Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

fidelity, to hamper policy: such was the code of all Renaissance

powers. The citizens readily accepted this code; they approved every

Venetian victory, however won; they gloried in the strength and

stability of their state, and offered it, in its need, a patriotism

and fullness of service unmatched among their contemporaries. They

honored the doge only next to God.

The doge was usually the agent, quite exceptionally the master, of

the Council and the Senate; his splendor far outshone his power. In

his public appearances he was clothed in magnificent raiment and was

heavy with gems; his official bonnet alone contained jewels to the

value of 194,000 ducats ($4,850,000?). `051119 Venetian painters may

have learned from his garb the gorgeous colors that flowed from

their brushes; and some of their most brilliant portraits are of doges

in official robes. Venice believed in ceremony and display, partly

to impress ambassadors and visitors, partly to awe the population,

partly to give it pageantry in place of power. Even the dogaressa

received a sumptuous coronation. The doge received foreign

dignitaries, and signed all important documents of state; his

influence was pervasive and continuous through his lifelong tenure

amid persons elected for a year; in theory, however, he was merely the

servant and spokesman of the government.

A long and colorful succession of doges marches through Venetian

history, but only a few impressed their personalities upon the

character or fortunes of the state. Despite the dying eloquence of

Tommaso Mocenigo, the Great Council chose the expansionist Francesco

Foscari to succeed him. Coming to the throne at the age of fifty,

the new Doge, in a reign of thirty-four years (1423-57), carried

Venice through blood and turmoil to the zenith of her power. Milan was

defeated, Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, Crema were won. But the growing

autocracy of the victorious Doge aroused the jealousy of the Ten. They

charged him with having won his election by bribery; and unable to

prove this they accused his son Iacopo of treasonable communication

with Milan (1445). Under the agony of the wheel Iacopo admitted or

pretended his guilt. He was exiled to Rumania, but was soon

permitted to live near Treviso. In 1450 one of the Inquisitors of

the Ten was assassinated; Iacopo was credited with the crime; he

denied it even under extreme torture; he was exiled to Crete, where he

went mad with loneliness and grief. In 1456 he was brought back to

Venice, charged again with secret correspondence with the government

of Milan; he admitted it, was tortured to the verge of death, and

was returned to Crete, where he died soon afterward. The old Doge, who

had borne the perils and responsibilities of a long and unpopular

war with stoic fortitude, broke down before these trials, which not

all his dignity could prevent. At eighty-six he became incapable of

carrying the burdens of his office; he was deposed by the Great

Council with a life annuity of 2000 ducats. He retired to his home,

and there, a few days later, he died of a burst blood vessel as the

bells of the campanile announced the accession of a new doge.

Foscari's victories had earned Venice the hatred of all the

Italian states; none could any longer feel secure in the nearness of

her grasping power. A dozen combinations were formed against her;

finally (1508) Ferrara, Mantua, Julius II, Ferdinand of Spain, Louis

XII of France, and the Emperor Maximilian joined in the League of

Cambrai to destroy her. Leonardo Loredano (1501-21) was Doge in that

crisis; he led the people through it with an incredible tenacity

only partly revealed in the handsome portrait of him by Giovanni

Bellini. Nearly all that Venice had won on the mainland by a century

of forceful expansion was taken from her; Venice herself was

surrounded. Loredano minted his plate; the aristocracy brought forth

its hidden wealth to finance resistance; the armorers forged a hundred

thousand weapons; and every man armed himself to fight for island

after island in what seemed to be a hopeless cause. Miraculously,

Venice saved herself, and recovered part of her mainland realm. But

the effort exhausted her finances and her spirit; and when Loredano

died- though fifty-seven years of Titian, and most of Tintoretto and

Veronese, were still to come- Venice knew that in wealth and power her

zenith and glory had passed.

IV. VENETIAN LIFE

-

The last decades of the fifteenth century, and the early decades

of the sixteenth, were the period of greatest splendor in Venetian

life. The profits of a world trade that had made its peace with the

Turks, and had not yet suffered severe curtailment from the rounding

of Africa or the opening of the Atlantic, poured into the islands,

crowned them with churches, walled the canals with palaces, filled the

palaces with precious metals and costly furniture, glorified the women

with finery and jewelry, supported a brilliant galaxy of painters, and

overflowed in bright festivals of tapestried gondolas, masked

liaisons, and babbling waters echoing with song.

The life of the lower classes was the normal routine of toil,

eased by Italian leisureliness and loquacity, and the inability of the

rich to monopolize any but the most perfumed delights of love. Every

humpbacked bridge, and the Grand Canal, teemed with men transporting

the products of half the world. There were more slaves here than in

other European cities; they were imported, chiefly from Islam, not

as laborers but as domestic servants, personal guards, wet nurses,

concubines. Doge Pietro Mocenigo, at the age of seventy, kept two

Turkish slaves for his sexual entertainment. `051120 One Venetian

record tells of a priest who sold a female slave to another priest,

who on the following day had the contract annulled because he had

found her with child. `051121

The upper classes, though so well served, were not idlers. Most of

them, in their mature years, were active in commerce, finance,

diplomacy, government, or war. The portraits we have of them show

men rich in conscious personality, proud of their place, but also

serious with a sense of obligation. A minority of them dressed in

silks and furs, perhaps to please the artists who painted them; and

a set of young bloods- La Compagnia della Scalza, "the Company of

the Hose"- flaunted tight doublets, silk brocades, and striped hose

embroidered with gold or silver or inset with gems. But every young

patrician sobered his dress when he became a member of the Great

Council; then he was required to wear a toga, for by a robe almost any

male may be endowed with dignity, and any woman with mystery.

Occasionally, in their magnificent palaces, or in their villa

gardens at Milrano or other suburbs, the nobles betrayed their

secret wealth to lavishly entertain a visitor, or to celebrate some

vital event in the history of their city or their family. When

Cardinal Grimani, high in both the nobility and the Church, gave a

reception for Ranuccio Farnese (1542), he invited three thousand

guests; most of them came in cabined gondolas smoothed with velvet and

eased with cushions; and he provided them with music, acrobatics,

ropewalking, dancing, and dinner. Normally, however, the Venetian

nobility in this period lived, ate, and dressed in moderate style, and

earned some fraction of their keep.

Perhaps the middle classes were the happiest of all, and joined most

lightheartedly in private and public merriment. They provided the

lower hierarchy of the Church, the bureaucracy of the government,

the professions of physician, attorney, and pedagogue, the

management of industry and the guilds, the mathematical operations

of foreign commerce, the control of local trade. They were neither

so harassed as the rich to preserve a fortune, nor so worried as the

poor to feed and clothe their young. Like the other classes they

played cards, threw dice, and deployed chessmen across the hours,

but they rarely gambled into ruin. They loved to play musical

instruments, to sing and dance. As their houses or apartments were

small, they made promenades and patios of the streets; these were

almost free of horses and vehicles, since transport preferred the

canals. So it was not unusual for the less sedate classes, of an

evening or on some festal day, to form impromptu dances and choruses

in the public squares. Every family had musical instruments and

included some bearable voice. And when Adrian Willaert led the great

double choir in St. Mark's, the thousands who could get in to hear

reversed their famous boast, and became for a moment Christians

first and Venetians afterward.

The festivals of Venice, in their unrivaled setting of churches,

palaces, and sea, were the most gorgeous in Europe. Every excuse was

used for pomp and pageantry: the inauguration of a doge, some

religious holyday or national holiday, the visit of a foreign

dignitary, the conclusion of a favorable peace, the Gharingello or

Women's Holiday, the anniversary of St. Mark or the patron saint of

a guild. In the fourteenth century the joust was still the crowning

event of a festival; indeed, as late as 1491, when Venice received

with stately ceremony the abdicated Queen of Cyprus, some troops

from Crete held a joust on the frozen Grand Canal. But the joust

seemed inappropriate to a naval power, and it was gradually replaced

with some form of water festival, usually a regatta. The greatest

feast of all the year was the Sposalizio del Mare, the solemn and

colorful rite of marrying Venice- La Serenissima, the most serene-

to the Adriatic. When Beatrice d'Este came to Venice in 1493 as the

captivating emissary of Lodovico of Milan, the Grand Canal was adorned

throughout its length like some splendid avenue in Christmas time; the

ship Bucentaur, symbolizing the Venetian state and all decorated

in purple and gold, sailed to meet her; a thousand boats rowed or

sailed around it, each adorned with garlands and bunting; so many were

the vessels, said an enthusiastic chronicler, that for a mile around

the water could not be seen.

In a letter written from Venice on this occasion Beatrice

described a momaria given in her honor in the Palace of the Doges.

It was a dramatic spectacle, mostly in pantomime, presented by

masked actors called momari, mummers. The Venetians were fond of

divers such performances. They retained till 1462 the medieval

"mysteries"; but popular demand caused these religious plays to be

prefaced or interrupted with comic interludes of so loose and

disorderly a character that they were forbidden in that year.

Meanwhile the humanist movement renewed Italian acquaintance with

classic comedy; Plautus and Terence were staged by the Compagnia della

Scalza and other groups; and in 1506 Fra Giovanni Armonio, monk,

actor, and musician, presented in Latin, in the convent of the

Eremitani, Stephanium, the first modern comedy. From these

beginnings Venetian comedy progressed toward Goldoni, always competing

with the Harlequin and Pantaloon of the commedia dell' arte, and

at times so rivaling this in uninhibited humor that Church and state

engaged in a running war with the Venetian stage.

An earthy licentiousness and profanity sat side by side, in the

Venetian or Italian character, with orthodox belief and hebdomadal

piety. The populace crowded St. Mark's on Sundays and holydays, and

drank homeopathic doses of the religion of terror and hope pictured in

the mosaics or sculptured in statue or relief; the deliberate darkness

of the pillared cavern intensified the effect of the icons and

sermons; and even the prostitutes, hiding for a time the yellow

handkerchief which the law required them to display as the badge of

their tribe, came here, after a weary night, to cleanse themselves

with prayer. The Venetian Senate favored this popular piety, and

surrounded the doge and the state with all the awe of religious

ritual. It imported at great cost, after the fall of Constantinople,

the relics of Eastern saints, and offered to pay ten thousand ducats

for the seamless coat of Christ.

And yet that same Senate, which Petrarch likened to an assembly of

the gods, `051122 repeatedly flouted the authority of the Church,

ignored the most terrible papal decrees of excommunication and

interdict, offered asylum to prudent skeptics (till 1527), `051123

sharply reproved a friar for attacking the Jews (1512), and sought

to make the Church in Venice an appanage of the state. Bishops for

Venetian sees were chosen by the Senate, and were presented to Rome

for confirmation; such appointments were in many cases put into effect

despite papal refusal to confirm them; after 1488 none but a

Venetian could be appointed to a Venetian episcopate; and no

revenues could be collected or used by any ecclesiastic, in the

Venetian realm, who had not been approved by the government.

Churches and monasteries were subject to state supervision, but no

churchman could hold a public office. `051124 All legacies to monastic

establishments paid a tax to the state. Ecclesiastical courts were

carefully watched to see to it that guilty ecclesiastics should

receive the same penalties as guilty laymen. The Republic long

resisted the introduction of the Inquisition; when it yielded it

made all verdicts of the Venetian inquisitors subject to review and

sanction by a senatorial commission; and only six sentences of death

were issued in all the history of the Inquisition in Venice. `051125

The Republic proudly took the stand that in temporal matters it

"recognized no superior except the Divine Majesty." `051126 It

openly accepted the principle that a general council of the bishops of

the Church is above the pope, and that an appeal may be made from a

pope to a future council. When Sixtus IV laid an interdict on the city

(1483) the Council of Ten ordered all clergy to continue their

services as usual. When Julius II renewed the interdict as part of his

war against Venice, the Ten forbade the publication of the edict in

Venetian territory, and had their agents in Rome affix to the doors of

St. Peter's an appeal from the Pope to a future council

(1509). `051127 Julius won that war, and forced Venice to accept his

spiritual authority as absolute.

All in all, Venetian life was more attractive in its setting than in

its spirit. The government was competent, and showed high courage in

adversity; but it was sometimes brutal and always selfish; it never

thought of Venice as part of Italy, and seemed to care little what

tragedy might befall that divided land. It developed powerful

personalities- self-reliant, shrewd, acquisitive, valiant, proud; we

know a hundred of them in their portraits by artists whom they had

just enough refinement to patronize. It was a civilization that,

compared with the Florentine, lacked subtlety and depth; that,

compared with the Milanese under Lodovico, lacked finesse and grace.

But it was the most colorful, sumptuous, and sensually bewitching

civilization that history has ever known.

V. VENETIAN ART

1. Architecture and Sculpture

-

Sensuous color is the essence of Venetian art, even of its

architecture. Many Venetian churches and mansions, some business

buildings, had mosaics or frescoes on their fronts. The facade of

St. Mark's gleamed with gilt and almost haphazard ornament; every

decade brought to it new spoils and forms, until the face of the great

fane became a bizarre medley of architecture, sculpture, and mosaic,

in which decoration drowned structure, and the parts forgot the whole.

To admire that facade with something fonder than wonder one must

take his stand 576 feet away, at the farther end of the Piazza San

Marco; in that perspective the brilliant conglomeration of

Romanesque portals, Gothic ogees, classical columns, Renaissance

railing, and Byzantine domes blends into one exotic phantasm, an

Aladdin's magic dream.

The Piazza was not then as ample and majestic as now. In the

fifteenth century it was still unpaved; part of it was occupied by

vines and trees, a stonecutter's yard, and a latrine. In 1495 it was

paved with brick; in 1500 Alessandro Leopardi cast for the three

flagstaffs such pedestals as no later ones would ever surpass; and

in 1512 Bartolommeo Buon the Younger raised the majestic campanile.

(It fell in 1902, but was rebuilt on the same design.) Not so pleasing

are the offices of the Procurators of St. Mark- the Procuratie Vecchie

and Nuove, built between 1517 and 1640, and hemming in the Piazza on

north and south with their immense and monotonous facades.

Between St. Mark's and the Grand Canal stood the chief glory of

civic Venice, the Palace of the Doges. It underwent in this period

so many renovations that little remained of its earlier form. Pietro

Baseggio rebuilt (1309-40) the southern wing facing the Canal;

Giovanni Buon and his son Bartolommeo Buon the Elder raised a new wing

(1424-38) on the western or Piazzetta front, and set up the Gothic

Porta della Carta (1438-43) *05030 at the northwestern corner. These

southern and western facades, with their graceful Gothic arcades and

balconies, are among the happiest products of the Renaissance. To

the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries belong most of the sculptures

on the facades, and the superb carvings of the column capitals; Ruskin

thought one of these capitals-beneath the figures of Adam and Eve- the

finest in Europe. Within the court Bartolommeo Buon the Younger and

Antonio Rizzo built an ornate arch, named after Francesco Foscari, and

mingling three architectural styles in unexpected harmony: Renaissance

columns and lintels, Romanesque arches, Gothic pinnacles. In the

niches of the arch Rizzo placed two strange statues: Adam protesting

his innocence, and Eve wondering at the penalties of knowledge.

Rizzo planned, and Pietro Lombardo completed, the eastern facade of

the court, a delightful marriage of round and pointed arches with

Renaissance cornices and balconies. It was Rizzo again who designed

the Scala de' Giganti, or Giants' Stairs, from the court to the

first floor- a simple, stately structure named from the gigantic

statues of Mars and Neptune set up by Iacopo Sansovino at the head

of the steps to symbolize Venetian mastery of land and sea. In the

interior were prison cells, administrative offices, reception rooms,

assembly halls for the Great Council, the Senate, and the Ten. Many of

these rooms were, or were soon to be, decorated with the proudest

murals in the history of art.

While the Republic glorified itself in this architectural gem, the

richer nobles... Giustiniani, Contarini, Gritti, Barbari, Loredani,

Foscari, Vendramini, Grimani... bounded the Grand Canal with their

palaces. We must picture these not in their present deterioration

but in their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century heyday: with their

facades of white marble, porphyry, or serpentine; their Gothic windows

and Renaissance colonnades; their carved portals opening on the water;

their hidden courtyards adorned with statuary, fountains, gardens,

frescoes, urns; their interiors with tile or marble floors, mighty

fireplaces, inlaid furniture, Murano glass, silken canopies,

hangings of gold or silver cloth, bronze chandeliers gilded, enameled,

or chased, coffered ceilings, and murals by men whose names have

gone around the world. So, for example, the Palazzo Foscari was

decorated with paintings by Gian Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Paris

Bordone, Veronese. Perhaps these rooms were more magnificent than

comfortable, the chairs too straight-backed, the windows drafty, and

no mode of heating that could warm both sides of a room or a man at

the same time. Some Venetian palaces cost 200,000 ducats; a law of

1476 tried to limit expenditure to 150 ducats per room, but we hear of

rooms whose fixtures and furnishings cost 2000. Probably the most

ornate of the palaces was the Ca d'Oro, named the House of Gold

because the owner, Marino Contarini, ordered that almost every inch of

the marble facade should be covered with decoration, much of it in

gilt. Its Gothic balconies and tracery still make it the prettiest

front on the Canal.

These millionaires, while feathering their own nests, spared

something for the citadels of their incidental faith. Strange to

say, St. Mark's was not till 1807 the cathedral of Venice; formally it

was the private chapel of the doge and the shrine of the city's patron

saint; it belonged, so to speak, to the religion of the state. The

episcopal see was attached to the minor church of San Pietro di

Castello, in the northeastern corner of the city. In the same remote

section the Dominican friars had their seat, in the church of San

Giovanni e Paolo; there Gentile and Giovanni Bellini found their final

rest. More important to history is the church of the Franciscans-

Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (1330-1443), known in fond

abbreviations as I Frari, the Friars. Externally it made no show,

but its interior gathered fame through the years as the tomb of

celebrated Venetians- Francesco Foscari, Titian, Canova- and as a

gallery of art. Here Antonio Rizzo designed a noble monument for the

Doge Niccolo Tron; Gian Bellini set up his Frari Madonna, and Titian

his Madonna of the Pesaro Family; here, above all, Titian's

Assumption of the Virgin rises in majesty behind the altar. Lesser

masterpieces adorned lesser fanes: San Zaccaria offered its

congregation inspiring Madonnas by Giovanni Bellini and Palma Vecchio;

Santa Maria dell' Orto had Tintoretto's Presentation of the

Virgin, and his bones; San Sebastiano received Veronese's remains and

some of his finest paintings; and for San Salvatore Titian painted

an Annunciation in his ninety-first year.

In the construction and decoration of the churches and palaces of

Venice a remarkable family of architects and sculptors played a

persistent part. The Lombardi came to Venice from northwestern

Italy, and so earned their cognomen, but their real name was Solari.

They included the Cristoforo Solari who carved the effigies of

Lodovico and Beatrice, and his brother Andrea, a painter; both men

worked in Venice as well as Milan. Pietro Lombardo left his mark

upon a score of buildings in Venice. He and his sons Antonio and

Tullio designed the churches of San Giobbe and Santa Maria de'

Miracoli- hardly to our current taste; the tombs of Pietro Mocenigo

and Niccolo Marcello in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, of Bishop Zanetti in

Treviso Cathedral, and of Dante in Ravenna; and the Palazzo

Vendramin-Calergi, in which Wagner died; and in most of these

enterprises they supplied the sculpture as well as the architectural

plans. Pietro himself did much architectural and sculptural work in

the Palace of the Doges. Tullio and Antonio, aided by Alessandro

Leopardi, set up the tomb of Andrea Vendramin in Santi Giovanni e

Paolo- the greatest work of sculpture in Venice excepting only the

Colleoni of Verrocchio and Leopardi in the square before that

church. For the adjoining Scuola di San Marco, or Fraternity of St.

Mark, Pietro Lombardo designed a rich portal and a strange facade.

Finally a Sante Lombardo shared in building the Scuola di San Rocco,

famous for its fifty-six paintings by Tintoretto. Largely through

the work of this family the Renaissance style of columns, architraves,

and decorated pediments prevailed over Gothic ogives and pinnacles,

and Byzantine domes. In Venice, however, Renaissance architecture,

still unsteady under Oriental influence, was too ornate, and

obscured its lines with ornament. The atmosphere and classic

traditions of Rome were needed to give the new style its definitive

and harmonious form.

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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