19 September 2010

Interlaced Circles

I wrote earlier about the inscription on the facade of Ca' Dario.  This entry is about the interlaced circles on the facade, three of them.

This is what four of the top names in Venetian architecture have to say about them:
  1. No house front is richer in colored stones, and this has often been pointed out as a consequence of Dario's years in Byzantium.  . . . Rather than Byzantium, it may instead reflect Dario's ego.  If he wanted to make a pretty show, he succeeded.
  2. . . . Cima da Conegliano's Healing of Anianus . . . the polychrome marble intarsias on the building are remarkably similar to those on the facade of Palazzo Dario.  Giovanni Dario wanted for his house what he had seen in the work of this impressionable painter; he wanted freedom of invention untrammeled by the rules and limitations of architectural dogma.
  3. Little is known of his earlier missions to Cairo . . . but while there he seems to have noticed the "telephone-dial" motif that he chose to adorn his own house.   . . .  The Venetian masons, unfamiliar with the Egyptian precedent, set the marble discs in their interlaced Byzantinizing borders by reference to local cosmatesque mosaic pavements such as that of San Marco.
  4. The architect may also have had descriptions of byzantine palaces in mind, . . .

We don't have any documentation for Dario's restoration of the little Gothic house he was given on the Grand Canal, but various things make 1486 look about right.  After he returned from Constantinople in 1485, Dario was treasurer of the scuola of S. Giovanni Evangelista which Pietro Lombardo was redecorating in 1485. During the 80s, Lombardo was also supervising the construction and ornamentation of the Miracoli

So it would not have been unlikely for him to have worked with Dario on turning the little Gothic house into a jewel box.  The Lombardo new constructions were highly symmetrical, Venetian Gothic wasn't, and apart from the asymmetry, the slanting slightly-drunk walls show the medieval fashion for building Venetian walls wider at the bottom than at the top.

As you can see, there has been a remarkable amount of extravagant prose expended in an attempt to explain Dario's choice of ornamentation, and especially for the interlaced circles.  They are infinitely pleasing, but they are no more Byzantine than they are late Roman and Venice was always a part of the Byzantine world.  We find these circles all over the place in the 5th and 6th centuries, and they reappeared in the late 12th century as far away as Westminster Abbey 

when the Cosmati set the fashions for church ornamentation a century and a half before that Egyptian "precedent."  S. Marco was nothing if not fashionable, and they ended up all through the rebuilt 13th C church in explorations of the variety of ways of interlacing circles -- on crosses antique even then,

in the treasury,

on carvings over the doors, 

on the floor of the narthex, 

on the floor by the pulpits.  

And on the south side, facing you when you come up from the water.

The Cretan, Giovanni Dario, was in love with Venice and called her quella cità sancta.  Ego? He had pulled Venice out of lethal situations, twice, with the Ottomans, and had several times worked wonders in Cairo.  Venice thanked him with what has become everyone's favorite house in Venice.  It seems silly to go to so much trouble for explanations -- Byzantine (the lack of survivals in Constantinople make this anyone's guess), Cairo?

a painting (a painting done several years after Ca' Dario)?  Dario saw  interlaced circles all over S. Marco and all over most other Italian churches he visited.  He saw them on the Miracoli.  Why would he not have chosen Venetian motifs for this house he dedicated the Spirit of the City?



There are more details here.

1 comment:

  1. I have recently learned that the rondel with interlaced circles I illustrate on the south facade of S. Marco was not put there until 1500 or so. This means Dario would not have seen it, but I don't think its presence is essential to the argument.


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