THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES 2 Annual Lecture 2008 Spectacle IN SIxTEENTH-century vENICE: OR HOw CARpaccio, gIORgIONE AND TITIAN represented patrician youth theatre Jaynie Anderson FAHA Herald Chair of Fine Arts School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne Delivered at the Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House 14 November 2008, Sydney 109 Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 33, 2008 110 Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 33, 2008 This lecture was delivered at the thirty-ninth Symposium of the Academy, convened by the Arts Section of the Academy, Jaynie Anderson, Roger Covell and Michael Ewans.1 he principal Italian piazza in every city has an urban presence of longue durée, T one that has continually evolved over many centuries. None more so than St Mark’s Square in Venice, where innumerable events have taken place from the moment of its creation until the present day. Unlike theatres as we know them, a piazza is a space that is accessible to the urban public. Its form is determined by buildings, streets, or even, as in this case, a waterway – the famous bacino between St Mark’s and the Isola San Giorgio. In one sense the space of a piazza is defined by the surrounding city and in another it can be transformed into the internal space of a theatrical stage. The Italian piazza often metamorphoses as a stage, furnished and refurnished for events, with temporary seating, sculpture, and stage sets, in short a work of art that is never finished, but always in the process of reinstallation. Unlike Australian theatre audiences, who are predominantly middle class and tertiary educated, the spectacle-loving Venetian public were from all social groups, were musically literate, and performed in what was perceived as a Republican space, that proclaimed the virtues of an oligarchic government. No wonder that in succeeding centuries British Republicans appropriated Antonio Canaletto’s views of Venice for the newly- invented dining room in the eighteenth century as symbolic of what might be achieved elsewhere and of the Republic they hoped to create. Venetians made spectacle a political art all their own. They have a trajectory from the ninth to the eighteenth century, unique in Italian cities, of theatrical traditions that began with the origins of the Venetian Republic and lasted until Napoleon Bonaparte disrupted and changed everything. After 1809, festivals were no longer in vogue, only to be revived in the twentieth century as tourist attractions, like the Venetian Carnival. One of the most popular stage sets was the Piazzetta before the Doge’s Palace. Canaletto’s drawing (Fig. 1), now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, represents the spectacle for Maundy Thursday, the anniversary of the Last Supper, when the Labors of Hercules (Le Forze di Ercole) were performed, a juggling act of equilibrium and agility in which human pyramids were formed in configurations, on 1 My lecture was conceived in response to the unique configuration of subjects that we have in this section of the Academy, The Arts, that is, a collaboration between Art History, Musical History and Theatre. The experience of research for this lecture has led me to begin to write a short book on the subject of Theatre and Art in Renaissance Venice. 111 Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 33, 2008 Figure 1: Antonio Canaletto. The Maundy Thursday Festival before the Ducal Palace, 1765. Drawing in pen and brown ink with grey wash, heightened with white gouache, 38.5 x 55.3 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. high platforms. The Doge, surrounded by patricians and citizens of all ranks, watched the event. Canaletto’s drawing is one in a series of 12 representing festivals in Venice, made in preparation for the widely distributed popular engravings by Giambattista Brustolon.2 The origins of such an event went back to the earliest days of the Venetian Republic. A famous Doge in the tenth century, Pietro Orseolo, divided his enormous estate into three thirds, one third to his relatives, another third to the poor, and a third purely to be used for public festivals, a gesture that reveals how important spectacle always was, both for those who ruled, and those who lived in Venice. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries young Venetian patricians, between the ages of 16 and 30, formed chic informal groups, called the Compagnie della Calza,3 to perform theatrical entertainments, to hold banquets, and to celebrate weddings. They were in essence patrician event managers and played an important role in the 2 The series, some twelve prints, was known as the Feste dogali (1770–1778), a celebration of festivals in which the Doge participated. 3 The classic articles on the phenomenon are: l. Venturi, ‘Le Compagnie della Calza, Sec. XV- XVI’, Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. XVI (1908), pp. 161–221, XVII (1909), pp. 140–223; Maria Theresa Muraro, ‘La Festa a Venezia e le sue manifestazioni rappresentative: Le Compagnie della Calza e le Momarie’, in Storia della Cultura veneta, III, parte 3, pp. 315–41, Vicenza, 1981. 112 Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 33, 2008 Figure 2: Anton Maria Zanetti II. Engraving with coloured watercolour, after Giorgione’s Compagno della Calza from the Canal façade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Illustration from Anton Maria Zanetti, Varie Pitture a fresco de’ principali maestri veneziani, Venice, 1760. From the hand-coloured copy in the Biblioteca Herztiana, Rome. Photo © Jaynie Anderson. creation of early theatre and opera. They also appear in a number of significant Renaissance paintings by Carpaccio, Giorgione and Titian, although their appearance has been almost entirely unnoticed. An eighteenth-century coloured copy of a lost fresco by Giorgione from the façade of the German Customs House in Venice, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, shows, their flamboyant dress, easily identifiable by their bi-coloured white and red stockings (Fig. 2).4 They often wore their blonde hair long in a fashion, known in Venetian dialect as zazzara, with a cap at a rakish angle. At the German Customs House in Venice, there is and was a central courtyard where theatrical representations took place, which may explain their presence on the façade 4 For the most recent analysis of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, see Alessandro Nova, ‘Giorgione e Tiziano al Fondaco dei Tedeschi’, in Giorgione entmythisiert, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Brepols: Turnhout, 2008, pp. 71–99. 113 Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 33, 2008 Figure 3: Vittore Carpaccio. The Miracle of the Reliquary of the True Cross at Rialto Bridge, Venice. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Published with permission from the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. of the building. Marino Sanudo, the Venetian diarist, who is the principal source for the Compagnie,5 described one such occasion at the Fondaco on 12 February 1517, to celebrate an alliance made with the German Emperor. The celebrations began in the morning and lasted until 3 am the next day. The entertainments consisted of masked dancing, different kinds of ballet, comic interludes from the celebrated buffoon Zuan Polo and elaborate triumphal chariots, with appearances from Cupid, 5 Marino Sanudo’s Diaries were published in 58 volumes over 24 years (1879–1903), from the manuscripts in the Biblioteca Marciana. An English translation of excerpts has recently been published, as Venice, Cità [sic] Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marino Sanudo (1496–1533), ed. Patricia Labalme, Laura White and Linda L. Carroll, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2008, see especially section 9, Theatre in Venice. See also their earlier article, ‘How to (and How Not to) Get Married in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Selections from the Diaries of Marino Sanudo)’, Renaissance Quarterly, LII, no. 1 (1999), pp. 43–72. 114 Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 33, 2008 Figure 4: Three woodcuts of patricianCompagni della Calza, Gioventù antica, fol. 66 verso; Giovane antico, fol. 68 verso; Compagni della Calza, fol. 101 recto. From Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diversi parti del mondo libri due, fatti da Cesare Vecellio, & con discorsi da lui dichiarti, Damian Zenaro: Venice, 1590. Biblioteca Marciana, Venice. marine animals, amorous nymphs making sacrifices and demonstrations of ancient fables. It was, Sanudo declared, a very luxurious and expensive event.6 Of all Venetian artists it is Carpaccio who is the painter par excellence of the Compagnie della calza, as in the classic representation of the long-haired blonde youth with his back to us, in the left foreground of the Miracle of the Reliquary of the True Cross in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice (Fig. 3). Distinguished by his pose, long hair and fashionable attire, he has long been recognised in the costume books as a member of the Compagnia della Calza, most notably by Cesare Vecellio in the first global account of fashion, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo, published in Venice in 1590 (Fig. 4). According to Vecellio, ‘Cristoforo Guerra, tedesco, Da Norimberga’, better known as Christoph Chrieger,7 created the exceptional woodcuts in the volume after drawings by the author.8 The compagno in the Miracle of the Reliquary plays the role of principal spectator. He is depicted just outside the fictional space of the large painting, in which is represented the illusion of a streetscape in Venice, at a point on the Grand Canal not so far from the Fondaco dei Tedeschi’s site. A preparatory drawing, a detailed study of this enigmatic and handsome youth, in the Albertina Vienna, reveals how Carpaccio took considerable care in delineating his 6 Marino Sanudo, I Diarii, op. cit., vol. 23, p. 583. A further reference in Sanudo to a ball there on 12 February 1520, suggests the space was considered appropriate for such events.