Memory of Venice, Miha Maleš’s favorite work, is a highly idealized and romanticized image of the famous Italian city. The foreground features the faces of a man and a woman surrounded by animals – two fish in the sea and a seagull in the sky – and on the right there is a Venetian gondola. Venice itself is painted in the background, high on the horizon, separated from the central scene of the painting by the sea or a canal.
Maleš’s idealized representation of Venice does not reveal the instability and fragility of its ecosystem. Built on the sea, the city is often flooded due to periodically rising water levels known as acqua alta. There are numerous historical sources about the flooding of Venice dating back as far as the eighth century, but with the climate change of the 20th and 21st centuries, floods have become significantly more frequent. In 1966, exactly 30 years after Maleš painted this picture, the floodwaters in the city rose to 194 cm, while the 2022 flood slightly increased this record to 204 cm. If the early floods were due to the city’s location on subsiding terrain, they have become a consequence of the rising water levels affecting the Venetian Lagoon over the past century.
Romantic depictions of Venice in the 20th century, such as Maleš’s, present an image of an ecosystem that is cut off from reality and increasingly difficult to rehabilitate. The recent construction of a flood control system clearly cannot solve the problem or reduce the likelihood of future floods, suggesting a scenario of Venice possibly disappearing, with only memories such as Maleš’s surviving.
