The splendour and squalor of Venice

Hard by the Rialto, in a densely packed and depressingly tacky quarter of Venice, the church of San Giovanni Cristosomo houses one of Giovanni Bellini’s most luminous and exquisite paintings. ‘I Santi Cristoforo, Girolamo e Ludovico di Tolosa’ is known to locals as ‘the Burger King Bellini’, after the fast food outlet opposite the church door. In any other city, the picture’s exquisite handling of light and complex mingling of Christian piety with Renaissance Neo-platonism would grant it a museum of its own, but in Venice its principal spectators are weary tourists in line for a Whopper.

Martin Gayford’s paean to Venice as ‘a huge, three-dimensional repository of memory’ is constantly alert to such anomalies. The city itself embodies perhaps the greatest concentration of art treasures the western world has ever known; yet, as he brilliantly demonstrates in his latest book, it has always been a site of conflict between squalor and splendour.