Veronica Franco vs. Maffio Venier: sex, death, and poetry in Cinquecento Venice

Italica, Fall-Winter, 2006 by Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski

The controversies surrounding Veronica Franco, both in our own time and in the sixteenth century, are fascinating. This essay shall return to this much-studied controversy once again, investigating the personal stakes of those individuals involved, but also, perhaps more significantly, the cultural stakes in the struggle over Franco's reputation and, indeed, her body. We know that there were many witnesses to the conflict between Veronica Franco and Maffio Venier, including the lover whom she initially suspected and the entire coterie of patrician spectators at the Ca' Venier. This male circle of literati must certainly have witnessed the battle with interest, fascination, and possibly horror. For Maffio's dominant fantasy about Franco, expressed clearly in his third and final poem, was that she was afflicted what we would call the tertiary stages of syphilis. Consequently the assembly that witnessed this battle in the salon setting of the Ca' Venier and beyond would not have been disinterested spectators of their unparalleled poetic insult-slinging. Rather the audience might well have been unnerved by the threat of syphilis embodied in Maffio's virtual Veronica, as much as by the assertion of Amazonian subjectivity contained in Franco's poetic persona. This poetic battle, seemingly circumscribed by the walls of the Ca' Venier and its circle of members, raised a much larger social question emblematic of that time and place: namely, what did it mean to be a public woman in Cinquecento Venice--a woman who, in the case of Veronica Franco, was both a courtesan and a published poet. Franco was, in a sense, a living performance of public art--a renowned courtesan whose body was available to a certain exclusive clientele, a published author, and a public presence. The degree of her publicity was both anomalous and unsettling.

Before returning to this power struggle between the courtesan poet and her adversary, a conduit into the liminal fantasy life of sixteenth-century Venetians, it is necessary to lay out a key metaphor of this paper--namely, that of the virtual body. Then, using the concept of the virtual, and drawing on the syphilitic imaginary of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Europe, this essay will offer a psycho-corporeal reading of the tenzone, an "embodied" reading of the verbal duel, and it will also advance a set of more global psychological speculations regarding the ephemera of pre-modern bodily experience.

The Virtual Body

The metaphor of the virtual body hinges on a distinction between the actual human body and a psychic or imagined body. The virtual body is related to that of the "corporeal psyche" described by Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, who retheorizes Freudian concepts of narcissism and the body ego in her book Volatile Bodies. This corporeal psyche is an imaginary body, a psychic projection of that body, though not a point-for-point mapping. It is "something like an internal screen," Grosz writes, "onto which the illuminated and projected images of the body's outer surface are directed.... [It] is a representation of the varying intensities of libidinal investment in the various bodily parts and the body as a whole" (37). Grosz distinguishes, then, between the actual body and a psychic version or experience of the body that does and does not correspond to the actual; it is not, she says, a "veridical diagram or representation of the empirical and anatomical body; nor is it an effect of which the body or the body's surface is a cause...." Rather, she thinks of this reformulated ego as deriving from two kinds of "surface"--one inside, however a psychic inside might be imagined, and the other outside, an outside which is equally, and counter intuitively, perceptual rather than simply real (37). It is, in a word, imaginary, though it is nevertheless rooted in one's experience of the world through one's body.