Multisensorial Hydrography with Venetian Depictions from 1880 to 1895

This article, prompted by first-hand experience of considerable controversy over cruise ships in the Venetian Lagoon, seeks to take forward reasoning around archipelagic wateriness. In light of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals on ‘Clean Water and Sanitation’ and ‘Life below Water’, I shuttle between the twenty-first and nineteenth centuries on an experimental trajectory that brings more-than-human ecosystemic matters to the fore. Questions of place identity and mobility in the Carbon Age are set within a Mediterranean framework that rounds out understanding of modern Venice’s escalating artificiality. A proposal for a hydrographic method of analysing art – adopting a sensorially immersive mode of liquid attentiveness – is applied to four works by French and Italian painters spanning two noteworthy decades: Giuseppe Pogna’s ‘Venice’ (1880); Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s ‘The Doge’s Palace’ (1881); Emmanuel Lansyer’s ‘Boats in the Environs of San Giorgio Maggiore’ (1892); Eugène Boudin’s ‘Seascape at the Giudecca’ (1895).