Venetians

by Paul Strathern

  Barattieri had asked for no payment, but instead requested that if he succeeded he should be allowed to set up a public gaming table between the two pillars. This proved a huge success, earning him a large income. However, this spot between the two pillars soon came to be regarded as a place of ill fortune by more than just unlucky gamblers, when it was chosen as the site for public hangings.*

  In the ensuing centuries gambling fever swept Venice, affecting all classes. Nobles set up gambling tables in their palazzi, as did the courtesans in their salons, while street corners hosted vicious games for more modest stakes. Regular edicts issued by the authorities banned gambling in taverns, courtyards, barber shops, on gondolas and even on canal bridges (favoured on account of the good vantage point they gave to lookouts). Such vain attempts to stamp out gambling only served to indicate the widespread nature of the contagion. Even the courtyards and corridors of the Doge’s Palace were not immune, and there large bets would be placed on the results of elections to public office, up to and including that of doge.

  In the sixteenth century the authorities had given in to the inevitable, issuing licences for ridotti or casini, usually small, well-decorated sets of rooms with gaming tables, often including a side-chamber – known as a ‘room of sighs’ – where unlucky gamblers could retire to rue their losses. Not content with gathering revenue from the licensing of ridotti, in 1638 the authorities opened their own state-sponsored Ridotto, which is generally recognised as the first full-scale casino in Europe, on which all later versions would be modelled. Such was the popularity of the Ridotto that other lesser casinos soon followed. An English visitor would remark of these establishments, ‘The crowd is so great that very often one can hardly pass from one Room to another, nevertheless the silence here observ’d is much greater than that in Churches.’

  The Ridotto itself remained the most prestigious of all the gambling establishments, occupying an entire wing of the Palazzo San Moisé,* just a hundred yards west of the Piazza San Marco. This four-storey building had a grand, long entrance hall the size of a ballroom, which became a popular meeting place. Further inside there were dining rooms, with the different gaming rooms located upstairs. Theoretically, as a public institution of the Republic, the Ridotto was open to all; but the high stakes required at the tables and a rigid dress code ensured that it was frequented mainly by nobles and the like. Entry was granted only to those in formal dress, with men expected to wear black three-cornered hats and women fashionable full-length gowns. Gamblers had to wear white masks, with some women wearing smaller black masks, adding a distinct frisson to card games such as basetta, which involved high winnings and high losses, and the poker-like faro, whose participants came to the tables to puntare (bet), and were thus the original ‘punters’. The clientele of the Ridotto consisted of a heady mix of nobles – old and young, rich or in ‘reduced circumstances’, sometimes accompanied by their fashionably dressed wives – as well as raffish professional sharks, courtesans and young English bucks.

  The most famous of all the gamblers to be seen at the Ridotto was undoubtedly the Scotsman John Law, who around the start of the eighteenth century gambled with unrivalled sums of money, frequently with spectacular success. Law was that far-from-unique combination of financial genius, con-man and escapee from disaster. The earliest disaster from which he escaped was at the age of twenty-one, when he killed a man in a duel in London and was sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn. Spirited out of gaol, he took ship to the Netherlands, an exploit that was aided by Elizabeth Villiers, William III’s mistress (women played a key supporting role in many of Law’s exploits). From now on, Law would be forced to live off his wits, a circumstance that led to the full psychological development of his three exceptional talents – as a thinker of remarkable penetration and foresight, as a mathematical gambler par excellence and as a similarly skilled womaniser. In this way he visited – and then quickly moved on from – the gaming tables, boudoirs and financial exchanges of Amsterdam, Geneva, Turin and Venice, the last of which he first visited during the final years of the seventeenth century. Here his success at the Ridotto was matched only by his amatory skills, leaving in his wake a procession of broken hearts and outraged husbands. But Law was so much more than a pioneer Casanova. According to his contemporary memoirist, the ‘Scots gentleman W. Gray:

  He constantly went to the Rialto [where] he observed the course of exchange all the world over, the manner of discounting bills at the bank, the vast usefulness of paper credit, how gladly people parted with their money for paper, and how the profits accrued to the proprietors from this paper.

  Over the coming years Law would acquire an aristocratic English mistress, Lady Catherine Knowles (or Knollys), with whom he would have two children, and he would at same time develop the idea of ‘paper credit’ into the modern concept of an alternative currency for higher denominations, in the form of publicly exchangeable paper money.

  With the expertise of a confident man, in 1715 Law finally managed to persuade the roue Regent of France, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, to allow him to put his paper-money idea into practice on the vast but stagnant French economy. Philippe had more enjoyable things to do than busy himself with arcane economic matters, and simply handed over to Law the financial affairs of the country, including the French colonies, as well as allowing him to hatch a scheme for the development of French North America (so-called Louisiana, which in fact extended north into the entire Midwest). The Mississippi Scheme, as it came to be known, was created in order to mine the vast quantities of gold widely supposed to lie along the banks of the Mississippi and in the hinterland French territory. The public was encouraged to invest in this potential goldmine by purchasing a special offer of shares that were released onto the market. At the same time the French economy, which had ground to a halt through a lack of solid currency and massive debts, was revived by the introduction of large quantities of paper money. This was backed by a minimal amount of ‘real’ money, as well as the enormous profits that Law confidently expected would soon be flowing in from the Mississippi Scheme, whose shares quickly shot up in price. In order to facilitate all this financial and economic activity, in 1716 Law was allowed to set up what became the Banque Generale, the first French central bank, with control of the currency. To balance this pyramid of enterprises would require, over the next few years, financial gambling on an extraordinary scale, not seen before or since.*

  Expert opinion is still divided as to whether Law was, in the opinion of the great twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter, ‘in the front rank of monetarists of all time’ or simply a superlative con-man whose fraudulent activities led him into waters way beyond his depth. He was certainly ahead of his time, leaving his pioneering scheme exposed to the flaws inherent in paper currency (many of which remain to this day); and all the evidence concurs that he did not set aside any secret personal profit from his scheme. When the Banque Generale eventually collapsed in 1720, bringing down with it the paper money, the Mississippi Scheme and all the rest, many were ruined. On the other hand, the massive debts that had clogged up the French nation’s economy simply vanished in a whirl of worthless paper notes. All the same, Law was lucky to escape with his life, fleeing the country dressed as a woman – though unavoidably he was forced to leave behind his beloved Lady Catherine.

  He ended up in Venice in the mid-1720s, back living once more off his wits and his winnings at the tables in the Ridotto. Law was by now famous throughout Europe: never before had the gambling of one man – not even royalty, not even an aristocrat – bankrupted the coffers of a major European nation. Back at his old haunt, he began to gamble on a more modest scale, gradually building up his assets. Yet he was unable to resist cashing in on his celebrity. He would sit behind a table, at his elbow a pile of coins worth 10,000 gold pistoles.* Law knew that many tourists, especially from France or England, would not be able to resist the temptation to gamble with him, so that they could boast of this fact when they returned
home. He extended an open invitation to all-comers: for an outlay of one golden pistole, he was willing to gamble his entire 10,000, if his opponent could roll six dice and get each one to come up a six. Well worth a bet, they thought, even at odds of 10,000:1 – and one by one the extra gold pistoles came rolling in. (Law was well aware that the real odds were in fact an even more unlikely 46,656:1.)

  This side-show provided him with a small but regular income, which he augmented many times over at the tables with his astute gambling. A lightning-quick mathematical mind, particularly with regard to probability theory, as well as an all-but-flawless memory, remained his main assets. These had survived the colossal responsibilities and mental pressure of his years in Paris, which had by all accounts several times brought him to the brink of complete nervous collapse. But now, once again, he knew that he was just playing the odds. It was during this period that Montesquieu made his visit to Venice. Previously, Montesquieu had been so incensed by what Law had done to his country that he had written a bitter satire, characterising Law as the son of Aeolius, the god of wind, travelling over the world accompanied by the blind god of chance and an inflated bladder. But when he actually encountered Law, Montesquieu could not help but be impressed, recognising that Law was ‘more in love with his ideas than his money … his mind occupied with projects, his head filled with calculations’. He still believed in the concept of paper money, and remained convinced that – introduced under the right circumstances – his project would succeed: there was still a future for it. Others were less impressed, recognising that the immense strain had taken its toll. The handsome womaniser was now but a shadow of his former self, his features haggard, racked by an increasingly disfiguring tic.

  The end was not long in coming. One frigid night, towards the end of February 1729, as Law was returning home on a gondola through the dark misty canals, he was taken ill. Over the coming weeks his weakened frame succumbed to pneumonia. The French ambassador, the Comte de Gergy, and Colonel Elizeus Burges, the British Resident (senior diplomatic representative), were both frequent visitors to his bedside. Law was known to have been working on a book setting forth his monetary ideas, and both men wanted to gain possession of this document the moment he died. The French had no wish for the secrets of the 1729 financial debacle to become public knowledge; while the British had their own opposite motives. At the same time, both men suspected that at the height of Law’s power in France he must have secretly stashed away a vast fortune, and were keen to discover where this was hidden. But neither Burges nor Gergy would succeed in their aims. On 21 March 1729 John Law died at the age of just fifty-four, taking with him any secrets that might have definitively damned or exonerated him in the eyes of history.

  During Law’s last years, he appeared to lose faith in the permanent value of currency, preferring instead to invest his surplus winnings in paintings. Here too he was ahead of his time, impervious to the ridicule of Burges: ‘No man alive believes that his pictures when they come to be sold will bring half the money they cost him.’ During the course of his few years in Venice, Law accumulated a collection containing some 500 paintings, including works by Titian, Tintoretto, Holbein, Michelangelo and even Leonardo. There is a suspicion that some of these were secretly despatched from Paris by his ‘wife’, Lady Catherine Knowles, before they could be seized by the authorities. Even so, Law is certainly known to have bought works by artists who were alive and working in Venice during his time there. And the greatest of these was undoubtedly the young Tiepolo, who in the latter half of the 1720s began to produce his first masterpieces.

  Gianbattista Tiepolo was born in Venice in 1696, in the working-class Castello district close to the Arsenale. He was the sixth child of a local sea captain. However, the Tiepolo family had a long and illustrious history, including a thirteenth-century ancestor who was Duke of Crete and was later doge for an exceptional twenty years. Despite such former glories, Tiepolo’s father was no longer of noble rank. Around the age of fourteen, the young Tiepolo was apprenticed to the studio of Gregorio Lazzarini, an accomplished but ultimately undistinguished artist who was much influenced by Veronese. Tiepolo would absorb this influence, yet his major influences came from outside Lazzarini’s studio, with his style taking on baroque and even rococo flourishes. His exceptional talent was immediately apparent, exhibiting an entirely original sense of energy and spectacle. From the beginning he appeared to draw in light and paint rather than outline, and as a result his works took on a blaze of colour and tone.

  The quality of Tiepolo’s work set him apart, but there also seems to have been an element of psychological ‘apartness’ in his character. He bore an illustrious name, yet he was not a member of the ruling class, while his talents set him apart from the people amongst whom he had grown up. Furthermore he had never known his father, who had died just a year after his birth, and there would always remain in his work an element of display that acted like a mask to protect, or distract from, a sense of inner emptiness. In 1719, at the age of twenty-three, he married the sister of the painter Francesco Guardi, and they would eventually have nine children, yet it seems that he was not in the habit of taking his family with him when he went to work abroad, often for years at a time. Even so, two of his sons would be sufficiently inspired by the example of their father to become painters themselves.

  Shortly after his marriage Tiepolo would paint his first masterpieces, a cycle of vast paintings to decorate the large reception hall of the Ca’ Dolfin, a palazzo on the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge, and he then went on to paint a series of spectacular frescoed ceilings. It quickly became apparent that he had found his medium. Fresco enabled him to transform ceilings into luminescent sky where brilliant mythological figures floated amidst clouds and architectural structures, seen from below in complex and often differing, yet always convincing perspectives. Yet these were all achieved with a lightness and brilliance that harked back to the traditions of an earlier Renasissance.

  Tiepolo’s fame quickly spread, and he began travelling Italy to fulfil commissions. His style, in the eyes of many experts, represented the last great flourishing of the Italian Renaissance, and Tiepolo was soon in demand all over Europe. Here was yet another creative spirit who felt drawn to leave his native city in order to fulfil his talent in exile. He spent the years 1750–3 in Würzburg in Germany, and although he returned to Venice to fulfil commissions from as far afield as Poland and Russia, he still spent much time away from home travelling the mainland.

  Yet despite Tiepolo’s international appeal, in many ways his art was Venetian through and through. His technique of building up his figures with colour upon colour echoed that of Giorgione, while his theatricality and flesh tones were reminiscent of Titian and Tintoretto. But his work also very much reflected the Venice of his own time. This was an art which delighted in spectacle, which chose above all else to dazzle and delight with its sheer brilliance. It was an art whose essential qualities lay in its surface. There was no straining after meaning or profundity. Its figures may have been fully realised and even recognisable in their individuality, but they had little in the way of psychological depth. The dazzling spatial effect of his ceilings, which frequently spilled out of their stucco frames, were sufficient to induce vertigo in the spectator below. They evoked wonder, rather than inspiring contemplation. Like the city itself, they were a carnival of colour and form played out against a background of almost unbelievable beauty.

  In 1761 Tiepolo travelled to Madrid, where he was commissioned by Charles III to cover the ceiling of the throne room with frescoes depicting in mythological form the glories of Spain when it had dominated the globe as an imperial power. The arrival of the sixty-four-year-old Tiepolo would incur the jealousy of the thirty-three-year-old German-born painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who was already established as a court painter. But the conflict between the remote Tiepolo and the learned and earnest Mengs was more than just personal. The young Mengs was a champion of the up-and-coming neoclassi
cal school, whose restraint and austerity of style were in marked contrast to the flamboyance of Tiepolo. A year later, following the cold early months of 1770, Tiepolo suddenly collapsed and died. He was buried in Madrid, far from Venice and his family. In his native city, and indeed across Europe, many recognised his death as the end of an artistic era. The Renaissance was long past, and Venice’s tradition of great artists who extended its political influence was now over. Such surface display and brilliance were no longer fashionable: the power-centres of Europe required a more realistic art to mirror their increasingly modern and enlightened world. Tiepolo’s mythological gods in the sky were to be replaced by the more realistic down-to-earth humanity to be found in the likes of Mengs’ neoclassical works.

  And in Venice the human figure all but disappeared, becoming a mere cipher amidst the meticulous beauty of the city itself, as depicted by its finest copyist, Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto. Here was an artist who reflected his city as no other, an artist who was all but created by his market – the rich tourists who wished to take home a souvenir of their visit to the most delight-filled city they had ever seen.