by Jan Morris
Worse still, ignominy was often immortalized in stone. Above the central arch of the Basilica there is an unhappy turbaned figure on crutches, biting his finger-nails. He is said to be the architect of the great church, condemned to perpetual contempt because he boasted that his work would be absolutely perfect, when it wasn’t. He is only the first of such victims. A tablet in the pavement of the Campo Sant’ Agostin permanently commemorates the punishment of Bajamonte Tiepolo, the aristocratic rebel of 1310. An iron lion clamped to a house in the Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini signifies that the place was sequestered by the State when its owner was thrown into prison. Beneath the arcade of the Doge’s Palace there is a plaque recording the banishment of Girolamo Loredan and Giovanni Contarini, members of two famous Venetian clans, for having abandoned the fortress of Tenedos to the Turks, ‘with grievous injury to Christianity and their country’. The one Doge whose face does not appear among his fellows in the Great Council Chamber is Marin Faliero, who was beheaded after a conspiracy to make him absolute ruler. His place there is a black vacancy, and beneath it is the cold inscription: Hic est locus Marini Falethri decapitati pro criminibus.
Once the Venetian Government did erect a tablet of remorse, exonerating the patrician Antonio Foscarini from the charge of treason for which he had been executed: but it is tucked away so high among the family monuments in the church of San Stae that hardly anybody notices it. Generally, though shame was perpetuated, distinction was muffled. Historians complain about the dearth of personal information on prominent Venetians, and until 1866 and the florid enthusiasms of the Risorgimento the only outdoor public monument in Venice was the statue of the condottiere Colleoni at San Zanipolo. Amends are sometimes made nowadays – there is a steamboat named for the brave general Bragadino, and a dredger for the dashing admiral Morosino: but ask any educated Londoner to name a distinguished Venetian, and he may perhaps murmur Marco Polo, Goldoni, Sarpi, or a tentative Foscari, but he will probably stick fast at Titian and Tintoretto.
All these rules applied most forcibly to the Doge himself, the unhappiest of the Venetian patricians. He was the most obvious aspirant for dictatorial glory, so to keep him helpless his powers were so persistently whittled away, over the centuries, that in the end he was almost a parody of a constitutional monarch, a gilded puppet, who was forbidden to talk to foreigners without supervision, and could not even write an uncensored letter to his wife. The only presents he might legally accept were rose-water, flowers, sweet-smelling herbs and balsam, than which it is difficult to conceive a more milk-sop selection; and after 1494 the Doge of Venice might only be represented on his own coinage kneeling humbly at the feet of St Mark. The most elaborate methods were devised to keep him impotent – methods, as the British Ambassador Sir Henry Wotton once observed, that did ‘much savour of the cloister’. The Doge was elected by his fellow-members of the Great Council, the general assembly of aristocrats, but choosing him was a tortuous process. First nine members of the council were picked by lot to elect forty electors, who had to be approved by a majority of at least seven. Twelve of the forty were then chosen by lot to elect twenty-five more, again by a majority of seven. Nine of the twenty-five were chosen by lot to elect forty-five by a majority of seven. Eleven of the forty-five were chosen by lot to elect another forty-one; and these forty-one, thus sifted in four stages from the entire Venetian aristocracy, had to elect a doge by a majority of at least twenty-five.
Yet despite all these disciplines, restrictions, penalties and expenses, leaders of quality were always available to the Venetian Republic in its great days, and the patricians were, by and large, wonderfully conscientious in performing their duties – one man whose life has been carefully recorded only missed a single weekly meeting of the Grand Council in thirty years of membership. Proud, romantic and often honourable were the names that sprang at me across the cornflakes, as I thumbed the telephone directory that morning – Grimani and Morosini, Pisano and Mocenigo, Bembo, Barbarigo and Gradenigo: but I saved the best of all till last.
The great-heart of the Doges was Enrico Dandolo, a rascally giant, who stormed the bastions of Constantinople at the age of 88, and held those Frankish grandees in the palm of his wrinkled hand. He was one of four Dandolo Doges, and you may see the remains of his palace, a smallish Gothic house, standing among the coffee shops near the Rialto bridge. ‘Oh for an hour of old blind Dandolo!’ Byron wrote of him, ‘th’octogenarian chief, Byzantium’s conquering foe!’ His figure stumps through the chronicles like a Venetian Churchill, and when he died they buried him as magnificently as he lived, in the basilica of Santa Sofia above the Golden Horn. (The Sultan Mohamet II destroyed his tomb: but Gentile Bellini, who spent some years in Constantinople as court painter to His Sublimity, brought home to Venice the old warrior’s sword, helmet and breastplate.) There was only one Dandolo left in the telephone directory, and hastily finishing my coffee and rolls, I set off that morning to visit him.
He was not, I should judge, a rich man, and he worked in the municipal department called the Magistracy of the Water, which supervises the canals and waterways of Venice. His wife and daughter (he had no son) were fresh-faced, kindly women, like a country vicar’s family in England. His apartment near San Zanipolo was pleasantly unpretentious. But when Andrea Dandolo leaned from his window to wave me good-bye, across the dark water of the side-canal, a gleam of old battles seemed to enter his eye, his deep voice echoed down the centuries, and all the sad pride of Venice was in his smile.
4
The Truth Not to Everyone
Venice is a complicated place, physically and spiritually, and it is extraordinarily difficult to establish Venetian facts. Nothing is ever quite certain. Life is enmeshed in contradictions and exceptions, and the most painstaking and persistent enquirers, the ones who always know what time the trains go, are often hopelessly misled.
The past of Venice, like the present, is thus shrouded in dubious fancies and deceits, and there are several alternative versions of almost every tradition. No guide book will make clear to you the significance of St Theodore and the crocodile, who stand together, one on top of the other, upon a pillar in the Piazzetta beside St Mark’s – for the good reason that nobody is quite certain what their significance is: most writers hazard a brief conjectural biography of the saint, but evade the crocodile altogether. The body of St Mark, which was seized by two Venetian adventurers from its tomb in Alexandria in the ninth century (they covered the mummified corpse with pickled pork, to keep curious Muslims away), is always said to be preserved beneath the High Altar of the Basilica: but all the odds are that it was destroyed in a fire in 976, and was artificially resuscitated for reasons of prestige. Why is the Campo dei Mori so called? Because the warehouse of the Moors was near-by, because of the Moorish figures that stand upon its walls, because its presiding family came from Morea, because their name was Moro – take your choice, nobody can contradict you. There are several different authoritative versions of the capture of Venice by the Allies in 1945, as you will discover by comparing the various unimpeachably official reports in the War Office library. Five modern reference books I have consulted give five different figures for the area of the Venetian lagoon. Napoleon, when he seized Venice, ordered an inquiry to be made into the character of the Venetians, rather on his Egyptian pattern – what were their prejudices, their political views, their tastes, their manners? The report was never completed, for the scholars assigned to the task confessed themselves incapable of establishing the truth.
No wonder the books seem inconsistent. In Venice you can never be quite sure. The odd thing is that though the information may be distinctly uncertain, the informants are usually dogmatic: for there is to Venetian manners something of the spurious conviction of the outsider. The Welshman tells a half-truth with insuperable assurance. The Afrikaner explains his preposterous principles with an air that is positively statistical. The Israeli finds it painful indeed to admit an error. The Venetian’s weakness is that h
e hates to confess ignorance. He always has an answer. You can never stump him, and hardly ever disconcert him, and if you ask him the way somewhere, through the tangled wilderness of the Venetian back-streets, he will summon a wise and helpful look, consider the situation carefully, take you kindly by the arm and usher you to the nearest vantage point; and pointing a finger through the labyrinth of medieval lanes that lies before you, entangled in canals, archways, dead ends, unexpected squares and delusive passages, ‘Sempre diretto!’ he will say courteously – ‘Straight ahead!’
This is no more than politesse, but sometimes the imprecision of the Venetians is deliberate. Sarpi once remarked to a friend: ‘I never, never tell a lie, but the truth not to everyone.’ There is little serious crime in Venice, but there runs through the affairs of the place a niggling note of amorality. It is rarely blatant. The hotels are expensive, the gondolas and water-taxis ruinous, the porters, shouldering your fibre-glass bag from one alley-way to the next, extortionate: but they generally work to a legal tariff, and are all too ready to discomfort the quibbler by producing it. The Venetians are never crude. They are a meditative people, who know just how far they can squeeze a victim without sending him away to Majorca, and their charm often outweighs their cupidity. The system of the Venetian Republic presupposed the worst in everyone, from the Doge downwards – during the last decades of independence, when corruption was rampant, enough bundles of wood disappeared annually from the Arsenal to build ten complete warships. The modern Venetian is similarly cynical, and assumes that you are too. ‘We Venetians,’ they say, ‘we’re just like anyone else: some of us are honest, and some of us are not.’ On a dungeon wall in the Doge’s Palace somebody has scratched, in dialect, the sad tag: ‘From the man I trust may God defend me. From the man I trust not I will defend myself.’
Violent crime is rare in Venice, but this is a city of petty thieves. In the eighteenth century pick-pockets who took their haul to the city guards were allowed to keep a percentage of its value: a traveller who enquired the purpose of this iniquitous system was told that it ‘encouraged an ingenious, intelligent, sagacious activity among the people’. When Titian was dying of the plague in 1576, robbers entered his house and pillaged it while he was still on his death-bed, some say before his very eyes. In the fifteenth century a housebreaker even succeeded in boring a hole into the Treasury of the Basilica, and getting away with an immense booty (he was hanged, at his own wry request, with a golden noose). Venetian burglars are sometimes equally impudent today. They are skilled at climbing through the windows of canal-side houses, stealing a handbag or a necklace, and drifting away in a silent boat, so that the big hotels have watchmen on the canals, the private houses are heavily shuttered, and the summer newspapers are full of burgled Finns, disillusioned Americans and spluttering Englishmen. ‘What can you expect’, say the Venetians cheerfully, ‘if they will sleep with their windows open?’
More casual pilferers haunt the water-buses or patrol the side-canals, picking up what they can. Everything movable was filched piece by piece from my own boat, lying in the Rio della Toletta: first a bollard, then a seat, then the ropes, then the very floorboards, until at last she rode there, chained to the wall, stripped, ravaged and forlorn. The front doors of Venice are secured with an extraordinary variety of locks, triple-turn Yales, antique padlocks, bolts, chains and bars: and if you are a little amused by this assortment when you first come to live in the city, after a few months you begin to see the point.
There is often a taste of sharp practice to the everyday transactions of the Venetians. This is perhaps a historical phenomenon. There were ulterior motives behind nearly everything the old Venetians did. ‘Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,’ sang a seventeenth-century English poet; ‘Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of policy.’ In particular the Venetians, like the Afrikaners, presented themselves as the chosen and guided of God, and skilfully adapted religious symbolisms to their own gauntly secular purposes. When the first leaders of the lagoon announced that St Peter had personally granted them the island of Torcello, with instructions to build a church upon it, theirs was no mere pious fancy: the divine gift of land established the rights of the Venetians over the hapless fishermen who lived in the island already, and the command to build a church was an earnest of permanence, a political declaration.
And when those brave Venetians stole the body of St Mark, in 829, they almost certainly did so under State orders. The Venetians, till then under the patronage of the obscure St Theodore and his crocodile, urgently needed the particular care of some more eminent divine – they were busy freeing themselves from the overlordships of the Eastern and Western Empires, and wanted an overpowering talisman of independence. The legend of St Mark’s shipwreck in the lagoon was invented; the body was stolen; and from that day to this Venice and the great Evangelist have been inseparable. The glittering Basilica was, to begin with, no more than a reliquary for the corpse, and for many centuries Venice went to war beneath the banners of St Mark, shouting ‘Viva San Marco!’, holding aloft his open book, and emblazoning everything with his winged lion (who ought to have, according to the Book of Revelation, six wings about him, and be full of eyes before, behind and within).
When the Basilica was burnt, and the precious body lost, a special miracle was devised: for it was put about that the ‘whereabouts of the corpse had been forgotten’, and during a service of intercession to ask for divine guidance, there was a crumbling noise from a nearby pillar, a flaking of stone, a shaking, and first the hand, then the arm, then the entire saintly body was miraculously revealed! Heartfelt were the songs of praise and thanksgiving, as priests and people crowded around the relic; complacent the smile on the face of the Doge, we may reasonably conjecture, as he swept out of the great church into his palace. The people of Bari, who had acquired the body of St Nicholas and were becoming distinctly uppity, were instantly discomfited by the news: and a little red tablet on the pillar in the Basilica, beside the Altar of the Holy Sacrament, still commemorates the point of emergence.
The old Venetians could be very sly. When Antonio Grimani was impeached for treason in 1500 (he had lost a battle) he put forward one touching ground for clemency: had not his son, Cardinal Grimani, faithfully revealed to the Republic all secret matters dealt with at Papal Consistories, so that the Venetians ‘with their accustomed prudence might provide for their own needs’? Even Tintoretto, entering a competition for the decoration of the Scuola di San Rocco, cheated by bringing a completed panel to the contest, when the rules demanded cartoons. The great pageantries of State, religious and secular, were intended largely to muffle the grievances of the working people. The Venetians were the first to organize pilgrimages to the Holy Land on a strictly commercial basis. The carnivals of the Venetian decadence were seen from the start as a useful tourist attraction – and the more decadent they became, the more people flocked to enjoy them. When the great mercenary Colleoni died in 1484, he left his entire fortune of nearly half a million ducats to the State (which badly needed it) on condition that a statue was erected to him in ‘the Piazza before St Mark’s’. The signory gratefully accepted the cash, but could not stomach the notion of a monument in the great Piazza, so reached a characteristic compromise with the truth. They commissioned the statue all right, and erected it in a piazza before St Mark’s – but it was the School of St Mark’s, not the Basilica, and the memorial stands there still in the square outside San Zanipolo.
So the Venetian moves through history surrounded by a thin miasma of dishonesty, like a cricketer with an odd tendency towards no-balls, or a golfer who can find no partners. Today the agreement of a rent is similarly tinged with chicanery, designed to delude the tax inspectors, or keep the truth from a sister-in-law. Ludicrous are the statements you will be invited to approve, assuring the authorities that you are (for example) accepting your new refrigerator as a gift from the dealer; or that you have promised the Signora to lend her your cottage in Kingston Seymour for
the winter, with use of the neighbour’s bathroom, in return for the absolutely free use of her apartment on the Grand Canal throughout the summer season.
But nowadays there is something rather innocent and touching to these subterfuges, for the Venetian is usually quite transparent in his small deceits, and is endearingly delighted when he has misled you. He cherishes no grudges, and he never minds losing. An air of child-like mystery surrounds his dealings, much concerned with dark and nameless go-betweens, off-stage confidants, grandmothers’ funerals. There is a wood-carving by the seventeenth-century sculptor Francesco Pianta, in the Scuola di San Rocco, which beautifully illustrates these tendencies. It is called The Spy, Or Curiosity, and it represents a conspirator so theatrically shrouded in cloaks, so hungrily peering between his slouch hat and his raised forearm, so slung with bombs and secret documents that the kindest old lady in Cheltenham or New Hampshire, finding him destitute on her doorstep, might be tempted to refuse him a cookie. I often think of this beguiling image, when my insurance agent telephones me with a little proposition about the premium.
He might also represent the Venetian Nosey Parker, a ubiquitous character. The Venetians were encouraged to be busy-bodies by the system of denunciations which supported the autocracy of their Republic. In several parts of the city you may still see the stone boxes or lions’ mouths – bocche di leone – that received citizens’ complaints. Some, like the one on the Zattere, were merely for grumbles about the neighbours’ sanitary habits, or charges of blasphemy and foul language. (‘Bestemmiate no più’, says an inscription near the Campo dei Mori, ‘e date gloria a Dio’ – ‘Swear no more, and give glory to God’.) Some were for more terrible accusations, of treason or conspiracy, that might well lead to a man’s execution. In the later days of the Republic a note in one of these boxes could result in immediate punishment without trial, and nothing is more evocative of the ruthlessness of old Venice than these benign stone figures: the lions, whiskered and smiling, do not look at all ferocious, and the eeriest receptacle of all was a box beside a comical statue, known as Signor Antonio Rioba, which still stands, heavily patched with ironwork, at the corner of Campo dei Mori. There was a period when the bravos or bandits of Venice could buy immunity from the law simply by murdering one of their colleagues and producing satisfactory evidence: and it is no coincidence that the Venetians invented income-tax.
