Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale

permitted their wives to dine out and attend theatrical entertainments alone, there were at least some independent-minded wives who defied the sanctions against appearing unchaperoned in public. Foreigners were surprised to see women dining out alone. And as early as 1487 a German guest at the monastery of Santi Giovanni e Paolo was astonished to observe elegantly dressed young women moving openly in and out of the dormitories and cells of the monks.

      The Milanese priest who had described the shopping opportunities, and who evidently had a practical mind, wondered how the women kept their dresses from falling off their shoulders. But if the older generation of Venetian patricians disapproved of the bizarre fashion for veiled faces and bosom-revealing bodices worn by women whose bodies, perfumed with amber, musk and civet, could be scented from a distance, sumptuary legislation failed to make much difference to their showy dress sense, and there was no law against décolletage until 1562. Sanudo was impressed by the size and value of women’s jewellery:

      The women are truly very beautiful; they go about with great pomp, adorned with big jewels and finery. And … adorned with jewels of enormous value and cost, necklaces worth from 300 up to 1000 ducats, and rings on their fingers set with large rubies, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds and other jewels of great value. There are very few patrician women (and none, shall I say, so wretched and poor) who do not have 500 ducats worth of rings on their fingers, not counting the enormous pearls, which have to be seen to be believed.27

      The erotically charged atmosphere in early sixteenth-century Venice is almost palpable in the paintings by Giorgione, Giovanni Cariani, Palma Vecchio, Titian and others of women whom we can no longer identify but whose inviting eyes and bared breasts leave no room for doubt about their availability. Titian was not the first artist to paint naked women, but he was the first to use live models, and to paint them lying down. Lightly draped or naked, Titian’s anonymous women, as real to us today as when his contemporaries thought they saw the blood pulsing beneath their trembling flesh, display an overt sexuality that had never been seen before in painting.

      On his map of Venice Jacopo de’ Barbari enlarged the scale of the arsenal to emphasize its importance. But there are fewer warships than would have been present at a time when Venice was at war with the Ottoman Turks. At the top of the map Mercury, god of communications and commerce, emerges from a cloud. Neptune, god of the sea, rides on his sea monster among trading galleys that are coming and going, riding at anchor, preparing to unload passengers and goods on to lighters. But a third tutelary deity of Venice, Mars, god of the wars fought in order to expand and maintain its trading empire, is absent. De’ Barbari’s black and white dolls’ city is at peace with itself and the world, serene, silent and inhabited only by a few stick people to indicate the scale of the buildings.

      The true situation was very different. The mid-millennium, when soothsayers all over Europe were predicting the end of the world, was actually a troubled time for the Most Serene Republic. In 1498 reports had reached the Rialto of Vasco da Gama’s exploratory voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, and three years later the worst fears were confirmed by news that twelve Portuguese ships had been spotted in Aden and Calicut. The threat to the Venetian monopoly of the spice trade, which had already been disturbed for several years by the disruption of overland routes during wars in northern Italy and Turkish wars in Persia, had been followed in 1499 by a series of bank failures, which ruined some of the wealthiest patrician owners of the trading galleys.

      It was in that same annus horribilis that one of the largest war fleets ever prepared in the Venetian arsenal suffered a catastrophic defeat by the Turks. Two Venetian gunships were blown up and the Turkish cavalry invaded the Friuli as far as the River Isonzo (where Titian’s grandfather Conte took part in the defence). ‘Tell your government that they have done with wedding the sea,’ the Turkish vizir gloated to the Venetian ambassador in February 1500, adding that it was the sultan’s turn now to be the bridegroom in the annual symbolic ceremony of the doge’s marriage to the sea. The Turk – ‘signor tremendo’ as Marin Sanudo dubbed the increasingly militant Ottoman Empire – had been harassing Venetian trading convoys since the Turkish conquest of Constantinople half a century earlier. It had been mostly a cold war, but now flared up into four years of fighting, during which the Venetians lost more essential naval bases in Greece and Albania, and it led to a temporary halt of Venetian trading in the Levant.

      The setback to overseas trade was not the mortal blow that some historians have made out. Revenues from the terraferma – ‘the most delightful, populous, and fertile part of Europe … the flower of the world’, as it was described by a Vicentine nobleman in 150928 – were about twice those from the sea empire. Nevertheless, taxation and customs duties on the oriental spices that passed through the mainland accounted for a large proportion of the state income, and the interruptions to overseas trade were at the time cause for deep concern. The reaction was swift and dramatic. All but the most profitable of the shipping lanes – those that went to and from Beirut and Alexandria – were abandoned. The ruling class relinquished its long-cherished exclusive right to own and profit from the trading galleys, and more of the merchant noblemen who had formerly spent much of their lives at sea stayed at home and spread their risks by investing in manufacturing, and in agriculture, property, mining and other industrial enterprises on the mainland. Venetians made new fortunes from expanded industries: the weaving and dyeing of silk and wool, the manufacture of fine soaps, leather working and sugar refining, all profitable commodities in the home and export markets. The fine-spun Venetian glass produced by forty or so furnaces on Murano was increasingly exported to the rest of Italy and the Levant and as far as Portugal, Spain and the Indies. Nevertheless, the diarist Girolamo Priuli was pessimistic about the shift from overseas trade to agriculture and industrial production: ‘In losing their shipping and their overseas Empire, the Venetians will also lose their reputation and renown and gradually, but within a very few years, will be consumed altogether.’29

      But the economy recovered. The seriously rich indulged themselves in ways that rivalled the behaviour of our most outrageously ostentatious twenty-first-century hedge-fund managers. At a wedding in 1507, a total of 4,000 ducats, which was only part of the bride’s dowry, the bulk of which was in property, decorated the banqueting table in six basins, one containing gold coins, the rest silver.30 By the 1560s more pepper and cotton was being re-exported from Venice than in the early fifteenth century.31 And in 1605, a little more than a century after the wide-eyed Milanese priest had marvelled at the goods on offer in the greatest of all emporia, the political commentator Giovanni Botero wrote a nearly identical account in which he described Venice as ‘a summary of the universe, because there is nothing originating in any far-off country but it is found in abundance in this city’.

      Titian arrived in a Venice that was enjoying what has been called its first Renaissance.32 There was an awakening appetite for learning and art. A small elite of connoisseurs began to collect cabinet paintings from avant-garde artists – almost all of Giorgione’s paintings and Titian’s earliest portraits were private commissions. Oak piles were being driven into the bed of the lagoon to make the foundations for new buildings that would gradually obliterate inner-city fields, orchards, vineyards and gardens recorded by de’ Barbari’s map. Sanudo described the building materials piled up in campi and on quays: bricks, terracotta and mortar from Padua, Treviso and Ferrara; sand from the Brenta or the Lido; wood from Cadore and around Treviso; hard white stone for foundations and façades from the Istrian Peninsula; fine marbles from Verona, Greece, Egypt and India.

      The population was rejuvenated thanks to milder than usual plagues in the late fifteenth century, which had spared the babies and young children who were the usual first victims. The old certainties were called into question by new men facing up to new economic, political and religious challenges, new patterns of trade, new ways of thinking about a world that had grown larger after the discovery of the Americas, the rounding of the Horn of Africa, and invasions of Italy by other European powers. The younger generation, which had a different perspective of its place in the world,