Venice

One of the most remarkable cities in the world, where the streets are canals, Venice rose from a group of islands in a lagoon on the edge of the Adriatic Sea to become one of the most vital commercial and artistic centers of Renaissance Europe.

Local myth tells that Venice was founded on Ascension Day in the year 421, although its first residents actually arrived on the islands in the sixth century. Ever since, Venetians have embraced a unique lifestyle. From the start they realized that their existence depended on finding a way to live with the sea—not a sea on its borders but one quite literally all around it. Venetians created their political system, based on the election of the doge (Venetian for duke), in the ninth century, and over time they developed a republican form of government that seemed to them and visitors to be an ideal political system. During the ninth century Venetians also defined their own religious fate when they stole the body of the apostle Mark from Byzantium in 828-29. Although they later misplaced his body, in one of the many miracles that defined Venetian history his body was rediscovered in 1094, an event now celebrated in a mosaic at San Marco, the glorious church that abuts the ducal palace and dominates the Piazza San Marco.

Venetians’ connections to the ocean long predated the so-called age of discovery. According to legend, sometime in the medieval era the doge wed the Adriatic, not only in a metaphorical sense but quite literally: He sailed out from the lagoon and into the open water and tossed in a golden ring. The ceremony was reenacted every year on Ascension Day when the doge sailed out to sea in a gilded galley in front of an audience of onlookers.

Venetians used their strategic access to the Adriatic to create the greatest seaborne mercantile domain in southern Europe. Although the republic lacked a substantial territorial base and was thus dependent on other states for an enormous variety of basic goods, including most of its food, enterprising merchants organized commerce that transported the goods of the Levant to the West.

Close ties to East and West led to the spectacular eccentricity of Venice’s architecture, (see ART AND ARCHITECTURE), evident in the Church of San Marco. Begun in the mid-11th century, San Marco was built in the shape of a Greek cross crowned by five domes. Local craftsmen spent inordinate time creating and embellishing the ornate interiors, many of them covered by sumptuous mosaics painted with gold leaf, but they paid little attention to its external appearance. By the 13th century or so Venetians, inspired by Romanesque and Gothic architecture, modified the exterior, adding carvings of fishermen, coopers, smiths, masons, and barbers whose talents allowed Venice to boom. The construction next door to the ducal palace signaled the fundamental link between church and state in the republic.

Residents and visitors alike recognized the special features of Venice. In the mid-14th century Petrarch praised the “august city of Venice,” which had become “the one home today of liberty, peace and justice, the one refuge of honorable men, the one port to which can repair the storm-tossed, tyrant-hounded craft of men who seek the good life.” Material wealth abounded, but Petrarch recognized something more precious: the city’s unparalleled “virtue, solidly built on marble but standing more solid on a foundation of civil concord, ringed with salt waters but more secure with the salt of good counsel.” The local 16th-century chronicler Marin Sanudo believed that the glories of the city would be perpetual. Venice was, he wrote, “a marvellous thing, which must be seen to be believed[.]” He agreed with those who asserted that “it will last for ever, as appears from this epigram found in the Supplemen-twm chronicarum: ‘So long as the sea contains dolphins, so long as clear skies contain stars; so long as the moist ground give forth her pleasant fruits; so long as the human race carries on its generations upon the earth, the splendour of the Venetians will be celebrated for all eternity.’”

The modern-day traveler to Venice will notice one of the city’s architectural legacies: the desire of the wealthy to build their palaces facing canals. No other city in the world located so many of its finest buildings along canals, nor did craftsmen and architects elsewhere spend so much time constructing fayades that were only visible by people in boats or across a lagoon. Venetians spent time and money on their buildings because they realized, as did the residents of other Italian cities, that buildings expressed common beliefs, aspirations, and values. A spectacular and orderly city, especially one constructed in the midst of a lagoon, had to convey to all the world the enormous public spirit of Venetians. What emerged from their efforts was nothing less than a lesson in civics taught by observation: political education absorbed without classes and lectures, without preaching or priests, even without the explicit attention of the patrician class.

From the late 14th century into the early 15th century, a series of construction projects demonstrated the artistic heights possible during the Renaissance. Local elites, eager to show off their wealth, built one palace after another along the canals. Some of the palaces, such as Ca Dario constructed for the secretary of the senate Giovanni Dario in the late 1480s, sprouted magnificent decoration. Others impressed by their sheer size, such as the palace built for the Loredan family during the first decade of the 16th century and now known as Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi. Owners of these palazzi offered public thanks in the form of carved inscriptions to the benevolent authorities who allowed their creation. Within the palaces and inside churches such as San Marco and Madonna dell’Orto, Venice’s great painters and artisans created images of lasting power and beauty. As a result, Venice has attracted visitors since the 16th century.

Venice’s ascent came from its merchants’ ability to organize long-distance commerce, particularly their ability to dominate the trade between the SpiCE Islands and Europe. The profits accrued through such commerce allowed Venetian rulers to employ artisans and painters, who transformed their dwellings into ornate urban treasures. As one resident wrote in his diary, “if trade falls off and men live on income little progress will be possible.” When a Milanese pilgrim stopped in Venice on his way to Jerusalem in the late 15th century, the signs of mercantile prosperity overwhelmed him. “Something may be said about the quantity of merchandise in the said city, although not nearly the whole truth, because it is inestimable,” Pietro Casola wrote in 1494. “Indeed it seems as if all the world flocks there, and that human beings have concentrated there all their force for trading.” He found “tapestry, brocades and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every colour and texture, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of spices, groceries and drugs, and so much beautiful white wax!”

To its celebrators, Venice was the perfect city. As one local diarist wrote, “whoever lived and stayed there seemed to be in an earthly paradise, without any tumult of war or suspicion of enemies, nor would he look to suffer misfortune or fear any mental perturbation, the city having endured and stood so long, for so many hundreds of years, in peace, quiet, and repose; and whoever wished to live in peace and quiet and expect to go about his business peacefully could not stay or live in a quieter or more peaceful place than the city of Venice[.]”

Despite its marvels, Venice in the 16th century was in crisis. In 1499 the Turks warned a Venetian ambassador that Venice’s time had passed. “Until now you have been married to the sea,” one informed the emissary; “for the future, that is for us, who are more powerful by sea than you.” The barbarians, as the Venetians defined the enemies who surrounded them, could not be kept back. A series of military conquests from 1509 to 1513 reduced the terra ferma that Venetians had managed to gain by the end of the 15th century, and a growing Turkish fleet threatened Venice’s control over the seas. Despite an alliance with the Vatican, Spain, and England put together to resist threats from the French, and despite a peace agreement signed between Venice and France in November 1513, Venetians could not retain control over territory they once claimed. By the time the accord was reached, they had lost Padua and much of the rest of their territory. To make matters worse, an earthquake rocked the city on March 26, 1511, a further sign to some locals that they were receiving divine punishment for their material excesses.

Even in its decline Venice remained a vital city in 16th-century Europe. Among the city’s residents was ClOVANNl Battista Ramusio, the editor of travel accounts whose readers learned about the world beyond the republic’s boundaries. Venice was also one of the publishing centers of Europe (see printing press), home to the famous Aldine Press. To the present day, there is no other city like it. Although some fear that the sea from which Venice sprang will ultimately drown it, for the moment, at least, it remains the greatest relic of the Renaissance.

Further reading: Patricia Fortini Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: Abrams, 1997); Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Knopf, 1982); Garry Wills, Venice, Lion City: The Religion of Empire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).