For young Nicolò, Preveza was a defining experience. Stung by the outcome of the conflict, he wrote a scathing account of the campaign. History of the War between Venice and the Turks is not so much a narrative as a vitriolic indictment of those who had pressed for war against the Ottoman Empire and then had behaved so ignominiously in the hour of battle. Nicolò ranted against “the infamy of all Christianity” and called on “the Spanish soldiers who were on the Emperor’s ships to bear testimony” to the shameful conduct of the western alliance.
Nicolò’s beloved Herodotus would probably have frowned at his overheated prose. In the end, the manuscript was never published and his fierce denunciation was read only, if at all, within the confines of Palazzo Zen. But the copy that survives in the Biblioteca Marciana offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this ambitious twenty-five-year-old patrician already fully engaged in the affairs of the Republic.
Although never a merchant himself, Nicolò was very proud of the mercantile origins of his family. To him, trade had been the lifeblood of the Republic since its earliest days and had strengthened it over the centuries. He felt very strongly that by shifting their economy from the sea to the mainland, Venetians had betrayed their roots and corrupted the soul of the Republic. “Now everyone rushes to buy property in order to live on their income,” he lamented, “while merchants [are] despised and greatly berated.” He blamed this morally impoverished environment for the hubris that had led to war.
Nicolò idealized the early days of the Republic, when Venice was a small democratic community and Venetians lived “in houses of equal size and height, decorated in the same manner.” He decried the new fashion of building “palaces and magnificent dwellings,” which fostered feelings of inequality—an obvious dig at the new landed aristocracy living in luxury on the Grand Canal. To him, the new palaces were garish symbols of Venice’s moral decay. He lambasted the fashionable young architects who indulged in the so-called ornamental style; ever the moralist, he railed against “the indolent and the pleasure-seeking” who mixed with singers and actors and courtesans.
Nicolò’s militant brand of nostalgia was no doubt sharpened by the fire of youth. But old republican values had always thrived at Palazzo Zen, and Nicolò had absorbed them from his grandfather, the venerable Pietro, and from his father, Caterino. Palazzo Zen was a household where renovatio did not mean renewal for renewal’s sake but rather through the rediscovery of the virtues and traditions of the early Republic.
At twenty, Nicolò had married Elisabetta Contarini, a member of one of the oldest Venetian families. She bore him a son, Caterino, ensuring the line would continue into the next generation. By the early 1540s, Nicolò was already looked upon as the leading representative of the Zen family, “whose great worth and wisdom,” wrote a contemporary chronicler, “everyone in Venice admires.”
His government career progressed rapidly. He was sent on his first mission abroad, to the court of Charles V in Madrid, to patch up relations with Spain after the fiasco of the war against Turkey. He made a lasting impression on the emperor, and if he still felt the urge to inveigh against “all Christianity,” as he had in the wake of defeat, he evidently bit his tongue.
Back in Venice, Nicolò joined the Collegio della Milizia da Mar, a commission established to oversee the reorganization of the Arsenal and the rebuilding of the Venetian fleet. In his view, the Arsenal was to be much more than just a great shipyard: he saw it as the hinge that would join Venice’s sea and land power. He set himself to the task “with loving diligence and practical wisdom,” in the words of one observer, and was often to be found in one of the yards at the Arsenal taking notes among the arsenalotti, measuring planks, weighing materials, testing pulleys to find new ways of “lifting huge weights with as little effort as possible.” It is doubtful the production target of 130 warships—roughly the size of the Ottoman fleet and slightly smaller than the Spanish Armada—was reached during his tenure or indeed afterward. But his thoughtful policies were credited with transforming the Arsenal into a leaner and more efficient ship-building machine.
Next, he turned his “good judgment” to improving the web of waterways in the lagoon. Over the centuries, the silt deposits brought in by the Piave and its tributaries had altered the sand and mud formations around the city. The haphazard dredging of new canals had further changed the seascape, dangerously affecting water levels. Nicolò was elected several times savio di terraferma and savio alle acque—land commissioner and water commissioner—key posts that enabled him to dominate the public debate on this issue during the 1540s and 1550s. He drew plans for reclaiming vast tracts of marshland and managed to renovate the lagoon’s complex hydraulic system.
Nicolò brought a humanistic approach to his scientific and managerial tasks. He was interested in a general reorganization of the city and its territory and he drew on his classical education to give depth and range to his technical solutions. Even though he was known primarily as an engineer, his Pliny and his Vitruvius were never out of reach.
Yet for all his dedication to Venice’s renewal, the pull of the past was always strong. All his life Nicolò sought ways to celebrate the fabled story of the Republic—making sure his family’s important role in it was remembered as well. His book on the origins of Venice was meant above all as a tribute to the city he loved. That the publication turned out to be a complete fiasco would have been especially painful and humiliating for him.
Marcolini had put his friendship with Nicolò at risk for the sake of a book. But he had taken a precaution by dedicating the volume to the patriarch of Aquileia, Daniele Barbaro, who served as archbishop of Venice. Barbaro was a well-known humanist and a distinguished former diplomat. He was also Nicolò’s closest friend. Marcolini hoped Barbaro would talk to his “soul mate” and “appease his rage in the face of my disobedience, much like Daniel appeased the ferocious lion.” The ploy worked, and Nicolò eventually forgave his publisher. The following year Marcolini printed a new edition of the book, revised and corrected, this time with the author’s approval. And if Nicolò is remembered at all as a historian, it is on the strength of that one volume on Venetian history.
Marcolini’s Shop
IN THE BIBLIOTECA MARCIANA I found a woodprint of Marcolini carved when he was in his late thirties or early forties. The portrait itself is very fine and conveys Marcolini’s energy and quick intelligence. He was a handsome man, with a wide forehead, a large, well-proportioned nose and an inquisitive expression. His hair was thick and curly, and like many of his contemporaries, he wore a long beard. The portrait has a Titian-like feel to it and although there is no certainty about the authorship, some scholars attribute it to the great Venetian master.
Francesco Marcolini’s portrait adorned the frontispiece of the 1540 edition of Le Sorti. (illustration credit 1.2)
Marcolini, I learned, was originally from Forlì, a small city in Romagna that had fallen on bad times during the rule of Caterina Sforza. For a talented young man interested in the book business, the obvious place to go was Venice, where relative intellectual freedom provided a more permissive atmosphere. He arrived around 1525, in the heyday of Doge Gritti’s renovatio. Aldus Manutius, the father of modern publishing, had died, but the industry was still very vibrant. There were no less than 150 printers operating in Venice at the time, many of them doubling as publishers. More books were being printed there than in any other European city.
Marcolini entered the fray with considerable brio, quickly establishing himself as a quality printer and publisher in the expanding market of music books and scores. Soon he opened his own print shop, next to the friars of the Order of the Cruciferi, whose oratory abutted Palazzo Zen. Pietro Zen, Nicolò’s grandfather, took the young printer under his wing; years later Marcolini readily acknowledged he was “a creature of the great Pietro.”
He invested his earnings in a new printing press and a complete set of Garamond type, purchased wood blocks to make engravings and hired Johan
nes Britus, a talented German engraver, to embellish his books. Marcolini himself was an accomplished artist, a draftsman and a goldsmith, and all his skills found expression in his print shop, where he worked late into the night, his hands covered in ink and sticky with glue, designing letter blocks for his chapter headings or preparing a collection of decorative friezes. He was not always a careful editor and his copy was often filled with mistakes he later had to correct (I noticed the list of errata in each of his books was usually very long), but he made a point of publishing beautifully designed and finely executed volumes, fretting endlessly about the title, the layout, the type. He promoted his books with enticing prefaces and blurbs.
Marcolini’s big break came in the early 1530s, when he first published Pietro Aretino, a literary celebrity who had been run out of Rome by Pope Clement VII after the publication of his popular Sonnetti Lussuriosi (Lewd Sonnets). Aretino arrived in Venice preceded by his fame. He was a talented satirist who delighted his readers with his impudence and irreverence toward the rich and powerful—although, when necessary, he knew how to ingratiate himself with them as well. His many patrons, among them the king of France, Francis I, lavished money and gifts on him in part because they feared his vitriolic pen. A larger-than-life character, he lived in great style, enjoyed a rich table and, as we shall see, was not above seducing the wives of his friends. Marcolini met Aretino shortly after the writer had settled in Venice and quickly came under his spell. It was Aretino who persuaded him to start his own print shop. As a mark of his friendship, and of his confidence in his publishing talent, he offered him the manuscript of La Cortigiana (The Courtesan), an uproarious comedy about life among the lower classes in papal Rome. Marcolini published it in 1534 and it became a runaway best seller. During the next decade, he published a dozen other books by Aretino, his star author.
While the Zens provided Marcolini with useful contacts in the upper reaches of the ruling oligarchy, Aretino introduced him to his artistic circle, which included Titian, Tintoretto, Sebastiano del Piombo and Jacopo Sansovino. This talented band of artists, writers and architects would gather in Marcolini’s print shop after a day’s work for a mug of wine and some boisterous conversation, which often continued at the young publisher’s home, where his beautiful wife Isabella gave everyone dinner.
It was a joyful period for Marcolini. His reputation as a quality printer and publisher grew and he made good money in the process. His own creativity found an easy and gratifying outlet in the production of his beautiful editions. He also became an accomplished goldsmith and developed a serious interest in architecture, even designing a bridge that was built over a canal on the island of Murano. “Our friend Francesco’s superb structure has finally given a soul to the body of Murano,” Aretino wrote to Sansovino, Venice’s chief public architect. In 1540 Marcolini authored his only book, Le Sorti intitolate giardino dei pensieri (The Cards of Fate in the Garden of the Mind), a society game published as a book of cards. Learned and playful, it was illustrated with splendid drawings—the hallmark of the Marcolini publishing house. No less a critic than Giorgio Vasari, the great Renaissance art historian, weighed in to praise Le Sorti’s “beautiful imagery.”
Then something went terribly wrong in Marcolini’s happy world. From the half statements and innuendos that surface in letters of the period, it appears that his beloved wife, Isabella, succumbed to Aretino’s insistent sexual demands. What we know for sure is that Marcolini shut down his print shop, left Venice in a hurry with his wife and sailed to Cyprus (then under Venetian rule), where he took on a clerkship in the governor’s office. Aretino wrote several letters to Marcolini begging him to come back. But he did not return to Venice until four years later, in 1549. By then Isabella was dead—she must have died in Cyprus or on the way home.
Marcolini opened for business again but never really made up with Aretino and did not publish any new work of his. Anton Francesco Doni, a writer of popular romances, became his new best-selling author. Doni’s fanciful love stories could not have been more different from Aretino’s biting satires and lewd poems. But they sold well, each edition running into several thousand copies. Marcolini continued to have one of the more interesting lists in town—a mixture of novels, biographies and narrative history—but it was certainly not as spicy and irreverent as it had been during his early years as a publisher (his backlist remained impressive, with works by Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Ariosto, as well as classics by Aristotle, Polybius, Ovid, Cicero and his beloved Vitruvius).
After his return from Cyprus, Marcolini renewed his ties with the Zens. Nicolò the Younger had been a teenager when he had last seen him; now he was the head of the family and a man of influence in Venice. Marcolini cultivated his friendship, even boasting to his readers that he had “not a little familiarity with this very noble and kind-hearted gentleman.” After the row over the unauthorized publication of Nicolò’s volume on the history of Venice, the two men, as we have seen, renewed their close ties. And it was to Marcolini that Nicolò eventually turned two years later when he decided to publish an account of his forebears’ travels in the North Atlantic.
Ramusio’s World
THERE WAS PROBABLY no better place than Venice to gain a sense of how the view of the world was changing in the mid-sixteenth century. True, the Republic was not a player in the Age of Discovery. Portugal, Spain, France and England were the new great naval powers driving world exploration. Still, if Venice no longer had the ambition and the resources to finance expensive expeditions to distant lands, it was nevertheless the major clearinghouse for the valuable information flowing back to Europe: information circulated more freely than in any other European capital. An endless stream of travel narratives, captain’s diaries, ship’s logs, maps and portolan charts found their way to Venice, which in turn had the printing presses, the publishers, the editors, the bookbinders, the illustrators, the mapmakers to process and disseminate the new literature of exploration.
The most ambitious publishing project in the 1550s was Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s monumental Delle navigationi et viaggi (On Journeys and Navigations). Ramusio was one of Venice’s highest-ranking and most respected civil servants. In the course of his long career in government he had collected the reports of the major European explorers, translated them into Italian and edited them carefully (while still a student, he had worked as an apprentice in Manutius’s print shop, reading and selecting manuscripts and preparing them for publication).
Poring over his travel narratives, Ramusio had reached the conclusion that the old Ptolemaic world was “quite inaccurate with respect to the knowledge we have today.” He decided to use the vast material in his possession to produce a written geography of the world that cartographers could use as a source for a new mapping of the globe. “I think it would be good and not a little useful,” he explained, “to assemble the narratives of our time written by those who have actually been in those regions and have described them in detail.”
Giovanni Battista Ramusio “stole time from Time itself” to complete Delle navigationi et viaggi, his three-volume collection of travel narratives. This medal was printed in the Museum Mazzucchellianum, an eighteenth-century museum catalog. (illustration credit 1.3)
As Ramusio saw it, the world beyond Europe was roughly divided into three parts: Africa, India and Brazil to the south; Asia and Scandinavia to the north and east; the New World to the west. Accordingly, he planned one volume for each geographical area, in that order. The first one came out in 1550. It was a sensation, in part because it included a considerable scoop: Leo Africanus’s report on his extraordinary journey across Africa.
Al Hasan ben Mohammad al Wazzan az Zayati, later known as Leo Africanus, came from a well-to-do Arab family living in Spain. After the fall of Granada in 1492, the family moved to Fez, in Morocco, where young Hasan was educated. He later traveled across Africa on commercial and diplomatic missions, but on a voyage home he was captured by pirates and sold as a slave. His new owne
r was so impressed by his learning that he presented him as a gift to Pope Leo X. The pontiff freed him in exchange for his conversion to Christianity and christened him Giovanni Leone. The former slave became a fixture in Roman humanistic circles. He wrote a Latin version of Description of Africa, the fascinating chronicle of his voyages, but the pope kept the manuscript under lock. So it was quite a coup for Ramusio to get his hands on it, thanks to his secret contacts in Rome.
CONSUMED BY the demands of his regular job as an influential secretary at the Senate, Ramusio pressed on with the preparation of the next two volumes of his trilogy “by stealing time from Time,” as his printer, Tommaso Giunti, put it.
Unlike Ramusio, Nicolò the Younger had been slow to understand the extraordinary changes taking place in the world as a result of the geographical discoveries of the first half of the century—including the rapid decline of Venice as a great naval power. His own vision of the world remained centered around the Mediterranean; he had little patience with the hoopla surrounding the Spanish conquests in the New World. “The Spaniards,” he wrote as late as 1540, “tell us there are many countries, islands and provinces there.” But he had been to Spain and knew better. “They are bombastic by nature. They brag and are untruthful.” Imprudently, he added, “Of one thing I am sure: they have found much less than what they claim.”
However, by the time the first volume of Ramusio’s trilogy came out, Nicolò was belatedly catching on. He now acknowledged the importance of the discovery of “so many territories where we least expected to find them.” Marveling at the success of Ramusio’s first volume, he thought it would be a good idea to offer an edited version of “the documents I have been able to salvage” on the voyages of his forebears. There was not much left: five badly damaged letters and a barely legible chart. According to Nicolò, he was largely responsible for the awful condition of those precious family heirlooms: “When I was a child I took those papers in my hands, and not knowing what they were, I tore and damaged them, as a child will do. To this day the very thought of what I did causes me the greatest sorrow.” He must have received quite a scolding if, so many decades later, he was still grieving for the wreckage he had caused. And given what I knew of Nicolò—his sense of duty, his diligence, an earnestness that verged on naïveté—it is hard for me to escape the feeling that the publication of the Zen voyages was, at least in part, an act of belated atonement.
Irresistible North Page 2
