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

Italica, Fall-Winter, 2006 by Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski

Through historical and psychoanalytic study of early modern fantasies regarding the body, one can move beyond the suggestive yet general reading of the corporeal psyche sketched by Grosz toward an understanding of individual imagined bodies and toward an awareness of certain collective sensibilities within the historical period or culture under investigation. The corporeal psyche, as Grosz defines it, is an individual's imagined experience of his or her own body. The virtual body, in contrast, is a more mobile concept--quite literally, in that it circulates. The virtual body may move from one person to another as shared corporeal fantasy, or it may be projected onto a person or group, or onto inanimate objects (e.g., buildings, ships, or cities). The virtual body, unlike the ego of classic Freudian theory, is not a transhistorical entity that exists outside of culture and inside one person, but a historically, socially, and geographically contingent projection of personal and also group identity. Though virtual bodies are fluid and evanescent, they are some extent generalizable--that is one premise of this essay: that one can posit many virtual bodies for a given time period. These are often templates of shared bodily anxieties and fantasies that nevertheless may have varied from person to person. We shall see several such bodies animating the poetry of Maffio Venier and Veronica Franco--the imagined bodies of prostitutes, sexual deviants, amazons, and many others.

The Syphilitic Imaginary

Syphilis had a significant and wide-ranging impact on the available range of corporeal fantasies in the early modern era. Syphilographers, early modern and modern alike, have studied the effect of the dreaded disease on the social, political, and spiritual lives of sixteenth-century Europeans. In his History of Syphilis, Claude Quetel traces the vectors of the epidemic, which may have been brought back from the New World (though historians continue to debate the origins of the illness), and which seems to have appeared in Italy in 1494, with the arrival of the mercenary army of Charles VIII of France. Certain of these soldiers carried syphilis with them, infecting the population with the virulent disease. In the following year Charles' troops were demobilized, and soldiers returning home and/or fleeing from the disease would spread the disease, that quickly became a near-global epidemic (Quetel 8-16).

Early medical commentators on syphilis, such as Gaspar Torella and Francisco Lopez de Villalobos, Jacques de Bethencourt, and Girolamo Fracastoro, detailed the symptoms of the disease, which proved most virulent in the first decades after its appearance in Europe, and which became marginally less severe by the end of the sixteenth century. (10) Their treatises, while not in agreement as to the causes of the disease, collectively create a portrait of the ravaging symptoms of syphilis on the body: initially, large, open sores on the genitals, together with a hardening of the surrounding tissues; terrible pains in the limbs, head, and neck; ulcerous pox erupting across the body; the loss of hair on the body; and tertiary damage to the nose, larynx, and bodily organs.