city. (photo credit i3.5)

An eighteenth-century engraving of Pozzi Prison of Venice. The “pozzi” were the wells of Venice and this underground dungeon, close to the waters, was named after them. It had a reputation for noisomeness, with the suggestion that it were better to be entombed alive than to be lowered into the hole. (photo credit i3.6)

Dream of Saint Ursula, painted by Vittore Carpaccio in 1495. The sacred interior is directly modelled upon Venetian interiors. Here are two double-arched windows, and two white Greek vases with a plant in each. The lower walls are covered with green cloth. There is a reading-table covered by a red cloth, and a very small three-legged stool covered with crimson cloth. On the table are a book and an hourglass. (photo credit i3.7)

The Tailor by Pietro Longhi. This eighteenth-century painting portrays one of the most important figures in Venetian patrician society. The Venetians had a keen eye for fashion and for striking colour. They manifested an almost childlike delight in dressing up. The patrician women of Venice, like the lady in the painting, in particular loved sumptuous attire. (photo credit i3.8)

The Geography Lesson by Pietro Longhi. The Venetians were expert, and famous, cartographers. They were looking for fixity and certainty, in their watery world. They were guided by the twin imperatives of trade and of travel, both of them embodied in the figure of Marco Polo. In this painting a fashionable patrician lady consults a globe with a pair of compasses in her right hand; an open atlas lies at her feet. (photo credit i3.9)

The Perfume Seller by Pietro Longhi. Perfume was one of the many luxuries in which Venice traded. It might be expected, in a most unnatural city, that everything was scented—hats, shirts, socks, handkerchiefs. Even the money was scented. Note the ladies in Carnival costume, a mantle of silk or velvet that covered the head and shoulders known as the bauta. (photo credit i3.10)

A wooden image of the Madonna of Mercy, carved and painted in the sixteenth century. Images of the Virgin were displayed everywhere in Venice. Hers was a popular devotion. There were many shrines on the corners of the calli, with a votive lamp burning before the Virgin. There was not a Venetian home, however humble, without its picture of the Virgin. (photo credit i3.11)

Madonna and Child Enthroned with Two Devout People, painted in the fourteenth century by Paolo Veneziano. This painting has the form and quality of an icon, and indeed images of the Madonna were venerated in Venice as the workers of miracles. The Virgin was also the archetypal “mother,” in whose capacious embrace the sons and daughters of Venice could rest. (photo credit i3.12)

The Coronation of the Virgin by Giovanni Battista. The cult of Mary penetrated every aspect of Venetian society. There were more than three hundred altars, in the fifteenth century, devoted to the worship of the Virgin. Venice was the Virgin, too, because she had never been assaulted. She was inviolate and immaculate, protected by the waves of the sea like a precious girdle. Mary is peace. Peace is stability. (photo credit i3.13)

The Tempest painted by Giorgio da Castelfranco, otherwise known as Giorgione, in the early fifteenth century. In his study of this quintessentially Venetian artist the English critic, Walter Pater, declared that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” In Venice oil paint can be liquid music. (photo credit i3.14)

Young Woman at Her Toilet by Giovanni Bellini. This painting of 1515 is evidence that the Venetians believed colour or colorito to be the mother of painting. They enjoyed the bliss of its warm and capacious embrace. Colour was soft and intimate and harmonious. That is why Venetian painting has often been associated with the depiction of the female nude. The naked woman can be said to be the invention of the Venetian artists of the sixteenth century. (photo credit i3.15)

Venus of Urbino by Titian (detail). The sensuousness and voluptuousness of Venetian art are most clearly seen in the female nudes of Titian. Planes and lines are supplanted by curves. His art is alive. It captures the movement and the appearance of life. It captures the effect of the transient moment. It is ardent. It has no sense of calculation or theory. (photo credit i3.16)

III Ship of State

8

“Let it be everlasting”

The cry in Saint Mark’s Square was always that of “Marco! Marco!” invoking the saint of the city. On his deathbed the greatest theologian of Venice, Paolo Sarpi, breathed the words “Esto perpetua!”—let Venice last for ever! Yet by the time he murmured this blessing, in 1623, the city had become a state in more than name. It had become one by deed and example. The abstract concept of the state did not emerge until the first half of the sixteenth century, but the idea of the common good was of course very much older. The common good had created Venice in the first place.

The first mention of the commune Venetiarum can be traced to the beginning of the twelfth century, when civic dignitaries wished to supplant the power of doge and people. From this time forward we can chart the growth of a bureaucratic state with its administrators and its diplomats, its governors and its laws. The local ties of parishes and the wards known as contrade were weakened, with a decline in the number of religious ceremonies designed to celebrate them; instead there emerged the notion of a unified and united city, expressed in numerous public works and relayed by public decrees. A new form of urban life was being created, at once more efficient and impersonal. Public order was confirmed and controlled by public means. The people had once created the city; the city now created the people. Or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves in terms of the city. The private had become public. The city had become a totality. Certain criminal acts, for example, were described as being “contrary to the public will” thus conflating the people with the city. By the fifteenth century, at the latest, we may speak of the formation of the Venetian state. It was known as the “Signoria,” roughly meaning sovereignty or lordship.

So how did this city become a state and, indeed, a forerunner of the modern state? It is a perplexing question, related to complex rituals of self-awareness and communal self-respect. It emerged together with a well-supervised system of public finance, sustained by such mechanisms as credit and bills of exchange. Some of the first banks in the world were located in Venice. The first public loans were issued in that city in 1167. The Banco del Giro was established in 1619. A state cannot survive without internal stability, governed by law. The Venetians were always proud of the nature of their justice, however flawed its administration might become. Yet the law behind all laws was, in the words of one English ambassador at the beginning of the seventeenth century, “reason of state.” The state was eternal. The state was the source of all morality. It had an almost Byzantine rigour and prestige.

But there are more practical matters to consider. A state needs a broadly defined elite that will exercise

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