Travel: English historian and Byzantine specialist, John Julius Norwich, presents Venice through the eyes of some of its 19th century visitors, for whom its magical combination of water, light, colour, art and architecture made it a place of reverie and fantasy, writes Helen Meany
Mary McCarthy identified the problem that besets every visitor to Venice: "No word can be spoken in this city that has not been said before," she wrote in Venice Observed. "The modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience."
While the prolific English historian and Byzantine specialist, John Julius Norwich, has certainly added his share to the torrent of words written about Venice, he has concentrated on understanding the city's history rather than attempting to capture its chimerical beauty in a wholly original way. His single volume, A History of Venice, combining two earlier works, is an authoritative, lucid and engaging account of the rise and fall of "the most serene" Republic of Venice (La Serenissima), which lasted for more than 1,000 years.
In his latest book, he briefly traces the city's dismal fortunes after 1797, when it passed into the hands of Napoleon's army. The French plundered its art treasures shamelessly before handing it over to the Austrians, who incorporated it into the Hapsburg Empire, under whose rule it remained, in a state of inertia, until the creation of the unified state of Italy in 1866.
In tribute to the procession of foreign artists, writers, connoisseurs and adventurers who were captivated by Venice during the 19th century, Norwich presents the city through the eyes of some of its most famous visitors, for whom its magical combination of water, light, colour, art and architecture made it a place of reverie and fantasy. He draws on letters, travelogues and fictional writings for a series of chapters evoking the Venetian sojourns of Byron, Ruskin, Henry James, Whistler, Sargent, Wagner and Browning. He also includes less well known figures such as Browning's son, Pen, who restored the palazzo Ca' Rezzonico (now a museum) before succumbing to what Henry James called "palazzo madness" - "almost as alarming, or as convulsive, as an earthquake, which indeed it essentially resembles".
James definitely has all the best lines here. His observations of the city and its devotees in his copious correspondence, in Italian Hours, The Wings of a Dove and The Aspern Papers, ensure that the chapter covering his residencies at the sumptuous Palazzo Barbaro and elsewhere is by far the most absorbing. It includes an account of the suicide of his cousin, the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, and his melancholy task of burying her clothes at sea: he described them resurfacing in the lagoon "like vast black balloons".
These biographical vignettes are interrupted by a chapter giving a moving account of the city's single moment of political upheaval in this period: the failed revolution of 1848-9, led by the courageous Venetian, Daniele Manin, and the Dalmatian scholar, Niccolo Tommaseo. The vividness of Norwich's treatment of this uprising and the Austrians' retaliatory bombardment, of the cholera epidemic and starvation that brought the city to its knees, displays his narrative and synoptic gifts at their best - and gives us a rare glimpse of ordinary Venetians, rather than the perspective of the expatriate, Anglo-American colony. It also shows up the other chapters as somewhat fusty excursions into well-trodden territory, as though Norwich feels compelled to continue researching and writing about the city he loves, but might be running out of fruitful avenues.
There are, nevertheless, some memorable anecdotes and details here: even the obligatory chapter on Byron, whom Norwich detests, is enlivened by a humorous description of the Romantic poet's struggle to learn Armenian from a monk - in between his better known Venetian antics such as jumping into the Grand Canal in evening dress, winning swimming races across the lagoon and preying sexually on servant women of all kinds.
And, while Byron's grandiose preface to the monk's Armenian dictionary suggests that he was no great loss to Near Eastern scholarship, his excursion into philology was infinitely better than the poetry of a fellow English Venetophile, the historian Horatio Brown, whose verse includes the lines: "Love's Bank is large, fear not an overdraft,/ While youth is Cashier and the Banker daft". Reams of bad poetry were inspired by the gondoliers' rhythms and the sinuous gliding of the gondolas - Shelley's "funereal barks". For Richard Wagner, who disdained all the Italian music he heard in Venice, the "melancholy dialogue" of the gondoliers' lament was extraordinarily affecting - as it had been 60 years earlier for his compatriot, Goethe. The "poetry of this simple song" influenced a phrase in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, most of which was composed in Venice.
Wagner's death in Venice shortly preceded that of Browning, who had described the composer as "a great genius but greater curmudgeon . . . a monster of peacock-like vanity". Monsters and eccentrics of one kind or another dominate these pages, their foibles genially recounted, but not indulged, by Norwich. He has no illusions about the myopic fanaticism of John Ruskin, acknowledging that the influential Victorian author of the "majestic" and "unreadable" The Stones Of Venice had no understanding of architecture but concentrated only on the minutiae of decoration and the facades of buildings. The entire Renaissance was dismissed by Ruskin as "Heathenism"; he valued only the Gothic style and was also violently anti-Catholic, somehow managing to recast the medieval Venetians as proto-Protestant.
Nevertheless, Lord Norwich, who for nearly 30 years was chairman of the Venice in Peril fund, gives credit to Ruskin for his early awareness of the endangered state of the sinking city, concluding that now "we need him more than ever". It's a generous tribute to one "great Venetian" from another.
Helen Meany is a freelance journalist and editor
Paradise of Cities: Venice and its Nineteenth-Century Visitors. By John Julius Norwich, Viking, £20