Book Review: The Unfinished Palazzo
/The Unfinished Palazzo:
Life, Love and Art in Veniceby Judith MackrellThames & Hudson, 2017“The intention of the patrons and the architect, Lorenzo Boschetti, who conceived it around 1749, was to erect an edifice of colossal size. It was interrupted at the level of the first floor for lack of funds due to the proprietors' reverses of fortune. At present it houses the Peggy Guggenheim Modern Art Gallery” – consult any paperback guidebook to Venice (this was from half a century ago, but the boilerplate scarcely changes), and that's what you're likely to read concerning the Palazzo Venier … a bloodless précis that's meant to give bored tourists a Morse Code dot-dot-dot of basic information about the Guggenheim Gallery, which always catches the eye of modern tourists because it's only one floor rather than the towering facades of its neighboring buildings.But oh! The world of passion and personality and pathos that's omitted from such a summary! “Behind these quiet, sun-washed walls,” one famous and famously emotive tourist exclaimed a century ago while taking a gondola ride down the Grand Canal, “lurk all the darknesses of the mortal heart!” But tourists in 2017 won't be encountering any darknesses of the mortal heart even once they get inside the quiet, sun-washed walls of the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery; the gallery's rooms are immaculate and peaceful – they give not the smallest hint of the passions that once soaked into the floors and walls. That's left for other books to do.The latest such book is a ripping good success along those lines: The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice by Judith Mackrell, out now in a lovely hardcover edition from Thames & Hudson. The book tells in colorful detail the lives of three women who ruled the Venier in the 20th century: first the Marchesa Luisa Casati, who spent a fortune on glittering balls during the early decades of the century, then British socialite Doris Castlerosse, who spent fortunes of her own in the interwar years, and third of course Peggy Guggenheim herself, who refashioned the unlikely palazzo into an even more unlikely modern art museum. Mackrell, dance critic for the Guardian, often very adroitly mixes biography and pop psychology:
Perhaps there would have been fewer attempts to diminish Peggy if she had conformed to a more acceptable version of middle-aged femininity – a groomed Manhattan hostess or a bluestocking intellectual. But she was a confusing figure in wartime Manhattan: a rich Jewish princess with a patrician edge, but also a soi-distant bohemian with a string of lovers and a rackety past. She was evidently a potent woman and brilliantly connected, yet her authority was often undercut by the nervousness of her manner, her gauche attempts at humour, her flinching gaze. There was something unresolved about Peggy's personality that made different people see very different things in her …
This very personal approach is followed throughout the book's three sections, and thanks to Mackrell's energetic storytelling skill, no Venier mistress eclipses either of the others, although all three tend to eclipse all the other people in their lives – often tempting them to outrages and indiscretions that might not have tempted less adored and more parented children. Mackrell is always sympathetic, and is always on the spot with the pertinent details, as in the case of the Marchesa's wayward daughter:
Overshadowed by her mother, Cristina naturally looked elsewhere for affection, and did so with a needy intensity. She was twenty-one when she met Jack Hastings, and fell precipitously in love with his fresh-faced handsomeness and mildly rebellious temperament. Jack, whose full title was Viscount Francis John Clarence Western Plantagenet Hastings, was an aspiring painter and a sympathizer with radical causes, and he was hell-bent on avoiding the responsibilities that came with his role as the future Earl of Huntingdon. If he fell in love with Cristina it wasn't just because she was beautiful, foreign and adoring but because, as a Roman Catholic and as the daughter of the Marchesa Casati, she was nothing like the traditional English bride his mother Maud would have chosen.
All grand houses fill up with stories (Natalie Livingstone's excellent The Mistresses of Cliveden from last year comes to mind), but this has always seemed more intensely true in Venice than elsewhere, perhaps because everything seems more intensely true in Venice than elsewhere, even when it's not. Reading something as enjoyable as The Unfinished Palazzo will make a great many readers wish there were similar volumes for every old pile on the Grand Canal. Here's hoping we get such volumes before the piles themselves sink under the waves.
