CHAPTER 1

Venetian Families

From the Household to the Scuola

Introduction

This chapter has two central aims. The first is to explore what it meant to be born on the boundaries of the Venetian patriciate. Around 2,600 patrician men were living in Venice toward the end of the fifteenth century.1 Pietro Coppo and Giovanni Bembo were born on the slippery boundaries of this tightly defined aristocratic class: Coppo, born illegitimately toward the end of 1469 or in early 1470, and Bembo, born to patrician parents on the fringes of noble society just a few years later in 1473. The first section of this chapter describes Bembo’s and Coppo’s relationships within their families: to their mothers, fathers, grandfathers, and uncles. Their marginal status brought uncertainties and ambiguities to their sense of kinship, shaping their sense of personhood and subjectivity through contested family relationships. This part of the chapter explores the consequences of illegitimacy and marginality for Coppo and Bembo, respectively. It is particularly important to understand the fine gradations and tensions in social status for both of these young men within their natal families, as these subtle distinctions would condition their trajectories of social mobility for the rest of their lives.
Both boys were educated as humanists, first in their family homes, and then in the Venetian Scuola di San Marco. Bembo’s and Coppo’s transformations into adults provide an unusual insight into what was the experience of many humanistically educated adolescents in Renaissance Venice. Existing on the margins of Venetian intellectual society, they give us an unusual window into the secondary humanist culture of Renaissance Venice. Following the transformations of Bembo and Coppo from boyhood to adolescence to adulthood, we are able to give not only a specificity and richness to the data amassed by social historians but also a level of descriptive detail usually available only for the most unusual individuals.2
The Scuola provided a new scholarly family for these young men, particularly in the intensely affective relationship between student and teacher. Both Bembo and Coppo were taught by renowned personalities in Venetian intellectual society in the last decade of the Quattrocento. Both formed important relationships with these men, founded on both intellectual endeavor and more emotional bonds. Tracking Bembo and Coppo from their natal families to their scholarly ones, the second aim of this chapter is to discover the ways in which these affective intellectual relationships shaped Bembo and Coppo from a very early age. The chapter traces the effects of these relationships from their scholarly careers to their political ones, and even to their conjugal families in the Mediterranean. At the heart of this chapter is a consideration of the bonds of family: the families these men were born into, and the families they made for themselves among their classmates and teachers.
The emotional landscape of the schoolroom has not always been well understood by historians of the Italian Renaissance. This chapter takes us through Venetian Renaissance schoolrooms through the eyes of Coppo and Bembo, allowing us to perceive its formative emotional significance to young Venetian men. In doing so, the chapter navigates between several fields of research: the social history of humanism, the social history of Venetian families, and the history of education. Our understanding of the social histories of humanism has recently become much more nuanced. Brian Maxson’s study of the social history of Florentine humanism has made our picture of who participated in that city’s intellectual culture far more capacious. Sarah Ross’s study of the upwardly mobile, aspirational middling classes of Venice—of the physicians and apothecaries who owned Latin texts, gave their children classicizing names, and wrote profusely of their intellectual life in their testaments—has given us a far more textured social history of humanism in sixteenth-century Venice.3 As Ross has found, humanism was not simply a dry, dusty intellectual endeavor undertaken in ascetic solitude, but one marked by individual and family aspirations, a way to consolidate close emotional ties, and undertaken with a keen sense of the social value of a classical education. In putting an examination of Bembo’s and Coppo’s social conditions alongside a study of the affective power of their education, this chapter aims to unfurl the complex relationship between social status, education, and interior life.

On the Boundaries of the Patriciate

Both Bembo and Coppo were born on the boundaries of the Venetian patriciate: one benefiting from all the privileges of membership but without the illustrious family history and wealth required to join the inner circle of patrician society; the other born illegitimately but able to potentially gain a foothold in political society through family connections and education. Though Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo were born with family names that indicated membership in the Venetian patriciate, their social statuses were in fact much more complicated than their names might first suggest. The Bembo clan sprawled throughout the city, with members in the most esteemed posts of government and moving in the most elite intellectual circles; but Bembo’s own immediate family was far less fortunate. Bembo was born a patrician and participated in all the rituals that demarcated a young patrician man’s social and political maturity. But there was an elite within the patrician elite in Venice, and neither Bembo nor any male member of his natal family could claim membership to that inner circle.4 Pietro Coppo was born the illegitimate son of Marco Coppo, who, along with his father and his brothers, had held some of the more important posts of the Venetian imperial bureaucracy. But we know nothing of Coppo’s mother, only that she was likely not patrician and that Coppo was born out of wedlock. With patrician births closely scrutinized, Coppo was both socially effaced and politically disenfranchised, his name missing from Coppo family genealogical chronicles as well as the central repositories of patrician social life in Venice.
Commemorating Giovanni Bembo’s branch of the family was (and is) the Ca’ Bembo in the Campiello Santa Maria Nova, just down the street from the parish church of San Cancian, a palazzo that belonged to Gian Matteo Bembo (1490–1570). Gian Matteo memorialized his brilliant career in Zara, Cattaro, Famagusta, Candia, and the terraferma with sculptures and inscriptions installed in the facade of his palazzo.5 Giovanni Bembo did not grow up in what would be Gian Matteo’s palazzo, though, but rather in a similar casa di statio, or a family palazzo divided into apartments for its members, also near San Cancian, perhaps even in the same campiello as Ca’ Bembo.6 Unlike Gian Matteo, he would not have much to commemorate in plaques or inscriptions. The house had belonged to his grandfather, Zuan Francesco (born in 1426), and then to his father, Domenico (born in 1459). It contained a garden as well as an apothecary shop.7
Giovanni was born in 1473, three years after his father had married Angela Cornaro. Bembo did not write much about his father in his lengthy autobiographical letter. Neither his grandfather, Zuan Francesco, nor his father, Domenico, nor even Domenico’s brothers, Girolamo and Alvise, had held any particularly important posts in the Venetian state. Bembo’s only discussion of his father is Domenico’s death: he was posted as castellano in Soncino in 1500, but he died that same year and was buried in the newly built church of Santa Maria delle Grazie there.8 Giovanni’s brother, Francesco, embarked on a more notable career than his father and grandfather: in 1494, he was appointed to a series of important posts at Modon, starting as castellano and eventually becoming capitano and provveditore.9 But Francesco died of syphilis not long after.10 If “the story of Venetian expansion is the story of men,” none of Bembo’s immediate male family members could claim much of a role in that imperial history.11
Much more important in Bembo’s own accounting for his life was his mother, Angela Cornaro. Angela appears throughout Bembo’s letter. She played an important role in urging Bembo to finally marry Cyurω and put an end to his shameful arrangement of cohabitation. Bembo was particularly proud of his connection to the Cornaro family, the wealthiest in Venice, through his mother. He repeatedly writes that Angela was related by blood to Caterina Cornaro, the then-deposed queen of Cyprus. This kinship loomed large in Bembo’s imagination of his family history, even if there is no evidence of a direct family relationship between the queen and Angela Cornaro.12 Bembo even named his third son Cornelio to commemorate this link between his own conjugal family and the famed Cornaro. As Holly Hurlburt has explored, the figure of Caterina Cornaro was important in Venetian culture as a cipher for thinking about the role of women in the Republic.13 It was through Angela’s (probably imagined) kinship to Caterina, rather than the more immediate history of his paternal family, the Bembo, that Giovanni Bembo crafted a sense of connection to the elite circles of patrician society.
Bembo followed the well-regulated trajectory from a prolonged patrician adolescence into political adulthood. His odyssey began at eighteen years old with an application to the Balla d’Oro, a lottery that allowed a lucky few to join the Great Council at age twenty instead of waiting until twenty-five, the usual age for inclusion. Enrollment in the Balla d’Oro became hugely popular among adolescent patricians at the end of the fifteenth century: the years 1471–90 saw a 185 percent increase in participation from the lotteries held in the first quarter of the century.14 Bembo and his brother Francesco were entered into the Balla on 22 October 1501 by their parents Domenico Bembo and Angela Cornaro.15 Their registration was witnessed by six patrician men who were likely friends and neighbors of the family; Benedetto Sanudo, for example, lived nearby in San Cancian.16
When patrician boys like Bembo, born legitimately of two patrician parents, turned eighteen, they would be registered in front of the State Attorneys, bringing along their fathers or male kin—perhaps even their male neighbors—to present evidence of their age. Finally, at twenty-five, they would earn their seat at the Great Council. Through their later twenties, these men would toil in minor, undesirable, and yet competitive positions in Venetian governance; in the 1490s, approximately 800 of the 2600 male patricians of the city held government posts.17 These “political apprenticeships” served a number of purposes: they provided crucial training and education for young men, preparing them for greater political responsibility in more desirable posts; they provided them with a salary, even a form of social welfare for poor nobles; and they kept the young men out of trouble.18
Bembo had privileged access to all the markers of status that defined adolescence and young adulthood for patrician men. And yet his branch of his paternal family set him on the margins of patrician society. His grandfather, father, and uncles had not amounted to much. Even his brother, perhaps destined for a more brilliant career in the empire, had his life cut short by syphilis. It was to his mother, Angela, rather than to his father that Bembo looked for blood relation to the patrician elite, through her tenuous kinship to Caterina Cornaro. As we will see, Bembo’s life was marked by a simmering resentment to his own class, even as he attempted again and again to gain the political offices that would allow him to make his way into the patrician elite. It is easy to imagine that the conditions for this tension between resentment and ambition were laid in Bembo’s early years, positioned as he was at the margins of the patriciate, with only his mother’s tenuous link to Caterina a possible instrument of social mobility.
Pietro Coppo was excluded from these rituals and privileges that defined patrician adolescent life. He was born illegitimately in two senses: his father was unmarried when Pietro was born, and Pietro’s mother was almost certainly not a patrician woman. As Thomas Kuehn has elegantly written, illegitimate children in Renaissance Italy had “a personhood of uncertain dimensions,” as their legal and social status in relation to their natal families was often ambiguous.19 Coppo was raised in the family home, and so was part of the social relationships of his paternal family.20 The Coppo family were never especially politically important in Venice, but they were one of the oldest patrician families in the city. Their family home was in the parish of San Paternian, just a few winding streets behind San Marco.21
Pietro’s father was Marco Coppo, who was one of seven Coppo brothers and one of the most politically successful.22 Marco (born 1443) had held several administrative positions in terraferma cities (Brescia and Verona), and was the castellano of Mocco (1471) and the podestà of Piran (1492) in Dalmatia. He was also camerlengo, or treasurer, on Crete (1484). Marco was married twice. He first wed the daughter of Nicolò Frizier in 1474.23 The Frizier family were part of the cittadino class, a social group defined as “original citizens” of Venice and eligible to serve in valuable and sensitive roles in the state chancellery. As James Grubb has found, searching for a firm class or community identity for the cittadino is a difficult task, particularly as intermarriage was relatively common between patrician men and cittadino women—especially when a large dow...