 Joseph Mallord William Turner (artist) British, 1775 - 1851 Approach to Venice, 1844 oil on canvas |
The painting needs its title, since we are presented with a haze of colored nothingness, through which there loom the bright accents of what we make out to be boats and a far-off steeple. The water is golden with light, but so is the sky: where does one end and another start? There is no perspectival depth, just space, height, clouds, dazzle, glory.
The impression given is of immense exhilaration, almost ecstatic in its power; the natural is allied with the spiritual. Turner has torn the world into paper shreds and thrown them up to the sun : there they catch fire and he paints them for us, crying "Alleluia!"
The clouds of glory, the lakes of light, the stone and mortar transformed into citadels of Heaven: these are not inventions. Few people have not seen the extravagances of glory that the sun produces with casual ease each morning! It was Turner's special gift to know that these extremes of light and color demand from the artist an extremity of technique.
When Turner first exhibited this painting, he accompanied it with these lines from a poem by Lord Byron-
"The moon is up, and yet
it is not night
The sun as yet disputes
the day with her"
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