by Sheila Hale
Rape, especially of poor women, sometimes by their fathers or putative husbands, was a frequent occurrence that was not always punished. The humblest victims were often too frightened to appeal to the law, and when they did so their assailants were on the whole let off remarkably lightly. The courts, which were of course entirely male, presumably chose to believe that any women foolish or brave enough to venture out alone was asking for it. Perhaps, like St Augustine in his commentary on the story of the rape of Lucretia, they shared the belief that the violation of a woman’s body cannot take place without giving her some physical pleasure. (When Titian was an old man, in three legendary rapes he painted for the delectation of the King of Spain, the Rape of Europa, the Rape of Lucretia and Danaë, the voluptuous victims do not look as displeased by their situation as they should have done.)
The government was far more concerned with sodomy, even within marriage, where it was practised everywhere in Europe as a form of birth control. Doctors were required by law to investigate and report any evidence of heterosexual sodomy, for which the punishment was decapitation followed by burning of the remains. Homosexuality, which was seen as a challenge to the very order of Creation, was condemned in all Christian countries. But in Venice, where charges of sodomy were investigated by the Council of Ten, homosexuals were pursued and punished with even more rigour than elsewhere in Europe, possibly because homosexual networks, which tend to be secret cabals in homophobic societies, were felt to threaten the authority and stability of the Republican government. Some sodomites were left to die in cages hung from the bell tower in the Piazza while the populace was encouraged to throw rubbish at them from below. The obsession with homosexuality made it an easy charge to make against an enemy, and accusations, some probably trumped up, were frequent. Nevertheless, if we are to believe Priuli, who was one of the Venetian patricians most obsessed by sodomy, by 1509:
the vice had now become so much a habit and so familiar to everyone, and it was so openly discussed throughout the city, that there came a time when it was so commonplace that no one said anything about it any more, and it neither deserved nor received any punishment – except for some poor wretch who had no money, no favours, no friends and no relations: justice was done on people like that, and not on those who had power and money and reputation, and yet committed far worse crimes.15
It has been suggested that some of Titian’s portraits – the three men in the Concert, the Man with a Quilted Sleeve, the Man with a Glove, the Portrait of Tommaso Mosti, the Bravo16 and the later Portrait of a Young Englishman have been singled out – have homoerotic overtones.17 There is no way of proving or disproving the idea, but given Titian’s sensitivity to the personalities of his subjects it is not impossible.
Of all the publicly enacted non-liturgical ceremonies for which Venice was famous throughout Europe, executions were the most frequent and popular.18 Punishments for crimes, by mutilation, hanging and/or burning at the stake, which in other cities took place outside the walls, were carried out at the foot of the Rialto Bridge near the market stalls or on the Piazzetta between the two granite columns bearing statues of St Theodore and the lion of St Mark (Venetians to this day avoid walking between the columns). The punishment varied to suit the crime, but in a typical ritual described by Sanudo in 1513 a serial rapist, robber and murderer was transported ‘in the usual manner’ by raft down the Grand Canal to Santa Croce, where he was disembarked then dragged through the city by horse to San Marco, where he was decapitated and quartered, the quarters hung on the scaffold between the columns of the Piazzetta.
The bloodlust extended to what must have been one of the most grotesque rituals enacted in any Renaissance city. On the morning of Giovedì Grasso, the Thursday before Lent, one bull and twelve pigs were solemnly condemned to death by the doge and the highest government dignitaries, who watched as the animals were chased round the Piazza and then decapitated between the columns on the Piazzetta. The ceremony was in memory of an annual tribute supposedly exacted in the twelfth century from the then independent patriarch of Aquileia. But for more than a century after the patriarch’s temporal dominion was abolished in 1420 it continued by popular demand, and the sacrificial animals had to be bought with money from the public purse.
If the real Venice was never the tranquil utopia eulogized by its propagandists, its self-image as a virgin city was justified. Protected from foreign invasion by its shallow ring of water, it had no need of the defensive walls that encased other cities; and the government that sat in the smiling, unfortified pink and white doge’s palace was strong enough to resist insurrection from within as well as from without. By the early sixteenth century, however, the reputation of the Most Serene Republic was tarred by its own myths and actions. In the rest of Italy and Europe it was a commonplace that, after a hundred years of unchecked imperial expansion on the mainland, Venice, the self-styled New Rome, aimed to absorb the entire peninsula in a Venetian-led Italian empire. The spies and diplomats of Venice failed to take account of the hatred and fear that was to culminate in a crisis that was the closest it came to annihilation before Napoleon finally put an end to the Republic in 1797.
The storm had been brewing since the autumn of 1494 when the French king Charles VIII had crossed the Alps at the head of a large army aiming to reactivate a shaky claim as a descendant of the Angevins to the throne of Naples. Charles’s invasion unleashed an unprecedented succession of wars and shifting alliances among European powers seeking dynastic control in Italy, which did not finally begin to peter out until 1530. The French descent into Italy encouraged the Republic’s territorial ambitions, which aggravated the other powerful states more than ever. The long-standing fear that Venice intended to extend its rule over the whole of Italy and perhaps even beyond the Alps seemed to be confirmed when in 1498 the Republic formed an alliance with the new French king, Louis XII, and provided substantial military support for a French occupation of Milan. ‘You Venetians’, roared Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, ‘are wrong to disturb the peace of Italy, and not to rest content with the fine state that is yours. If you knew how everyone hates you, your hair would stand on end.’19 In 1503 the Republic took advantage of the power vacuum in Rome created by the death of the Borgia pope Alexander VI and the illness of his son Cesare to enlarge its grain supplies and trading opportunities by occupying the papal territories in the Romagna of Forlì, Cesena, Rimini, Faenza and Imola. It was a move that incurred the implacable rage of Alexander’s bellicose successor Pope Julius II. Niccolò Machiavelli, in Rome on a mission for the Florentine government, spoke for many Italians when he wrote in a dispatch: ‘One finds here a universal hatred of them … and to sum up, one draws the conclusion that the campaign of the Venetians … will either throw open to them the whole of Italy, or lead to their ruin.’20
While Julius II bided his time, Maximilian I of Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor presumptive, and the French king Louis XII were the first to react. In September 1504 they met at the French court at Blois where they signed a treaty of alliance, which contained a hidden clause providing for an attack on Venice. Maximilian struck first. It was his intention to make his way to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope and to assess what the French were up to in Italy. When the Venetian government refused him safe passage, in 1508 he assembled an army of 6,000 men, crossed the pass above Cortina d’Ampezzo and trained his guns on Titian’s hometown Pieve di Cadore. The Venetian commander who resided in the castle surrendered without conditions, and Maximilian tried to persuade the local authorities to accept incorporation into the Tyrol. But a committee of fifteen Cadorines, including three senior members of the Vecellio family – Titian’s grandfather Conte, Conte’s brother Andrea, and Andrea’s son Tiziano – urged resistance and got word of the invasion through to Venice. On 2 March a Venetian army, led by the commander in chief Bartolomeo d’Alviano and equipped with mountain guns and an escort of cavalry, made its way up the Piave and crossed the bridge over the Boite river. Joined b
y a contingent of men from Cadore that included Titian’s father, they surprised the German army at Valle, below the slopes of Monte Antelao a few miles to the west of Pieve. At the end of a bloody battle, which raged all night in freezing mist, the German guns were all taken, their army routed, and those who tried to escape were massacred by the Venetian cavalry. D’Alviano went on to force the surrender of imperial possessions in the Friuli. It was the most successful military campaign Venice had fought – or would fight – for a long time, and by 5 June Maximilian was left with no choice but to sign a three-year peace treaty with Venice.
The victory of 1508 remained a source of local and family pride in Cadore for many years to come, and the first-hand descriptions of the battle that Titian heard from relatives and family friends who had fought in it stuck in his mind and furnished the setting for a different, legendary battle he would paint thirty years later for the doge’s palace. (The painting no longer exists, but a vivid preparatory sketch set on the bridge over the Boite below the slopes of Monte Antelao survives.) It was not, however, the last Cadore would see of Maximilian, who broke his truce with Venice and returned to the Friuli, sacking and burning to the ground whole villages in western Cadore, occupied Cortina d’Ampezzo (which remained Austrian until 1918) and finally succeeded in storming the castle of Pieve.
Nevertheless a treaty was formulated on 10 December 1508 at Cambrai, a conference centre in north-east France. Instigated by Pope Julius, ostensibly for the purpose of a crusade against the Turks, the hidden agenda at Cambrai was in the first instance a pact of aggression aimed at clipping the wings of the mighty St Mark. The leading members of what became the League of Cambrai were Louis XII, Julius II, Maximilian on behalf of the empire, Ferdinand of Aragon for Spain, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. The estates of both the latter two shared a boundary with the Venetian domain and both had lost territory to Venice during its land-grabbing campaigns. They agreed:
to put an end to the losses, the injuries, the violations, the damages which the Venetians have inflicted, not only on the Apostolic See but also on the Holy Roman Empire, the House of Austria, the Dukes of Milan, the Kings of Naples and divers other princes, occupying and tyrannically usurping their goods, their possessions, their cities and castles, as if they had deliberately conspired to do ill to all around them …
Thus we have found it not only well advised and honourable, but even necessary, to summon all people to take their just revenge and so to extinguish, like a great fire, the insatiable rapacity of the Venetians and their thirst for power.
On 27 April of the following year Julius excommunicated the doge and imposed an interdict on the city. On 14 May French troops led by Louis XII moved east from Milan to Agnadello, where they inflicted a resounding defeat on a Venetian army. Four thousand Venetians were gunned down and the Venetian commander, Bartolomeo d’Alviano, who had made the strategic mistake of crossing the River Adda into French-occupied territory, was taken prisoner. Sanudo, who was in the ducal palace when the news arrived, described the reaction:
a secretary came running in with letters in his hand from the battlefield, with many gallows drawn on them. Thereupon the doge and the Savi read the letter and learned that … our forces had been routed … And there began a great weeping and lamentation and, to put it better, a sense of panic … Indeed they were as dead men.
Two days later when a raging wind blew out a glass window in the Great Council Hall and tore off one of the wings of the lion of St Mark on its column in the Piazzetta, Sanudo interpreted the freak summer storm as a portent of worse to come. He was right. The remains of the League’s army moved eastwards on to Padua, the university city only a few miles up the Brenta from Venice, where an imperialist faction opened the gates and declared Padua a republic under the protection of Maximilian. Venice, stripped of all its mainland possessions except Treviso, saw the farms and villages across the lagoon in flames, heard the guns of an apparently unstoppable enemy and prepared for siege.
‘To tell the truth, as I am bound to do,’ wrote Girolamo Priuli, ‘no one would ever have imagined that the Venetian mainland state could be lost and destroyed within fifteen days, as we have now seen … There was no human mind or intellect which would have considered it, nor any astrologer, nor philosopher, nor necromancer, nor expert practitioner in predicting the future who would have considered it nor prophesied it …’21 Speaking as the head of one of the three Venetian banks at the time, he added that the value of state bonds had plummeted to 40 per cent of their pre-war value and that the state was no longer able to pay interest. Priuli maintained that in turning its face from the sea to the mainland and giving way to dissolute habits Venice had courted its own doom. Over and over again his diaries examine the causes of the shocking reversal of God’s goodwill: mal-administration, delays in the dispensation of justice, corruption, sumptuary laws not enforced and soon forgotten. The habit of wearing what he thought were French fashions at a time when Venice was at war with France was unpatriotic as well as frivolous and corrupt. His fellow patricians had grown flabby as well as prey to disgusting vices. Sodomy had ‘become so habitual that it was more highly regarded than having to do with one’s own wife’.
With the roads blocked on the mainland it was difficult for small merchants to conduct business. After six months of war a Venetian merchant of modest means wrote in a letter to his brother, who was trying to do business in the Levant: ‘One can think and talk of nothing but of war, plague and scarcity, but most of all about the war. The war makes us forget the plague because the time has come about which our forefathers said that the living will envy the dead.’ At the end of December 1509 he described how the soaring cost of living had affected his household: ‘For more than half the week we must get along without meat, and I must confess that I mix water in the wine when the wine is still in the casket.’22 The doge, Leonardo Loredan, was criticized for his apparent inertia. Sanudo wrote that he was ‘more dead than alive’, and Priuli that he seemed mentally and physically ill.23
As the war progressed Priuli described the worsening economic climate: ‘There is almost no business any more; no trade can develop because the roads are interrupted and often entirely blockaded. Taxes are not paid. The poor cannot pay them and the rich are exhausted, and everyone complains endlessly. Alone the customs produce some income … but that is not enough for expenses required by the war … The Venetian senators are in great desperation and almost worried to death to find one ducat.’24 The tax screw had become unbearable. Indirect taxes had a negative effect on business and made it harder for the people to pay direct taxes. Government officials and members of the ruling nobility were required to pay in tax 50 per cent of the fees for special services with which they traditionally supplemented their modest salaries. Jews, always required to pay for the privilege of living in Venice, now paid even more dearly. With the supply of food from the terraferma unreliable, grain, cattle and wine had to be brought in by ship, and the consequent higher prices were all the harder to bear when most people’s incomes were diminished.
Forced loans were extracted from those who could afford them, and were rewarded by high offices. By 1515, the government went so far as to publish the names of those nobles who had made loans, the sums they had donated and the names of those who had refused. But the most shocking measure to raise money for the war effort, because it went against the grain of long-cherished republican values, was the introduction of the sale of offices in March 1510. For those young patricians whose families were prepared to pay 100 ducats, the age restriction for membership of the Great Council was dropped from twenty-five to seventeen. Two hundred ducats could buy election as one of the Savi. A more substantial offering could smooth even admission to the ranks of the procurators, supposedly the most honourable of all offices but now to be had for 12,000 to 100,000 ducats, while the membership was enlarged to forty. The unprecedented policy of cash for honours scandalized Sanudo. ‘And so’, h
e sighed, ‘everything is up for sale.’ Nevertheless in 1516 Sanudo, who was not rich, managed to scrape together a loan of 500 ducats which bought him a seat in the Senate. And the sale of offices would remain an accepted practice for years to come.
The war dragged on for nine years. As the members of the League inevitably fell out among themselves, Venice dodged and wove, forming an alliance in 1510 with the pope against the French, in 1513 with the French against the pope and emperor. Thanks more to diplomacy, statesmanship and good luck than to military victories, Venice regained virtually the whole of its terraferma by 1517. Although the conclusion of the war was not the end of Venetian involvement in the wars of Italy, it was nevertheless quickly incorporated into the myth of Venice as a state dedicated to peace. Venice was once again God’s chosen city, saved and eternally blessed by Christ and the saints. No other state, not even those of the ancient Athenians and Romans, had ever succeeded in defending itself against so many powerful enemies. The intervening years, however, had been the most testing and psychologically shocking in the history of the Republic. For many years afterwards Venetians spoke of the days before or after ‘the War’, and nothing after it was quite the same. And it was during those fearful times, when the very existence of his adopted home was threatened, that Titian emerged as an independent master and painted his radiantly serene early masterpieces.
FIVE
The Fondaco, Giorgione and the Modern Manner
