Giorgione in the House

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2024

Giorgione in the house

On “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” at Frick Madison, New York.

The arrival of a single painting in the United States is not often cause for a special exhibition. When the visitor, however, is a work by Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione (ca. 1477–1510), you make an exception. Only about ten paintings are attributed today to the enigmatic Venetian, and The Three Philosophers (ca. 1508–09), now on loan in New York for the first time from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is among his greatest achievements. So the appearance of this canvas at the Frick Collection’s temporary home of Frick Madison is cause for a very special exhibition indeed. That this painting has been reunited—for the first time in some four hundred years—with its pendant composition, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80), the masterpiece from the Frick’s own collection that in the sixteenth century occupied the same Venetian palazzo as the Giorgione, is also cause for jubilation. This reunion is the occasion for a revelatory one-room show, “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.”1

The loan is the result of a pursuit that bordered on obsession for Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. The exhibition is also a tribute to the Frick’s outgoing director, Ian Wardropper, who has set his retirement for next year, and his high-minded use of the collection’s temporary digs on Madison Avenue—the former home of the Whitney Museum, onetime outpost of the Metropolitan Museum, and future headquarters of Sotheby’s auction house. On March 3, the Frick will vacate these galleries that have functioned like private viewing rooms for its collection and move back to its mansion at One East Seventieth Street.

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

The installation of the Frick’s permanent collection on Madison Avenue—and in particular the presentation of St. Francis—was the inspiration for Salomon’s dream of reuniting the Bellini with the Giorgione. To underscore the worthiness of the unprecedented loan, in the accompanying catalogue published by D Giles Limited, Salomon collects everything we could possibly imagine about the creation, meaning, and provenance of The Three Philosophers and its relationship with St. Francis in the Desert.

Three years ago, I wrote about the effect of seeing St. Francis in the Desert in the light of Frick Madison (see “Sublet with Bellini” in The New Criterion of April 2021). A raking illumination fills the scene from beyond the left frame—unseen by us, but fully apparent to Francis, who exposes the symbolic wounds of the stigmata on his hands and feet. Flora and fauna fill this vision of his rocky hermitage as the rays seemingly melt its icelike outcropping into a stream, watering a kingfisher below. Kenneth Clark noted how “no other great painting, perhaps, contains such a quantity of natural details observed and rendered with incredible patience: for no other painter has been able to give to such an accumulation the unity which is only achieved by love.”

Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, ca. 1508–09, Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: KMH-Museumsverband.

At Frick Madison, positioned in its own alcove, the painting has been lit by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoidal windows in a way that accentuates the work’s own luminous dynamics. Light and shadow, depiction and reality glow together. The Three Philosophers has now been hung on this alcove’s opposite wall, which had been left empty before the arrival of the Giorgione. Again we are presented with figures in a rocky landscape, this time three men in colorful robes, with two standing and one seated. The similarities in these compositions of roughly equal size are striking, especially as the two paintings can now be observed together. The hills in the distance share uncanny form, as do the designs of the distant towns with their arched construction. The stepped stones in the foregrounds seem like mirror formations. Even the tiny pebbles appear to have been quarried from the same source.

The two paintings interact the more you move around them and take them in. Are we looking at the same scene depicting two different periods of time? Or are these two sides of the same outcropping, with the stone floor of Frick Madison now running between them? While the direct lighting of St. Francis leaves little doubt of its divine origin, the illumination of the Giorgione is more elusive. A sun low on the horizon seems to be setting, but the figures appear to be lit with an unexplained glow. Those “three philosophers” may be seen carrying scientific instruments and tablets relating to the sun and moon, but the lighting of the composition is non-Euclidian and otherworldly. It is almost as if the radiance of the Bellini is now bouncing off of the Giorgione in mystical, lunar-like reflection.

Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, ca. 1475–80, Oil on panel, Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

As is often the case with Giorgione, the more we look into this young painter’s work, the less we understand it. Anyone who has tracked down Giorgione’s small painting The Tempest (ca. 1508) in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia can likewise attest to the mystery of that strange and tender scene of a nursing mother, an idle man, and ruined architecture beneath a stormy sky. Who are they? Where are we? What are we seeing? The questions strike like a thunderclap emanating from the clouds above. Here is something more than just visual storytelling with known characters and stock symbols. Rather it is something absorptive, mysterious, and new.

The same goes for The Three Philosophers. The composition has warmed observers with its brilliance but also baffled scholars about its meaning since just about the time of its own creation. In 1525 a Venetian collector by the name of Marcantonio Michiel (1484–1552) was making a survey of art in the Veneto when he recorded a definitive account of these paintings together in what he titled his Pittori e pitture in diversi luoghi (Painters and paintings in different places). This manuscript was later published as his Notizia d’opere di disegno (Information on works of design).

In his account of the paintings “in the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini,” written in the Venetian dialect, Michiel lists ten works. One of them is “three philosophers,” he writes, a “canvas in oil of the three philosophers in the landscape, two standing and one seated who is contemplating the sun’s rays, with that stone finished so marvelously . . . begun by Giorgio from Castelfranco and finished by Sebastiano Veneziano.” Another is a “Panel of St. Francis in the Desert,” which Marcantonio Michiel identifies as an oil by “Zuan Bellini, begun by him for Messer Zuan Michiel, and it has a landscape nearby wonderfully finished and refined.”

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

Marcantonio Michiel’s account is significant for several reasons: for coining the titles of the two works (3 phylosophi and S. Francesco nel diserto); for its clear descriptions of the paintings (dui ritti et uno sentado che contempla gli raggii solari cum quel saxo finto cusi mirabilmente and un paese propinquo finito et ricercato mirabilmente); for information about their authorship and provenance (Fu cominciata da Zorzo da Castel Franco, et finita da Sebastiano Venitiano and Fu opera de Zuan bellino, cominciata da lui a Ms. Zuan michiel); and for describing them together in one private collection (In casa de Ms. Tadio Contarino).

Recorded some forty-five years after the creation of St. Francis, seventeen years after Three Philosophers, fifteen years after Giorgione’s death, and nine years after the death of Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1424/35–1516), Michiel’s survey is also revelatory for what it leaves out: the identity of those three philosophers, as well as the particular moment depicted in Saint Francis of Assisi’s life. Both have been sources of discussion and conjecture ever since. For St. Francis, most scholars now agree that the image depicts the saint’s stigmatization, not in the “desert” but rather at his Apennine retreat at La Verna. Still, two standard references are missing: the seraph delivering Christ’s wounds, and Brother Leo. An alternative interpretation is that we are rather presented with Francis composing his Canticle of the Creatures, that prayer to “Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth, and Sister Bodily Death.”

The Giorgione poses an even greater conundrum. “Apart from Giorgione’s Tempest,” writes Salomon in his exhibition catalogue, “very few Venetian Renaissance works have received as much attention and been as widely interpreted as The Three Philosophers.” The identification of those “three philosophers,” which was left unstated by Marcantonio Michiel even within two decades of its execution, has resulted in centuries of conjecture. Assuming the painting in fact depicts “three philosophers” from antiquity, the proposed combinations as collected by Salomon have included the following: Archimedes, Ptolemy, and Pythagoras; Aristotle, Averroes, and Virgil; Regiomontanus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy; Ptolemy, Al-Battani, and Copernicus; Aristotle, Averroes, and a humanist; and Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. Alternatively, the figures might represent the Three Magi; or Marcus Aurelius studying with two philosophers on the Caelian Hill; or Abraham teaching astronomy to the Egyptians; or Evander and Pallas showing Aeneas the Capitoline Hill; or a meeting between Sultan Mehmet II and Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios in Constantinople; or Saint Luke, King David, and Saint Jerome; or King Solomon, King Hiram of Tyre, and the master craftsman Hiram of Tyre as they plan the Temple in Jerusalem; or perhaps even the painters Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, and Giorgione. For Xavier Salomon, the most convincing identification, as proposed by the scholar Karin Zeleny, is that of Pythagoras with his two teachers, Thales of Miletus and Pherecydes of Syros, “the first three philosophers of the Western tradition shown while at the Oracle of Apollo at Didyma.” I am more partial to the poetic approach proposed by the art historian Tom Nichols in his book Giorgione’s Ambiguity, in which he suggests that our interpretation is meant to remain free-floating and open-ended. Deliberate ambiguities, he writes, are Giorgione’s “visual traps set to capture the viewer’s curiosity and speculation.”

“Uncertain about authorship, patronage, dating, and the significance of both paintings,” writes Salomon, “when it comes to Giorgione’s Three Philosophers and Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, we know much less than we think we do.” What is certain is that these paintings occupied the same Venetian home soon after their creation, even if the specific location of Taddeo Contarini’s residence in the neighborhood of Cannaregio has been up for debate. Marcantonio Michiel writes that Bellini painted his St. Francis for Zuan Michiel, and the painting was then acquired by Taddeo Contarini (ca. 1466–1540) soon thereafter. It is possible that Giorgione’s Three Philosophers was a direct commission by this powerful and supposedly unscrupulous Venetian merchant—one even intended to complement the Bellini. While he may or may not have painted it for Contarini’s collection specifically, Giorgione most likely studied with Bellini, and so St. Francis might still have been front and center in his mind.

The last time these paintings were seen in one place was between 1556 and 1636. Like a flash of light of some divine rapture, their being brought together in this spectacular exhibition makes their connections manifest once again.

1.   “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” opened at Frick Madison, New York, on November 9, 2023, and remains on view through February 4, 2024.

Carpaccio by the slice

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2023

Carpaccio by the slice

On “Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

It is the contemporary fate of Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1465–1525), the Venetian painter of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, now with a major new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, to share his name with a popular dish of sliced raw beef.1 The joint appellation, as it turns out, is not a coincidence. In 1963 the Palazzo Ducale organized its first ever retrospective of this “master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice,” as the National Gallery dubs its current show. La Serenissima at the time was awash in Carpacciomania, so much so that Giuseppe Cipriani, the owner of Harry’s Bar, named his culinary invention after the reds of the appetizing painter.

The famous restaurateur was not alone in appreciating the taste of this last of the Venetian “Primitives”—one who was sandwiched, as it were, between the coolness of Giovanni Bellini and the maniera moderna warmth of Titian and Giorgione. A little over a century before Cipriani paid his respects, John Ruskin unearthed Carpaccio among his stones of Venice. The painter sent Ruskin into a “reverie” approaching a “delirium of fantasy.” Then as now the artist’s great appeal was his stunning architectural staging, one that sets his mythological, biblical, and historical storytelling in idealized Venetian cityscapes.

Vittore Carpaccio, Two Women on a Balcony, ca. 1492/1494, Oil on panel, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Museo Correr, Venice.

In his Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice of 1877, Ruskin placed Carpaccio at the apex of Venice’s “classic and mythic” age. An honorary member of the Accademia, for weeks Ruskin sat and copied Carpaccio’s monumental cycle of paintings of Saint Ursula, the artist’s most famous set of works, originally created for the Scuola di Sant’Orsola confraternity. “I went crazy about Saint Ursula,” he said of the recently restored works in the Accademia museum. In St. Mark’s Rest, his epilogue to The Stones of Venice, Ruskin even bumped Bellini from his top spot to declare Carpaccio’s Two Women on a Balcony, in the Museo Correr across the Grand Canal, as “The best picture in the world . . . and I know no other picture in the world which can be compared to it.”

In 1882 Henry James set out on his own Venetian tour, Ruskin’s “generous lamp” in hand. In works such as Saint George and the Dragon and Saint Augustine in His Study, James found a “paradise of his own room.” Unlike the “vertical” pull of much of Italian art, James appreciated the “horizontal” window that Carpaccio opened onto the spiritual world, with the terrestrial and the celestial seeming to cohabitate in our own temporal space. Placing him among his favorites Bellini and Tintoretto, James declared that Carpaccio was the “most personal and sociable of artists” for his “care for human life at large.” The anchoring of Carpaccio’s safe harbors seemingly in the actual stones of Venice—with marble paving stones and building façades receding in perspective view—has appealed in many times of rebuilding and renewal: for example during the French Second Empire, through such artists as Gustave Moreau, and following World War I, in the neoclassical fantasies of Giorgio de Chirico.

The times must be right again for another Carpaccio rediscovery. Fortunately the National Gallery (and, undoubtedly, only the National Gallery) has the lending power to mount a major stateside survey of the artist. The first outside of Italy, the display should enkindle our own Carpacciomania. Curated by Peter Humfrey in collaboration with Andrea Bellieni and Gretchen Hirschauer, the exhibition is presented in partnership with the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia—which, as with their joint 2018–19 exhibition of Jacopo Tintoretto, will also mount the show at the Palazzo Ducale. In Washington, even without some of his most significant paintings on offer, in particular those from his expansive Saint Ursula cycle, “Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice” features forty-five paintings and thirty drawings. Gathering work from some forty-eight venues, the transporting exhibition leaves us with much to chew on.

Vittore Carpaccio, Saint George and the Dragon, 1516, Oil on canvas, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Benedicti Claustra Onlus, Venice. Photo courtesy of Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Benedicti Claustra Onlus.

While little is known of the young Carpaccio, he clearly became intoxicated by three Bellinis: the brothers Giovanni and Gentile and their father, Jacopo. Together they developed and refined the Venetian understanding of single-point perspective. As an apprentice to the Bellini sons (whether he trained with Giovanni or Gentile or both is not entirely certain), Carpaccio inflated their compositional inventiveness to maximum volumetric effect. Never before had paintings breathed with quite so much fresh air.

Like the brothers Bellini, Carpaccio worked with oil on canvas rather than in fresco, as the new medium was far more resilient in the humid Venetian climate. The availability of printed books and woodcuts added elements of the northern Renaissance to Carpaccio’s cosmopolitan mix, with printed maps and depictions of distant lands informing his visual concatenations.

The results are indeed storytelling at its most masterly. And rather than overwhelming us with such monumental painting cycles as his Saint Ursula, which at nine feet tall by eight to twenty feet wide (and again newly restored) remains in situ at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, “Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice” helps us appreciate the painter on a more intimate scale with smaller works. Assembled here, the altarpieces, private devotional paintings, smaller confraternity commissions, and studies and cartoons that he made in preparation for his larger compositions all speak to the artist’s consummate craft and the particular interests of his Venetian patronage.

Carpaccio was the opposite of groundbreaking. In his compositional structuring, he was fortifying. His imaginative worlds were perfected 3D environments, premium-engineered with all Venetian-made parts. Into his spaces he arranged numerous figures far more occupied with one another than with our own subjective point of view. Unlike the later artists of the Venetian cinquecento, with Carpaccio there is no heavy artistic hand to draw us in. We instead get a self-contained universe, a sim-Serenissima where the activities exhibit the same ordered rules as the compositions’ single-point perspectives.

Vittore Carpaccio, Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon (recto); Letter Rack (verso), ca. 1492/1494, Oil on panel, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

The exhibition begins with Ruskin’s “best picture in the world,” the Two Women on a Balcony—but here presented even better than in Ruskin’s day. Sometime in the 1700s this small work, most likely part of a set of folding shutter doors painted for a Venetian palace, was divided from its upper half. The lower portion with the two women eventually went to Venice’s Museo Correr. The upper part, now titled Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon, ended up at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The panels, dated together to ca. 1492/94, were only reidentified as being part of the same composition after conservation efforts in the early 1990s. This exhibition now temporarily reunites for only the second time in recent history what was clearly intended to be a single whole—the line of a lily stem even connects the two parts. Their happy reunion begs to remain permanent, if only the Getty and Correr could arrive at a loan agreement to share the works.

In the lower panel, the women gather on a balcony filled with birds and dogs. The scene is busy with domestic activity even if the women (and their dogs) appear somewhat bored by the pet play. The upper panel suggests the reason for their tedium. Above and beyond them, the men have loaded onto their gondola-like boats for a lively hunting and fishing expedition out on the lagoon. The components together reveal the ordering of Venetian society in one view. As both groups contend with their animals, the women in the foreground, who seem little interested in what is happening below the balcony, add humor to the recreation of their husbands beyond. The clever division and animated activity of the entire panel reveal Carpaccio’s great ingenuity with composition, compressing and expanding space to his will to contain his full “care for human life at large,” as Henry James put it. That the scene is clearly cut off to the left would certainly suggest that some additional Carpaccio is still out there waiting to be rediscovered—just look for the matching balustrade and rear end of a brown dog. Adding to this intrigue, the verso of part of the known panel is painted with personal letters appearing to hang from a line in trompe l’oeil. As much as we might appreciate him by the slice, Carpaccio is best enjoyed whole.

The organization of Carpaccio’s compositions was no accident. His studies of faces, architecture, and perspective were exacting. His deliberative process might help explain why we are now left with more of Carpaccio’s preparatory work than almost any other artist of his time. The National Gallery presents thirty of these drawings both to let us appreciate his working methods and to help illustrate his larger paintings that cannot travel. Among these examples, a blue double-sided sheet from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is a standout. Titled Head of a Young Woman in Profile (recto) and Head of a Young Woman in Three-Quarter View (verso), the drawings from ca. 1488–89 served as studies for two of the numerous faces in Carpaccio’s Apotheosis of Saint Ursula, one of the paintings in the Accademia cycle. The drawings are not necessarily innovative. They even may have been copies of works by Pietro Perugino and Pinturicchio. Still, through their exquisite modeling created with hatch marks of white and black chalk and washes of brush and brown, they reveal a luminous grace.

Carpaccio’s extensive compositional planning did not necessarily serve him well as his reputation contended with the rise of the modern style of Titian and Giorgione. Even at the time of Ruskin, in 1871, Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle wrote that Carpaccio was “without any poetry of fancy” in their History of Painting in North Italy. In her current catalogue essay, “Carpaccio as a Draftsman,” Catherine Whistler concurs that he was “overshadowed by the poetic genius of Titian.” Even Peter Humphrey writes that “set against the more heroic and classicizing art, the work of Carpaccio must have appeared staid, quaint, and irrelevant.” At the very least, Humphrey continues, “his narrative paintings and skills as a storyteller may be seen as a vital link in the continuous tradition in Venetian painting from the late Gothic style of the early fifteenth century to the late baroque of the eighteenth.”

But there is more to Carpaccio than merely his role as a historical connection between the painting styles of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice. His appeal is in locating us in spiritual space and infusing this built environment with pious order. We can see why the scuole, those social and charitable organizations of Venice, all commissioned him to paint their lives of Saint George and Saint Stephen and Saint Ursula and the Virgin Mary. The worlds he envisioned were immersive. They could be entered, touched, and breathed. The paradise he creates is indeed “of his own room,” to which he extends a welcoming invitation.

1.   “Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice” opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., on November 20, 2022, and remains on view through February 12, 2023. The exhibition will next be on view at the Fondazione Musei Civici, Palazzo Ducale, Venice (March 18–June 18, 2023).

New Worlds

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2021

New worlds

On a discovery of fifteenth-century Venetian glass beads in Alaska.

Venice can be a furnace, as anyone who visits in midsummer will tell you. Beyond the heat of the Adriatic sun, the lagoon city is also a furnace for culture. This is why we still visit: to experience those ingredients of East and West, of Rome and Byzantium, of Europe and Asia and past and present, that melted together and crystallized through art and architecture into islands of faith and fortune.

Out of that heat came many miracles. In the fifteenth century, Venice’s glass factories on the lagoon island of Murano produced a particular miracle that has only now come to light. One day, over five hundred years ago, a guild of Murano glassmakers combined a mixture of silica, plant ash, lime, cobalt, and copper. They fueled their furnace with alder and willow wood. They added their grains of silica made from the sands of Crete and Sicily and the quartz of the local Ticino and Adige rivers. Turned malleable through the ash, strengthened by the lime, the silica melted into molten glass that was lustrously colored like a milky blue cloud, the result of the material’s exposure in heat to the cobalt and copper. The glassmakers then extracted the mixture. They stretched it into a thin cane, or drawn tube, until it was no more than half an inch thick. Then they cut the tube into tiny segments and reheated the pieces in a special rotating furnace. This final process smoothed over the edges, until the glass cuttings became polished and round.

What emerged that day were translucent cerulean globes of a dreamy, oceanic radiance. Then as now they were the coveted creation of that particular Venetian genius for melding art and technology into objects that are unlike anything else in the world. Bisected with tiny holes, the beads were designed to be tied together. Little did the glassmakers of Murano know quite how far those ties would take them.

The glassmaking guilds of Venice developed their proprietary techniques for manufacturing rosary beads—paternostri—of extraordinary beauty. In the markets to the east, beyond Renaissance Christendom, these same glass beads became prized as veriselli—imitation gemstones. Two centuries before, the Venetian Marco Polo had famously opened up the worlds of Asia, returning with paper and stories of the Silk Road. Now it was the glass of Venice, an alchemy of art and artifice, that was making its way to the Orient.

Out of the furnaces of Venice, those blue beads ended up traveling farther than even Marco Polo could have imagined. In the months and years after their creation, a handful of the beads followed the Silk Road routes to the east. Down the Adriatic and around the horn of Greece, past the Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas, the beads moved hand over hand into China. Then to the north and east, they passed into aboriginal Asian territories. Eventually they reached the tribal lands along the northern Pacific. Now at the western edge of the Bering Sea, at the outer edge of Asia, the beads went again by boat. This time they were traded along indigenous fishing routes. Now in the hands of prehistoric Eskimos, they crossed the Bering Strait, a journey of over fifty miles by kayak—remarkably, into present-day Alaska.

It wasn’t until 1741 that Vitus Bering, a Danish cartographer in the service of Russian explorers, first made contact with the native peoples of southern Alaska. The sea and strait dividing the Asian and North American continents are named in his honor, and his discoveries ended the region’s prehistoric period by opening the door for Russian traders. The Murano beads, entering North America sometime in the 1400s, predate the arrival of European contact there by centuries.

Venetian beads found in northern Alaska. Image: Kunz & Mills / American Antiquity.

Following native trade routes along the Noatak River, Eskimos carried these beads up from the Chukchi Sea and the Kotzebue Sound. Eventually they reached the crest of the Continental Divide at a place called Punyik Point, a site in the Arctic tundra along the north shore of Etivlik Lake suited for caribou hunting and trout fishing. Here along the western Brooks Range, the Colville River begins its Arctic journey among the shrub-willow patches to the Beaufort Sea to the north east.

Judging by their well-worn appearance, the Venetian beads were prized, rubbed, and held close. The Eskimos likely divided them, now tied with local twine and mixed in with cold-hammered copper jewelry of native manufacture, among a family clan living in different temporary dwellings. One day, they hid the beads along with their local jewelry behind the benches and in the entry tunnels of the temporary winter shelters they had dug into the earth. Then, for reasons we can only imagine for a nomadic people who left no written record, they departed and never returned for their unique possessions. Maybe there was a catastrophe. Maybe they were simply unable to retrieve them. Over the seasons, as the shelters collapsed back into the earth, the beads came to rest among the caribou bones. They were only rediscovered and identified over five centuries on, matching beads found at two other Arctic sites, all connected by the drainages of nearby rivers.

When the archaeologists Michael L. Kunz and Robin O. Mills announced the finding of these Venetian beads in February 2021 in the journal American Antiquity—the result of decades of research and field investigation at three archaeological sites—they speculated that the objects were among the earliest evidence of European culture in the Americas. Through radio-carbon dating of the locally sourced twine discovered among the neighboring jewelry, and what is otherwise now known about the nomadic dwellings in which they were found, they concluded that the beads most likely arrived in their resting place sometime in the middle of the 1400s. The two archaeologists called their discovery the “first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent.” That means the beads entered the North American continent many decades before Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies in 1492—an event that also brought Venetian beads to the New World.

It took a leap of faith for those beads to cross the ten-thousand-mile route from the Venetian lagoon to Punyik Point. It also took a leap and many years of research for archaeologists, digging for over half a century around the outlines of what remained of those small nomadic dwellings, to realize quite what they had found. Yet seeing those beads today, as extraordinary as it now seems, it is still possible for us to understand the dynamics that delivered them over such vast distances to be traded among such disparate peoples.

We speak too little of beauty. Yet, time and again, the wealth of culture, and the creativity to embed that culture into things of beauty, has the power to surprise. In the affections of art, of music and dance, even of captivating ideas, humanity extends its reach against the odds. Beauty can draw the lines of culture over vast distances, making the most unexpected connections. It can also be all that remains, not just of value, but of values, long outlasting the people who created, conveyed, and protected it. If only we would recognize culture qua culture, as something to be prized for its richness and coveted for its complexities outside of the diktats of the present moment.

There was a time, even in the lifetime of many readers today, when the arrival of European culture in the Americas was considered a cause for celebration. Perhaps this celebration was too unalloyed and too unchallenged, but American civic identity has long recognized the events around it as world-defining, on the order of the first humans stepping out of Africa, and not unreasonably so. In another time, the discovery of the Venetian beads of Punyik Point might have been heralded along the lines of Columbus’s first landfall, or the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. Beyond Viking outposts in Greenland and Newfoundland, which might date to 1000 A.D., everything that European civilization has touched in the Americas started at Punyik Point, with tiny glass beads seeding the crest of the Continental Divide. The story invites wonder, not at conquest, but at culture and its astonishing powers to connect worlds we otherwise insist are unconnected.

We live at a moment when the historical overlay of European culture onto the Americas has never seemed more tenuous. The regular attacks on its symbols and rituals now feel like concerted acts of extirpation, with energies that seem to burn for nothing less than the annihilation of Western culture down to the roots of the American soil. The culture of the West has not always been here, the arguments go. It is alien, compromised, bringing with it a set of foreign ideals that have not nearly been met. Native peoples have also lived in the Americas for thousands of years—if not since the beginning of time, as oral traditions may teach, then at least for longer than anyone can remember, through the ice age, through periods when even the landscape looked quite different and the continents of America and Asia may have been connected. And these critics are right, at least about the West’s relatively brief presence in the Americas. Six hundred years is but a moment compared to six thousand years, or thirty thousand years.

The discovery of the Venetian beads should, in fact, remind us of this impermanence. It is precisely this impermanence, the bead-like preciousness of culture, that needs care and protection. Western culture often exists as an intervention—a cultivated garden, a voice in the wilderness, a remote settlement. Some of its most lasting moments have been on the margins, where cultures are set in relief and the divisions between settled and unsettled are most deeply felt. Western culture can be best expressed in these extended, exploratory, colonizing forms—as refugees from the Trojan War setting foot on the coast of Italy, or American astronauts touching down on the lunar surface, or Venetian beads adorning a family of Eskimos. This is why the culture of the Americas has been so remarkable in its heterogeneous, modern form. Those Venetian beads signaled the beginning of a moment that has enriched the world of culture.

The discovery of the Venetian beads should also suggest the true complexity of that exchange. Western culture arrived here as an interchange, an import to the Americas as much as an export of Europe. If only we would recognize and protect that culture today as well as its Asian and Mesoamerican custodians did half a millennium ago. The five-hundred-plus-year history of European contact in the Americas may be a blink of the eye, but consider what has been achieved in that short time. No matter how it may end, consider also that the future of the Americas will be buried together—
Native and European jewels mixed among the caribou bones.

For the prehistoric people of northwest Alaska, even if they could not have imagined the Basilica of San Marco with its celestial domes, they knew they had something remarkable in their tiny globes of sky, crystallized in Mediterranean sand. The same goes for the unimaginable chain of hands that connected these people through those beads, from the Arctic tundra of Punyik Point all the way back to the Murano glass guilds of fifteenth-century Venice.