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Invisible Cities (2000) Oil on canvas, 72x132cm This painting was for the Marco Polo suite; the torn paper is from the title page of the first printed account of his travels. The crumpled paper on the right shows the thumbnail sketches that were the only preparatory work I did before commencing the whole commission. By and large my working methods circumvent making any kind of detailed studies beforehand, and also the time constraints here further made such work pointless. Needless to say, this painting is the least successful of the nine, as I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do prior to starting it. The title of the painting is from Italo Calvino's book, wherein Marco Polo describes to Kubla Khan some of the fantastical cities in his empire. At one point in the narrative Calvino asserts that the descriptions of all the different cities are simply those of different aspects of a single city: Venice, where Marco Polo was from. In this painting, the architecture in the right hand strip is taken from Vittore Carpaccio's painting Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross, which takes place in a view of the Grand Canal in Venice with the old Rialto Bridge; the left hand section is from Giovanni Bellini's Sermon of St Mark in Alexandria. The square in Alexandria, and the building that bounds its far side is quite obviously based on St Mark's, Venice: Bellini's imaginative reconstruction of Alexandria is limited by his frame of reference. ©copyright 2005 Nicholas Middleton |
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