People have seldom felt neutral about Venice, a city that has provoked an abundance of contrasting emotions, love and hostility, envy and admiration, grief and gratitude. Since it ceased to be an independent state in 1797, most visitors have succumbed to its enchantment, to the beauty of its buildings, the appeal of its canals and the blending of light and stone and water. John Ruskin, who pronounced himself a ‘foster-child of Venice’, was its most vigorous and effective champion, the author of The Stones of Venice, a three-volume, mid-Victorian work of insight, polemic, fine writing and occasional silliness. His book might have deterred attempts at emulation, but it didn’t: as James Morris, one of the most evocative writers on the city, has remarked, Venice is ‘paved with purple passages’ – including some good ones of his own. Admitting it was ‘a great pleasure to write the word’ Venice, Henry James thought there might be ‘a certain impudence’ in writing any more. ‘There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject,’ he wrote; but he said it all the same, at length.1
The enduring success of the Venetian Republic aroused the admiration of intellectuals from other Italian states where the republican experiment had failed. In the early sixteenth century the Florentine Guicciardini opined that Venice had the best government of all time, while his fellow Tuscan, the poet and satirist Pietro Aretino, lauded the city as a ‘universal fatherland’, a ‘refuge of displaced peoples’ and a ‘freedom common to all’.2 Subsequent writers extolled the tolerance and stability, the tradition of public service, the wealth and art and manners of this vigorous maritime republic. In his epitaph for the city William Wordsworth lamented the passing of ‘the eldest child of liberty’, a power that had held ‘the gorgeous East in fee’ and had subsequently acted as ‘the safeguard of the West’.* A later poetic sensibility suspired in Venice when Robert Browning came to live and die in the Ca’ Rezzonico, the sumptuous Baroque palace on the Grand Canal. He had already penned his personal epitaph: ‘Open my heart and you will see / Graved inside of it, Italy.’†
Not all Victorians held such views. Many of them believed that Venice had been iniquitous, a decadent and corrupt state that had survived by means of prisons, spies and tyranny. The city was also considered backward and stuck in the past: radical Tory MPs in Westminster in the 1880s used ‘Venetian’ as an adjective to describe reactionary colleagues they considered elitist and oligarchic.3 Earlier Lord Byron had contributed to the myth of sinister Venice in his play The Two Foscari, in which the condemned man denounces the state for its spies, slaves and dungeons, its Bridge of Sighs, its ‘strangling chamber’ and its ‘torturing instruments’. A generation later, Giuseppe Verdi thought of turning the drama into an opera for his Venetian debut at the Fenice theatre; when it was pointed out that Venice was not the most appropriate venue for the work – descendants of the ‘villains’ still lived there – the composer substituted Ernani and took I due Foscari to be performed in Rome.
Many of the state’s critics were French. Jean-Jacques Rousseau mocked its decadence, called its republic a sham and condemned the Council of Ten (which had charge of the state’s security) as ‘a tribunal of blood’, ‘horrible également’ to both patricians and people4 – a judgement so misguided it makes one wish its author had lived long enough to witness real tribunals of blood directed by his apostle Robespierre. Napoleon Bonaparte followed this deluded philosopher, tormenting dejected Venetian delegates in 1797 with his ignorant views on their state’s alleged tyranny. The first modern historian of Venice was Pierre Daru, previously Napoleon’s minister of war, whose eight-volume work depicts the republic as a hidebound and decadent oligarchy. While Daru (like his master) presumably took this line to justify the invasion and destruction of a neutral state, the motives of later historians are less obvious. Critics have zealously examined Venice’s blemishes, such as its slave-trading and its colonial rule – defects not unique to Venice – and its diversion of the Fourth Crusade in order to sack Constantinople in 1204. The historian Steven Runciman may have been right to describe this last event as one of the greatest of all crimes against humanity, yet 1204 was a single year in a 1,100-year history.5
Everyone agrees that Venice is different from anywhere else. Visitors immediately see that it has no hills and that its streets are full of water; soon they also notice that it has neither ramparts nor a castle; the Doge’s Palace, the headquarters of the Venetian Empire, is unfortified. As they wander about, they will observe that there are no fountains, no ruins and not many statues in public places; since it was founded after the fall of Rome, it has no amphitheatres, no triumphal arches and no classical archaeologists. Nor does it have noblemen’s towers – those sinister structures that abounded elsewhere in the north – which accurately suggests a lack of murderous factions. The patricians had palaces, but these too are different. The external decoration – the harmonious arrangement of windows, pillars, balconies and arches – is concentrated on the façade, while the unadorned brick sides usually look at other brick sides across narrow lanes. While the patricians could do as they pleased with their façades, they were prevented by law from putting statues and balustrades on their roofs: all they were allowed were chimneys and – provided they were senior figures in the admiralty – a pair of small obelisks.6
Most city centres in northern Italy are a mixture of architectural styles since the Romanesque, but in Venice the emphases are different and the proportions often inverted. The influence of Byzantium on the lagoon is obvious: St Mark’s is modelled on a church in Constantinople, and a number of Veneto-Byzantine palaces survive near the Rialto. Yet Venice is fundamentally Gothic, one of the few Italian cities to be thus blessed; it was still constructing in the Gothic style after the others had given up. The city has some great Renaissance buildings, especially those by Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio, but they – like the churches and palaces in elaborate Baroque – do not always seem to belong to Venice. Sansovino’s library, across the Piazzetta from the Doge’s Palace, is a beautiful structure yet it is unrelated to any earlier Venetian building; it is not even similar to the one adjoining it, the rusticated, practical Mint built at the same time by the same architect. One might say similar things – as Ruskin did‡7 – about Palladio’s great churches, whose geometrical harmonies are spread out across the water from St Mark’s: San Giorgio Maggiore, the Zitelle, the Redentore. In the mid-sixteenth century, when the wooden bridge on the Rialto was in danger of falling down, the Venetian authorities organized a competition to design an alternative in stone. Several famous architects, including Palladio and Michelangelo, put forward proposals, but the prize was awarded to the virtually unknown Antonio da Ponte because his plan showed an understanding of local topography. Palladio’s scheme, which only small boats could have passed under, would have been more appropriate in the spacious park of a country house in England.
Venice is said to have been founded in AD 421 by refugees from the mainland fleeing Vandal invaders; in the following century they were joined by others escaping the Lombards. They settled on the islets, mudflats and sandbanks of the lagoon, initially at Torcello and at Malamocco on the Lido, but in the early ninth century they established their capital on the safer central islands of the Rialto. Bleak and inhospitable though the lagoon must have seemed, it provided a secure sanctuary. The problem was less how to defend than how to inhabit what was largely a swamp. For centuries the inhabitants drained and dredged, diverting silt-carrying rivers from the lagoon and converting sandbanks into islands which they could build upon. The construction of a building required long wooden stakes driven into the mud covered first by clay and then by wood planking upon which a brick wall base was laid – all below the high water mark; upon these foundations the building was then completed in brick, often with stone too and sometimes with marble as well.8
In its early years Venice was governed from the exarchate of Ravenna, and its ‘dux’ (later doge) was a vassal duke of the Byzantine Empire. Later it became autonomous, but the link between Venice and Constantinople remained strong until the thirteenth century. For an empire with little commercial nous, the trade and shipping of the islanders made Venice a very useful ally; the lagoon also benefited from Byzantium’s cultural influence and from trading links with different parts of the empire. Another boon was Charlemagne’s decision, after two failed assaults on the Lido, to let Venice remain tied to the Byzantines, thereby excluding it from his kingdom of Italy and from the Holy Roman Empire. This spared the city’s inhabitants from having to choose between Guelphs and Ghibellines and, though they gave money to the Lombard League, from fighting in Italy’s interminable medieval wars. Venice had plenty of enemies in the Adriatic – Arabs, Slavs, Normans and later Turks – but its only lasting Italian foe was Genoa, and the wars between them were a result of commercial rivalry in the Levant.
Until the early fifteenth century Venice turned its back on the peninsula and concentrated initially on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Needing Istria for its stone and Dalmatia for its timber, it gained control of their coasts and, around the turn of the millennium, its doge proclaimed himself Dux Dalmatiae et Chroatiae, a title with implications that the kings of Hungary resented. In the twelfth century the Venetian fleet enabled the city to have a strong trading presence in the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, but it was not until the next century that circumstances allowed it the opportunity to acquire an empire at the expense of Byzantium. Providing the knights of the Fourth Crusade with ships in 1202, Enrico Dandolo – an old, blind and ferocious doge – persuaded the crusaders (who had planned to invade Muslim Egypt) to attack and loot the Christian town of Zara and thence to capture and plunder Constantinople, the greatest city of Christendom, overthrowing the emperor in the process and transforming his empire of the east from a Greek entity into a Latin one. Although the Greeks were back in control half a century later, Byzantium was by then irretrievably weakened and in no shape to defend itself against the advance of the Ottoman Turks.
After the Crusade and the pillaging of Byzantium, Venice ceased to be simply a maritime republic with trading posts scattered across the eastern Mediterranean. It became a colonial power that acquired, together with many smaller places, Crete in the thirteenth century, Corfu and parts of the Morea in the fourteenth, Cyprus and Salonika in the fifteenth, and Cephalonia in 1500. The island of Crete was divided into six districts named after the six sestieri of Venice: San Marco, Castello, Cannaregio, Dorsoduro, San Polo and Santa Croce. Yet the empire remained essentially mercantile, one of the colonies’ main purposes being to provide friendly harbours all the way home from the Black Sea. Its total population of some 400,000 people (including Venice itself) meant that it could never have been a true colonizing enterprise. The empire was less a place of settlement and plantation than a world of ships and quays, wharves and warehouses, populated mainly by shipwrights, sailors, fishermen, merchants, dockers, consuls and customs officers.
Until the later fourteenth century Venice’s chief enemies were not the Arabs or the Turks but the Genoese, who, after subduing Pisa in 1284, dominated the Tyrrhenian coast and much of the western Mediterranean. Genoa was as great a maritime power as Venice, maintaining trading posts as far away as Syria and the Black Sea. Although the navies of the two republics were well matched, the Genoese unexpectedly lost the most crucial of their battles, at Chioggia in 1380, when their ships besieging Venice were blockaded by a returning Venetian fleet and destroyed. Genoa’s main disadvantage as a state was its chronic factionalism, the most persistent in all Italy: the city suffered fourteen revolutionary outbreaks in the first half of the fourteenth century. Yet political weakness did not prevent the Genoese from becoming the world’s principal bankers in the late sixteenth century, taking over from Lyon and Antwerp as the financial centre of western Europe.
It was the lagoon that saved Venice from the Genoese, as it had protected the city from earlier invaders. In the ninth century Charlemagne’s son Pepin ran aground on the sandbanks and lost his ships, an Arab fleet proved incapable of negotiating the currents, and a Magyar army that was invincible on land launched a disastrous attack in coracles. Innocuous though it may seem to visitors, the lagoon is a labyrinth of currents and shoals, of mudflats and sandbanks, of narrow channels and unexpected shallows, both a haven for its occupants and a hazard for outsiders. One of the smallest islands is called Buel del Lovo (‘wolf-gut’ in Venetian) because its navigable channel is so tortuous.
A trip down the lagoon to the fishing ports of Chioggia and Pellestrina takes you away from the touristic isles of Burano and Torcello and shows you how human settlement has changed over the centuries and in some cases disappeared altogether. The earliest buildings on most of the smaller islands are convents and monasteries, and many ruins remain, much vandalized since the suppression of the religious orders. One island was set aside for plague victims, another for lunatics, a third for quarantine. Many others were appropriated for military purposes, usually by the French and Austrian occupiers of the nineteenth century: then they were used for barracks, hospitals, munitions factories and gunpowder magazines. More recently, some have acquired new roles such as a fish cannery, a university, an archaeological school and a sailing marina.9
The voyage also reminds you how real and important the maritime life still is to the economy and livelihood of the lagoon. Among the lines of fishing vessels, the boats of pilots and coastguards are constantly busy; beyond the island fortresses, oil tankers ply their way to and from the refinery at Porto Marghera (destroying as they do so the delicate ecological balance of the lagoon). Everywhere you notice the maintenance operations, the boatyards and the dry-docks, the incessant dredging, the re-siting and replacing of the bricole and other posts. You become aware of how the lagoon is defended against the Adriatic when you see the great sea-walls of Pellestrina, erected to stop the waves from breaking in, sweeping away the port and swamping the other islands.
Knowledge of the lagoon allied to supreme nautical skills enabled Venice to become a great sea-power. Its galleys, rowed very largely by free men not slaves, were the Mediterranean’s most effective fighting ships until the sixteenth century. By contrast with Genoa, where business was an affair of individuals, the Venetian state directed much of the city’s economic life: it regulated trade, organized convoys for its merchant marine and ran the great shipbuilding yards of the Arsenale, which was the largest factory in the west, capable in a crisis of constructing several galleys a week. The yards’ workforce of about 1,500 men, the arsenalotti, were well rewarded for their skills, each receiving annually, among other benefits, 500 litres of wine. In the early sixteenth century Venice was the richest and most splendid city in Christian Europe, its wealth generated by trade and the production of vast quantities of silk and glass: its largest employer, with a thousand looms, was the silk industry.
By that time Venice had already acquired its reputation as a state offering its citizens political stability and personal freedom. It never experienced a successful revolt or conspiracy, although in the fourteenth century there had been one failed plot and one insane attempt by a doge to set up a monarchy. The Venetian political system was convoluted but, as Italians from the mainland admitted, it functioned. Power was diffused, its concentration prevented by councils and committees and electoral procedures so obscure and complicated that it is hard to see how they were dreamed up. The head of state was an elected leader, the doge, the most fettered ruler in Italy. Beneath him and his six councillors (the minor consiglio) were the body of ministers (the collegio), which formed the executive, and the largely autonomous, often maligned Council of Ten (consiglio dei dieci), responsible for the security of the state. A senate of some 200 mainly old men provided the legislature and below that was the Great Council (the maggior consiglio), which effectively contained the ruling class, consisting eventually of more than 2,000 patricians. Often criticized as a narrow oligarchy that closed its membership in 1297, the Great Council did in fact continue to admit newcomers, though fewer than before. It was in any case the largest elective body in Italy, and its meetings required the construction of the vast Sala in the Doge’s Palace decorated with the largest oil painting in the world – Tintoretto’s version of paradise – and a host of lesser works depicting the acmatic moments of Venetian glory.
The factionalism of medieval Italy had forced communes to appoint a podestà, a nobleman from outside, to act as an impartial administrator. Yet as the historian Mario Ascheri has pointed out, Venice did not need a podestà because centuries earlier it had created a tradition for its head of state that guaranteed impartiality.10 The doges lived grandly, housed in splendour in the palace that people often choose as their favourite building in the world. Yet most of them were figureheads who could do little without the consent of their councillors and their law-officers. Moreover, the post required numerous sacrifices: its holders could not trade or accept gifts or own property outside the republic; nor could they abdicate or leave Venice if they wanted to; they were not even allowed to talk to foreign ambassadors on their own. As for their relations, Venice was so unlike the rest of Italy that a doge’s son, far from being able to succeed his father, was not allowed to vote or hold office – or even marry a foreigner without the permission of the Great Council.
The doges were nearly always old men – when he started the job in 1521 Antonio Grimani was eighty-seven – elected for life in the most labyrinthine of processes. The youngest member of the Great Council would go out into the Piazza San Marco and choose the first lad he saw as a ballot boy. The boy would then pick thirty names of the council from an urn, a number which would be reduced by lot to nine members who now went into conclave to vote for forty, again reduced by lot, this time to twelve, who had to choose twenty-five, brought back down by lot to nine, who each had seven votes to choose forty-five, who were then reduced to the eleven who finally chose the forty-five who elected the doge.11 Even at the end of all this, matters might not be straightforward. The election of Marino, the second Grimani doge, required seventy-one ballots.
Venice possessed the most harmonious society in Italy. Outsiders noticed that its citizens were more united than in other places and that they shared a community spirit, a belief in the common good, that was absent in Florence or Genoa. There was little violence or street-fighting, which would have been difficult in any case because of the canals. Venice had class but not class conflict. Aristocrats did not parade about with armed retinues, and fishermen and arsenalotti did not riot in the streets. Men of the middle classes did not agitate strenuously to become part of the ruling oligarchy: they made their fortunes and spent much of them on the buildings of their confraternities, the magnificent scuole which they adorned with cycles of paintings by such artists as Carpaccio, Tintoretto and the elder Tiepolo. In Venice political discontent was defused by the opportunities of sea trade in which all classes participated. At home the patrician and the gondolier lived in very different conditions but they were judged by the same system: there were no legal privileges for nobles. Civil and criminal jurisdiction were regarded as on the whole fair, and women came to enjoy legal rights rarely found elsewhere: husbands were prevented from being in the same room when their wives were making their wills.12 As for the foreign propaganda about dungeons groaning with political prisoners, this was a libel. Despite Bonaparte’s taunts about tyranny, his occupying army was unable to find a single political prisoner in the whole of the republic.
Patricians liked to think that, of Venice’s twenty-four founding families, half of them were descended from early Christians and could thus call themselves ‘apostolic’.13 Yet, pretentious though they may have been about their status, they seldom behaved like patricians in the rest of Europe. Since they did not own country estates before their city acquired a mainland, they did not have a tradition of living in castles or hunting in forests. Nor did they despise trade or administration: they happily accepted their roles as shippers, merchants and councillors. Portraits in other states show nobles wearing bright and sometimes garish costumes, but in Venice patricians wore plain black robes except when they held office. Ostentation was largely confined to the façades of their palazzi, whether on the Grand Canal or in humbler districts where many of them lived; sumptuary laws limited the amount of silk, brocade or tapestries they could use for interior decoration.
Venice had the least feudal of aristocracies: no baronial courts or feudal contracts, no private armies, no pompous coats of arms and no primogeniture. The patricians did not even have titles, although in the nineteenth century the Austrian rulers invited them to become counts; their only official distinction was the initials NH and ND (Nobil Homo and Nobile Donna) after their names. Renowned for its tradition of public service and conscientious paternalism, the patriciate identified itself with the state to an extent not easy to find among the baronage of European monarchies. It saw itself not as a collection of individuals but as a body administering a state that actively discouraged individualism; indeed, Venetian history reveals a shorter list of charismatic figures than anywhere else except perhaps Siena. In their lifetimes doges were seldom painted in heroic manner, and their deaths went uncommemorated by the state: the great tombs in Santi Giovanni e Paolo had to be erected at the expense of their families. The cult of the individual was so weak in Venice that before 1866, when the city was joined to Italy, it contained only one statue in a public place – and then only because its erection was the condition of a legacy from a wealthy condottiere, Bartolemeo Colleoni.§
Venice was celebrated for religious and racial tolerance, though its citizens were not of course devoid of religious fervour: they stole the body of St Mark from Alexandria and the relics of other saints as well; they were serious about the cause of church reform; and they reacted to plagues by building the great churches of the Salute and the Redentore. They even had the unusual habit of canonizing Old Testament figures by naming such churches as San Giobbe (Job) and San Moisè (Moses) in their honour. Yet, as James Morris has observed, there is ‘no sense of priestly power’ in Venice.14 Religion was important, but its position was subordinate to the state: the doges, not the bishops, were its protectors. The people, as they put it themselves, were Venetians first and Christians afterwards, an attitude that naturally provoked the anger of various popes, who periodically placed the city under an interdict. Yet the Venetians were rarely cowed by such actions and in 1606 they simply ignored an excommunication of their senate and an interdict imposed upon their state because the republic had decided that no property could be given to the clergy and no churches or monasteries could be founded without its consent. They had also had the temerity to arrest two priests and charge them with common crimes without handing them over to an ecclesiastical court. Upon receiving the interdict, Venice ordered its priests to carry on their work as normal, which they did, thereby forcing the Borghese pope, Paul V, to back down and lift the ban. The pontiff was not greatly consoled by his opponents’ concession over the clerical miscreants, who were handed over to the French ambassador.
People of different faiths were permitted to celebrate their religion in Venice, and Protestantism too was regarded for a while with sympathy; a considerable number of patricians were potential converts in the sixteenth century. For a few years the republic managed to resist papal demands to set up a local inquisition but in 1547 it acquiesced. As inquisitions go, the Venetian version was relatively relaxed, partly because the state insisted that the inquisitors should include one of its own nobles. When Paolo Veronese completed his enormous picture of The Last Supper, the Inquisition summoned him to explain how he could have depicted so sacred an event in such a gaudy and materialistic manner: the diners, clad in velvet, silk and ermine, are feasting in an ambience of table cloths, marble floors and Corinthian pillars; decanters, jugs and wineskins testify that a lot of drinking is going on – as does the presence of two drunk German halberdiers – and the pagan, hedonistic note is reinforced by the presence of dogs, a cat, a jester with a parrot, and women leaning out of a nearby house to enjoy the spectacle. Tolerant though they were prepared to be, the inquisitors were unimpressed by Veronese’s claim that painters could take the same liberties as poets and madmen and they ordered him to make alterations. In the event the artist made no changes at all except to change the title by inscribing on two pilasters a line from St Luke’s Gospel: ‘And Levi made him [Jesus] a great feast in his own house’ – the event that provoked the Pharisees to admonish Jesus for eating and drinking with publicans and sinners. Veronese’s Renaissance diners do not look very like publicans but they look even less like disciples.
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 back 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.