Venice at Her Mirror

Lisa Arsenault is a public-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

This lyrical description of Venice contains frequent references to the
works of the artists who have painted and sculpted there over the
centuries, interspersed with vignettes of contemporary daily life:
people haggling in market squares, barges plying on the canals, ivy
overflowing from a balustrade.

The author’s love for the city is implicit in every rhapsodic word,
and there are some beautiful descriptions, including a particularly
memorable one of the Grand Canal. However, this short work (75 pages,
with French on the even pages, English on the odd) has been translated
from French, which may account for some of the obscurities in meaning.
How else to explain the following (typical) sentence? “Marine is the
city, marine are the pearls it secretes, and I dream of the gothic, the
blossoms of Galatian grottoes, the only truly original art in the two
thousand years of Pisces, or what would have been the sole original if
painting had not taken over by oil enabling the West, from Van Eyck to
the present day, to prolong the temple and the coronation.”

Finally, references are not placed in context or elaborated upon; the
text presupposes an expert knowledge of Venetian art on the reader’s
part.