Beyond the Brushstrokes

About a year after the Royal Academy hosted a fascinating but ill-attended exhibition devoted to the art of seventeenth-century Naples, it is now the turn of another maritime city state, Venice, whose 'golden age' came a century earlier and whose box office receipts have fared better. Both subjects were for years neglected both by historians and art historians, and especially in the case of Venice the exhibition provides a case study in historiography as much as it does an aesthetic spectacle of stunning quality and interest.