Sunday 2nd November, Munich

Learning a language begins with a leap of faith, but also a gradual colouring of sound with meaning.

Walked in the gardens of the Schloss Nymphenberg. A clear sunny morning, all the leaves like drops of gold. A canal runs up to the Schloss, then continues behind it through the gardens, perfectly straight. It must be about two kilometres long. I enjoyed its straightness. These are days when the air is right, the weather cold and clear, and I am reminded of other days like this. I didn’t visit the Porcelain factory.

Staatsgalerie. Once again struck by Beckmann’s paintings. The graphic quality of German painting, so well-designed, and then Beckmann’s use of black, the only artist other than Picasso who could make it work as a pigment. Upstairs Oskar Kokoschka’s painting Venedig, with the ‘OK’ in the corner. He painted it visiting Venice for the first time, in 1924 — just over seventy years ago. A view from the Hotel Danielli, done in a mirror. He did one other view, in 1948, when he had paintings in the Biennale — what artist does that nowadays? Also spent time looking at Josef Scharl’s portrait of the painter Adolf Hartmann. The German habit of constructing figures with lots of patches and scribbles, bloating them with haptic excess. Evening to see Lost Highway with Wolf - a different sort of excess.

4th November

Another fine clear day. Bought a ticket for Venice, leaving Wednesday. Read and made notes on Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. Went to a friend of Andrea’s and we watched Lawrence of Arabia dubbed in German. A strange experience.

5th November

Failed to find a book on Venice at the Anglia bookshop on Schellingstrße. Failed to join the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Failed to read properly at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, (the Art History Institute housed in the former führerbau, Hitler’s headquarters, on Königsplatz in Munich). Failed to negotiate a crowded metro without audible frustration.

Succeeded in reading Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences, understanding where I could. Will have to write something about Panofsky to collect my thoughts. It’s all about the method - but a method designed around a specific problem rather than being an alien tool.

6th November

On the 9.20 from Munich to Verona. I shared a compartment with a ratty-looking Italian man, who brightened up as we crossed the Brenner and offered me a can of beer and a panini. He knew no English so we continued in amiable train-noise silence.

Inn Valley very beautiful, flat and verdant, as I remember from hitchhiking through in 1991. Tried to read all of Goethe’s journey from Carlsbad to Venice, from his Italian Journey. The way he communicates his joy at being in a new country is so touching , a naive yet moving identification of ‘first’ experiences. This is the first time he had seen the object of a poem written in latin - Lake Garda. I look out of the window but it is not there. I have no Latin.

No blizzards or rearing horses as we cross the Brenner Pass. Down into the Po Delta, change at Verona, and finally to Venice.

Venice is an island. Surprise as the train hit the Ponte della Liberta, like suddenly speeding out over the darkening sea. Sticks rising from the water, at slight angles, with elegant rippling reflections. I saw a line of these and followed them down to Venice itself, glistening in the dusk. Open the window and let the warm watery air flood the compartment.

Portents of rain as I walked into the town. My hotel near the station is expensive, and leaves me with 70,000 lira to live on for three days, about fifteen pounds, nowhere near enough.

By half past six when I set out on a walk around the town it was raining steadily. How happy I am to be here. Venice out of season but still warm, raining, dim and mysterious. Freedom just to explore for a few days. Absolutely nobody knows I am here apart from the people I pass on the street, and they do not care.

My eyes rove greedily around the vaults of San Marco, standing at the back as a Mass is conducted, admiring the glistening vaults. S. Giorgio Maggiore magical, lit-up from a distance across the canal. I get lost on the way back, stumbling on what looks like Canaletto’s Stonemason’s Yard.

7th November

Walked down the Ligna di Spagna to the station. A misty morning, still raining, but I am extraordinarily happy to see Venice at first light. I change my last thirty marks, pay the rest of the hotel bill, and quiver at the thought of what I have to live on for the next few days.

Then to the Biennale, via San Marco, again. I enter in a side door and have it to myself for some time, before being caught and ushered out the front door where a throng of tourists are waiting.

Arrived at the Biennale saturated by the rain. Crossing the Riva dei Sette Martini the water was choppy and high and washing onto the promenade. The humourless attendant at the Biennale refuses to believe I am a student so I pay the full entrance fee, 18,000 lira, a third of my remaining money.

The Biennale is odd. There’s a temporary feeling of permanence, or perhaps a permanent feeling of temporariness. A kind of art-olympics feeling, each nation represented. I take refuge in the Spanish Pavilion, full of old brown dusty pseudo-poetic stuff. Belgian and Dutch pavilions similar. The guards look utterly bored at the end of the long season. In the Italian pavilion the attendants uniformed like air hostesses, dashing around and gossiping. The works are better here, a memorable Ed Ruscha room with a painting of a classical portico and a pair of watch hands, and then some threatening little paintings with threatening titles. Some good things by Tony Cragg, including a sculpture made from thousands of dice.

Good Lichtenstein, duller Richter.

The Icelandic pavilion reminds me of the Goldsmith’s degree show this year: grimly dark room video stuff. The authority of anomie, a new thing in art. American pavilion, work by Robert Cottlestoe, not heard of before but very good, funny, pushing it but coherent and surprising.

The British pavilion has Rachel Whiteread: a revelation. A cast of a library, a work to spend time with, as if trying to decipher the titles of the books. It brings back thoughts of the books in the Zentralinstitut, and the art history library on Georgenstraße in Munich, where I read opposite the alluring and mysterious Mathilde, with her mesmerising French-inflected English, who astonishes me with her knowledge of nineteenth-century German painting at Kaffeepause, cigarette twiddling between nervous fingers. Here she is in Venice, dangerously summoned by Whiteread’s books. A bridge between works of art and works of writing, between the old and new life. They are the same thing. A book is a work of art, a writer an artist.

Flicked through a book by the door about the British pavilion over the years. Howard Hodgkin looking tanned and like a Caesar by his painting D.H. in Hollywood. I am here because of him — a scholarship from a German foundation attached to a prize he won. Do you want to go to Germany? I don’t need to see your paintings. Just go.

In the Canadian pavilion a moving, amusing film by Rodney Graham, Vexation Island. I watch it over and over again. A man lies on the beach of a paradise island with blood on his forehead, obviously unconscious. He wakes, his parrot points to the sea with his wing and squawks. He hauls himself up and staggers over to a tree, from which a coconut falls, he staggers and falls on the beach and the loop begins again. It’s a bit like this, isn’t it, life? The shock of waking up and finding one’s terminal slumber to the trueness and obviousness of love death and loneliness is enough to render you unconscious again.

Gerhard Merz high neon installation in the German pavilion, shocking really, as though it could have been created by Albert Speer, and yet impressive, self-aware, provoking in all the right ways.

Walked over to the Isola di S Petrio, then back around the Arsenale. Bought two bananas from a greengrocer and ate one as I sauntered down the Via Garibaldi. I’ll save the other one for tomorrow. Lots of cats about - could I kill and eat one?

To the Guggenheim, via San Marco - but now the square was flooded, ten inches of water around the portal. The wooden walkways are out. Aqua Alta. In November 1966 boats were sailing around the Campo. I stood at the edge of the island at Zattere allo Spirito Santo and felt the lagoon as an extension of the city, as if all were water, just floating, or hanging slightly beneath the surface. The Canale della Giudecca has the expanse of a lake and the colour of the sea. The colour is the opposite of strong pink. I am frightened of the sea. Marvel at the uneven floor in San Marco, sinking, so it seems, into the silty foundations. Gold tessera describing the rounded surfaces. I see the coherence of mass and space in the five domes and their arms, the nave, choir and transept.

Three thousand Lira to see the Pala d’Oro is sadly too much. The price of five bananas.

Throughout the day I imagine Goethe admiring the city. He describes the alleyways as being measurable by an arms-length span, occasionally narrow enough to scrape elbows. He would be seeing what I am seeing, yet how unlike him I am — an imposter from a late squalid age.

From San Marco I walked round the back of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, along the waterfront to the Dogana, next to the Chiesa della Salute and the entrance to the Canal Grande. When Goethe arrived in Venice he hopped into a Gondola with a fellow countryman who waived the customs official off with a small bribe.

I have nothing to bribe with, only persistence. After some persiflage and dispute at the ticket desk (do I not look like a student?), able to enter the Guggenheim on a student ticket, the very last of my lira.

It is a perfect museum.

In the first room a Calder sculpture flanks two paintings by Picasso from the twenties, a totemic artist in studio and children playing on the beach. The fantastic Magritte Empire of Light in the next room. It has a triangular ambivalence: title, image, content. A not-bad Delvaux, Prime Time and a good Ernst, Garden Air-Plane Trap.

Marini and Chagall on the terrace, and a terrific Bird in Flight by Brancusi, the best placed work by him seen since seeing the one in the Tate rotunda earlier this year.

Picabia’s Very Rare Painting on Earth, and some good cubism, particularly Poet by Picasso. Some astonishingly good Mondrians, notably one of the oval sea drawings. Their pluses and minuses seem to extend out into the lagoon itself, enticing, threatening, bamboozling.

I walk out into the sculpture garden and look at a totemic figure by Ernst, sited between two tall trees, and Fruit by Jean Arp and also a Giacometti (oh yes, there was Woman with her Throat Cut lurking, minatory, inside). Around the corner rests Peggy Guggenheim’s grave. 1898-1979. I hope to live that long, and die and be buried in Venice. A list of dogs’ names, about thirty, the last one ‘Cellida’, dying the same year as her mistress. A dynasty of art poodles coming to an end. I sit on the stone pergola and think about love death and pets, before setting off once again for the Ligna di Spagna.

I passed on the northern side of the Rialto and blow almost all of my remaining lira on two bananas, a tin of tuna and a baguette. A lavish evening feast, just eaten in the hotel room, listening to loud Australians in the next room. Now a walk up to the north, to S. Alvivo, the Madonna del’Orto, and to the end of the Canale di Cannaregio to see what the Ponta della Liberta looks like at night. The rain stops, leaving a cold mist in the air. Everything dissolves in this cool miasma, as if the lagoon has become some ineffable, surfaceless presence.

Later... the northern districts totally deserted, the night still warm. Frightening to reach the end of the towpath to meet a dark expanse of sea, murkily lapping at the stepped bank. So terrified could not get closer than five feet from the edge. It reminds me of certain streets near the shoreline in New York, walking late at night, suddenly gripped by fear at the scale of the Hudson, the frailty of everything in the face of such sublime scale. Europe meeting the Americas. Venice as the end of Europe.

Wandered randomly for a while around the northern shore. Lights from the Liberty Bridge curved slightly into the darkness. Venice is a puzzle.

8th November

Woken in the early hours by a siren, slowly working to a baleful climax, then tailing off, ham ghost fashion. Must be either a prison siren or for the flood. Looked out the window to see thunderous rain and a waterlogged pavement. The last echoes of the siren faded over the Lido and I drifted back to sleep. Dreamt I rescued both American girls in room 5 (we spoke in the corridor last night, after my grand feast, me with tuna down my front and a mad look of satiety) from an inundation.

Learnt the next morning at the station bar, where I paid with tiny coins for a cup of coffee, that the siren was for high water. Last of the lira on three bananas, and then ate one watching the Italians crossing the Scalzi bridge, near the station. All looking the same, blue shirt on olive skin, happy, fixed, fed.

Looked at the mosaics again in San Marco, and copied down some inscriptions in the narthex. Best one in the northern arm, showing scenes from Genesis and Exodus on the interior of the cupola. Thought about Panofsky’s point that true perspective representation is only possible on a concave surface, the interior of a sphere, to match the spherical curve of the retina. The hierarchical narrative imagery works in symbolic perspective in most of the cupola mosaics, especially those of Pentecost and Accession over the nave. Also a series of images of the flood (topical), Noah releasing the dove and the rook, the return of the dove and the rainbow (odd as it means it was still raining), then the deliverance and presentation of the dove to the temple, all the unclean beasts roving around.

Somehow the barrier was down, or the attendant was distracted, and I am able to sneak around and see the Pala d’oro. At first it seems fantastically vulgar, a spangled dirge of gold and jewels. More interesting the four alabaster columns supporting the ciborium, carved with figures that mapped and reinforced the mass of the pillar. I don’t know what to think of it. I am hungry and it looks edible. Suddenly, the ceiling is lit by a precious coin dropping into the meter. I look skyward and understood in an instant a phrase from Panofsky about colour defining space.

My cleverness (I pat myself on the back) was to retain just about enough money for the return journey. Walk down the Ligna di Spagna to the station, but find that all the trains are off due to a strike. Not knowing what else to do, I return to the hotel, where the landlady is ironing and folding linen. She says that Venice is very expensive and that most of the buildings need a lot of restoration. As we talk I see out of the window a wooden walkway being installed. The sky is welling with darkness and a great ominous feeling spreads over the watery island.

On the advice of the landlady I totter along the wooden walkways, the lagoon just inches away, to the Franciscan church of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Entrance fee three bananas, but worth it. I should have known to come here. The vastness of it, on such a small island. The space is articulated by wooden crossbeams between vaults, going across the nave, to ‘prevent the settling of the churches pilings into the lagoon mud’, I read.

Looked at Veneziano’s Madonna in the northern chapel, opposite the fantastically-placed Giovanni Bellini Madonna. A cleanness and a precision to it, so unlike the feeling of being in Venice, the most lugubrious of cities. Is it a city at all? What is it that Giovanni Bellini didn’t paint? Is it what an artist doesn’t paint that gives the key to their work? Did he ever paint the dark emerald waters, lapping against the fondamente of his native city?

I hear German spoken for the first time and it sounds homely and warm - a strange sensation. Dürer in Venice. Transalpine travel, the memory of a painting style.

Wooden figure of John Baptist, the scraggy one, painted in an altarpiece with other larger-scale figures, making the John look pathetic and human, crushed by the surrounding space. Over the altar in the octagonal apse a painting I fail to recognise at first as Titian. How can I not know. We are all still learning. Save the best for last. It transforms itself into one — a Titian — as I look, although it gets less Titianesque as it goes up, despite being an Assumption.

Choirstalls carved by Marco Cozzi, on the back inlaid perspective studies, one-point, oblique, two-point, odd mixes.

Monteverdi’s tomb: a wilted rose over the simple commemorative slab.

Titian’s Pesara Madonna, again seeming to lose itself in the upper register. ‘Titian was not a great devotional painter, and worked better on secular formats’ I mutter sententiously to myself, then wonder what it meant to say such a foolish thing.

Then a grotesque monument to the Doge Giovani Pesaro, enlivened by huge ‘negro’ figures and a figure of death. Always this underside, here in mercantile Venice.

The whole church left a great impression, its space, the sheer quality and astonishing diversity of objects it contained. I would have missed it but for the linen woman. I am impatient and have a short attention span, always wanting to get back. I am constantly mistaken about time being too short. I want to go home, not realising I am already there. So often it is passing through this stage, this moment of angst, of boredom, of hunger, or whatever, that you reach the moments of true revelation. There is a lot to be said for not giving up.

Walked down to Santa Maria della Salute, the light starting to fail, the rain coming on full as I reached the portal. I marvel at the inside at its gradual revelation of mass and space. It felt ordered, cold, the failing light turning up the baroque drama, a sense of mystery.

Quite dark when I came out, the paved causeway black and slippery. Remains of money spent on three bananas and a bottle of water. I imagine jumping on the train as the first waters rush across the station floor, the train pulling out as it splashes and sloshes between the rails, blue flashes illuminating the faces of those running alongside trying to get on. Gathering speed along the Liberty Bridge, buffeted by waves, rocking dangerously, the windows splashed by waves, almost underwater, then finally running onto land, the last carriage barely off as the narrow isthmus collapses beneath it. Look back to see the island half-submerged, faltering in the darkness.

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