“…her father had once explained the theory of heaven to her like this.
Heaven was all the great Venetian paintings, he had said. But some had been
lost in fires or otherwise destroyed, and many had been dispersed around the
world. The surviving pieces of Venetian heaven were hopelessly scattered, and
we couldn’t ransom them. So, his daughter declared and laughed, she’d had the
idea of fitting a few bits together. Not knowing what to do with herself, she’d
begun to do that. She’d been to Dresden, had stood before Giorgione’s Venere dormiente. She had visited
Paris for the pictures the French had stolen, London for a ceiling from Ca’
Contarini….Not a seat of judgement and of justice, her father’s kingdom of God.
Come to that, not a kingdom. A marine
republic, no? Anyway, just hues, lines, shimmering of a lost dignity and
loveliness one could try to piece together in one’s head.”
I read William Riviere’s By the
Grand Canal (Grove Press, reprinted 2005) a few months ago, and I enjoyed
his detailed, atmospheric and loving descriptions of Venice.
Just before Christmas, I managed to
track down a copy of A Venetian Theory of Heaven. The novel follows Venetian-born heiress,
Amedea Lezze. Married to English architect Guy Ashmanhaugh, and mother to their young son Corrado,
Amedea is restless and bored with the domesticity of her life.
She meets a newly arrived French lecturer, Gerard Charry, and finds a means of escape.
Amedea leaves her
family in Venice and rents an idyll in Tuscany which she shares with
Gerard. And yet, even with him she is restless, and in pursuit of occupation
and diversion, Amedea remembers her father’s theory of heaven and sets off on
small trips around Europe in search of ‘lost’ Venetian paintings.
I am entranced by this ‘Venetian
theory of heaven’, and Riviere’s descriptions of Amedea’s travels in search of
the paintings set me off on my own detective hunt over the past few days.
What does Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus look like? Where is it?
Which pictures did the French steal? Where is the ceiling in London?
A Venetian Theory of Heaven – Part 2
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