Lessons in art history: Renaissance Art in Venice: From Tradition to Individualism, by Tom Nichols

“I remember just wandering around hundreds of churches and seeing the paintings, a lot of them in their original context. They’ve never been moved. You were seeing them as you were meant to see them. I really loved the place.” He still does.

We are currently sitting in Glasgow, more than 1300 miles north of the subject of our conversation in his office. After nearly 20 years teaching in Aberdeen, Nichols has been Reader of Art at Glasgow University for the last three. He teaches and he writes. On the table in front of us is his latest book, Renaissance Art in Venice: From Tradition to Individualism, a handsomely produced primer on Venetian art between the 1400s and 1600. It takes in the work of Palladio and Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto (Nichols’ first love) and charts the distance from then to now; perhaps not always as far as you might think.

Nichols comes from literary stock. His uncle is the playwright Peter Nicols, his sister the novelist Tessa Hadley but ever since he walked into the Scuolo di San Rocco and saw more than 50 Tintoretto paintings on the wall as an undergraduate in the early 1980s he was hooked on the visual. Five years later he had published his first book on the artist.

The reputation of Venetian art often rests on its audacious use of colour. You can overcook that idea, Nichols suggests. Tintoretto was more interested in chiaroscuro. “He doesn’t really like colour.” And Titian increasingly stripped colour out of his later paintings.

Still, colour is a huge part of the story of Venetian art. “That’s what distinguishes it from the art of Florence or Rome which are more about form and design and the intellect. Venice is very much a fantasy sensual world.”

That love of colour is also in a way a reflection of the modernity of Venice. The fact that Venetian artists could get hold of an array of pigments is a reflection of the republic’s maritime trade.

“You’ve got a merchant fleet that can go right around the bowl of the Mediterranean to the east. You bring back spices and exotic goods, trade them with German peoples. Everyone in the world is in Venice wanting to trade.”

The Renaissance had its own form of globalisation then.

The Venice of Nichols’ book is a conservative medieval city, a place of political rivalries and religious certainties (the counter-reformation is on its way), where the German painter Albrecht Durer could worry that he might be poisoned. But the modern is being born too. Look at Venetian art from one direction and it’s all sex and stardom.

After all Giorgione painted Sleeping Venus in 1510, one of the first reclining nudes, “what I call the ‘plate of meat’ paintings,” Nichols says, “laying a woman out on the landscape. You can look at it from a feminist perspective.”

In so doing Giorgione offered a model for every reclining nude up to and beyond Manet’s Olympia. And his fellow Venetian artists were not slow to take up the challenge. “Titian walks through that door with his own erotic paintings,” Nichols points out. “Many other artists do it.”

Titian, you might argue, also introduces us to the idea of an artistic star system. “After a certain point in his career he was an international grandee. He was painting for Philip II and Charles V. He was a portrait painter of Princes.”

In short, artists in the 16th century are marketing themselves.

This all sounds very now, doesn’t it? As Nichols points out: “You’re looking at that level of internationalism, secularisation, market competition in the 16th century. It’s a very different thing from earlier centuries. It speaks to us, that stuff.”

Or maybe we see what we want to see. This is our dream of Venice. Along the canals of the medieval city we want to catch a reflection of ourselves.

Renaissance Art in Venice: From Tradition to Individualism, by Tom Nichols, is published by Laurence King, priced £19.95.