He was soon aware, of course, that the city was not all he had hoped for. He found the streets dirty and, typically for a man of his time, began to devise a more scientific way of cleaning them. Much of the architecture left him unmoved: he never appreciated the mosaics of St Mark’s or the gothic style, and even went so far as to describe the façade of St Mark’s as like that of a giant crab. As one steeped in the ancient world he turned to the works of Palladio for excitement and inspiration. Palladio, he claimed, had shown it was possible to transform the petty-mindedness of Christian society through the noble spirit of the ancients. ‘There is something divine about his talent, something comparable to the power of a great poet who, out of the world of truth and falsehood, creates a third whose borrowed existence enchants us.’
It was inevitable that Goethe would be interested in the horses, among the few genuine antiquities in the city. In his diary entry for 30 September, two days after his arrival in Venice, he records his first impressions of them. Expecting perhaps some overpowering presence, he is disappointed with their display.
These exquisite animals stand here like sheep that have lost their shepherd. When they stood closer together on a more worthy building in front of the triumphal chariot of a world-conqueror, it may have been a noble sight. Still, thank God that Christian enthusiasm hasn’t melted them down and made chandeliers and crucifixes out of them. May they stand here in honour of St Mark since we owe their preservation to St Mark.
A week later he gets closer.
The horses of St Mark’s seen near to. Excellent figures! From below I’d just about noticed that they had patches of colour, partly a lovely metal sheen, partly touches of copperish green. Close up you can see they were completely gilded and are covered all over with weals, as the barbarians wouldn’t file the gold but tried to hack it off. Never mind, at least that way the shape was left. A magnificent team. I’d love to hear someone who really knows horses talk about them.
He noted too – as we saw earlier – how ‘up there they look heavier and from down on the square they look as delicate as deer’. Goethe had spotted that the horses had been crafted so as to appear more natural from below – as had the Delphi charioteer: an important point to note when we consider the setting for which they might have been created. Like others, he assumed that the gilding had been scratched off by ‘barbarians’; but, as we shall see, the scoring was probably done deliberately to lessen the reflective glare of the sun.
The horses, St Mark’s and the Piazzetta as they would have looked at the time of Goethe’s visits to Venice in the 1780s. (Artist unknown.) (Christie’s Images, London/Bridgeman Art Library)
Goethe’s real goal was Rome, and he continued his journey southwards after only two weeks in Venice, but four years later he made a second and what turned out to be a final visit to the city. His mood then was very different. Venice and the sea could hardly have the impact they had had on his first visit – ‘the first bloom of affection and curiosity has fallen off.’ He has had new experiences. Back in Germany are his mistress Christiana and their six-month-old baby August, whom he misses more than he expects. He becomes deeply melancholic. ‘My heart felt no desire: the yearning gaze soon turned backwards to the snow of the mountains [the Alps]. Southward [of Venice] lie so many treasures! But a treasure in the North, a great magnet, draws me back irresistibly.’ In his frustration he writes poems full of erotic yearning interspersed with violently anti-Christian sentiment. Only the arrival in Venice of the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar – one of his patrons, to whose ‘court’ he could now attach himself – brought him some relief, through the entrées into Venetian society the attachment gave him.
There were other matters haunting Goethe. While the retinue of the dowager duchess was enjoying the fading aristocratic splendours of Venice, in France a revolution was unfolding. Goethe felt ambivalent towards the turmoil. ‘To me too the French seem mad; but a madman at liberty can utter wise sayings while in the slave, alas, wisdom falls silent.’ So, despite the chaos of upheaval, there may be some good emerging – but Goethe was too realistic not to sense the dangers, presaging ‘the sad fate of France … [when] the masses became tyrant to the masses’. What Goethe could not have predicted was that it was to be a child of the revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was to overthrow the republic whose last years he was enjoying.
13
THE FALL OF THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC
A republic famous, long powerful, remarkable for the singularity of its origin, of its site and institutions, has disappeared in our time, under our eyes, in a moment. Contemporary with the most ancient monarchies of Europe, isolated by its system and its position, it has perished in the great revolution that has overthrown many other states … Venice has disappeared with no possibility of returning; her people are effaced from the list of nations; and when, after the long storms, many of her ancient possessions will have regained her rights, the rich inheritance is no longer.
PIERRE DARU, History of the Venetian Republic,
1819 (trans. Margaret Plant)
FOR CENTURIES VENICE HAD BEEN PROTECTED BY A combination of its position as an island, its diplomacy and, often, sheer luck. With the city’s economic and political power almost gone, it could be tolerated by other Europeans as an aristocratic pleasure park. Yet even this limited role was placed in jeopardy when a new force hit northern Italy: the French Revolution as personified in the military genius of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 had set off tremors across Europe, and in the first heady days of revolutionary fervour liberals everywhere supported its ideals. In Venice there were many, particularly among the impoverished nobility, the barnabotti (so called because they tended to congregate in the district round the Church of St Barnabas), and the bourgeois citizenry, who had always been excluded from power, who clamoured for change. Unsettled by the unrest, the doge and his ministers tightened up censorship and forbade public political meetings; as in France, the weight of centuries of tradition and introspection stifled any chance of effective reform. The Venetian government was unable to do more than react to events and its image was so steeped in aristocratic absolutism that when, in Paris, the royal palace of the Tuileries was stormed by a mob in August 1792 and the king could not at first be found, the crowd surged on to the house of the Venetian ambassador, suspecting he might have sheltered there.
By 1793 a coalition of conservative European powers – Britain, Austria, Prussia, Holland, Spain and Sardinia – was forming against the French, but Venice could not even muster the energy to join it. By now the city had little military strength – a poorly armed militia numbering perhaps no more than five thousand – but at least it might have derived some protection from membership of an alliance. Instead, it plunged deeper into isolation. Having already forfeited the opportunity of support from its neighbour Austria, Venice lost any chance of being regarded favourably by the new French regime when the brother of the guillotined king Louis XVI, the Comte de Lille, actually proclaimed himself the new king of France on Venetian territory in Verona. After protests from Paris the Venetians persuaded him to leave – but then found themselves in more trouble with the French when an Austrian army crossed the terraferma on the way to fight the French in central Italy. In a muddle typical of its diminished vitality, Venice claimed that Austria had the right to do so by an ancient treaty – then, when the French demanded to see the treaty document, could not find it.
In 1796 the French army in northern Italy was led by the 26-year-old general Napoleon Bonaparte, whose origins, in Corsica, were Italian.* In a series of startling victories that summer, Napoleon had seized Savoy and Lombardy and had reached the borders of Venice and Austria. Although he was technically the servant of the French government (at this point the Directory, which had come to power in November 1795), he was already assuming personal control of Italy’s destiny. As a child of the Revolution, he had absorbed the stories of Venice’s decadence and tyranny, and s
o was hardly predisposed to do the city any favours. The easiest way into the heartland of the Austrian empire was through the Brenner Pass, and Venetian envoys were bullied into allowing the French to occupy Verona, which stood at the foot of the pass. The retreating Austrian troops then tricked the Venetians into letting them occupy the fortress of Peschiera on the edge of Lake Garda to the north of Verona, which simply gave Napoleon another excuse for vilifying Venice. Belatedly the Venetians began raising a new militia on the terraferma, but the recruits were so ill-disciplined they soon became involved in scraps with the French occupying troops. When riots broke out in Verona Napoleon took his chance to send an envoy to Venice to tell the doge and the Collegio that if the Venetians did not bring the militia to order he would declare war on Venice. The Senate offered a cringing apology but it was rendered meaningless when a full-scale revolt broke out in Verona. It was suppressed in April 1797, after which the city was stripped of its art treasures and required to provide horses, boots and cloth for the French armies.
The French occupying forces in northern Italy claimed that they were liberators, but this meant little to the conservative Italian peasantry. Unrest simmered. By early 1797 Napoleon had crossed into Austria and realized that he risked being isolated on the far side of the Alps if he did not impose a political solution that would secure his rear. In a secret treaty with the Austrians made in April 1797 he forced them to surrender central Italy, telling them that they could have the Venetian terraferma in compensation. Having made the deal and now needing to impose it, he had fresh incentive for humiliating Venice. He rested his case on the ‘tyranny’ of the Venetian government. ‘I will have no more Inquisition, no more Senate. I shall be an Attila to the state of Venice,’ he told a grovelling set of Venetian envoys who had caught up with him in Austria. Just as the envoys were setting off back to Venice, messengers from the city arrived with ominous news. On 20 April a French lugger, the Libérateur, had entered the lagoon, and even though no actual state of war existed between Venice and France, it had been treated as an enemy ship and fired upon; its commander had been killed. The unfortunate envoys were told to return to Napoleon to present a Venetian version of events. It was hardly convincing and Napoleon exploited his opportunity. The murder of the Libérateur’s commander, he blustered, was ‘without parallel in the annals of the nations of our time’, and he considered himself fully justified in declaring war.
In the last days of April 1797 French troops reached the shores of the lagoon and began training their guns on Venice. An ultimatum arrived asking for a complete capitulation of the city. Three thousand French troops were to be allowed to enter to take over all strategic buildings and the French would assume command over what remained of the Venetian fleet. A democratic government was to be installed and all political prisoners were to be released. (French propagandists had long talked of torture chambers deep in the Doge’s Palace.) Twenty paintings and six hundred manuscripts, to be chosen by French commissioners, were to be handed over to the French.
The Venetian government had allowed itself to be outmanoeuvred and was now completely exposed. Even so, it might have faced the challenge with more dignity. A meeting of the Grand Council was called for 12 May, but so many members of the nobility had fled to the mainland or failed to turn up on the day that it did not even have the required quorum of six hundred. There was little will to resist. The doge moved that the Council should surrender its powers to a democratic government in the hope, he argued, of ‘preserving the religion, life and property of all these most beloved inhabitants’. The resolution received the support of 512 of the 537 nobles who had appeared – many of whom, as soon as they had voted, slipped off their robes and left by back entrances of the palace, perhaps hoping to avoid the bands of more resolute citizens who were touring the streets chanting ‘Viva San Marco!’ Back in the palace, Ludovico Manin, the 118th of the doges, faced an almost empty Council Chamber and declared the resolution carried. Returning to his quarters he handed his corno and linen cap to his manservant. ‘Take these,’ he said, in a final tired gesture of abdication, ‘I shall not be needing them again’.
The republic had collapsed with no more than a whimper, the victim of its own moral and political bankruptcy. On 12 May ‘there died’, wrote Ippolito Nievo in Confessioni d’un Italiano, his novel of the downfall of the republic published in 1858, ‘a great queen of fourteen centuries, without tears, without dignity, without funeral’. Venice had, of course, surrendered itself to the bullying of Napoleon; but the fiction was promulgated that the city had been ‘liberated’ from tyranny. Within a few days ‘Year One of Italian Liberty’ had been proclaimed and a Committee of Public Instruction set up under French supervision to educate the Venetians in their new life. The history of Venice, so carefully manipulated by its rulers in the past, now received a radical makeover. Originally, it was now said, the Venetians had fled to the lagoon in order to live in liberty; then, with the law of the Serrata of 1297, instituting closed rule by the nobility, this had all been lost. It was fitting that exactly five hundred years later the original liberty of its citizens should be restored. To provide a symbolic marker of the occasion the remains of the doge responsible for the Serrata, Pietro Gradenigo, were exhumed from the Church of San Cipriano and thrown to the winds.
The new freedom was to be celebrated on 4 June with a festival in the Piazza San Marco, which, in a moment of anti-clerical fervour, was renamed (somewhat prosaically) Piazza Grande. A Tree of Liberty was set up in the Piazza and placards with slogans were erected proclaiming ‘Established liberty brings about universal peace’ and ‘Dawning liberty is protected by force of arms’ – the latter a reference to the French garrison which now kept order in the city. On the day of the festival itself, bands marched round the Piazza with processions of citizens in tow. The newly appointed president of ‘the sovereign people of Venice’, one Angelo Talier, extolled the Tree of Liberty as a symbol of regeneration. ‘The day destined for the erection of the sacred Tree of Liberty will be a day of joy for all true citizens, who may begin to live the worthy life of man, and it will be a monument of gratitude to our descendants, who will bless the generosity of France.’ (Whatever noble ideals the French revolutionaries held, they did not include equality of the sexes. It was argued that the ‘feminine’ softness of aristocratic vanity and luxury had been transformed into the more ‘manly’ valour of ‘democratic industry’!) So the myth was sustained that the French had simply enabled an organic revolution of the Venetian masses (‘Long live the heroes of France, lightnings of war, who without shedding a drop of blood among us, knew how to break our harsh bonds’), and the president’s speech led on to a symbolic burning of the Golden Book, in which the names of the noble families were recorded, together with the corno and other insignia of the doges. Suitable exhortations on ‘the hateful and detestable aristocratic yoke’ accompanied their reduction to ashes. The Fenice, the opera house, was ordered to put on relevant shows inspired by glorious moments of the Roman republican past, notably a drama of the assassination of Caesar by Brutus.
Few of those watching the ‘celebrations’ can have been deceived. The Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi saw the dance around the Tree of Liberty as a Dance of Death.
The sweet delusive dream of a democracy … made men howl and laugh and dance and weep together. The ululations of the dreamers, yelling out Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, deafened our ears, and those of us who still remained awake were forced to feign ourselves dreamers, in order to protect their honour, their property, their lives.
The reality of the refound Venetian ‘liberty’ was soon exposed. The only real liberation was that of the Jews, whose ghetto (the word, which is believed to have been derived from a medieval Venetian word for foundry, is first recorded in Venice) was opened up and its gates burned so that its inhabitants were no longer segregated. There was never a democratic election in the city, and in the Treaty of Campo Formio made between Napoleon and Austria in October 1797, Venice a
nd the Dalmatian coast were simply handed over to Austria.
Before the new owners arrived, Napoleon, who was to visit Venice only once, for ten days in 1807, put in hand the city’s final humiliation. The Bucintoro, the state barge, was burned and the commissioners arrived to select the paintings and manuscripts according to the ultimatum announced by Napoleon in May. In the spirit of the Revolution, the church and the seat of autocratic government were to bear the brunt of the confiscations. So the ceilings of the Council of Ten’s meeting room and the refectory of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore were stripped of their Veroneses, and a selection of Titians and Tintorettos, together with a stunning Giovanni Bellini, The Madonna and Child Enthroned from the Church of San Zaccaria, were collected. The commissioners confined themselves to their original quota of twenty paintings; such was the mass of riches available they even passed over the two great Titian altarpieces of the Frari, taking instead another Titian from Santi Giovanni e Paolo, The Death of St Peter Martyr, which was then considered his masterpiece.*
The Horses of St. Mark's Page 18
