ABSTRACT
The visitor to Venice, gliding lazily or attentively along the Canal Grande, will have realized, perhaps with a mixture of shock, disappointment and mild outrage, that many of the palazzi that she or he passes show to the world not their actual façades but screens, resting on scaffolding, painted to represent their once-glorious frontages, imposed to conceal the work of restoration that is continuing beneath. Artfully framed to give an appearance of actuality, and easily confused with the structures they project, these simulacra offer an appropriate metaphor of the treatment of Venice within English visual culture, in constructing a form as beguiling as it is misleading, an elaborate trompe l’œil that both represents and conceals the fabric itself.
