The Most Original Modernist Painting in Venice

There certainly are a great number of noteworthy, deeply original paintings to see in Venice. You can find what I have identified elsewhere in COUNTERPUNCH as the first modernist work, Giorgione’s Tempest (1506). And in the churches and in the museums there are numberless Titians, Veronese, and Tintoretto’s, which constitute a visual feast that will exhaust even the most energetic traveler. And so, it may seem surprising that the work that has recently attracted my attention in Venice is by Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804). A notable figure, though hardly one of the most famous Venetian painters, he was the elder son of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), the most famous eighteenth-century Venetian painter. After youthful work in his father’s studio, he was renowned for his etchings. Giandomenico outlived the Venetian Republic, which died at the hands of Napoleon in 1797.

I am especially interested in just one of Giandomenico’s paintings, his Hawk with Pigeons, which is in Ca’Rezzonico, the palace now devoted to the museum of eighteenth-century Venice. I don’t know if he made any other similar works. The museum catalogue tells the story. Giandomenico’s paintings were painted between 1759 and 1797 for the family villa on the mainland. Then, in 1906, they were purchased by the city of Venice and transferred to this museum. On the back wall is permanently set what the catalogue nicely calls this “snapshot-like image”: Hawk Swooping onto the Flock of Sparrows in Slight. Originally installed on a ceiling, here it is on a wall. And a brief interpretation is offered:

It is impossible not to see in this painting an allusion to the empirical culture of the Enlightenment, where the sky is the space of the birds and not the home of ancient divinities.

Many of Giandomenico’s paintings show human figures suspended in the clouds.

Perhaps, then, I was especially attracted to this picture because I have been trying to make my way through a marvelous, but almost unreadable book, Hubert Damisch’s very academic treatise A Theory of /Cloud/. Toward a History of Painting (2002), which alerted me to the complex symbolic uses of clouds in old master painting. Damisch says:

Not only does the Cloud liberate those whom it supports from the laws of gravity, but it also shows how profane space may open onto another space, thereby imbuing the former with its truth.

That’s the case, I agree, when, for example, the Holy Virgin appears to rise upwards on clouds filled with putti. Look, for example, at another Venetian painting that interests me, Titian’s renowned Assumption (1516), in the Frari. But in Hawk, the sky-scene is secularized. In context, in Ca’Rezonnica, The Hawk appears a fluke, a break, as it were, of our modern aesthetic in the staid world of eighteenth-century painting.

We art critics learn to trust our intuitions, and so I was immediately taken by this painting, of all the works on display at Ca/Rezonnica, which inspired reflection. Usually, the skies in Giandomenico’s paintings are filled with human figures. Here, however, we have emptiness, as one often finds in very varied modernist paintings. In the works with monochrome backgrounds by Alex Katz or the blank panels Andy Warhol juxtaposed to his silkscreened portraits, for example, and, closer to Giandomenico’s time, in the background behind the murdered revolutionary in Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793), as written about two very different art writers, T. J. Clark and Thomas Crow, whose account I discussed recently in this journal. I am not suggesting that these very different artists were influenced by Giandomenico, but looking for aesthetic affinities. Contemporary painting is haunted by blankness. And so, any present-day artist would be proud to have made this painting. That was why it feels uncanny to see The Hawk in this Venetian museum, as if a modernist conception of the potentiality of depicted emptiness had wandered into the old regime. If you haven’t been to this museum, look it up on YouTube, which has some excellent displays of this setting. I’m not convinced by the museum catalogue claim that we find a hint of Enlightenment values here. This hawk is certainly an aggressive creature, ready to pounce on the pigeons. What has that to do with the political hopes of the Kantian Enlightenment? But we certainly do see that Giandomenico was a marvelously original observer.

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