"Venice: Pure City" brims with this sort of insight and anecdote, particularly with regard to the city's long and fruitful interchange with Byzantium, a relationship that would cast a unique and decisive influence over both aesthetics and culture. Given the book's reach, it seems like quibble to harp on small errors, but Igor Stravinsky died in New York and the Eastern Emperor Alexius Comnenus (Alexio Komenos) surely was gone by the Fourth Crusade. When it comes to the visual arts, Ackroyd's assessments can be a trifle quirky. He finds the Venetian portrait tradition, for example, curiously lacking any "personal character." In fact, as just one of many contrary examples that come to mind, Catena's great portrait of Andrea Gritti, the Doge who built that palace, depicts a face that is the apotheosis of calculation.
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Book review: 'Venice: Pure City' by Peter Ackroyd
The erudite and engaging Peter Ackroyd's 32nd book brims with insight and anecdote.
On the other hand, Ackroyd's evocation of Venetian light — and of the role distinctive building materials, like terrazzo and Isturian limestone play in refracting it through both memory and art — fits lovingly and convincingly into the rhapsodic tradition.
As Ruskin at his most lucid put it in volume two of "The Stones of Venice": "The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things."
Venice, as Ackroyd so vividly portrays it, is the still-living rebuttal to vulgar purism.
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