Private Lives in Renaissance Venice

Apollo, Dec, 2004 by Francis Ames-Lewis

Private Lives in Renaissance Venice Patricia Fortini Brown Yale University Press, 35 [pounds sterling]/$50 ISBN 0300102364

In the conclusion to this handsome book, Patricia Fortini Brown suggests that the mythic success of Venice rests in a paradox that 'encompasses more than its geophysical improbability ... the tension between magnificenzia and mediocritas manifest in palace building reflected a dialogue between tradition and modernity'. Perhaps because Fortini Brown's thoughts on the subject-matter of the book were sparked off by Francesco Sansovino's comment, in his Venezia citta nobilissima of 1581, that 'Venice was a society both frugal and opulent--an ambiguous claim that cried out for explanation', such opposites abound. For example, the triumph of the romanising, all'antica modernity of the grand early-sixteenth-century palaces did not displace venezianita: these modes were able to coexist 'precisely because of Venice's conservatism' with its capacity to synthesise the new with the old.

Despite the Venetian belief in the value of mediocritas, by the early sixteenth century patrician and cittadino alike strove in the interiors of their palaces to impress by the ostentatious display of expensive, luxury furnishings and dress. Sumptuary laws, 'more a rhetorical stance than a practical remedy' were, Fortini Brown suggests, perhaps 'effective precisely because they did not work'. It is such paradoxes, polarities and tensions that form the analytical framework within which the discussion in this illuminating book is located. The book is based on the series of eight Slade Lectures that Fortini Brown delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2001, and 'the informality of a spoken presentation has been retained whenever possible'. The result reads less densely than the author's two major earlier books, but the tone generally suits well the wide-ranging subject coverage. This runs far beyond the conventional emphasis on architecture, painting and sculpture, spanning objects from doorknockers to domestic glassware and cutlery, to children's furniture and to women's platform shoes.

A central aim of the book is to explore what is Venetian about the Venetian domestic environment and its furnishings, and this calls for the extensive quarrying and analysis of textual materials. Texts are of several types: treatises on nobility and on the household, sumptuary legislation, household inventories, and sixteenth-century descriptions of domestic space provide the backbone for consideration of the surviving furnishings and luxury objects themselves. Fortini Brown threads her way through this wealth of material with great skill and sensitivity to produce a vivid picture of the splendour of the wealthiest households of renaissance Venice.

One text, discussed by Fortini Brown at well-deserved length, may exemplify the richness of the available material: the household inventory of the courtesan Elisabetta Condulmer, drawn up at her death on 13 September 1538. The daughter of a noble but indigent patrician, Elisabetta appears to have slid through necessity into her occupation; and to judge by the luxury in which she lived, she made a considerable success of it. She lived in a well-appointed apartment in the contrada of San Felice. The walls of one of the main rooms were lined with paintings, many alla fiandrese (in the Flemish style), including a large portrait of herself; and the room was opulently furnished with twenty-four chairs, a dining table, three benches, five strongboxes and two cradles. Her bedroom was decorated with sacred paintings and furnished with quantities of maiolica and glassware. It was dominated by her walnut bed with gilded columns alla cortesana, which was fully provided with snowy white mattresses, coverlets and pillows. She also owned useful feminine objects such as four lutes and a spinning-wheel.

But it is the considerable number of paintings that Elisabetta Condulmer possessed that is the primary signal of her success. Fortini Brown observes that furnishings fail into two categories: the utilitarian and essential, and the decorative and optional--three-dimensional objects such as beds, benches and chests, and flat objects such as rugs, hangings, mirrors and paintings. It was the latter type of luxury but inessential furnishing that proliferated in type and quantity in sixteenth-century Venice.

Fortini Brown distinguishes constructively between the functions, and the related decorations and furnishings, of different types of domestic interior. Her book opens with a discussion of the changing understanding of the notion of nobility, and the ways in which the aspirations of the Venetian patriciate towards nobility developed during the course of the renaissance. The notion of family identity is explored by examining the development of the palace. This is manifested externally through the espousal of the all'antica style in facade design, and in the way that the Venetian nobility displayed its lineage by attaching carved coats of arms or family devices onto their palace walls. Internally, family identity could be further demonstrated in the layout of internal spaces and their specialised functions, and the decoration and furnishing appropriate to those spaces and functions. Interior spaces may also be gendered: the author explores both the activities particular to women, such as needlework or lace-making, and the objects related to female and maternal domesticity. Elsewhere she focuses attention on domestic entertainment--games, festive celebrations, gambling and the display of erudite collections.