Panoramic Venice. The Discovery of the Infinite Horizon

The protagonist is the city.
Through the images of the exhibition, the telescope of time reveals a Venice in contrast to the one we have seen tested by the tide, emptied by contagion, obscured and poignant. Here re-emerges that prodigious urban and civic organism, which eludes even the nineteenth-century attempts to grasp it whole with the first spectacular trials of immersive reality.

‘How will we live together?’ is the title of the upcoming Architecture Biennale. We ask ourselves ‘What is the image of Venice that we would like?’. At sixteen hundred years from its foundation, these glimpses and panoramas open a new world, all to be explored.

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The extraordinary work around which the entire exhibition revolves is the one painted in 1887 by the Venetian painter and decorator Giovanni Biasin. It is the largest view of Venice ever created. Preserved in the collections of the ancient Accademia dei Concordi in Rovigo, it is exhibited for the first time at the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice after a recent conservation restoration that has recovered its original colors.
The mere dimensions of this singular document, a tempera on paper, are enough to highlight its exceptional nature: standing just over one meter seventy tall, the view extends for twenty-two meters in length. More than a ‘view’, it is a ‘panorama’ of the city.

The exhibition, open until September 12, 2021, arises from the desire to present in Venice, over a century later, Biasin’s original gaze on the city, but it is also an opportunity to reconstruct, through around sixty engravings and paintings, that captivating journey that starts from the tiny fifteenth-century woodcut vignettes, almost solely focused on Piazza San Marco, and gradually expands to ever broader glimpses of the skyline of Venice, until it embraces the entire horizon.

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Giovanni Biasin

Giovanni Biasin trained at the Venetian Academy of Fine Arts where he had as teachers, among others, Giuseppe Borsato and Giovanni Pividor. He soon moved to Rovigo and became the principal decorator of Polesine. Villas, city palaces, public gathering places, and offices saw him at work, and clients appreciated his qualities and versatility. Frescoes, stuccos, and reliefs adorned walls and ceilings in modern styles and eclectic forms.

Together with his son Vittorio, he developed and patented a particular type of papiers peints that he used primarily in the private rooms of the residences he decorated. These were years of frantic updating of domestic environments and of suggestive techniques in creating illusionistic landscapes and panoramas. In 1887, he participated with a small oil on canvas, Viatico, in the National Artistic Exhibition, for which he was also called to decorate the grand Atrium of the entrance from the land.

The National Artistic Exhibitions are an initiative of the young united Italy and are held in turn around the country. The sixth of these exhibitions takes place in Venice. To host the event, which lasts six months (a precursor to the future Biennale, which will be born shortly after, in 1895), the Municipality makes available the area of the Public Gardens, on the condition that the greenery is not touched, and builds a grand temporary structure to accommodate the hundreds of works sent by artists and artistic industries from all over the country. It is precisely for this occasion that Biasin creates the grand Panorama of Venice. Curiously, however, there is no trace of the work in the numerous critical reports of the Exhibition.

The ‘Panorama of Venice’ by Giovanni Biasin

Using a long roll of reinforced paper and employing very vivid tempera colors, Biasin depicts Venice in 360°. The viewpoint, at water level, is approximately the center of the San Marco basin, although the artist introduces variations and perspective distortions to allow for a more effective portrait of the city.

Starting from the Giardini di Castello and continuing around, then returning to close the circle, the artist enlivens his view by inserting delightful details of monuments, buildings, gardens, and boats, giving the whole a light and narrative tone.

Even today, it is possible to find exactly his impressions: just mount the panorama on a large drum around the observer and here is a vision more than suggestive of late nineteenth-century Venice.

And this is precisely what happens to those who visit this exhibition. An immersive experience ante litteram among gondolas, steam boats with their plumes of smoke, water omnibuses (those that will soon be called ‘vaporetti’), military uniforms, Venetians strolling, and the great evocative green of the Gardens, which will soon host the famous International Art Exhibition, the ‘Biennale’, indeed.

The scene is vibrant and dotted with figures and moments of life that perhaps provide the richest and most faithful pictorial image of late 19th-century Venice.

Many open questions… about the work

Why paint this work on such a fragile support? It is almost a miracle that a painting of such dimensions, on paper, has survived to this day. How was this panorama presented? On a single wall or on multiple walls? Was it displayed in its entirety or in sections? And again: why does it not appear in the catalog of the Exhibition among the painting works? Why was a second version created with the help of his son Vittorio? And if Giovanni Biasin conceived his panorama precisely as a large papier peint decorative compensation for the public view of the Basin obstructed by the pavilion? The gigantic tempera is still far from having resolved all the questions that spontaneously arise for those who observe and study it.

The Panorama by Biasin encapsulates all the charm of an unprecedented experiment, of a hybrid and somewhat indefinable genre, whose very use, due to its unusual dimensions and handling difficulties, created some not easily solvable problems. Biasin worked in an unstable balance, willingly seeking an unusual expressive path, challenging, among other things, the fierce competition of new genres: that wide-angle photography, those color printing systems made possible, for example, by chromolithography or serigraphy; ultimately competing even with those moving images that the cinematograph was launching on the market with unprecedented and highly suggestive effects. Right in Venice, the Lumière brothers were experimenting with the use, for the first time, of the moving camera for the creation of a revolutionary film. They would call it, coincidentally, ‘Panorama de Venise’.

The panoramas

Biasin’s panorama did not emerge from nothing. Not so much because of the fortunate views of Venetian painters of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century that somewhat preceded it, but rather because the fashion and passion for panoramas had spread across Europe in the 19th century with significant successes: London, Paris, Vienna, and a good number of cities and landscapes had been depicted with even gigantic panoramas that were mounted in equally large cylinders like circus tents, masonry structures, iron, or other specially constructed materials.

The public could enter for a fee to see shows that, in addition to the panorama of cities and landscapes, included light effects such as dawn or sunset or the onset of night and the lighting of public illumination, or historical episodes, famous characters, battles, parades, and much more. Ingenious mechanisms were developed to create the effect of navigation by moving the audience’s stands, provoking scenes of panic or seasickness: the same that would happen with the first cinematic films. And logically, the era of panoramas would end to make way for the seventh art.

‘Seeing’ Venice

If the highlight is Biasin’s spectacular ‘slide’, the exhibition retraces, through true cornerstone works, the developments that over time led to the birth, at the end of the 18th century, of the term ‘panorama’ and the works that determined its fortune: from the famous woodcut by Erhard Reuwich from the late 15th century, to the rare depiction of Venice drawn by Giovanni Merlo in the 17th century. From the elaborations between the 16th and 17th centuries of a curious Venice with a Nordic face to the 19th-century panoramas of our most famous engravers, engaged in progressively varying and expanding their panoramas in a sort of game of testimony and appreciation of the inimitable Venetian face, up to our days.

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Caffi, Moro, Pividor and so on, testify in the exhibition to the fortune of a genre and bring to the admiration of the public a collection of little-known or even unknown works that can for the first time be compared and contrasted with each other.

It is also from this humus that a singular and extraordinary unicum like Biasin’s Panorama emerges. The exhibition concludes with the plates by Guido Albanello, who in 2004 took up the challenge of the aspiring panorama artists of the 19th century.