Judi Harvest

Clara the rhinoceros by Pietro Longhi, from 1751 (Ca' Rezzonico).

Everyone, if they're lucky, has a favorite painting. A work of art that is an expression of an incommunicable reality, which paradoxically communicates. A painting that pulls us back year after year, like an old friend. A painting we would steal if we could.

My favorite painting is of a rhino, stripped of his horn, whose benign presence is providing entertainment for a gaggle of onlookers at the Carnevale in Venice. It is by Pietro Longhi, an eighteenth century Venetian genre painter. This small work lives in Ca' Rezzonico, a palace in Venice, also one of my favorite places. While living in Venice from 1986-91, I'd visit this painting whenever I wanted a lift, but I never questioned its special power until now. When I finally thought about it, the idea of a Rhino in Venice was quite absurd. A rhino in Venice is not an easy feat. How did it get there? And why? Was it for his horn, held high by a Venetian nobleman in the painting, filled with aphrodisiac promise? Further, I wondered, what does the Rhino have in common with his audience?

For me, it's more than meets the eye. Both the rhinoceros and the Venetian belong to dying breeds. There are presently 600 rhinos and 70,000 Venetians remaining. Almost all of the rhinos live in zoos or protected environments, and the Venetians, too, live in a closed, controlled habitat where they are constantly on display. In Longhi's painting as in life, the rhino and the Venetians are divorced from their natural environments, out of harmony with the rest of the world.

On January 29th, 1996, fire destroyed Il Teatro La Fenice.

It was on my first day in Venice in 1973, while a student at the Tyler School of Art in Rome, that I discovered this painting, I knew, as soon as I stood steps of the train station, that someday I'd live in this city of beauty and veiled mystery. As if led by an unseen guide, I ended up in Ca' Rezzonico, and discovered Longhi's painting. Ever since then, whenever I'm in Venice, I return to visit my rhino and, feeling like a privileged pilgrim, I am restored.

On January 29th, 1996, I arrived in Venice to work in Murano on my glass volcanoes, the same day fire destroyed Il Teatro La Fenice. The scene that welcomed me was similar to an erupting volcano. Flames billowed out of control, smoke and black ashes were everywhere. People were crying in front of their beloved opera house which, living up to its name, the phoenix, has been the victim of three previous fires and has risen from the ashes each time. The day after, people brought flowers and placed them on the ash-covered marble steps, as if for a relative who died. I watched and thought "Longhi would have understood this scene; he would have captured what no camera could." Carnevale festivities were about to begin, yet the city was too sad to notice.

Burnt Velvet (Velutto Bruciato), 1996

In August, 1995, I visited Panarea, a remote island in Sicily of only one hundred full-time inhabitants, to which electricity only arrived five years ago. I was staying in a house where I have been a privileged guest for the past 18 years. Prominently situated at the entrance of the house and gardens, stood a dead tree. For several years the owner debated cutting it down, but I proposed keeping it, making it into a work of art. After removing some of the branches and painting it, the tree was transformed into a big piece of coral rising up from the volcanic earth. Coral is a well-known good luck charm in Sicily, and the bigger the better. I built a scaffolding around it and made a brush handle from a piece of bamboo cut from the garden. Buckets of paint and ladders were tied to the tree (so was I at a certain point to keep from falling). The painting of the entire tree took three weeks, and when it was finished I illuminated it at night with a spotlight. The islanders came to see it and, in their Sicilian dialect, told me that I'd given life to something that was dead.

Back in my studio in New York, the coral tree became another symbol. As I drew it repeatedly, the branches took on the appearance of the valves and veins of the heart. This organ, vital for our survival, is also a metaphor for art and life.

This body of work, entitled Rhinoscimento, is not only about Venice, Venetians, rhinos, coral trees, or hearts, but about beauty and rebirth, and the fragility of life. Life without death is not life. If something is not alive it cannot die. Art is the only way we have of keeping life alive, and death from its finality.

As of this writing, the Fenice Theater is rising slowly from its ashes once again. The Coral Tree still stands in Panarea and I repainted it in September, 2000. As for the rhino, I understand from a recent article in The New York Times that their population is on the increase. As for me, I am still longing for Longhi.

Judi Harvest
New York
Written on the anniversary of the last Fenice fire, January 29, 1997.
Updated on January 29, 2001.

L’Albero di Corralo 1995