Pink Floyd and the Imago Urbis

摘要

On 15 July 1989 Pink Floyd held a concert in Venice in front of more than 200,000 people. Framed in the foreground by the city's famous twin columns - of its patrons, St Mark the Evangelist, represented by a winged Lion, and St Theodore of Amasea - and in the background by Andrea Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore, the band performed from a floating platform in the middle of the Venetian lagoon, while the assembled crowds filled every inch of St Mark's Square, the adjoining Piazzetta and waterfront Riva degli Schiavoni, and even jostled for a front row seat in an ever-growing carpet of boats moored within the lagoon itself. A particularly striking aerial photograph, retrieved from a Venetian archive, presents the scene a few hours before the band took to the stage, 'mechanically repeating', as Roland Barthes would put it, 'what could never be repeated existentially'.