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

most reliable source we have for the political and social history of Venice and of the European powers with which Venice was involved in the first third of the sixteenth century. In the City of Venice, which he wrote in parallel with the diaries, he noted the prices of commodities: oil and candles both fixed by law at four soldi a pound; mutton at three soldi a pound; a cartload of wood at twenty-eight soldi; fresh water imported during times of drought eight buckets for one soldo. He gave the location of brothels and made a list of the varieties of fish sold at the Rialto. He couldn’t resist informing posterity that his family owned an inn at the Rialto called The Bell, with shops on the ground floor, which brought in 800 ducats a year in rent, ‘which is a marvellous thing and a huge rent’.

      Once they reached the age of twenty-five, all men of noble birth were required when not away on business to sit on the Great Council, the sovereign body of government, which met on Sundays to deliberate and vote. The Great Council, which existed primarily as a check on the power of individual members of government, had to pass all constitutional changes and new laws. It elected the members of the most important government offices, and the governors and administrators of the dominions on the terraferma and overseas. Members of the higher government councils and magistracies served for short periods, between three months and two years, although in practice the same men were often re-elected, especially during wars and other emergencies. Virtually all decision-making committees, as well as military commands and ambassadorial posts, were filled by experienced politicians in their middle age or older. Venetian ambassadors, trained by obligatory participation in government for the whole of their adult lives, acquired political and diplomatic skills that set them apart from the representatives of other Italian and European states. They were everywhere, and their preserved reports, which were confidential newssheets that ran to many pages, enrich our understanding of the political atmosphere of sixteenth-century Europe with details about the character and demeanour, as well as the policies and motives, of the rulers of the Renaissance world.

      But when Titian was growing up in Venice a government that was in effect a gerontocracy – the average age of doges in the sixteenth century was seventy-five – was beginning to cause some resentment among the younger noblemen. The young men wearing parti-coloured tights and dashing short jackets who can be seen in the ‘eyewitness’ paintings by Carpaccio, Mansueti and Gentile Bellini are patricians not yet old enough to sit on the Great Council. They are wearing the uniform of one of the compagnie delle calze, the companies of the hose, which, in the absence of a princely court, were responsible for organizing and providing the decorations for parties, weddings, festivals and theatrical entertainments. There were twenty or so of these companies, whose membership was predominantly restricted to the patrician class. They were chartered and supervised by the Council of Ten, who kept them well away from unmarried young women.

      The structure of the Venetian government has often been described as a pyramid, with the Great Council at the base and the doge and his Collegio, or cabinet, at the top. It is a helpful simplification but misleading because the organization was more flexible and more complex than the comparison implies. The shape and balance of power shifted over time according to circumstances, and its adaptability is one of the factors that explain its remarkable stability. In Titian’s day the most authoritative body in the structure of councils and magistracies was the Collegio, which comprised the doge and his personal councillors, one from each of the six districts, or sestieri, into which Venice was and still is divided; the Savi, or wise men, who advised the Senate about the execution of policy decisions; the heads of the Council of Ten; and the three heads of the Quarantia, the forty-man court of appeals. The doge also chaired the Senate, the hub of government where foreign, economic, military, domestic, mainland and overseas concerns were debated and decided. The members of the Senate were elected annually by the Great Council, which usually re-elected them for a second year at least. The senators in turn elected the Savi, and the Provveditori, commissioners with various spheres of administrative responsibility, the most important of whom represented the state in military and naval affairs.

      The division of power and responsibility between the Senate and Council of Ten was not entirely clear-cut. Described by Sanudo as ‘a very severe magistracy of top nobles’, the Ten, which despite its name was usually larger, was responsible for state security: the quashing of treason, the vetting of foreigners employed by the state, and the conduct of diplomacy considered too sensitive for the larger numbers of senators. It employed a corps of spies, informers and assassins, and had its own armoury and its own prison for state offenders. While ordinary suspects were entitled to representation by their own lawyers and were tried in public by a committee of state attorneys, defendants brought before the Ten were denied the right to independent counsel and were tried in private by a committee of masked members. By Titian’s day the Ten had extended its functions to matters of foreign policy and finance, including overseeing the revenues of the Salt Office, which paid for the upkeep and decoration of the doge’s palace. It was to the Council of Ten that Titian would address his first petition to paint for the palace.

      Apart from the doge, the only patricians who kept their jobs for life were the procurators of San Marco, the most important officials after the doge. The procurators were career politicians, usually elderly and supposedly, but not necessarily always, of impeccable respectability. They lived rent-free in ancient and increasingly decrepit houses on the south side of the Piazza, which were not replaced until later in the century by the dignified Procuratie Nuove, the new procurators’ residences that still line the Café Florian wing of the Piazza. They also owned and let out a number of properties in and around the Piazza, including some hostelries that also served as brothels, and the northern wing now known as the Procuratie Vecchie, the old procuracy. The procurators were responsible for the care of the basilica of San Marco and the land around it, for the administration of legacies and for the care of orphans. Although their personal allowances were modest, their control of large sums of money gave them considerable financial power. They had automatic seats in the Senate, were often employed as ambassadors, and the special advisers attached to the Senate, the Council of Ten and the doge known as the zonte (Venetian for giunte, meaning additions) were usually drawn from their ranks. All doges since the fourteenth century had previously served as procurators.

      The power of the doge, who was elected by a stupendously complicated system of balloting, was defined and constrained by prohibitive oaths, the promissioni ducali, to which each doge was required to agree on his accession. But, although his rule was far more restricted than that of other Renaissance princes, the doge, as primus inter pares, was not a mere figurehead. A talented and determined doge who lived long enough in office could make a difference. He was, furthermore, the head of a state that maintained a degree of independence from the Holy See in Rome that was unique in Italy. Many a pope was enraged by the Venetian tradition of controlling its own ecclesiastical patronage, even appointing its patriarchs from the ranks of its own patriciate. Papal nuncios in Venice regularly denounced the anomalous wish of the doge to be both prince and pope, but they complained in vain.

      To worship God in Venice was also to worship Venice, God’s most sublime and improbable creation. In Venice, as a fifteenth-century Venetian humanist observed, ‘Republican virtues are identified with divine virtues, and God and the State, patriotism and religion, are metaphorically fused.’7 The religious heart of the city was San Marco’s basilica, which was both the state church and the doge’s private chapel. St Peter’s church, nominally the cathedral until 1807, was located far away on its remote island in Castello. The dress and behaviour of the doge retained a Byzantine appearance; and the neo-Byzantine style of churches with open naves and domed Greek cross-plans further asserted Venice’s religious independence from Rome. In Titian’s first altarpiece, St Mark Enthroned with Sts Cosmas, Damian, Roch and Sebastian (Venice, Church of Santa Maria della Salute), St Mark occupies the high throne normally reserved for St Peter.

      Once a Venetian nobleman had entered the Great Council he became a togato, obliged to wear a robe known as the toga at meetings of the Great Council and on official visits to the terraferma. Sanudo described the basic class code of Shakespeare’s ‘togaed consuls’8 right down to their underclothes:

      [They wear] long black robes reaching down to the ground, with sleeves open to the elbows,