CHAPTER TWO

VIRTUS ROMANA AND THE MYTH OF VENICE

One of the consequences of the wars of the League of Cambrai was a change in the psychological and cultural relationship between Venice and her Terraferma. Alongside the development of a commercially successful interest in agronomy and the pleasures of country life there grew a need to envelope the Terraferma into a Venetian identity and credo. Two elements made this transformation of the Terraferma possible and both distinguish Palladio’s works and theory from other Renaissance architecture: the first element was the ‘myth’ of Venice, Venice as the most serene, virtuous and divinely ordained Republic; and, secondly, the connection between Venice and antiquity, both through its connection with the Byzantine Empire and in its emulation of ancient Rome.

In an act of communal genius, medieval and Renaissance Venetians intertwined the threads of parochialism, patriotism and the ideal of la vita civile to weave a republican, popular piety that inspired not only the interest of outsiders but their passions as well. Venice’s historical reputation for beauty, virtue, religiosity, liberty, peacefulness and republicanism was acknowledged and celebrated in the visual arts, musical lyrics, poetry and official and popular history.[i] In the myth of Venice parochial sentiments that cut across class lines met with the elite ideal of civic life. Already in 1364 Petrarch in his description of the Republic in a victory over Crete wrote of the serenity and honour of the Republic:

The august city of Venice rejoices, the home today of liberty, peace and justice, the one refuge of honourable men… Venice - rich in gold but richer in renown, mighty in her resources but mightier in virtue, solidly built on marble but standing more strong on a solid foundation of civic concord, ringed with salt waters but more secure with the salt of good council.’[ii]

Praise of Venice during the Renaissance invariably began with applause for its unparalleled beauty and urban charm as a city quite literally built upon the sea. In 1548 an emissary from Friuli, Cornelio Frangipane, in an oration to Doge Francesco Dona (1545-53) lauded Venice as incomparably beautiful to see, marvellous to contemplate, secure, peaceful and rich; on another occasion he added that, after Paradise, Venice was the best place in the universe.[iii] The humanistic emphasis on rhetorical hyperbole and the NeoPlatonic belief that outward beauty was a sign of inward virtue, encouraged the cultivation of pleasant appearances. The undisputed importance of a planned and uncluttered city as Vitruvius and other ancient writers had prescribed not only ensured a cleaner and healthier city, but a stunning cityscape also gave proof of a well arranged political and social order.

The seeming proof of Venice as a comparatively well arranged political and social order came after the Sack of Rome in 1527. In contrast to the disaster that had befallen Rome, Venice had made a miraculous emergence from its earlier wars without serious loss of property or independence. As a result, the ‘myth’ of Venice as a Republic which surpassed even Republican Rome in the perfection of its constitution, saw a resurgence in the political theatre. The claim was based on the permanence of Venice over the centuries, its assurance of liberty, and an assertion of a sharing of power among its component inhabitants. Two of the most influential statements of the myth, those of the patrician Gasparo Contarini and of the Florentine historian Donato Giannotti, were written in the period 1523-31.[iv]

Whether expressed in painting, in poetry or utopian texts, land and landed affairs came to assume an important place in Venetian cultural identity and the construction of the ‘myth of Venice’. The Venetian humanist, poet, cardinal and historian Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), as an early sixteenth century spokesman of this development, served as a courtier in a number of the princely courts of upper Italy over the course of his life: at the Montefeltro court of Urbino where he was in contact with Baldassare Castiglione, writer of the Renaissance handbook of manners The Courtier, and at Mantua in the court of Isabella d’Este, one of the great cultural patrons of the high Renaissance.

Bembo is perhaps best remembered for the poetic discourses that he wrote as a young man in the late 1490’s such as Gli Asolani.[v] This work celebrates the ideas of courtly and Platonic love and was modelled upon Petrarch and written in a highly stylised vernacular. Set in a courtly garden, its theme is the refinement of worldly love into a higher, ideal love which elevates the human spirit to the point of contact with the harmonies of created nature, the celestial spheres and the cosmos.[vi] The characters and events in Gli Asolani were modelled upon the stylised, self consciously literary and philosophical group of patricians and noblewomen gathered at the court of the former Queen of Cyprus, Caterina Cornaro.[vii]

Associated literary, artistic and musical figures in Bembo’s Gli Asolani included the painter Giorgione and the Arcadian pastoral and Neoplatonic themes of Jacopo Sannazzaro’s text L’Arcadia of 1500[viii]. Like Sannazzaro’s L’Arcadia, Gli Asolani’s aim is to celebrate the moral and spiritual perfection that supposedly emerges from a close association with the natural world and its rhythms.

Figure 4. Gentile Bellini, Procession in the Piazza c. 1505[ix]

These themes became strongly represented in the younger generation of Venetian painters in the early years of the new century. Alongside the continued celebration of the imperial city, its history, tradition, landscape and society, as captured in works such as Gentile Bellini’s Procession in the Piazza c.1505 (fig. 4) one begins to see a Venetian art which celebrates the rural landscape and sets Madonnas, patrician gentlemen and nubile young women in an arcadian landscape that consciously echoed the landscape of the Terraferma. This appreciation of the landscape which went on to influence many other Renaissance painters outside of the Venetian Republic can already be seen in Giovanni Bellini’s Pieta of 1500 (fig.5). There is a fascination with what is specifically the Venetian Terraferma: cultivated lands in the foreground, a middle ground of hills and the clearly recognisable town of Vicenza; and in the horizon the blue Alps with their snowy peaks.

Figure 5. Giovanni Bellini: Pieta 1500[x]

The utopian Arcadianism, calm composition, harmony and beauty of these paintings are not completely unrelated to the most practical of Venetian interventions in the Terraferma. The same interest in the actual shape, value and meaning of the landscape was as influential to painting as to drainage, engineering, surveying and architecture. Indeed, as Rosand has argued, ‘it is through architecture that landscape is first acknowledged as a valid theme in renaissance art theory’[xi]. Certainly Palladio’s consistent interest in the landscape, city and country, in relation to the effect and meaning of his works is one of the elements that highlights his intellectual involvement in these interests and ideas.

Palladio’s early education under the guidance of the humanist and Vicentine noble, Giangorgio Trissino, through his Accademia Olimpico, highlights the part that these humanist and arcadian elements played in Palladio’s architectural credo. As the inscriptions over three of the Villa Trissino’s doorways proclaim, Trissino’s academy imparted three things: Study, the Arts, and Virtue. It was the third of these three pursuits, in Latin virtus, rendered as virtu in sixteenth-century Italian, that was of particular importance to the aspiring architect. Palladio was later to assert the role of virtue in architecture by depicting Regina Virtus, the Queen of Virtue on the frontispiece to each of his four books, where she sits as mother of the arts, presiding over the architecture within (fig.7, p.35). In antiquity, virtue meant excellence and good action which was to be directed for the benefit and enhancement of civic life by the well rounded individual. For this to be developed education was necessary; hence virtue was preceded by study and knowledge of the arts. Presumably with these ideas in mind Andrea Piero dalla Gondola was renamed Andrea Palladio by Trissino during the late 1530’s with the intention that he would serve society as a man of virtue. [xii]

The name Palladio may have been derived from Pallas Athena, or the talisman in her image, known as Palladium. The Romans believed Aeneas had brought the talisman to Italy where, as a symbol of wisdom and vision, it later safeguarded Rome. Alternatively he may have been named after Palladius, the fourth century writer on agrarian economy, certainly the rich farmland of the Veneto had provided many of Palladio’s patrons with their wealth. Interestingly, before Trissino met Palladio he had written an epic poem L’Italia liberata dai Gotthi in which he described an archangel, called Palladio, who was an expert on architecture and instrumental in expelling the Goths from Italy.[xiii] Palladio’s adoption of the name would also have given a stronger literary and mythological gravitas to an occupation or profession that, unlike previous architectural theorists such as Vitruvius, Albert and Raphael who were not solely architects, was to some extent being defined by him and his patrons.