Day 3: Venice: Sojourn with Tintoretto, Ruskin, Proust
Morning began with a walk over the Rialto Bridge, a slow crossing above the bustling Grand Canal. The city’s commercial center where once news and gossip spread among the merchants; we now clutch purses tightly in a sea of pickpockets and tchotchke merchants. Ruskin called the da Ponte built bridge “The best building raised in the time of the Grotesque Renaissance, very noble in its simplicity.”
Known to be a regular rereader of Shakespeare all his life, Ruskin saw Venice as a city whose shifting fortunes revealed deeper questions about virtue and decline—ideas staged in The Merchant of Venice through its conflicts over justice, wealth, and identity. Proust, reflecting on the remnants of an old order in Venice and Paris alike, captured that sense of fading tradition and uncertain change found at the heart of Shakespeare’s Venetian world.
Beneath its arches, markets buzzed. The damp, briny Pescaria sells fresh seafood from the Adriatic Sea and lagoon, while the Erbaria trades in produce. The present neo-Gothic loggia was constructed in 1097, the official sale of fish was regulated beginning in 1227 under Venetian authorities, a marble plaque above the market shows the law for minimum allowable length of different fish species
Enroute, the 1541 marble statue Il Gobbo di Rialto, a crouching, naked hunchback supporting a small flight of steps historically used for official proclamations and to publicize death sentences.
Our first art encounter of the day was at the Church of San Cassiano, three Tintorettos, including The Crucifixion (1568). Ruskin, often suspicious of Tintoretto’s boldness, here admitted the force of the painter’s religious imagination. A church has stood here since 726 with the present building consecrated in 1376.
The surrounding square, Campo San Cassiano was the site of the world’s first public opera house and showcases a blend of Venetian Gothic and Renaissance styles. This may be where Marcel got lost in the streets straying to a square that the next day he is unable to find.
Lighting conditions in Venice’s historic churches were often dim and atmospheric during Ruskin’s time, with candles or natural light remaining primary sources of illumination. Gas lighting had started to be introduced in Venice in the late 19th century, but many sacred interiors like the Scuola Grande di San Rocco still relied on candlelight for much of the ambiance in Prousts day.
Our appreciation of Venetian art, has been profoundly enhanced by modern interventions: the strategic lighting of in-situ paintings within the historic churches and the meticulous restoration and cleaning of canvases, many restored by funding from US-based Save Venice. Ruskin was instrumental in the founding of William Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and to the principle of “anti-scrape” architectural conservation. We have a sharper view but engage with the works in a manner closer to the radiant ideals that both Proust and Ruskin celebrated.
Later at Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where the walls feel “alive with the spirit of Venice; Tintoretto has thrown life into stone and plaster.” We took Ruskin’s advice to “give unembarrassed attention and unbroken time” to San Rocco. These are not just 33 Tintoretto paintings, but sermons, narratives, moral visions. Proust viewed the painter through a Ruskinian lens, would have seen in Tintoretto’s unfolding epics the same time-layering he captured in his prose — a spatial representation of memory itself. Each oval medallion a chapter, each panel a revelation.
A passing tour guide gestures in approval toward our well-worn copy of Ruskin’s Venice by Arnold Whittick. We read aloud, craning our necks to study the ceiling’s paintings, unravel their stories, and marvel at the transcendent beauty of this sacred space. My mother’s old opera glasses proved essential for seeing the mosaics of San Marco Basilica up close yesterday, and they again provided intimate viewing of Tintoretto’s painted stories at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.
Jacopo Tintoretto’s monumental 1565 Crucifixion—screened behind scaffolding on my previous two visits to Venice—was unveiled this year in all its restored glory. Not merely a depiction of Christ’s death; it is a visual theology, a moral drama, and a memory-palace compressed onto canvas. On seeing for the first time, Ruskin wrote to his father: “I never was so utterly crushed to the to the earth before any human intellect as I was today, before Tintoret.” He spent hours closely studying and sketching the master’s work, singling out the Crucifixion for its “touch of quiet thought in his awful crucifixion—there is an ass in the distance, feeding on the remains of strewed palm leaves. If that isn’t a master’s stroke, I don’t know what is.”
Next door, the 1490 Renaissance-Baroque Church of San Rocco—dedicated to the plague saint who eternally lifts his robe to reveal the wound on his thigh—houses yet more Tintorettos.
After, we strolled to Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari into the churches sacred silence, Ruskin called it “a very noble example of Italian Gothic” a “repository” — not only of relics and bodies, but of Venice’s soul. Proust wrote: “I should enjoy the same rapture as on the day when a gondola would deposit me at the foot of the Titian of the Frari ….”
We move through the vast interior of the church, reading aloud Ruskin’s reflections on Venetian monuments. We begin with sculptures depicted in serene repose and proceed to the tombs, where Ruskin describes a statue rising before a tomb like an actor on stage, surrounded not by virtues alone, but by allegories of Fame and Victory, accompanied by genii, muses, and symbols of conquered kingdoms and devoted nations. He critiques Canova’s tomb, crafted by Canova himself, as “precise in technique, yet excessive in sentiment, absurd in concept, and utterly lacking in invention and emotional depth.”
Titian’s great Assumption of the Virgin soars above the altar like a flame, while Bellini’s quieter Madonna in the sacristy Triptych murmurs peacefulness. Ruskin had said of the Titian, “the picture attracts undue attention because of the coloring” (he saw it in the Accademia). For Proust, Titian’s Assumption was the very image of his longed-for mythic encounter with great art — anticipated since youth.
Proust, like Ruskin, was captivated by Giovanni Bellini’s Venetian angels. Ruskin writes, “But Bellini’s angels, even the youngest, sing as calmly as the Fates weave.” In Young Girls in Flower, the voices of Albertine and her companions are described: “And on this more varied instrument they played with their lips, with all the application and ardor of Bellini’s little angel musicians—qualities that are also the exclusive privilege of youth. Later, these girls would lose that note of enthusiastic conviction.” We, too, hold fast to our “enthisiatic conviction”.
After a quick stop at Bar alla Toletta for our favorite cicchetta and tramezzino, we made our way to San Sebastiano, where Veronese beginning in 1555, when he was 27-years old, spent decades transforming the church with his art, and was interred here beside the organ in 1588. The inscription on his tomb alludes to the qualities of his art in sticking closely to nature, and asserts that he conquered fate through his fame. In addition, the Titian Annunciation.
Ruskin distrusted Veronese’s extravagance — all silk and sensuality — but even he could not deny the sumptuousness. For Proust, Veronese was the painter of Venice’s double nature: radiant yet fragile, a façade of beauty veiling the transience of everything. Marcel compares foreboding Parisian skies to those in the work of Veronese, “beneath which only some terrible and solemn act could be in process, such as a departure by train or the erection of the Cross.”
Our next stop, the Gallerie dell’Accademia, where time itself seemed painted. Carpaccio’s narrative vignettes of St. Ursula – illustrates the life story of Ursula, a mythic princess, bride, pilgrim, and Christian martyr of the 4th century – the paintings beloved by both Ruskin and Proust for their vivid realism and moral imagination. The Dream of St Ursula is on view, the paintings in the cycle are alternated, taken off view as restoration continues.
Ruskin admitted “I went crazy about Saint Ursula,” and spent months in the Accademia, even coaxing The Dream of Saint Ursula from its wall to copy in a quiet studio onsite. Proust, saw these same halls as the crossroads of art and lived experience, memory and myth, sainted mothers and society dinner parties. Marcel’s pursuit of beauty across the city’s shimmering surfaces and submerged depths—intertwined with a deeper homecoming: a reunion with his mother.
In The Fugitive, their Venice sojourn aligns the mourning mother and the mourning son in a fragile symmetry of tenderness and loss. Grief transmutes into vision; the mother’s sorrow becomes a mirror in which time is reborn, her face suddenly lit with “the respectful and enthusiastic fervour of the old woman in Carpaccio’s St. Ursula.”
Thus, Venice—suspended eternally between shimmer and subsidence—serves as the perfect solvent for this alchemy: in its labyrinthine canals, the narrator rediscovers his mother’s love, transmuting loss into luminous art through the redemptive grace of perception.
Marcel was particularly interested in Veronese’s paintings, likening The Feast at the House of Levi, the supper Veronese had trouble convincing the inquisition to see as a religious occasion, to a Verdurin dinner party, like when the Polish sculptor Ski calls for fruit and wine “there, against the sunset, it will be a beautiful Veronese” to which Madam Verdurin retorts “It will be almost as much.”
Veronese defended his drunken German mercenaries, dwarves and other oddities as artistic license,“We painters take the same liberties the poets and madmen take.” In the post-war salons of Proust’s novel, banning Wagner’s “Boche music” became a secular inquisition, a litmus test as rigid as the Venetian tribunal that grilled Veronese in 1573. Where the Holy Office demanded doctrinal purity in paint, wartime France demanded patriotic purity in music—and both turned art into evidence of treason.
We linger over Venice as seen by its native painters: Gentile Bellini’s Procession in St. Mark’s Square; Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe Altarpiece, where saints are arrayed in lucid geometry and soft, melodic angels reappear amid architecture that echoes St. Mark’s itself—now with St. Francis beckoning us across the threshold of the sacred; Giorgione’s enigmatic Tempest (c. 1506–1508), with its stormy landscape and mysterious figures, hangs near the artist’s rare surviving fresco fragment from the Fondaco dei Tedeschi facade (1508). Though not on view, it was Carpaccio’s The Healing of a Madman (or The Miracle of the Cross at the Ponte di Rialto), whose costumes inspired Fortuny and, through him, stirred Marcel.
We end the afternoon walking slowly along the Zattere promenade, the air soft with sea salt, the light slanting over the Giudecca Canal. The boats rocked gently in their moorings. Venice moved — but slowly, like memory shifting in a dream. At Hotel La Calcina, once Ruskin’s own residence, we watched the sunset, where the Grand Canal opened wide and quiet. In the fading gold, the rooftops turned to silhouettes. We sipped an aperitivo and imagined Ruskin at this very spot, poring over sketches, Proust perhaps passing in a gondola below, eyes drinking in the same view.
Dinner at La Bitta, a restaurant familiar from past visits, always brings warmth and simplicity. After the emotional richness of the day, the food grounds you.
Venice at night feels suspended. Like the surface of a still canal, it reflected more than it revealed. We walked back through narrow calli, past shuttered shops, and sleeping campi. Introspective, we consider a heartbroken Marcel walking through the narrow Venetian alleys in search of recapturing the romantic in an idolized city. The bells tolled nine. We were already dreaming
