Martin Gayford on Venice: La Serenissima

We are so pleased to welcome art critic Martin Gayford to the bookshop this year. Do come and join us for an insightful and energetic investigation of Venetian art. Martin is a prolific and skilled writer who has published many books about a wide range of topics, including Freud, Hockney, Constable.

Here, he brings the full weight of his knowledge and expertise to bear in an informative and entertaining style that is sure to sate your intellectual appetite.

Venice: City of Pictures

Venice was a major centre of art in the Renaissance, where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm. Nowhere else has been depicted by so many great painters in so many diverse styles and moods. Venetian views were a speciality of native artists such as Canaletto and Guardi, but the city has also been represented by outsiders like J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet.
The story is not confined to the Renaissance though. Since the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s, and the arrival of pioneering modern art collector Peggy Guggenheim in the late 1940s, the city has become a shop window for the contemporary art of the whole world, and it remains the site of important artistic events.
In this elegant volume, Gayford - who has visited Venice countless times since the 1970s, covered every Biennale since 1990, and even had portraits of himself exhibited there on several occasions - takes us on a visual journey through the past five centuries of the city known 'La Serenissima', the Most Serene. It is a unique and compelling portrait of Venice that will delight lovers of the city and lovers of its art.

About Martin Gayford

Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include Michelangelo: His Epic Life (Penguin), as well as Man with a Blue Scarf (in which he recounts the experience of being painted by Freud), Modernists and Mavericks, Spring Cannot Be Cancelled (with David Hockney), A History of Pictures (with David Hockney), Shaping the World (with Antony Gormley), and Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939-1954 (with David Dawson), all published by Thames & Hudson.