Venetians

by Paul Strathern

  * Some of the building and its loggia of delicate Renaissance pillars survived the conflagration and remain standing in a rather forlorn state to this day.

  10

  ‘Lost in a day what had taken eight hundred years to gain’

  THE REPULSED INVASION of the Veneto by Maximilian I, which had driven Queen Caterina from her court at Asolo, had merely been the first prong of a concerted attack on Venice by the League of Cambrai. In assembling this alliance, Pope Julius II (‘the warrior pope’) had exerted his formidable powers of persuasion, with the result that for varying lengths of time this alliance would include major powers throughout Europe, including Spain, France and the Holy Roman Empire, with even England and Scotland being persuaded to join. The aim of Julius II was nothing less than the conquest of all Venice’s mainland territories. Not only had Venice taken over territory south of the Alps from the Adriatic to the environs of Milan, but it now appeared poised to absorb the small city states of the Adriatic hinterland to the south in the Romagna, which were officially papal territory. Not for nothing had the Venetians allied themselves with the likes of Pandolfo IV Malatesta; indeed, in 1503 they even connived in Malatesta’s unsuccessful attempt to retake Rimini. If the Papal States of the Romagna fell into Venetian hands, this would not only be a personal humiliation for Julius II – a man not given to humility – but it would establish Venice’s commanding role in Italy, and there was no telling where this might end.

  The second prong of the League of Cambrai’s attack was launched in Lombardy, when its assembled forces under King Louis XII of France crossed the Adda River into Venetian territory in April 1509. In preparation for this inevitable attack Venice had assembled a large mercenary army under the joint command of the Orsini cousins – Bartolomeo d’Alviano and Niccolò Pitigliano – two of the most accomplished condottieri in Italy. The Orsini were given orders to avoid direct conflict with the invading forces, restricting themselves to picking off detachments in tactical skirmishes. Unfortunately Alviano disagreed with this strategy. On 14 May he was confronted by a large force of French soldiers and crack Swiss mercenaries, which had advanced three miles from the Adda River into Venetian territory as far as the village of Agnadello. Instead of beating a tactical retreat, Alviano decided to attack, sending word to the nearby other half of the Venetian forces led by his cousin, telling them to come to his aid at once.

  As battle commenced, Alviano’s forces had the advantage of being on a hillside above a vineyard, and opened fire with all their artillery. The French cavalry at once charged towards the Venetian cannon, but were impeded in their advance by the lines of vines and irrigation ditches in the vineyard. In the midst of this action there was a downpour, and the rain caused the charging French and Swiss soldiers to become bogged down in deep mud. With the support of reinforcements, now would have been the time for the Venetian force to charge down the firmer slope and hack down those few French cavalrymen emerging from the vineyard, while at the same time continuing to subject the main body of the enemy to an overwhelming artillery barrage. But word arrived back from Pitigliano telling Alviano to avoid all contact with the enemy, while his cousin continued to march his army south. Despite this blow, Alviano still held the advantage and refused to withdraw his troops, persisting with his attack. Ironically, it was now that Alviano found himself plunged into the very situation that the Venetians had sought to avoid. Unexpectedly King Louis XII appeared on the scene with the main army; meanwhile a detachment of the original French forces had moved without being detected to the other side of the hill, in preparation for a surprise attack on Alviano’s men from the rear. Alviano now found himself facing attack on three sides. Grimly he watched as his cavalry fled through the closing gap in the encircling enemy forces. All the remaining Venetian forces could do was stand and fight their ground as best they could, which they did heroically for three hours. During the course of this fierce hand-to-hand combat Alviano was slashed across the face and taken prisoner. Others were not so lucky: more than 4,000 of his men were slaughtered, and another 2,000 wounded.

  During this era few ever survived serious battlefield injuries, and the wounded were usually left to die on the field where they fell. After the battle, soldiers of the victorious army would search for any senior enemy officers who were still alive, rescuing them for the ransom they could demand from their family. After this the bodies of the dead, as well as those of the howling and groaning non-walking wounded, were subjected to human scavengers, who emerged as if from nowhere to search for valuables, cutting off fingers to obtain rings, slashing open the outfits of the mercenary soldiers to discover any hidden trinkets or coins which they themselves had taken as booty on some previous battlefield. Morning would see the arrival of animal scavengers, such as ravens and wild dogs, which would tear without discrimination into the flesh of the dead and defenceless. In this timeless ritual, as old as battle itself, the starving peasantry and feral animals that inhabited the territory ravaged by the warring armies found their recompense.

  News of this bloody defeat reached Pitigliani’s forces that evening, and overnight most of his mercenaries simply melted away in the darkness. The defeat at Agnadello was possibly the worst in Venetian history, and such were its catastrophic effects that Louis XII and the army of the League were able to take possession of all but the bare coastal remnant of the Venetian mainland territories. As Machiavelli put it so memorably three years later: ‘Venice lost in a single day what had taken eight hundred years of effort to gain.’* With this defeat, La Serenissima passed the zenith of her greatness.

  Meanwhile the Republic’s eastern-Mediterranean maritime empire, which it had indeed taken almost 800 years to gain, was under threat from the westward land expansion of the Ottoman Empire. However, Venice now held Cyprus, which was the key to the trade routes with Egypt and the Levant – which most importantly centred on Alexandria and Beirut. Even so, a more significant threat to Venice’s primary oriental trade in spices and luxury goods from the Orient had appeared from a totally unforeseen quarter.

  The pioneering exploration of the west-African coastline in 1456 by the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto, under the sponsorship of the Portuguese, had soon been extended by his patrons on their own account. By 1488 the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and ten years later Vasco da Gama reached India; by 1509 the Portuguese had reached as far as the Malacca Strait that led from the Indian Ocean towards the Pacific, and seven years later they arrived off the Canton River in southern China. By the second decade of the sixteenth century a sea trading route between Portugal and the Orient had become well established.

  At first the Venetians were complacent with regard to this development, as these new routes involved sailing such vast distances across dangerous oceans. (Vasco da Gama’s trip to India and back was in fact longer than a voyage around the globe – though not quite as long as Ferdinand Magellan’s first accidental circumnavigation, which lasted from 1519 to 1522.) What the Venetians had not realised was that this method of trading represented nothing less than a commercial revolution. The sea voyage to the Orient may have been more than twice as long as the Silk Route to China, but it soon became clear that it had the great commercial advantage of being much less expensive. Overland caravan traders had to pay levies on their goods at the border of every sovereign territory that they traversed; sea traders bargained for their goods at the source, bringing home considerably cheaper merchandise.

  Although the Venetians were slow to appreciate this problem, their eventual answer harked back to the intrepid spirit of an earlier outward-looking age of exploration and expansion. The rulers of this city of canals conceived the bold idea of building a canal across the Suez isthmus to link the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. In fact, this idea may not have been quite as innovative as it initially appears, for a shallow link had been dug between the Nile delta and the Red Sea during classical times. Evidence of this canal may well have been provided by the Renaissa
nce resurgence of interest in classical documents, which had been transported to Europe in large numbers by priests fleeing Constantinople in the time preceding its fall. At any rate, the Venetians began negotiations with Egypt’s ruling Mamelukes regarding this project. But it was not to be.

  In 1512 the Ottoman sultan Bejazit II had been succeeded by his son, known as Selim the Grim, who had revitalised his father’s eastern expansionist ambitions. In 1516 the Ottomans launched a military campaign east into Syria, and a year later conquered Egypt, where Selim I (as he is more formally known) personally accepted the emblems of the Egyptian caliphate, the sword and mantle of the prophet Mohammed.*

  While these Ottoman conquests spelled the death of the proposed canal, they did not put an end to Venetian trade with the Levant and Egypt, except during the intermittent periods of war between the Republic and the expanding Turkish Empire. However, the Venetians no longer enjoyed privileged trading rights, like the virtual monopoly guaranteed to them by the Mamelukes. Instead, from now on they had to compete with other European traders, especially their Italian rivals, the Genoese and the Florentines. The Venetians also suffered other trading setbacks during this period. Along with the Genoese, they had traded directly with the Turkish mainland, most notably in the highly profitable alum market. This comparatively rare mineral was mined at Phocaea on the Gulf of Izmir, and was used in the glass-making and tanning industries; but, more importantly, it also served as a fixative for dyes in the cloth trade, making it the most valuable bulk commodity on the international market, despite the substantial customs dues demanded by the Ottoman authorities. Then alum was discovered closer to home at Tolfa in the papal territory north of Rome, and when mining revealed extensive deposits of high-grade mineral, Pope Pius II sought to establish a monopoly by banning all Christian states from trading in alum with the infidel Ottomans, on the grounds that the customs duties paid in the course of this trade were subsidising the Ottoman armies that threatened Christendom. At the same time, a papal decree established a considerably increased price for the sale of alum.

  The Venetians and the Genoese, for their part, simply ignored this ban, undercut the papal price and set about establishing their trade as far afield as Bruges and England. Yet this was but one positive development. The fact remained that the Republic found itself under increasing threat. Stripped of all but the last remnants of its mainland territories after the disastrous defeat at the Battle of Agnadello, its eastern trade now stood under the shadow of the expanding Ottoman Empire and the threat posed by the new route around the Cape of Good Hope opened up by Portuguese traders. Yet faced with the possibility of ruin, Venice blossomed as never before; indeed, all the indications are that the Republic was now entering a golden age of art and culture. Venice was at last realising, in its own characteristic way, the full potential of the Renaissance. This might seem incongruous, at a time when the Republic was so exposed, yet such contradiction is far from unique in the history of city states. The emergence of Athens as the cultural exemplar of the classical Greek world – the city of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – occurred alongside defeat by Sparta and later the Macedonians. External threat (along with a tradition of quasi-democratic freedoms, allied to material and cultural richness) would seem to be an essential ingredient in such exceptional creativity.

  As the Renaissance pioneer Petrarch had observed, Venice had initially remained resistant to many of the new attitudes and ideas, as well as much of the culture, of the Renaissance. As subtly distinct culturally as it was geographically from the rest of Italy, Venice had over the centuries developed its own unique version of medieval Gothic – in the form of a Greco-Venetian style that is perhaps best epitomised by the basilica of San Marco, with its Gothic façade and Romanesque bas-relief topped by Byzantine domes and intricate spires. Although early Renaissance works such as Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Colleoni had appeared in Venice, these remained the exception rather than the rule. And, indicatively, Colleoni’s statue had been conceived by a Florentine sculptor.

  However, by the early 1500s a transformation was taking place on the Venetian cultural scene. This is best illustrated by the painter Gentile Bellini and his younger brother Giovanni. As we have seen, around 1480 Gentile Bellini had been chosen to represent Venetian art at the court of Mehmet II in Constantinople. Although influenced by Byzantine painters, his work already exhibited much of the clarity of vision, and humanity, that characterised Renaissance art. And on his return he would paint the somewhat frumpish portrait of Caterina Cornaro. But by now his work was out of fashion, and his reputation had been eclipsed by that of his younger brother Giovanni, whose vivid use of colour, realism and depiction of emotion had inspired a revolution in Venetian artistic taste.

  Giovanni Bellini was one of the first Venetian artists who wholeheartedly embraced the Renaissance style. He also pioneered the use of oil paint, which would revolutionise art. This replaced tempera (colour pigment mixed with a water-soluble medium such as egg white), which in order to achieve its gentle effects had to be applied in layers that dried quickly, requiring a speed of technique and judgement that was difficult to master. Oil paint, on the other hand, took much longer to dry, enabling its pigments to be blended more easily, while its plasticity and thickness enabled the artist to reproduce more easily the texture of his subject, as well as imbuing the paintings with a hitherto-unseen depth and richness of colour compared with the characteristically paler hues of tempera. This facilitated subtlety of brushwork and other techniques: Bellini is even known to have used his fingertips to blend colours and soften the effect of light.

  All this would manifest itself in the sheer artistry of the ensuing generation of painters, who would lead Venetian painting into the High Renaissance. Both Giorgione and Titian are known to have worked during their youth in Giovanni Bellini’s studio, where they almost certainly learned how to use oil from their master. However, Bellini’s attitude with regard to his subjects would prove too tentative for both these ambitious young men, who soon quit his studio on account of what they deemed his restrictive attitude. Giorgione, whose real name was Giorgio Barbarelli, was the younger of the two apprentices. He was born around 1477 at Castelfranco on the mainland some twenty-five miles north-west of Venice. He appears to have been from a peasant family, but quickly revealed a natural grace and charm that belied his origins. He developed into a tall, strikingly good-looking young man. According to Vasari:

  He was brought up in Venice and took unceasing delight in the joys of love; and the sound of the lute gave him marvellous pleasure, so that in his day he played and sang so divinely that he was often employed for that purpose at various musical assemblies and gatherings of noble persons.

  Little of a precise nature is known about the life of Giorgione, who in his time was usually known in his home city by the Venetian variant of Zorzo; and though he became something of a legendary figure during his brief thirty-three years of life, he seems not to have been in the least egotistical. For the most part he did not even sign his prolific output of accomplished paintings, which has led to considerable controversy over the identity of a number of works attributed to him.

  One work that is unmistakably attributed to Giorgione, and is regarded by many as the most characteristic of his genius, is The Tempest, which was painted sometime around 1507. Regarded by some as the first genuine landscape painting as such in European art, it portrays the enigmatic figure of a soldier gazing across a stream at a naked woman suckling a child. But these two figures only occupy the foreground at the lower edges of the canvas. The scene as a whole is given a sense of foreboding by the looming dark clouds and flash of lightning that dominate the sky above what appear to be the buildings of an abandoned city in the background. Some have interpreted this painting as representing Adam and Eve cast out of Paradise (the empty city), with the storm and lightning representing God’s wrath at their Original Sin (made manifest in the form of the suckling child). However, as with many of Giorgione’
s works, no definitive interpretation can be given. The scene is essentially enigmatic, leaving the individual elements to be studied for their own sake, with each contributing to the overall sense of mystery. The lasting vivacity and influence of this painting, containing as it does the image of a man dressed in everyday clothes juxtaposed with a naked female figure seated on grass, can be seen in Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), which shocked audiences when it was painted some five centuries later.

  In the last year of his life Giorgione began a work called The Three Philosophers, depicting three men standing in a grove before a cavern. Once again the enigmatic quality of this work lends itself to a number of interpretations. Some have seen it as the Three Wise Men standing at the entrance to the grotto wherein lies the infant Jesus; others have seen it as indeed portraying three philosophers, all standing before the cave where, according to Plato, unilluminated humanity busied itself watching the play of a shadow world, whilst only the philosophers who disengaged themselves from such chimeras could see the outside light of the ideal world of eternal truth. Another intriguing philosophical interpretation identifies the three figures as representing three historical stages of human development. The stern old grey-bearded man, who appears to be holding a tablet and is somewhat marginalised at the right of the painting, represents medieval thought with its reliance upon interpretation of the ancient texts, which are treated as if they are set in stone. The man in the middle wearing a turban represents the Moslem world, from which emerged so many of the long-forgotten European classical works – which in turn inspired the Renaissance, represented by the seated young man gazing speculatively into the distance as he looks up from the manuscript in his hand. Such an interpretation represents an understanding of what precisely was taking place in the Renaissance – a self-knowledge that remains exceptional in the eras of human thought. There is some evidence that Giorgione died, probably of the plague, before he could complete this work, and that it was finished for him by his friend Titian.