Relics/Icons/Paintings: A Very Short History of Venetian Painting

This essay is for Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good

To understand the history of Venice, you need to know that there were three ways in which saints and other holy figures were presented in the churches. There were relics, bodily remains or objects associated with a person. Icons. And artworks. All three kinds of presentations are found in contemporary sacred culture. But until recently, art historians didn’t say much about relics. As Garry Wills, speaking as a Catholic, noted, “of all the superstitions we find registered in the history, politics, and art of the Middle Ages, relics can seem the most unconvincing, even the most absurd.”(Orthodox Christians have a different view.) And only recently has much attention been given by art historians to icons, and their relationship to artworks. Relics, icons and pictures stand for the saints or holy figures in different ways. The relic consists of the physical remains; the icon represents the saint visually, and the picture represents the saint. But this distinction between icons and pictures can be hard to pin down. Christopher J. Nygren speaks of icons in his Titian’s Icons: Tradition, Charisma, and Devotion in Renaissance Italy (2020) in a way justified by his account. Normally, however, scholars would not identify Titian’s paintings of the Madonna as icons. Usually Icons are non-naturalistic visual works. They look different from paintings. None of the numerous icons illustrated in the Getty Museum book by Alfredo Tradigo could be confused with a Renaissance painting. When Vasari calls icons ‘Greek paintings’, he makes an important distinction, contrasting theme to Tuscan pictures. Icons belong to the Byzantine Eastern Rite tradition, while naturalistic paintings are integral to Renaissance Italian Catholicism. That’s the usual scholarly convention.

Relics, icons, and sacred paintings all aid in prayer. When you pray, it may help to be close to a saint’s relics. Or if you can, contemplate an icon showing that sacred figure. Or, at least, if you look at a picture of the holy figure. Relics, icons, and pictures thus all take you close to the saint, and so facilitate prayer. All things being equal, proximity matters. So too does visual resemblance. These tools supporting prayer supplement one another. In San Marco, Venice, you find all three sources for prayerful contemplation. The relics of Mark are under the main altar, and on the church walls are icons and pictures depicting him.

The history of Venetian painting is bound up intimately with the political history of the Venetian Republic. That state was founded in 826 when two merchants spirited his relics to the city. Logically speaking, since God is everywhere, you can pray to Him equally well from anywhere. But in practice, it’s helpful to have a supportive environment. And so that’s why Christians collected relics. The bones or artifacts intimately associated with the holy person or saint support prayer. That said, of course, it’s natural to worry about the authenticity of relics. When authentic relics were highly valuable, the temptation to prevent fakes must have been strong. With paintings, there are well-established tests for fakes. When a fine original is valuable, and a forgery of little value, such testing is important. In a pre-modern culture, there were no similar tests for relics. Some believers have told me that it’s possible to ‘feel’ when a relic is genuine. Perhaps! But I love the idea that, when praying, it doesn’t matter whether the relic is genuine.

The sacred value of the relics is self-evident: they are the physical remains of the sacred figure. From relics to icons to naturalistic paintings: we tell this story schematically, with art historians presenting these three forms of sacred memorabilia in detail. Imagine, if you will, a Christian culture whose churches have only relics. They pray in the presence of their saints. But then some believers become dissatisfied, for the bare bones do not reveal a saint’s appearance. While these relics make the saint literally present, they don’t make it easy to conjure up his presence. Icons, they argue, more fully support worship because they depict the saint. More exactly, since relics and icons supplement each other, believers can employ both, their icons representing the same figure whose relics they treasure. Paintings take this story one logical step further. While icons present sacred figures, paintings show him in a literal way, focused on his appearance. If you want to see the story of Mark, including the events taking place after his physical death, then look at the figurative images in the mosaics in San Marco. But the price of this additional information is the loss of the relic or icon’s immediacy.

Pictures, mere representations, have a developmental history, as icons do not. And pictures can have aesthetic value, for we are interested not only in what they depict, but also in how they use color and line to present their subjects. When the Venetians turned from preserving relics and displaying icons in their churches to paintings, some loss was felt. A painting of St Mark provides more visible information about his life than relics, but at the price of a less intimate relation to that saint’s body. And so questions about the veracity of those images were sure to be raised. But you can have relics and icons and pictures of the saint, all three all at once. Venice’s San Marco contains Mark’s bones, presents him in icons, and has mosaic paintings telling his story. It is, therefore, a perfect place to pray.

Here I give the barebones outline of the story of art in Venice, in three parts. In 826, enterprising Venetian merchants obtained the relics of St. Mark, which were in Alexandria, where he had been martyred, and brought them to Venice, where they remain. Mark thus became the Republic’s patron saint. Icons are the real thing; they are the physical remains of the sacred figure. But they aren’t visually very exciting. St. Mark’s bones, as bones don’t look different from anyone else’s. And so if you want your prayer to be supported, an icon would be better. The icon would better suit your purposes, for it makes the saint present. Looking at it, you see Mark’s presentation. That it’s not an illusionistic image of him emphasizes this sacred quality. The icon presents not just Mark the man but the saint. Icons are more visually stimulating. For while a relic is the saint, the icon is an image of her or him, made present.

The development of naturalistic painting takes this imagined story a step further. When we seek to be near St. Mark, we want to look at his life story, as is told in the mosaics of San Marco. Compared with icons, illusionistic pictures thus give us much more information about Mark. With an inevitable price, for these are mere representations of the holy man. But of course, you can’t have everything. If you want to see the story of St Mark’s preaching and travels, then you can enjoy a picture. But you need to accept the fact that a mere representation is not an icon— it doesn’t make him present.

This, then, is a philosopher’s a priori argument about these developments of visual art in Venice. It is, it might be said, the history of Venetian art that could have been written by Hegel, had he taken an interest in this subject. It is the story of the sacred uses of painting in Venice. The next part of the narrative is the portion of the history of interest to art historians, the development of Giorgione (and his successors) of visual art that embraces and inspires aesthetic pleasure. And so I will tell that part of the story, a happy accident from the point of view of the religious patrons, on another occasion.

Notes:

Joan Carroll Cruz, Relics: What They Are and Why They Matter (1983) a popular history. Also see Alfredo Tradigo, Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church (2004). Garry Wills, Venice: Lion City —The Religion of Empire (2001) dismisses relics. And Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (1997) and Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Losossky, The Meaning of Icons (1982).

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