Women's Music. A painting, a book, a concert, a museum in Venice.

There are three reasons that usually prompt visitors to cross the threshold of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice: Giovanni Bellini’s Presentation in the Temple , the magnificence of the salons, and Carlo Scarpa ’s spaces on the first floor. Probably few enter because they are moved by the desire to get to know Gabriele Bella’s paintings: most, however, are always surprised when they happen upon the room dedicated to him, wallpapered with his canvases. There are about forty of them, all of the same format, arranged to cover every empty inch of the wall, in a singular access ofhorror vacui in which passages of eighteenth-century Venetian life unfold: Bella’s paintings in fact capture moments of everyday life in Venice in the eighteenth century, including public ceremonies, secular or religious, fairs, festivals and popular festivals, concerts and dance parties, scenes of strolling, fishing or hunting, and sports games.

Bella was not a particularly gifted artist, far from it: one might consider him a mere craftsman or little more. His paintings are repetitive, meager, uncertain in execution, lacking in study, paratactic, flat, and Bella was an artist with little sense of composition. It is not, therefore, because of some valuable linguistic value that one admires his paintings: they are, however, valuable documents of the time, luminous records that inform how life was lived in the worldly and festive Venice of the 18th century.

Looking away from the elegant balls, the pretty damsels strolling along the riva degli Schiavoni, the parades on the sea and the celebrations for the election of the doge, one will notice, in the lowest register of the wall on the left as one enters, almost resting on the ground, a canvas that negl’inventarî of the Querini Stampalia is recorded as La cantata delle orfanelle per i duchi del nord (or, if you want to use the title Bella includes in the cartouche, La Cantata delle putte delli Ospedali nella Procuratia fatta alli Duchi del Norde). It is a painting executed around 1782: it depicts the feast prepared on the occasion of the visit to Venice that year of the heirs to the throne of Russia, Grand Duke Paul Petrovič Romanov, that is, the future Tsar Paul I, and his wife, Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg. In their honor, a concert was given in a large hall in the Procuratie, which was in the availability of theVenice Philharmonic Academy (which had its headquarters here) and was used as a theater for the occasion, complete with boxes for the female musicians.

The female musicians are the “orfanelle” referred to in the title of the painting: they were very young, little more than children, and studied singing or music in the four women’s orphanages in Venice. Looking at the painting brings to mind Tiziano Scarpa’s masterpiece, Stabat Mater, the 2008 Strega Prize-winning novel that tells the story of Cecilia, one of the orphan girls at the Ospedale della Pietà, following the girl in her individual growth, in her violin lessons, in her imaginary dialogues with the figure of death, and in her relationship with the absent mother who abandoned her and to whom she hopes one day to be reunited.

Gabriele Bella, La cantata delle orfanelle per i duchi del nord (1782?-ante 1792; oil on canvas, 95.5 x 124 cm; Venice, Fondazione Querini Stampalia)

Gabriele Bella’s paintings at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia

In a passage from the novel, a concert given by the orphan girls is described with minuteness and poetry, which is worth quoting in full: “The church is a large square hall, a musical cube. On the side walls, a few feet high, are two large balconies, facing each other. They are a dozen meters long and protrude a couple of meters from the wall. They are accessed through a small inner doorway on the second floor of the Hospice. The balustrade that surrounds the two balconies has two bands: the lower band is made of stone, the upper band is made of gilded metal and is composed of a trine of openwork ornaments. So the musicians playing on one poggiolo can see those in front of them on the poggiolo on the other side of the church, can follow their movements and tune in to Don Giulio’s gestures marking time. But those who sit in the pews and watch us from below cannot distinguish our faces, because the weaves of metal that surround the two balconies are too dense to their diagonally ascending gaze. To those who look at us from over there, sitting in the church pews, we are an outline, a silhouette. We are a shadow, an imagination, a dream. We are a semblance that secretes music. We are ghosts blowing an intangible substance. We turn out beautiful because we are mysterious and spread beauty in the air, the lie of music masking our affliction.”

Usually, spectators were not allowed to see the girls’ faces: they played overhead, behind a grille that concealed their appearance from the eyes of those who flocked to hear them. But their music was appreciated, the Venetian aristocracy could not do without their concerts, and it not infrequently happened that the young women showed themselves, as is the case in Gabriele Bella’s painting, or that they introduced themselves to the listeners so that they could meet them live, as happens toward the end of Tiziano Scarpa’s novel.

Even today westill listen to the music written for those unfortunate maidens. We likely do so, for example, every time the notes of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons resound, published in 1725 but, by the author’s own assertion, composed earlier, most likely when he was violin master at the Ospedale della Pietà. “Don Antonio” is the other protagonist of Stabat Mater, he is the new violin teacher who begins to insinuate music inside the little orphans of the Pieta, he is the composer who helps them translate their being and moods into sounds: his music, says Cecilia, “enters inside our eyes, impregnates our heads, makes our arms move. The elbow and wrist of the right arm bend to maneuver the bow, the fingers of the left hand bend over the strings.” Vivaldi is the master who “pulls feminine sounds out of our bodies, offers to the hair-clogged ears of old males the sound version of women, our translation into sound, just as males want to hear it.” A music “made by women,” spilling the “spicy scent” of women into the air. Scarpa, in the endnotes to Stabat Mater, wrote that we tend to forget that Vivaldi’s music was often composed for female performers. Gabriele Bella’s painting brings us back, with the palpable concreteness of images, to this historical evidence.

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