Commentary – Empty spaces as an open wound

Emanuele Antonio Cicogna describes the visit of the viceroy Archduke Ranier of Austria in Venice, which at that time was part of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom. The Republic of Venice lost its independence in 1797, when it was occupied by Napoleonic troops, and was never restored. In 1814, after Napoleon’s defeat, the region became part of the Austrian empire. The Archduke Ranier was the Viceroy of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom and, consequently, his visit represented a crucial moment of interaction between central and local authorities (Mazzocca 1989).

According to Cicogna, Ranier was visiting the Ducal Palace of Venice, a widely renowned symbol of the former Republican power and history, when he remarked on the absence of some paintings by Veronese created for the Palace at the end of the sixteenth century. Not only did Paolo Veronese work for the Serenissima, he was also one of the most internationally admired and influential masters of the Venetian Renaissance (Ton 2011). The absence of some of his most important paintings, therefore, could not pass unnoticed.

Leopoldo Cicognara, who accompanied the Archduke during his visit, was a scholar of Venetian art and president of the Academy of Venice. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the Academy of Fine Arts was in charge of the education of young artists as well as of the protection of local heritage. Cicognara had abandoned his political career after being disappointed by the Imperial turn of French politics under Napoleon and had joined the Venetian administration of Fine Arts in 1808. From that moment onwards, he worked tirelessly for the promotion of Venetian artists and the Galleries of the Academy, which opened as a public museum in 1817 (Marini, Mazzocca, De Feo 2017).

As Cicognara pointed out, the absence of Veronese’s paintings from the Ducal Palace was the consequence of Napoleonic spoliations that had taken place in 1797. Following the defeat of the Republic, the French government selected some of the greatest masterpieces of Venetian art and took them to Paris, where they were mostly exhibited in the Louvre museum. In 1815, Napoleon’s defeat triggered the process of restitution of the confiscated artworks. Despite the French reluctance, the Austrian government achieved the return of most of its precious treasures to Venice. However, some paintings were never returned (Gabbrielli 2009).

In the short anecdote by Cicognara we recognize the Venetian perspective on the issue of outstanding restitutions. The French government refused to return Veronese’s paintings due to allegedly insurmountable conservation issues. In order to be returned, those large-format paintings would have to be cut into smaller portions and face a month-long journey across the Alps, as they already had done after their removal in 1797. This was the reason given by the French conservators to prevent the Venetians from removing the paintings. Cicognara believed that such an explanation (given both for the large canvasses from the Ducal Palace and The Wedding at Cana from S. Giorgio Maggiore) was just an excuse to maintain ownership of those great masterpieces.

The artistic excellence of the missing paintings by Veronese, their site-specificity and their integration within a wider iconographical program made it nearly impossible to find a suitable replacement. Cicognara thus decided to leave the empty spaces (»vacui«) left by the missing canvasses on the ceilings instead of replacing them with copies. Those »vacui« remained as a visible trace of the consequences of the French spoliations. One year after the return of many of the confiscated artworks, the issue of outstanding restitution was still an open wound in the Venetian public space. In these respects, replacing the originals with copies would have been an act of acceptance and surrender towards an absence perceived by the Venetians as illegitimate and unjustifiable.

The empty space, however, represents not only a symbolical memento, but also acted as a powerful emotional trigger towards the international visitors and particularly the Viceroy, who was still in a position to claim the missing paintings from Paris. Cicognara was well aware that the French spoliations in Italy had raised many controversies in the international community already in 1797. Many scholars, headed by the French Quatremère de Quincy, underlined the importance of preserving the original contexts for which those artworks had been intended in the first place. At that time, a successful restitution process must have still appeared as an achievable goal. Such a perspective is shared by the narrator himself, Cicogna, who fully supports Cicognara’s reply to the Archduke (»molto a proposito rispose«, »he replied quite rightly«).

In contrast to Cicognara, however, Cicogna kept his opinion to his private diaries, which he never intended to publish. It was only in 1859, after Cicognara’s death, that the Academy of Venice replaced the missing paintings with copies by Venetian artists, according to a suggestion made by Cicogna himself. Many decades after 1817, the empty spaces on the ceilings became a source of embarrassment no longer suitable for such a representative venue, whereas at that point any claim for restitution represented merely a futile effort (»fatica gittata al vento«, in Collavizza 2014, p. 35).

Matilde Cartolari is a PhD student at Technische Universität Berlin in co-tutelle with the University of Udine. She is currently working on the Italian Old Master exhibitions organized for propaganda purposes by the Fascist régime in the 1930s.

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