The Venice Myth

Culture, Literature, Politics, 1800 to the Present

David Barnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848935105
• eBook ISBN: 9781317317494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Venice holds a unique place in literary and cultural history. Barnes looks at the themes of war, occupation, resistance and fascism to see how the political background has affected the literary works that have come out of this great city. He focuses on key British and American writers, including Byron, Ruskin, Pound and Eliot.

1 ROMANTICS

In Daphne Du Maimer’s short horror story ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1971), the protagonist John has a moment of bitter disillusionment with Venice:

The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone.¹

The vision transforms Venice into a drowned Atlantis, a dead city covered in ‘slime and mud’, empty and inaccessible. The ‘lost underworld of stone’ is a picture of Venice reduced to its essential character — a museum piece evoking decay, ruin, death, and the collapse of civilization. Du Maurier’s story — and the famous 1973 Nicholas Roeg film that follows it — depend on a vision of Venice as both a dead city, and a city that awakens thoughts of our own, individual deaths.

Du Maurier’s images of Venice depend upon a rich history of myth and counter-myth that emerged around Venice in the modern era. Tropes of secrecy, intrigue, death, decay and ruin developed as part of a literary and artistic tradition of depicting Venice in the Romantic age. These traditions, I suggest, are born out of a set of complex ways of processing Venice as a political and cultural idea after the city’s fall. In 1797, Venice was attacked by the French army under the command of Napoleon. The Doge abdicated and the ancient Republic ceased to exist, putting hundreds of years of independence and wealth to an end. Venice became occupied territory — occupied first by the French, and later by the Austrians. Venice’s decline, fall and occupation were lyricised as they happened — the city’s history playing out as a myth in action. The city became a protean energy, to be co-opted into social and political concerns at will. Venice’s defeat at the hands of Napoleon was perfect for Romantic consumption, feeding the age’s interest in decay and ruin. As Thomas MacFarland has argued, these ruins not only became the dominant subject of Romantic poetry, but were embodied in its very form. Incompleteness, ruination, fall, and loss are intrinsic to the very idea of Romantic verse, which constantly returns to ‘the always distant country’,² the lost place (Venice’s ‘lost underworld of stone’). Romantic verse itself, argues MacFarland, is always incomplete, fragmented and ruined, always gesturing outside of its own textuality.

Thus Venice — recently fallen, rapidly decaying — became the perfect subject for Romantic creativity. Its long history and its political fall could be re-imagined in multiple ways, generating endless myths that fed off one another and perpetuated their own existence, whilst its ‘aesthetic’ of crumbling stone, water, and reflection could be harnessed for myriad (and sometimes conflicting) purposes. The indeterminacy of Venice for Romantics reflected the conflicted politics of the early nineteenth century. Venice could be both the noble victim of French aggression or a corrupt oligarchy whose fall was richly deserved. Venice could stand for the passing of time and the universality of decay, for sexual freedom and liberty, for republican fervour or despotism, for self or society. Venice was all these things and more — and understanding the city’s imaginative transformations in the Romantic era is key to appreciating its later history as icon and myth.

Consider Wordsworth’s celebrated Miltonic sonnet ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’, for example, probably written in 1802–7.³ The sonnet seems to move beyond Venice to meditate on the nature of decline and fall (the word ‘extinction’ stands out markedly in the poem’s title):

Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.

She was a maiden City, bright and free;

No guile seduced, no force could violate;

And, when she took unto herself a Mate,

She must espouse the everlasting Sea.

And what if she had seen those glories fade,

Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;

Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid

When her long life hath reached its final day:

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade

Of that which once was great, is passed away.⁴

The ‘tribute’ due to Venice here is no longer material (caskets of wine or baskets of precious stones), but imaginative. Venice’s empire, ‘strength’ and ‘glories’ become part of the imagination, internalised within Wordsworth’s creative world (he had not visited Venice when he wrote these lines, although he would see the city much later, on his continental tour of 1837). Musing on loss, fall, and ruined greatness are of course, central Romantic themes. Yet there is a distanced, perhaps even blasé, tone to Wordsworth’s sonnet. ‘Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid’ — the qualifying word dampens the mood of nostalgia that the poem reaches towards.

Yet understanding the sonnet’s political contexts add nuance and shade to a reading of these lines. Written as part of a series of ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’, the poems see Wordsworth musing on the ascent of Napoleon and France’s turn to authoritarian militarism. In the eighth sonnet, ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’, the leader of the Haitian revolution is, like Venice ‘fallen’, ‘never to rise again’ (Toussaint was deposed by Napoleon in 1802, and deported to France, where he died in 1803).⁵ In the twelfth poem in the sequence, ‘Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’ (the country was invaded by France in October 1802), Wordsworth bemoans the end of Swiss ‘Liberty’.⁶ Venice thus features as one among many victims of Napoleonic aggression, ‘fallen’ as the ideals of the French Revolution (‘new-born Liberty’ in the third sonnet, ‘To a Friend, Composed Near Calais’) are betrayed by the usurping Bonaparte, ‘Consul for life’.⁷ As Wordsworth’s thinking developed, his resistance to Napoleonic power manifested itself increasingly in support for the fledgling nationalist movements arising in Europe.⁸ In ‘The Convention of Cintra’ (1809), Wordsworth wrote of ‘the happy day for Europe’ when ‘the natives of Italy and the natives of Germany […] shall each dissolve the pernicious barriers which divide them, and form themselves into a mighty People’.⁹

Wordsworth’s imaginative nationalism (free nations become, in Cintra, ‘strongholds in the imagination’)¹⁰ combines political liberalism, revolutionary fervour and Romantic humanism. In this context, the ‘Ode’ to Venice forges links across historic and political time, to unite the Romantic imagination with the ideal of Venice as the ‘eldest Child of Liberty’, soon to play its part in a regenerated Italian nation. Wordsworth’s sonnet encapsulates the protean energy that Venice represented to the Romantic age. At once the symbol of past and present, ruin and freedom, of the individual mind and the political ideal, Venice is a ‘spot of time’ embodying and generating personal and political mythology. Wordsworth’s use of Venice here reflects its position as contemporary victim of Napoleonic aggression, yes; but his choice of a Venetian subject also depends on the political mythology of Venice that the Romantic age inherited. Understanding the resonances of these mythologies is crucial in helping to make sense of the amorphous and complex position of Venice within Romanticism.

Myths: Daru and the Leggenda Nera

A so-called ‘Myth of Venice’ proliferated from the seventeenth century onwards, acting as a political yardstick with which to measure institutions and regimes. Venice’s famed liberty was praised as the perfect example of moderate Republicanism, fêted for ‘the excellence of its institutions and harmony of its rulers’.¹¹ The Myth became popular in Republican circles in France, Holland and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹² The Myth stressed the balanced and rational quality of Venetian government. In the words of the seventeenth-century Piedmontese cleric Botero, Venice was ‘come vergine intatta’ (‘like an immaculate virgin’) — maintaining the example par excellence of a pure, just, and Christian state.¹³ Venice’s celebrated freedom was thought to be imbibed by Venetians from birth. Also lauded was the supposed clarity and impartiality of Venice’s judicial system, and the city’s sovereign independence. Venice’s resistance to Roman clerical interference made it plenty of friends in Protestant northern Europe, even among the Puritans of Cromwell’s Commonwealth.¹⁴

Yet by the early decades of the nineteenth century, Venice had become a byword for oligarchy, tyranny, decay and corruption. By the time of the battle of Waterloo in 1815, writes Margaret Plant, Venice was an isolated ‘place of ruin’ whose history was ‘interpreted not as a tradition of liberty, but of servitude and inquisition’.¹⁵ What had changed? Whilst there were pejorative traditions of viewing Venice before the early nineteenth century,¹⁶ by and large the city benefitted from a positive self-image. To understand this extraordinary change in the place of Venice in the European imagination, it is important to explore the political resonances of Venice’s fall to Napoleon in 1797. Venice’s defeat, and the end of the Most Serene Republic, was the result of a series of events linked to the aftermath of the French Revolution and Republican France’s assertion of itself on the world stage. The French army under Napoleon had always intended to exploit Venetian wealth for its campaigns in Italy — and Bonaparte made shrewd use of revolutionary rhetoric to incite rebellion against the ruling class of Venice. In the end, Doge Lodovico Manin abdicated himself voluntarily, Venice surrendered to the French, and control passed to a mixed Municipality, consisting of patricians and ordinary citizens.

But French aggression from the outside was complemented by a growth in pro-Jacobin sentiment in Venice itself in the 1790s. Many Venetians were enthusiastic Bonapartists. Part of their enthusiasm stemmed from the opportunity French occupation provided to imagine a greater, unified Italy beyond the confines of Venetia. Napoleon’s arrival coincided with a growth in negative portrayals of the old Republic. William Wordsworth’s mixed feelings over the death of Venice in his sonnet reflect a conflicted European response to the city’s fall.¹⁷ Whilst for some the event represented another example of French aggression, for others Venice’s defeat signalled the triumph of a new republican and democratic world order.

Reading Venice’s fall in this way depended, at least in part, on an image of the city’s history as a record of corruption and tyranny: an image that became known as the leggenda nera (or ‘black legend’). As we shall see in the case of Byron, later Romantic authors derived much of their material from a number of early nineteenth-century historians. These historians of the leggenda nera had benefited from the fall of the Republic in 1797; using the opportunity of Venice’s demise, they presented their work as an exposé of the dark truths behind Venice’s secretive government. Chief among them was the French historian, Pierre Daru, whose Histoire de la République de Venise (1819) was exemplary of the attitudes in circulation around the Serenissima’s ‘dark’ past. Daru was not an unbiased observer. He had been Napoleon’s minister for war, charged with the responsibility of negotiating Venice’s surrender, and the Histoire can be viewed as a lengthy excuse for France’s invasion and occupation of the Republic in 1797.¹⁸

Daru’s work forms part of a surge in historical interest in Venice in the period — an interest that is often sensationalist and prurient, as historian Filippo de Vivo has shown. Indeed, de Vivo has identified what he calls a ‘voyeurism’ in historical treatments of Venice after the fall of the Republic¹⁹ The historians of the leggenda nera attracted attention by offering the unveiling of treasures ‘hidden in the archives, the best-kept mysteries of this mysterious Republic’.²⁰ Such voyeurism rested on these historians’ self-presentation as revealers of secrets, of intrepid explorers of the hidden. They traded, in de Vivo’s words, on the ‘f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction: The Venice Myth
• 1 Romantics
• 2 Revolutionaries
• 3 Tourists
• 4 Fascists: The Stamp of the Lion
• 5 Fascists: Urbs, Passion and Politics
• 6 Beware of the Doge: Venice Deconstructed
• Works Cited
• Notes
• Index