Episode Highlights
Episode 1 - The City as Architecture
Highlights
• Venice features many styles of architecture: Byzantine (7th-13th c.), Gothic (13th-14th c.), Renaissance (14th-15th c.), Baroque (16th-17th c.), and Rococo (18th c.).
• Time, climate change, and regular floods constantly pose a threat to Venetian buildings.
• Many buildings embody the Venetian concern for artifice and outward appearance. Often, beautiful façades do not reflect the structures behind them, which may be cold, cramped, or even crumbling.
• Many observers have associated Venice with death, decay, and dissolution; the buildings evince the splendor and “sweet melancholy” of transience.
Questions to Consider
- In your opinion, what makes Venetian architecture unique?
- How do you feel about the tremendous effort and expense required to preserve Venice’s architecture?
- Why do you think Venice’s beauty carries such strong associations with death?
Episode 2 - The City as Art
Highlights
• With soft light reflecting off the water and sightlines resembling those in theatrical sets, Venice has always attracted artists.
• Venetian artists developed a fast, seemingly improvisational style of painting known as prestezza.
• The Venetian conception of art as a communal enterprise, rather than an individual one, naturally springs from the city’s political, religious, and commercial life.
Questions to Consider
- Which of the artists or paintings shown in this episode affect you most powerfully? Why?
- As Ackroyd explains, after a fire destroyed the frescoes in the Doges’ Palace, late-16th-century artists resurrected lost symbols and invented a history of the city. How does art contribute to mythmaking in American culture? In other cultures?
Episode 3 - The City as Music
Highlights
• Venice has a long, rich association with music; it’s the birthplace of the madrigal, a center for religious composition, and a capital of opera.
• For four decades in the early 18th century, Antonio Vivaldi served as director, composer, and administrator of the choir at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian orphanage for girls. The exuberance, spontaneity, and spirituality of his music perfectly express the Venetian temperament.
Questions to Consider
- As you listen to the women of the Schola Pietatis Antonio Vivaldi, what particular characteristics of the music move you?
- Do you think Vivaldi ever felt a conflict between the spirituality of his priestly life and the artifice of opera and secular performances? If so, how do you imagine he reconciled the two?
Episode 4 - The City as Theatre
Highlights
• Through the centuries, Venice’s religious rituals and political governance have absorbed the theatricality of its operas, street performances, and stage plays.
• Historians trace the roots of opera to commedia dell’arte—a kind of street theatre with stock characters and improvised dialogue.
• During Carnival, everyday life becomes theatre. Historically, Carnival has allowed Venetians to temporarily adopt new identities, easing tensions among social classes and releasing social pressures.
Questions to Consider
- In what sense do the political and religious rituals of other cultures exhibit theatricality?
- How does Venetian Carnival differ from similar celebrations in New Orleans and elsewhere?
- How has this series changed or deepened your appreciation of Venice? What is your lasting impression of the city?
