Venice: Pure City

by Peter Ackroyd

  There may on occasions be a certain straining after effect. That is the less pleasing aspect of the theatrical genius. There seems, in Venetian art, to be a taste for the extraordinary. Veronese and Tiepolo were condemned by some for creating vast and exuberant stage sets. There were also less than flattering comments upon the apparent gaudiness and over-elaboration of Venetian art. It was noted that Venetian painters liked to present what were almost inventories of goods, of fabrics, of ceramics, of furnishings, even of the latest fashions in dress. They had a tradesman’s eye. They display tapestries and cloths and hangings like a hawker in a market. We may speak in almost a literal sense of the richness of the surface. Even the beggars of Tiepolo are sumptuously clothed. Joshua Reynolds concluded that “a mere elegance is their principal object, as they seem more willing to dazzle than to affect,” with many Venetian works “painted with no other purpose than to be admired for their skill and expertness in the making of painting, and to make a parade of that art.” Yet what is Venice but an endless parade?

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  The Eternal Feminine

  Who is the woman on the balcony? It is a familiar Venetian motif. In the paintings of the public ceremonies of Venice, the women are to be seen looking down at the processions from a myriad of balconies and terraces. It is a sign, not of their presence, but of their seclusion. They are in the prison of the home. Yet in this ambiguous territory of the open balcony, half public and half sheltered, there are other possibilities. Byron wrote in Beppo:

  I said that like a picture by Giorgione Venetian women were, and so they are,

  Particularly seen from a balcony (For beauty’s sometimes best set off afar).

  The women are perhaps available; therefore they are all the more alluring. Turner painted many Venetian windows and balconies. His “Jessica,” derived from The Merchant of Venice, is seen at an open window; the painting is accompanied by Turner’s version of Shakespeare’s text, “Jessica, shut the window, I say.” The window is an opportunity for sexual display. It is a way of showing off the goods. The gaze is intrinsic to Venice. In Marco Polo’s account of social life in China he congratulates the young ladies of that country for their modesty. “They do not,” he wrote, “hang out at the windows scanning the faces of the passers-by or exhibiting their own faces to them.” It is not hard to see the allusion here to his native city.

  Venice has been called a feminine city. Henry James noted that “it is by living there from day to day that you feel the fullness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman …” He then expatiates on the various “moods” of the city before reflecting on the fact that “you desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it.” This, from a man who is never likely to have possessed any real woman, suggests the amount of displacement that Venice can provoke. It was considered to be licentious in action and attitude. It was, after all, the city of touch, the city of sight, the city of texture. It spoke openly to the senses. It revealed itself. The presence of water is also believed to encourage sensuality. Luxury, the stock in trade of the city, represents the apotheosis of sensuous pleasure. The lovers of the world came, and still come, here. It was known to be the capital of unlimited desire and unbridled indulgence; this was considered to be an expression, like its trade and its art, of its power. Venetian conversation was known for its lubriciousness and its vulgarity. The French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, called Venice “le sexe même de l’Europe.”

  In poetry, and drama, Venice was often portrayed as the beloved woman, all the more charming for being constantly in peril. It could be said in Jungian terms that when the masculine identity of the city was lost at the time of its surrender to Bonaparte in 1797, it became wholly the feminine city enjoyed by exiles and tourists from the nineteenth century onwards. The journalism and literature of the last two centuries, for example, has included many representations of Venice as a “faded beauty.” It has been celebrated for its power to seduce the visitor, to lure him or her into its uterine embrace. The narrow and tortuous streets themselves conjured up images of erotic chase and surprise. The city was invariably represented as a female symbol, whether as the Virgin in majesty or as Venus rising from the sea. It was stated in legend that Venice was founded on 25 March 421, the feast of the Annunciation, and on that same day Venus was in the ascendant. The city was doubly blessed. How could it not be invincible?

  So Venice was the city of Venus. The goddess was born from the sea. She was intimately associated with the sea. It was said that she was created by the white spume that Neptune cast on the islands where the city arose, implying the deep sexuality of the city within the lagoon. For the traveller crossing the water from Marco Polo Airport the city does seem to rise up miraculously from the waves. It is one of the primal sights of the world. The word Venice conjures up Venus within its syllables. The naked Venus was represented by the city without walls. “Venus and Venice are Great Queens,” James Howell wrote in his Survey of the Signorie of Venice, with a further pun on “quean” or prostitute. Venus was queen of Love, and Venice was queen of Policy. Thus in the Dunciad Alexander Pope apostrophises the city:

  But chief her shrine where naked Venus keeps,And cupids ride the Lyon of the Deeps;Where, eased of Fleets, the Adriatic mainWafts the smooth Eunuch and enamour’d swain.

  * * *

  But Venice was also the city of the Virgin. Images of the Annunciation are to be found on the Rialto bridge, on the façade of Saint Mark’s, and on the walls of the ducal palace, as well as diverse other places in the city. The worship of the Virgin entailed, even demanded, the glorification of the state. The endurance of the republic was another proof of its divine origin. Like the Virgin herself, it had been taken out of time. That is perhaps still its condition. In the paintings of Mary swooning before Gabriel, executed by Tintoretto and Titian as well as by a host of lesser Venetian artists, the Virgin is portrayed as a Venetian maiden in a typically Venetian house.

  The cult of Mary penetrated every aspect of Venetian society. The doge attended mass at Saint Mark’s, according to a sixteenth-century chronicler, “on all the days of Our Lady.” There were processions and festivals, like that of the “Twelve Marys” which culminated in the ritual journey of twelve statues along the Grand Canal; the celebrations lasted for eight days. There were more than three hundred altars, in the fifteenth century, devoted to the worship of the Virgin. In the church of S. Maria Gloriosa there were no less than eight separate altars dedicated to her. The famous nikopeia, a Byzantine icon of the Virgin supposed to have been painted by Saint Luke himself, was carried in state around Saint Mark’s Square on the feast of the Assumption; this relic became the palladium of the republic, its safeguard and defence, and is still to be found in the basilica of Saint Mark’s. It was also a source of prophesying. It was said that if anyone wanted to know if a friend was alive or dead it was only necessary to place a lighted candle before the image; if the friend was alive the candle could not be put out by any wind but, if the friend was dead, its flame would be extinguished by the merest breath or sigh.

  Venice was the Virgin, too, because she had never been assaulted. She was inviolate and immaculate, protected by the waves of the sea like a precious girdle. Mary is peace. Peace is stability. James Howell, in his Instructions and Directions for Forren Travell, declared of Venice that “this beautious Maid hath bin often attempted to be vitiated, som have courted her, som brib’d her, som would have forc’d her, yet she hath still preserv’d her chastity intire.” No other city had remained so pure for so long. The coronation of the Virgin in heaven by Christ was then employed, in painting and poetry, as the victorious image of Venice. The Queen of Heaven is also the Queen of the Sea, “like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army with banners.” As late as 1746, fifty-one years before the republic was destroyed, a Venetian friar, Fra Francesco, could utter a prayer to the divine protrectress. “O great Virgin, look down upon thi
s City which you have elected here on Earth as the principal object of your Maternal Love.”

  Hers was a popular devotion. There were many shrines on the corners of the calli, with a votive lamp burning before the Virgin; these were maintained by the people of the immediate neighbourhood. There was not a Venetian home, however humble, without its picture of the Virgin. There were artists who did nothing else but execute cheap images of the Madonna known disparagingly as madonnieri. They were, however, only following in the tradition of Bellini. When the bells rang for the enunciation of the prayer “Ave Maria,” the Venetians would fall down on their knees in the streets and squares.

  Images of the Madonna were venerated as the workers of miracles; one icon in a niche on the exterior of an old house in the parish of S. Marina was believed to possess powers of healing. Votive lamps, candles and flowers were piled before it in ever greater profusion, and the crush of worshippers in the narrow street became so great that the statue had to be removed to an inner courtyard. On the site was erected the splendid jewel box of a church named S. Maria dei Miracoli. One evangelical Englishman of the early seventeenth century, William Bedell, wrote of the “multitude of idolatrous statues, pictures, reliquies in every corner, not of their churches onely, but houses, chambers, shoppes, yea the very streets … the sea it self is not free; they are in the shipps, boates and watermarks.”

  The Virgin was also the archetypal “mother,” in whose capacious embrace the sons and daughters of Venice could rest. In Venetian folk songs the city is depicted as the mother. The mother is such a formidable figure in the Venetian imagination that there may be other and more remote forces at work. Is it possible that the Venetians yearned for the mother because their city was not built on the soil? Mother Earth did not bear it or rear it. In Jungian theory the mother represents the place of origin. But in a sense Venice had no place of origin. The mother also represents aspects of life and consciousness for which the Venetians longed, materiality and sensuousness among them. Could the art and culture of the city therefore be a form of recompense for a motherless state?

  And then, as living proof of the efficacy of virgin love, there emerged in the sixteenth century a mysterious woman who became known in fact and legend as the Virgin of Venice. She appeared from nowhere. She began cooking for hundreds of homeless people, every day, in one of the public squares; she begged from the rich to feed the poor, and such was the force of her example that a permanent institution was found for the dispossessed named the Ospedaletto dei Derelitti. She uttered prophecies concerning Venice, the first of which began with the declaration that “The beginning of the Reformation of the world will take place in Venice.” She called both herself and the city Jerusalema Ponentina, and as a result in sixteenth-century literature Venice became known as the New Jerusalem. The artificial city was also the archetypal city.

  Michael Kelly, an Irish tenor who lived in Venice a century earlier than Henry James, declared that the city was “the paradise of women, and the Venetian woman worthy of a paradise.” Note that for him it is a paradise of, rather than for, women. Mrs. Thrale, in the same century, remarked more astringently of the Venetian woman that “the government knows every pin she wears and where to find her at any moment of the day or night.” This sense of watchfulness, and of close scrutiny, is part of the truth. The patrician women stayed out of sight; they appeared in public only on ritual occasions, and if they ever did stray from home they were accompanied by servants. They always wore veils. Theirs was an almost eastern seclusion.

  The women of the middle and lower classes possessed considerably more freedom of movement. Peasant women brought their produce to market, and the “middling sort” (to use an ancient phrase) often worked in their husbands’ shops or studios. Women are listed in the public records as linen-makers, bakers, spice-sellers and cobblers. It was often said that Venetian females were stronger, and hardier, than the males.

  A Venetian wife was not considered legally to be part of her husband’s family; she remained within the family of her father. Marriages were arranged between families rather than between individuals. In public documents the woman was known only in relation to her father or her husband. There were more severe restrictions. In a statute of the fifteenth century, adultery, on the woman’s part, sometimes merited the death penalty.

  Yet legal convention is not everything. It was widely reported that Venetian women commanded much authority at home. It is clear from testamentary bequests that, after the death of husbands or fathers, women of the upper and middle classes could often accumulate great wealth. There were also institutions, such as the singing schools, that consolidated the female presence in the city. The female servants or concubines of the Venetian priests often became the matriarchs of the local church, ministering to the community. There were also “wise women” and healers known in every neighbourhood. In such a superstitious place as Venice, they were fully employed.

  There were many other social ties between women. The patrician females in one district, for example, might act as patrons to younger and poorer girls. The plays of Goldoni, and the memoirs of Venetian citizens, reveal a close-knit parish community of servants, neighbours and friends who would stand on the thresholds of their houses or cluster around the well-head to exchange news and gossip. There was not the sense of privacy that obtained in England or in northern Europe. If a husband was beating his wife unduly or unjustly, according to the standards of the time, he would become the target for abuse and even prosecution. In Venice it was the society that determined individual behaviour. The parish was essentially the female preserve in a male city; where the public areas were dominated by men, the private and domestic spaces were the realm of women. The parish was the place where they bartered, bought and sold, exchanged services. This arrangement satisfied all parties, and to a large extent maintained and consolidated the famous harmony of Venetian society.

  Yet women had one crucial advantage. On marriage, they brought their dowries with them. There was always a dowry. It was the central feature of marital negotiation, in the marriages of the working people as well as of the nobles and merchants. One old Venetian song asks the question. “How many merchants got their start with dowries they were paid?” Yet although the dowries were in the control of the husband during his lifetime they were returned, at his death, to the wife to manage as she pleased. Most females became brides at the age of fourteen or fifteen; their spouses tended to be twenty-nine or thirty. Since the women were younger, they were likely to live longer. Some women became very rich. So even if they were invisible, they were still influential.

  The more astute mothers used that wealth to increase the dowries of their own daughters, thus augmenting their eligibility. By the late fourteenth century, in fact, there was a phenomenon in Venice known as “dowry inflation”; the expenses, and the rewards, of a marriage were so great that only one girl in the family could be exchanged and only one male in the family could reap the rich harvest. As a result there was in the city a huge store of unmarried men and women; the men lived with their families, and the women characteristically were consigned to convents.

  Herodotus wrote in the fifth century BC that the tribes of the Veneti were accustomed to sell their daughters at an open auction to the highest bidder. As late as the tenth century AD there are reports of annual matrimonial fairs in Venice itself, conducted on the feast day of Saint Mark (April 25) at S. Pietro di Castello, where the young girls came holding their dowries. It is an example of a persistent Venetian tradition, continued by other means. In a city of markets, unmarried women were the ultimate commodity. The merchandise of female flesh and money was exchanged for increase in nobility or political power. It was essentially a transfer from visible to invisible assets. When the newly married bride went in procession to her marital home, it was a way of making the exchange public and accountable. It represented the free circulation of capital through the body politic. Since the goods could be easily damaged, young girls were often pla
ced in convents for a time; the nunneries were a kind of warehouse.

  On the day for the signing of the marriage contract, in the families of the patricians, the bridegroom repaired to the house of his prospective father-in-law; when the groom and his friends were all gathered, the young girl, dressed according to convention in white gown and brilliant jewels, was paraded twice in a circle to the sound of fifes and trumpets. Then she proceeded into the courtyard, was greeted by all her female kin, and by means of a gondola was transported to all the convents where her relations were immured. The bride’s gondoliers were obliged to wear scarlet stockings. Behind the walls of the convents the young girl was shown to the nuns, who may have had mixed feelings about the matter. On the dawn of the marriage day a small orchestra would play outside the bride’s house as she prepared herself for the procession to the parish church. After the marriage ceremony itself there was a public feast, to which all the guests brought presents.