On a small island in Venice called the Lido, twenty small boats lie in a
field, most in a state of disrepair. They are not old—thirty years at
most—but they represent, says Evelyn Ansel, “the end of a lineage that’s
hundreds of years old.” Wooden boats like these, used for
transportation, fishing, racing, or duck hunting, long plied the
Venetian canals. They are not the gondolas ferrying tourists. These are
an endangered cultural phenomenon.
This was an important step of historical preservation because Venetian
craftsman never developed paper plans for the boats they built. Theirs
was an oral tradition, passed down from generation to generation. With
Ansel’s computer model, researchers can now calculate not just a boat’s
dimensions, but also the angle of its curves, the volume of its hull,
and countless other specifications historians need to fully understand
or recreate the boats. Ansel gave her findings to the officials running
Arzanà.
Ansel comes from a family of shipbuilders. Both her father and her
grandfather restored and built boats at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport
Museum of America and the Sea. During the spring of her junior year, she
built boats with her grandfather, who now lives in a cabin on the coast
of Maine. He chooses to live there with no running water and uses a
woodstove for heat. When Ansel visited him, she says, it was brutally
cold. “I needed an electric tea kettle to heat water for my baths,” she
notes. “I’ve never been so intensely aware of spring coming on.”
In return, her grandfather honed her boatbuilding skills and introduced
her to an art conservator who ten years ago worked on preserving bell
towers in Venice. He introduced Ansel to the software she would need to
create detailed renderings of Venice’s historic ships.
Venetian boats had a number of unique design features. Their bottoms
were flat to avoid running aground in the shallow water, and pilots row
them with a single oar while standing, which produces the extra
maneuverability needed to navigate Venice’s twisty, tight canals.
“Venetians drive their boats the way we drive our cars,” Ansel says. It
took her a while to get the hang of it, but once she did, she says, “I
got to spend my summer on the water. It was fantastic.”
Ansel, who officially graduated in the winter, eventually expects to
study museum studies and art conservation. In the meantime, she works
beside her father at Mystic Seaport, where the staff is restoring the
last remaining wooden whaling ship. “We swing axes around all day,” says
Ansel. “I love it.”
Photo by Dana Smith
