Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice

FOUR

Myths of Venice

The order with which this holy Republic is governed is a wonder to behold; there is no sedition from the non-nobles, no discord among the patricians, but all work together to [the Republic’s] increase. Moreover, according to what wise men say, it will last for ever …

MARIN SANUDO, THE CITY OF VENICE, 1493–15301

As Titian explored the incomparably beautiful city that would nurture his genius he came upon allegorical images in stone and paint of beautiful women representing peace, harmonious administration, prudence and justice. His uncle would have told him that these were the political virtues that set Venice apart from all other cities at a time when the rest of Italy was plagued by upheaval and foreign intervention, and that many great writers and thinkers, foreign as well as Venetian, extolled the unique stability and independence of the Most Serene Republic. As the first republic to govern a large empire on land and overseas since the fall of republican Rome, Venice saw itself as a new, Christian Rome, founded by God in the fifth century AD so that a Christian empire would rise from the ruins of the pagan civilization. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II the Conqueror in 1453, and the subsequent immigration of exiled Greek scholars, Venice styled itself also as the New Byzantium and the New Athens. Venice, as one historian has put it, ‘claimed the bones, the blood, and the culture of ancient Greece and Rome’.2 But it did so in the name of God and its own special patron saints. The Republic enjoyed the protection and favour of many saints, of whom St Mark was the most important. The Evangelist, whose body, smuggled from his tomb in Alexandria by two Venetian merchants, reached Venice in 828 – an event known as the translatio, the transfer – was the alibi and protector in whose name the Republic conquered and defended its religious integrity, and whose symbol of a winged lion was emblazoned on banners carried into battle and installed all over the city and throughout the empire. Marin Sanudo, on an official tour of the mainland empire, noted an inscription on the walls of Pirano in Istria that read: ‘Behold the winged lion! I pluck down earth, sea, and stars.’

Venice was governed as a republic by an oligarchy of some 2,500 patricians, about 5 per cent of the male population, who ruled according to an unwritten constitution designed to prevent the rise to power of any individual or faction.3 Membership of the patrician class was strictly by inheritance. Until long after 1381, when some new men were admitted to the patriciate in recognition of their contribution to the Venetian war against Genoa, no amount of money or service to the state could buy entrée. Regime-change in Republican Venice was made impossible by a unique system of checks and balances. No equivalent of the Florentine Medici family was able to take control of a hermetically sealed governing caste defined by lineage. No Savonarola, however charismatic, could influence the structure or policies of government.

Thanks to the survival of government records and to Venetian patrician chroniclers, whose shared identity was defined by their hereditary right and obligation to rule, we know in some considerable detail about the day-to-day business of the Venetian government and the events, both trivial and important, that coloured life in Titian’s adopted city.4 The two most informative of the patrician diarists in the first decades of the sixteenth century were Girolamo Priuli and Marin Sanudo, neither of whom had especially brilliant political careers. Priuli, head of one of the great Venetian banking houses, was the gloomy conscience of his class. His diaries are full of threnodies about the sinful and luxurious habits that in his view were responsible for all the natural disasters and defeats in war that afflicted Venice in his lifetime. Sanudo, Priuli’s temperamental opposite, enjoyed the pleasures and display of wealth that Priuli condemned. Garrulous and sociable, he kept a collection of objects of interest from all over the world and a library of 6,500 books and manuscripts which made his house in the Calle Spezier behind the Turkish warehouse one of the essential sights of Venice, along with the arsenal and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, for VIPs in Venice.

Sanudo was an obsessive recorder of minutiae. He wrote poetry, plays, a history of the doges and an account of the invasion of Italy by the French king Charles VIII, which led to decades of war on Italian soil between the French and the Habsburg empire. Today he is best known for his panegyric Of the Origins, Site and Government of the City of Venice,5 and above all for his diaries,6 which were notes for an official history of the Republic that he was to his great disappointment never called upon to write. Too much of a prattler for his own political good, he was forever pacing the corridors of the ducal palace, eavesdropping at the Rialto on news from abroad, continually in the public squares investigating every occurrence, no matter how minimal, how unimportant it was. He jotted down the incessant recordings that were for him ‘both wife and magistrate’ in a vernacular style that he himself described as ‘coarse, unadorned and low’; but it is precisely because he never polished or edited them that they are the richest and most reliable source we have for the political and social history of Venice and of the European powers with which Venice was involved in the first third of the sixteenth century. In the City of Venice, which he wrote in parallel with the diaries, he noted the prices of commodities: oil and candles both fixed by law at four soldi a pound; mutton at three soldi a pound; a cartload of wood at twenty-eight soldi; fresh water imported during times of drought eight buckets for one soldo. He gave the location of brothels and made a list of the varieties of fish sold at the Rialto. He couldn’t resist informing posterity that his family owned an inn at the Rialto called The Bell, with shops on the ground floor, which brought in 800 ducats a year in rent, ‘which is a marvellous thing and a huge rent’.

Once they reached the age of twenty-five, all men of noble birth were required when not away on business to sit on the Great Council, the sovereign body of government, which met on Sundays to deliberate and vote. The Great Council, which existed primarily as a check on the power of individual members of government, had to pass all constitutional changes and new laws. It elected the members of the most important government offices, and the governors and administrators of the dominions on the terraferma and overseas. Members of the higher government councils and magistracies served for short periods, between three months and two years, although in practice the same men were often re-elected, especially during wars and other emergencies. Virtually all decision-making committees, as well as military commands and ambassadorial posts, were filled by experienced politicians in their middle age or older. Venetian ambassadors, trained by obligatory participation in government for the whole of their adult lives, acquired political and diplomatic skills that set them apart from the representatives of other Italian and European states. They were everywhere, and their preserved reports, which were confidential newssheets that ran to many pages, enrich our understanding of the political atmosphere of sixteenth-century Europe with details about the character and demeanour, as well as the policies and motives, of the rulers of the Renaissance world.

But when Titian was growing up in Venice a government that was in effect a gerontocracy – the average age of doges in the sixteenth century was seventy-five – was beginning to cause some resentment among the younger noblemen. The young men wearing parti-coloured tights and dashing short jackets who can be seen in the ‘eyewitness’ paintings by Carpaccio, Mansueti and Gentile Bellini are patricians not yet old enough to sit on the Great Council. They are wearing the uniform of one of the compagnie delle calze, the companies of the hose, which, in the absence of a princely court, were responsible for organizing and providing the decorations for parties, weddings, festivals and theatrical entertainments. There were twenty or so of these companies, whose membership was predominantly restricted to the patrician class. They were chartered and supervised by the Council of Ten, who kept them well away from unmarried young women.

The structure of the Venetian government has often been described as a pyramid, with the Great Council at the base and the doge and his Collegio, or cabinet, at the top. It is a helpful simplification but misleading because the organization was more flexible and more complex than the comparison implies. The shape and balance of power shifted over time according to circumstances, and its adaptability is one of the factors that explain its remarkable stability. In Titian’s day the most authoritative body in the structure of councils and magistracies was the Collegio, which comprised the doge and his personal councillors, one from each of the six districts, or sestieri, into which Venice was and still is divided; the Savi, or wise men, who advised the Senate about the execution of policy decisions; the heads of the Council of Ten; and the three heads of the Quarantia, the forty-man court of appeals. The doge also chaired the Senate, the hub of government where foreign, economic, military, domestic, mainland and overseas concerns were debated and decided. The members of the Senate were elected annually by the Great Council, which usually re-elected them for a second year at least. The senators in turn elected the Savi, and the Provveditori, commissioners with various spheres of administrative responsibility, the most important of whom represented the state in military and naval affairs.

The division of power and responsibility between the Senate and Council of Ten was not entirely clear-cut. Described by Sanudo as ‘a very severe magistracy of top nobles’, the Ten, which despite its name was usually larger, was responsible for state security: the quashing of treason, the vetting of foreigners employed by the state, and the conduct of diplomacy considered too sensitive for the larger numbers of senators. It employed a corps of spies, informers and assassins, and had its own armoury and its own prison for state offenders. While ordinary suspects were entitled to representation by their own lawyers and were tried in public by a committee of state attorneys, defendants brought before the Ten were denied the right to independent counsel and were tried in private by a committee of masked members. By Titian’s day the Ten had extended its functions to matters of foreign policy and finance, including overseeing the revenues of the Salt Office, which paid for the upkeep and decoration of the doge’s palace. It was to the Council of Ten that Titian would address his first petition to paint for the palace.

Apart from the doge, the only patricians who kept their jobs for life were the procurators of San Marco, the most important officials after the doge. The procurators were career politicians, usually elderly and supposedly, but not necessarily always, of impeccable respectability. They lived rent-free in ancient and increasingly decrepit houses on the south side of the Piazza, which were not replaced until later in the century by the dignified Procuratie Nuove, the new procurators’ residences that still line the Café Florian wing of the Piazza. They also owned and let out a number of properties in and around the Piazza, including some hostelries that also served as brothels, and the northern wing now known as the Procuratie Vecchie, the old procuracy. The procurators were responsible for the care of the basilica of San Marco and the land around it, for the administration of legacies and for the care of orphans. Although their personal allowances were modest, their control of large sums of money gave them considerable financial power. They had automatic seats in the Senate, were often employed as ambassadors, and the special advisers attached to the Senate, the Council of Ten and the doge known as the zonte (Venetian for giunte, meaning additions) were usually drawn from their ranks. All doges since the fourteenth century had previously served as procurators.

The power of the doge, who was elected by a stupendously complicated system of balloting, was defined and constrained by prohibitive oaths, the promissioni ducali, to which each doge was required to agree on his accession. But, although his rule was far more restricted than that of other Renaissance princes, the doge, as primus inter pares, was not a mere figurehead. A talented and determined doge who lived long enough in office could make a difference. He was, furthermore, the head of a state that maintained a degree of independence from the Holy See in Rome that was unique in Italy. Many a pope was enraged by the Venetian tradition of controlling its own ecclesiastical patronage, even appointing its patriarchs from the ranks of its own patriciate. Papal nuncios in Venice regularly denounced the anomalous wish of the doge to be both prince and pope, but they complained in vain.

To worship God in Venice was also to worship Venice, God’s most sublime and improbable creation. In Venice, as a fifteenth-century Venetian humanist observed, ‘Republican virtues are identified with divine virtues, and God and the State, patriotism and religion, are metaphorically fused.’7 The religious heart of the city was San Marco’s basilica, which was both the state church and the doge’s private chapel. St Peter’s church, nominally the cathedral until 1807, was located far away on its remote island in Castello. The dress and behaviour of the doge retained a Byzantine appearance; and the neo-Byzantine style of churches with open naves and domed Greek cross-plans further asserted Venice’s religious independence from Rome. In Titian’s first altarpiece, St Mark Enthroned with Sts Cosmas, Damian, Roch and Sebastian (Venice, Church of Santa Maria della Salute), St Mark occupies the high throne normally reserved for St Peter.

Once a Venetian nobleman had entered the Great Council he became a togato, obliged to wear a robe known as the toga at meetings of the Great Council and on official visits to the terraferma. Sanudo described the basic class code of Shakespeare’s ‘togaed consuls’8 right down to their underclothes:

[They wear] long black robes reaching down to the ground, with sleeves open to the elbows, a black cap on the head and a hood of black cloth or velvet. Formerly they wore very large hoods, but these have gone out of fashion. They wear trimmings of four sorts – marten, weasel, fox or even sable … Soled stockings and clogs are worn in all weathers, silk undershirts and hose of a black cloth; to conclude, they wear black a lot.9

The more important members of government were required, sometimes on pain of fines, to wear the special colours of their offices – scarlet, crimson or a deeper violet-crimson known as pavonazzo with stoles in the same or a contrasting colour.10 White or cloth of gold was worn only by the doge and Venetian knights. Close attention was paid to the colour and cut of official robes, which could indicate mood or subversive tendencies as well as status. The cut of sleeves inset into robes varied. The more modest ones were straight and narrow. Some were voluminous and gathered at the wrist like bags. The most important sleeves were bell shaped and open at the wrist to show off expensive fur linings, the widest and grandest of all being the dogale, or ducal sleeves, a sartorial privilege the doge shared with procurators, doctors of medicine, ambassadors and governors on the mainland.

The civil servants who administered the day-to-day business of government wore the same basic black toga as nobles without office – it was something like the equivalent of the bowler hat and umbrella that professional Englishmen used to wear. They were drawn from the cittadini originari, native-born citizens, who formed the next caste down from the nobles. Since only 5 per cent of the male population were cittadini and since they had no vote, they were hardly what we would call citizens; their status was more that of second-rank nobility, and they sometimes married patrician wives. The cittadini notaries who comprised the ducal chancery – which consisted of the grand chancellor, the four secretaries of the Council of Ten and eight secretaries of the Senate – served for life and were thus in a position to influence long-term policy-making. The grand chancellor, whose position commanded a salary of 300 ducats a year plus 50 as a housing allowance, was the most powerful man in Venice after the doge and the procurators. Known as the ‘people’s doge’, he preceded the doge in ceremonial processions, dressed in scarlet, and accompanied him on his daily rounds of government departments, attending the Collegio in the mornings, meetings of the Senate or Council of Ten after lunch, and the Great Council on Sunday afternoons.

The cittadini civil servants were on the whole better educated and more cultivated than their patrician employers. In the chancery school at San Marco they were taught the core subjects of sixteenth-century learning: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy based on the study of ancient Latin and Greek authors, as well as calligraphy to ensure that their handwriting reflected well on the state, and modern languages to enable them to act as interpreters and to translate letters from foreign governments that could not be entrusted to outsiders. There was a strong emphasis on rhetoric, which was taught by imitating Latin models, especially Cicero. Previous education was not a prerequisite, but some entered the chancery after attending the state-run University of Padua. Although their education was primarily intended to equip them with practical skills, some were connoisseurs of modern art who admired and befriended Titian, helped him in his negotiations with government and sat to him for their portraits.

The cittadino caste was not entirely impermeable. It was sometimes possible for wealthy immigrants to attain that rank, which gave them, as well as social standing, certain legal rights, business contacts and trading concessions. But it was a process that could take twenty years or more of residence, and normally required them to own a prominent palace in the city. These new cittadini further established their positions in Venice through generous patronage of the arts – Titian would count several of them among his patrons; and many served as officers in the Scuole Grandi, the charitable confraternities that were a distinctive feature of Renaissance Venice and a powerful force for social stability. Membership of the Scuole, which was mostly restricted to cittadini and richer members of the lowest class, the popolani, was a mix of businessmen, artists, artisans, industrialists, merchants and state functionaries. In Titian’s day patricians sometimes acted as patrons of the Scuole, but were explicitly prohibited from membership later in the century.

The Scuole Grandi were unique to Venice and distinct from the Scuole Piccole, smaller brotherhoods devoted to particular religious rites or trades, or representing foreign communities, which numbered over 200 by mid-century. In Titian’s youth there were five Scuole Grandi, each with a membership of five or six hundred: Santa Maria della Carità (the oldest of the foundations, now the Accademia Gallery), San Giovanni Evangelista, Santa Maria della Misericordia, San Rocco and San Marco. A sixth, San Teodoro, was founded in 1552. About 10 per cent of the male population belonged to one or another of the Scuole, which were administered by a rotating governing board, or banca, of cittadini, elected by the membership and chaired by a grand guardiano, who had to be over fifty and served for one year. The Scuole Piccole were run along similar lines except that the chief executive was usually called a gastaldo. All the Scuole were highly competitive and vied with one another to commission, often with the aid of government grants, the most magnificent buildings, decorations and paintings. Titian, who joined the Scuola di San Rocco in 1528 and was later a board member, would paint for two Scuole Piccole, and for two Scuole Grandi, including his Presentation of the Virgin for the boardroom of the Scuola della Carità.

Francesco Sansovino, author of the first guidebook to Venice,11 described the Scuole as representing ‘a certain type of civil government in which, as if in a republic of their own, the citizens enjoy rank and honour according to their merits and qualities’. As well as looking after their poorer members, they ran almshouses and hospitals, administered private estates and trusts, and in wartime supplied men for the army and galleys. As representatives of the state, their chief officers wore crimson or pavonazzo in processions on feast days or in celebration of victories. The members of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista can be seen gliding through the city on Corpus Christi Day in the narrative cycle painted by Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Mansueti, Vittore Carpaccio and other Venetian artists between 1494 and 1500.

Venetians who were neither patricians nor cittadini were popolani, which meant everyone from immigrant labourers living in shantytowns to merchants, industrialists, artisans and great artists (although the Bellini brothers and Carpaccio were cittadini originari). Some members of this diverse lowest class made fortunes – in 1506 a rich merchant popolano died without heirs leaving 60,000 ducats to the procurators to distribute to charity. But unlike the working classes of other Italian cities, where the members of guilds had at least in theory a voice in government, the popolani of Venice didn’t even have a distant memory of democratic or quasi-democratic government. Some foreign observers wondered at their failure to rise up and demand a say in the way they were governed. According to Luigi da Porto, a nobleman from the neighbouring city of Vicenza, their passive acceptance was due to the high proportion of foreigners in the city:

apart from a few [Venetians] with long-established citizenship … all the rest are such new people that there are very few of them whose fathers were born in Venice; and they are Slavs, Greeks, Albanians, come in other times to be sailors, or to earn money from the various trades pursued here … These people are so obsequious towards the nobles that they almost worship them. There are also many people who have come from diverse places for dealing and warehousing, as from Germany and all of Italy, and have thereafter stayed on to make money and been residents a long time; but the majority also have families in their own countries, and many after a little while leave for home, and in their place send others, who care for nothing except making money; and so from them can come no disturbance whatever.12

But there are other explanations for the absence of social unrest. Cramped living conditions enforced at least a degree of interaction between the classes and foreign residents. Throughout the city the little houses of the poor were clustered around the great palaces. Rich and poor, patricians and popolani attended the same parish church, sometimes sharing the cisterns that were the only supply of fresh water. Everyone marked the passage of time according to the same rhythms in an age when time was a flexible dimension and the hours sounded by church bells varied in length according to the season. The twenty-four-hour clock began at sunset, the working day at sunrise. Sanudo tells us that the bells of the campanile of San Marco could be ‘heard all over the city and also many miles away’.

A succession of spectacular public pageants glorifying the government of the Most Serene Republic became more numerous and more elaborate throughout Titian’s lifetime. Ritual celebrations defined everyone’s calendar year and served to focus the attention of all Venetians on their common heritage and destiny. Recent victories were proclaimed by trumpets and fifes in the Piazza while church bells rang all over the city. Every significant event, long past or recent – religious, historical, quasi-historical, legendary; peace treaties, conquests, the arrivals of foreign ambassadors and visiting royalty – was celebrated with a procession, pageant or regatta, all accompanied by the singers and instrumentalists for whom Venice was famous throughout Europe. Carnival, which lasted from 26 December until the first day of Lent, was a psychological safety valve, a time when men and women, patricians, cittadini and popolani, were allowed to mock one another, dress up as one another and get a taste of how the other half lived. Masked criminals could more easily escape detection during the season, but the revelry never led to mob violence against the state.

The Assumption of the Virgin (the subject of Titian’s immense and explosively innovative early painting for the high altar of the church of the Frari) was celebrated on the fortieth day after Easter Sunday with a ceremony that was the most symbolically complex fusion of religion and patriotically adjusted history in the Venetian calendar. On the day of the sensa, as it was known, the doge was rowed on the state barge, the elaborately carved and gilded Bucintoro, into the Adriatic, where he cast a gold ring into the waters. The marriage to the sea, the ‘carefully orchestrated apogee of the state liturgy’,13 commemorated, as well as the Assumption, the most important Venetian secular legend, according to which Doge Sebastiano Ziani in 1177 had acted as peacemaker between Pope Alexander III and the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The rewards were the Republic’s perpetual dominion over the sea and independence in perpetuity from both pope and emperor. Titian’s two large canvases for the doge’s palace of episodes from the Alexandrine story were among the tragic losses to fire in the 1577. The sensa was also the biggest tourist attraction of the year and the occasion of a major fair in the Piazza.

Of course Venice was far from the perfect state as idealized by its contemporary and later mythmakers.14 Two-thirds of the population, including increasing numbers of patricians, were at risk of poverty. In a corrupt and violent age, Venice was not much less corrupt and probably more violent than other Italian cities. Clientism, intrigue and fraud were by no means unknown in government. Although patricians were strictly forbidden to solicit for votes, they struck deals in an area of the Piazzetta known as the brolio – hence the word imbroglio for complicated political intriguing. The crime rate was high. Three patricians who served on a rotating basis as Officials of the Night (Sanudo was one of them for a six-month period) prowled the streets after dark with the authority to search any house, and take a cut in any fines they imposed. But they never succeeded in preventing armed criminals from the Romagna and Marches from sneaking into the city by night. Gangs of bored, arrogant members of the companies of the hose behaved as privileged young dandies do in class-conscious societies, accosting strangers with ironic courtesies that could turn nasty. In 1503 a man was condemned to death for selling cooked human flesh. One of Titian’s servants was murdered in 1528 when he was living in the parish of San Polo, and another later in his life after he had moved to north-east Venice.

Rape, especially of poor women, sometimes by their fathers or putative husbands, was a frequent occurrence that was not always punished. The humblest victims were often too frightened to appeal to the law, and when they did so their assailants were on the whole let off remarkably lightly. The courts, which were of course entirely male, presumably chose to believe that any women foolish or brave enough to venture out alone was asking for it. Perhaps, like St Augustine in his commentary on the story of the rape of Lucretia, they shared the belief that the violation of a woman’s body cannot take place without giving her some physical pleasure. (When Titian was an old man, in three legendary rapes he painted for the delectation of the King of Spain, the Rape of Europa, the Rape of Lucretia and Danaë, the voluptuous victims do not look as displeased by their situation as they should have done.)

The government was far more concerned with sodomy, even within marriage, where it was practised everywhere in Europe as a form of birth control. Doctors were required by law to investigate and report any evidence of heterosexual sodomy, for which the punishment was decapitation followed by burning of the remains. Homosexuality, which was seen as a challenge to the very order of Creation, was condemned in all Christian countries. But in Venice, where charges of sodomy were investigated by the Council of Ten, homosexuals were pursued and punished with even more rigour than elsewhere in Europe, possibly because homosexual networks, which tend to be secret cabals in homophobic societies, were felt to threaten the authority and stability of the Republican government. Some sodomites were left to die in cages hung from the bell tower in the Piazza while the populace was encouraged to throw rubbish at them from below. The obsession with homosexuality made it an easy charge to make against an enemy, and accusations, some probably trumped up, were frequent. Nevertheless, if we are to believe Priuli, who was one of the Venetian patricians most obsessed by sodomy, by 1509: