Soon afterwards Tintoretto was commissioned to paint a portrait of the satirist Aretino. In order to impress upon his untameable sitter who was to be master of the situation, Tintoretto is famously said to have measured up Aretino using a pistol – a hint that Aretino quickly understood. The subsequent portrait was recognised as showing a deep understanding of Aretino’s nature.
Tintoretto was by now receiving civic commissions for works in San Marco, an accolade that elevated him to the company of Venice’s finest artists, past and present. But some of his finest work, along with masterpieces by Giovanni Bellini, Titian and Veronese, would be destroyed in 1577 by a fire that gutted many of San Marco’s major council chambers – to such an extent that parts of the administration were forced to move temporarily to the Arsenale. Tintoretto and Veronese would be able to paint replacement works, but those by Bellini and Titian were lost for ever.
While Titian had become an honoured and very well-rewarded cultural ambassador for Venice, travelling far afield to paint the portraits of kings and queens, an emperor and a pope, Tintoretto would never leave Venetian territory, indeed seldom straying beyond the often claustrophobic confines of the city itself. His character remained throughout his life a not uncommon Venetian blend of spiritual otherworldliness and unscrupulous ambition. He made a habit of asking for little or no payment for a commissioned work, other than to cover his costs; yet he would go out of his way to ensure by any means that he obtained the commission in the first place. In 1560 he was asked to bid, along with several other distinguished artists including Veronese, for a commission to paint the ceiling of the school of San Rocco. Each of the competitors was asked to submit their drawings and designs for judgement. Instead, Tintoretto quietly measured the space to be covered by the painting, hastily painted a canvas of the same size with a speed and expertise such as only he could accomplish, then secretly had the painting put in place and covered over. When the day of the competition arrived and he was asked to submit his design, he simply pulled back the cover to reveal his finished painting in place. The judges, to say nothing of his competitors, were furious, remonstrating that he was only meant to submit a design for the painting. To which he replied that this was his method of designing a painting and he knew no other way – for a design was surely intended to show the ultimate effect of the painting.
Such methods made him many enemies, but all were forced to admire the sheer artistry of his work, which retained its spectacular flourishes and the dimmed realism of its atmospheric colouring throughout his life. And even in old age, he still could not resist combining this brilliance with his underhand methods of obtaining work. Such unscrupulousness would be epitomised in the commissioning and execution of his final masterpiece, Paradise. The painting itself would be a towering work filled with all manner of ethereal and exemplary figures swirling through the clouded heavens beneath the haloed figure of Christ in excelsis. Yet the manner in which Tintoretto won this important commission was somewhat less exalted: he virtually blackmailed various influential senators, telling them how he prayed night and day that he could gain this commission, believing it would allow him one day to enter paradise. Two years after completing this work, Tintoretto would die at the age of seventy-six, when he would be buried in the church of Madonna dell’Orto, where he had painted the paintings that first brought him to wider public notice.
* In the early fifteenth century the small island of Santa Maria di Nazareth in the Lagoon was established as an isolated lodging for travellers arriving from ports known to be affected with the plague. Here they would be detained for forty days (giving rise to the name ‘quarantine’). The island was known locally as Nazaretto, but when it was also used for isolating those suffering from leprosy it became known as Lazaretto (after Lazarus, the beggar whom Christ cured of leprosy). The general name Lazaretto stems from this island. Later, when the quarantine area was extended to the neighbouring island, the two islands became known as Lazaretto Vecchio (old) and Lazaretto Nuovo.
14
Women of Venice
THE MODELS USED by Venetian artists such as Titian and Tintoretto for their sumptuous nudes would usually have been courtesans, or sometimes prostitutes. As the ambassador of Ferrara noted with regard to Titian, ‘I suspect that the girls whom he often paints in different poses arouse his desires, which he then satisfies more than his limited strength permits.’ No respectable woman would have been permitted to pose in such a fashion.
In a city of otherwise somewhat strict morality, there were a surprising number of courtesans and prostitutes. Paradoxically, this was because the morality, especially that imposed upon women, was strict during this period. Young women were preserved as virgins until they were married, usually well before they were twenty; these young women, as well as wives, were closely chaperoned when they left their homes. This left a large number of young men, who usually did not get married until at least their late twenties, with considerable sexual energy to expend. Owing to the authorities’ fear of homosexuality, prostitution was covertly encouraged, though strictly regulated, so that it brought in a tidy sum to the Republic’s exchequer. Prostitutes were confined to certain streets and were required to sit at their windows with their breasts exposed. It appears the authorities soon became more concerned with revenue than regulation, for a shocked English visitor during this time estimated that there were around 20,000 prostitutes working in the city, ‘whereof many are esteemed so loose, that they are said to open their quivers to every arrow’. While this description would seem to be symptomatic of the profession, outrage may well have caused him to exaggerate their number – local sources suggest a figure closer to 15,000. Even so, this would have accounted for more than one in five of the entire female population. Not for nothing was Venice a city of sailors; and as word of its unique beauty, artistic treasures and reputed libertinism spread over Europe, it also began to attract a stream of cultured and dissipated visitors. During ‘the folly and madness’ of the pre-Lenten Carnival, when the revellers of both sexes wore masks, prostitutes were able to escape the districts to which they were normally confined. And they also customarily took part in other typically Venetian events. At the regatta – which Aretino had so vividly described, and Canaletto would so colourfully depict – there was traditionally a women’s race where the prostitutes competed standing bare-breasted, rowing in two-oared gondolas, cheered on with gusto by the crowds lining the quaysides. But there was no such place on the public stage for respectable women.
When young women married, they were expected to bring with them a handsome dowry. Many noble families were unable to afford these dowries for more than one or two of their daughters. This meant that a large number of women of good families were left unmarried. These were for the most part encouraged, or forced, to forswear the world, become nuns and enter convents. The extent of this practice can be seen in the fact that by 1481 there were 2,500 nuns in the city. These were confined in some fifty convents – one-third of which were on remote islands in the lagoon. Many of the nuns confined in these institutions felt no calling, and as a result tales of desperate unhappiness and promiscuity abounded. Perhaps inevitably, Aretino wrote a scurrilous book entitled The Secret Life of Nuns, which contained much graphic and hilarious description of the titillating antics within a convent. The reality was rather more desperate and sad, as can be seen from the case of Laura Querini, whose story would be repeated in many variations, and in many convents.
Laura took her vows in 1584 at the age of fifteen in the convent of San Zaccaria, whose sisters included many from amongst the most noble families in Venice, as indeed she was. The convent itself was in the heart of the city, backing onto a canal that led off the busy Riva degli Schiavoni just a stone’s throw away. This location, around the corner from San Marco, must have made it even more difficult for the nuns, who would have heard all the daily commerce and cries of the city beyond their incarcerating walls. However, although they could never leave the convent, the rule fo
r the nuns within it appears to have been quite relaxed, though in a characteristically Venetian fashion. A woman who regularly visited the monastery, by the name of Donna Cipriana, was in the habit of introducing Laura to male ‘friends’, and during her twenties and thirties Laura would form several ‘friendships’ with visiting young men. Although these meetings were secret, they were conducted in the convent parlour, suggesting the connivance of someone within the monastery. However, nothing particularly untoward appears to have taken place at these meetings. Laura would later claim, ‘I never did anything wicked, that is, I never lost my virginity.’ But as she approached her forties, Laura evidently found the whispers, fondlings and kisses in the parlour increasingly inadequate.
When Laura was thirty-nine, Donna Cipriana introduced her to a nineteen-year-old young man whom she came to call Zuanne Cocco. As she confessed, ‘I fell in love with him, and I induced him to fall in love with me.’ She even paid Donna Cipriana to bring her magic potions, so that she could cast a spell on Zuanne, inducing him to make love with her. But Zuanne remained cautious: having sex with a nun could result in the death penalty. So Laura hatched a desperate and daring plan. Together with a fellow nun she called Sister Zaccaria, she began digging a wall in a storeroom that backed onto the canal, using a piece of iron pulled from the grille on her cell window. For more than a month Laura and Sister Zaccaria continued digging away at the stone wall – which proved to be six stones deep – before finally they made a hole through it that overlooked the waters of the canal. They disguised the hole on the canal side by pushing a large stone into place and blocking the gaps at the edge of the stone with terracotta. The hole in the storeroom wall they apparently covered with black and white lime.
Laura’s determination evidently overcame Zuanne’s reluctance. He set out one night, accompanied by his cousin (who was intended as Sister Zaccaria’s reward for her part in the plot), and together the two of them made their way by boat along the canal, put a plank across from the boat to the hole and clambered into the convent. According to Laura, ‘they stayed with us for two or three hours, while they had intercourse with us’. After this first visit, Zuanne returned alone and concealed himself in the storeroom for some ten to twelve days. During this time Laura brought him food, but also diligently made a point of being seen by the other nuns in the communal places within the convent, ‘and then when everyone was asleep, I went alone to be with him’.
Yet despite all Laura’s precautions, news of her secret trysts somehow leaked out and was passed on to the authorities, who set about putting her on trial, threatening her with torture if she did not reveal every detail of her dalliance. The preceding quotations from Laura are all taken from her eventual trial, at which she was forced to reveal the true identity of the young men she had called Zuanne Cocco and his cousin Zorzi. These were Andrea Foscarini and Alvise Zorzi, both scions of distinguished noble families (each of which would boast a doge). However, as soon as Andrea and Alvise had got wind of Laura’s coming trial they had fled. In their absence they would be sentenced to twenty years’ exile from the city and all the territories of Venice, with the stipulation that if ever they set foot in the Republic during their exile they would be sentenced to death. In the course of the trial it came out that Laura and Sister Zaccaria had been assisted in their plot by a servant woman called Antonia and her husband Zulian, who worked as a carpenter at the Arsenale. They had acted as go-betweens, and Zulian had used his boat to collect Andrea Foscarini and Zorzi. For their comparatively minor part in the plot, Antonia and Zulian were given extremely harsh sentences, presumably to deter others who might be tempted to accept payment for such services. Zulian was condemned to serve eight years as a galley slave in the Republic’s navy – with the proviso that if he was physically unable to complete this term he would receive eight years in gaol and have his right hand cut off. His wife was sentenced to be publicly flogged through the streets the quarter-mile from San Marco to the Rialto – an ordeal that would certainly have inflicted on her seriously debilitating injuries and incurred such disgrace as to have rendered her a social outcast (as indicated in the further proviso that if henceforth she ventured again into a convent or convent church, she would have her nose and ears cut off).
This trial, which took place in 1614, caused a great scandal, along with widespread gossip, made all the more piquant by the fact that the convent of San Zaccaria was known to contain daughters of the most noble families. The precise fate of Laura and Sister Zaccaria remains unknown. As they were both nuns they could not have been sentenced by the secular court, and would have been placed in the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. According to records in the Vatican, the Patriarch sent to Rome a plea for their absolution, almost certainly at the instigation of the powerful Querini family, so it seems that they may well have escaped further punishment. Yet the final word should perhaps be left with the Cambridge historian Mary Laven, whose Virgins of Venice includes this and many other examples of life in Venetian convents: ‘For these two women, a life sentence within the walls of San Zaccaria was probably punishment enough.’
The nearest that Venetian women came to any degree of self-fulfilment and independence was perhaps in the life of the courtesan, though this way of life was beset by its own risks. The courtesan occupied an ambiguous niche in society. The ‘honest’ courtesan was certainly far from being a common prostitute, despite the fact that she expected to be paid for her sexual favours. She was frequently a figure of some repute, attracting artistically talented and intellectual young men (and some not so young) to the social gatherings she hosted. Here conversation was often witty, intelligent or poetic – fulfilling a genuine need, for these aspects of social life were not usually found at home amidst the domesticity of family life, in the corridors of power at the Doge’s Palace or amidst the businessmen who gathered at the Rialto. Courtesans were often ‘sponsored’ by rich and powerful figures, but usually came to rely upon the generosity of their several admirers. As such, jealousies were frequent; and this certainly contributed to the risk of the courtesan’s life. Without a powerful figure lurking in the background, one false move could easily bring about her downfall and ruin. And even with such protection, the prospect of ruin was ever-present – in the form of fading looks, pregnancy or sexual diseases, most notably syphilis. This hideous disease had spread throughout Italy during the last decade of the fifteenth century, and from then on was a constant threat to sexual libertines of both sexes. Where prostitutes were concerned, syphilis was taken as an occupational hazard, for both the women and their clients. Painful and quackish ‘cures’ abounded – with treatments ranging from poisonous mercury to harmless (and useless) ‘charms’ such as garlic. Prostitutes would continue working until disfigurement and other hideous ailments rendered this impossible. With courtesans, the effect was more genteel, but equally vicious. A hint of this disease, in whispered gossip or a jealous satirical poem, and a courtesan’s clientele of admirers could vanish overnight. Few patrons were of sufficient compassion to support a courtesan when her health and charms had gone. And yet the finest of the courtesans were figures of genuine distinction.
Amongst these was Veronica Franco, who was born in Venice in 1546. Her family belonged to the merchant class, though her mother before her had been an ‘honest’ courtesan, and coached her in the skills, charms and intellectual accomplishments that were required if she wished to establish herself as a courtesan, or gain a good marriage. Initially, Veronica succeeded in the latter sphere, and in her teenage years was married to a prosperous physician called Paolo Panizza. But this did not last, and they were soon separated. Around this time, Veronica gave birth to the first of her three surviving children, though she later insisted that Paolo was not the father. By the age of nineteen she had established herself as a courtesan, her name appearing alongside that of her mother in Il Catalogo di tutte le principal et più honorate cortigiane di Venizia (The Catalogue of All the Main and Less Honoured Courtesans of Venice), which
was published in 1565. This listed the names, along with an indication of the addresses and fees charged by known courtesans in the city. Veronica is listed as living in the Santa Maria Formosa district, charging ‘2 scudi’ and with ‘her mother as go-between.’* Il Catalogo would have been for under-the-counter circulation in certain bookshops, being purchased by locals and acting as a guide for visiting tourists. The first general guidebook to the city, Venetia, città nobilissima, would be published sixteen years later in 1581
Within nine years Veronica Franco would be the most celebrated courtesan in the city. There is a portrait of her, almost certainly by Tintoretto, which depicts someone of striking rather than traditionally beautiful features, with the gaze of a self-possessed woman of some character and seriousness. It is not difficult to imagine her as the talented poet and letter-writer that she was by now becoming, to such an extent that she was a welcome guest at the literary salon presided over by Domenico Venier,* and was soon exchanging love-poems with his young relative, the poet Marco Venier.
In 1574 the French king Henry III made a celebrated visit to Venice, when the city went out of its way to impress upon the twenty-three-year-old monarch its worthiness as an ally in the dangerous power game now being played out in Europe between France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Not only was Henry shown the most advanced technology of the Republic (the galley miraculously constructed in the Arsenale in the time it took him to dine) and its cultural achievements (having his portrait painted by Tintoretto), but he was also encouraged to sample the delights for which the city had now achieved renown throughout Europe. One evening, his royal finery disguised beneath a cloak, he managed to slip out of a side-door to a waiting gondola. Here he was taken on a journey through the canals, probably by the poet Marco Venier, and secretly delivered to the house of Veronica Franco. Here, in the words of Veronica, he arrived ‘like Jupiter descending from heaven to my humble roof. Afterwards she would write him a letter and two sonnets, expressing her ‘immense desire’ for him. When he left, Henry had taken with him a small coloured enamel portrait of her, which she had given him ‘in exchange for the lively image that you have bequeathed to the centre of my heart’. Veronica would never forget this royal visit – as an overwhelming personal experience, as well as for the ultimate social honour it bestowed upon her.
Venetians Page 26