; before Carpaccio’s Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, in whose stern cheekbones and slanted gaze Swann spied the weathered face of his coachman Rémi.
We cross the Grand Canal by traghetto toward Santa Maria della Salute —brief, silent, almost liturgical. Venice always teaches patience: beauty here is a slow unfolding. The church of thanksgiving and plague, Venetian Baroque at its most triumphant. Ruskin found in the Salute both grandeur and hypocrisy—its scroll buttresses “ridiculous,” its ornament “beautiful of its kind.” Yet he confessed himself moved by its setting, those sweeping stairs descending to the water, a vision Turner caught in flame and mist.
We are treated to Organ Vespers, accompanied by two violins—Vivaldi and Bach filling the nave, their notes rising like incense. One can imagine Proust and his mother here, as in The Fugitive, their long-delayed pilgrimage unfolding amid the hush of sanctity and music, time contracting into a single rapturous moment. Only when the final bow is lifted does the organist stand—revealed to be the gentle nun who had quietly handed us our programs and ushered us to our seats.
Tradition says the icon on the altar, Madonna of Health, was painted by Saint Luke the evangelist; it is one of a dozen all attributed to Luke. This one miraculously painted in the 12th century, came from a cathederal in Crete, and was placed here in 1670. Inside the Sacristy, Titian and Tintoretto hold court: Saint Mark Enthroned with Saints Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas and Damian—a canvas Ruskin once adored, later mourned as “destroyed by restoration.” Then The Wedding at Cana, Tintoretto’s operatic tumult, as crowded and theatrical as a Proustian soirée.
Wandering Dorsoduro’s calli, crossing small bridges, in a silent alley the salmon-colored “Hidden Nest” housed Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge—a quiet testament to a complex literary and musical partnership. Joseph Brodsky once sipped tea here with Olga and Susan Sontag, who was buried in a Fortuny Delphos gown in 2004 at Montparnasse. Brodsky describes the encounter in his essay Watermark – his love letter to Venice – he, like Olga and Ezra, is buried in Isola di San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island. Olga’s name is still on the bell.
Pound drew early aesthetics from Ruskin: precise observation, art’s moral weight, resistance to commodified beauty. He admired Proust’s “beautiful boredom”—sentences to live in, linking past and future—and insisted perfect Proust criticism would span seven pages, semicolons only. Yet in 1927 his antisemitism surfaced: Proust, a “vicious little Jew, picking up everything he can find and everything he can remember.”
From the Accademia Bridge, you look straight at the warm ochre glow of Palazzo Contarini-Polignac (Contarini dal Zaffo). Winnaretta Singer bought it as a birthday surprise for her husband Prince Polignac, and showcasing its Tiepolo frescoes it became the heart of one of Venice’s liveliest musical salons. In Notes, journal d’un musicien (1933), Reynaldo Hahn recalled his visit to Venice to meet Marcel Proust in 1900. The city inspired his song cycle Venezia—six songs of Italian poems sung in Venetian dialect. Venice still remembers moonlit evenings when Proust, Reynaldo Hahn, and Winnaretta drifted down the canal in a gondola, a little Cramer piano set in the flat-bottomed hull, its notes drifting over the water with every gentle stroke of the oar. Eager to share his music, Hahn one evening gave a solo concert, he describes: “an illuminated boat, I was alone with the piano and two oarsmen. Little by little, passers-by gathered, lining the balustrades of the bridges; …The Chansons vénitiennes had the effect, on that small crowd, of firecrackers, producing a joy and an astonishment that delighted me. ‘Ancora! ancora!’ they cried from above…”
We made our way to the Piazza to ascend the 323 foot tall Campanile of San Marco, whose height commands the most sweeping panoramas of Venice at sunset. John Ruskin, writing in The Stones of Venice, described the Campanile as a model of architectural restraint — a “perfect instance of the power of proportion.” The gilded Archangel Gabriel that crowns the tower, serving as both weather vane and spiritual emblem, took on special significance for Marcel Proust. In The Fugitive, he recalls how “in its dazzling glitter, which made it almost impossible to fix it in space, the Golden Angel on the Campanile promised me… a joy more certain than any that it could ever in the past have been bidden to announce.”
From this vantage, we see the measured order of canals, domes, and campanili spreading toward the lagoon — Galileo Galilei is said to have tested the laws of gravity and Goethe beheld the sea for the first time. The crowd around me—strangers bound by the moment—fell silent, breaths held in awe of the spectacle God and Venice had arrayed before us. Venice itself seemed poised to lift off: marble facades glowing rose-gold, the faint resonance of distant bells and lapping waves, sky bleeding into sea in a vision so weightless, so luminous, it felt as if the city might simply ascend into the twilight.
The evening evolved, time for an apertivo at Gritti Palace, once Casa Wetzlar, where John and Effie Ruskin lived in 1851. Effie, lonely and alienated, wandered the same canals we now face, while Ruskin sketched the Salute. Monet’s painting from this vantage is a misty Salute in violet haze that seems to reconcile their ghosts.
As we raise our glasses on the terrace, the Salute glowing across the canal, the bells of the clock tower tolling, we share a long communion of Venetian time: a place of Doge’s intrigues, Carnival masquerades, and pilgrims of art and loss. And, just as the light turns to gold, one feels a sudden chill along the balustrade — it may be only the sea breeze. Or perhaps old Doge Gritti himself, curious to see what new visitors have come to sip from his city’s eternal cup.
Talk turns to worn stones and gothic tales. Palazzo Ca’ Dario leans over the Grand Canal like a beautiful drunk. Built in 1487, cursed, it killed its first owner’s family—daughter widowed, bankrupt, then drowned; grandson knifed in the street. Owners since have followed the same script: an Armenian jeweler ruined and murdered; English scholar Rawdon Brown, who assisted Ruskin in his Venetian research, was financially ruined and forced to sell at a bargain; a painter who saw a white lady in the halls. Mario del Monaco crashed his car racing to sign the papers; Count delle Lanze was bludgeoned inside by a lover who later jumped off London Bridge; The Who’s manager fled to sleep in his gondola, then fell down stairs in England. In 2002 the band’s bassist rented it and dropped dead of a heart attack days later. Locals still won’t row past after dark; they say the palace doesn’t like company.
A tranquil saunter back to our rooms brought us before the Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo (Palazzo Minelli). Rising from its flank, the famous spiral staircase—Bovolo, meaning “snail” in the Venetian dialect—unfurls like a ribbon of stone and arches, its delicate bends like Burano lace now bathed with night’s diffused light, transforming into a Proustian magic lantern. Proust, ever the seeker of lost time, might have paused here as we did, the delight of the eye caught by unexpected beauty.
