Jeannie went back to sleep, but I gave up about 4:35 and did my morning meditations, finished yesterday's blog, and read-ahead in the Paradiso.
After breakfast we took the Number 1 vaporetto down the Grand Canal to San Marco where we attended 10:30 mass at the basilica. There was glorious singing, a wonderful organ, an incomprehensible homily, and clouds of aromatic smoke.
After mass we walked to the Palazzo Grassi a museum of contemporary art. The building itself is glorious, saved from near-ruin by a French multimillionaire. I am a fan of modern art and Jeannie has come to enjoy our conversations about it. But we were both mostly unimpressed with the current exhibition at the Grassi. The artists are so fundamentally pessimistic about the human condition. (The link above will take you to the museum's website.)
The most dramatic piece encompasses about one-quarter of a floor (perhaps one floor of our house) given over to several small bronze female nudes, most with nails piercing the body and one live female nude reclined on a couch reading. The catalog references conjunctions of reality and unreality, questions regarding the artistic process, the role of model as object, et cetera. All provocative in their way.
But where the Grassi was a building struggling to ask interesting questions (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not), San Marco was struggling to answer important questions (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not). Any authentic question is valuable. But trying to answer is more helpful than just posturing for something provocative.
We went to lunch at A Beccafico near San Vidal. This is on the main route between the Galleria della Accademia and San Marco. At one point an especially large tour of Italian (?) teenagers piled up "merging" into the narrow two way Calle Zaguri (perhaps 5 feet across). The pile-up continued for at least thirty minutes as one tour group collided with another. I finally took a picture. This is not a queue for anything in particular. This is just the Venetian version of traffic congestion.
After lunch we crossed the Accademia Bridge over the Grand Canal and followed the narrow alleys behind Peggy Guggenheim's home and museum to visit another of the French millionaire's collections of contemporary art. Once again, it's a fabulous building - an old customs warehouse - but filled with mostly ridiculous art.
The picture below shows the new museum - Punta Della Dogana - and the white-domed Salute church behind it. We bopped into the high Palladian structure. Very rational, very cool, and, in a certain way, an early shift to asking interesting questions instead of trying to answer important ones.
The current exhibit at the Dogana is entitled, "In Praise of Doubt." The same phrase might summarize Dante's Divine Comedy, but the stance and outcome are profoundly different. Both see doubt as a counter to illusion. But one leaves us naked, hungry and hurt; the other offers love and care.
We caught the Number 1 back up the Grand Canal just before it started raining. Most of the way most of the passengers who wanted to get on could not fit. At the train station we took the 5.2 toward our hotel, but got off one stop earlier than usual. I thought we would approach from the west along the same wide "foundamenta" that is in front of our hotel. Instead we found a narrow dock that nearly collapsed under us and finally brought us to a canal with no crossing about 100 feet from our hotel. Fortunately it had mostly stopped raining. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of our adventure.
Between our visits to museums here's a picture taken using the reflection of a glass door. Our own attempt at modern art. What question are we trying to answer?
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