The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (34 page)

The rich queued up to have their portraits painted by the likes of Titian, who had now reached such eminence in his old age that, in recognition of his services to the Republic, he had been elevated to the nobility and his family name was inscribed in the Golden Book. Titian would finally die at around ninety years of age during the plague outbreak of 1576. He had achieved such fame and riches that he received the doubtful honour of having his house ransacked by thieves after his death. During this grim time when inns and shops were closed and the streets were deserted, there were frequent outbreaks of civil disorder as the downtrodden poor took out their spite on those who had benefited so disproportionately during the years of prosperity. The inhibitions of others were cast aside as the belief prevailed that the plague outbreak marked the long-delayed end of the world – expected by many at the one-and-a-half millenium in 1500. Venice had not suffered an affliction like this since the Black Death more than two centuries previously. All those who could, fled to their estates on the mainland, whilst those suffering from the plague were shipped across the Lagoon to the Lazaretto islands.
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These were soon so overflowing with the afflicted and the dying that sufferers were then housed in disused galleons anchored nearby. These spots were said to have witnessed pitiful scenes, with desperate inmates screaming in their extremity beneath makeshift shelters on the small islands, while others threw themselves from the high decks of the galleons, and many called pitifully to passing fishing boats to rescue them. A continual pall of smoke hung over the entire Lazaretto islands from the burning of the dead bodies. In all, 51,000 citizens of the city and the lagoon islands (well over a quarter of the population) are known to have died in the outbreak, which began in the winter of 1575
and disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived in the early months of 1577.

Titian’s death left his rival Tintoretto as the city’s acknowledged leading artist, along with Veronese. Tintoretto had been born Jacopo Comin in Brescia on 29 September 1518. His father was a dyer by trade; hence Jacopo’s nickname ‘Tintoretto’, which means little son of the tinter (or dyer). Tintoretto quickly demonstrated a precocious talent, using his father’s dye to paint on the walls of his workshop. When he was fifteen his father took him to Venice to become an apprentice in Titian’s studio. But after ten days the master despatched his pupil back home. Such was Tintoretto’s expressive independence of style that Titian recognised that he would never accept the discipline of being his pupil, one of whose duties was to finish the paintings of his master. Tintoretto’s artistic style was matched by his dramatic temperament, which would further alienate him from Titian when he returned to Venice. However, Titian was generous enough to recognise his growing talent, a recognition that brought Tintoretto his first commissions. Despite these, during his early years he suffered from some financial hardship, whilst continuing to teach himself how to master the necessary technique. During these years he ambitiously advertised his studio with a notice proclaiming that his paintings had ‘the design of Michelangelo and the colour of Titian’. Yet still he received insufficient work. At the age of twenty-eight he desperately offered to paint two large works on religious subjects for the church of Madonna dell’Orto for no other recompense than the cost of the materials, in order to advertise his talent. This was beginning to develop through his study of Michelangelo, his attendance at dissections in the medical schools, and his habit of making wax models of the figures grouped in his paintings. This gave them a three-dimensional appearance amidst the perspective background, for which he often used dark tones to emphasise the drama of his scenes. The subjects of his paintings for the Madonna dell’Orto were the Worship of the Golden Calf and the Last Judgement, theatrical settings which accorded with his style to such effect that they were quickly recognised as the works of a new master.

Soon afterwards Tintoretto was commissioned to paint a portrait of the satirist Aretino. In order to impress upon his untameable sitter who
was to be master of the situation, Tintoretto is famously said to have measured up Aretino using a pistol – a hint that Aretino quickly understood. The subsequent portrait was recognised as showing a deep understanding of Aretino’s nature.

Tintoretto was by now receiving civic commissions for works in San Marco, an accolade that elevated him to the company of Venice’s finest artists, past and present. But some of his finest work, along with masterpieces by Giovanni Bellini, Titian and Veronese, would be destroyed in 1577 by a fire that gutted many of San Marco’s major council chambers – to such an extent that parts of the administration were forced to move temporarily to the Arsenale. Tintoretto and Veronese would be able to paint replacement works, but those by Bellini and Titian were lost for ever.

While Titian had become an honoured and very well-rewarded cultural ambassador for Venice, travelling far afield to paint the portraits of kings and queens, an emperor and a pope, Tintoretto would never leave Venetian territory, indeed seldom straying beyond the often claustrophobic confines of the city itself. His character remained throughout his life a not uncommon Venetian blend of spiritual otherworldliness and unscrupulous ambition. He made a habit of asking for little or no payment for a commissioned work, other than to cover his costs; yet he would go out of his way to ensure by any means that he obtained the commission in the first place. In 1560 he was asked to bid, along with several other distinguished artists including Veronese, for a commission to paint the ceiling of the school of San Rocco. Each of the competitors was asked to submit their drawings and designs for judgement. Instead, Tintoretto quietly measured the space to be covered by the painting, hastily painted a canvas of the same size with a speed and expertise such as only he could accomplish, then secretly had the painting put in place and covered over. When the day of the competition arrived and he was asked to submit his design, he simply pulled back the cover to reveal his finished painting in place. The judges, to say nothing of his competitors, were furious, remonstrating that he was only meant to submit a design for the painting. To which he replied that this was his method of designing a painting and he knew no other way – for a design was surely intended to show the ultimate effect of the painting.

Such methods made him many enemies, but all were forced to admire the sheer artistry of his work, which retained its spectacular flourishes and the dimmed realism of its atmospheric colouring throughout his life. And even in old age, he still could not resist combining this brilliance with his underhand methods of obtaining work. Such unscrupulousness would be epitomised in the commissioning and execution of his final masterpiece,
Paradise
. The painting itself would be a towering work filled with all manner of ethereal and exemplary figures swirling through the clouded heavens beneath the haloed figure of Christ
in excelsis
. Yet the manner in which Tintoretto won this important commission was somewhat less exalted: he virtually blackmailed various influential senators, telling them how he prayed night and day that he could gain this commission, believing it would allow him one day to enter paradise. Two years after completing this work, Tintoretto would die at the age of seventy-six, when he would be buried in the church of Madonna dell’Orto, where he had painted the paintings that first brought him to wider public notice.

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In the early fifteenth century the small island of Santa Maria di Nazareth in the Lagoon was established as an isolated lodging for travellers arriving from ports known to be affected with the plague. Here they would be detained for forty days (giving rise to the name ‘quarantine’). The island was known locally as Nazaretto, but when it was also used for isolating those suffering from leprosy it became known as Lazaretto (after Lazarus, the beggar whom Christ cured of leprosy). The general name Lazaretto stems from this island. Later, when the quarantine area was extended to the neighbouring island, the two islands became known as Lazaretto Vecchio (old) and Lazaretto Nuovo.

14

Women of Venice

T
HE MODELS USED
by Venetian artists such as Titian and Tintoretto for their sumptuous nudes would usually have been courtesans, or sometimes prostitutes. As the ambassador of Ferrara noted with regard to Titian, ‘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.’ No respectable woman would have been permitted to pose in such a fashion.

In a city of otherwise somewhat strict morality, there were a surprising number of courtesans and prostitutes. Paradoxically, this was because the morality, especially that imposed upon women,
was
strict during this period. Young women were preserved as virgins until they were married, usually well before they were twenty; these young women, as well as wives, were closely chaperoned when they left their homes. This left a large number of young men, who usually did not get married until at least their late twenties, with considerable sexual energy to expend. Owing to the authorities’ fear of homosexuality, prostitution was covertly encouraged, though strictly regulated, so that it brought in a tidy sum to the Republic’s exchequer. Prostitutes were confined to certain streets and were required to sit at their windows with their breasts exposed. It appears the authorities soon became more concerned with revenue than regulation, for a shocked English visitor during this time estimated that there were around 20,000 prostitutes working in the city, ‘whereof many are esteemed so loose, that they are said to open their quivers to every arrow’. While this description would seem to be symptomatic of the profession, outrage may well have caused him to exaggerate their number – local sources suggest a figure closer to 15,000. Even
so, this would have accounted for more than one in five of the entire female population. Not for nothing was Venice a city of sailors; and as word of its unique beauty, artistic treasures and reputed libertinism spread over Europe, it also began to attract a stream of cultured and dissipated visitors. During ‘the folly and madness’ of the pre-Lenten Carnival, when the revellers of both sexes wore masks, prostitutes were able to escape the districts to which they were normally confined. And they also customarily took part in other typically Venetian events. At the regatta – which Aretino had so vividly described, and Canaletto would so colourfully depict – there was traditionally a women’s race where the prostitutes competed standing bare-breasted, rowing in two-oared gondolas, cheered on with gusto by the crowds lining the quaysides. But there was no such place on the public stage for respectable women.

When young women married, they were expected to bring with them a handsome dowry. Many noble families were unable to afford these dowries for more than one or two of their daughters. This meant that a large number of women of good families were left unmarried. These were for the most part encouraged, or forced, to forswear the world, become nuns and enter convents. The extent of this practice can be seen in the fact that by 1481 there were 2,500 nuns in the city. These were confined in some fifty convents – one-third of which were on remote islands in the lagoon. Many of the nuns confined in these institutions felt no calling, and as a result tales of desperate unhappiness and promiscuity abounded. Perhaps inevitably, Aretino wrote a scurrilous book entitled
The Secret Life of Nuns
, which contained much graphic and hilarious description of the titillating antics within a convent. The reality was rather more desperate and sad, as can be seen from the case of Laura Querini, whose story would be repeated in many variations, and in many convents.

Laura took her vows in 1584 at the age of fifteen in the convent of San Zaccaria, whose sisters included many from amongst the most noble families in Venice, as indeed she was. The convent itself was in the heart of the city, backing onto a canal that led off the busy Riva degli Schiavoni just a stone’s throw away. This location, around the corner from San Marco, must have made it even more difficult for the nuns, who would have heard all the daily commerce and cries of the city beyond their incarcerating
walls. However, although they could never leave the convent, the rule for the nuns within it appears to have been quite relaxed, though in a characteristically Venetian fashion. A woman who regularly visited the monastery, by the name of Donna Cipriana, was in the habit of introducing Laura to male ‘friends’, and during her twenties and thirties Laura would form several ‘friendships’ with visiting young men. Although these meetings were secret, they were conducted in the convent parlour, suggesting the connivance of someone within the monastery. However, nothing particularly untoward appears to have taken place at these meetings. Laura would later claim, ‘I never did anything wicked, that is, I never lost my virginity.’ But as she approached her forties, Laura evidently found the whispers, fondlings and kisses in the parlour increasingly inadequate.