Venice: Pure City

by Peter Ackroyd

  From these foundations Venice rose, resting upon a petrified forest. Somehow it manages both to defy, and to make use of, nature. These great trunks of oak and larch and elm had always to be submerged; if they were exposed to the air, they would begin to rot. In their waterlogged condition they were sturdy, however, and almost imperishable. The weight they bore was immense. The campanile in Saint Mark’s Square, for example, weighs 14,400 tonnes (14,170 tons); yet the piles of wood carry it. The Rialto bridge is supported by twelve thousand piles of elm. The church of the Salute is borne up by 1,156,657 piles of oak and larch. The weight of the building itself helps to stabilise them. There is no complete rigidity. That is impossible in the lagunar waters. Yet even though the piles may shift a little, they do not collapse. Many of them have lasted for a thousand years.

  There is a chant sung by the pile-drivers dating from 1069, the latest variant of which was transcribed by an Englishman in the nineteenth century:

  Up with it well,Up to the top,Up with it well,Up to the summit.

  The primary materials of construction are brick and timber, with stone used as a decorative rather than a structural necessity. At the waterline is placed a foundation of Istrian stone that is impermeable to water. Ruskin described that stone, quarried on the mainland (there is of course no natural stone in Venice itself), as “smooth sheets of rock, glistering like sea waves, that ring under the hammer like a brazen bell.” Above the stone is brick faced with stucco so that the church, or dwelling, also glisters. The absence of stone walls also gives an incomparable feeling of lightness to the material fabric. Venice is a floating world.

  In the Galleria dell’Accademia hangs Titian’s “Presentation of the Virgin”; it is placed on a wall that was once part of the albergo or hall of a notable confraternity; in the foreground of the painting is a great staircase, which the young virgin is ascending. In fact the staircase itself leaves the picture and enters the Venetian world; just to the left of the canvas is the tower staircase of the albergo itself, which seems to obtrude into the painting. Among the crowd of people accompanying the Virgin are pictures of recognisable individuals; these are the members of the confraternity. It is typical of Venetian painting to incorporate local detail as part of the overall design. The background wall of the “Presentation” is constructed out of pink and white bricks, set in diamond pattern, as an unmistakable reference to the façade of the ducal palace.

  When Carpaccio needed to depict Cologne, in his cycle of paintings concerning Saint Ursula, he simply used the image of the Arsenal in the district of Castello. Tintoretto uses Saint Mark’s Square as a setting for biblical miracles. The humble houses and shops of his paintings are directly modelled on Venetian interiors. He placed the image of his contemporary, Aretino, in the company witnessing the Crucifixion. In Veronese’s “Conversion of Saint Pantalon” the elderly man cradling the miraculously healed child is the parish priest of the church of S. Pantalon who in fact commissioned the work. There is no attempt here to honour the “individuality” of the priest; rather he becomes part of the company of the blessed, and in so doing reflects beatitude upon the city itself.

  When Titian depicted the miraculous draught of fishes, from the narrative of Luke, he ensured that the boatmen took up the characteristic stance of Venetian gondoliers. It is said that in his paintings from the New Testament, Tintoretto always made the Apostles gesture like gondoliers. In his “Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge” Carpaccio faithfully depicted the wooden bridge, the sign of the Sturgeon Inn, the houses and institutions along both banks of the Grand Canal, and the members of the confraternity of which he was the official painter; it represents the poetry of urban detail, with its bricks and balconies and chimney-tops. More than any other painters in the world, the Venetians readily depicted the environment of their home city. Never has a city and its people obtruded so much on artistic traditions.

  23

  Learning and Language

  The Renaissance came late to Venice. That European revival in humane letters, and in classical scholarship, made a slow and fitful entry into the city. It was not necessarily on congenial soil. The Venetians have never been known for their commitment to scholarship, or to learning for its own sake; they are not inclined to abstract inquiry, or to the adumbration of theory. A humanist on the mainland, Giovanni Conversino, reported to the Venetians in 1404 that “even if you desired to be learned you would not be able to do so; everything you have you possess through drudgery, talent and danger.” The sheer necessity of survival transcended questions of abstract principle. It may be true, too, that Venice did not share in the Italian Renaissance because it had never been part of the mainland where classical art and literature once flourished. Literature was not, in a literal sense, part of its territory.

  The young patricians were characteristically trained in the arts of practical statesmanship. If they learned Greek, the essential language of the new humanism, it was primarily so that they might administer the Greek colonies of Venice. What did the enlightened leaders of Venice do? They codified the state laws and compiled state papers. Humanism in general was put at the service of the administration; the leaders of “learning” were also the leaders of the senate and of the great council; their concern was to engender political values that maintained and preserved the social system of the city. They were characteristically magistrates, ambassadors, and even doges. There was a great debate in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries upon the rival claims of the active life and the contemplative life in Christian history. The Venetians always espoused the active life. God’s providence was a political matter.

  If they wrote texts at all, these were concerned with specific problems and circumstances; their theoretical context, if it can be called such, was one of pride in the Venetian state. The only history with which they were concerned was their own history. There were no works that challenged political or economic orthodoxy; there were no volumes extolling the progress of the individual soul in search of beatitude; there were no testaments burning with the chaste flame of aesthetic philosophy. All was rigorous, and severe, and restrained. In Florence the movement of neo-Platonism had its fervent and almost mystical adherents. In Venice, the only interest in Plato sprang from a general respect for authority. There were of course Venetian collectors of coins, of manuscripts, and of antiquities; but they were animated by an acquisitive rather than an intellectual spirit. They were merchants rather than scholars.

  When one famous scholar, Cardinal Bessarion, came to the city he was so impressed by its magnificence that he left his collection of rare books and manuscripts to the Venetian state. They were stored in crates in the ducal palace, from which some of them were stolen or sold. The rest were allowed to gather dust for eighty years. Bessarion had bequeathed his collection four years before his death in 1472, but the library for them was not erected until the 1550s. Petrarch, known as the “father of humanism,” bequeathed a selection of his library to the state in 1374. In 1635 his manuscripts were found heaped in a small room above the great door of the basilica of Saint Mark’s. Damp and decay had got to them.

  There was no university in the city itself. The absence might seem a singular omission for any city-state; but there of course was no university in London, either, that other centre of trade and business. In any case it would be wrong to report an utter dearth of learning. There were schools and academies for those of an enquiring mind. The principal disciplines were those of mathematics, geography, physics, astronomy, trigonometry and astrology. Botany was an important discipline, too, with the emphasis on horticulture. There were public lecturers, freelance schoolmasters and private tutors. A school of rhetoric was established in 1460, with the aim of improving the level of public speaking in the city. There were masters of grammar in each of the six sestieri, and small schools were also established in the houses of certain patricians; it is not clear, however, how high they aspired. Certainly a large proportion of the population w
as literate and numerate (perhaps a quarter of the citizenry by the end of the sixteenth century) but it would be hard to claim much refinement or subtlety in a Venetian education. It was designed, really, to increase the efficiency of the state. Cultivate learning, one fifteenth-century patrician told his son, “both for the honour of your country and for the glory and amplification of our family.”

  Venice was always a city of clubs and fraternities, each one of them a state in miniature with its officers and festivals. So there were in the city thirty or more “academies” where the more educated Venetians might meet and converse. There was an “Academia dei Filosofi” and an “Academia dei Nobili,” for example, both situated on the adjacent island of Giudecca; the situation was pertinent, implying that the patricians could escape from the centre of politics and commerce in order to discourse of higher matters. The geography of the lagoon was always important in the Venetian imagination. And there were “salons,” formal or informal, where scholars and intellectuals mingled with the leading patrician families. Yet the salon was the home of patronage and, in a city devoted to fashion of every kind, a marketplace for the dissemination of novel ideas or fancies. There was singing, reading of poetry, playing of musical instruments, and sometimes even dancing. It is hard to estimate, however, whether the discourse of the salon ever reached higher than the level of informed gossip.

  Galileo was one of the learned Italians attracted to Venice. At the age of twenty-eight he was appointed by the Venetian authorities as principal lecturer in mathematics at the University of Padua, a Venetian colony, and he stayed in that institution for the next eighteen years. He devoted himself to the pure and applied sciences, inventing the thermometer and the telescope during his residence there, and his appeals to the Venetian administration for patronage were based upon a very practical determination. He understood the true nature of the city very well. When in 1609 he devised the first telescope, he wrote to the reigning doge that the invention “may be of inestimable service for every business by land and sea; for it is thus possible, at sea, to discover the enemy’s vessels and sail at a far greater distance than is customary.” He displayed the powers of the telescope from the top of the campanile in Saint Mark’s Square, and the Venetian officials were duly impressed. A few weeks later he was appointed professor of astronomy for life, with three times the highest pay ever granted to any lecturer in Padua.

  So we may celebrate the practical genius of Venice. There were no visionaries in Venice. They produced no Machiavelli and no Plato. There was no speculation on utopias. There was no concern for dogma or theory. There was no real interest in pure or systematic knowledge as such; empirical knowledge was for the Venetians the key to truth. Experience, rather than reason, was the furnace in which solutions were to be forged. In this they were also very close to the English genius. The Venetians were well known for their adaptability and their common sense; in diplomatic negotiations they were inclined to compromise and to accommodate varying points of view. In the affairs of the world they tended to be efficient and unsentimental.

  There may have been no great poetry in the city, but there were important texts on hydrostatics and geography, on hydraulics and astronomy. The Venetians also possessed a practical inventiveness, in pursuits as different as glass- and instrument-making. They invented easel-painting as well as the science of statistics. The real intellectual success of Venice, however, came in the practical manufacture of books. The first licence to print was issued in 1469. Just eighteen or nineteen years after the invention of movable-type printing by Johannes Gutenberg, the Venetian senate announced that “this peculiar invention of our time, altogether unknown to former ages, is in every way to be fostered and advanced.” In this, the senators were five years ahead of William Caxton.

  The Venetian authorities had sensed a commercial opportunity, and the city soon became the centre of European printing. They created the privilege of copyright for certain printed works in 1486, so the investment of the printers was guaranteed; it was the first legislation for copyright in the world. Venetian bankers underwrote the costs of the new ventures. The paper came from Venetian territory near Lake Garda. All the conditions, for what would now be called mass production and mass marketing, were in place; indeed printing was the first form of mass production technology, creating identical objects at identical cost. It was only right, and natural, that Venice should be the pioneer of that trade. Venice, in 1474, was said to be “stuffed with books.” At the time of the Counter-Reformation, too, the authorities maintained a more liberal attitude towards censorship than the other city-states of Italy. At the beginning of the sixteenth century there were almost two hundred print shops, producing a sixth of all the books published in Europe.

  Venice excelled in printing, rather than creating, literature. Its most famous printer, Aldus Manutius, was a wandering scholar from Bassanio near Rome. He came to Venice as a lecturer, and despite his great learning he was soon imbued with the commercial spirit of the city. He became aware that knowledge of the classics could be wrapped up in packages like bales of raisins; he could turn learning into a commodity. So in 1492 he formed a workshop for the production of Greek texts. In this pursuit he was aided by the Greek scholars who had fled from ruined Byzantium with the words of the past in their heads. They brought with them, too, manuscripts and commentaries. Almost by accident Venice found itself at the forefront of the revival of learning. Its commercial spirit had consequences in the sphere of the intellect.

  In the summer of 1502 an edition of the plays of Sophocles was published with the colophon “Venetiis in Aldi Romani Academia,” thus inaugurating a remarkable sequence of all the important Greek authors in meticulously edited versions. The fonts—of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—were beautiful, and are in fact still in use. The manuscripts were scrupulously copied, in type that seemed aesthetically to rival the original handwriting of the compilers. The printing shop had become an “academy” where visiting scholars were employed to edit the texts and to proof-read the sheets coming off the press. Greek scholars were also hired as compositors.

  So by degrees there grew up an “Aldine circle” devoted to the dissemination of learning, in which the spoken language was largely Greek, prompting Aldus to describe Venice as another Athens. Erasmus became a part of that circle, as well as other itinerant scholars and humanists, and at a later date he recalled that some thirty-three employees slept and worked on the premises; he also found the food frugal, and the wine vinegary. Aldus mixed with the Venetian patricians who considered themselves to be patrons of learning; they believed that he added to the glory of Venice. The press of visitors became so great, however, that Aldus put up a notice before his door, at the corner of the Campo di S. Agostino: “Whoever you are, Aldus earnestly begs you to state your business in the fewest possible words and begone, unless, like Hercules to weary Atlas, you would lend a helping hand. There will always be enough work for you and all who come this way.”

  Yet the turning of knowledge, and learning, into commodities had other consequences. It was said at the time that the abundance of books made men less studious. There were complaints about the “vulgarisation” attendant upon the new technology. In an age of cultural transition, there are always anxieties expressed by those who are still reliant upon the old order. The Aldine press helped to bring the classical authors within the view of a wider audience; the editions were smaller, and cheaper, than any others. For some scholars, this represented a threat to their cultural supremacy.

  The printers of Venice also became masters of musical printing, map printing and medical printing, spreading information around Europe. Books on the human anatomy, and on military fortifications, were published. Works of popular piety, light literature in the vernacular, chapbooks, all issued from the city of the lagoon. Printing linked the various strata of the literate classes of Europe together; otherwise there would have been no such general response to the teachings of Luther. The publication of maps helped to create a ne
w international trading economy. The commercialisation of knowledge, as a consequence of Renaissance humanism, indirectly led to religious reformation and the industrial revolution.

  The Venetians did have a university but it was located twenty miles (32 km) away in Padua, the city having been taken in 1404. Venice itself would not have welcomed a large body of free-thinking students within its domain. It was also concerned with the loyalty of its own young men, and forbade Venetians to study anywhere other than Padua. So the patrician youth migrated to the mainland city in search of enlightenment, together with students from England, Germany, Poland and Hungary. Sir Francis Walsingham, the famous Elizabethan “spymaster,” and Sir Philip Sidney studied in Padua. Many of these foreigners were, by the sixteenth century, followers of the “reformed” religion of Luther and Zwingli; but their apostasy did not bother the Venetian authorities, who were in any case accustomed to the various faiths of the world.

  Padua itself was most celebrated for its schools of law and of medicine, and became in the words of Thomas Coryat a “sweet emporium and mart town of learning.” There was a chair of agriculture, and a veterinary school. There was a famous department of anatomy, to which the Venetian authorities guaranteed a plentiful supply of corpses. By the middle of the sixteenth century Padua had become the most significant centre for scientific learning in Europe. In a world of institutional faith and individual piety, it offered a secular education. That was the reason for its success. “We despise,” one Venetian of the sixteenth century wrote, “knowledge of things of which we have no need.”