The Renaissance scholar Francesco Sansovino (1521-1586) called Venice, and its watery setting, “the impossible in the impossible”. Situated in a tidal lagoon and built largely on artificial islands, the sheer improbability of magnificent churches and shimmering palaces emerging from the depths creates an abiding sense of the surreal in those fortunate enough to visit.
Denis Romano’s new work seeks to make the miracle comprehensible. It spans a vast temporal sweep: from descriptions of the Roman shore-side settlements which eventually coalesced into Venice to considering the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The book’s best chapters concern Venice’s surging life as a sovereign republic and maritime empire in the High Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Across these centuries Venice’s famous “mixed polity”, combining elements (at least symbolically) of monarchy, patrician-republic and popular democracy, appeared to confer an inner peace which in turn strengthened the city against external threats.
Styling the doge, Venice’s non-hereditary monarch, who was elected for life from among his noble peers, as “His Serenity” was part and parcel of a wider strategy of reputation management. Venice’s retention of the “international gothic” style in architecture long after it had ceased to be fashionable across most of Renaissance Italy augmented an aura of unique stability.
This was more image than reality, and struggles over contrasting visions of ducal power played out in artistic commissions. The summit of the grandiose staircase fronting the Ducal palace was executed across the dogeships of brothers Marco and Agostino Barbarigo (who ruled successively from 1485 to 1501) who conceived it as the site for Ducal investitures – thus stressing Venice’s monarchical dimension.
In 1544, however, the nobles pushed back, installing two huge statues of Mars and Neptune atop the structure. Symbols of Venetian might on sea and land the statues, as Romano notes, “dwarfed the men who at that very spot became the Republic’s temporary custodians” – cutting them down to size.
Processions and internal pilgrimages were key to how Venetians configured their identity. The best known was the annual spring-time “Marriage of the Sea”. Originating in around 1000 as a modest blessing of the lagoon, the ceremony grew more elaborate as Venice became not only a coastal city but, after the Fourth Crusade, a maritime empire projecting force across the waves with its mighty galleys.
Sources show that by the mid-1200s a “marriage rite” had been incorporated. The doge boarded his ceremonial galley, whose oarsman rowed him to the Adriatic. Once there his chaplain blessed the water, and then the monarch tossed a gold ring into the depths. By the 1500s the ceremony had been fixed on Ascension Day and involved innumerable small boats, a Mass, ceremonial feasting and general partying.
The message, however, remained constant. When the doge cast the ring into the sea, he recited the text, “We wed thee, O sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion.” Venice’s imperium would, beside a substantial domestic hinterland, include the Dalmatian marches (today’s Croatian coast), and islands as far off as Crete and Cyprus.
That outward orientation entailed a complex relationship with the wider Catholic world. Venice competed with the Ottomans for dominance in the Mediterranean (the two powers fought seven wars between 1463 and 1718). Just as often, though, economic considerations caused the city to evade alliances with Catholic states against the Sultan – at once a strategic rival and an important trading partner.
Although Romano tries to give due weight to religion’s importance in Venice’s story when it comes to civic pageantry, his handling of faith generally is far from assured. The Great Schism (1054) receives only a footnote – and that only amid discussion of events a century later. Exploration of what that rupture meant for Venice as, at that time, a Byzantine territory in the West, or for the large Venetian colony resident in Constantinople, is oddly missing.
Later we learn that attempts at imposing Tridentine liturgical reform were resisted in Venice because of strong attachment to local traditions. We are left uninformed about what those traditions actually were – or how they may have perpetuated traces of the Orthodox East.
Romano’s treatment of belief sometimes descends into schoolboy-howler territory as in the assertion that the Nestorian heresy is “the belief that Christ has two distinct natures, human and divine” – the error in fact being conceiving of the two natures as lacking personal unity.
These blemishes undermine a work which otherwise presents an impressive synthesis of Venice’s political, economic, cultural and environmental history. The book, however, remains enjoyable for its general narrative and abundant illustrations.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is an Anglican clergyman and a freelance journalist.
Photo: Gondolas at quay near St Mark’s square with San Giorgio Maggiore in the background, Venice, Italy, 8 February 2013. (Photo credit FRANCOIS XAVIER MARIT/AFP via Getty Images.)
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