The Fine Bones of a City

Is there a mapping that can occur when the human body synchs with the urban body? If that was to happen, wouldn’t it happen in Venice which runs and spreads corporeally like a fine web of bones, blood vessels and causeways? Venice has been metaphorically described along these lines as writers extol the labyrinth, in which it is perhaps best to be lost, to go with the flow. Tiziano Scarpa, for example, has written 'Venice is a Fish,' in which he describes the water city as a vast sole stretched out against the deep, tethered to the mainland by a fishing line. Aerially, it looks, at any time, like it might flick its tail and be off, except for the forests of inverted trees that hold it fast in its seabed slime, on its armature of millions of now-petrified piles. Overlaying this grid, and its rafts, are pockets of architecture, and collections of communes, all with their own fine detail, laid out almost secretly like a plated, yet still-boned, festa.
Here my thoughts swim around images and are grounded by a few, momentarily come to life and are held together: today I am pulling in the prose of Scarpa and his fish, a massive sixteenth century woodcut seen in Museo Correr, and a 1950s oil painting seen at Venice's Gallery of Modern Art, Ca' Pesaro.
Since the fifteenth century, Venice has been a centre for the artistic consideration of cartography and the 6-panel woodcut, ‘Aerial View Map,’ by Jacopo de’ Barbari (c.1470 – 1516) was a landmark work. Astounding at the time, and still poignant today, is its conceptualisation and materialisation of the aerial view, along with its exactitude in paving, tiles, facades, chimneys, roads, bell towers, small squares, and even, the pattern of the sea’s surface. With this map, the renaissance laid claim to a new creation--a synthetic vision of the city under the guidance of the laws of geometry and perspective.
More modern, but along similar lines, is the painting ‘Sojourn in Venice’ by Tancredi (Parmeggiani Tancredi, 1927-1964). It plays with abstraction to suggest the multiple and overlaid parts of the city, its many compartments and allusive links.
In Venice, the city’s body whispers to me ‘within, within, within’ and my body (especially my feet!) will fail before I think I’ve charted my way.