Hard by the Rialto, in a densely packed and depressingly tacky quarter of Venice, the church of San Giovanni Cristosomo houses one of Giovanni Bellini’s most luminous and exquisite paintings. ‘I Santi Cristoforo, Girolamo e Ludovico di Tolosa’ is known to locals as ‘the Burger King Bellini’, after the fast food outlet opposite the church door. In any other city, the picture’s exquisite handling of light and complex mingling of Christian piety with Renaissance Neo-platonism would grant it a museum of its own, but in Venice its principal spectators are weary tourists in line for a Whopper.

Martin Gayford’s paean to Venice as ‘a huge, three-dimensional repository of memory’ is constantly alert to such anomalies. The city itself embodies perhaps the greatest concentration of art treasures the western world has ever known; yet, as he brilliantly demonstrates in his latest book, it has always been a site of conflict between squalor and splendour. The six panels of Jacopo di Barbari’s glorious view of the lagoon in 1500 depict the axes of the trade routes of a great bazaar. When Sansovino was engaged to ‘patricianise’ San Marco in 1527, tawdry trinket stalls disfigured the piazza then as now.

It is from Venice that the European tradition of oil painting derives – the city’s ‘greatest gift to the world’

Renoir claimed to be ‘powerless’ against Venice, which Monet described as ‘too beautiful… untranslatable’. But in examining Venice’s history through the story of its pictures, Gayford has succeeded in doing the impossible – that is, finding something new to say. Progressing through six centuries, the narrative loops through time, tracing connections between contemporary and classical art to demonstrate Gayford’s thesis that new ways to paint make new ways to see.

The revolution begins with the Bellini dynasty, and Gayford vaults the psychological crevasse between the 15th century and the present with élan, recovering the vitality, energy and thrilling modernity of its innovations. He is excellent at ekphrasis, describing the manner of patrons and saints meeting in the new composition of sacra conversazione as a gathering ‘in a celestial conference room’, or the ‘shadowy vat of air’ conjured in Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe altarpiece. With Giorgione (‘Big George from Castelfranco’), he introduces the idea of pictures being made for personal, private pleasure rather than as public statements of devotion, paintings that could be ‘savoured like a sonnet’. Venice invented the modern art market, with patrons like Isabella d’Este as a prototypical Peggy Guggenheim competing for star artists. Art as a personal pastime made Venice the centre for another new profession, publishing, with the foundation of the Aldine Press in 1494, which capitalised on the developing printing industry to make Petrarcha bestseller.

The freshness and precision of Gayford’s vision reanimates even the most familiar Venetian masterpieces. A Titian scholar, his evocation of the disarming, almost hallucinatory sensuality produced by the dash and flutter of brushstrokes is positively gleeful. It is from Venice, not Florence, that the European tradition of oil painting derives, one which Gayford describes as the city’s ‘greatest gift to the world’; yet even when Titian and his troubled, enigmatic contemporary, the relatively neglected Lorenzo Lotto, were reconfiguring their century’s vision, there were those who lamented their dubious techniques as a disgrace to art. The Papal Inquisition was outraged by Paolo Veronese’s scandalously luscious and playful ‘Last Supper’, and Gayford notes that his interrogation comprised the first artist interview ever recorded. (Veronese blithely changed the title of his teeming, worldly canvas at the monastery of San Giorgio without altering a single detail.)

No traditionalist was more outraged by the shock of the new than John Ruskin. Gayford mercilessly exposes the pinched aridity of his vision by recalling poor John Bunny, a devoted Ruskinite, who was so absorbed in painting yet another meticulous view of the basilica, flat and lifeless as a cardboard theatre set, that he failed to notice James Abbott McNeill Whistler pinning a sign to his back which read: ‘I am totally blind.’

Whistler’s presence in Venice in 1879 was occasioned by the bankruptcy consequent on his lawsuit against Ruskin, after the latter notoriously accused him of fraud:‘I… never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’ Whistler won the suit, but the costs obliged him to retrench, luckily for art, as his sojourn in the lagoon produced the haunting seascape ‘Giudecca’. Ruskin’s feud was based on similar objections to those made by Vasari against Tintoretto 400 years earlier.

Gayford makes space for artists who ought to be better known, including Rosalba Carriera, internationally renowned and considered superior to Guido Reni in her lifetime (the first English language biography of Carriera, by Angela Oberer, was published in June), and Giulia Larma, whose provocative altarpieces made her part of a circle of scientifically and mathematically inclined women in the northern Italian 18th century who deserve greater scholarly attention. Women have always had a place in Venetian art history beyond its site as the birthplace of the nude in oil. Gayford discusses the influence of the Marchesa Luisa Casati, who inspired Léon Bakst and Man Ray before dying in penury, having spent her fortune on fashion, parties and cheetahs. La grande Peggy, who took over the Marchesa’s palazzo on the Grand Canal, galvanised the Venice scene when she showed Jackson Pollock at the 1949 Biennale. Even now, Pollock remains a contentious artist, but Gayford repositions him as quintessentially Venetian, obsessed with Tintoretto’s technical capacity to manipulate paint into capturing the movement of time rather than freezing it.

That Venice forms part of the imagination of the world makes it uniquely vulnerable, not least to the venality of its own governors. In 1872 the prefect Luigi Torelli was condemned for his proposal to ‘modernise’ the city with a ring road on the Riva dei Schiavoni. Venetians hated him, as they loathe the present mayor, Luigi Brugnaro. Hyper-tourism poses an even greater threat to Venice now than the Futurist happening which proposed razing it to the ground in 1910.  Nonetheless, meandering through Gayford’s book is as delightful an experience as getting calmly lost in the labyrinthine calle, past and present always overlayered and intertwined. From the glowing tesserae of the architect Carlo Scarpa’s ‘Byzantine’ design for the Olivetti showroom to the doughty icon of the city, the Lion of Venice column, a hodge-podge of sculptural ingredients whose provenances date from the 5th century to 1892, Venice emerges as a mosaic kaleidoscope whose dynamism remains as fundamental to human vision as it was when the maker of the Burger King Bellini first took up his brush.