Shadows of Venice

Artist John Taylor Arms (American, 1887–1953)

Date1929-30

MediumEtching

DimensionsPlate: 10 1/4 × 12 1/8 inches (26 × 30.8 cm);
Sheet: 14 7/16 × 17 5/16 inches (36.7 × 44 cm)

ClassificationsPrints

Credit LineBequest of William P. Chapman, Jr., Class of 1895

Terms

Etching
Bodies of water
Bridges
Canals
Gondolas
Rialto Bridge, Venice, Italy
Urban views

Object number62.0749

Label CopyBetween 1929 and 1935, when Berenice Abbott was busy photographing New York, American etcher John Taylor Arms was touring Italy, lavishing incredible care and precision on his records of its cultural monuments. Arms’s Shadows of Venice depicts a famous Venetian bridge, the Ponte di Rialto. In his views of Venice, Arms’s intent was to create an artistic statement lamenting the slow decline of La Serenissima, here through the painstaking depiction of time-stained, crumbling stone.The contrast is striking between this idea, inspired ultimately by Romantic vedute like those of Piranesi, and Berenice Abbott’s photograph of Wanamaker’s Venetian-inspired “Bridge of Progress," which joins two consumer emporia and trades an elegant canal for a noisy street.

(Andrew C. Weislogel, "Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond, 1450–1940," catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Stuart M. Blumin, and presented at the Johnson Museum August 11–December 23, 2012)

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