The City and the Senses

Urban Culture Since 1500

Jill Steward, Alexander Cowan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317038139
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation. Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.

PART ONE
AN ENVIRONMENT OF ALL THE SENSES

CHAPTER ONE
Stench in sixteenth-century Venice

Jo Wheeler

An analysis of contemporary perceptions of stench is essential to understanding the increasing regulation of the urban experience in the sixteenth century. In the medical theory and natural philosophies of the time, stench was equated with disease. To look at practical measures to fight stench is therefore to examine the ability of urban authorities to cope with formidable problems of disease, sanitation, rising poverty, overcrowding and crisis migration. Anxieties ran highest in the face of the age’s great killers, infectious diseases, above all, plague. Responses were shaped as much by the increasing experience of pestilence and typhus in a milder endemic form as by the horror of devastating epidemics in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands in the first half of the sixteenth century. Venice makes a particularly important case study, since it was this city that ‘adopted the most stringent health regulations anywhere in early modern Europe’.¹ Arguably, the Republic also established the most active and effective permanent machinery to monitor and combat stench in this period.² Despite all this, in 1575–77, the city was stricken by a plague outbreak so terrible that over a quarter of the population perished. The Venetian example also reveals much about the limits of intervention in urban health in this period and the extent to which the threat of stench was employed to extend social controls.³

In the now vast literature on understandings of epidemic disease and fevers from the Black Death to the late seventeenth century, one constant is the perceived threat of foul vapours released from decaying matter and from stagnant water. These stenches were thought to corrupt and putrefy the surrounding air, producing poisonous and pestilential miasmas.⁴ Breathing in this venomous air caused the humours to putrefy and generate plague in those most vulnerable to infection. The air literally reeked of death. Notions of infection and contagion were also imagined very differently. No real distinction was made between airborne spread and contact, as both terms referred to the passing of a poison or taint and both were used interchangeably.⁵ Miasma was thought to lurk and be transported in victims’ clothes, in their baggage or to be spread through their foul breath. As stenches were thought to cling to and impregnate fabrics in the same manner as perfumes, they could remain dangerous for weeks.⁶ The impact of new contagious diseases such as the pox served to accentuate these understandings of how stench was transmitted from person to person.

Ground-breaking studies of miasma in early modern Tuscany and France have documented these attitudes in stunning detail and how this thinking was shaped by Hippocratic and Galenic theories in which illness was thought to originate in the environment.⁷ Galen, for instance, in On the Difference of Fevers, singles out putrefaction arising from corrupt air as the manifest cause of plague, which struck certain individuals when foul air was accompanied by predisposing factors such as an imbalance in the humours.

Contemporaries also had a shrewd grasp of the connections between dangerous environments and diseases: brackish marshes were especially feared since they were ridden with fever. The seasonal rhythms of disease served to confirm these understandings: the hot months when stenches were most offensive coincided with fresh outbreaks of epidemics.⁸ Cities became graveyards of fever. Plague which had only temporarily subsided during the winter returned. Only typhus abated.⁹

In Venice, the Health Commissioners took the threat of stench so seriously that they asserted in 1501, ‘Knowing that of all the measures that can and must be taken to keep this city healthy, the principal one is to remove all the causes giving off fetor and stenches.’¹⁰ Rotten meat could ‘infect this city with pestilential disease’. In what follows, surviving records provide a rich mine of material for exploring what was defined as stench in Venice and how the cultural meanings of stench took on distinctive form here because of the city’s unique location. It is possible to reconstruct rival theories of foul air connected to key political debates and to analyse closely when and why policy changed. Medical treatises, printed orders and legislation all provide a wealth of detail about counter-measures against stench, above all the use of specific odours and perfumes to rectify the air and protect from disease.

Perceptions of stench in sixteenth-century Venice have to be carefully unpacked. In the context of eighteenth-century France, Alain Corbin argues that ‘what was intolerable was the odour of putrefaction, not combustion’.¹¹ The Venetian evidence lends some qualified support to this position. The gut-wrenching odours of festering rubbish and excrement, discarded entrails, putrid meat and fish were all identified as stench by the Provveditori della Sanità,¹² the Health Commissioners, and all were targets of a barrage of ordinances. Similarly, here, as throughout Europe, smoke did not evoke feelings of disgust but was instead perceived as a counter-measure against stench. Every expert knew, through Galen, that Hippocrates himself had ordered bonfires lit in the streets against plague. ‘Experience tells us,’ wrote the irregular practitioner and surgeon, Leonardo Fioravanti, ‘that during the 1556 plague, Murano did not suffer any corruption and this by virtue of the glass furnaces.’ Similarly the physician Andrea Marini (d.1571), in his Discourse on the Air of Venice, identified Murano and the parish of San Barnabà as the healthiest parts of the city because ‘the furnaces of glass makers and potters there continually cleansed the air of its gross humid vapours’.¹³

The same logic that linked stench and putrefaction explains the association of certain trades in Venice with stench and filth, and why the Health Board made them their targets to the exclusion of others. Tomaso Garzoni, in his Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Venice, 1585), branded tanners ‘an exceedingly dirty, fetid and stinking trade. In time of pestilence they are the first to be expelled.’¹⁴ Furriers too were prime suspects: the nauseating smells of skins left for months smeared with millet flour and oil to absorb the putrefying particles must have been unbearable in the heat.¹⁵ Dyers who used ox blood as an auxiliary product to produce the intense red known as rosso turco were banished, from 1413 onwards, every March to the ‘margins and extremities’ of the city.¹⁶ This may also have been motivated by the fact that workers in this craft trod cloths up to their knees in vats of fermented urine, used both as a detergent and to aid the absorption of dyes.¹⁷ Such measures did often provoke successful resistance by these guilds, in the form of petitions.

Surprisingly, the thirty or so trades massed in the Arsenal, the dockyards and the largest industrial complex in Europe at the time were not associated with stench (despite Dante’s description of the heat and noise there in the Inferno). This silence is difficult to explain, but it seems highly significant that the Arsenal was located outside the ‘guts’ [viscere] of the city.¹⁸

Thresholds of tolerance of stench, though, were lowered by concerns of ‘decorum’ which focused particularly on the city’s commercial and political centres, St Mark’s Square and the Rialto. Both were invested with a slew of symbolic meanings, and representations of the city interpreted them as symmetrical, as the two ‘piazze’ around which the ‘body’ and ‘bowels’ of the city were organised. Here concerns about stench were inextricably linked to controversial concerns to exclude the poor and humble trades from these public spaces.

Jacopo Sansovino, elected proto [superintendent of works] at San Marco in 1529, famously swept away a series of hostelries and stalls of butchers and cheese sellers in renovating the area around St Mark’s Square (1536–37).¹⁹ If we can trust Vasari, he also removed latrines around the columns at the same time, ‘something foul and shameful for the dignity of the palace and the public square, as well as for foreigners, who coming to Venice by way of San Giorgio saw all that filthiness first’.²⁰ These measures must be seen in the context of a contentious programme of radical renewal undertaken by a group around Doge Gritti, one strand of which was an unrealised project for a magistracy to embellish the city, removing ‘ugly’ sites that ‘denigrate its splendour’ (1535).²¹ Yet, seven years later, the fetid smoke spewing out of the Mint at St Mark’s Square was considered so unwholesome in so important a place that the furnaces were pushed out to a peripheral parish, San Gerolamo.²² And, after more than three centuries on the piazzetta, by 1556 the meat market was considered a ‘polluting’ presence by Sansovino, a proposal that encountered stiff opposition. The situation was only resolved in 1580, when the Beccheria was transferred from next to the Mint to Santa Maria in Broglio (at the far end of the Piazza), an area ironically occupied by a rubbish tip.

Notions of stench were shaped as much by moral and social prejudices as by observation.²³ Diseases such as typhus and plague hit the poor hardest, encouraging magistrates to portray their suffering as divine punishment inflicted on them for their filthy and corrupt habits. The danger of contagion created opportunities for social control. In 1521, destitute victims of the pox ‘loitering’ and begging on the streets were accused of ‘emitting a great stench and infecting their neighbours’ which could ‘breed infection and diverse illnesses’, justifying the establishment of the Incurabili hospital.²⁴ As early as 1506, brutal distinctions were made between the deserving long-term resident poor and outsiders, stigmatised as dangerous or fraudulent vagabonds, an infestation to be expelled from the city.²⁵ The disastrous sequence of famine, hunger, typhus and pestilence in 1527–29, when masses of starving peasants, who literally embodied stench and disease, crowded the streets, provoked crisis measures. An emergency poor law was passed, assisting the local poor and authorising expulsion and forced labour for foreign and ‘fraudulent’ beggars.²⁶

More efficient and repressive measures against the stench of the poor were stimulated more by recurrent famine than by epidemics, since their incidence decreased. In 1539, the Health Commissioners drove out ‘four or five thousand persons, beggars and others, who had recently come to this city’, sentencing many to galley service against the Turks. Chronicles in fact describe a flood of male migrants who arrived by boat with their wives and children, who took up residence under the city’s bridges, dying of hunger.²⁷ It was only in another famine year, 1545, that the poor law was systematically applied, when some six thousand ‘beggars’ poured into Venice. Suspicion spread to refugee populations: if it was the Albanians and Slavs in the mid-fifteenth century, a century later it was the Marranos, Portuguese New Christians.²⁸ Their expulsion in 1550 was justified by fears of infection because of their squalid and overcrowded living conditions.

As during the Florentine epidemic of 1630–31, the routine behaviour of the poor was transformed into symptoms of lethal diffusion.²⁹ The attack on stench was highly discriminatory, and it did meet resistance. For example, we find cases of artis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• Part One An Environment of All the Senses
• Part Two The Culture of Consumption
• Part Three Cultural Control and Cultural Subversion
• Index