Venice: Hub of our world

IF he wrote about the tribulations of turnip growing or the life story of, say, Noel Dempsey, Peter Ackroyd would still produce a bestseller.

The author of a masterful history of London, and other works of originality on subjects such as Chaucer and Dickens, has a style near unparalleled, an evocative, sweeping camera of an imagination that nothing escapes.

Does anyone research as well as him? A short paragraph seems distilled from ten scholarly tomes. So what does he make out of a story crammed with historic events, with discoveries that changed society, with stories wondrous and weird, with the epic lives of great artists and great dilettantes? Is it stretching a point to say it is the story of humanity itself? Ackroyd, not given to excess, might concur.

Venice begins with the imagined fleeing of the Veneti tribe from barbarian hordes. They could only go south, to the sea. Establishing wooden shacks built on long staves driven into the lagoon beds, they formed communities. Other clusters of houses were joined to the core by bridges. Shallow waters were filled in with rock, and earth brought on boats from the mainland. A village became a town, which became a city. The nominal date for the founding of the city is 421, but Ackroyd speculates it could have been a century earlier. The city became an empire. Venetians became know for outstanding shipbuilding. Trade flourished and mercantilism was the watchword.

The author cogently argues that the origins of capitalism are in Venice. Its sailors and merchants tagged on to the crusades, not from religious zeal, but because the markets of the Levant were ripe for plucking. Crete and Cyprus were two of the city state’s major conquests, as well as much of the Dalmatian coast. Constant warfare nearly bankrupted the city on several occasions, and, when it didn’t, provided it with largesse to decorate its palaces and churches. Venice fought and conquered Byzantium, and its main domestic rival, Genoa. Though detached from the Italian consciousness, Venice was incorporated into the concept of Italy.

The book is less chronological than thematic, a structure that lends itself to repetition on a minuscule scale. There are chapters on beliefs and customs, trade and war, myths and music, and, of course, art. Ackroyd argues that some of this transient, shifting environment appeared in the character of the Venetians over the centuries. Its people were insular, untrusting, the mask that became synonymous with the city’s festivals appropriate to their character. A woman shopping in the market wears a mask, so do her two infants. Tintoretto was one of the most famous artists born in the city, who also contributed to the reinventing of the city, by itself.

The book is replete with superb colour plates of great palaces, churches and people. It has several reproductions – Titian, Bellini, many with the quirkiest of comments: in Venice, oil paint can be liquid music.

In the end, the city became a haven for tourists, but it has long been like that. The population is falling drastically, there is always the threat from the sea, but Venice endures. So does Ackroyd.