Schlagwort-Archive: Venice

2007: The Facsimile of Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana

Commented by: Matilde Cartolari

In 1563 the rear wall of the refectory of S. Giorgio Maggiore’s monastery in Venice was decorated with the large-scale painting The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese. Taken to Paris after the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, the painting was never returned. In 2007 the bare wall of the refectory in S. Giorgio Maggiore was filled with an extremely accurate digital facsimile of the missing painting held in Paris. Such replacement challenges our notions of authorship, uniqueness and originality, while indirectly testifying to the sense of loss created by the displacement itself.

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1815: The Return of the horses of St. Mark in Venice

Commented by: Matilde Cartolari

The bronze horses of Saint-Mark’s church in Venice have a long story of appropriations and dispossessions. Taken as war-booty from Constantinople in 1204, they embodied the power of the Venetian Republic for more than five centuries, before being moved to Paris after the French conquest. Their return to Venice in 1815 was celebrated as an act of munificence and generosity by the restored Austrian government.→ Continue reading