Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass 1250-1550.

Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass 1250-1550 New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. 40 b/w + 160 color pls. 240 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-300-08135-9.

Hill's Venetian Colour is even broader in its range than the subtitle suggests. The fruit of much time in Venice over a significant period, it is a rich meditation on the interaction of the varied media of Venetian art, architecture, and culture with the conditions of light and sea that are particular to La Serenissima. While the text could be read as building toward an analysis of late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento painted color as increasingly tonal, the importance of the volume derives precisely from its lack of focus on the standard fare of art history: architecture, sculpture, painting. These are present in abundance, but on equal footing are: goblets, embroidered silks, maiolica plates, bookbindings, bottle glass windows, lace. One of the most informative sections is on brick pavements and terrazzo flooring (74-81). Hill is interested in the patterning of the bricks and how the patterns interact with light (fig. 95); this is his approach to mouldings and stone arches as well. It is through his own photographs (beautifully reproduced with the help of a Getty grant) that his point is often made. While the prose is somewhat uneven, moving from poetic passages to straight forward information to occasional lack of clarity, the photographs, showing a detail of mosaic in afternoon light (fig. 75) or a brick and Istrian stone facade in midday sun (fig. 110), are consistently eloquent.

In this multimedia approach, Hill is aided by the recent conservation of many facades, paintings, and mosaics, and he cites the published conservation material of such key figures in Venice as Lorenzo Lazzarini. There are some omissions. While Hill notes (with reference to a conservation report of 1980) that the Porta della Carta was gilded and painted, he does not refer to Vasco Fassina's published work (1994) that documents from tiny residues the placement of vermilion, ultramarine, and gold leaf on the facade of the Ca' d'Oro. Descriptions of paintings sometimes disconcertingly mix specific pigments such as lapis [lazzuli] and red lake with descriptive adjectives such as "oatmeal" (138). This reviewer would have welcomed somewhat fuller endnotes, particularly in regard to technical data.

Hill's easy shift from painted glass object or embroidered silk to a real specimen is engaging, and while these confrontations are frankly offered as parallels, not meant as specific sources, they are instructive. They remind us that art is produced in a material, visual, and cultural ambient. The author weaves in many useful facts concerning technical processes, guild regulations, sumptuary laws, moments of historic visual change, such as the paving of the

campi. When Hill makes generalized direct connections, however, he tends to overstate his case. For example: "the mosaics of San Marco set the tone for the painterly achievements of Venetians in the sixteenth century"(55); "the invention of light-catching textures in the costume prepared the ground for broken, painterly brushwork in the era of Giorgione" (182). And: "exploitation of the mark [brushstroke] was due less to the rise of oil painting than to the interaction in Venice of the early sixteenth century of varied media -- textiles... prints, mosaic and oil painting" (206).

On a theological point Hill seems less well informed than in cultural history. In describing an Annunciation (the moment of the Incarnation) he makes the common error of confusing the Incarnation (Christ's conception) with the Immaculate Conception (Mary's conception free of original sin) (113).

The theme of water -- and the related effects of waves, transparency, and reflection -- recurs throughout the text, in reference to such varied materials as mosaic, silk, satin, glass. In a nice point regarding watered silk, Hill notes: "in Venice to work such silk was known as 'dar onda all'amuer' -- 'to make waves on the sea"' (184). In the following passage, the reflected light of Venice is connected effectively with issues of color: "If Leonardo's High Renaissance art was founded upon conscious mastery of chiaroscuro, Titian's stemmed from daily experience of contre-jour. It may be that when Dolce chose to describe the essential element of colouring as a contendimento between light and dark, he was intuitively picking up on the dynamic of Venetian contre-jour by choosing a word that implies contest more than contrast" (210).

The convincing message of this beautifully produced book is that "Venetian colour" grows from the physical environment and cultural context, including the rich variety of materials available in seafaring Venice and the techniques developed in their use. This complex ambiance creates the color -- and texture-- of the Venetian experience.