Myths of Venice

The Figuration of a State

David Rosand

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807872796
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte medievale

Over the course of several centuries, Venice fashioned and refined a portrait of itself that responded to and exploited historical circumstance. Never conquered and taking its enduring independence as a sign of divine favor, free of civil strife and proud of its internal stability, Venice broadcast the image of itself as the Most Serene Republic, an ideal state whose ruling patriciate were selflessly devoted to the commonweal. All this has come to be known as the "myth of Venice." Exploring the imagery developed in Venice to represent the legends of its origins and legitimacy, David Rosand reveals how artists such as Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Titian, Jacopo Sansovino, Tintoretto, and Veronese gave enduring visual form to the myths of Venice. He argues that Venice, more than any other political entity of the early modern period, shaped the visual imagination of political thought. This visualization of political ideals, and its reciprocal effect on the civic imagination, is the larger theme of the book.

1: Miraculous Birth

Unique in its site, built upon the mud flats of a lagoon, rising above the waters, Venice rhetorically exploited every aspect of its singularity (plate 1, fig. 1). Unwalled, its defense lay in its surrounding waters: the delicate defenselessness of the Ducal Palace (fig. 2) contrasts tellingly with, for example, the heavily fortified Palazzo Vecchio of Florence (fig. 3). Unlike so many cities on the Italian peninsula, Venice was not of ancient Roman foundation, and it made much of that distinction. Emerging after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Venice claimed to be the first republic of the new era, born in Christian liberty, hence a true historical successor to pagan Rome. Originally subject to the authority of Byzantium, Venice gradually asserted its independence of and, eventually, superiority to Constantinople. On the western front, central to the historico-political elements constituting the myth of Venice, were events of 1177, when Doge Sebastiano Ziani (1172–78) mediated peace between Pope Alexander III and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa: from that moment on, according to the local historical vision, Venice stood on the political stage of Europe as a third sword, an equal to the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Beginning in the fourteenth century, those events were depicted in a series of pictorial cycles in the Ducal Palace, recorded in manuscript illuminations, repainted in the fifteenth century, and preserved for us now in the canvases painted after the disastrous fire of 1577. However dubious the historical facts and their interpretation, the paintings themselves became in turn the verifying documents, pictorial scripture: as it is painted so it was.¹

In the mid-fourteenth century, the myth of Venice refined itself rhetorically; its public self-assertion acquired a new, humanistic resonance, enunciated by the most eloquent cultural voice of Italy, Petrarch himself. The great Tuscan poet was prepared to trade his precious library for the intellectual liberty offered by the Serenissima. In 1364 he celebrated his host's swift conquest of Crete with an epideictic vocabulary that was to condition Venetian oratory for centuries. Rejoicing with “the most august city of Venice,” Petrarch hailed it as

today the one home of liberty, peace, and justice, the one refuge of honorable men, haven for those who, battered on all sides by the storms of tyranny and war, seek to live in tranquility. Rich in gold but richer in fame, built on solid marble but standing more solid on a foundation of civic concord, surrounded by salt waters but more secure with the salt of good council . . . , Venice rejoices at the outcome, which is as it should be: the victory not of arms but of justice (Epistolae seniles, IV.3).

The rhetoric of revived Latin has been reharnessed to the celebration of state. Exalting the uniqueness of the city, its marvelous site and even more marvelous liberty, acclaiming its identity with divine justice, Petrarch's letter further established basic tenets of the myth and quite naturally became a scriptural text in Venetian apologetic literature of the Renaissance. “Even in our age,” Petrarch continued, “fraud yields . . . readily to fortitude, vice succumbs to virtue, and God still watches over and fosters the affairs of man.”²

God's intervention in the affairs of man was manifest in the spectacular city that He caused to rise from the waters; in the words of Gasparo Contarini, the most influential Venetian apologist of the sixteenth century, the city seemed “framed rather by the hands of the immortal gods, than in any way by the art, industry, or invention of men,” a miracle left on earth to be discovered by mortals.³ It seemed impossible—indeed, was deliberately made to seem impossible—to separate the uniqueness of its legal constitution from the singularity of its physical site, a miracle on earth. The very vision of its wondrous self was an integral part of the powerful image of Venice: Venetia, Venetia, chi non ti vede non ti pretia. By the middle of the sixteenth century, this traditional proverb was being Englished as “Venice, he that doth not see thee doth not esteeme thee.” And the commonplace was

even broadcast from the Elizabethan stage, as Shakespeare's schoolmaster Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost (IV.ii) proclaims, “as the traveller doth of Venice:—Vinegia, Vinegia, chi non te vede, ei non te pregia.” Some version of the proverb had reached England already by 1542, the date of Andrew Borde's The First Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge: “Whosever that hath not seene the noble citie of Venis hath not seene the beewtye and ryches of thys worlde.”⁴ A century later, another Englishman, James Howell, summarizes this sentiment in his Survay of the Signorie of Venice: “the Eye is the best Judg of Venice.”⁵

FIGURE 1: Aerial view of Venice (Photo: Böhm).

FIGURE 2: Ducal Palace, south facade (Photo: Böhm).

Such an anthology of English response testifies to the success of the Venetian self-advertising campaign, which took full advantage of new technology in the second half of the fifteenth century as Venice very quickly appropriated the recently invented printing press and astutely turned itself into the printing capital of Europe. She did so in part by creating the copyright privilege, attracting publishers by guaranteeing protection of their investment and thereby encouraging some of the most remarkable graphicinitiatives.⁶ On October 30, 1500, Anton Kolb, a German merchant resident in the city, was granted a four-year privilege for a monumental woodcut view of Venice (fig. 4). Designed by Jacopo de’ Barbari and realized with the aid of a team of surveyors, the full image, printed from six blocks, measures some nine feet across.⁷ In addition to copyright protection, the publisher requested exemption from all duties and license to sell the print, at a price of three ducats, throughout the Venetian domain—which by 1500 had attained its maximum extension into the terra firma. In his petition Kolb declared that he had undertaken this difficult project “principally to the fame of this sublime city.”⁸ Private enterprise served public policy in disseminating the image of the miraculous city, a center of commerce based upon its maritime power. Part view, part plan, Jacopo de’ Barbari's bird’s-eye rendering appropriately emphasizes along its vertical axis the main operational centers of Venice: the religious and governmental core around the piazza, centered in the ducal basilica of San Marco and the contiguous Ducal Palace, and, proceeding north along the Merceria, the commercial hub at the Rialto.⁹ The figures marking that axis, and their inscriptions, further declare Venice a city favored by the gods: by Mercury (fig. 5), who “shines favorably on this above all other emporia” (as proclaimed by his inscription: MERCVRIVS PRECETERIS HVIC FAVSTE EMPORIIS ILLVSTRO), and by Neptune (fig. 6), who, “smoothing the waters of this port,” makes Venice his home (AEQVORA TVENS PORTV RESIDEO HIC NEPTVNVS).

FIGURE 3: Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Photo: Brogi).

These classical deities represent a Renaissance humanist gloss on a venerable tradition of divine favor, a paganized inflection of a Christian tradition. According to standard legend, Venice was founded on March 25, the date of the Annunciation. On that day in the year 421, with the foundation of the church of San Giacomo di Rialto, the first stone laid in the lagoon, Venice was born. Upon the ruins of the fallen empire of Rome, abandoned by Constantine and destroyed by barbarian invasions, a group of devout refugees from the mainland established on these mud flats the first republic of the new, Christian era. Going back at least to the twelfth century, the identification of March 25 as the birthday of Venice was subsequently elaborated in ways that exploited its fullest resonance. By the end of the fifteenth century, the range of associations extended from the astrological ascendancy of Venus to the day of the creation of Adam and of the crucifixion, as well as conception, of Christ.¹⁰ In his De origine urbis Venetiarum (posthumously published in 1493) Bernardo Giustiniani summed up the tradition, giving it further humanistic sanction:

. . . the sacrosanct day [March 25] was chosen on which the divine message was brought by the Archangel to the most glorious Virgin with the indescribable bending of the celestial highness to the abyss of humility. It was then that the highest and eternal wisdom, the Word of God, descended into the womb of the most chaste Virgin so that man, lying in the depths of pitiable darkness, might be raised to the most joyful society of celestial spirits. But indeed, there is no measure to the divine wisdom. For He Who, on that day, in choosing the Virgin for the redemption of the whole human race, looked especially towards her humility . . . , wished also that on the same day, in a most humble place and from most humble men, a start should be made toward the raising of this present Empire, a beginning of so great a work.¹¹

More than a new Rome or a new Constantinople, Venice was a new Jerusalem, a city beloved of God, who caused her to rise from humble mud, resplendent, above the waters, a beacon of Christian liberty.¹² The Roman Empire had been destroyed by the barbarian tribes; pagan might was fallen, and God in his infinite wisdom saw to a proper, Christian succession. On March 25 began as well the new era of political grace. As the Archangel Gabriel had announced the conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary of a Savior to redeem humanity from Original Sin, so did God assure the political salvation of mankind through the foundation of this Christian republic on the very same date. Thus did the Feast of the Annunciation become an integral part of the state calendar. A celebration (like all such feasts in Venice) at once religious and patriotic, it was an occasion for an official andata in trionfo, the triumphal procession of the doge and Signoria, on the feast that came to be known as the Madonna di Marzo. March was a month recognized by all ancient cultures as the beginning of the new year, the season of renewal, spring time, when “the world puts on new colors, refreshing its lost beauty,” as Francesco Sansovino sang of “la natività di Venetia.”¹³

The referential ...