Venice: Pure City

30 Divine and Infernal

Venice was the gate of heaven. At a time of religious crisis, in the middle of the sixteenth century, a cleric wrote that Christ was about to return to Italy and “I believe Venice will be the door.” The ranks of the rulers and the judges of Venice were compared to the numbers and dominions of angels and archangels; it was the nature of the city to inspire its citizens with the aeterna beatitudo, quae in visione Dei consistit, the eternal happiness which lies in the vision of the godhead. This is the context for Tintoretto’s great vision of paradise in the ducal palace. It was proclaimed, if not believed, that the constitution and laws of the city had been “sent by God”; the success and expansion of the Venetian Empire were then seen as the working-out of divine providence in the world of time. The very survival of a city upon the waters was a miracle. The Venetians themselves referred to their home as “our holy earth” or as “the holy city.”

In 1581 the Venetian writer Francesco Sansovino declared that Venice was “revered by everyone as a sacred thing on earth to be worshipped, were this possible.” It was not permissible of course; it might have provoked comparison with the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf (one of the favourite subjects of Venetian painting). Yet it was not altogether a novel doctrine. In the ancient religion of Mesopotamia, for example, the city was considered to be the essence of the divine. It need hardly be added that such worship encourages despotism and authoritarianism on a very grand scale. That is why the identity of church and state in Venice was so powerful. It allowed the governors of Venice to maintain their distance from the jurisdiction of Rome and the Roman pontiff. The doge was the pope of Venice, and the senators his cardinals. On Palm Sunday the doge released white doves from the doorway of Saint Mark’s in commemoration of the Ark’s coming to rest after the Flood. It was an invocation of the city’s own rescue from the waves. But was it a religious, rather than a political, ritual? The distinction, in Venetian culture, did not apply.

It was an accident of geography, perhaps, that this was the city from which the pilgrims sailed to the Holy Land. The pilgrims came to Venice to purchase supplies and provisions for the long voyage, and slowly the city itself was seen to be an integral part of their holy journey. They participated in all the sacred rituals of the Venetian Church. They worshipped at the same oratories and chapels. They venerated the same icons. The shrine of Saint Mark attracted many thousands, and hundreds of thousands, of foreign visitors. The tomb smelled of spices, the Venetian trade. The intimate association between Venice and the East also helped to convey the image of the city as part of the Holy Land, an intimation or glimpse of the divine, worthy of pilgrimage in its own right.

The city was a sacred space containing many intimations of the spiritual world. There were innumerable images of the saints, as well as the Virgin, in its dark passageways. The candles or lamps in front of them created a luminous area, banishing vice and crime. There were more than five hundred street shrines, or capitelli; but their purpose was political as well as religious. They were a means of curbing disorder among the people. The Virgin would not look kindly down upon civic unrest. The archangel Michael guards the south-west corner of the ducal palace with his drawn sword. The landscape of the city is dominated by bell towers ringing out “Holy! Holy! Holy!” The churches of Venice, like the convents and monasteries, were all carefully sited. The church of S. Maria dei Miracoli, for example, is placed on the frontiers of the two northern districts of Cannaregio and Castello. One of the oldest churches in Venice, that of S. Giacomo, is situated at the very centre of the Rialto market. It was here that commercial contracts were signed. Machiavelli wrote that “we Italians are corrupt and irreligious beyond all others.” That was not true of the Venetians. They were corrupt and religious.

Where there is the divine, there is always the infernal. One cannot exist without the other. There were many folk stories of the devil walking confidently over the bridges and along the calli of the city. He was reported to have taunted the mason working on the Rialto bridge, for example, with the claim that no one could build so wide an arch of stone. He offered to perform the work in exchange for the soul of the first person who crossed the bridge. It turned out to be the mason’s infant son.

Venice was a sacred text to be read and meditated. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the city was first seen as a totality, to be carefully structured. It had survived, by the exercise of the divine will, and now had to be sculptured. The body of Saint Mark, supposedly preserved in the basilica, was the central point of the configuration between the ducal palace, the market and the Arsenal. This was the sacred geometry of Venetian power.

It is noticeable, in Venetian painting, that the miracles of the Scriptures often take place in a Venetian setting. For Tintoretto the events of the New Testament were seen as an aspect of familiar Venetian life. In a manual of devotion written for young Venetian girls, the Garden of Prayer, the author instructs his readers to “take a city that is well known to you … hold in your mind the principal places where the episodes of the Passion would have taken place.” So the agonies of Christ were to be pictured along the calli and within the campi of la Serenissima.

It was itself a city of miracles. No city in Europe, with the possible exception of Rome, has witnessed so many. Every parish had its own sacred events. The compiler of the Cronica Venetiarum, writing in the middle of the fourteenth century, describes miracles and portents in the same spirit of verisimilitude as more mundane events and actions. Miracles were announced with impressive frequency by the authorities of the city. It was another way of reaffirming its sacred destiny. An angel rescued a workman falling from the scaffolding around the basilica of Saint Mark’s. A holy virgin walked across the water of the Grand Canal. A slave was rescued from condign punishment in Saint Mark’s Square by Saint Mark himself. The same saint, together with his brothers in Christ Nicholas and George, exorcised demons threatening the city with flood. Miraculous events became particularly common in the 1480s, just after the end of the Turkish wars in which Venice lost its domination of the Mediterranean. In these miracles the Virgin became the agent of divine intervention, thus in theory restoring the status of Venice as “Queen of the Sea.”

Carpaccio painted “Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge” when a lunatic was healed by the presence of the relic. There was the miracle at S. Lio in the early years of the fifteenth century, when in the parish of that name a holy relic would not be associated with the funeral of a wicked man. It grew so heavy that it could not be carried over the threshold of the church. Giovanni Mansueti completed a painting of the event in 1494. It is still possible to recognise the site, and certain of the larger houses, in 2009. That is another Venetian miracle.

The sacred sites of Venice can be enumerated. The first of them, by common consent, must be the basilica. It is the umbilicus, the central point, the core. It is the place where the divine and human meet. In the beginning there had been another church on this site dedicated to Saint Theodore but, when the supposed body of Saint Mark arrived in the lagoons, everything changed. As soon as the relics arrived in 829, a church with a wooden roof or dome was raised on the model of the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. The church was largely destroyed by fire in 976, but was subsequently restored. The final reconstruction, vaulted and built in brick, assuming the shape of the basilica still before us, was undertaken in the second half of the eleventh century. The fact that it was based upon a model already five hundred years old was a material blessing. It emphasised the supposed antiquity of the Venetian religious tradition. The city had no true religious history of its own; so it borrowed or adapted what it saw. The undulating pavement of the basilica, for example, was not an accident or a mistake. It was deliberately modelled on the floor of the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Ravenna, built in the fifth century. The pavement was to rise and fall “as if agitated by winds and to present the likeness of a storm.” It was supposed to invoke the position of Venice upon perilous waters.

In the thirteenth century a programme of mosaics was formally introduced, taking their example from the church of the Holy Apostles but introducing specifically Venetian motifs. These in turn were erased, restored only in the seventeenth century. In the fourteenth century the façade of the basilica was partially transformed in Gothic style. So the church arose by a process of accretion and accommodation, encrusted and adapted over the centuries. Marbles and statues—bought or stolen, it made no difference—were attached to it in almost haphazard fashion.

The basilica is unique. To some it has a Moorish air; to others it appears to be a relic of Byzantium; others admire the window traceries and the great screen as miracles of the Gothic style. The derivations do not matter. It is possibly the most beautiful building in the world. It rises from the square like an apparition wreathed in clouds of jasper and porphyry, of opal and of gold. As a piece of chromatic decoration, it is unsurpassed. The pillars and porches and domes rise one above the other, ornamented with mosaics and sculptures that tell stories from the divine and human worlds. The play of light and dark across the façade is increased by the deployment of closely ranged columns. It exudes a kind of barbaric splendour.

Upon entering the interior, the visitor is lost in twilight. It is like some great cavern beneath the sea filled with sunken treasure. It has been shaped in the form of a cross, but there are shadowy aisles and alcoves lit by the flame of a candle or the gleaming of an icon. There are five hundred columns of porphyry, serpentine and alabaster. The roof is a sea of gold. The mosaic work, covering forty thousand square feet (3,700 sq. m), is a skein of iridescence thrown across the walls and arches. Divine light was more significant than natural light. The interior is filled with silks and enamels, gold and rock crystal, as if it were itself a bejewelled reliquary. It is a church of merchants suffering from what one English traveller described as “religious horror,” in the sense of awe and dread. It is a church of material wealth and costly display. It is also a church of rare commodities. Here is the icon of the Virgin painted by Saint Luke. Here is the stone of granite from Mount Tabor, on which Christ preached to the people. Here is the executioner’s block, stained with the blood of Saint John the Baptist. Here are marble columns from the Temple of Solomon. Here, in the chapel of Saint Isidore, lies Saint Mark. It is the perfect stage setting for ritual devotion.

In its present form the campanile or bell tower of the basilica was erected at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, taking the place of an old watchtower that had stood on the site for seven hundred years. There had been an attempt to build a new bell tower in 1008, but the structure had sunk into the ground. The present campanile was used as a vantage point from which to view the city, and a defensive station from which to scan the sea. It was continually being struck by lightning until the introduction of a lightning rod, but there was no disaster worse than that of Bastille Day, 1902, when it buckled and folded upon itself, neatly imploding into a large pile of rubble. It fell, as the Venetians said at the time, “like a gentleman.” There were no fatalities, except that of the caretaker’s cat. The largest of the bells, “La Marangona,” fell two hundred feet (60 m) without incurring any damage. It was then determined to rebuild the tower dov’era, com’era—where it is and how it is. Ten years later the campanile rose again, indistinguishable in its outward appearance from its predecessor. That was the Venetian way. It is said that if the visitor arrives in Venice to the sound of “La Marangona,” then that visitor has the soul of some dead Venetian being welcomed back to the city.

The palace of the doge, beside the basilica itself, is the other sacred site of the city. Proust’s grandmother journeyed to Venice, when she was dying, simply in order to visit this place. Proust wrote that “she would not have attached so much importance to that joy she got from the ducal palace if she had not felt it to be one of those joys which, in a way we imperfectly understand, outlive the act of dying, and appeal to some portion of us which is not, at the least, under the dominion of death.”

The original palace was erected at the beginning of the ninth century, but was destroyed in 976 during one of the few civil riots in Venetian history. It was continually enlarged and adapted; wings were pulled down and constructed; halls and passages and galleries were introduced. In the early fourteenth century, according to the narrative of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, the original “Byzantine Palace” was supplanted by a “Gothic Palace,” the latter coinciding with the final triumph of the aristocratic polity. This is the building that faces the bacino or pool. It became the home of government. Architecture has always been a statement of power. This Gothic palace itself grew and grew, with new halls and saloons to accommodate the increased complexity of the government apparatus. Ruskin compared it to a “serpent” that eventually bites its own tail.

The apartments of the doge were still within what was known as “the old palace” or, in other words, the decayed Byzantine original. In 1422 it was decreed that it should be pulled down and what Ruskin called the “Renaissance Palace” erected in its place. Ruskin believed that the demolition of the Byzantine structure was an act of vandalism, dating from its removal “the knell of the architecture of Venice, and of Venice itself.” His eschatological tendencies may not now find favour. Yet by degrees the whole complex took the form that can still be seen. It was gutted by fires, endlessly restored and adapted; but it survived. The ducal palace, as it is now, took its final shape in the middle of the sixteenth century. Like the city and the government, the development of the palace was gradual and pragmatic.

It was not the home of the doge only. It was the site of government, with chambers for the great council and the senate and the multitudinous committees that made up the Venetian state. It housed the prisons and the stables. What is most remarkable, however, is what is not there. It is not defended. There are no walls or barbicans. A wall was thrown around it at the beginning of the tenth century, in response to the threat of Hungarian invasion, but that was demolished two centuries later. The government was considered secure, both from internal and external enemies.

The palace is, or seems to be, a miracle of lightness. The European observer is accustomed to heaviness of foundation and lightness of summit. In the ducal palace the expectation is disappointed. The long double-storeyed arcade, at ground level, creates the illusion of space and airiness. The deep shadows within the arcade act as a metaphor for the foundation. The darkness has the illusion of volume. The upper part of the façade is made up of tiny marble pieces of pink and white and grey, in the pattern of damask, shimmering in the light of the lagoon. The whole structure has the exact proportions of a cube, but it is a cube of light. The palace might be said to float like the city itself. It is not, in Proust’s phrase, under the dominion of death.

Two great fires, of 1574 and 1577, enveloped the halls of the senate and great council. The works of Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, and others, were destroyed. Yet their destruction provided, as it were, a blank canvas on which the late sixteenth-century myth-makers of Venice could work their wonders. A new sequence of paintings was commissioned. The official artists of the time (among them Veronese and the now elderly Tintoretto) did not invent any of the artistic programmes. They submitted to the wishes of their political masters. They were ordered to re-create the ideology of the ruling class in triumphal terms. This they proceeded to do. They invented a completely imaginary history of the city. They defined its power. They celebrated its virtues. They deliberately copied the Venetian art of preceding centuries in order to project the idea of enduring identity; lost images were restored, old symbols reaffirmed. It is the essence of the conservatism of Venice. The artists depicted the battles won by Venice. They painted votive images of deceased doges. They proclaimed Venice as Justitia and Liberator. The works were not considered as individual masterpieces, but as parts of a coherent whole. The paintings in the palace represented the ethos of the Venetian community in a more embracing sense. The project lasted for twenty years. It was an allegory of the state itself.

Before the palace lies Saint Mark’s Square, perhaps more properly known as the Piazza. It is the only true square in Venice. It was once the site of two islands, facing the Bacino di S. Marco, separated by a narrow canal. Much of the present square was a grass field on an island named “Il Morso” for its hard and tenacious soil. This was the site of the first ducal palace and the ducal chapel. On the same island were two churches, and a hospice for pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. They were the nucleus from which the present square grew. It was decided that a place of assembly should be erected for the Venetian commune. It was necessary to build courts also for the administration of justice. So power, and authority, gradually accrued to the site.

In the twelfth century the Square was enlarged approximately to its present size. The trees and vines were cleared, and the new site was paved with bright brick of herringbone pattern. The new pavement covered the old canal that had once divided the two small islands. (Its waters still run beneath the present square.) Now all was a coherent whole. Covered walks were built around three sides of the square, against which houses were constructed, leaving the basilica clear to sight. The effect, according to Marino Sanudo, was “as if one were at a theatre.” The effect had not been planned by one architect or designer; it was a miracle of collective will.

The importance of the Square was sealed when two great columns, brought from Constantinople in 1171, were placed on the edge of the bacino. There was a third, but it fell into the lagoon. The remaining two have stood there ever since, surmounted by a lion and an image of Saint Theodore. The columns and the basilica, however, are the only surviving remnants of the medieval arena—with the possible exception of the pigeons, or doves as some prefer to call them. The birds have haunted the Square since its beginnings.

Shops appeared under the newly built arcades, in the twelfth century, and in Venetian fashion proceeded to monopolise the territory. The square became a place of trade. Sheds and stalls of every description, selling food and merchandise, littered the site. The stalls of money-changers were set up beneath the campanile; a meat market conducted its business beneath the windows of the ducal palace. Rows of shops selling cheese and salami and fruit once stood where now the tourists line up for the vaporetti, the buses that run upon the water. Where the famous Library now stands, there were bakeries. In the piazzetta, the smaller part of the Square facing the lagoon, five hostelries competed for custom. The pillars of the ducal palace were used as public latrines, and it was noticed that the patricians would lift their gowns and paddle through the pools of urine without complaint. In fact it was observed that the Venetians relieved themselves wherever and whenever they wished.

And of course beggars congregated beneath the arcades, displaying their wounds and diseases. It was the space for the great religious and civic ceremonies of the city; it also was the arena for bull-fights and horse races. It was the place of punishment. Prisoners were hung in cages from the campanile, and beheadings were carried out between the two monumental pillars. In the summer of 1505 the gibbet was removed from the Square, and three flagpoles put in its place before the basilica. That was the final touch for the official canonisation of the space. Between the ducal palace and the basilica stood the stone of proclamation, a truncated pillar of porphyry from which the doge pronounced judicial sentence. It was like any large medieval town, in other words, except for the overwhelming majesty of the site itself. This order and this disorder, this beauty and this squalor, are the key to any understanding of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Venice.

In the 1530s one architect above all others modelled the Square as it now appears. Jacopo Sansovino was charged with the task of creating a classical space out of the medieval confusion. He built the church of S. Geminiano, on the opposite side of the Square from the basilica, demolished later on the orders of Napoleon. He constructed the great Library and the Mint that faces the bacino; he also re-created the loggetta at the base of the campanile. He found a square of brick and turned it into marble. The Square was, for Thomas Coryat, “of that admirable and incomparable beauty, that I thinke no place whatsoever may compare with it.”

It was the central point of the city, the place to which all of the tourists were directed or towards which they drifted. An Englishman of the eighteenth century noted “a mixed multitude of Jews, Turks, and Christians; lawyers, knaves, and pickpockets; mountebanks, old women and physicians … people of every character and condition.” After his victory in 1797 Bonaparte razed the church of S. Geminiano in order to build a third range of stately apartments; this completed the trilateral shape of the Square in triumphant form. He also removed the bronze horses and dispatched them to Paris. They were returned in 1815.

Throughout the centuries of turmoil it remained the place of meeting and assignation. Ruskin’s wife, Effie, described it as a “vast drawing room lighted enough by the gas from the arcades all around the Square” where wandered “a dense crowd in the centre of men, women, children, soldiers.” Effie Ruskin’s husband saw it in more apocalyptic terms. He described it as “filled with the madness of the whole earth,” filled with “idle Venetians of the middle classes” and military bands; in the recesses of the arcades lay “men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless” while around them begged the urchins of the city “full of desperation and stony depravity.” And this is what aroused his anger—not one Venetian ever glanced at the wonderful basilica. “You will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance brightened by it.” It is still one of the paradoxes of the city. It has been often said that, if you sit at a table in Florian’s or Quadri’s for long enough, everyone you have known in your life will eventually pass by. If it were once the case for the middle-class Englishman or German, it is not the case now. You will see only knots of tourists from every country under the sun.

31 Of Belief

Pope Gregory XIII once confessed that “I am pope everywhere except in Venice.” A Venetian historian, in 1483, reminded the cardinals of his city that “Venice was their true parent, and the Church only a stepmother.” That is why Venetian cardinals in Rome were often considered by the papal authorities to be little better than spies. Because the bones of Saint Mark were preserved in the heart of Venice, the city claimed an apostolic status equal to that of Rome. Its power and authority effectively meant that it had inherited the mantle of the Holy Christian Empire.

So it was a very Venetian church, overwhelmingly subject to state control. The doge was considered to be a sacred no less than a secular figure. When the bishops of Venetian colonies on the terra firma received instructions directly from the pope, they relayed them to the council of ten for approval. Members of the clergy were forbidden entry into any of the state archives, and those patrician families who held ecclesiastical benefices were prohibited from involvement in ecclesiastical affairs. It was believed and widely stated that the supposed divine origins of the city meant that it had received its powers directly from God, and was simply retaining the traditional authority of state over church.

The state supervised all matters pertaining to the Church, including the content of sermons and the administration of the mass. Bishops were appointed by the senate. The bishops themselves never questioned the process, in any case, since all of them came from patrician families. No churches could be erected without the permission of the government. In the official documents of every period there are references to “our see of Grado” or “our bishops of Olivolo.” There was also such a thing as state theology. It was painted on the walls of the ducal palace. The state had its own liturgy, quite different from that in use elsewhere, with texts that included homage to Mark above all other saints. Heresy, therefore, was principally a crime against the state. It has been suggested that the Venetian Church was inspired by the Byzantine state Church, in which religion was seen as an aspect of proper governance, but it was also directly rooted in the experience and situation of the city. It was not part of the Italian mainland. It had created its institutions ab novo. It refused to submit to any external authority.

So Venetian religion was a very potent and efficient mingling of superstition with practicality and good sense. When an Italian movement of fervent proselytisers, known as the Bianchi for the white robes that they wore, came to Venice in 1399 they were forbidden to process or preach in public; they were spreading an apocalyptic message on the eve of a new century. When one group did try to file into the Square before the church of S. Zanipolo, the leaders of the council of ten were waiting for them. They wrenched the crucifix from the hand of the principal worshipper, tore off its arms and threw the pieces of the cross at the others. The procession was then broken up, according to a chronicle, “with many insults and injuries.” That is how the Venetian authorities dealt with any threatening minority. They could not endure dissent or disorder, however pious in origin.

Venice, however, did tolerate those who posed no threat. At the time of religious innovation in the sixteenth century, the authorities were not opposed to the presence of Protestant students at the University of Padua. Venice became known as a haven for European reformers who had fled the more orthodox kingdoms of the north. The city had always been open to travellers and merchants from the rest of the world. So it had no problem with foreign faiths. It had important trade relations with heretical nations such as England and the Netherlands. Commerce came first. Venice had to remain an open port. The German merchants, lodged in the centre of the city, were Lutherans. It made no difference. The English ambassador to Venice at the time of James I, Henry Wotton, believed that the city might in fact join the reforming nations. That was wishful thinking. Venice may have distrusted the papacy but it would never cease to believe in the Virgin and the intercession of the saints. It was unthinkable. They would have liked to reform the Catholic Church, of course. They would have liked to reform the pope out of existence.

The people were in any case excessively devout. They evinced what Defoe called “prodigious stupid Bigotry.” In a more kindly tone Philippe de Commynes wrote that “I believe God blesses them for the reverence they show in the service of the Church.” There were more than a hundred churches from which to choose. There were statues and pictures at every corner. The aisles were filled with worshippers. There were endless processions, each with its own particular form of ritual—the procession of Corpus Christi, when a senator and a poor person walked side by side ahead of the others and rose petals were strewn across the route; the procession of Good Friday, when lamps and torches and candles were placed in front of the great houses; the ceremony of Palm Sunday, when a myriad of pigeons was set free in front of the basilica; the procession of the doge to the convent of S. Zaccaria on Easter Day. Each ceremony had its own social, as well as religious, purpose. A culture of public processions is very common within authoritarian societies.

Effie Ruskin remarked of the ordinary Venetians that “they don’t seem to believe anything particularly, but are superstitious by habit.” That is possibly the best definition of Venetian piety. When an Englishman, visiting a Venetian church, did not kneel at the elevation of the host he was taken to task by a Venetian senator. The Englishman said that he did not subscribe to the doctrine of the real presence, to which the Venetian replied, “No more do I. But kneel as I do, or else leave the church.” The devotion of the people was also the greatest possible bulwark for the state itself.

The use of icons and relics meant that such devotion knitted all of the people together in a bond of piety. The body of Saint Mark guarded all of the citizens. But there were many other saints to be touched and seen. There were, at the last count, more than fifty dead saints in defensive formation. They were considered, in a city without walls, to be essential. One monastery possessed the relics of twelve separate saints. It is surprising that there were enough saints to go round. In November 1981 two gunmen rushed into the church of S. Geremia, ordering the priest and congregation to lie on the floor. They then seized the mummified skeleton of Saint Lucy and stuffed it into a sack. The head of the saint was broken off, unfortunately, and rolled into the aisle. The silver death mask of Lucy was also left behind. A month later the poor saint was found discarded in a hunting lodge near Venice.

The Venetians greatly preferred what might be called “full body” relics. They needed the whole body because insecurity in the spirit demands completeness. Yet in exceptional circumstances an arm or a leg would do. The head of Saint George was lodged in the Benedictine monastery on the island of S. Giorgio Maggiore. His arm had arrived some decades before. There were pieces of Saints Peter, Matthew, Bartholomew and John the Evangelist, scattered through the various shrines of the city. The head of the prophet Jonah, saved from the belly of the whale, had also somehow made its way to the city of the lagoon. The body of Saint Tarasius was doubly celebrated because it had miraculously escaped fragmentation; two robbers from another city had tried to remove his teeth, but the saint refused to yield them up. The whole thing came to the city. When a Dutch traveller of the seventeenth century went to gaze upon one piece of sacred flesh, he found it “whole and undamaged, with her breasts and her carnal appearance looking as though it was smoke-dried meat, feet and hands, since this holy body had been in the fire.” Or, perhaps, some enterprising merchant had burnt another body so that it might pass as the genuine article.

Saint Isidore of Chios was buried in the doges’ chapel. The head and the body of Saint Barbara, unfortunately separated, were stolen from their shrine in Constantinople and transported to the lagoon. When the Venetians were forced out of Crete by the Turks, they took the body of Saint Titus with them. Two Venetian merchants smuggled the body of Saint Simeon the Prophet from a church near Saint Sophia; it was reported that they had encountered “some difficulty.”

It was said that whenever a Venetian entered a famous shrine the first question would always be “What can we steal for Saint Mark’s?” Monks of foreign monasteries were bribed to give up their honoured dead. Other saints were simply pillaged. So the basilica itself was compared to the house of a pirate retired from business. Of course the thefts were excused under the guise of piety. It was said that these translations—we may call them borrowings—succeeded because the saints themselves wished to be enthroned in Venice. They wished to receive more prayers and more veneration. Otherwise they would have refused to leave their original shrines. Saints can be very stubborn. So the arrival of a purloined relic in the city was yet another sign of God’s grace. It was a very convenient argument.

The relic-hunters were merchants under another name. The relics were in a sense also merchandise. They were collectable. They were a source of revenue from the religious tourists coming to the city. They were in themselves valuable—the crown of thorns that had once rested on Christ’s head was valued at the sum of seventy thousand ducats.

In the basilica of Saint Mark’s was a vessel containing drops of the blood that Christ shed while enduring the agony in the garden of Gethsemane. There were thorns from the crown, fragments of the true cross, and a portion of the flagellation pillar on which the Saviour had been bound. Here also are to be found portions of the hair, and a sample of the milk, of the Holy Virgin. The basilica is an enormous reliquary. In this way the Venetian Church could be associated in spirit with the heroes and heroines of early Christianity. By forging relics, as often happened, the Venetian authorities were inventing a religious history for themselves. But they could not supply the native saints to close the deal. There were more Venetian artists than Venetian saints.

There were a few native saints but, typically enough, they were all in some sense connected with the political status of the republic. Saint Pietro Orseolo had been a doge of the tenth century before retiring to a monastery. Saint Marina recovered Padua for the republic. Saint Lorenzo Giustiniani was a favoured son of the city who was intimately involved in the struggle to re-establish the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The holiness of the Virgin surrounds him.

It has been observed with some surprise that, in the absence of candidates from home, the Venetian authorities named many of their churches after Old Testament prophets. There are in fact forty Old Testament figures in the Venetian calendar of saints. That is not a feature of western Christianity. But it is an integral aspect of the eastern Church, from which Venice borrowed so many details of its devotion. There were churches for Saint Moses, Saint Job, Saint Daniel, Saint Samuel and Saint Jeremiah. The Venetians identified themselves with the chosen race that had similarly wandered over the wilderness in search of a divinely ordained homeland.

There were some visiting saints. Venice was, after all, the city of tourism from earliest times. The most famous of these divine travellers must be Saint Francis who, after attempting to convert the sultan, arrived in the city at some point in the 1220s. He stayed in Venice itself, and soon became aware of some birds singing on certain trees among the marshes. He rowed to that spot with a companion and, when they alighted on the marshy ground, Saint Francis began to pray aloud. But the birds kept on singing. The saint then commanded them to be silent. They obeyed, and would not depart until he gave them approval. On this site, then, there rose a church and a monastery of Franciscans.

The Venetians themselves had no particular fondness for the pope or for the Catholic faith beyond Venetian territory. The Jesuits, considered to be the agents of the papacy, were unpopular in Venice; it was the practice of children to follow them, crying out “Go away, go away, take nothing with you and never come back.” Pius II called the Venetians “traders” and “barbarians” and “hypocrites.” He declared that they “never think of God and, except for the state, which they regard as a deity, they hold nothing sacred, nothing holy.” The Venetians in turn regarded the papacy as an enemy, a ruler of Italian lands rather than a representative of God. The city was an arena for pope-baiting. There was a famous story of a Venetian prisoner who, on hearing the news of the accession of Sixtus V, clapped his hands. “I will be free now,” he said, “for he buggered me when I was a boy.” That was the kind of story Venetians enjoyed. They were delighted to hear, from one of their ambassadors to England in the sixteenth century, that there were prints in London of the pope shitting out medals and mitres and beads.

So the powers of the Inquisition were, in Venice, restrained and restricted. There was no Spanish or Roman fervour. The Venetians insisted that, on the tribunal, three secular judges should act as a balance against three ecclesiastics. It was established in the city in 1547 but typically, in a city known for its superstition, the principal objects of its enquiries were women accused of witchcraft. The testimonials of these trials reveal an informal, and almost relaxed, mode of interrogation. The Venetian authorities had a tendency to record the most trivial details. So we can hear the people again—“and as she said these things, she was crying …” “Oh, he said, there’s one thing I’ve forgotten to say …” “As he did not know how to reply, he kept silence for the length of one miserere.”

It cannot be assumed that the Venetians were necessarily genial judges. It is simply evidence of the fact there was already in the city a well-attested culture of civic denunciation. Venetian citizens were used to being accused by one another. But harsh punishment was rare. There were few executions for heresy, in comparison with other Catholic states, and there was little use of torture. Those women who were convicted of witchcraft were commonly sentenced to a period in the pillory.

The Venetian Church was capable of independent power because its authority was firmly based upon the will of the people. The priests were elected by the property owners of each of the seventy parishes. It was a relatively democratic system that demonstrates how indissolubly religion and society were mingled, reminiscent of the procedures of the early Christians. It has been estimated that one quarter of the priests of Venice were of patrician status, but this must mean that the overwhelming majority of the approximately six hundred clergy were ordinary citizens or even perhaps from the popolani. The word for parish priest in Venetian dialect, pievano, is derived from the Latin word plebs. So the unique role of the priest in the parish may ultimately spring from the earliest democratic societies of those who came first to the lagoon. It certainly helps to explain the rootedness and strength of Venetian popular devotion. The priests acted at every level of the parish. They took on the role of notaries, drawing up wills and marriage contracts; they were financiers, arranging the wages and costs of their churches; they were arbiters in social disputes. The priest could also act as a lawyer, or as an accountant.

Their parishioners were undoubtedly the most superstitious in Italy. The transcripts of the witch trials themselves reveal the intense credulity of the people. It was a city of omens and of prophecies. In 1499 the senate consulted an oracle known as “the spirit of Ferrara,” asking such questions as “Are we to have war or peace with Milan?” and “Shall we lose Pisa?” In 1506 the doge and the council of ten were informed of the birth of a winged and hairy monster. In 1513 the council of ten deliberated on the warnings of an astrologer. There were many superstitions and superstitious practices. It was good to die on a Saturday. If it rained on the bier of the departed, the soul would be saved. It was unwise to walk between the two columns in the piazzetta; misfortune would surely follow you. A guest who crumples a napkin at dinner will never come to that table again. If the clock strikes the hour when you are asking the time, you have heard the knell of your own death. The first person whom you meet on New Year’s Day holds the clue to your fortunes; a humpback is a sign of good fortune, a lame person is an omen of bad luck. These superstitions, and many others like them, were still current in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The witchcraft of Venice was different from that of the mainland. It was the witchcraft of a tightly knit urban and mercantile society open to all the superstitions of the East as well as of the West. It was said that it was the delight of witches to unchain the gondolas, by night, and set sail to Alexandria. When the hair of children was cut, their mothers used carefully to gather it up in case it fell into the hands of the hags. You could recognise those who had been cursed by witch or demon. Their faces had the colour of green fruit, and their eyes were narrowed. Those who fell under a curse experienced a range of unpleasant symptoms: some felt as if dogs were devouring their flesh, or that a mouthful of food had stuck in the throat, or that their bodies were invaded by a freezing wind. Storms at sea were blamed upon the agency of fiends, which is why Saint Mark, and the other saints, stood guard by the side of the lagoon.

Yet the witches were also part of the religious culture of the city. They invoked the Virgin and the saints. One notorious witch, known as Apollonia, told the Inquisition that she prayed “in the name of God and the Virgin Mary, who puts her hands before mine.” To stop a bleeding nose it was necessary to recite a ritual formula—“Blood stay strong, as Messer [Lord] Jesus Christ stayed strong in his death. Blood stay in your vein, as Messer Jesus stayed in his passion.” One of Casanova’s earliest memories concerned a nosebleed. His grandmother immediately took him in a gondola to a witch on the island of Murano, where he was promptly cured. It is an indication of Catholic folk culture with very ancient roots. It survived in Venice.

The key to Venetian witchery, however, lies in the acquisition of money. It was a culture in which scholarly necromancy was used to find hidden treasure. The discovery of treasure was a Venetian preoccupation. The pursuit of magical gold recurs again and again in the records of the Inquisition. One patrician had secretly imparted to friends that he knew of a huge mass of gold, guarded by spirits, in a deep cavern. It is as good as a fairy tale, suited to Venetian ingenuity and credulity. Alchemists were always welcomed in Venice; the prospect of turning base metals into gold was too alluring to resist. At the end of the sixteenth century there was a famous Venetian alchemist, Giambattista Angello, living in London.

And of course the spirit of commerce was also present in dealings with the supernatural powers. The devil had always to be paid for his services, for example, with salt or with a coin. The transaction had to be seen to be fair on both sides. Magic could be used for political purposes. There were many cases when the devil was summoned to reveal the names of those who would be successful in the election to the great council. Gamblers used spells and symbols. It was a culture, also, in which love potions flourished. One such potion was sage mingled with menstrual blood; when it was mixed with the food and drink of a male, he became irresistibly attracted to the woman who had dispensed it to him. Where people are packed so closely together, the passions may run high.

More than any other place in Italy, Venice was a harbour for ghosts. There are few other Italian cities where ghost stories are part of cultural tradition. Yet by the eighteenth century the city had become the setting for wraiths and phantoms, continued in a book such as Alberto Toso Fei’s Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories published in 2004. In a real sense Venice was haunted by its past. It wanted to keep hold of its past. What better way to express it than to see ghosts in the corners? It was said that, on the vigil of All Souls, the dead left their resting places on the cemetery island of S. Michele and crossed the lagoon into the city. Each spirit visitant then returned to his or her home, and sat invisible by the kitchen fire. How did you see a ghost? Only those whose baptismal rites had been interrupted, or improperly conducted, possessed that ability. The lure of money, to the Venetians, was also to be found in the spirit world. The most frequent type of ghost was one who had concealed its treasure before death.

Some of the grander houses were reputed to be haunted. Certain passages of water were avoided. There are stories of shrieking skulls, of statues coming alive, of strange creatures of the deep. The Venetians have always loved the bizarre and the fantastic. Living on water opens the mind to the supernatural and to unconscious association. From this watery and uterine landscape, strange shapes will emerge representing the dreams or nightmares of humankind. Hence in Venice the intense fear of magic.