Courtyard of the Doge's Palace, Venice, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Courtyard of the Doge's Palace, Venice, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Courtyard of the Doge's Palace, Venice, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-2E4A6F

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Somewhere in Venice in the 1950s, a man in a dark jacket has paused on the external staircase of a Gothic-Byzantine courtyard — almost certainly the Palazzo Ducale — and adopted the posture of someone having a profound thought, which in Venice in the postwar era was practically required by law. The carved white Istrian stone balustrade, the arched colonnade below, and the stone wellhead in the corner had been arranged for exactly this kind of contemplation for about five centuries, and the man is delivering on the brief. European travel in the 1950s still carried the weight of a serious cultural undertaking: you did not go to Venice to relax, you went to stand in courtyards and feel the appropriate gravity of Western civilisation, preferably while wearing a jacket. What the tourist economy had not yet discovered was that the gravity was optional, but that realisation was still a decade away. He leans on the rail above an arch that Ruskin had declared one of the finest in Europe, wholly unaware that within twenty years the square below would be managed by crowd-control barriers.

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