Fragments of the Venetian Discourse
Fragments of the Venetian Discourse

Summary/Abstract: It was probably Henry James who was one of the first admirers of Venice to distinctly draw attention to the fact that the veritable building material of the town is neither sand, stone nor water but something much more powerful: light, conceived as materia prima: The light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with all respect to Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, the greatest artist of them all. You should see in places the material with which it deals—slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea and sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred nameless local reflections, and then to fling the clear tissue against every object of vision. More than a hundred years later, the phenomenal Watermark by Brodsky contained a distant reflection of that observation, albeit this time in a more concrete form. Brodsky made an observant remark about the particular variant of Venetian light: The winter light in this city! It has the extraordinary property of enhancing your eye’s power of resolution to the point of microscopic precision [...]. It carries no warmth or energy, having shed them and left them behind somewhere in the universe or in the nearby cumulus. It’s particles’ only ambition is to reach an object and make it, big or small, visible. What is the light mentioned in those two fragments, how is it comprehended? Quite certainly it is not merely a physical quality. It is no longer ordinary electromagnetic radiation, but possesses the power of extracting things out of non-being. To put it in stronger terms: it has the power to create the world and render it visible. This gesture changes things fundamentally: it takes the conceit of light out of the space of physical description and strict measurable parameters and introduces it into curious space with properties that only partly succumb to rational description.

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