During its nineteenth-century subjection to alien rule, first by the French
under Napoleon Bonaparte, then as part of the Austrian Empire, Venice became
the victim of continued attempts at distorting its earlier history as an
independent republic. What its citizens called “la leggenda nera”, the black
legend of a tyrannical oligarchy operating in secrecy to suppress freedom
with the help of spies, informers and assassins, was first promoted by the
French historian Pierre Daru in his Histoire de la République de Venise
(1819). Habsburg government propagandists, keen to emphasize the benign
intentions of the imperial regime, seized eagerly on his evocation of a
millennial reign of terror by a pseudo-democracy formed exclusively of
patrician families. Writers not necessarily favourable to the changed
political climate nevertheless made much of the inherent irony in the notion
of the so-called eldest child of liberty surviving with the help of
clandestine denunciations, shadowy conclaves and imprisonment without trial.
Byron’s tragedy The Two Foscari, following hard on Daru’s heels, presents the
fifteenth-century doge Francesco Foscari and his family as victims of this
same draconian system, one which their aristocratic echelon was dedicated to
upholding. Satisfying a private vendetta pursued by the senator Loredano,
the deaths, firstly of Francesco’s son Jacopo (exiled on a trumped-up murder
charge) then, as a consequence, of the old man himself, accomplish the fiat
of an implacable Council of Ten. The play was turned by Giuseppe Verdi into
an opera (one of his gloomiest, as he later acknowledged) and provided a
tragic theme for several canvases by Francesco Hayez, Risorgimento Italy’s
most admired painter, and himself a Venetian.
Cooler appraisal by twentieth-century historians has gradually disentangled
the Foscari affair from the Black Legend, locating it as an unfortunate
culminating episode in what was otherwise one of the most successful careers
enjoyed by any public figure of the Italian Renaissance. Longest-reigning
doge in the Serene Republic’s history, Francesco Foscari is the subject of
Dennis Romano’s well-weighed biographical study, The Likeness of Venice, a
book which deals not only with its subject’s impact on his contemporaries in
and beyond Venice, but examines his role as artistic patron and scrutinizes
the political and cultural perspectives distorting posterity’s view of his
achievement.
Born in 1373 to a moderately influential patrician family which derived its
wealth mostly from mainland estates, Francesco clambered dextrously up the
ladder of public office, from membership of various committees to the
positions of state prosecutor, ambassador to Florence and a seat on the
Council of Ten. Eased with the help of generous grants from various trust
funds to impoverished noble families, his appointment as Doge in 1423 took
place according to a traditionally complex selection process involving no
fewer than six ballots, the first of them depending on random choices by a
small boy selected from the crowd outside the Palazzo Ducale.
Poets and musicians were happy to laud “the great father, only ornament of our
age”, an equestrian tournament was staged in Piazza San Marco, and the
Dogaressa Marina Nani arrived at her new residence aboard the bucintoro and
dressed like a bride. Her husband’s eagerness to make his mark as Doge in a
vigorous public works programme – repairing the Torcello cathedral, dredging
the Grand Canal, building the Lazzaretto isolation hospital – was matched by
a determination to establish the Foscari as a clan whose time had come at
last. The indelible impact of such ambition is traced for us both by Ca’
Foscari, most imposing of the Grand Canal’s Gothic palaces, and, more
significantly, by the Porta della Carta, an elaborate gateway to the Palazzo
Ducale which contrives both to enunciate the triumph, spiritual and
temporal, of the Serene Republic and to glorify the Doge himself as the
incarnation of those virtues (Charity, Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude)
whose figures inhabit the niches on either side of the portal itself.
Charity and temperance could be set aside easily enough when it came to
pursuing Venice’s mainland campaigns aimed initially at fending off the
territorial greed of Milan’s Visconti dukes. If not chiefly responsible for
the resulting shift in Venetian imperial focus from commercial domination of
the eastern Mediterranean to the creation of an Italian land empire
extending deep into southern Lombardy, Francesco Foscari took advantage of
the opportunities for decisive leadership offered by the Milanese war to
promote his ducal office as princely rather than merely emblematic. While
Venetian armies, marshalled by a succession of alien condottieri,
established the Republic’s hegemony over Brescia, Bergamo, Padua and Verona,
the Doge took an active role in the ceremonial reception of such visiting
dignitaries as Niccolo d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara, and Medea di Saluzzo,
future Queen of Cyprus. A new civic ritual added to the annual Corpus
Christi celebrations honoured “the church of St Mark and the serene Lord
Doge” and when, in 1441, Francesco’s son Jacopo married Lucrezia Contarini,
the lavish festivities lasted more than a week.
In such a context of self-aggrandizement, the reasons for Francesco’s two
requests to abdicate, made in 1433 and 1442 respectively, seem initially
mysterious. Romano renders each of them plausible, whether through the
ageing Doge’s desire to shake off the cares of state or as a retreat from
internecine power struggles among the Venetian patriciate, where a hostile
faction was headed by his senatorial rival Pietro Loredan. It was the
latter’s son who oversaw the political process whereby, in 1457, Foscari,
now aged eighty-four, was compelled to lay down his office. His own son
Jacopo, repatriated after a period of exile for receiving foreign bribes,
was once again banished for an identical crime. Already brought low by the
sentence passed on Jacopo by the Council of Ten (the younger Loredan had
actually pressed for beheading), Francesco was further humiliated by being
forced to watch as his ducal ring was smashed and the corno dogale, his
ceremonial headdress, stripped of its gold ornaments. Barely a week after
quitting the palace, he died “as a ripe piece of fruit falls with the first
gust of wind”.
Somewhat grudgingly, though aware of mounting public disquiet at the
unprecedented deposition of a reigning doge, the Council conceded him the
appropriate funeral honours, with the corno restored to him as he lay in
state, a solemn procession from Piazza San Marco to the Basilica dei Frari
and eventual interment in the church of SS Giovanni e Paolo. Both a funeral
oration by the humanist orator Bernardo Giustinian, and the inscription on
the canopied tomb, emphasized Francesco’s piety, temperance and courage,
while reminding Venetians how much they owed him as pater patriae. “I
supported the wavering freedom of Italy”, runs the pseudo-autobiographical
epitaph; “I fought the agitators of quiet, I enriched the fatherland with
ornaments.” Foscari’s posthumous victory was achieved when the Grand
Council, by voting to curb the powers of an overweening Council of Ten,
appeared implicitly to blame it for Jacopo Foscari’s exile and his father’s
demise.
King or president? Had Francesco been less monarchical in style and more of
the constitutional figurehead his status officially demanded, Romano’s book
would not have been nearly so compelling. The Doge’s ultimate betrayal by an
immemorial Italian clannishnesss towards corrupt family members does nothing
to undermine our admiration for him as an inspired Renaissance prince and
patron. An exemplary clarity governing the narrative thread of The Likeness
of Venice is enhanced by its final chapter, unfolding the often bizarre
cultural afterlife of Francesco in the hands of Romantic poets, Fascist
movie-makers and the creators of that urban mythology on which Venice’s
modern survival appears increasingly to depend. Dennis Romano’s serene
command of his sources allows space for an informed reading of Ca’ Foscari’s
transitional architecture, a thoroughgoing dossier on the treacherous
condottiere Francesco Bussone, known as Carmagnola, and details of the
significant shift in the Republic’s generation of revenue, during this
period, from forced loans to direct taxation. Within the Venetian state
itself, as this exceptional study reminds us, the questions engendered by
its most dynamic of doges as to where executive authority should truly
reside never found a wholly satisfactory answer.
Dennis Romano
THE LIKENESS OF VENICE
A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari 1373–1457
368pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
978 0 300 11202 3
Jonathan Keates is the author of Smile Please, 2000, and The Siege of
Venice, 2005. Handel: The man and his music was reissued last year.
