City of the eye
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I’m looking out of the windows from Peggy Guggenheim’s Palazzo onto the Grand Canal, its flow of milky turquoise playing across the turbulent surface of a Jackson Pollock and the linear serenity of a Mondrian seascape.
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The snow cold air glints on the translucent crystal surfaces of one of Calder’s playful mobiles, like fragments of coloured ice suspended on wire.. To Joseph Brodsky, Venice was a city of the eye, where
after a while the body starts to regard itself as merely the eye’s carrier, as a kind of submarine to its now dilating, now squinting periscope. In the morning the winter light,
he goes on,
breasts your windowpane and, having pried your eye open like a shell, runs ahead of you, strumming its lengthy rays along arcades, colonnades, red brick chimneys, saints, and lions
.(Brodsy,
)
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Yesterday it arrested me in a narrow alleyway near the Frari – a vivid display of scarlet, rose and rust orange made doubly resonant by its name: calle Tintoretto.
