Rubens Santoro

By the late nineteenth century, Venice had nearly abandoned its traditional sources of trade and commerce, instead living primarily off the tourism industry.  Postcards, photographs, and paintings such as Santoro’s Gondolas on a Venetian Canal, Santa Maria Della Salute in the Distance, transformed the city into a visual product compelling tens of thousands of visitors/customers.   Further, affordable packaged vacations specifically tailored to middle-class Germans, French, and British plus new rail links through the Alps flooded the canal-ways with a greater number of tourists than ever before.  In response, Venetians began to host their own tours of their city to incorporate visits to the landmarks made famous in Santoro’s paintings and his fellow artists like Martin Rico Y Ortega (see lots 4 and 25) along with the literary works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, or Browning.  Such tours were not complete without a reading from the appropriate lines of text such as from Browning’s A Toccata of Galuppi (1855):

Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings. What, they lived once thus at Venice, where the merchants were the kings, where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?

Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by... what you call... Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival; I was never out of England—it's as if I saw it all!

Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May? Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,

When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?

As in Browning’s work, Santoro plays with the contemporary understanding of Venice in its distinct, visceral impressions.   Santoro’s use of bright palette and breezy brushstrokes evokes the same warm sunny May day, while the repeated ripples of the canal’s water coupled with the overlapping architecture and costumed figures gives the work a touch of timeless fantasy.  Santoro's composition both inspires dreams of Venice and reminds lucky visitors of its truly distinct beauty.