Navigating the Canals: Making and Moving Venetian Renaissance Paintings

Despite the impressive scholarly attention that the Venice of the Renaissance has commanded, there is as yet no overarching study devoted to the challenges posed by the city's unique physical and geographical environment on the manufacture and delivery of paintings, particularly large scale, in the lagoon city. This doctoral project investigates two aspects of this problem: the handling and transport of paintings from the painter's workshop to their intended destination, and how their supports were made across time, and whether innovations were made in response to Venice's challenging physical environment.

The research will concentrate on Venetian paintings from the fifteenth & sixteenth centuries in order to plot changes over time. This chronological scope also corresponds with Venice's expansion into the mainland, and the growth of new, distant markets. It will therefore enable discussion of environmental impact on the transport beyond the lagoon, from water to land, over plains and mountains.

The project aims advance our knowledge by assembling and merging published findings with new evidence from the archives of the numerous magistracies who regulated all standards of artistic production, manufacture, commerce and transport in Venice and from other repositories. A database of documentary evidence regarding the aspects of transport and painting support noted above will be created and made available online, linked to an interactive digital map of Venice on which will be plotted sites relevant to the National Gallery's Venetian paintings. A second aim is to mine untapped archives with the potential to shed light on the subsequent journeys of the National Gallery's Venetian paintings, from Venice or the Veneto to their current known provenance. The Gallery's paintings as physical objects, capable of revealing whether aspects of their condition might relate to transport and how their support was constructed, will provide test cases for any documentary discoveries.

Visitors to the National Gallery rarely consider how painters working in Venice faced additional challenges posed by the lagoon's unique environment. Painters' studios were located on canals in a city where humidity is constantly high, and where every route on foot is interrupted by dozens of bridges that can only be crossed via steps. From the point of view of transport alone, each painting created in Venice has undergone what might be considered an epic journey from workshop to intended destination, whether a church or a house, a palace or the hall of a scuola, within the lagoon islands or beyond.

The subsequent history of Venetian Renaissance paintings (and other Italian works), certainly involved further journeys before they came to rest in the Gallery. These later travels owed much to accidents of fashion or conquest. The largest disruptions and subsequent dispersal of Venetian paintings stemmed from Napoleon's suppression of religious communities.

The history of the movement and displacement of Venetian paintings, particularly large ones, from their creation and during their longue durée has never been considered systematically. The project aims to recover lost processes, peregrinations and alterations to the paintings' supports though a combined study of historical records and technical evidence from the paintings themselves, framed by new research questions.