The short, lascivious lives of two Venetian theaters, 1580-85

Renaissance Quarterly, Autumn, 2002 by Eugene J. Johnson

Both theaters were built to produce revenue, and Ettore Tron's letter of 1580, in which he stated that he had rented palchi to half the nobles of the city and taken in some 1,000 ducats, suggests that the first season was a success. (34) Such diversification of investment was typical of patrician Venetian families in the late sixteenth century; when northern Europeans were making significant inroads into Mediterranean trade previously dominated by Venice. (35) The fact that in the successive years of 1578, 1579 and 1580 the Ten permitted the performance of comedies suggests that in post-plague Venice there was widespread demand for entertainment, and the Michiel and Tron must have decided to cash in on this demand by building their theaters. The vote of 1579 that permitted comedies by a large majority may have given the two families a false sense that such permission would continue to be renewed easily. The closer votes of 1580, which might have been taken as a warning of things to come, occurred after the th eaters had been built. (36)

The Tron theater was located on the site of the present garden of Palazzo Albrizzi, at the intersection of the Rio San Cassian and the Rio della Madonnetta, on the western edge of the parish of San Cassiano. (37) Because it occupied a rectangular plot, it may have been the "oval" theater mentioned by Sansovino, with a plan perhaps similar to the Tron theater built on the same site in the eighteenth century for which drawings survive. (38) The Michiel theater, much closer to the Grand Canal, seems to have stood on the opposite side of the Corte del Teatro Vecchio from the canal, in an area now occupied by a block of apartments. (39) The plot on which it stood was almost square in shape, and so this theater may have been Sansovino's "round" one -- that is, with boxes arranged in a semi-circle. Both situations allowed access to the theaters from nearby canals, an important issue in a Venice with relatively few paved streets. Well-dressed patricians attending the comedies would not have cared to walk through mudd y calli to reach them. What may have stood on the sites before the theaters is not known. It seems most likely that the Tron and the Michiel placed the structures of their theaters inside already existing walls and under already existing roofs. (40) Certainly documents discussed below give credence to this hypothesis.

The novita in assoluto, to use Mangini's phrase, of these theaters was the presence of revenue-producing boxes. What the source for this new concept may have been is not clear, but there was a long tradition in Venice of using windows as private spaces from which to view public events. The windows of the Procuratie Vecchie filled with women in Gentile Bellini's famous painting of the Procession of Corpus Christi in Piazza San Marco of 1496 (Venice, Accademia) offer a case in point. In other parts of the city windows and balconies were rented to spectators to watch the guerre di bastoni, battles on bridges between large groups of men that became increasingly popular in Venice from the sixteenth century on. Henry III of France watched such a battle from a balcony overlooking the Ponte dei Carmini in 1574, (41) and one can assume that all the other balconies and windows around the Campo dei Carmini were thronged by spectators. By the late seventeenth century balconies overlooking such battle sites, where the occ upants could both see and be seen, fetched a much higher rent than a box at an opera house. (42)