Free Your Mind! (eBook)

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VENICE

Before considering the career of Tinto Brass, we should remember that he is Venetian: from a city with its own cultural traditions that, in historical terms, only recently became part of Italy. His family trace their ancestry back to the lands on the eastern side of the Adriatic, which, for centuries, were part of the Hapsburg domains. It is uncertain whether they were ethnically Slav or German. They may even have originally been Italian, only to be subsequently ‘Slavicised’ or ‘Germanised’ during the numerous shifts of political control in that area. What is clear is that by the mid-nineteenth century his great-grandfather, Michele Brass, was resident in Gorizia (in German, Görz) where he was active in dissident political circles. He identified as Italian and was an ‘irredentist’, one of the many Italian-speaking citizens of Austria-Hungary who wanted the area they lived in to secede and become part of Italy.

Considering oneself Italian then, as now, did not imply being part of a homogenous culture that radiated outwards from Rome. In fact, identifying specifically with Venice was perfectly compatible with having roots in the north and east of the Adriatic, as these were areas that had once been part of the aristocratic city republic. Being Venetian, for instance, meant having a different, and in some ways more cosmopolitan, history compared to those who considered themselves Neapolitan, Sardinian or Sicilian. The prominence of the city dated back to 1082 when it was granted tax-free trading privileges throughout the Byzantine Empire. With the benefit of this concession, a string of Venetian settlements, ports and fortresses were established through Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus which combined with the city’s easy access to the Alpine passes into northern Europe gave it a significant share, for centuries, of trade with China, India and Japan. Because of this network of territories, trading bases and trading arrangements, Venice enjoyed world power status for approximately four hundred years. It accrued much wealth and contained a diverse population, including a significant Jewish community, famed for their residence in ‘the ghetto’. After 1453, the advance of Islam through Europe gradually eroded this position, and with the fall of Rhodes in 1522, Venice ceased to control trade with the east. But even after this the city remained a useful mid-range power, and an important player in coalitions against the Ottoman Empire. The Venetian navy took part in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and it fought alongside Austria and Poland in 1684.

Venice’s existence as a separate state ended in 1797 when the city and its surviving possessions were traded by Napoleon with Austria, in an arrangement that saw Austrian Flanders (Belgium) become part of France. Confirmed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Austrian control of Venice was noted for its suppression of Italian political aspirations, a policy that united a great many of those of Italian descent in a hatred of the Hapsburg regime. Risings that attempted to restore Venetian rule, either locally, or across its former Adriatic territories, or that even aimed at a broader ‘Italian’ unity, were suppressed in 1821, 1830 and 1848. The city failed too to profit from the 1859 conflict between France, Sardinia and Austria and, with its immediate surroundings, only became part of Italy (created as a state in 1861) after 1866 when, despite experiencing defeats on land and sea, Italy successfully allied itself with Prussia against Austria. Under the terms of the Treaty of Vienna, which confirmed Venice would henceforth be part of Italy, Italy was obliged to abandon any future claims to parts of Istria and Dalmatia that contained a large Italian population. These remained within Austria, and because of this, ‘irredentism’ there was strengthened. Most Italian citizens of what was now called Austria-Hungary identified strongly with Venetian culture: its distinct dialect, much used in Italian theatre comedies as the coarse language of common people, its annual carnival with elaborate disguises, costumes and masks (an event banned in Venice under Austrian rule) and its immense artistic tradition, personified by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Canaletto and many lesser-known figures.

This was the world that Michele Brass lived in, shaping both his political views, and those of his son, Italico.(1) Born in 1870, Italico proved to be very talented at painting. He trained as an artist in Munich under Karl Raupp from 1887 and then in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens from 1891, where he won bronze medals at the Exposition Universelle and at the Salon. Shortly after this he married Lina Vigdoff, a Russian medical student from Odessa, and settled with her in Venice. It was propitious timing. The first Biennale was staged that year, and quickly became a national and international event, superseding the gatherings of artists, architects and writers that had previously taken place at the Caffè Florian. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Venetian art was undergoing a revival. This was led by Ippolito Caffi (who died at the Battle of Lissa in 1866 whilst serving as a war artist) and galleries across Europe began exhibiting the work of painters like Eugene de Blaas (like Brass, an Austrian) and Guglielmo Ciardi. Like Ciardi, Italico Brass painted in a post-impressionist style and, once he had the funds to do so, assembled his own art collection.

His reputation spread and in 1899 one of his works was purchased by King Umberto I of Italy. In 1907 another, The Procession Returning from the Island of San Michele, inspired the Ezra Pound poem ‘Per Italico Brass’. Resident, like Italico Brass, in the Dorsoduro area of Venice, Pound spent 4 months in the city in 1908, during which he self-published A Lume Spento, his first collection of verse. What appears to have attracted him to Brass’s picture was the way it fell stylistically between different schools, representative neither of impressionism nor of photographic realism. To be noticed by Pound, who was only 23 then, may not have seemed of much significance at the time, but in the years that followed, with Pound championing a revolution in literature via his enthusiasm and support for TS Eliot and James Joyce this would have been no bad thing. Nor, after 1924 when he returned to Italy from Paris, would Pound’s later gravitation to support for Mussolini.(2)

Granted a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1910, Italico Brass’s reputation continued to grow. Supported by the journalist and critic Ugo Ojetti (another irredentist, and subsequently a signatory of the 1925 Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals) his work was exhibited at the 1911 International Art Exhibition in Rome and later toured as part of a travelling show that visited Budapest, Berlin and Paris. In 1914, a solo exhibition in Paris followed, organised by the legendary art dealer and gallery owner Georges Petit, who some years earlier had been one of the first promoters of the Impressionists. After this his work was shown in Buenos Aires and San Francisco, where both he and Ciardi won gold medals, Brass for the picture Il Ponte Sulla Laguna.

His ascent into the orbit of Georges Petit took place against a background of monumental international events. War broke out between Russia, France, Britain, Belgium and Serbia on one side, and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other in August 1914, with the Ottoman Empire added to the conflict later that year. As an Austro-Hungarian citizen, Italico Brass now found himself, theoretically, an enemy of Petit. Fortunately, Italy, his adopted country, although it was part of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, declared itself neutral. By March 1915 it had cancelled its treaty obligations, switched sides, and sensing the opportunity to make territorial gains, had declared war on Austria-Hungary (May 1915) and the Ottoman Empire (August 1915). It refrained from tangling with Germany until August 1916. Willingly granted Italian citizenship, Brass followed the footsteps of Ippolito Caffi half a century earlier, and was appointed an official war artist by the Italian high command. Posted to the Duke of Aosta’s Third Army he was given the task of documenting military events on the Isonzo front. For the next three years he took part in the various advances and retreats in that area, keeping a diario pittorico, and emerged unscathed to be awarded an exhibition of his works, dedicated to Venice, in the Galleria Pesaro in Milan in 1918.(3)

With peace, and a considerable income from the sales of his work, Italico Brass bought the Scuola Vecchia dell ‘Abbazia di Santa Maria della Misericordia (the Old School of the Convent of Saint Mary of Grace) in the Cannaregio district of Venice. More than six hundred years old, by the early twentieth century it was in an advanced state of disrepair. He began an extensive restoration, using it to store and display his large art collection, whilst commissioning additions, such as a round tower, an oriental-style balcony and some galleries inside the main hall as well as a complete redesign of the walled garden and its Gothic colonnade. For the remainder of his life, Italico Brass divided his time between painting, and being a connoisseur of sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian and Venetian art. He also participated fully in the municipal affairs of Venice as a member of the Commission on Public Buildings, the Board of Directors for Venice’s Municipal Museums and the Scientific Committee that prepared the exhibitions for Titian (1935),...