John Addington Symonds, Venice and the Gaze

Abstract

Examining John Addington Symonds's developing representation of Venice, this article contends that Symonds pursued a sense of wholeness that he believed had been degraded. Symonds argued that elements of the fullness of life found in Renaissance Venice could still be discerned in his own period, where he focused on seeing and representations of the visual sphere. While encounters with Renaissance Venetian art could be problematic, the search for wholeness in relationships with working-class men was more successful. A wide range of Symonds's texts are addressed, including the poem “Phallus Impudicus”, his essay on Tiepolo and “In the Key of Blue”. Questioning responses to Symonds that place his writing wholly within the frame of aestheticism and decadence, the article closes by noting the continuities between Symonds and writers of the modernist period, including D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster.