Portrait of the weekCultureTwo Venetian Ladies on a Terrace, Carpaccio (c1475)
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Artist: Vittore Carpaccio, active by 1490 and dead in 1525 or 1526, is the definitive painter of Venice. The most anthropologically detailed artist of the Italian Renaissance, he painted the city, its houses, canals and faces - as in the meticulous depiction of a working household in his Birth of the Virgin (1504-8), which has much in common with northern European art.
There is a grace, joy, colour, life and a panoramic love of a unique, watery urban world in Carpaccio's painting that is pure Venice. His perspective on city life was tolerant, and he cherished the immersion of the individual within the city's turbulent excess, as seen in The Healing of the Possessed Man (1494). The story is confined to a corner of the painting; our eyes, meanwhile, wander to the Rialto, where gaudily dressed gondoliers row richly robed passengers over still black water. Around this graceful scene crowd gothic palaces; above, laundry dangles; on the canalside, merchants are congregating. At once crowded and elegant, Carpaccio's art is an irresistible portrait of Venice's floating world.
Subject: The women in this painting have been identified by some art historians as courtesans (a recognised social group in Renaissance Venice, celebrated in paintings such as Titian's Flora) and by others as noblewomen; they sit, after all, on the roof of a palazzo. The mystery has been deepened by the discovery that this painting, now in Venice, was originally the bottom half of a larger picture. The other half, known as Hunting in the Lagoon , is in the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. There are traces of hinges on both, suggesting that the original wooden panel - juxtaposing the male world of the hunt with the female world of the garden terrace - was a painted door.
Distinguishing features: This is a flagrantly artful composition in the near doubling of the two women, with their ornate hairstyles and bosoms exposed by off-the-shoulder dresses, and in the terrace on which they sit so monumentally. Realistic details are suspended magically in a harmonious visual music, a pattern of colour and form: the page-boy climbing between the marble pillars, the doves perching on the parapet, the big dog chewing at a cord, a letter held down by its paw, a pair of discarded wedge shoes lying next to the peahen on the salmon-pink floor. No wonder scholars suggest various allegorical readings of this constellation of objects.
The balance of signs, though, probably adds up to a celebration of marriage. The peahen was emblematic of happy marriage; dogs, then as now, symbolised fidelity. The sensuousness of the women was a desired quality of aristocratic Venetian wives. The way one leans on the balustrade, dangling her handkerchief, implies afternoon relaxation, perhaps torpor. If this is the world of the Venetian noblewoman, it is both rich and sensuously dull - there is nothing to do but wait for the returning hunter.
And yet it is the formal power of the painting - almost abstract in its shape, colour and composition - that makes it live after more than five centuries. Carpaccio's Venice was a city where life was art.
Inspirations and influences: Carpaccio influenced Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, who perfected oil painting in 16th-century Venice.
Where is it? Museo Civico Correr, Venice.
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