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

Italica, Fall-Winter, 2006 by Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski

The poet's "bizaria," his "eccentricity," arises from his desire to preserve his own bodily integrity, which he envisions as graphically undone--by himself--if he were to trade money for sex. To hire a courtesan would be tantamount to doing violence to his own masculinity.

Masculinity may be also at stake in another stanza of the poem:

   Se paga le puttane de bordello
   Che a tutti i muodi se fa bisegar
   E spesso ha falla buso e a manganello. (Dazzi 26)
   [Whores in brothels get paid / For doing it every which way / Often
   mistaking the bore for the artillery.]

Almost in passing, Maffio hints at the "sexual deviance" of prostitutes and of the men who frequent them. How exactly that might work he leaves to the imagination. It should be noted, however, that while prostitution was tolerated in Renaissance Venice, certain forms of intercourse were not. Sodomy between men and women, or between men and men, was, for example, stigmatized and sometimes severely punished (Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros 109-45). It is not clear, however, whether Maffio implies a specific sexual act by "ha falla buso e a manganello'; he could also be referring to female dominance, sexual or otherwise. Franco, though a courtesan rather than a common prostitute, leaves herself open to such charges of deviance by charging for her services, as does her clientele.

In the second poem in the series, An fia, comodo? Ache muodo ziogheno? [Wouldn't you like that? How should we play?], Maffio launches a deeply ad feminam attack. Each part of Veronica's body is profoundly ugly, wasted, destroyed:

   Se dise co' una in ossi xe reduhta
   Chela somegia Veronica Franca,
   Che no ghe xe de ti la piu destrutta. (Dazzi 31)
   [They say that reduced to her very bones / she resembles
   Veronica Franco, / and that no one is more destroyed that
   she is.]

As Margaret Rosenthal notes, the poem offers an anti-blazon describing infected and horrific body parts (Honest Courtesan 56). This attack on Franco also contrasts with and undermines the blazons by male lovers that were written to Franco and that she included in her publication of the Terze rime, perhaps to counteract the damage done by Maffio. What is striking about this second in the series of three poems attacking Franco is that here he switches from an attack on her practice to an attack on her body, suggesting that it is wasted by age and disease.

It is the third and last poem, however, that presents the most extreme images of Veronica's body. Veronica, ver unica puttana describes a syphilitic "mostro in carne umana" [monster in human flesh, Dazzi 37]. Maffio's virtual Veronica, the "adopted daughter of the French disease," sends so many men to the hospitals that these institutions send her gift baskets at Easter and Christmas:

   E te manda da Pasqua e da Nadal
   Un sturuol de regallia ogni ospedal.
   No estu del gran mal
   Francese la diletta fia adottiva ... ? (Dazzi 38)
   [And at Easter and Christmastime / every hospital sends you
   a gift basket. / Are you not the beloved adopted daughter / of
   the French disease?"]