The inquisitors might allow Veronese to outwit them but they felt they could not be so lenient with heretics. Some Protestants came to Venice in the belief that it was a sanctuary: one unfortunate Savoyard Calvinist, who settled there in the 1570s, thought he was safe because Venice ‘was a free country where each could live as he wished’. He soon wished he had opted for another refuge because he was one of the heretics who were executed, though not in the manner of inquisitions elsewhere – on bonfires in front of vast crowds – but by being rowed out at night, bound to a heavy stone and dropped in the lagoon. Some twenty-five heretics perished in this way, not a huge number by the standards of Spain or Rome or of the England of Mary Tudor, which burned nearly 300 men and women for remaining loyal to the Protestantism of the queen’s deceased brother. Perhaps there would have been more victims in Venice if class and communal solidarity had not discouraged the exposure of other deviants.15
In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare’s Antonio accepts the likelihood of his death at the hands of Shylock with the words:
The Duke [doge] cannot deny the course of law:
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.16
Although Shakespeare never went to Venice, he encapsulated in this short speech much of what its citizens thought about the republic: that its ruler was not a tyrant and could not ignore the law; that the system of justice was evenhanded and inviolate; that Venice was a generally broadminded, multi-ethnic city; and that its prosperity depended on trade and good relations with other countries.
Visitors in the sixteenth century were so struck by the population’s diversity that they believed Venetians were outnumbered by foreigners. The state welcomed several foreign communities and allowed them to build their synagogues and their orthodox churches in the city; nevertheless, always wary of disorder, it felt safer if they lived together in single-ethnic allocations. The Venetians were a suspicious and secretive people, perennially worried about the possibility of plots, and so they designated areas in various sestieri of the city for the foreigners to inhabit: Greeks and Slavs lived in Castello, Armenians were divided between Santa Croce and their monastery on the island of San Lazzaro; the Germans had their quarters next to the Rialto Bridge, while further up the Grand Canal the Turks had theirs, the Fondaco dei Turchi, where they were moved for their own safety after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. From the early sixteenth century the Jewish community resided in an area called the Ghetto, a word which then had none of its later connotations: it was simply the name of the district, surrounded by a canal, called after the brass foundry that used to exist close by. The Venetians were not anti-Semites, and their ghetto was not intended as a place of banishment for an unpopular community. The Jews were forced to wear distinguishing clothes but they were seldom persecuted in other ways; many of them flourished as bankers, merchants and doctors. As the historian of Venice Peter Lauritzen has written, ‘the Jews were no more segregated or ill-treated than were the Turks, the Persians and the Germans, or even the foreign ambassadors, all of whom lived a restricted life in their own compounds’. If they were not treated as well as they had been during the Arab caliphate of Córdoba – or as they were in Salonika under the Ottomans – Jews nevertheless found in Venice one of their safest havens in Christian Europe. The prestige and prosperity of its Semitic community encouraged Benjamin Disraeli to claim, quite fancifully, that his ancestors were Venetian Jews.17
For almost a thousand years after the first settlers arrived in the lagoon, Venice had ignored the mainland. It had evolved into an Adriatic and Mediterranean power, not a peninsular one; it possessed islands off Turkey and the Levant but not Padua, a day’s ride to its west. Shortly after 1400, however, Venice turned around. Some patricians opposed the reversal, arguing that expansion on the mainland could lead to a costly embroilment in Italian affairs. They were right. Venice inevitably became involved in the peninsula’s wars, its economic interests shifted from the maritime towards the terrestrial, and many of its noblemen preferred to live as rent-receiving landowners than as risk-taking merchants. Venetians now became more Italian, more receptive to humanism and the Renaissance, even if in this sphere they lagged far behind Florence. Yet the proponents of expansion had good arguments too. The acquisition of land would safeguard their overland trade routes and allow them control of the rivers dumping silt into the lagoon; it would provide them with supplies of timber and food, an important consideration now that Ottoman expansion was hindering the import of grain from the Black Sea; and it would give them the opportunity to check the eastward expansion of Milan, which, under the leadership of Giangaleazzo Visconti, had become the most powerful city on the mainland.
Giangaleazzo seemed on the verge of conquering the whole of northern Italy when he died unexpectedly in 1402. Venice took the opportunity of his demise to go on the offensive and quickly acquire Vicenza, Verona, Padua, the Trevisan March as well as, a few years later, Friuli. The advantage in the fighting with Milan itself oscillated between the combatants, but when the wars ended, concluded by the Peace of Lodi in 1454, the Venetian mainland (known as the terraferma) was larger than the duchy of Milan and included the Lombard cities of Bergamo, Brescia and Crema.
The Venetians were not as generous as the ancient Romans in extending their citizenship to subject cities on the terraferma; few nobles from outside were ever admitted to the governing patriciate. Yet on the whole they kept their promises to respect the laws and customs of their new territories. Peasants and artisans on the mainland were certainly grateful that Venetian courts protected their rights from the exactions of local landlords; and it was the cities, not the aristocrats of the terraferma, that supported Venice in its most perilous moment, the War of the League of Cambrai at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Nearly 300 years later, cities of the mainland again rose in defence of themselves and of Venice, this time against Bonaparte during the French conquest and occupation of the region.
Venetian success was too much for the rest of Europe; it was simply too blatant and too glittering for jealous rivals to stomach. Reproached for greed, the republic was also accused of treachery because it continued to trade with the Ottomans between wars. In 1503 Venice finally went too far by seizing and absorbing some of Cesare Borgia’s conquests in the Romagna. Although the new pope, Julius II, hated the Borgias, he was determined to collect the territories himself and he insisted on their surrender. When the Venetians yielded only a fraction of their gains, the enraged pontiff put together an alliance which had as its objective the capture of the whole of the terraferma and its division among the victors. Known as the League of Cambrai (1508), it was headed by the four most powerful men in Europe: King Ferdinand of Aragon, King Louis XII of France, the Emperor Maximilian and Julius. It also had the backing of several lesser allies including the Duke of Savoy, the Duke of Milan and the King of Hungary; only the dying King of England, Henry VII, and his son, Henry VIII, refused to take part in the dismemberment of the republic.
Venice soon suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Agnadello (1509) and lost most of the terraferma. Restricted to little more than the lagoon, it was saved unexpectedly by the mercurial Julius, who suddenly identified France as the chief danger to the peninsula. Switching sides and joining Venice, the pope also managed to persuade Spain and the emperor to enter his new coalition, the Holy League of 1511; now that the enemy was France, Henry VIII joined in too. When the French were driven out of Milan a year later, the Venetians bizarrely selected the moment to abandon the league and join the losing side. As a result they lost in 1513 what they had regained a year earlier although, by the end of these wars in 1516, they again possessed the terraferma. The constant changing of sides by all the main players makes this one of the most cynical as well as most frivolous periods of European
diplomacy. It certainly forced the Venetians to realize they were no longer a fully independent power: for survival they now needed France as an ally or else Spain, which from 1519 was joined to the empire under Charles V, the heir of the imperial, Castilian and Aragonese thrones.
The beginning of Venetian decline has been a subject long debated by historians. It has sometimes been dated as early as the fifteenth century, starting with the adventures on the mainland; more frequently it has been identified with the war against the League of Cambrai; occasionally it is placed later still, after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.18 Yet perhaps the moment of truth came in 1529 after a Spanish victory in another war against another coalition, the League of Cognac formed by France, the papacy, Venice, Florence and Milan. The Venetians were ignored in the subsequent peace treaty between France and Spain and were later forced to give Charles V tribute as well as three ports in Apulia which they had acquired to bolster their defence of the Adriatic.
Venice’s downhill slide was neither uniform nor consistent. In the fifteenth century, at a time when the republic was expanding in northern Italy, it was losing islands in the Aegean to the Ottoman Empire. Forty years after its humiliation by Charles V, it was instrumental in defeating the Turks at Lepanto, and for a century afterwards it controlled much of the central Mediterranean with a fleet of increasingly obsolete ships. In the first half of the seventeenth century Venice sensibly stayed clear of further wars between France and Spain and, although it lost Crete to the Turks in 1669, it enjoyed a brief resurgence, even conquering the Peloponnese from the Ottoman enemy at the end of the century. Yet the success was transient, and within a generation Venice’s maritime empire had been reduced to the Dalmatian coast and the island of Corfu.
Even as Venetian power declined in the early sixteenth century, the republic itself was growing in wealth and population. By 1565 the city had some 170,000 inhabitants with another 2 million on its terraferma. The number of citizens was diminished by a terrible plague in 1576–7 and an even worse one in 1630, which left the city with barely 100,000 inhabitants. The economy began to shrink, but the wealth of the upper classes did not altogether evaporate. In the seventeenth century the city’s merchants and patricians continued the tradition of the previous century by building hundreds of villas on the terraferma, often along the Brenta Canal, graceful summer retreats with columned porticoes and statues in the garden.
Venetian art flourished even at times when Venice seemed about to lose all its possessions outside the lagoon. In Florence the Renaissance emerged in a period of comparative republican tranquillity; by the time it had installed itself in Venice – as Titian was beginning his career – the armies of the League of Cambrai were threatening the city. Yet as one appreciates the work of the Venetian masters, from the light and gentle storytelling of Carpaccio to the dark religious passion of Tintoretto, who painted at least nine versions of The Last Supper, one finds scant suggestion that their city was often in great peril. As they revel in colour and light and texture, they seem almost unaware of the violence engulfing northern Italy. Painting declined after the dangers were over, in the seventeenth century – as people who go to see Tintoretto at San Rocco can judge as they climb the stairs and glance at Antonio Zanchi’s embarrassing painting of Venice Delivered from the Plague; one cannot help wondering whether Zanchi himself felt a bit ashamed to be in such proximity to the masterpieces of the older artist. Architecture accompanied painting in a joint decline. One may not agree with Ruskin that the Renaissance was a disaster for Venice, but it’s easy to regret some of the city’s Baroque, the grandiloquent palaces, the florid statuary, the overloaded façades of certain ostentatious churches. In Italy the best Baroque belongs to Rome and to the south.
Venice in its decadence remained a civilized place. It kept out of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and was at peace for most of the eighteenth century, until the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte. Its women began to enjoy greater freedoms than before: fewer of them were forced into convents and those in unhappy unions found marriages easier to dissolve. Venice enjoyed a theatrical golden age with Goldoni’s realistic comedies and a reputation as a great centre for music, possessing four conservatoires and a large number of theatres where opera could be performed. Its most talented musician was the violinist and composer, Antonio Vivaldi, whose job at a local orphanage for girls, the Conservatorio della Pietà, obliged him to provide his employers with two concertos a month. Yet the city was undeniably decadent. Giambattista Tiepolo was a highly talented painter but a victim of the decorative taste of his period: his luminous ceiling frescoes, with light blues and pinks, angels and clouds and impossibly white-skinned women, suggest neither passions nor anguish nor even dilemmas of the mind; he owed very little to Tintoretto or to that great later master, the tormented Caravaggio. Venetian patricians had long been considered an enlightened class and, perhaps as a result, they did not bother much about the ideas of the European Enlightenment. Having lost their purpose as merchants and colonial governors, many of them sighed and resigned themselves to a perpetual quest for pleasure. As Andrea di Robilant explained to his friend Giacomo Casanova, ‘since I do not gamble and there is nothing I want to buy for myself and I cannot stand trying to reason with our politicians and having nothing more to read … I spend my time with the ladies’.19
After losing its empire, its power and much of its productive wealth, Venice turned to tourism, a move much sneered at by outsiders – as if it were unique for a city with a great past to sell itself to foreign visitors, as if Florence, Rome and Naples did not all do the same. Venice had long welcomed tourists, even stealing the bones and bodies of saints to entice medieval pilgrims to stay in its dozens of alberghi. Yet in catering to the pleasures of the eighteenth century its very name became a byword for venal sin, mocked and laughed at as if the city were a permanent carnival and its people were all gamblers playing faro or baccarat continuously in the casinos when they weren’t idling in other ways, wearing masks, dancing at balls and lounging in gondolas. The men were typecast as libertines like Casanova, while the women – even those who were not courtesans – were thought to enjoy a routine of unbroken frivolity, drinking chocolate, watching puppet shows, languidly fanning themselves and sometimes playing a spinet decorated with rustic scenes or floral patterns. Ladies were believed to exist in a world draped with damask and chinoiserie and frescoed by one of the Tiepolos, a world of mirrors and mandolins, of lapdogs and lacquer furniture, of the latest toilette set made in Augsburg, a decor perhaps including a slight hint of undemanding piety such as a scene of the Holy Family painted on the headboard of a bed.
Venice naturally exploited the myth and made money from it: if an Englishman hired a gondola for an innocent ride, he was liable to be rowed to a courtesan’s door. The paintings of Canaletto (1697–1768) reveal a combination of commercial and patriotic motives: he wanted foreigners to pay him to take home canvases of his personal Venice, a city that was sunny, happy and golden, its serenity symbolized by the thousands of tiny artificial waves – simply joined-up ‘u’s – with which he depicted unruffled water. His younger rival Francesco Guardi was very different. A more romantic and more poetic artist, he liked to portray the often tempestuous atmosphere of the lagoon; by contrast with Canaletto, his paintings seem to suggest that the end of Venetian glory was near, as indeed it was, the republic dying shortly after his own death in 1793.
Musing on the past from the formal chastity of the Victorian age, Browning evoked the myth of decadent Venice with the ‘balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day’, ‘the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base his head’ and the final unkind question, ‘What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?’20 Yet the kissing would not have stopped of its own accord: like the casinos and the carnival, it stopped because Bonaparte was determined to inflict his own version of liberty upon a famously free people. The Corsican general stole Venice, gave it to Austria and then took it ba
ck again; Austria retrieved it at Napoleon’s fall and then lost it in a war with Prussia in circumstances that allowed France to present it to the new kingdom of Italy in 1866.
None of this was destined to happen: Venice had endured too long to be ranked as one with Nineveh and Tyre. Ancient Rome had had a great history: between its capture by the Gauls and its sacking by the Goths it lasted for 800 years in spite of frequent coups and overthrows of governments. The Republic of Venice survived 1,100 years with no pillaging and no capture until it succumbed to Bonaparte; at no time had its government been overthrown. In 1797 it was a state in decline, certainly, but it need not have fallen much further. It might have recovered (like the Netherlands), it should have regained its independence in 1814 (again like the Netherlands) and today Venice could have been (like The Hague) the capital of a successful small country inside the European Union. Its incorporation into the kingdom of Italy – which its people did not want – was almost as much an aberration in its history as its forced membership of the Habsburg and napoleonic empires.
5
Disputed Italies
FOREIGN RULERS
‘Since the Roman zenith,’ wrote Guicciardini in the sixteenth century, ‘Italy had never known such prosperity or such a desirable condition as that which it enjoyed in all tranquillity in the year of Our Lord 1490 and the years immediately before and after.’1 While the Italian states were enjoying a period of unprecedented amity – the larger ones finally realizing they could not dominate all the others – the peninsula had been spared a full-scale foreign invasion from the north for over 200 years. All this changed in 1494 when Charles VIII became the first of three consecutive French kings to lead a huge army into Italy.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 14