the class that for ever feeds the pawnbroker and the small money-lender.
The Republic exercised the strictest supervision over these industries,
and few cities in the world ever turned a harder face against the
inroads of the Hebrews. It was with the greatest unwillingness and with
many precautions that Jews were ever admitted into the city at all, and
a special code provided the most extraordinary and cruel penalties for
the most ordinary misdemeanours when committed by them. They were forced
to wear a special dress with a large patch of yellow on the chest, and
they could only follow the meanest occupations. In mediæval Rome it was
the business of the Jews to bury the Christian dead, but it often
happened that the Pope’s private physician was a Hebrew. I do not find
that in Venice they were ever forced to be gravediggers for the poor,
but they were forbidden to act as physicians except for their own sick.
Both Church and State rigorously forbade their intermarriage with
Christians, and, so far as the happy ending of the love story is
concerned, Lorenzo and Shylock’s daughter could never have married. More
than once, before the sixteenth century, the Jews were expelled from
Venice and made to live in Mestre, which seems to have been their
regular headquarters, but they were allowed to come into the city during
the time of certain public fairs. If they prolonged their stay beyond
the limit, however, they became liable to fine or imprisonment. Some of
these measures had been partly relaxed by the middle of the sixteenth
century, but the Jews never enjoyed anything like equality with the
other citizens.
Oddly enough the money-lender of the lower classes in Venice was the
wine-seller, whom the people called the Bastionero. In the wine-shop it
was customary to pawn objects for wine and money
[Illustration: THE RIALTO STEPS]
simultaneously, one-third of the value being given in wine, which was
generally watered. If the pledge were not redeemed within three months,
the amount to be paid for getting it back was increased, and again at
the end of the next three months, and so on, until,
[Illustration: NOON ON THE RIALTO]
at the end of the year, the original sum lent was doubled. If it was not
paid, the wine-seller had a right to sell the object for what it would
bring.
A modern Eastern proverb says that one Greek can cheat any ten Jews, but
that one Armenian can cheat ten Greeks. Considering that Venice had a
distinctly oriental character during the Middle Ages, and since we know
that the small money-lending wine-sellers were not Jews, I suspect that
they were principally Greeks and Armenians, the more probably so as we
know that great quantities of Greek and Armenian wine were imported into
Venice, and that those wines will bear a good deal of watering. The
latter is an important point, for it is manifest that when the pledge
was redeemed within the first three months, the lender’s profit was the
difference between the nominal and the real value of the wine which
formed one-third of the loan.
The government which tolerated this ignoble occupation exhibited the
most extraordinary prejudice against the government pawnbroking offices
which were common in other Italian cities. Historians have in vain
endeavoured to discover why this prejudice went so far that, in 1524,
the Council of Ten published a decree threatening with death on the
scaffold any one who should even propose the creation of such an
establishment. Without entering into any ingenious speculation, it seems
possible that the Venetians, who were wise if not virtuous, considered
that while it was impossible to prevent the poor from borrowing small
sums on their little possessions, to authorise such borrowing by making
the government the lender would greatly increase the temptations of
that more shiftless class to whom borrowing seems to be a prime
necessity of existence.
[Illustration: AT THE RIALTO]
The centre and heart of all this activity, good and bad, was the bridge
of the Rialto. We find it hard to realise that until near the end of
the sixteenth century it was still built of wood with a movable
drawbridge in the middle to admit the passage of larger vessels.
Carpaccio, who lived in the fifteenth century, has left us a faithful
representation of it as it remained for nearly a hundred years
afterwards. It would be interesting to place beside that picture
Turner’s lost painting of the same subject, a very beautiful canvas
which I have twice had the good fortune to see in the course of its more
than mysterious peregrinations. I last heard of it, though not
certainly, as being in the south of France.
The present bridge was begun after infinite hesitation in 1588, and was
built after the designs of Antonio da Ponte, whose name was certainly
prophetic of his career. Twelve thousand elm piles had to be driven into
the soil on each side of the canal to a depth of sixteen feet to make
the foundations of the arch. The construction occupied three years, and
is said to have cost 250,000 ducats, presumably of silver. The bridge as
it stands is a remarkable piece of work, and would be beautiful if the
hideous superstructure of shops could be removed. It is interesting to
note that fifty years before its completion, Michelangelo offered the
Doge Andrea Gritti a plan for a bridge, as is amply proved by the
existence of a picture in the Casa Buonarotti in Florence representing
the subject.
[Illustration: EVENING OFF S. GEORGIO]
V
CONCERNING SOME LADIES OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
The clever modern Italian playwright, Signor Martini, makes one of his
witty characters say that there are ‘women,’ but that there is no such
thing
[Sidenote: _Martini, ‘Chi sa il giuoco non l’ insegni.’_]
as ‘woman’ in the abstract. In other words, ‘women’ are a fact, but
‘woman’ is a myth. Though this may be a little paradoxical, there are
certainly distinct types of women in each class of life. The smart
society woman of to-day and the labourer’s wife, like the Venetian
patrician lady of the sixteenth century and the fisher-wives of
Chioggia, have in common only their sex, their weaknesses and their
sufferings; there is very little resemblance between their virtues, and
none at all between their joys.
The noble ladies of Venice in the sixteenth century were as idle and
frivolous as Orientals. The fact must be admitted by any one who studies
the times; and if it is not of a nature to please those who idealise
that period, it may be partly excused by the consideration that the
Venetian nobleman treated his womankind very much as a Turk treats his
harem. He was not jealous, as lovers understand jealousy; granted a
certain degree of beauty and a dowry of a certain value, he cared very
little whom he married. When Kugler, the famous art critic, says of
Titian’s picture of the Schiava, the Slave, in the Barberini Gallery in
Rome, that the name is utterly meaningless, he shows that he knew
nothing of Venetian life. The slave in the sixteenth century not seldom
meant everything, where the wife meant nothing; and if the wives were
idle and frivolous, we must remember that when they were young and
good-looking, they often found themselves in competition with beautiful
Georgian and Circassian women for their masters’ favour. Where women are
plentiful, beautiful, and not clever, the men who love them are rarely
jealous. But those grave and magnificent Venetians, who had not a
scruple in politics, nor in matrimony, were excessively sensitive about
anything which touched their technical honour, and it seemed to them
altogether safer and wiser to teach their wives and daughters what they
were pleased to call ‘habits of domestic seclusion.’ To be plain, they
encouraged them to stay at home; and sometimes, by way of making
obedience easier, they locked them up. M. Yriarte says with partial
truth that their ‘seclusion’ was that of the harem, not that of the
classic gynaeceum; he did not realise that the latter was nothing but a
harem too, and that if the Greeks kept their wives at home, it was that
they might sup undisturbed in the society of Phryne.
The influence of the East on everything connected with private life in
Venice increased with the Renascence, and is even more perceptible then
than during the nominal domination of the Byzantine Empire, when Roman
traditions still had great force, and new currents of thought reached
Venice from the Lombards.
Yet in one respect there was nothing oriental about the Venetian noble
of the sixteenth century. When he ordered his women to appear in public
at all, he sent them out adorned like those miraculous images which are
covered with ‘ex voto’ offerings, and they mixed in the crowd that
filled the Piazza of Saint Mark’s, shoulder to shoulder with the
shameless free.
The Venetian gentleman, so sensitive about his technical honour, was not
even displeased when the chronicler, the reporter of his day, confounded
ladies and courtesans in pompous praise of their beauty and dress. One
of the nobleman’s principles seems to have been that a woman was never
in danger in public, nor when her door was locked on the outside and the
key was in her husband’s pocket, but that any intermediate state of
partial liberty was fraught with peril.
At home the Venetian ladies suffered the pains of boredom in common with
the Georgians and Circassians, who not infrequently lived under the same
roof, but who presumably saw something more of their masters. The young
mother had not even a resource in her children, for it was necessary
that the latter should be brought up to be precisely like their fathers
and mothers, and in order to accomplish this the fathers kept the boys
with themselves, and made them serve in the Senate when they were still
quite small; whereas it seems that the girls were brought up largely in
convents, such as that of the Vergini, lest they should learn too well
from their mothers what it meant to be the wife of a member of the Great
Council.
Does any one remember, in all the portraits of Venetian ladies by
Carpaccio, Tintoretto, Veronese, or Titian, to have seen a mother
accompanied by her little child? There is the conventional flower, there
is the jewel, there is often the lap-dog; but the child is as
conspicuously absent as the effigy of Brutus at Junia Tertia’s funeral.
Children were born and were splendidly baptized; but after that they had
no part in their mothers’ lives. And the ladies themselves had no great
part in Venetian social life, except on its great occasions of baptisms,
marriages, and funerals, or in public ceremonies, when they appeared in
a body, by order of the Ten, in their richest clothes and as a part of
the decoration. It is no wonder that they had few friends and were bored
to extinction.
As a specimen of what a young and noble Venetian girl could become if
emancipated, one cannot do better than take Bianca Cappello. She was
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Annali._]
born in 1548 in the magnificent palace which her father, Bartolommeo
Cappello, had built for himself near the Ponte Storto. Her mother died
when Bianca was a little child, a misfortune which probably had no very
great influence on the girl’s education or character, seeing how little
the Venetian ladies occupied themselves with their children. She
received the usual teaching, and learned to read and write after a
fashion, and such of her letters as have been preserved show that her
writing was anything but good. No doubt she had the usual number of pet
birds and lap-dogs to play with, and plenty of sweetmeats, and when she
was sixteen she was very like other girls of her class and age.
In Italy young girls are taught not to look out of the window in town.
Bianca was terribly bored, and she looked out of the window. Opposite
her father’s palace was a house occupied by two Florentine burghers,
uncle and nephew, Bonaventuri by name, who represented the great Tuscan
banking-house of Salviati.
Bianca looked out of her window, dreaming, no doubt, of the dancing
lessons which she would be allowed to have when she should be married,
and of other similar and harmless frivolities; and young Pietro
Bonaventuri also looked out of the window, neglecting his ledgers.
The girl was very lonely and excessively bored. She never left the
palace except to go with her father
[Sidenote: _Galliccioli, iii. 210._]
to their villa in Murano for a few weeks in the fine season. She was not
even taken to church, because, some eighty years, earlier, a young girl
called Giovanna di Riviera, when going to mass with her mother on the
morning of the third of March 1482, had been picked up and literally
carried off by a too enterprising lover. After that, young girls of good
birth were not allowed to go to church, and mass was said for them in a
little chapel at home.
Bianca was so terribly bored that she began to make signs to Pietro from
her window. She had nothing else to do. One of her most important
occupations was to sun her hair on the high ‘altana.’ That was a real
pleasure, for the palace was gloomy, though it was new, and her room
felt like a prison cell; but she could not be always sunning her hair.
The young banker’s clerk responded to her signals of distress with
alacrity, and a dumb love affair began, apparently highly approved by
the youth’s uncle, who was a man of business. On the night
[Sidenote: _1564._]
between the twenty-eighth and the twenty-ninth of December the two
eloped and got away from Venice without being caught.
Bartolommeo Cappello’s appeal to the Council of Ten is extant. I give
the most interesting part of it:--
‘I shall here expose, and not without tears, the cruel and atrocious
deed of which I was the victim on the night of December the
twenty-ninth. The scoundrel Pietro Bonaventuri, with the consent of his
uncle, Giovanni Battista, and of accomplices whom I know not ... entered
my house, which is almost opposite his, and carried off my only
daughter, sixteen years old; he first took her to his house and then hid
her from place to place, to my great dishonour and that of all my
family.’
The document goes on in a strain of lamentation, and ends with the
request that the Council of Ten should set a price on the head of the
seducer, and bring the girl back to be locked up in a convent; and the
unhappy father offered a prize of six thousand lire to any one who would
bring him Pietro Bonaventuri, alive or dead. The letter expresses more
hatred of the lover than sorrow for the lost child.
The Ten proceeded in the matter without delay; Pietro’s uncle was thrown
into prison, and died there soon afterwards of a putrid fever. Bianca’s
woman-servant and the latter’s husband, who was a gondolier, and who
had, of course, both been acquainted with the plan of her flight, were
arrested and tortured; as for Pietro and Bianca, they had been already
some time in Florence, where they learned that they had both been
condemned to death by default. The Ten had proceeded against the
insignificant banker’s clerk with terrible energy.
But Bianca, who had been so dreadfully bored, now had too much to do.
Pietro’s affairs did not prosper, and after selling the jewels she had
brought with her, she was obliged to work with her hands in his house,
which was not at all what she had bargained for. Chance favoured her,
however, and she helped chance as well as she could, and succeeded in
attracting the notice of Francesco de’ Medici. He was the son of Cosmo,
the Grand Duke, and the brother of Isabella, then not yet drowned in her
own basin by Paolo Giordano Orsini, and of Cardinal Ferdinando, who
afterwards poisoned his brother and became Grand Duke. Francesco lost
his heart to the beautiful Bianca, and she had no objection to winning
it; Pietro Bonaventuri, who was a man of business instincts, but not
sufficiently cautious, had no objection either. But old Cosmo, the Duke,
was much scandalised by his son’s behaviour, though he himself had been
accused of nothing less than loving his own daughter Isabella, and he
remonstrated with Francesco.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘that I do not wish to weary you with preaching,
but when things go too far you must learn what I think of you.’
Francesco learned, but does not seem to have been much affected by the
knowledge, for he presently installed Bianca and her complaisant husband
almost under the same roof with his wife. Pietro, however, was really so
superfluous that he was soon suppressed, after which his widow occupied
an official position in
[Illustration: CASA WEIDERMANN]
the court of Tuscany as the acknowledged mistress of the heir to the
throne. Francesco now attempted to get a reversal of the sentence
passed on Bianca by the Council of Ten, and employed an influential
person to plead the cause; but it was thought improper that such a case
should be treated in the name of old Cosmo while he insisted on ignoring
Bianca’s existence. Cosmo died in 1574, but still nothing was done.
It may be doubted whether any woman in Bianca’s situation ever went to
such extremes of treachery and effrontery. Her victim, the gentle
Archduchess Giovanna of Austria, Francesco’s wife, died at last in 1578,
possibly without being helped out of the world, and Francesco married
Bianca secretly two months later; but the marriage was not announced to
the people until the year of mourning was over. Bianca was Grand Duchess
of Tuscany.
The effect of the news in Venice was magical. The Senate made the
following curious declaration:--
‘The Grand Duke of Tuscany having deigned to choose as his consort the
lady Bianca Cappello, of noble Venetian family, endowed with such great
qualities that we judge her worthy of that dignity, it is but right that
our Republic should exhibit its satisfaction at the honour conferred
upon it by this important and prudent decision of the said Grand Duke.
We therefore decree that the aforesaid illustrious and puissant lady,
Bianca Cappello, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, be declared the adopted and
beloved daughter of our Republic.’
Bianca’s father, who, being a good Venetian, was almost as good a man
of business as Salviati’s murdered clerk, and much more prudent, wrote a
letter full of touchingly tender feeling to the daughter whom he had
cursed so loudly and so long; he and his sons, Bianca’s brothers, were
made Knights of the Golden Stole, and all the records of the scandalous
trial that had taken place fifteen years earlier were burnt. Bianca’s
public marriage and coronation took place on the twelfth of October
1579, and the Republic sent two ambassadors and the patriarch Grimani to
show the Grand Duchess that all old scores were forgotten. She was
thirty-one years old.
We know even more than is necessary of Bianca’s life and intrigues. She
survived her triumph eight years, till she and her ill-gotten husband
died of poison within a few hours of each other; but whether the drug
was administered by the Cardinal Ferdinando, Francesco’s brother, or
whether the two meant to give it to him and took it by mistake, is not
clear. He himself declared that he had not poisoned anybody. It is at
least certain that he would not allow Bianca to be interred in the
Medici vault, but had her privately buried in the crypt of San Lorenzo.
The Venetian Republic did not go into mourning for its ‘well-beloved
adopted daughter,’ since it was best not to quarrel with the Cardinal
Grand Duke, who had probably suppressed her, though his physician made
an autopsy and assured the public that she had died of frightful
excesses of all sorts.
The moral of this unpleasing tale is that the manner of bringing up
Venetian girls in the sixteenth century was not of a kind to develop
their better instincts, for there is nothing to show that Bianca
Cappello was very different from other girls of her time, except in the
great opportunities for doing harm which fell to her share.
Probably the most enjoyable weeks of a noble Venetian girl’s life were
those which preceded her marriage, and were chiefly spent in the
preparation of her wedding outfit. The age was eccentric as to dress; it
was the time of the huge Elizabethan ruffle and hoops; in Venice it was
especially the time of clogs.
The latter had been introduced in the fourteenth century on account of
the mud in the still unpaved
[Sidenote: _Urbain de Gheltof, Calzature._]
streets, and they continued to be worn and grew to monstrous dimensions
after their usefulness had very much decreased. It became the rule that
the greater the lady was, the higher her clogs must be, till they turned
into something like stilts, and she could no longer walk except leaning
on the shoulders of two servants. In China, the Chinese men, as
distinguished from the Tartars, encourage the barbarous breaking of
girls’ feet, because it makes it impossible for them to gad about the
town when they are older, and still less to run away. The Venetian
noblemen approved of clogs for the same reason.
M. Yriarte tells how a foreign ambassador, who was once talking with the
Doge and his counsellors in 1623, observed that little shoes would be
far more convenient than the huge clogs in fashion. One of the
counsellors shook his head in grave disapproval as he answered: ‘Far too
convenient, indeed! Far too much so.’
The civic museum in Venice contains two pairs of clogs, one of which is
twenty inches in height, the other seventeen. Some were highly
ornamented, and the Provveditori alle Pompe made sumptuary regulations
against adorning them with over-rich embroidery or with fine pearls. At
the same time, shoemakers were warned that they would be liable to a
fine of twenty-five lire for any pair of clogs not of proper dimensions
and becoming simplicity. Yet they continued to be worn of extravagant
size and excessively ornamented till the end of the seventeenth century,
when they suddenly sank to nothing, so that a clever woman of the time
complained that the Venetian ladies were beginning to wear shoes no
thicker than a footman’s.
They were especially affected by the nobles, for the burgher class wore
them of much more moderate size. Altogether the life of the burghers’
wives was far more enjoyable; they occupied themselves with music and
painting; they held gatherings at which men and women really exchanged
ideas, and ‘academies’ at which women with a turn for poetry or science
could compare themselves with the most gifted men of Venice.
The most alive of the noble women of the sixteenth century, the one of
whom we have the most vivid impression, was assuredly Bianca Cappello,
who was a monster of iniquity. The others, who had not her
opportunities for great crime, all seem like lay figures, or common
odalisques, who lived a sensuous existence that was never disturbed by
an idea. But the burgher women amused themselves, and thought, and
wrote, and sometimes even allowed themselves a little sentiment.
As for the women of the people, we know nothing about them, as there are
no documents regarding them, but it seems probable that they were, on
the whole, both happy and honest.
There was one more category of women in Venice, as elsewhere, a class
that numbered eleven thousand six hundred and fifty-four members,
towards the end of the century, all young, many of them fair, all
desirous of pleasing, and all, strange to say, present at every public
festival--the class of those who were outside of class, the gay and
shameless free. A Venetian of those days made a catalogue ‘of all the
chief and most honoured courtesans of Venice ... their names ... the
lodgings where they live ... and also the amount of the money to be paid
by noblemen and others who desire to enter into their good graces.’ This
list is dedicated ‘to the most magnificent and gracious Madam Livia
Azzalina, my most respected patroness and lady ... the princess of all
Venetian courtesans.’ Moreover, at the end of the pompous dedication,
the writer, who signs only his initials, adds that he kisses the gay
lady’s ‘honoured hands.’
Some authors, taking this for a catalogue made out by the government,
inform us that the Venetian Senate always gave courtesans the title of
‘deserving.’ Lord Orford refuted this calumny in a curious pamphlet
quoted by Mr. Horatio Brown in his valuable and delightful _Venetian
Studies_. The catalogue contains two hundred and fifteen names; at
number two hundred and four stands the name of the famous Veronica
Franco--‘that skilled writer of the sonnet and curiously polished verses
which say so little and say it so beautifully,’ says Mr. Brown.
Tassini tells an anecdote in point. Two gentlemen were walking one day
over the bridge near the Church of Saint Pantaleo, and they were
confiding to each other their conjugal troubles. ‘Do you know who is the
only honest woman in Venice?’ asked one of them. ‘There she is!’ He
painted to a little marble head which is still visible in the front of a
house below the bridge. The story went the rounds, and the bridge itself
was re-christened ‘Il Ponte di Donna Onesta.’
The elegance of the gay ladies was incredible, and it was in order to be
distinguished from them that respectable women little by little adopted
the black silk gown and veil which they wore to the end of the Republic.
The veil was black for married women and white for young girls.