The Book of the Courtesans (14 page)

Coryat’s warning had little effect. Perhaps this is because, though the
desire would not have been entirely conscious, madness of this kind was exactly
what certain men wanted. They were seeing not just physical thrills but mental
thrills as well, to go underneath conventional wisdom and reverse the
established order of their days, an order which, though comfortable, could also
be suffocating.

A certain shine in the eyes of a courtesan would offer a reprieve. That her
business was the realm of unreason, folly, foible, indulgence, wild desire,
delirium, and disorder was apparent in her expression. Yet the same gaze
promised that she would be a trustworthy guide. She was not ignorant of
convention. Her knowledge of the deeper order of flesh was mixed with a canny
comprehension of the social order. She knew how to read both matter and form;
she mixed the understanding of many complex histories artfully with wantonness;
those seductive eyes were educated, her misbehavior cultivated.

In this light, it is not surprising that by the mid-sixteenth century, Venice,
a city which made its fortune from sophisticated indulgences, should become
renowned for its courtesans. These brilliant women were part of a shining
panoply of goods, splendid silks, rich velvets, vibrant gems, sharp and
intriguing spices shipped from the East, which together with the translucent
beauty of the glass blown on the Venetian island of Murano, and the gold leaf
in abundant supply that adorned not only St. Mark’s but so many private
palazzos (covering the entire facade of the Cà’ d’Oro, for
instance), dazzled the senses. After the visitor gliding in a gondola down the
Grand Canal caught sight of the faintly flirtatious image of a palazzo gleaming
like buried treasure in the water as he traveled toward St. Mark’s Square,
the beauty meeting his eyes would seem to multiply beyond any proportions his
mind could hold. The cascade of luxurious sights, smells, and sensations that
greeted the senses everywhere was almost overwhelming. Strangers encountering
Venice, according to one early English writer, would often be “striken
with so great an admiration and amazement, that they woulde, and that with open
mouthe, confesse, never any thing which before time they had seene, to be
thereunto comparable.”

But to gauge the entire effect of a visit to Venice during the Renaissance, two
other essential ingredients should be included. Mixed inextricably with the
luxury of the Ducal Palace, the glorious churches, and all the private palazzos
belonging to the great families of Venice was the great art being produced then.
Extraordinary figures newly rendered in thread, laid in mosaic and tile, or
painted as frescoes by Carpaccio, Giorgione, Palma Vecchio, Veronese, Titian,
and Tintoretto embellished ceilings and staircases, entryways and the walls of
great rooms. No less impressive to most visitors in that period were the
illustrious courtesans of Venice, some so splendid that they must have seemed,
like the goddess who looked after the city, as if they had just risen from the
sea that shone so seductively at every edge.

It has been said more than once that Venice itself was like a courtesan.
Whenever anyone came to the city with whom the Venetians wanted to gain favor,
they would supply him with every possible luxury. The visit of the French king,
Henri III, provided a chance for exceptional largesse. Isolated by an
estrangement from Spain, the doges hoped for the friendship of France. Hence,
Henri was wooed with the best of everything the city had to offer. He was
brought to the city in a ship rowed by four hundred oarsmen and escorted by
fourteen galleys. Then, as his ship crossed the lagoon, it was met by a raft on
which, using a furnace shaped like a marine monster whose jaws and nostrils
belched flame, glassblowers blew objects that they felt would amuse the king.
Soon another armada joined his ship, decorated in opulent tapestries, adorned
with figures of dolphins and gods of the sea. Entering the city, he passed
through an arch designed especially for the occasion by Palladio, which Titian
and Veronese had embellished with painted figures. The Cà’ Foscari on
the Grand Canal had been prepared lavishly, his bed sheets embroidered in
crimson silk. For the banquet held in the Great Council Chamber inside the
Doges’ Palace, the sumptuary laws, which ordinarily pressed restraint on
the city’s ladies and courtesans, were temporarily suspended, so that the
women present wore their most extraordinary jewels and pearls, not only around
their necks but in their hair and beaded over their cloaks. The meal, served on
silver plates, consisted of twelve hundred items, including a serving of
bonbons from which there were three hundred different varieties to choose.
After viewing the opera written for his visit, Henri was asked to witness the
launching of a galley constructed for his benefit during the time that dinner
had been consumed. And all this was followed by several other days of splendid
sights and pleasures. He visited the aging Titian, posed for a portrait by
Tintoretto. And finally he was presented with a heavy book: the
Catalogue
of the Chief and Most Renowned Courtesans of Venice
, featuring
210
miniature portraits from which he was asked to choose
whom he would like to visit. According to those who witnessed the process, he
perused the catalogue intently. After some time, he decided on the courtesan
who was at that time the most favored in Venice: Veronica Franco.

We know little of what transpired on the night of their meeting, except that
the king must have been pleased. He took a miniature of Franco away with him.
And he offered to help her with the coming publication of one of her books. In
response, as well as dedicating the book to him and writing sonnets about him,
she expressed her gratitude in a letter that overflows with praise for the
monarch’s “serene splendor.”

She was well familiar with splendor; her own was legendary. Her exceptional
intelligence alone must have been dazzling. Not only was she bright but she was
also educated, an accomplishment rare among the women of her time, when out of
any given hundred women in the city, fewer than ten knew how to read, and of
these, less than four had received any public schooling. Franco was born to a
family of
cittadini originari
, a respected, usually professional class
of native-born citizens. In such a family, only the sons would have received an
education. But as a girl, Veronica had been allowed to attend the lessons given
to her three brothers by their private tutors. Why an exception was made in her
case is not known. Perhaps her mother, Paola, who, not unusually among
cittadini
families that experienced financial distress, was a
courtesan, believed that her daughter should be properly prepared for this role.
Veronica would have no great inheritance to sustain her should the need arise.
But if she were to become an honored courtesan instead of a prostitute, she
would have to be cultivated.

In hindsight, however, it is easy to see that Franco valued education for other
reasons, too. The sheer joy of learning, the love of poetry, the desire to
understand, delineate, see beneath the surface were passions which drove her
throughout her life. When she reached her sixteenth year, she entered into a
marriage that her mother had arranged for her with a doctor named Paolo Panizza.
This is virtually all we know about the man, except that since one of several
wills she executed over the years requests that her beneficiaries retrieve her
dowry from him, we can theorize that he might have been unusually abusive in
some way.

Much of what we do know about her life comes either from these wills or from
her letters. Elegant, by turns philosophical and decorous, not only do the
letters she wrote reveal a shining intelligence but they also make clear how
much she took part in the intellectual life of the city. A world closed to most
women had opened to Franco when she became a courtesan.

For a short period after her marriage, both mother and daughter were registered
with the city. The record shows that they lived together in the parish of Santa
Maria Formosa. Neither charged very much for her services. Paola was aging and
Veronica was inexperienced. But all that was to change rapidly. Veronica
quickly became one of the most sought-

after women in her trade. It was in this role, as companion to scholars,
artists, and writers, that she was able to enlarge her education even further.
She became a favorite of Domenico Venier, once a protector of Tullia D’
Aragona, and a member of a great Venetian family who supplied more than one
doge to Venice. Domenico, who himself had been a senator, encouraged Veronica,
read her poetry, and, equally important, included her among his regular guests
at the salon which was held in his private palazzo, the Cà’ Venier. It
must have been through this circle that she was afforded a brief meeting with
the brilliant French essayist Montaigne while he was visiting Venice.

Montaigne knew well that intelligence flourishes from intellectual intercourse.
In a famous essay he tells the reader: “To my taste, the most fruitful
and most natural exercise of our mind is conversation.” Not only does
discussion provide validation, it also supplies a mirror with which ideas can
be clarified. Even from disagreement, which Montaigne claimed to value, the
mind will be illuminated, as sharper edges are drawn.

And in between accord and discord, there is another space, inhabited by friends
and colleagues, a territory filled with sparks and resonances, which support
and augment any process of creation. As gradually during her mid-twenties
Franco became known for her poetry and for the many anthologies that she
compiled, she became a valued participant in the literary and artistic world of
Venice. From her letters, we know that in this period she was also hosting
gatherings of intellectuals and artists in her own home.

Tintoretto was most probably among the artists who attended these gatherings.
Some scholars of the period believe that the painter and the courtesan were
friends. The thought itself ignites the imagination. Moving back and forth from
her poetry to his paintings, one finds an unpredictable but compelling affinity.
Besides Franco, Tintoretto painted a few other courtesans. In one of these,
the subject is rendered with beautifully soft degrees of brown. The color,
steadfast in her eye, blushes in the background, rises toward red on her lips,
gathers in a filmy tan in the translucent shawl around her shoulders, shines
with a pink luster in the pearls around her neck, glows with creamy whiteness,
rounded by chestnut shadows on her breasts, which she exposes. But though
Tintoretto had a talent for such portraits, clearly he spent his greatest ardor
on religious paintings. Indeed,
La Lavande dei Pieti
hangs today in
San Moise, where Franco worshipped later in her life. Certainly the worlds they
inhabited converged in casual ways. But where then would the deeper concordance
between a religious painter and this poet courtesan be found?

The answer, of course, is in the shine. In every sense of the word, light is
the real subject of Tintoretto’s
Paradise
, the great fresco where
enlightened bodies, free of gravity, rise toward an enveloping incandescence.
His painting
The Last Supper
, in the chancel of San Giorgio Maggiore,
presents a drama of light, radiating from the head of Jesus with such a
forceful intensity that it appears to have captured all the apostles in its
path as it splinters the atmosphere of the room. That the painter was
interested in the physical properties of light is undeniable. The subtlety with
which he depicts the phenomenon in all its variations is impressive. But for
Tintoretto, light is both real and symbolic. He has added a second source of
light to the scene, an oil lamp, which, less intense, still burns with a
fascinating ferocity of its own, and this light is surrounded by a choir of
angels, as if swimming in the element but also made visible and even conjured
by it.

Though Tintoretto is the true conjuror, simulating light to make visible what,
by lesser hands, is seldom depicted—the mystical states that are
experienced by those struck with religious awe. It is this emotion that seems
to fascinate him most and he shows it by showing what the devout see—a
world energized by luminosity.

We find a similar bedazzlement in the poetry of Veronica Franco. Her subject
was, of course, more worldly. But though in some circles even today sacred and
profane love are opposed, the Renaissance was waking to a certain rapport
between the two. What is portrayed in Titian’s famous painting
Sacred
and Profane Love
is not conflict but harmony. Together, the writers and
artists from this period were reclaiming the conjoined mysteries of eros.

This was Veronica Franco’s subject, what she calls, in one poem, “the
supernatural miracles of love.” Like Tintoretto, she was drawn to inner
states. She explores the awe which lovers feel, an emotion not dissimilar to
religious awe. Indeed, she compares Henri III to a god:

As from heaven down to a humble roof

Beneficent Jove descends to us here below

Since this king had ascended both the thrones of Poland and France by
divine right, the comparison seems especially appropriate. But the practice of
depicting lovers as gods was common to an age eager to explore the divinity not
only of love but of erotic pleasure. The amorous descent of Jove was often
chosen as a subject by painters, among them Correggio and Titian. In these
paintings, following the ancient myth, Jove enters the chamber of Danaë as
a cloud that empties a golden shower on her. Thus are both semen and sexual
pleasure shown as sacramental, the gold here, no less than in the Basilica of
St. Mark’s, a sign of spiritual illumination.

Franco portrays the king’s amatory prowess similarly, but with a more
diplomatic delicacy. “He shone such a ray of divine virtue,” she
writes, coupling luminosity with potency, “that my innate strength
completely failed me.” Light is everywhere in her poetry. Here, another
lover is like a burning sun, there a light more beautiful than the sun. Her own
passion is a spark ignited. She herself shines: in fact, the “bodily eye
can scarcely bear the splendor of her brow.” And also like Tintoretto,
the real source of illumination in her work is inward. When she writes that
“like snow in the sun you vanished in tears,” it is the inner
experience of love she is tracking, what we would call today the psychology of
eros.