Venetian Renaissance

• 1. Introduction

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  The Venetian Renaissance earned a peculiar insult from the era's most powerful tastemaker. Giorgio Vasari published his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1550. He left the Venetian school almost entirely out of it. The omission was so conspicuous that Vasari recognized he needed to visit Venice for extra material before his second edition of 1568. The rest of Italy had a long habit of looking past what Venice was doing.

  Foreigners knew better. Travelers who entered Italy through Venice often developed a deep appreciation for what they found there. After Venice itself, the finest collections of Venetian art wound up in the large museums of Europe, not in other Italian cities.

  The Republic of Venice occupied a world apart. Its islands and lagoon kept it physically separate from the mainland city-states. That geographic isolation gave Venice a political, economic, and cultural independence unusual in Renaissance Italy. Its mainland territories were extensive, reaching far inland and along the Adriatic coast, making Venice a magnet for artists and thinkers across a wide region.

  What made Venetian painters so different from their Italian peers? How did a single basilica with opposing choir lofts reshape European music? And what can the guilds, the printers, and the architects of this singular city tell us about how a cultural tradition sustains itself across centuries?

• 2. The Art of Color

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  Giovanni Bellini, born around 1430, built a workshop that trained several of the most significant painters in the Italian Renaissance. His brother Gentile, born around 1429, worked alongside him. Out of that orbit came Giorgione, born around 1477; Titian, born around 1489; Tintoretto, born in 1518; Paolo Veronese in 1528; and Jacopo Bassano in 1510. Together with Bassano's sons, these painters formed the core of the Venetian school.

  Color, not line, was the school's defining commitment. This placed Venice in direct tension with the Mannerist style dominant elsewhere in Italy. The Venetian approach exerted great influence on the subsequent development of Western painting, and its distinct aesthetic endured well beyond the Renaissance period itself.

  Byzantine methods had shaped Venetian painting until around 1400. The shift toward International Gothic and early Italian Renaissance forms came when painters from outside the city were commissioned to ornament the frescoes of the Doge's Palace. Guariento di Arpo from Padua, along with Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello, brought those styles to Venice through those commissions.

  Padua, Brescia, and Verona, cities within the republic's mainland territories, sent artists to the Venetian school. Dalmatia, Istria, and the islands off the Croatian coast contributed as well. "The major Venetian painters of the sixteenth century were rarely natives of the city" itself. Some spent most of their careers working in other parts of the republic.

  Vittore Carpaccio's Lion of Saint Mark, a tempera on canvas from 1516, captures the political weight that painting carried in Venice. The image shows a lion bearing divine marks, a halo and wings, pointing to an open book inscribed with the words "Peace unto you Mark, my evangelist." The lion's front paws rest above land; its rear paws stand above the sea. The republic used artistic patronage as an "arm of government," treating art as a political asset to be managed and deployed. The Lion of Saint Mark stood atop the column on the Piazzetta, on the city's gates, and on its palaces.

  From Titian onward, Venetian painters were the most sought-after artists at the princely level for commissions outside Italy. Art critics and artists continued to spread the Venetian school's prominence across Europe well into the nineteenth century.

• 3. A Republic in Stone

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  A Senate resolution in 1535 declared Venice "the most beautiful and illustrious city which at present exists in the world." The Venetian elite held a collective belief in architecture's power to project the republic's grandeur. Overt competition between patrician families was discouraged in favor of "harmonious equality," a standard that applied to buildings as much as to any other domain. Novelty for its own sake, or the deliberate recovery of ancient glory, was regarded with suspicion.

  The Doge's Palace, rebuilt repeatedly after fires, retained its Gothic facades rather than replacing them with a modern face. Arched and rounded windows persisted far longer in Venice than in other Italian cities. Citizens of Venice believed the city had been founded on the Day of the Annunciation, giving its architecture a spiritual identity distinct from other Italian cities. Structures including St Mark's Basilica and the Piazza San Marco were understood as "a visible expression of the idea of Venice."

  Mauro Codussi, born in Lombardy in 1440, was among the first architects to work in a Renaissance style in the city. He died in 1504, and his son Domenico continued his practice. Giorgio Spavento was active from at least 1489, and Antonio Abbondi, known as Scarpagnino, worked from at least 1505 until his death in 1549. Scarpagnino began the church of San Sebastiano in 1506.

  Jacopo Sansovino, born in Florence in 1486, arrived in Venice after the Sack of Rome in 1527. In 1529 he was appointed Protomaestro to the Procurators of San Marco, making him chief architect for the republic's most important civic properties. He found a style that satisfied Venetian patrons and that would be described later as "definitive for the entire subsequent history of Venetian architecture."

  Sansovino's Biblioteca Marciana, begun in 1537, is considered his undoubted masterpiece. Palladio, who watched it being built, called it "probably the richest ever built from the days of ancients up to now." Frederick Hartt described it as "surely one of the most satisfying structures in Italian architectural history." The library's long facade faces the Doge's Palace across the Piazzetta di San Marco. Its shorter sides face the lagoon and the Piazza San Marco. Sansovino also designed the Zecca, or mint, on the Piazzetta. His palazzi include the Palazzo Corner della Ca' Grande, begun in 1532, and the Palazzo Dolfin Manin from 1536.

  Michele Sanmicheli, born in Verona in 1484, returned to that city in 1527 and was engaged by the state as a military architect. Most of his commissions were fortifications and military or naval buildings across the Venetian territories. He also built several original palaces. The Palazzo Bevilacqua in Verona, begun in 1529, became his most celebrated work.

  Andrea Palladio, born in 1508, was the principal architect of the later Venetian Renaissance. In Venice itself he designed relatively little. San Giorgio Maggiore, begun in 1566, and Il Redentore, begun in 1577, are his two major church buildings in the city. He designed many villas in the Veneto and around Vicenza. A World Heritage Site now preserves 23 of his buildings in Vicenza and 24 country villas in the surrounding region. His style was later developed in the Palladian architecture of Britain and the American colonies. His Venetian window, with its central arched top, carried a distinctly Venetian architectural element around the world.

  Vincenzo Scamozzi, born in Vicenza in 1548, moved to Venice in 1581, the year after Palladio's death. He designed the Procuratie Nuove on the Piazza San Marco and completed many projects Palladio had left unfinished. His pupil Baldassare Longhena, born in Venice in 1598, introduced full Baroque architecture to the city and went on to complete many of Scamozzi's remaining projects in turn.

• 4. Venice in Print

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  In 1511, Fra Giovanni Giocondo produced in Venice the first edition of Vitruvius illustrated with woodcuts. Giocondo had also designed the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in the city between 1505 and 1508. This illustrated volume changed how architects across Europe engaged with the only significant classical text on building to survive from antiquity. Venice had already established itself as the undoubted centre of book publishing in all of Italy. Aldus Manutius was the most important printer and publisher working there, though far from the only one. Venetian editions reached readers across the continent.

  Sebastiano Serlio, born in 1475, published his "Seven Books" on architecture and perspective in Venice, across several volumes from 1537 onward. He had worked in the city as an architect but left little physical mark there. His illustrated books became essential reading for architects across Europe and were quickly copied and translated. Daniele Barbaro, a patrician humanist, clergyman, and Venetian diplomat, was a patron of Palladio and commissioned the Villa Barbaro. Palladio illustrated Barbaro's Italian translation of Vitruvius, published in 1556.

  Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura appeared in 1570, illustrated by Palladio himself. It carried his ideas across Europe with a reach his buildings alone could never have matched. Vincenzo Scamozzi's L'Idea dell'Architettura Universale was published in 1615 and looked back to Palladio's example. Venice held the same dominant position in publishing printed music scores, making its presses central to cultural transmission well beyond architecture alone.

• 5. Sound in the Basilica

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  Adrian Willaert became maestro di cappella at St. Mark's Basilica in 1527 and held the position until his death in 1562. His tenure marked the founding moment of what music history calls the Venetian School, a body of composers active in Venice from roughly 1550 to 1610. Gioseffo Zarlino, one of the most influential music theorists of the age, called Willaert "the new Pythagoras." Willaert's influence flowed not only through his compositions but through his teaching; most of the composers who followed studied with him.

  St. Mark's Basilica had opposing choir lofts facing each other across a wide and reverberant interior. Sound could not travel in a straight, predictable line through that space. Composers learned to use the delay to advantage rather than fight it. The result was the Venetian polychoral style: groups of singers and instruments performing sometimes in opposition and sometimes together, united by the sound of the organ.

  Pope Leo X died in 1521, and the years that followed weakened Rome's position as the dominant centre for musical patronage. Many composers moved elsewhere rather than remain tied to a city in decline. Venice, with its wealth and its magnificent basilica, offered a stable and well-resourced environment. The rich patronage available there drew composers from across Italy and beyond.

  By the 1560s, two distinct factions had formed within the Venetian school. A conservative group, led by Zarlino who was then maestro di cappella, followed the tradition of Franco-Flemish polyphony. This group included Cipriano de Rore and Claudio Merulo. A progressive group, led by Baldassare Donato, included Giovanni Croce and, later, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. An additional point of contention was whether the top position of maestro di cappella at St. Mark's should go to an Italian. The faction favoring local talent prevailed. Giovanni Croce was appointed in 1603, followed by Giulio Cesare Martinengo in 1609.

  The 1580s brought the school to its peak. Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli composed massive works scored for multiple choirs, groups of brass and string instruments, and organ. These compositions were the first to include dynamics and among the first to include specific instructions for which instruments should play which parts.

  Organists Claudio Merulo and Girolamo Diruta worked in this same period, developing an instrumental style and technique that gradually spread northward into other European traditions. That tradition passed through Sweelinck and then Buxtehude, eventually reaching the work of J.S. Bach. The Venetian polychoral tradition and the simultaneous development of monody and opera in Florence together defined the end of the musical Renaissance and the beginning of the Baroque.

• 6. Guild and Community

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  Petrarch wrote in the mid-fourteenth century that Venice was "solidly built on marble but standing more solid on a foundation of civil concord." That foundation had a practical form: the guild system. By the mid-fourteenth century, Venice had founded more than fifty guilds covering trades from stonemasons and glassmakers to woodcarvers and wool workers. Scholars have long argued that the republic's stability and prosperity depended significantly on this organized communal structure.

  Dennis Romano, writing in Patricians and Popolani, observed that "nowhere in Venetian society was the emphasis on community and solidarity more pronounced than in the guilds." Each artisan joined the guild corresponding to his trade upon a pledge of allegiance to the doge. The government administered justice equally across social levels. This helped prevent the riots and political protests that troubled other Italian cities.

  The "Arte dei depentori," the painters' guild, is the oldest known guild in Venice, with records going back to 1271. Its membership extended well beyond painters. Gilders, textile designers, embroiderers, gold-tooled leather artisans, playing-card makers, mask makers, and sign painters all belonged to the same organization. Masters controlled production processes, while workers and apprentices contributed what they could, including sweeping floors and grinding pigments.

  The Feast of Saint Mark brought guild members together for trade as much as for ceremony. Members of each guild participated by offering paintings, furniture, carpets, objects of glass, gold, and textiles. The functions of the guilds were both political and cultural. The republic that these guilds helped sustain would maintain its independence for more than a thousand years, a span no other Italian state came close to matching.