by Susan Jaques
Along with riches, Venice endured its share of tragedy. As Palladio’s church on San Giorgio Maggiore was going up in 1576, the maritime power was struck by a plague that wiped out one third of its population. To mark the unspeakable loss, the Paduan architect was hired to design a church for the nearby island of Guidecca dedicated to Christ the Redeemer, Redentore. Venice’s deliverance from the plague was commemorated with an annual festival in which the doge and his court crossed the water in a flotilla of boats to visit the church. Together, the islands of San Giorgio Maggiore and Guidecca and their remarkable Palladian churches marked Venice’s southernmost boundary.
Flanking the central portal of San Giorgio Maggiore were statues of Saint George and Saint Stephen, to whom the church was dedicated. Instead of a cross, the dome was topped with a copper and wood figure of St. George, some thirteen feet tall. Inside the church were the relics of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, given to the Benedictines in 1109. Until the recent invasion, St. Stephen’s feast day, December 26, had been an even bigger holiday in the Republic than Christmas. The doge had led the annual ceremonial procession, rowing out to the Church for Mass sung by the resident Benedictine monks and choristers from nearby St. Mark’s.
Through the centuries, the beautiful abbey had welcomed many celebrities—from King Henri III of France and Queen Casimira of Poland to Austrian emperors Joseph II, Francesco I, and Frederick I. In 1443, exiled Cosimo de’ Medici took refuge here with his court and friends, including architect Michelozzo Michelozzi who built a library for the Benedictines. Now Barnaba Chiaramonti’s visit would also prove historic.
Though the papacy had been vacant for three months, Cardinal Chiaramonti had only learned of Pius VI’s death in early October. He had arrived in Venice ahead of the conclave to attend Pius’s Novena. Nine days of public Masses were held at St. Mark’s Basilica for the repose of the pontiff’s soul.2 French troops had taken the elderly pope from Rome to Sienna in February 1798, just days after the Republic of Rome was proclaimed. From there, Pius was moved to Florence in May, then to Valence in July where he died a month later. On January 30, 1800, Pius was buried in an unadorned grave in a cemetery in Valence.
Since the great Western Schism ended in 1417, every papal conclave had been held in Rome. But with Neapolitan king Ferdinand II occupying the Eternal City since the end of September, the College of Cardinals had to find an alternative location. Some cardinals fled Rome for Venice. Others, including Cardinal Albani, Dean of the Sacred College, sought refuge in Naples.
Habsburg emperor Francis II, head of Catholic Austria, offered the isolated San Giorgio Maggiore to the cardinals, agreeing to pay for most of the conclave, along with Spain, and to guarantee its safety. Because of the political turmoil, the turnout was the lowest since 1534. Only thirty-four of the forty-six living cardinals made it to Venice. For many, the trip posed serious risks and challenges. Twenty-four votes were required to elect a new pope. The Benedictine monks moved into temporary quarters to make room for the arriving cardinals. Monsignor Ercole Consalvi was appointed secretary of the conclave.
Barnaba Chiaramonti entered the dignified church with its lofty transept, enormous dome, and colossal Corinthian columns. Palladio, who did not live to see the church finished, considered white the color most pleasing to God. In the 1590s, the decade after the architect’s death, the Benedictines began decorating its simple interior. Jacopo Tintoretto and his workshop created a series of altarpieces placed in Palladio’s marble frames. One of Tintoretto’s last works, the Entombment (1594), was hung in the Chapel of the Dead where the abbots of the monastery were buried.
Before commissioning Palladio to replace the Gothic-style church, the Benedictines hired him to design a new dining room. A low wide flight of stairs led to the vestibule where an imposing door recalled the Roman basilica, San Salvatore di Spoleto. Inside the impressive hall featured a barrel-vaulted ceiling and three large windows. Now the east wall above the abbot’s head table was empty.
In September 1797, French troops stormed into the monastery and ripped the Wedding at Cana off the wall of the refectory. To get Paolo Veronese’s monumental one-and-a-half-ton work (22 by 32.5 feet) to Paris, it was cut in half and stitched back together in France, where it was displayed at the Louvre on November 8, 1798. Venice was still in shock by the plunder of its art treasures, which included the four magnificent bronze horses from the façade of St. Mark’s Basilica. The monastery also lost Rocco Marconi’s Christ and the Adulteress, Cima da Conegliano’s Saint Jerome in the Desert (1495), and two small panels depicting four pairs of saints.
The Benedictines had specified the subject of the purloined painting, the wedding banquet at Cana in Galilee when Jesus miraculously turned water into wine. The contract called for Veronese to fill the entire wall opposite the room’s entrance, using precious pigments like ultramarine, and complete the canvas in time for the September 1563 “festa de la madona.” By adding columns and other classical architectural elements, Veronese created the impression that the picture was an extension of the space. Palladio’s cornice created a framing device for the top of Veronese’s canvas.
Veronese set his colorful composition in Renaissance Venice, complete with lavish table settings and ornate costumes, music and conversation. Guests and servants surround the serene central figures of Jesus and Mary who are joined at the table for dessert by twenty-one men and four women, including contemporaries of the artist.3 The work features a staggering 132 figures. The orchestra is made up of artists with Veronese playing the viola, Tintoretto on the violin, and Jacopo Bassano the flute. The bearded man leaning toward Veronese and playing the viola may be the architect Palladio.4
The refectory was a no-talking zone, a place for silence and contemplation. Above the entrance to the dining room, Veronese painted two angels, now lost, that are thought to have held a card inscribed SILENTIUM.5 Finished in a year, Wedding at Cana earned the thirty-four-year-old painter 324 ducats, food, and a barrel of wine. After the collaboration, Palladio asked Veronese to work with him again at the Villa Barbaro at Maser.
Accolades soon began for the work. Two years after the painting’s completion, a resident monk named Benedetto Guido wrote: “[a]ll the sculptors come and the painters to admire it three, four, and six times . . . and PAOLO [sic] is praised with eternal fame.”6
Wedding at Cana was so renowned that people went to San Giorgio just to see it. Cosimo III de’ Medici claimed it alone was worth a trip to Venice. Princes requested copies. In December 1705, to avoid the crowds, the friars limited the number of visitors to the island traveling to see the painting. Almost a century later, visitors headed to Paris to experience the masterpiece with similar gusto.
Bergamo carver Gaspare Gatti furnished the large choir facing the Sacristy of San Giorgio Maggiore with some eighty-two walnut stalls. Flemish sculptor Albert Van der Brulle carved four dozen spectacular panels narrating the life of Saint Benedict, which included dolphin-riding cherubs. To the right of the choir, a door led to a dark, narrow spiral staircase.
Up this flight of stairs, Barnaba Chiaramonti and his fellow cardinals convened in a private chapel hidden from view. The chapel was originally conceived as a choir for the monks to pray at night. In the 1730s, an organ was acquired for the room. The high wooden seats folded down allowing the cardinals to stand with arm rests. The chairs are still inscribed with the names of each of the cardinals.
Above the high altar hung Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio’s 1516 St. George and the Dragon. Eight years earlier, Carpaccio had depicted St. George for a painting at the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the seat of a confraternity built by wealthy Dalmatian merchants. Carpaccio created nine paintings depicting the lives of St. George, patron saint of the scuola, and St. Jerome, patron saint of Dalmatia.
For the chapel at San Giorgio Maggiore, Carpaccio took inspiration from Jacopo da Varazze’s chronicle of the lives of the saints, the Golden Legend, a hugely popular religious work from
the Middle Ages. Carpaccio included references to the monastery including St. Jerome in the upper left corner and St. Stephen being stoned to death on the top right. For the predella, Carpaccio depicted the martyrdom of St. George. According to legend, after converting to Christianity, the officer in the Guard of Emperor Diocletian was tortured by his fellow Roman soldiers.
The cardinals arrived at San Giorgio Maggiore deeply divided on the selection of a new pope. Austria’s support for the conclave had come at a price. The Habsburgs wanted a pope who would not challenge its occupation of Venice and territories of the Papal States. As special envoy of the Austrian emperor, Cardinal Francesco Herzan von Harras’s December 12 arrival was a major event. As reported by the Venetian Gazette, most of the prelature, along with many prominent Venetian and foreign figures, accompanied the cardinal in an afternoon procession of numerous gondolas from the Procuratie to San Giorgio Maggiore.7
Pius VI’s nephew, Cardinal Braschi, led another faction promoting Cardinal Carlo Bellisomi, Bishop of Cesena, a protégé of Pius and Spain’s first choice. Braschi garnered the support of Albani, Dean of the Sacred College, along with Cardinal York and Cardinal Chiaramonti. He also lobbied Cardinal Hertzan for his vote. Unbeknownst to Braschi, Herzan was secretly developing a bloc backing Cardinal Alessandro Mattei. The Austrians’ first choice for pope, Mattei had signed the onerous Treaty of Tolentino on behalf of the papacy. Mattei and Bellisomi ended up locked in a stalemate. Meanwhile a minority bloc emerged led by Cardinal Leonardo Antonelli, supported by France’s only representative, Jean-Sifrein Maury, the personal envoy of the future Louis XVIII, brother of France’s beheaded king Louis XVI.
France’s new first consul Napoleon Bonaparte also tried to influence the papal election. In February 1800, Prime Minister Talleyrand wrote to the Spanish Ambassador in Paris, asking the king of Spain to exercise his right of royal veto. The conclave, Talleyrand complained, was entirely under the domination of Austria with the non-Catholic governments of Britain and Russia participating. He reminded the Spaniards that the selection of the right candidate was in the interest of both France and Spain.
The Spanish minister replied that Spain’s Cardinal Lorenzana was working under the king’s instructions. In a March 30 letter to Talleyrand, the French Ambassador to the Spanish Court Charles-Jean-Marie Alquier repeated the king of Spain’s reaction to Talleyrand’s letter: “You don’t know my people: I would be stoned to death and shred to pieces if I were to do what the First Consul is asking.”8
After nearly three months of wheeling and dealing and threats of vetoes, the various factions fell apart. The impasse was almost unprecedented in the history of papal conclaves.9 Finally in March, conclave secretary Consalvi proposed a compromise candidate, fifty-eight-year-old Barnaba Chiaramonti.
Like his relative Pius VI, Chiaramonti was born in the small northern Italian town of Cesena in Romagna. At fourteen, he entered the local Benedictine order taking the name Don Gregorio. Ordained a priest in 1765, Gregorio taught theology and philosophy at the abbey of S. Giovanni of Parma, a duchy that was undergoing political and ecclesiastical reforms under the Bourbons. After the accession of his relative Giovanni Angelo Braschi as Pius VI, Gregorio’s career took off. He returned to Rome in 1775 as theology professor at the college of S. Anselmo. Three years after Pius VI named him Bishop of Tivoli, the forty-two-year-old was elevated to Cardinal and Bishop of Imola in Romagna. For the past several years, Chiaramonti had been carefully navigating the Papal States crisis.
When Napoleon’s army invaded northern Italy in 1797, the Cardinal advised his diocese to submit to the new Cisalpine Republic. In his Christmas homily that year, he argued that there was no conflict between a democratic form of government and being a good Catholic: “Christian virtue makes men good democrats. . . . Equality is not an idea of philosophers but of Christ . . . and do not believe that the Catholic religion is against democracy.” When Austrian forces replaced the French two years later, Chiaramonti called on his congregation to submit to the authority “of the victorious Austro-Russian armies” and the “unvanquished defender of the laws of the Church and of the Throne, the Most Pious Emperor Francis II.”10 At the same time that he counseled submission to the new regime, Chiaramonti called on authorities to protect the clergy and their flocks, referencing the captivity of his elderly relative, Pius VI.
Now, Chiaramonti’s republican views about faith and democracy alarmed some of the conclave’s older cardinals. On top of that, the former Benedictine monk was happy as a bishop; the papacy wasn’t a position he sought. After persuading him not to prolong “the widowhood of the Church,” the Cardinals broke the stalemate on March 14, unanimously electing Barnaba Chiaramonti (Chiaramonti himself voted for his supporter Cardinal Dean). The scholarly prelate was considered pragmatic and conciliatory, someone who would remain neutral in future European conflicts.
In memory of his predecessor, Chiaramonti took Pius VII as his pontifical name. In addition to Bishop of Rome, he was pontifex maximus. Originally the title of ancient Rome’s pagan high priest, literally the “greatest bridge-builder,” pontifex maximus metaphorically connected mortals and gods.11 The holders of the prestigious position, typically members of prominent Roman families, interpreted omens, managed the calendar, and advised the Senate. In 63 B.C.E., Julius Caesar was elected pontifex maximus. His successor Augustus made the position of high priest an imperial prerogative; successive Roman emperors automatically inherited the esteemed title.12
According to Christopher Lascelles, when Christianity replaced paganism as Rome’s imperial state religion in the late fourth century, Emperor Gratian relinquished the title and granted it to the Bishop of Rome. From then on, the Bishop of Rome became the high priest or pontifex maximus of the Catholic Faith. As Lascelles explains, “The term ‘pontiff’, by which the pope is sometimes known, is derived from Pontifex, and various churches and papal tombs in Rome bear the inscription ‘Pont. Max.’”13
Trading his black Benedictine habit for white vestments, Pius VII was carried on the portable throne, sedia gestatoria, to the altar of the Abbey Basilica for a public “adoration.” But because they had not supported Francis II’s candidate Mattei, the cardinals were locked out of the prestigious St. Mark’s Basilica for the papal coronation. Instead, the ceremony was held in San Giorgio Maggiore on March 21, the Feast of St. Benedict.
The tiara, an emblematic sign of the papacy, was a conical-shaped metal cap decorated with three crowns. This unique headwear is mentioned for the first time by the Uber Pontificalis, which describes the entry of Pope Constantine (710) in Constantinople wearing a cap, the camelaucum. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the papal tiara evolved to feature a three crown design, the triregne.
As part of the Treaty of Tolentino, the Vatican had been forced to cede the papal tiaras from the sacrarium.14 During his kidnapping, Pius VI’s crown with its spectacular emerald was also seized. In lieu of the real thing, Antonio Cardinal Doria-Pamfilj, the Cardinal Protodeacon, placed a papier-mâché tiara of cardboard and gilt paper on Pius VII’s head.
From the window of the great hall, Pius delivered his “Urbi et Orbi” blessing. Representatives of various princes, including Austria’s emperor, did not attend. Crowds overflowed onto the piazza outside the abbey; thousands more watched Pius’s public crowning on the balcony from boats in the canal and St. Mark’s square across the water. After a six and a half month vacancy and nearly four months of contention, the Church had a new pope.
When the late Pius VI visited Venice in 1782, he had met Doge Paolo Renier at San Giorgio in Alga. His successor would enjoy no such meeting. Venice’s last doge, Ludovico Manin, abdicated in May 1797 when Napoleon invaded the city. Many blamed him for surrendering to France too easily. In May, Pius VII issued his first encyclical, Diu satis. He praised his predecessor as a martyr pope, like Martin I who was exiled to Crimea by the Byzantine emperor. In a passage about France, he referred to the “strength and constancy” of the episcopa
te, the clergy, and the faithful in the face of a “cruelty revisited from former times.”15
While the College of Cardinals convened in Venice, Napoleon was busy planning an encore in Italy. The Treaty of Campo Formio had left the Habsburgs hungry for revenge. In early 1800, the Austrian army crossed into northern Italy. After defeating a French regiment near Genoa, they organized a siege to starve the remaining French troops. Austrian troops advanced to Nice in southeastern France, coming close to Fréjus where Napoleon had landed the previous fall.
In March, Napoleon gave orders to General André Masséna, commander of the Army of Italy, about the Genoa siege and sent supply trains down the Rhône. In early May, Napoleon embarked on the Second Italian campaign. He had returned from Egypt determined to divorce Joséphine for her affair, but the two reconciled. While in Milan, he took another mistress, the singer Giuseppina Grassini, who he subsequently installed in Paris.
Surprising the Austrians in Lombardy required Napoleon’s army to cross the Great St. Bernard, a fifty-mile-long, eight-thousand-foot elevation pass. The steep trail had been opened up for Julius Caesar some two thousand years earlier. No one since Carthaginian general Hannibal had attempted such a bold offensive. Napoleon led forty thousand soldiers through the icy pass.
At the summit, Napoleon and his army took a three-day break at the Monastery at Col Du St. Bernard, famous for its lifesaving dogs. Since its founding in the eleventh century by an Augustinian monk, the monastery and hospice had supported monks, travelers, pilgrims, and soldiers along the treacherous journey. In the monastery library, Napoleon read Livy’s account of Hannibal’s famous crossing with elephants and his victories over the Romans.