“Just because the shape of Venice is not given, so to say once for good, but on the contrary it keeps on melting and then recomposing, recreating itself in our time: for this reason it does not lie”. This is Venice in the thought of one of the most interesting historians and art critics of the Nineteenth century, Sergio Bettini.

The reflection on the shiftiness of the cities begins in the first times of his adventure as a researcher and it relates immediately to a wider conception of the growing shape, of the shape-event as it was thought by Focillon. It is the year 1945 when Bettini introduces the thought of the French philosopher in Italy, with the Italian edition of “Vie de formes”. A first part on Venice, seen between all cities as the pure paradigm of art in movement, is sketched by Bettini in the publication of 1950 whose draft was written in 1942. In these days, edited by Neri Pozza, will be published in the series recently entrusted to Giorgio Agamben “The fourth prose” a volume escaping all genres and containing a complex installation operation, with various investigations ( the editor Andrea Cavalletti says in the afterword that it can be read as a phenomenology book). It is a sharp critical exercise, considered inter omnes as his masterpiece “Venezia. Birth of a city” with a dense iconography. The Venice of Bettini obeys through the centuries to an original Kunstvollen, an artistic intention of his own. The birth, the becoming, the urban structure, the front architectures, the lack of perspective, the asimmetrical cuts, answer to a shape that is in contrast with the geometrical order and subverts the geometries of statics. A look completely new and mature on a city that was strongly wanted and tenaciously built on unstable foundations.

In the beginning Bettini offers a definition of the city as a unique big surface: “Venice was born between air and water: its image comes out in the almost mathematical point of contact between air and water, it becomes real in these two unlimited dimensions: its shape will thus be able to be defined as coherent, if it will interpret the value of one and the other”. Before facing the “historical” problem of the birth and shaping of the city, Bettini pauses on the multitude of myths that were born on its image in the years. He reproposes the idea of Georg Rimmel, subtle and sensitive philosopher and now “on the estreme border of romanticism”, of comparing Florence to Venice, asserting a superiority of the first on that something which is “incomplete and superficial” that characterizes the second one. He assembles the morbid anxieties of Walter Pater, Ruskin, Byron, De Musset and the mawkish collection of the deaths in Venice. It is interesting how Bettini dates the romantic prefiguration of the myth of Venice to the nordic baroque” (…), an affinity with Stimmung. Both are openings, or at least tensions of a close plastic shape”. And he is fast in pointing Marcel Proust’s vision, far from gloomy romantic misunderstandings; a “present” Venice, because it is different from any other classical city and perpetually melt in “an open shape, formed during time, then solved in color and rythm”. He documents the critics on the beginnings, granted by a late-roman exodus in the population of deserted islands. What is crucial is the shift from late-roman villa to warehouse for goods’deposit, and the progressive marbling between the fourteenth and the early fifteenth century “when the until then empty areas are filled in”. Bettini proposes a reading of the city in an anticlassical key, “fouded not on a perspective structure of the urbanized space, but on the temporal continuity of this space”. He crosses and analyses crucial turning points in taste and styles, often stressing the importance of manufacts and their function (unforgettable are the pages dedicated to the rowlock).

In the end he changes the tone of a definition “quite easy and not so touristic” on the symbol of Palazzo Ducale in order to see it in the context in which it took shape, when in the windows “lights light up, of a strange purple colour which creates a swift contrast with the front marble, that seem made of white gold; and all the surface has an intense and slightly oblique look, of proud and chilly pride”.