Venice: Pure City

34 The Map Unrolls

There are many maps of Venice, not all of them very reliable. It must be one of the most mapped cities in the world, and yet in a sense it is unmappable. The calli are too labyrinthine, the connections are too circuitous. There are just too many alleys and passageways to be set down on paper. The city does not in any case exist on one level, but on the canals, along the bridges, beside the first-floor windows. An all too familiar sight is that of tourists brandishing maps and looking up vainly at the names of streets and bridges. They may find themselves somewhere that is “not there.” It is impossible for the stranger not to get lost in Venice. Cities of the mind, in any case, cannot be found on any map.

The first surviving map of Venice, where the eventual shape of the city can clearly be seen, was produced in the early twelfth century. The most famous map, however, remains Jacopo de’ Barbari’s “bird’s-eye view” of 1500. This was the map that created the image of Venice as significant form. Its detail was unparalleled, its execution unrivalled. Yet it was a symbolic, rather than naturalistic, representation. It imparted a form of sacred geometry and in the process emphasised the role of artifice in the creation of the city. Mercury, sitting on a cloud above the city with the axis of the Rialto market and the basilica of Saint Mark directly beneath him, announces that “I Mercury shine favourably upon this above all other markets.” Neptune gazes at him from the waters of the lagoon, declaring that “I Neptune reside here, smoothing the waters of this port.” The city itself takes the form of a dolphin disporting on the waves. It is also deserted, lending credence to the belief that Venice was more important than any of its passing inhabitants. They were merely the shadows upon its walls. The map was of course useless for any practical purpose. As another fifteenth-century Venetian cartographer, Fra Mauro, put it, “my map … was only one version of reality. It would only be of any use if it were employed as an instrument of the imagination. It occurred to me that the world itself should be seen as an elaborate artifice, and the expression of a will without end.”

Many Venetian maps were also an expression of the city’s mercantile interests. They were designed not simply to outline the trading routes to Cathay or Trebizond, but to facilitate the passage of trade in places where no one from the city had ever traded before. There was much competition, for example, to find a sea route to the spices of the Indies. On the back wall of the loggia beside the Rialto market were frescoes composing a mappamundi; in the loggia itself was kept a copy of The Travels of Marco Polo.

The Venetians were expert, and famous, cartographers. They were looking for fixity, and certainty, in their watery world. It is easy to understand their obsession in a city where map and reality rarely meet. Map-making represents the desire for order and control. It is another aspect of the all-observing government. The Venetian authorities, for example, commissioned many detailed maps on all aspects of the provinces on the mainland under their dominion. It was perhaps in this spirit of conquest that a Venetian cartographer wrote the first essay on landscape painting. There were no landscapes in Venice. Landscapes could only be created out of colonised territory. In 1448 another Venetian map-maker, Andrea Bianco, first intimated the existence of the Americas by drawing an “island” in the approximate position of Brazil. A Venetian, Giovanni Contarini, executed the first accurate map of Africa at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Maps of the world covered the walls of the houses of the prominent merchants and patricians. The apartments of the ducal palace were decorated with maps that outlined the trading routes of Venice across the known world. In a painting of the mid-eighteenth century by Pietro Longhi, “The Geography Lesson,” a fashionable patrician lady consults a globe with a pair of compasses in her right hand; an open atlas lies at her feet. Fra Mauro himself, a Benedictine monk from Murano, created a famous mappamundi complete with symbolic detail and scriptural reference. He declared that he had created it “for the meditation of the illustrious rulers” of the city. By the middle of the fifteenth century there was a workshop in Venice devoted wholly to the production of maps. The Venetian map-makers were particularly renowned for their portolano charts, maps of coastlines designed specifically for the use of sailors. In 1648 there was established in Venice an Academy of the Argonauts that specialised in the publication of maps and globes.

It is no wonder, therefore, that a copy of The Travels of Marco Polo was kept in the Rialto. Polo is the most famous of all Venetians, with the possible exception of Casanova, and he is the most famous of all travellers. His was in one sense a typical Venetian business story. He was part of a trading family. There were once two brothers, born in the Venetian parish of S. Giovanni Grisostomo, who were at the head of a mercantile house in Constantinople; it was a branch of their family business. They were patricians but, in Venice, patricians thrived on trade.

In 1260 Niccolò and Matteo Polo, at a time of great turmoil in the Byzantine city, decided to travel east in order to find new markets. They took with them a stock of jewels, well hidden in their clothes, and began a long journey into Central Asia. They made their way to the city of Bukhara, in the region now known as Uzbekistan, where wars and rumours of war delayed their progress for almost three years. It was their good fortune, however, to become acquainted with some envoys on their way to the court of the Great Khan, “the lord of all the Tartars in the world.” It was not an opportunity to be missed. So they travelled to the city of Kublai Khan. The emperor was courteous and inquisitive; he questioned them closely about the laws and customs of their society. At the end of their stay in Peking, he entrusted them with a message for the pope and requested them to return to him with oil taken from the lamps that burned before the sepulchre of Christ in Jerusalem.

It took them another three and a half years to make their way back to Venice. They had not seen their city for fifteen years and, on their return, Niccolò Polo found in the household a son who was now sixteen. He had been named after the guardian saint of Venice. Eventually they received letters of papal blessing and privilege from the new pope, Gregory X, and were able to take a phial of the precious oil. Then they returned to the court of Kublai Khan, with young Marco Polo as part of their company. Once more their journey lasted for three and a half years. Yet the most intriguing part is yet to tell. Twenty-four years later, three strangers arrived in the parish of S. Giovanni Grisostomo. They wore coats of coarse wool like Tartar warriors. They had long hair and long beards, their skin harshly burned with long exposure. Marco Polo, together with his father and uncle, had finally returned home.

They were not recognised as members of the Ca’ Polo. They spoke a barbarous Venetian. They would very likely have been removed from the parish as imposters. Then Marco put the matter to the proof. He took the three coats of homespun wool, and ripped them open. Sewn within them were multitudes of precious jewels—rubies, sapphires, diamonds, emeralds—that they had acquired through the generosity of the Great Khan. The Venetians were of course instantly convinced by this lavish display of wealth and, according to the chronicler, received the travellers “with the greatest honour and reverence.” Marco Polo became known as Marco Millione, and the courtyard of his house became known as the Corte Millione. Recent excavations on the site of his family house have revealed the laying of new foundations that date from the time of Polo’s return; his money did not remain in jewels.

The world knows that the story does not stop there. Marco was a great patriot and at his own expense fitted out a galley for the war against the Genoese. At the battle of Curzola, in September 1298, Polo was captured and taken. He was incarcerated in a Genoese gaol, where he lay for about a year. During that time he became known for his fabulous stories of distant lands. And he found an amanuensis. An old man from Pisa, known as Rusticiano, took down his narrative in a curious antique French borrowed from the romances. The written account has all the marks of verbal delivery—“this is enough upon that matter, now I will tell you of something else,” “now let us leave the nation of Mosul and I will tell you about the great city of Baldoc,” “but first I must tell you.…”

The manuscript was copied. It began to spread. But after his imprisonment Marco Polo returned to a quiet and obscure life in his native city, engaged in nothing more than the usual commercial routine. He presented one copy of his book to a visiting French knight, but there is no record of any other connection with the work that has made him immortal. He died in 1323, at the age of sixty-nine. On his deathbed he declared that he had not told half of the things that he had seen. It was once believed that his stories were just that—stories—but in recent years it has become more and more evident that he was in fact giving a true record of the nations and cities through which he travelled. He was practical and prudent, clear-headed and with an eye for detail. He also has an almost child-like energy and curiosity that permitted him to survive many years of wandering among bewilderingly strange peoples. He was very much a Venetian. We might almost deem him to be a Venetian hero, except that the city detested heroic individuals as a threat to the well-being of the state.

From the narrative of his travels it is clear that Polo journeyed across the whole longitude of Asia on behalf of Kublai Khan, eager to know the details of his empire. Only a Venetian, perhaps, could have carried out such a mission. He was the first traveller to reveal the wealth and greatness of China, to describe the steppes of Mongolia and the fastness of Tibet; he wrote of Burma and of Siam, of Java and of India; he expatiates on the sorcerers of Pashai and the idolaters of Kashmir; he narrates the battle between Genghis Khan and Prester John.

His was in many respects a miraculous journey, but Polo was really following a Venetian tradition. Diplomats and other officials were required to give detailed written reports or relazioni of the foreign cities they had visited. Polo’s book was in part intended to provide the Venetians with an object lesson in good governance. It could be said in fact that, a few years after the traveller’s return, the Venetian government did introduce some of the principles if not the details of the Mongol system. They were following the precepts of the Great Khan, the Great Lord of Lords, whom Polo describes as “the most potent man, as regards forces and lands and treasure, that exists in the world, or ever has existed from the time of our first father Adam until this day.”

The merchants of Venice, too, needed precise relation of the conditions of local societies and local economies. What were their needs? What could they sell? Just as they were trained to appraise goods with an objective eye, so they were keenly observant of local conditions. They needed, above all else, information. It is appropriate, then, that Polo particularly observed the trade in all the cities that he visited. Of the city of Kubenan, in Persia, he wrote that “there is much iron and steel and ondanique, and they make steel mirrors of great size and beauty.” Once he had described how people earn their livings he would often add that “there is nothing else worth mentioning.”

The Venetian patricians were professional travellers, predominantly in their role as merchants. Unlike their contemporaries in Florence or in Hamburg, they could not survive without accurate knowledge of the coasts and seas. So the spirit of travel was always part of Venetian consciousness. How could it not be, when the city faced outwards to the Adriatic and the Mediterranean? By the ninth century Venetian traders had visited Egypt, the Euxine region and the sea of Azov. In the early fifteenth century there was a Venetian serving as a knight in Denmark. A century later a Venetian shipbuilder was prospering in the yards of Elefante in India.

There are travellers’ tales of Greenland and of Tartary. Pietro Querini sailed into the Arctic Ocean in 1432; forty years later, Giosafatte Barbaro touched the shores of the Caspian Sea. When John Cabot (a citizen of Venice by choice and state decree) made landfall in the New World, he planted the flag of Saint Mark beside the English standard. It is worth mentioning, perhaps, that Sebastian Cabot was born in Venice; he went on to discover Labrador in 1498, and was to be found in the lower reaches of the Rio della Plata in 1526. In the middle of the fifteenth century a young Venetian patrician, Alvise da Mosto, travelled to Senegal and discovered the Cape Verde islands. He wrote down the details of his journeys, in true Venetian fashion, since he was “the first that from the most noble city of Venice have set forth to sail the Ocean beyond the straits of Gibraltar towards the south, to the land of the Negroes.…” He was first and foremost a trader, however, exchanging horses and wool and silk for slaves and parrots.

The object of the Venetian travellers was to achieve both profit and honour; social authority and esteem were derived from commercial wealth, and these journeys of discovery were designed to acquire all of them. That is why many merchants kept journals of their progress. It was a way of confirming their exploits, and their diaries acted as memorials for the family business. The first travellers’ accounts were published at Venice in the fifteenth century. In 1543 was issued an anthology of travel writing entitled Journeys from Venice to Tana, Persia, India and Constantinople. The first steps were taken from the city of the lagoon.

Maps transcribe frontiers. Venice was always a frontier. It was called “the hinge of Europe.” It has the essence of a boundary—a liminal space—in all of its dealings. It is a perpetual threshold. It is half land and half sea. It is the middle place between the ancient imperial cities of Rome and Byzantium. It was the place where Italy mingled with the Orient, and where in more general terms Europe mingled with Africa. It was the place to take ship for the Levant and leave behind the world of Christendom. That is why some considered it to be the sacred mission of Venice to unite western Christendom to the rest of the world—to the Greek Christians of the Bosphorus as well as to the adherents of Islam and Hinduism.

Goethe described it as “the market-place of the Morning and Evening lands” by which he meant that the city, poised between west and east, is the median point of the rising and the setting suns. When the empire was divided in the time of Charlemagne the lagoons of Venice were ascribed neither to the west nor to the east; according to the Venetian historian, Bernardo Giustiniani, they were left “inviolate and intact almost as certain holy places.” He went on to say that “these places were left as kinds of boundaries between both emperors.” In the medieval period the postal service provided by Venetian galleys was the only means of communication between the courts of Germany and of Constantinople. The first images of the Muslim world came from Venice.

It was a frontier, too, between the sacred and the profane. The public spaces of the city were liminal areas between piety and patriotism. The boundaries between past and present were ill-defined, just as the boundaries between private and public were endlessly transgressed. This was the place where Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Christians, Turks and Europeans, Roman and Orthodox, all met and mingled. All the civilisations that made up the Mediterranean—Graeco-Roman, Muslim, Judaic and Christian—found a focus in Venice. It was said of Venetian painters of the fifteenth century that they had effected a synthesis between the Tuscan and Flemish styles of art. The city was the doorway between the cold north and the warm south, first fashioned for trade but then a means of access for the general business of life that flowed across Europe.

Venice in every sense represented cultural and social heterogeneity. By some it was considered to be Oriental, with the basilica of Saint Mark as the very model of a mosque and the Rialto as a souk. That was why the city was so distrusted by other European nations. It contained within itself intimations of “the Other.” It is pertinent and suggestive that the Arabic words that penetrated the Venetian dialect are largely concerned with trade—so we have zecca (mint) and doana (customs house) and tarifa—or concerned with luxuries such as “sofa” and “divan” and “caravanserai.” “Alas Venetian race,” Pius II wrote in 1458, “how much of your ancient character have you lost! Too much intercourse with the Turks has made you the friend of the Mohammedans.” The façade of the ducal palace, facing the lagoon, is Muslim in inspiration. There are in fact borrowings and adaptations—of Islamic architecture and Islamic art—throughout the city. Even the Venetian colours, ultramarine blue and gold, are derived from the Middle East. The trade routes, the organised seagoing caravans, even the craft guilds, of Venice were Muslim in origin. There was a genuine sympathy with, and admiration for, Islamic civilisation that was not unconnected with distaste for papal pomp. In the paintings of Carpaccio, for example, Venetian interiors are shown to be decorated with objects of eastern provenance; the throne of the Virgin in Gentile Bellini’s “Virgin and Child Enthroned” is placed carefully on a Turkish carpet or prayer rug.

Venice was in many respects akin to Byzantium. It borrowed both concepts and practices from the ancient city, to the rule of which it had once submitted. It was even known as the second Constantinople. It was a hierarchical, rather than a feudal, society. The influence of Byzantine civilisation was noticeable in the way that the young girls of Venice were kept secluded, and in the custom of separating men and women at church services; it can be seen, too, in the stiffness and pomp of the religious ceremonies where the rituals and relics of the Byzantine Church are to be found in abundance. There is something Oriental, too, about the stateliness and symbolism of Venetian political life with its elaborate bureaucratic machinery and its solemn practices of election. Was the doge not also a form of emperor? He could be seen in a similarly sacred light. In Holy Week the doge impersonated the last days of Christ. This was also the role of the Byzantine emperor.

The basilica of Saint Mark was based upon the model of the Apostoleion in Constantinople. The chroniclers of Venice also report that the church was the work of an architect from that city, but the claim is disputed. There seems to be no doubt, however, that there were Muslim artisans resident at the time. The religious polity of Venice, with its notion of a state Church, is based upon Byzantine example; the head of that Church was known as the patriarch, as at Constantinople.

There are many other derivations. The notion of the Arsenal, an arms manufactory funded by the government, is taken from Byzantine practice. The long black cloak, worn by the male patricians of the city, is taken from the model of the Byzantine kaftan. The ritual scattering of coins to the people, on the occasion of the election of the doge, is a practice borrowed from the eastern emperors. The art of keeping detailed records is surely derived from the early experience of Byzantine bureaucracy. The word itself—“Byzantine”—has become a synonym for excessive detail. In Venice, too, everything was committed to writing. When Venetian males grew beards, at times of national or personal sorrow, they were following their eastern contemporaries. The love of puppets and of puppet theatre has an ancient ancestry. Of course Italians in general have long maintained a tradition of puppetry and mask theatre, but Venetians acquired their love of puppets from the more spectral tradition of Byzantium that emphasises the melancholy aspect of the inanimate doll until human desire gives it breath.

35 The Huddled Family

Until very recent times there was always a sense of brotherhood among the people of Venice. It was the merest cliché to state that they all represented one family. Everyone noticed it. It manifested itself in an air of sociability. The popolani were the “children” of the republic, and the male patricians were their fathers; Goethe described the doge as “the grandfather of the race.” The provision of public health care, and the foundation of orphanages for fatherless children, testify to the fact that the state considered itself to be in essence one extended family. The governors of these institutions strove to create little families within the larger family. This was the Venetian way.

The degree of harmony can be overstated; there were the usual disputes and enmities that occur in any enclosed community. The Venetians were not saints. But there was none of that raucous disharmony or that partisan rancour that affected cities such as Genoa and Florence. The affections and attitudes of the people were confined within a small and insular space; it was natural and inevitable that social life would take a familial tone. The topography of the city was seen as an immense family house. James described it as a collective apartment, and remarked upon “the splendid common domicile, familiar, domestic and resonant.” It is said that Napoleon coined the description of Saint Mark’s Square as the finest drawing room in Europe. This was a family, however, that could never leave the house.

The family was itself the defining social force of Venetian society. Political and commercial alliances were built upon the foundation of family life. The phrase, l’honorevolezza della casa, the honour of the house, was often used and quoted. The success or failure of a political career depended in large part upon the influence of the patrician’s family. The same names—Vendramin, Barbo, Zen, Foscari, and Dandolo among them—appear through centuries of Venetian history. They are far more enduring than the Bacons or the Cecils. The great council was essentially a meeting of families, tied together by sets of obligations and responsibilities; it was temperamentally a place of accommodation and compromise, therefore, rather than a partisan assembly. It was not an arena for the display of principle or ideology. Individual families were not able to form factions, or excessively influence the results of elections; they survived on the foundation of mutual dependence.

In law the Venetian authorities considered the entire family to be responsible for the misdeeds of an individual member of the household. The anonymous compiler of the Cronica Venetiarum, in the middle of the fourteenth century, described particular families just as if they were individuals with certain habits and characteristics; the Dandolos were “audacious,” whereas the Barberini were “senseless … sporting themselves throughout the world.” It was said that there never had been a rich Barbo, a poor Mocenigo, or a compassionate Erizzo. The same surname will occur among lists of the senate, of the episcopal authorities, of the great traders. There was an obsession in Venice with genealogy, and in the fifteenth century Libri d’Oro or Golden Books were instituted to record patrician marriages and births.

The major agent of business in the city was the fraterna or family collective. Its ledgers would comprise household accounts and business accounts as part of the same equation. Brothers who lived together were treated as business partners unless they formally dissolved their association; family businesses were considered to be more efficient and more responsive. Fathers and sons, according to one patrician, worked for each other “with more love, more honour, more profit and less expense.” Certainly the “overheads” could be cut. There were many more bachelors in Venetian society than anywhere else in Italy. In the fifteenth century, for example, more than half the adult male patricians of the city remained single. When they died they left their property to the married brother’s children, thus keeping the business in the immediate family.

The household itself was considered to be an image of the state. It was an institution in which the individual will was obliged to submit itself to the collective decision. The husband held an impersonal authority; the wife was meant simply to breed; the children were ordained to silence and obedience. Masters and servants were bound together in a tight context of control. Without the family, there would be no state; without the state, there would be no family. The ideal of familial harmony was, therefore, very strong. The statutes of the building commissioners of Venice invoked “love and fruitful happiness between … good neighbours and dear friends.” The members of the confraternity of S. Giovanni Evangelista desired grace “through love of brotherhood,” while the stonecutters worked for “the good and welfare of all.”

We may compare the people of Venice, therefore, to the bees working together in their hives of gold. Bees are obedient to the general purpose of the hive. They compete, but they do not struggle. They are tireless in their work, but there is no obvious coercion exercised upon them other than the search for the common good. There are no civil wars. In The Feminine Monarchy or the History of the Bees, published in 1609, Charles Butler named certain characteristics of the bees; they were profitable, laborious, loyal, swift, nimble, bold, and cunning. All of those qualities have also been ascribed to the Venetian people. Pliny the Elder remarked that bees are bee-like because “they recognise only what is in the common interest.” That is also the key to the understanding of Venetian society. We may also adduce the nature of Venice from Bee Wilson’s The Hive, in which she states that the beehive “is a place where the world of nature and the world of artifice collapse into each other, which is why it is so mysterious.” This is also the mystery of the city.

What is that common good for which the people of Venice strive? It might be called the necessity of survival itself, the continuation of being. There need be no other goal than the maintenance and preservation of life itself. It is primordial, manifest in the cry of a child and the gasp of a dying man. “On one point alone is there agreement,” the Spanish ambassador wrote of Venetian government in the early seventeenth century, “and that is the perpetuation of ruling.” All the other motives for human action—wealth, power, glory—are subordinate to this central need. It is a principle of interrelation or interaction, based upon organic force rather than mechanical power. It is the flow of connected purposive activities that is the history of Venice. In history of course we trace separate events, and attempt to designate “causes” to them. But the central cause is beyond reach. It is part of the inner being of things. Instead we may glimpse only a network of relations, more important and more fundamental than the events or objects that are related.

The common good embodied the communal will and the communal sensitivity. Every individual was supposed to subordinate his or her interests to those of the state. If it is possible for proto-capitalism also to be a form of proto-communism, then Venice represents that condition. But these terms may be anachronistic. It may be better to subsume them within the context of the medieval collective, and with the notion of the city as a human organism created in the image of God. “Capitalism” and “communism” then become instruments of the instinctive need to battle and to survive. It was said that in a republic such as Venice, unlike a dukedom or kingdom, the common good took precedence over the role and will of individuals. The nature of the republic lies in a legal and institutional process, not in power or in personality. There was no single focus of power in Venice. It was a pluralistic force. There were no despots in the whole course of Venetian history. The city itself was always pre-eminent.

The idea of the family manifests itself in four different instincts or beliefs. The territory of the city is deemed to be a common heritage; the government of the city represents a sacred covenant; the origin of the city is to be found in family or clan; the piety of the city lies in the respect for forefathers. The citizens of Venice were born into a setting of human interdependence and natural need. This is perhaps the condition of life itself. Social life is man’s state of nature. There is no need to posit some Rousseau-esque social contract. This was also the insight vouchsafed to George Eliot who, on observing sunset in the Venetian lagoon, remarked that “it is the sort of scene in which I could most readily forget my own existence, and feel melted into the general life.”

The goals were unanimity and solidarity. The major projects of Venetian trade, for example, were collective endeavours whereby groups of merchants bound themselves together in formal treaty for the carriage of goods. The government itself took responsibility for the largest galleys. The people of Venice found their meaning in the network of guilds and parishes and scuole that formed the social life of the city. There were endless committees and councils and boards of control.

The equality of the Venetian people themselves is a matter of argument. The division of the populace into patricians, citizens and popolani might suggest that there was indeed a hierarchy of social position and social responsibility. But there is also no doubt that there were levelling tendencies at work within the Venetian polity. As early as the sixth century Cassiodorus, the Ostrogothic leader, remarked to the Venetians that “among you there is no difference between rich and poor; your food is the same, your houses are all alike.” According to tradition all the houses in the city had once been of the same height. When in the eleventh century two or three old families tried to create ruling dynasties they were rebuffed by the patriciate who said that “we did not come here to live under a lord.”

There is in fact a broad equality among merchants. Money knows no class or barrier. So Thomas Coryat noted that “their Gentlemen and greatest Senators, a man worth perhaps two millions of duckats, will come into the market, and buy their flesh, fruites, and such other things as are necessary for the maintenance of their families.” The streets of the city, and the narrowness of its bounds, meant that there was a constant mixing and mingling of classes. As merchants, too, the patricians could not divorce themselves from the common life. That is why the lowest floors of the grander houses were often let out for shops and warehouses. The laws of Venice prohibited displays of ostentatious extravagance. But frugality, or what was known as mediocritas, was in any case a Venetian instinct; many wills stipulate that the person is to be buried “with as little pomp as possible.” And then there is the natural environment. Water is a great leveller. It has been remarked, for example, that the River Thames is a great haven of social equality. On water all are at an equal level.

So there was a pronounced cordiality among all the people of Venice. An English aristocrat of the eighteenth century observed that “there is a universal politeness here in every rank; the people expect a civil deportment from their nobles towards them; and they return it with much respect and veneration; but should a noble assume an insolent arrogant manner towards his inferior, it would not be borne with.” They were all in it together. In the comedies of Goldoni servants often lose their tempers with masters. And masters never, ever, strike their servants. There were some who deplored this freedom of manners. In a dialogue entitled Discorsi Morali, of the late sixteenth century, a speaker remarked that in Venice “servants are licentious, dissolute, vicious and disrespectful” whereas those who attended princely courts were “good, loyal, sincere and well-mannered.”

There was a stated belief, then, in the concept of “freedom,” manifested in the original notion of a state that was not the servant of princes. The myth of communalism, when in reality the refugees had fled under the leadership of bishops or local lords, was very strong. For the government, freedom did not consist of private liberty, but of freedom from interference by other states.

From at least the fourteenth century, Venice offered visitors and strangers the luxury of liberty of belief. That is why it was seen as an open city, accommodating Calvinists and Anabaptists as well as Greek Orthodox and Muslims and Jews. Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade. “Because I am a man born in a free city,” one senator told his colleagues, “I will freely express my feelings.” It is not a sentence that could have been uttered in many places at the beginning of the sixteenth century. At the end of the seventeenth century, too, a French chronicler wrote that “The Liberty of Venice makes every thing Authentick, for whatsoever the Life is, or Religion one Professes, provided you do not Talk, or Attempt anything against the State, or the Nobility, one may be sure to Live unmolested, for no Body will go about to Censure their Conduct, or to oppose the Disorders of their Neighbours.”

That is the reason why this freedom of conscience migrated into freedom of behaviour. It has always been a feature of the city, and in the fourteenth century Petrarch had condemned the “foul language and excessive licence” of the Venetians. But it became the defining feature of the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Venice became known for what would now be called “permissiveness,” and it was soon remarked that personal liberty was not incompatible with ordered government. This was a revelation to the rest of the world. English tourists often contrasted the atmosphere of Venice with that of London, in which city the major occupation consisted in censuring the behaviour of other people. Nothing of the kind ever happened in the city of the lagoon. There was method, however, behind the emollient atmosphere. Freedom prompted visitors into spending more and more money. There was another kind of liberty. In Venice you could leave your past and acquire a new identity.

It has often been remarked that there are very few biographies or autobiographies in Venetian literature. The individual is indeed absent in Venetian life. The children of the patrician class were taught at an early age that they must not strive to stand above their fellows. It was said that the Venetians never forgave failure by their admirals or commanders but, similarly, they never forgave success. Individual glory might imperil that of the city.

The predominant mode of portraiture in Venice was group portraiture; it has in fact been suggested that the collective portrait first emerged in the city. The great nineteenth-century historian of Venice, Pompeo Molmenti, remarked that “in Venetian painting the individual is lost in the joyous throng.” Tintoretto, for example, was fascinated by the movement and orchestration of crowds; he was rarely interested in the depiction of individual human beings, who are subordinate to the overall rhythm and unity of the composition in much the same way as the Venetian people are part of the rhythm of the state. In the paintings of Carpaccio there are always groups of people exchanging pleasantries and engaging in gossip. They are never arguing. There is never a sense that they could change anything about their lives. That is the nature of Venetian society. Venice was always a place for crowds rather than for solitary wanderers; the most common sight, in the twenty-first century, is of groups of tourists. If the individual is depicted by the Venetian portraitist he (and it is almost always he) is shown in his social and political role. There is no trace of the inner life and no attempt at psychological revelation. There is instead a careful anonymity. The expression is characteristically remote or aloof. The note is one of reserve and decorum, what was known in Venice as decoro. The individual is less important than the rank or class of that individual; the sitter is seen to be absorbed by his role in the state. It is almost invariably the case that the hands are concealed.

It is hard, therefore, to praise the famous men and women of Venice. There were great artists, but there were no great individuals such as Lorenzo de’ Medici or Pope Julius II. In literature, as well as history, Venetians were not individualised. They were not well known for their eccentricities or for their triumphs. The comedies of Goldoni are the comedies of ordinary life; they are filled with the poetry of domestic fact and local intrigue, not the exploits or adventures or sensibilities of outstanding individuals or aberrant types. They reflect a benign social order. The people of Venice were always known for their docility. They might have been easily aroused to private passion, but they were always respectful to the authorities.

Burckhardt could never have written of Venice, as he once wrote of Florence, that “the individual was led to make the utmost of the exercise and enjoyment of power” and that the leaders of the people “acquired so marked a personal character.” None of the doges or governors of Venice ever had a “personal character.” The city had never been and could never have been a feudal state; feudalism was a system that sanctioned and maintained individual lordship. Machiavelli observed that the security and happiness of the city derived from the fact that, unlike any other state, its gentlemen did not have castles, or private armies, or retainers. Venice was “a great reputable work of joint human endeavour,” Goethe wrote, “a splendid monument, not of a master, but of a people.”

This was a matter of congratulation to the people themselves. Gasparo Contarini, in his book on the state and government of Venice published in 1547, remarked that “our ancestors, from whom we received so prosperous a commonwealth, all came together to maintain, honour and increase their country without any thought of personal glory or advantage.” They remained anonymous in life and in death; their only memorial was the state itself. “Though these Venetian gentlemen are extraordinary wise when they are conjunct,” James Howell wrote in the seventeenth century, “take them single they are but as other Men.” The secret lay in their cohesiveness, one to another. Outside this context, these patricians had no identity; their private selves were taken up by their political selves. They were nothing without the state. With no “great men” Venice represents Tolstoy’s dictum that human history is governed by a million different chances and interests, bound together by what can only be called a communal instinct. Each period is an unveiling of that instinct. The author is truly overwhelmed by the complexity of this process.

36 Moon and Night

The night and silence of Venice are profound. Moonlight can flood Saint Mark’s Square. Venice is most characteristic at night. It has a quality of stillness that suits the mood of time preserved. Then it is haunted by what it loves—itself. The doorways seem darker than in any other city, lapped as they are by the black water. The little lamps still flicker before the statues of the Virgin on the corners of the calli. There are many kinds of night in Venice—the capacious blue of the summer night, and the fierce blackness of the winter night. The modern Venetians rarely seem to go out at night. There are no drunkards roaming through the street in the hours of the early morning. There are no raucous shouts. One contemporary acoustics engineer has measured the level of nocturnal sound in Venice at thirty-two decibels; the night of other cities is approximately thirteen decibels louder. There is no “background” noise.

In the second half of the thirteenth century a government agency was established known as the signori di notte or lords of the night who were obliged to safeguard public order under cover of darkness. The Venetian night seems to have been an object of suspicion. It contained the horror of unseen water, deep and dark, and of winding labyrinthine alleys. It is the time of assault and of subversion. The night was the time for the spy or the assassin. Night was the opportunity for secret groups, or even for the writing of graffiti on the walls of the city against the lawful government. For a city that prided itself upon its rational order and control, the night was an especial enemy. In decrees it was announced that there were many pericula or dangers in the night; there was always the risk of “disordines et tumultationes” or disorder and riot. Night was chaos. Night was threat. The night of Venice seemed to invoke the original blackness and silence of the lagoon, from which the city rose; the night was the memory of origin.

Yet the ubiquity of the Carnival in later centuries literally lightened the mood. In the eighteenth century the memoirs of Goldoni reveal a little world of night. The shops remained open until ten o’clock in the evening, many of them not finally closing their doors until midnight; at midnight, too, “all the taverns are open, and suppers are in preparation in every inn and hotel.”

What, then, are the sounds of the night? The sound of the footfall echoes through this city of stone. Venice is a good acoustic instrument. There is the occasional chime. There is the sound of water lapping and slapping against stone as part of its everlasting movement. There may be a call upon the water, pure and resonant; still water carries the voice very far. The narrow streets can also act as funnels of sound. Then there is the scarcely discernible sound of the gondola. In the nineteenth century the more romantic travellers noted that there were times when music crept over the waters. Liszt, more perceptively, invoked the “silent noises” of the city; the murmur of the boat floating across the water is one of them.

There are always moments when silence seems to descend upon Venice. “Everywhere,” Dickens wrote in Pictures from Italy, “the same extraordinary silence.” For him it was the enforced silencing of modern life—no carriages, no wheels, no machinery. For many Victorian travellers the charm of Venice lay in its distance from modern industrialised civilisation. Two centuries before, John Evelyn had described Venice as “almost as silent as the middle of a field, there being neither rattling of coaches nor trampling of horses.” Nor noise of cars. You may turn a corner, and come upon an area without sound. No other city still has so many pockets of silence. In Michael Dibdin’s Dead Lagoon, the narrator declares that “such absolute, unqualified silence was troubling, as though some vital life function had ceased.”

There was a dark side of Venice, a side that the night conceals. There were many poor, and many outcasts. Beggars have always been an aspect of Venetian life. In the late fifteenth century the senate discussed the problem of old men, and others, who lay each night in the precincts of the ducal palace. A “home” and a hospital were constructed. But they were not enough. At times of famine, as in the winter of 1527, the poor died against the pillars. Children stood in the market of the Rialto, or in the Square, crying out “I am dying of hunger! I am dying of hunger and cold!” One contemporary recorded that “the city stank with their odour.” This is a measure of the intense confinement of urban living. And of course Venice could produce no food of its own.

In the early seventeenth century a new institution, the Ospedale dei Mendicanti, was erected to clear the streets and squares of the countless vagrants. All beggars in Venice were obliged to obtain a licence, and to lodge at the hospital; unlicensed beggars were expelled, and those who were reported to be too successful in their trade were consigned to the galleys. The owner of an unofficial beggars’ lodging house was whipped all the way from Saint Mark’s Square to the Rialto bridge.

Not all of them, however, found their way into the public haven. Effie Ruskin noted that in the evening “we see them all lying packed together at the edges of bridges, wrapped in their immense brown cloaks and large hoods.” One Venetian patrician, Gasparo Contarini, was not sure if they were citizens of the Venetian republic or stray animals. Some families lived on rickety boats beside the quays. In the nineteenth century the palaces along the canal were converted into tenements, where the poor huddled. No pictorial view of Venice in that century was complete without the appearance of a picturesque vagrant, preferably young and female and pretty.

In the middle of the sixteenth century there were estimated to be six thousand beggars in the city. By the end of the eighteenth century that number had risen to twenty-two thousand. This was perhaps partly a reflection of the reputation of Venice as a centre for travellers; it has always been the case that beggars are more likely to find succour from foreigners. Mrs. Thrale described them as “saucy and airy and odd in their manners.” She also noticed that they were treated by the Venetian people themselves with great softness and courtesy. An account of the Venetian beggars of the sixteenth century records their words. “I made the people think I was a madman.” “I dressed up as a pilgrim and with an image of Saint James in my hand, I covered my face. I made piteous signs and gestures and the rich gave me money.” They showed their wounds, their cancers and their ulcers in the public squares. There were familiar calls for succour. “Pity! Pity!” “I will pray for your life if you throw me a coin.” “Give money for the blessed Virgin.” The beggars came to Venice from many other cities. A list, dating from the summer of 1539, registers them from Milan, Sicily, Pisa and even France. In the twenty-first century, for example, old women and young men are to be found lying bowed on the bridges with their hands outstretched. Venice has been known as the haven for the outcast and the exile in every sense. Why should it not extend that courtesy to the genuinely dispossessed?

There is no dawn chorus of small birds in Venice. Yet as day breaks, the life of the city wakes from its silent slumber. Once more the traveller hears the rising voices, the whistles, the songs, the shouts, the pealing of bells. It is the morning of a human city. There is endless chatter in the air.

37 While the Music Lasts

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, in Ecce Homo, that “when I seek another word for music, I always find only the word Venice.” One evening in the city, in the late nineteenth century, Richard Wagner was being carried home on a gondola across the dark waters; his gondolier plied the oar when suddenly “from his mighty breast came a mournful sound not unlike the howl of an animal, swelling up from a deep, low note, and after a long-sustained ‘Oh!’ it culminated in the simple musical phrase, ‘Venezia’ …” So Venice is the music, while the music lasts.

In a guidebook to Venice, published in 1581, the city is celebrated as the seat of music, la sede di musica. It was the harmonious community, with an unrivalled tradition of sacred and secular music. The ducal orchestra played every day for an hour in Saint Mark’s Square; throughout the centuries, that central space has always been filled with music. There were other street bands, as well as concert halls and choirs. All of the sestieri echoed with the sound of voices and of instruments. On Good Friday the members of each parish—the wine-sellers, the fishermen, the gondoliers—would sing out the long chant of the Twenty-Four Hours. This was nothing to do with church observance. It was the choice of the people themselves. Each guild had its own songs and melodies. There were popular choral societies. There were many accademie, or private societies, where amateur musicians performed. The inventories of middle-class Venetian households reveal the presence of string or keyboard instruments in most of them.

All the public festivities of the city were conducted to the sound of music. There were concert barges, moored in the Grand Canal and elsewhere, performing for the Venetian public and for visitors. An engraving of 1609 shows a host of musical entertainments upon the canal. Concerts were also given by virtuosi in private houses. Musicians were even employed in the gambling houses of the city. And there were always comic ballets at the time of the Carnival. One English traveller noted, in 1770, that “the people are so musical here, that all day long the houses send forth the most melodious sounds, which die off charmingly along the water.” The presence of water invites song and music; there is something about its flow, and the sound of its flow, that elicits other melodies. So we read of “the solemn flow” of Venetian church music.

In the late eighteenth century Charles Burney remarked that the Venetian people seemed to converse in song. The gondoliers were notorious, if that is the word, for singing recitatives taken from the sixteenth-century poetry of Torquato Tasso. Yet these were laments, because the sadness of Venice entered its songs. Goethe has described how the women of the other islands of the lagoon, sitting on the seashore, would sing Tasso to their husbands fishing in the waters; the men would then reply in song, setting up a domestic conversation in music. Tasso was one of Venice’s favourite sons, having lived in the city during his early youth; his father was a member of the Aldine circle.

There were also popular songs, known as vilote, sung by the women as they sat sewing or preparing food. These were often laments of love, concerning hopes and dreams and desires. The vilote were also danced out in the campi to the music of harpsichords. And of course there were the famous Venetian serenades, sung beneath the ubiquitous balconies to the accompaniment of the mandolin or the guitar. It could be said that the Venetians were infatuated with music. They loved love and they loved melody. It is reported that when the Byzantine exarch, Longinus, visited the city of the lagoons in 567 he was almost deafened by the sound of bells and musical instruments waiting to greet him.

So there are records of Venetian music from the earliest periods of its history. In 815 “Priest Giorgio of Venice” became so expert in the art of organ-building that he was said to be guided by “mirifica arte.” Subsequently the organ-builders of Venice became famous throughout Europe. There are records of a singers’ guild in the basilica of Saint Mark’s from the beginning of the fourteenth century. A singing school for males was established there in 1403. Yet essentially the beginning of the sixteenth century initiated the long period when Venetian music took the palm. After the great expansion of its empire had ended, it aspired to other forms of supremacy. Venice was the home of the madrigal, invented in the city. It was the centre of church music. It was the capital of opera. There was scarcely a European composer of note who did not make his way to Venice—Scarlatti, Gluck, Mozart, Wagner, Handel, Mendelssohn, Monteverdi, Stravinsky, all visited the most serene city. Wagner and Monteverdi died there.

The masses in the churches, sustained by music and choir, lasted for many hours. Some passages of that sacred rite, particularly at the gradual and at the elevation of the host, were sustained by instrumental music so that people attended church as if they were visiting the concert hall. Instrumental music was also employed to suggest wordless prayer. What might be private, and intimate, becomes in Venice public and theatrical. The words of the songs for the heroes and heroines of the opera were altered to celebrate the male and female saints of the day; arias could be transformed into oratorios. Churches were in fact designed to be zones of sound. The church of the Incurabili, for example, was constructed as an oval space.

On one occasion in the 1750s five orchestras were deployed in the basilica of Saint Mark’s under the direction of Baldassare Galuppi. In that church, too, there was a tradition of polyphony taken up by two or more choirs singing antiphonally or simultaneously to the accompaniment (if they were needed) of four organs. It was a divine machinery of sound, amplified by the labyrinthine acoustics of the space. It is not at all extraordinary that musical events were held there, on the afternoons of Sundays and of holidays. The nature of these “polychoral” events, in which opposing forces eventually achieve harmony, was uniquely suited to the bias of the Venetian state. The “echo” effects of polychoral music were not inimical, either, to a city of reflections upon water.

The orphan girls in the charitable institutions of the state were given an extensive and elaborate musical training, so that their concerts became the wonder of the age. These institutions, known as ospedali, became in essence musical conservatories where young girls learned how to sing, to play, and to compose new works. They also attracted the maestri of Venice as their instructors. Antonio Vivaldi, for example, was for four decades the musical master of the Ospedale della Pietà. The girls were situated in singing galleries, enclosed by wrought-iron grilles so that their voices and melodies might have come from unseen angelic powers. Charles Burney reported, in the summer of 1770, that “the girls played a thousand tricks in singing, particularly in the duets, where there was a trial of skill and natural powers, as to who could go highest, lowest, swell a note the longest, or run divisions with the greatest rapidity.” Individual girls had their own cabals of admirers. The fact that they were orphaned only contributed to their power. But they were not nuns. Young men came to the ospedali with offers of marriage to those whose voices pleased them best. There was no sound of applause, in the churches of these institutions, but instead the audiences wept and prayed. There are reports of men and women fainting at the intensity of sound. Gondolas were moored in the adjacent canal, or rio, with their passengers straining to hear the sounds from within. Diverse observers, Rousseau and Goethe among them, have testified that these girls ravished and stupefied the senses. “I cannot imagine anything,” Rousseau wrote, “so voluptuous, so touching as this music.” This sensuousness strikes the right Venetian note.

The harmonies of Venice had another aspect. The ancients believed music to be the token of the ordered cosmos. Since Venice was the preeminent exponent of ordered governance in the world, it was only natural that music should emanate from it. It contained the music of the spheres. It partook of heaven and of earth. The gates of paradise had opened in the city. All the various forms of constitution—monarchy, oligarchy and republic—were moulded and mingled together. These were celestial harmonies, imparted by God. Even the merchants of Venice were educated in the rules of proportion, in mercantile textbooks such as The Rule of Three also known as The Golden Rule or The Merchants’ Key. Pythagorean mathematics was an important feature of commerce. The architecture, or architexture, of the city was conceived harmoniously. If it is indeed true that buildings have been raised by the power of music, then the churches and noble houses of Venice have assuredly embodied the melody of the world. The architects of the day studied theories of harmony. In foreign policy the doge and senate strove to maintain a “balance” of powers; they strove for peace, it was said, because peace reflected harmony in every sense.

Just as in a sonata or concerto no one instrument must dominate the others, so in the Venetian state no one interest or authority could be allowed to influence the rest; all was of a piece. No one may rise too high, or fall too low. Nothing was out of proportion. The aim was perfect order. And that, to a large extent, and to the amazement of the rest of the world, was achieved. When the figure of Apollo was carved in a niche of the loggetta at the base of the campanile of Saint Mark’s its sculptor, Jacopo Sansovino, declared that “it is known that this nation takes natural delight in music, and therefore Apollo is represented to signify music … extraordinary harmony perpetuates this admirable government.”

The dances of the city, therefore, have some significance. The diaries of Venetians suggest that there was almost uninterrupted public dancing in the squares and courtyards of the city. In the noble houses, dancing in the ballroom was a favoured means of expression. There were “dances for women,” events in which more than a hundred females might participate. There were scores of dancing schools, teaching “the Hat dance,” “the Torch dance” and “the Hunt.” Dances were performed on barges. They were an important aspect of the ubiquitous street theatre. So the movement of the spheres was reproduced in the streets of the city. In one painting by Gabriele Bella, “Festo dà Soldo in Campiello,” a group of Venetians, male and female, are to be seen dancing in formal measures to the accompaniment of two violins and a cello. Their fellow citizens watch from the balconies, or from the neighbouring tavern, as the women twirl their aprons and the men raise their arms in the air. And of course the popular performances of the commedia dell’arte had their own frenzied dances, together with a litany of vulgar and satirical songs.

And then there is the nature of music as an expression of political life. Thus we may say that humankind comes into the world to maintain and to celebrate the structure into which it is born; there is a joy in formal order and display. There is a joy in the endless echoes and repetitions, so much like the governance of Venice. There is deep solace to be found in the experience of harmony where is heard the voice of tens of thousands rather than that of one. The music of Saint Mark’s was under the direct control of the state procurators, an expression of the evident fact that Roman Catholicism had been transformed into a state Church. There was, or was supposed to be, a profound concord between faith and the city and the harmony of song. To put it more crudely, music became a form of political propaganda. The paintings and engravings of the various civic processions always depict the drums, the cymbals and the silver trumpets. Music then became a method of maintaining social order. Many Venetian operas used allegory to comment upon contemporary events, with Venice as the heroine of all encounters. Venice then became Venetia, the unassailable virgin holding sword and scales—“ecco Venezia bella”! In one production, Il Bellerofonte, an exact and elaborate model of the city arose from the sea to the accompaniment of music.

The painters of Venice were also devotees of music. Vasari seems to consider Tintoretto’s musical skills, for example, as more worthy of praise than his painterly achievement. Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana” shows a quartet playing to the invited guests; the members of that musical group have been identified as Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano and Veronese himself. Thus when Walter Pater, in his study of the Venetian artist Giorgione, suggested that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” he was identifying one of the central tendencies of Venetian art. Pater adds that in the Venetian school following Giorgione “the perfect moments of music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or its accompaniment, are themselves prominent as subjects.” Oil paint can be liquid music. So we read of Titian’s “tonic harmonies” and “rhythmic movements,” and of the “eager, quick tempo” of Lorenzo Lotto. The language of Tintoretto’s composition seems invariably to be also the language of music. When we gaze upon the architectonic harmonies of Tiepolo, we hear the music of Vivaldi’s violins energetic and triumphant. On the other side, there are references to Vivaldi’s “delight in orchestral colour.” In the language of the Venetian arts, music and painting seem to be twinned. In his painting known as “The Vision of Saint Augustine” Vittore Carpaccio, the great designator of Venetian scenes, depicts the saint in a musical universe; Augustine has written on sheets of music the notes for tenor and contralto, while at his feet lie works of music sacred and secular. The vision, then, is one of transcendent harmony.

The painting of music is a thoroughly Venetian art. There are many hundreds of paintings that show men and women holding musical instruments. The angels of Venetian religious painting are generally musicians; angel choruses are replaced by angel orchestras, but no other artistic tradition places so much emphasis on these images of celestial harmony. There are drawings of girls and boys singing; there are paintings of music being played by pools and by wells, as if the Venetian consonance between music and water was being endlessly celebrated. Titian was entranced by the spectacle of music-making and of concert scenes. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Yet the music of Venice is the music of performance and of display. It is never the music of meditation or of sorrowful introspection. It relies upon improvisation and dramatic interpretation. Once more it is the love of surface, and the rich deployment of the effects of the surface, that define the Venetian sensibility. It is what is known as coloratura.

Yet Venice would not be Venice without the smell of trade as well as the sound of music. The city became the capital of music-publishing, and of instrument-making. There were many collections of instruments, designed for investment as much as display. The great Venetian composers can in another light be seen as very successful men of business. We may take the case of that quintessentially Venetian artist and violinist, Antonio Vivaldi. No one was more eager for commission and more avaricious for gain. He had the trading instinct in his blood. At one point he called himself “un franco intraprenditore” or candid businessman.

He was born a Venetian in 1678, and baptised at the parish church of S. Giovanni in Bragora. His father, Giambattista Vivaldi, was a musician in the basilica of Saint Mark’s. It was here that Vivaldi himself began his training as a violinist. His father taught him the rudiments of the family profession. This was the Venetian tradition. At the age of fifteen he was received into the minor orders of the Church, and ten years later he was ordained as a priest. He became known as the prete rosso or red-haired priest, the red hair perhaps being an expression or indication of his fiery temperament. He had a prominent arched nose, pointed chin and large expressive eyes.

Vivaldi had a congenitally weak constitution, having been close to death as a premature baby, and he always needed assistants to help him travel. As he explained in a letter, written towards the end of his life:

When I had just been ordained a priest, I still said mass for rather more than a year and then gave it up, because three times I was forced to leave the altar without finishing mass on account of my illness. For this reason I spend my life almost entirely at home, leaving my house only in a gondola or carriage, because with my chest complaint, known as heart seizure, I cannot walk. No nobleman invites me to his house, not even our doge, because they all know of my ailment. I can usually leave the house immediately after breakfast but never on foot.

Yet this was the man who plunged himself into a relentless round of composition, administration and direction. He was quixotic and impulsive, by all accounts surrendering himself to the moods of the moment. Like his music he seems to have acquired some extraordinary internal energy from an unknown source of power. He was said by one English musician of the time, William Hayes, to have “too much mercury in his disposition”—which meant that he was impulsive and quixotic. He was, perhaps, a little eccentric. In 1704, at the age of twenty-six, he was appointed to the music school of the orphanage, the Ospedale della Pietà, and was music master there for most of his life. When he joined that institution he became a thorough master of all its music. He became teacher, director, and player. Nine years later he was appointed as the official composer of the ospedale. During those years his fame as a composer had increased, and spread throughout Europe. The king of Denmark, Frederick IV, made an especial visit to the ospedale to hear one of Vivaldi’s oratorios.

Yet already his energy and determination were driving him in another direction. In the same year that he was appointed official composer, his first opera was staged in the city of Vicenza on the mainland of the Veneto. This was a prelude to the performance of his operas in Venice itself, where he quickly earned both popularity and income. For the rest of his life he divided his compositions between operatic and sacred work. The pursuit of profit was part of his purpose. He was in the habit of offering his works to foreign musicians, demanding very high prices. He marketed Venetian music in the same way that his contemporary, Canaletto, marketed Venetian views on commission to visiting tourists. He haggled over prices and costs. He decided not to publish his works, on the supposition that he could earn more money by selling the manuscripts. He discussed his finances with an English traveller, Edward Holdsworth, who reported that “he finds a good market because he expects a guinea for every piece.”

In his operatic works he was an entrepreneur as well as a musician. He rented the theatre. He engaged the singers and the musicians. He chose the libretti. He conducted the orchestra and provided solo accompaniments on the violin. He had to respond to the demands of the public. If an opera were unsuccessful he found a replacement within a matter of days. Yet this supreme impresario was also a man of the cloth. The Venetian dramatist, Goldoni, recorded a visit to Vivaldi. “I found him surrounded by scores,” he wrote, “his breviary in his hand. He rose, made the sign of the cross with broad gestures, put his breviary down …” This conflation of piety and business, of the sacred and the secular, seems so thoroughly Venetian as to need no further comment.

Yet all things in Venice were dependent upon fashion. A close friend of Vivaldi, Charles de Brosses, wrote in 1740 that “to my great surprise I found that he is not so highly regarded as he deserves to be in this country, where everything follows the trend of the moment.” It was for this, and other reasons, that Vivaldi looked for patrons abroad. He journeyed to Vienna, and was about to travel on to Dresden when in 1741, at the age of sixty-three, he died. It was reported that after a life of excessive prodigality he died a pauper. Yet this may be the usual pious epilogue for a career of extravagant genius.

In his rapidity of execution, Vivaldi is thoroughly Venetian. He wrote more than five hundred instrumental works, and almost one hundred operas. He boasted that he could compose a concerto with all its parts “faster than a copyist could copy it.” His playing, too, had the fire and energy of lightning. The German scholar, Zacharias von Uffenbach, attending one of Vivaldi’s concerts, noted that he “quite confounded me, for such playing has not been heard before and can never be equalled. He placed his finger but a hair’s breadth from the bridge so that there was hardly room for the bow. He played thus on all four strings, with imitations, and at an unbelievable speed.” Von Uffenbach then commissioned Vivaldi to write for him some concerti grossi. Three days later, Vivaldi delivered ten of them. On the manuscript score of his opera, Tito Manlio, there is the inscription “Musica del Vivaldi fatta in 5 giorni”—music by Vivaldi, completed in five days.

In his manuscripts there is evidence of a tremendous force of conception and execution outstripping the ability of the hand to register it. There is such animation and rhythmic drive that the momentum is irresistible. The coloristic effects, the vivid impressionism, the shimmering harmonies, the fantastic ingenuity of Venetian music find their acme in Vivaldi. Any imitated pattern creates excitement. Agitation creates excitement. Vivaldi is vivacity. Speed, of composition and of execution, is the key. The words used by his contemporaries were “fierezza,” fiery energy, and “prestezza” or rapidity. The melodic force is overwhelming. The impression is one of inexhaustibility.

He was also a man of the theatre, creating an environment of insistent and unrelenting sound for the expression of extravagant and violent feeling. His most famous work, The Four Seasons, is intensely expressive. It was a way of translating a pictorial and operatic genre into music. There is in fact in his art a thoroughly Venetian tendency to combine display with melody, so that he introduces operatic effects within his instrumental music and sustains his operas with the techniques of his concerti. The first page of the solo violin part of the “Spring” concerto resembles a composition by Mondrian; the notes seem to dance together. They arch and leap and soar in serried ranks. On his scores Vivaldi will scrawl down hurriedly “spiritoso” or “allegro.”

Sometimes he will continue the notation for three or four pages; then pause; then cross it all out; then with the same vigour and rapidity begin all over again from the first notes. On occasions he would write out two movements for the same place, and then leave it to the interpreter or musicians to make their preference. He worked sometimes so quickly that he forgot his original key. His writing became more abrupt and elliptical in the course of composition.

The same rush of genius, the same facility and prolixity, are evident through the history of Venetian culture. Tintoretto was well known for the ferocious energy of his artistic practice. He could paint the walls of a church, or the hall of a guild, within a week. In a later century Tiepolo was known for being able to finish a large canvas in ten hours. So in the music of Vivaldi there is a tremendous quickness and pressure, guided by a driving force and rhythmic impulse that astonished his contemporaries. It is as inexorable as fate. It rushes forward like the tides of the lagoon. What is the secret of this exuberance in the artists of Venice? It is joy. Joy in creation. It has to do with the fact of living in an harmonious city. Yet it is also the joy of living in unity with the culture and society that surrounded them. They were at home. The ground of their being was Venice itself.

Is it then possible to interpret the nature of Venetian music as an organic whole? It is marked by exuberance and spontaneity, a ferocious gaiety that is manifest in other forms of Venetian art. The most used and favoured word is brilliance. It has associations with the glitter of Venetian glass, and the glittering light upon the water. Yet Venetian music also has associations with the richness of colour and texture in Venetian art. We read of the brilliant “tone colours” and “chromatic phrases” associated with the musicians of Venice, as opposed to those of Naples or of Florence. The Venetian manuals of music written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rely largely upon expounding the arts of improvisation and ornamentation. Venetian music, therefore, is predominantly expressive. The temperamental affinities, to put it perhaps too crudely, are with show over substance. One German musicologist of the eighteenth century, contrasting Venetian melodies with Roman harmonies, remarked that “the Venetian makes its way to the ear more quickly, but its spell continues for a shorter time.” The art of echo, already noticed in sacred polychoral music, was also an aspect of secular music. The Venetian sonata, for example, has been noticed for its marked contrapuntal effects.

The music of Venice has a certain sweetness. It was often light and clear. In that sense it could be suggested that it contains little interior life. There could be no Beethoven in Venice. It has an irresistible flow. It has the rhythm of the sea, not of the wheel. It provokes astonishment and admiration rather than contemplation. Yet it could also be unruly and abrupt, with sudden and unexpected turns both in melody and in harmony. It is often eccentric or extravagant. It sometimes relishes strangeness, or what were known as bizzarria. It has an eastern flavour. It can even be claimed that, through the agency of Venice, the music of the East entered the classical European tradition. Venetian music is sustained by constant and subtle variation. It favours contrast and intricacy; it can be fast, and florid. It perfectly suits the genius of the virtuoso. It has been suggested that the solo concerto was first heard in Venice. It may be possible, then, to define the nature of this music as an expression of the Venetian temperament; Stendhal remarked that “the glittering reflection of the Venetian character falls across the texture of Venetian music.” The process of transmission and inheritance has never properly been understood, except in the evident relish of a language that describes art and character in identical terms. And so we have the words—vivacity, gaiety, radiance, extravagance, energy, buoyancy, spontaneity, urgency, facility, exuberance, impetuosity. Oh! Venezia!