Everywhere one looks, one sees the Salute: from the hotel, across the canal, from where we had lunch, from the terrace where we had dinner: grand and majestic and slightly larger than life with its spiral volutes, designed by Baldassare Longhena, who was small and dapper and lacking in self confidence. But I’ve never actually seen it close up, so this morning I walked across the Accademia bridge and through the back streets of Dorsoduro to see it close up:-
We had lunch in the Palazzetto Pisani in a first-floor room on the Grand Canal.
This is the façade of the Palazzetto:-
We arrived by water taxi:-
After an afternoon wandering through pavilions in the Giardini which were variously political, it was a pleasure to walk into the Japanese Pavilion which is about pure visual pleasure, a complex piece of blood red lattice work holding up an infinite collection of keys: if symbolic, not political, but about life experiences sublimated:-
We visited the workshop of Luigi Bevilacqua, which still has fourteen looms from the eighteenth century where they handweave velvets, damasks and brocades to historic patterns. It may just be preserved as a historic relic, but what a relic:-
We went into the backstreets of Cannaregio to visit Orsoni, an old established industrial manufacturer of mosaics, with an amazing library of mosaic glass, every colour except fuschia:-
I was pleased to discover that I still had my original copy of Hugh Honour’s Companion Guide to Venice in my travel cupboard, not the first edition of 1965, but the second edition of 1967, which still has a dutiful copperplate inscription in it that it was given to me by my Aunt Margaret in 1967, presumably for Christmas. This confirms what I had always slightly doubted that my first visit to Venice was in Easter 1968 when I was allowed to stay a couple of nights on my own in a hotel behind the Accademia and explored the city – the Carpaccios in S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the Colleoni monument, the Accademia itself – with the Companion Guide in hand.
I thought I should pay my respects to S. Marco and to hear the band play at Florian’s, but I spent my time instead examining the sculptural decoration on the Procuratie Nuove, begin by Scamozzi in 1586 when the Empire was already in decline:-
I’m not sure that I want to say where we had lunch because it feels like an invasion of privacy: only to say that it’s very nice to be able to visit an unrestored Tudor house, one room deep, with exemplary brick pilasters and remote from the twentieth century apart from the distant noise of the dual carriageway:-
I love the campus at UEA with Denys Lasdun’s strange space age ziggurats rising out of the parkland and Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre still astonishingly modern in the way that it combines large-scale, semi-industrial space with the intimacy of examining small-scale objects from different visual cultures arranged informally in vitrines across the floor plane:-
We went on a quick day trip to the Sainsbury Centre to see the exhibition Francis Bacon and the Masters: a wonderful exhibition not just because it helps to demonstrate Bacon’s astonishing visual eclecticism. It’s a completely convincing demonstration of the way his imagination fed on imagery of past art, not only Velázquez, but Titian and Van Gogh and Soutine and Hellenistic sculpture, never copying, but always adapting pose and composition. It’s also a wonderful exhibition for the wealth and range of work lent by the Hermitage, which Bacon never actually visited, but which is able to supply examples of every sort of art that Bacon might have devoured.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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