In 1882, long before The Wings of the Dove, Henry James praises Venice as basically a wonderfully enchanting outdoor museum. "All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance upon the clouds." It's true, and this is the enduring appeal of the place. And a place is really what you have to call it. Venice isn't a city, not in the sense of Paris or New York or London or Rome, where a dynamic present menaces the traces of the past. It isn't really an island in the traditional sense, though it's surrounded by water. It is merely an artificial land mass. You can't even run there, and I am sure the native Venetians, whoever they are, have high BMIs and are slack and underexercised even if they are cultured. Venice invented allegorical painting of civic history, not gym class, lacrosse, or football. But Henry James was pretty out shape too. I don't fault him for that--it's critically passe to evaluate authors based on their physical fitness. My advisors frown upon it.
What I love about doughy Uncle Henry's description is that Venice's museal qualities endear him. The idea of the museum, I think, has all sorts of bad connotations: artifice, artificiality, false disctinctions between art and life, snobbery, boredom, canonization, death, Woody Allen, interpretation, bathrooms, coatrooms, tearooms, fatigue, curation, incoherent placards, stealthy and anonymous farts, conspicuous and concussive farts that add a soundtrack to the viewing, or an olfactory supplement to a Dutch master or a Pollock. Tammi guessed that the word has to do with the muses, and the OED confirmed her etymological sense. "In the ancient Hellenic world: a building connected with or dedicated to the Muses or the arts inspired by them; a university building, esp. that established at Alexandria by Ptolemy." Then it is no wonder that Venice produces so much wonderful writing, that people return to this museum for sustenence.
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