Venice: Pure City

fall from their backs.” He also observed the fact that “they neglect no artifice to improve their appearance.” In 1597 Fynes Morrison described them as “tall with wood, fat with ragges, red with paint and white with chalke.” The “wood” was that of large platform shoes. In an unnatural city, therefore, they were the image of unnaturalness. In the city of trade, fashion was a large element of consumption. In Venice female fashions changed faster than anywhere else in Italy.

For many travellers Venice was a vast open-air brothel, the “flesh shambles of Europe” as one visitor put it. Even Boccaccio, writing in the Decameron, which is not dainty, declared that the city was “the common receptacle for all sorts of wickedness.” Roger Ascham, two centuries later, said that he saw in nine days “more libertie to sinne than I ever heard tell of in our noble Citie of London in nine yeare.” It was remarked that the young men who went on the Grand Tour to Venice invariably returned with the present of syphilis to bequeath to future wives and children. Venice had no famous lovers, only famous roues and courtesans.

In the early seventeenth century Thomas Coryat estimated the number of prostitutes to be twenty thousand, “whereof many are esteemed so loose, that they are said to open their quivers to every arrow.” It sounds like the overestimate of an outraged moralist, but the figure may not be so inflated. A century before, a Venetian chronicler, Marino Sanudo, estimated the number at 11,654. A great deal can happen in a hundred years, especially in a city that grew increasingly notorious for its incidence of lust and libertinism. Sanudo’s figure is also to be placed in the context of a population in the early sixteenth century of one hundred thousand; on this evidence, approximately one in five Venetian women was a prostitute. It was reported that Venetian men preferred prostitutes to their wives. One explanation for their ubiquity may rest in the large proportion of unmarried patricians. Fornication, according to Fynes Morrison in the late sixteenth century, was “esteemed a small sinne and easily remitted by Confessors.” Saint Nicholas was the patron saint both of sailors and of prostitutes, the two indispensable Venetian trades.

There were certain areas devoted to venality. There were brothels in certain favoured streets (some thirty or forty streets altogether) with a fair selection of them in the area of the city known as Castelletto. In one house thirteen prostitutes shared an apartment. The main centre was from the fifteenth century the Campo S. Cassiano, known as Carampane, close to the inns and hostels of the Rialto. Saint Mark’s Square itself was used as a meat market by Venetian mothers—“every mother,” a French traveller of the seventeenth century put it, “that is willing to be rid of her Daughter, carries her thither every Day as to a Market … nor are you oblig’d to buy a Pig in a Poke, for you may view and handle her as much as you will.” In the memoirs of Casanova there is an account of just such a transaction. Casanova met a mother and daughter in a coffee house where, on understanding his intentions, the mother asked for money; her daughter was not to lose her virginity “without making a good profit out of it.” Casanova offered ten sequins for her maidenhood, but wanted to assure himself first that he was not being swindled. And this, in his inimitable manner, he proceeded to do. This was an everyday story of Venetian folk.

The genteel courtesan, or “honest” courtesan, was a Venetian speciality. She was not to be confused with the common prostitute or meretrice. She was deemed to be a “free” woman, cultivated and refined. Coryat, who had become something of an expert in the flesh trade, described the courtesan as “decked with many chaines of gold and orient pearles like a second Cleopatra (but they are very little), divers gold rings beautified with diamonds and other costly stones, jewels in both her eares of great worth.” He recommended that travellers carry with them a herb called “moly” or “Ulysses herb,” a type of garlic, to ward off her attractions. But the merits of the courtesan were not merely carnal. She was disposed to intellectual conversation, to repartee and to poetry. She was considered to be the embodiment of the Renaissance ideal, of sensuality leading to the salon if not to sublimity. She also became the embodiment of a new type of woman, and a new form of female consciousness; the courtesans of Venice were significant figures, achieving a social and even intellectual dominance that other women could not equal. That is why they became notorious all over the European world. If Venice is indeed a female city, then it is best represented by the courtesan.

Sexuality also led to the painter’s studio. The status of the unnamed women in Venetian paintings is not at all certain—although it must be the presumption, for example, that Titian’s nudes were indeed courtesans. Images of the repentant whore, Mary Magdalen, may also have been based upon living originals. The ambassador of Ferrara in Venice revealed in a letter to his sovereign that “I suspect that the girls whom he often paints in different poses arouse his desires, which he then satisfies more than his limited strength permits.”

The city was a market in most commodities, so why not in the human body? You had to be able to see what you were purchasing. “By the light of a candle,” according to one Venetian proverb, “you do not judge women or paintings.” A false mole placed by the nose indicated insatiability; in the cleft of the chin, it signified an adventuress.

The state itself condoned, and encouraged, these venereal practices. The prostitutes of the city had their own guild, and they traded under the auspices of the department of public health. The reasons for this toleration have more to do with money than with morals. The tax revenues from the earnings of prostitution were reputed to be worth twelve warships for the protection of the state. The prostitutes also encouraged what might be now called the tourist trade. The adult males would spend money on other commodities, thus increasing the general prosperity of the city. In the process the women helped to parade the famous “liberty” of Venice. They became part of the “myth of Venice.” When Othello says to Desdemona, “I took you for that cunning whore of Venice,” everyone in the audience would understand the allusion.

There were other social forces at work. It was argued that the presence of prostitutes meant that the more respectable women of the city were safer and purer. It was suggested, too, that the ready availability of women was a means of preserving order among the lower classes. They were also considered to be a guard against homosexuality. In the fifteenth century, in a period of sodomitical excess, the prostitutes of the city were ordered to bare their breasts as they leaned out of the windows. Some of them, however, decided to dress as young men.

The city was thereby also known as a centre of homosexuality and of homosexual prostitution. It was considered by many to be an “eastern” vice, and of course Venice was deeply indebted to eastern culture. It was believed that the men of Venice were, in the words of one eighteenth-century critic, “enervated and emasculated by the Softness of the Italian Musick.” The tenderness and luxuriance of the city were considered to be corrupting. But there was also the ambiguous status of land and water, of frontier and mainland. Anyone of weak sensibility might thereby be aroused or stimulated into transgressing ordinary boundaries. The love of boys is reflected in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, where the elderly Aschenbach is lured to his death by the sight of Tadzio. In the course of this novella Mann hits the perfect note to depict the sensuous genius of the city: “our adventurer felt his senses wooed by this voluptuousness of sight and sound, tasted his secret knowledge that the city sickened and hid its sickness for love of gain, and bent an ever more unbridled leer on the gondola that glided before him.”

Venice appeals to those of ambiguous sexuality—Proust, James, “Baron” Corvo, Diaghilev, and many others. As the French writer, Paul Morand, put it in Venises, “in Venice homosexuality was nothing more than the most subtle of the fine arts.” In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, it was the most feared and punished of all sex crimes. The shops of apothecaries, and pastry-makers, were denounced as centres of this criminal activity; the porticoes of certain churches, and the schools of gymnastics, were also considered to be dangerous. Venice was full of dark passageways, in any case, where Sodom might rise again. It was believed that homosexuality might “engulf” the city. It was believed that it was against nature and natural law, but then was not this also the case of Venice itself?

The city, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was being characterised as a whore. It was known for its apparent “decadence” and for its mercantile greed. The Queen of the Sea was transmogrified into “the whore of the Adriatic,” just as Byzantium was once derided as “the whore of the Bosphorus.” There seems to be something deeply troubling about cities of luxury and of sensation. In sixteenth-century London there was a brothel known simply as “Venice.” The city was a decrepit courtesan, sporting its baubles of gold. The futurist, Marinetti, described it at the beginning of the twentieth century as “steeped in exotic lewdness.” The English poet, Rupert Brooke, depicted it in a “tawdry and sensual middle-age.” It was perhaps inevitable. A place that continually asserts that it is a sacred centre, a city of the Virgin Mary, will inevitably incur disgrace and disillusion. That reputation has since changed for the better. Is it a matter of degradation that Venice has become a museum city? There is no reason to believe so.

The pervasiveness, or at least the acceptance, of prostitution may have led to a change in public morals. By