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Venice has always been a place that exists in the imagination as much as in reality. It has been painted, written about, and turned into film by so many visitors from abroad that you could justly say there are two Venices: the actual city on the Adriatic and that palimpsest of texts and images that occupies the public domain and is part of the public memory. You don’t need to have travelled to Venice to have been there. By the same token, it is a destination that resists efficient dismemberment by guidebook even when you are there: Venice can’t be filleted in a weekend or even a week. There are simply too many layers to work through—too many corners, too many stories, too many sunsets, too much water, too much history, too much art.

Our abiding modern image of Venice as a splendid sepulchre both preserving and entombing a glorious past owes a great deal to the nineteenth-century English imagination, in particular. In the itinerary of the Grand Tour—that rite of passage once undertaken by well-born young Englishmen that involved an extended trek through Europe in search of culture and the roots of Western civilization—Italy was a de rigueur stop; Venice, the jewel in the crown. In the nineteenth century the English went to Italy for months at a time to commission paintings, mingle with the aristocracy, and pick up antiquities (sometimes, they picked up the aristocracy: Anglo-Italian marriages could be a mutually advantageous by-product of the Grand Tour). From the 1860s, the high period of American Venetophilia, English sojourners in Venice were increasingly joined by leisured American tourists, writers, and painters. Some of the more well-to-do rented or bought palazzi where they kept open house: in the 1880s, the glittering guest list of the Daniel Curtises at the Palazzo Barbaro included John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and, of course, the aged Robert Browning.

Browning, like James, travelled to Venice often throughout his life (his son Pen would later acquire that wedding cake on the Grand Canal, the eye-poppingly baroque Palazzo Rezzonico). Browning and James were both drawn by the lure of what James called ‘the visitable past’, the promise of intimate contact with a civilization that had fed the sources of their own art. Browning especially was attracted by the vigour and the robustness of Renaissance culture: the largeness of its personalities, its ambition, and its optimism, qualities on display everywhere in Venice’s colossal marbles and lustrous canvases and waterborne palaces. He and James both enjoyed the hospitality of a wealthy American hostess called Katherine de Kay Bronson, who owned a house on the Grand Canal and a country villa in Asolo, a hilltop town in the Veneto some forty miles to the northwest of Venice. It was to Asolo that Browning went in the autumn of 1889, when he was busy revising the poems in the collection that was to be his last, Asolando.

Browning was now seventy-seven years old. His celebrated marriage to the poet Elizabeth Barrett, which had caused a scandal when they eloped together in 1846, belonged to another era: Elizabeth had died in 1861. Browning knew that his own career was also drawing to a close. He was one of the most lionised and popular poets of his age, but all who met him testified to his peculiar guardedness. When Henry James was introduced to Browning he was perplexed and not a little horrified at the apparent difference between Browning’s real-life personality and the sophisticated, finely tuned sensibility he’d been led to expect from the poetry. The Robert Browning James encountered was loud and cheerful and garrulous, his opinions were clichéd and his health strapping; he ate well and chattered undiscriminatingly and told awful jokes. Shocked, James put Browning into one of his stories, The Private Life, as the bafflingly bluff—or insufficiently ‘subjective’—writer Claire Vawdrey: ‘He never talked about himself; and this was the topic on which, though it would have been tremendously worthy of him, he apparently never even reflected.’

Had he but known it, James had already put his finger on the answer to the mystery. If Browning was not ‘subjective’ enough, this was entirely deliberate: long experience of having his most intimate feelings made public property had taught him not to refer to his private life if he could help it; if possible, not to reveal anything personal of himself at all. His vexed resistance to exposing his inner self to the public gaze extended to his poetry—throughout his career he made a technical virtue out of not speaking in his own voice on the page. His preferred form was the dramatic monologue, in which a character (who might be made up, or have some historical basis) addresses an unseen audience. As an artistic strategy it is a strikingly effective way of revealing the human personality in action. And indeed, one of Browning’s abiding themes was the relationship between art and its human subject, most searchingly addressed in a number of dramatic monologues which he wrote about artists. Set in Renaissance Italy, they reflect the Victorian fascination with the period—with its sumptuousness, its dynamism, its unparalleled belief in the human animal.

Perhaps the best known is My Last Duchess, first published in 1842. The poem is impressive in being, quite literally, a perfectly achieved picture in words: it re-creates the portrait of a beautiful young woman, recently deceased, as described for us by her widower, the art-loving Duke of Ferrara. Ferrara is too much of an art-lover, perhaps. The poem makes it shockingly clear that he not only killed his wife, but actually prefers the image of his dead duchess to the original since the image is inert—he can dominate it in the way he could never dominate the living woman. Though the poem is ostensibly about art, it is the humanity of the duchess that makes the strongest impression, however. The pen portrait is just as lifelike as the painted one: we are left with an exhilarating sense of the girl’s animation and joie de vivre long after her murderous husband has once again tried to muffle her up.

After My Last Duchess Browning would go on to write some of the best poems of his career about the theme of artists and their work: Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto, Pictor Ignotus. Yet all the indications are that he lost his faith in art, and poetry, by the end of his life. Asolando, his last work, exudes a sense of exhaustion and disappointment, a loss of faith in the creative impulse that had previously sustained him, and an overwhelming awareness of the sterility of art for art‘s sake. The once burning bush, he writes, is bare. A flower is just a flower; ‘Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man.’ Yet Browning, as My Last Duchess so eloquently shows, always knew that art—the pursuit of pattern—is meaningless unless it is humanised, rooted in the real.

When I began to write The Bellini Madonna it was this apprehension of Browning’s, rather than the details of his celebrated marriage, that interested me most. The Bellini Madonna is set partly in Asolo during Browning’s stay of 1889 with Mrs. Bronson, and Browning wanders in and out of the narrative, as guarded as when James met him, if a little more worn. He came ready-made. The real challenge lay in creating the novel’s present-day narrator, Thomas Lynch—who resembles the Duke of Ferrara in his greedy aestheticism—and gradually investing him with some of Browning’s later poetic insights: his disillusionment with abstractions, his awareness that the world is too random and various, too intractable, to be contained by art. Desperate to prove the existence of an uncatalogued Madonna del prato by the great Venetian master Giovanni Bellini, Lynch worms his way into the ancestral home of the Roper family in Berkshire, where he finds a diary kept by James Roper while on the Grand Tour in Asolo in 1889, containing clues to the painting’s whereabouts. As Lynch tries to unravel James Roper’s hints, he is drawn into a sexual cat-and-mouse game with Roper’s great-granddaughter, Anna. She is as ingenuous as Browning’s Duchess, as lovely and as vulnerable, and Lynch’s developing relationship with her upsets all his assumptions about the superiority of possessing an image of a woman to the real thing. By the close of the book Lynch, too, is a murderer of sorts, but with this difference: he is a Ferrara agonisingly aware of the crime he’s perpetrated.

There is also a genuflection, in the novel’s plot, to Henry James’s great novella about nineteenth-century Venice, The Aspern Papers. But the key to it all—the figure in the carpet, as James would say—is Giovanni Bellini himself. Dürer really did visit Bellini in 1506, and he really was in the habit of writing copious letters home about his travels abroad. In real life, however, Dürer was far more interested in how much paintings could sell for than what they looked like. The missing Madonna in the book is entirely invented, as is every detail of her creation and every scrap of her provenance. Bellini’s astonishing qualities as a painter, however, are not.

Why Bellini? Of all the painters of the Italian cinquecento, it seemed to me that he best expressed that quality of compassion for his human subjects that Browning managed to convey in My Last Duchess. Browning never wrote a dramatic monologue about Bellini, but he surely should have. The founder of the Venetian School of painting, Bellini raised Venice to a centre of Renaissance art that rivalled Florence and Rome. He was one of the pioneers of the new medium of oil paint, and his luminous use of dense colour introduced volume into representations of the human body in a way that had never been attempted before. His madonnas are fully three-dimensional; they seem to tremble and breathe. They are so girlish, so bruisable. You can easily imagine them not feeling quite equal to the part they’ve been called on to play, biting their nails, eating cherries, riding around on mules. They are striking examples of humanity, rather than ciphers in a devotional message. If Dürer learned anything from Bellini it was how to import this naturalism into his own work: just look at the Madonna of the Rose Garlands, which he painted in 1506 for Venice’s community of German merchants, and compare its easy fluidity to the didactic linear style he had favoured previously. This is the moment when the Renaissance reaches the north, when ideas give way to flesh.

Browning died in Venice, at the Palazzo Rezzonico, on the day that Aslando was published; his body was interred in Westminster Abbey. Bellini is buried in the cemetery of the Scuola di Sant’Orsola, but his real monuments are to be found everywhere in Venice, and beyond. You can visit Bellini’s San Giobbe Altarpiece in the Accademia, his Frari Triptych at Santa Maria Gloriosa, his Sacra Conversazione in San Zaccaria; but you probably already know these madonnas without even realising that you do, just as Bellini’s stunningly corporeal angels and putti—struggling to balance their oversized lutes on their knees, or tilting their pudgy bottoms at us, or glancing shyly up as they try to master their flutes—are reproduced in almost every book on the history of painting in the Western world. They persist in the fund of common images we have all, at some time, had access to. His art and his surprisingly modern vision of humanity are as much a part of our shared imaginative inheritance as Venice itself.

This essay first appeared in the Picador edition of The Bellini Madonna (New York, 2010)

The Bellini Madonna effectively blends historical fact and fiction with a compelling modern-day story. How did the idea for the novel come to you? What is your background in fine arts?

I don’t have any formal fine arts training I’m afraid, just a love of pictures and an interest in different kinds of representation. I think a lot of writers are fascinated by and a little envious of the effects achievable by the visual arts. In a picture you get a total and apparently spontaneous impression, whereas the written word (in the European languages at least) takes the eye on this rather laborious journey from left to right—if only we had that painterly power to put it all across at once, to show rather than to tell!

I began to jot down ideas for The Bellini Madonna while I was in the last stages of a doctorate in English at Oxford. I was supposed to be doing a thesis on the development of the short story as a genre, but my heart wasn’t in it. I longed for the long-distance seduction of the novel; more specifically, like most unhappy students of other people’s fiction, I wanted to write my own. While avoiding my thesis I’d got into the habit of reading almost anything frivolous and unrelated, particularly mysteries and Gothic novels—the sort of book in which secret passages, hidden diaries and lost treasures are on the menu. For years I’d kept a postcard of Giovanni Bellini’s enigmatic Madonna of the Meadow propped up on my bookcase. One day, while I was guiltily turning the pages of another mystery (I always kept the phone off in case my supervisor inconveniently thought of ringing) it occurred to me that I had the ingredients for a detective story. What if Bellini had gone on to paint a later, lost Madonna even more disturbingly beautiful than this one, and what if this missing painting suddenly turned up? I’ve always liked the tantalising possibility—borne out, from time to time, by chance discoveries that make the newspapers—that there might be a few masterpieces out there which have somehow escaped the art market over the centuries to lie hidden in private collections. Why not start here? I knew that I wanted to create the sort of book I liked to read; one which, if possible, had all of the ingredients of a Gothic page turner: the crumbling mansion, the skulduggery, the fraught chase—and, of course, the art. So it all began as pure escapism. The Renaissance, or literary theory? There was no competition.

Perhaps the least apparent historical influence on the novel is Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers. Browning, James, and their hostess in Asolo, Katherine de Kay Bronson, all figure in your novel, but only Browning and Mrs. Bronson appear as characters. Do James and his novella exert a more subtle influence?

The spirit of James hovers over the whole, I feel. There’s the old faded house, the proximity of the deep past; the concupiscent narrator—in The Aspern Papers, James’s narrator, who comes to Venice to search for some hidden letters once written by the great poet Jeffrey Aspern, is guilty of literary concupiscence, whereas Lynch’s is of the artistic as well as the more usual fleshly sort. They both set out to seduce a helplessly complicit woman who might just be able to deliver the treasure they seek, only to back off spectacularly at the end just when it’s in their grasp. What I admire most in James is his complex moral geometry, not just in The Aspern Papers, but in almost every story by James you care to think of. A typical Jamesian story contains an ironic inversion at the end: by remorseless degrees his characters are led to adopt the opposite of whatever position they start out with. James knows, like no one else, that you’re not going to want what you’ve always wanted as soon as you get it.

Another historical figure of note is the exiled and imprisoned queen Catarina Cornaro, who was forced to give up her kingdom after the death of her husband. Cornaro is intriguing; can you elaborate on the connection between the queen, her secretary Pietro Bembo, and his work Gli Asolani with the larger themes of The Bellini Madonna?

Catarina Cornaro is one of many trapped female figures in the book. She is another disappointed and powerless woman: like the Madonna, Mrs. Bronson, Anna, Giulia. They are not artists (like Browning, Dürer, Bellini) or even commentators on art like Lynch, not creators but procreators. They’re endlessly talked about by the men, but essentially overlooked (except by Bellini, of course. He can see quite plainly that the Madonna’s capacity for love, her role as the mother of Christ, was her life work, an achievement equivalent to that of any artist).

The question that Lynch, through his obsession with the Bellini and his celebration of physical beauty, is really asking is: is there a transcendent meaning to the physical world? Art and religion both come from the same impulse, the impulse to transform, to get beyond, to find such a meaning. So, arguably, does romantic love. Bembo’s Gli Asolani, the book that no one in the novel has read, is a celebration of courtly and idealised love on a grand scale (and it’s dull, believe me. The appropriate critical response is given by Browning in the loggia at La Mura: ‘Who can’t in a moment convert his lady love into Aurora, or a rosebush, or a silver fountain? Or a thousand other metaphorical flim-flams?’ And Bellini, who is, I hope, always a touchstone for artistic integrity in the novel, dismisses it too). Set in the garden of Catarina Cornaro’s castle in Asolo, the theme of Gli Asolani is the refinement of worldly love into a higher love that elevates the human spirit. It reflects the young Bembo’s belief in an ideal beyond contingency and the imperfections of the daily world of the senses, and in the power of poetry to express it. All that nonsense (which is roundly praised in the newspaper review of Puppi’s book on Bembo found by Lynch). This idealised Platonic tosh is what Browning and Bellini ultimately repudiate—they’re cowed, in the end, by the sprawling enormity of creation and their inability to contain it in their work. I hope that The Bellini Madonna, in spite of—or perhaps through—its surface finish and its interest in the detail of things, repudiates it, too. Though there’s an irony, perhaps, in trying to write a highly crafted book about the pointlessness of loving art and its ideals as opposed to people and the physical world.

Thomas Lynch has a very distinct voice and background. Describe your relationship to Lynch as a character of yours. How does his narration style relate to your writing style? Do you sympathise with his greater struggle?

Lynch is vain, lazy, pretentious, unprincipled, amoral, licentious. Frightened, arid, alone. In this he’s utterly human. The more frank he is about his own bankrupt nature, the more I’m willing to forgive him. Ideally I’d like the reader to feel most compassion for him when he is at his most loathsome and blinkered. In his voice I aimed deliberately at a prose that is worked, that would draw attention to the act of observation—because Lynch, though clever and perceptive in many ways, really can’t see.

At the end of their lives both Browning and Lynch renounce art. Elaborate on what distinguishes art that is worthwhile from art that distracts from life. Is originality alone, as Browning seems to suggest, enough?

Actually, worthwhile art is often full of distractions, don’t you think? In trying to be true to life, art has to be true to its distractions, its messiness. Not too obviously shapely, in other words.

Browning at last rejects the illusion of control afforded by words, accepting the ultimate powerlessness of art to say anything very real about the world, which remains intractable. How should the artist approach the world? Dürer, like Lynch, explains too much (as Bellini tells him, ‘Your art has too much rhetoric about it’.) Both pursue pattern, allegory, order. Lynch in particular is selective in his search for meaning: he talks, he does not look. He idealises, as bad art idealises. He does not easily accept what is human, banal, ragged. And his childhood seduction, of course, occurs over beguiling words in a room called Rhetoric (the Jesuit schools really do christen their classrooms in this way.) Browning comes to see how futile it all is—and so does Lynch. ‘Knowledge without love is lifeless,’ says the elderly Browning, once a cocksure young man, now close to death and bewildered by the meaning of his life’s work. The final word belongs to Bellini: ‘You must love this flower because it is a flower, this tree because it is a tree.’ Or as Browning exclaims: ‘Language! What piss! A book is just a book. A flower is just a flower.’ In other words, stop telling stories. Shut up and live.

You write evocatively about a wide variety of settings. Are there any locations in the story that you haven’t personally visited? Are there any real estates that served as inspiration for the sprawling Mawle House?

I’ve been to Venice a number of times, though it’s a place that still eludes me—it’s so hard to approach it without preconceptions. When I started writing the book I hadn’t been for many years. Just before I started the final draft I had a crazy compulsion to go to the Veneto at once, now, this very minute, and make sure that everything was ‘really’ as I’d described it. There followed a frenzied weekend at a hotel in Asolo from which I attacked Venice, Treviso, Bassano, etc. in turn, like a surveyor. After one nightmarish evening crossing Treviso on foot at dusk with a measuring tape, I realised that I was writing fiction, and was allowed to make things up.

Is Mawle real? About as real as Venice. Mawle contains elements of an actual house not many miles from where I live, and I did go to just such a sad and squalid Open Day there once as the one in the book. But this place probably has a website and a gift shop now and could be doing very well, thank you, so it would be unfair to name it.…

What authors or books are you most influenced by? Were any especially inspiring in working on The Bellini Madonna?

Apart from James, there’s a hefty debt to Nabokov there—Nabokov is the unparalleled creator of unreliable narrators. His Humbert Humbert has such an exquisite sense of mortality. I’m drawn to writers who celebrate the glorious trivia of daily life while acknowledging that we’re all on the way out: Chekhov, Bellow, Woolf, Dickinson, Borges. But I still think Woody Allen sums up the whole ars longa vita brevis problem better than anybody when he says, ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.’

Anna asks (page 198): ‘Do you believe that people can change, Dr. Lynch? Really change, in themselves… for always?’ How would you answer this question?

Really change? Lynch’s answer would be, ‘My dear girl, of course not.’ That’s the answer implicit in the novel, anyway.

But the question is a bit of red herring because I don’t think people are ever one thing for any length of time, let alone always. The human personality seems to be such an unpredictable, even unfixed, entity—as James’s Amerigo puts it in The Golden Bowl, ‘everything is dark… in the heart of man’. We’re all capable of anything, given the appropriate conditions.

This interview first appeared in the Picador edition of The Bellini Madonna (New York, 2010)