Recognizing Venice

Apparently there is a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, also known as facial agnosia or “face blindness,” affecting to greater or lesser extent some two percent of the world’s population. The disorder is characterized by the inability to recognize faces, and in extreme cases the affected person does not recognize his own face in the mirror and in photographs.

I’m not sure if this is a handicap or, to the contrary, a blessing. St. Paul, famously, takes God as his example when, in addressing the Galatians, the apostle declares that He “accepteth no man’s person” or, even more starkly in translations anticipating the King James, “looketh on no man’s person” (Tyndale, 1526) and “loketh not on the outwarde appearaunce of men” (Coverdale, 1535). Finally, in a “literal” translation attempted by Young in 1862, we read that “the face of man God accepteth not.”

My father never recognized people – squinting at them pitifully and always taking pains to explain, lest they mistook his myopia for arrogance, that he was shortsighted – yet never availed himself of a pair of spectacles. As a child I found his behavior inexplicable, and it was many years later that I understood the point. Knowledge is a drug, which technology, including optics, pushes on the good Christian, who ought to turn a blind eye to its seductive and seditious allurements. For if fancy, as the minstrel sings in The Merchant of Venice, is “engend’red in the eyes / With gazing fed,” then so is folly.

A long preamble, but there you are. It was not the first time I revisited Venice after spending four years in that city at the close of the last century. This time, however, I had reason as well as curiosity enough to look up some of the people I used to know here, and was consequently taken round and about as if I were a famous survivor of a shipwreck who had spent twenty years on a desert island in the Pacific. And the fact is that, in a city that had not changed in a thousand years, to say nothing of twenty, I did not recognize anyone or anything.

From the gondola in the Grand Canal – though the opalescence of sunlight on the fish fin sized crests of its placid waves was a sight that seemed familiar to me from infancy – I failed to recognize the first palazzo where I lived and, embarrassingly, its former owner, Baron Franchetti, seated opposite me in the gondola, had to point it out. “Well, it was only for three months,” I smiled sheepishly. At length we arrived at our destination, Palazzo Mocenigo, where I spent the following two years, and it was only the marble plaque, QVI ABITO LORD BYRON DAL 1818 AL 1819, that made me recognize the house. I don’t think that if the sign said QVI ABITO ANDREI NAVROZOV DAL 1999 AL 2001 it would have given me a bigger jolt of recognition.

And, wonder of wonders, the apartments that had been Byron’s and later mine were now home to the Circolo dell’Unione, the gentlemen’s club that used to be housed somewhere near the Accademia, where Baron Franchetti sometimes took me to dinner just as he was doing now. I recognized the wild flowers dotting the glaucous lacquer of the wardrobes upstairs, dressing-room totems which, unaccountably, had remained in place in what was now a clubhouse, but hardly anything else. People came up to me, remembering what they had drunk at my house when I lived here, but I could not recall either the faces or the names.

The next day it was the turn of Palazzo Contarini-Michiel, at Ca’ Rezzonico, next to the house where Browning died, not to be recognized. God, those Grand Canal houses are all alike, I thought, staring at the building where I had spent another two years “like a ram at a new gate,” in a Russian turn of phrase. All these palazzos seemed to me a unified, continuous structure running the entire length of the canal, a two and a half miles’ long block of unsmiling, serious follies, a Socialist housing project for merchants of Venice whose ships have been lost at sea or, more likely, expropriated and nationalized. In short, perception had shut its doors and the brain was now busy making excuses for the eyes.

I don’t feel bad about the whole experience. Twenty years ago I saw much too much and it may be that the time has come to cut down.