With Still Life with Oysters and Lemon ( 2001 ) and, now, Seeing Venice, Mark Doty—arguably the most renowned and influential gay poet writing today—is turning himself into, it seems, if not an art critic or historian then at least a sort of tour guide. And why not? His words are as gorgeous as the paintings they describe—and sometimes nearly as opaque, as they flow from Doty's impressionistic takes on this or that aspect of a painting.
Seeing Venice, however, seems destined for a somewhat limited audience. The book consists of 40 color illustrations, each of which captures some detail from a single painting by Bernardo Bellotto, View of the Grand Canal. Preceding the photos is a 13-page "essay" about the painting by Doty. None of the book is paginated.
I say "essay" in quotation marks because the text is not so much a coherent discussion of the painting as little riffs on features of the painting—water, sky, boats—or on topics that the painting suggests to Doty—privacy, conversation, memory. Some of these contemplations occupy a full page of the diminutive format, while others are a brief couple of lines.
On certain topics, Doty uses a quote from someone else to start or cap off his reflections, and in one case, "Surfaces," offers only the thoughts of another: "Ruskin: 'The Venetian habitually incrusted his work with nacre; he built his houses, even his meanest, as if he has been a shellfish—roughly inside, mother-of-pearl on the surface.'"
Each little section, though, regardless of structure, reads a bit like a prose poem. For example, at the start of "Sky," Doty muses: "Greenery—leaf, tree, trunk, flowers, scrap of weed poking from a stone wall or stray corner: there is none. Not a drop. Everything here has been shaped by human hands. This is the built world raised to its highest power."
While certainly not in any way an analysis of the painting—there is no discussion of technique and little about the artist ( that comes at the end from the publisher in "About the Artist" ) , Doty's text does serve the purpose of drawing one's attention to particular details in the painting. At "Black" he says: "That box on the side of the house, with its pointed roof and its single door open to reveal a rectangle of pure darkness, is a sort of shrine, but in Bellotto's hands it seems almost abstract ... . The wall needs its small black rectangle, inside the box, to allow the sunwashed expanse to dazzle, to seem almost overexposed."
A gimmicky, but nice, feature of the book is that under the translucent book wrap there is a jacket that can be opened out to show Bellotto's painting in its entirety.
This is not a "gay" book, but Doty proved some time ago that he is about more than being gay. Seeing Venice is, instead, simply a book for people who appreciate beauty in its many guises.
Seeing Venice: Bellotto's "Grand Canal," edited by Getty Publications. With an essay by Mark Doty. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002. ISBN: 0-89236-658-3. $14.95 ( cloth ) .
