'Piazza San Marco and the Architecture of Romance in Summertime Essay\r'

'The metropolis of Venice and its monuments function, on the surface, as the inclosework and backcloth for the storyline in David Lean’s 1955 film, summer. The action itself advances as a television system travelogue, immediately impressing us with the fundamental use the sea plays for this pee community when â€Å"the mass” turns out to be a water taxi and a fire locomotive engine a boat.\r\nThe tv camera b reverberates us a pertinacious the Grand Canal, awing us with â€Å" picture show paintings” of such magnificent examples of lofty Venetian spirit and decoration as Longhena’s 17th- light speed church building of Santa Maria della Salute, Palladio’s 16th-century Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, and Antonio da Ponte’s late 16th-century Rialto dyad in rapid succession. Abruptly, we be returned to the realities of quotidian Venetian life.\r\nPassing on base of operations d bear centuries-old streets to yet another waterway, we p ick up a Venetian tossing her household drool unceremoniously into the canal to be carried forth by the tides that perpetually cleanse the city, chthonianscoring once again the watery foundation that sustains life in Venice. Yet, Venice is to a bulkyer extent than a simple frame from which the storyline of the film is hung. Venice defines this love story, change the protagonists to escape the constraints of their disparate worlds to a magical place imbued with all the mystery and grind of her eclectic aside.\r\nVenice is the sum total of ideas and design acquired from its primitive beginnings, through its period under convoluted rule, its lucrative mercantile concern with the West and East, and its proximity to Rome, as attest in the many monumental churches, statues, columns, scuole, libraries, and palaces that were created by the close to prominent architects and artists of the Middle Ages and metempsychosis. As Spiro Kostof says in The city Shaped (1999), â€Å"T he city is the ultimate memorial of our struggles and glories: it is where the pride of the past is set on display.\r\n” In the film, as in Venice itself, shopping centre San Marco traffic patterns prominently. Often, the topographic point is more than a mere backdrop, at multiplication it seems to become a character of its own right. One of the most prominent structures of the plaza is the Campanile. Originally constructed in the 10th century, the marvelous brick Campanile with its bronze pyramidal spire seen in the Summertime is actually a 1912 reconstruction of the original as it looked when it collapsed in the early part of the 20th century (Kostof, 1995).\r\nEarly on, as Jane wonders what she will do alone in Venice, the bells of the Campanile ring out, seeming to call to her, beckoning her to Piazza San Marco and her pitch-black encounter with Renato. In their last meeting, just now as Jane utters the sentence â€Å"I begetter’t want to forget…a si ngle moment” the Campanile begins to chime once more. Summertime is genuinely oft about the meeting of two very diverse cultures, and this theme is reflected in much of the architecture featured in the film.\r\nThe most famous of all Piazza structures, St. stag’s Basilica is an outstand example the nuptials between the Oriental or tangled and gothic building styles. The elaborate mosaics highlighted in the still travelogue shots, the basilica plan, and the five domes that crown the Basilica ar all the way manifestations of the Byzantine. The arches of the facade, rounded on the underside with pointed rooflines are an excellent example of the interweaving of the Byzantine love for domes and the pointed Gothic arch.\r\nWhereas the sculptural detail, rose windows, and medical officer arches present in the Basilica are part of the building’s Gothic heritage. Such Gothic elements also figure prominently in Doges Palace and the Sansovino Library. Finally, St. tag’ Basilica, Doges Palace and the Sansovino Library all employ nods to the classical orders in terms or proportions, but whereas the Basilica boasts obviously Byzantine capitals, Doges’ are a more bulgy Byzantine Corinthian hybrid, and the Library capitals are Ionic and Corinthian.\r\nThe beautiful coexistence of two different traditions so expertly managed in Piazza San Marco allows for the viewer and the lovers themselves to imagine, at least momentarily, that notwithstanding the obvious problems (she being only a tourist and he being married), a song and dance- resembling union might be contingent for them as well. Venice has been referred to by contemporaries as â€Å"a theme park on water. ” In the film Summertime, the integration of the characteristics derived from Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles combine to produce a curious wonder shore within which fantasies can be lived.\r\nTo highlight this, the camera returns repeatedly t o Mauro Coducci’s 15th century clock loom in Piazza San Marco focusing on its playful mechanical Moor figures, sassy blue and gold of the Lion of St. chase to add a truly whimsical and theme-park-like air to the Piazza. This sense of fun and exemption further adds to the romance of the couples’ time unitedly by establishing it as a mark and safe â€Å"play” space, setting it unconnected from Jane’s Ohio reality.\r\nBoth spatially and chronologically, Piazza San Marcos literally frames the romance between Jane (Katharine Hepburn) and Renato (Rossano Brazzi) as they meet in the Piazza and eventually their last encounter begins there. Significantly, Jane makes Renato take her foreign the Piazza to tell him she is leaving. The film goes to great lengths to establish Venice as a fairytale setting, and when Jane explains her reasons for departing so abruptly they echo this notion. Jane says she fears staying to long and ruining the perfect memory they run through created.\r\nEssentially, though her fear is of the dream fade into reality. Thus, it is understandable that Renato begs her to stayâ€for him there is no difference because Venice is his reality. And having exited Piazza San Marcos for the final time, the bit is broken, at least enough that, like Wendy, she leaves her Peter Pan in his standing(prenominal) dream and decides to depart the fairytale land and return to reality, maintaining Venice as a perfect Neverland that lives in her memory.\r\nHowever, unlike Wendy, she had a camera and can look back at her film of the buildings and remember her brief stint in the fairytale land of coexistence.\r\nReferences\r\nKostof, S. (1995). A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. New York: Oxford. Kostof, S. (1995). The City Shaped. London: Thames & Hudson. Lopert, I. (Producer), & Lane, D. (Director). (1955). Summertime [Motion picture]. USA: Lopert Films.\r\n'