The Renaissance

  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 Murano 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,22 repeatedly flouted the authority of the Church, ignored the most terrible papal decrees of excommunication and interdict, offered asylum to prudent skeptics (till 1527),23 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.24 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.25 The Republic proudly took the stand that in temporal matters it “recognized no superior except the Divine Majesty.”26 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).27 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 façade 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 façade 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 façades.

  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)* at the northwestern corner. These southern and western façades, 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 façades, 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 façade 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 façades 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 façade 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 Niccolò 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 Niccolò 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 façade. 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.

  2. The Bellini

  Next to St. Mark’s and the Ducal Palace, the glory of Venetian art was in painting. Many forces conspired to make the painters the favorites of Venetian patronage. The Church, here as elsewhere, had to tell the Christian story to its people, of whom only a few could read; she needed pictures and statuary to continue the passing effect of speech; so each generation, and many churches and monasteries, had to have Annunciations, Nativities, Adorations, Visitations, Presentations, Massacres of the Innocents, Flights into Egypt, Transfigurations, Last Suppers, Crucifixions, Entombments, Resurrections, Ascensions, Assumptions, Martyrdoms. When detachable paintings faded, or grew stale to a congregation, they might be sold to collectors or museums; they were periodically cleaned and occasionally repainted or retouched; their authors, if reincarnated, might not recognize them today. This, of course, did not apply to murals, which usually disintegrated on their walls. Sometimes, to avoid this fatality, the picture was painted upon canvas and this was then fixed to the wall, as in the Hall of the Great Council. In Venice the state rivaled the Church in appetite for murals, for these could feed patriotism and pride by celebrating the grandeur and ceremonies of the government, the triumphs of trade or war. The scuole, too, might order murals and painted banners to commemorate their patron saints or their annual pageantry. Rich men wanted scenes of outdoor beauty or indoor love pictured on the walls of their palaces; and they sat for portraits to cheat for a while the ironic brevity of fame. The Signory ordered a portrait of every doge in turn; even the Procurators of St. Mark so preserved their features for a careless posterity. It was in Venice that the portrait and the easel picture achieved most popularity.