How Shakespeare Drained Venice

[The Duke of Norfolk] toil'd with works of war, retired himself
To Italy; and there at Venice gave
His body to that pleasant country's earth,
   - Richard II IV,1

It's an odd thing that Shakespeare set a play and a bit in Venice (Merchant and Othello) and mentions the city 46 times*, but he doesn't seem to have realised that the city was built in the sea.

At least, that's the implication of the lines above. The Merchant of Venice contains not a solitary reference to gondolas or canals, and nor does Othello. As Holofernes says in Love's Labours Lost:

I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice;
Venetia, Venetia,
Chi non ti vede non ti pretia.

Which means Venice, Venice, he who has not seen you cannot appreciate you.

And that seems to have been the case with Will. To be fair, Venice in Shakespeare's time ruled a lot of territory on the mainland. This was known as terra firma, which is the origin of the phrase.

Anyway, how do you make a Venetian blind?

Poke his eyes out.

Shakespeare was never wrong, reality sometimes stumbled.

*58, if you count variants like Venetian.

Rubens, Van Dyck, Monet and Carpaccio (with a Twist)

Leonardo Da Vinci once wrote that:

...the poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things and far below the musician in that of invisible things. 

However, he didn't seem to notice that the poet was the only one who could wander in both realms, and describe the place where they meet, which is pretty much the human life.

Painting would seem to be the opposite of language, and yet painters have drifted into our vocabulary.

Some words are of obvious origin, such as rubenesque to describe those ladies of delightful plumpness, or Van Dyck to describe the pointiest of beards.

Some require a brief explanation. You might be happy to be described as a Monet, if you didn't realise that it meant that you were beautiful from a distance, but rather disappointing from close up.

Others are as obscure as a comma in hell. Few people have heard of the Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio (1465-1526). He wasn't the greatest artist ever. In fact, his main talent was in the mixing of paints. He did the most lovely reds, and became famous for them. Have a look at the picture of the bedroom on the right. That is the work of a man who knows what his talent is.

There was an exhibition of Carpaccio paintings at the Doge's Palace in Venice in 1961. Just round the corner from the Palace, at Harry's Bar, a chef called Giuseppe Cipriani was wondering what to call his brand new dish of thinly sliced red meat. And that, dear reader, is why carpaccio is called carpaccio.

The dish and its name caught on, and that is why if you do a Google image search for Carpaccio, poor old Vittore is now down in ninth place, behind the food to which he posthumously donated his name.

Giusseppe Cipriani also invented a cocktail, which he called a Bellini after another Venetian painter, Giovanni Bellini*. Giovanni Bellini painted what's probably my favourite painting: the San Giobbe Altarpiece.

*I assume. I haven't checked up whether it was the Elder (and that's the worst line in Brideshead). 

Saint Pants

I think, by default, that my long-schemed week of saints is upon us. Now gaze, dear reader, upon my all-compassionate underwear.

Once upon a time there was a chap who probably didn't exist and who probably wasn't called Pantaleon. Legend has it that he was personal physician to Emperor Maximinianus. When the emperor discovered his doctor was a Christian he got terribly upset and decreed that the doctor should die.

The execution went badly. They tried to burn him alive, but the fire went out. They threw him into molten lead but it turned out to be cold. They lashed a stone to him and chucked him into the sea, but the stone floated. They threw him to wild beasts, which were tamed. They tried to hang him and the rope broke. They tried to chop his head off but the sword bent and he forgave the executioner.

This last kindness was what earned the doctor the name Pantaleon, which means All-Compassionate.

Anyway, in the end they got Pantaleon's head off and he died. By the tenth century he had become the patron saint of Venice. Pantalon therefore became a popular Venetian name and the Venetians themselves were often called the Pantaloni.

Then in the sixteenth century came the Commedia Dell'Arte: short comic plays performed by travelling troupes and always involving the same stock characters like Harlequin and Scaramouch.

Pantalone was the stereotypical Venetian. He was a merchant and a miser and a lustful old man, and he wore one-piece breeches, like Venetians did. These long breeches therefore became known as pantaloons. Pantaloons were shortened to pants and the English (though not the Americans) called their underwear underpants. Underpants were again shortened to pants, which is what I am now wearing.

Pants are all-compassionate. Pants are saints. So think, dear reader, upon my martyred underwear.

I've always liked the lines from Kubla Khan:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Because I imagine the earth to be wearing thick pants. This etymology also means that Liar, liar, pants on fire is wrong, because they couldn't burn Pantaleon.

History does not record and this mosaic does not reveal whether St Pantaleone wore pants.

P.S. There's also a word pantaloonery, which means either fooling around like Pantalone, or the material used for making pants.