Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2009, vol. 4

Body of Empire: Caterina Corner in Venetian History and Iconography Holly Hurlburt

n 1578, a committee of government officials and monk and historian IGirolamo Bardi planned a program of redecoration for the Sala del Maggior Consiglio (Great Council Hall) and the adjoining Scrutinio, among the largest and most important rooms in the Venetian ’s Palace. Completed, the schema would recount Venetian history in terms of its international stature, its victories, and particularly its conquests; by the sixteenth century had created a sizable maritime empire that stretched across the eastern Mediterranean, to which it added considerable holdings on the Italian mainland.1 Yet what many Venetians regarded as the jewel of its empire, the island of , was calamitously lost to the Ottoman Turks in 1571, three years before the first of two fires that would necessitate the redecoration of these civic spaces.2 Anxiety about such a loss, fear of future threats, concern for Venice’s place in evolving geopolitics, and nostalgia for the past prompted the creation of this triumphant pro- gram, which featured thirty-five historical scenes on the walls surmounted by a chronological series of ducal portraits. Complementing these were twenty-one large narratives on the ceiling, flanked by smaller depictions of the city’s feats spanning the previous seven hundred years. The program culminated in the Maggior Consiglio, with ’s massive Paradise on one wall and, on the ceiling, three depictions of allegorical Venice in triumph by Tintoretto, Veronese, and . These rooms, a center of republican authority, became a showcase for the skills of these and other artists, whose history paintings in particular underscore the deeds of men: clothed, in armor, partially nude, frontal and foreshortened,

61 62 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt fighting, dying, deliberating. Their efforts had created and maintained the Venetian empire. Nonetheless, women and their bodies appear occasionally and significantly in this tour de force of male artistic and physical prowess. Some are spectators at the fringes of ceremonial occasions, often shown clutching children, such as in Paolo Fiammingo’s Alexander III Blesses the Venetian Fleet or Vicentino’s Alessio IV Angelos with the Crusaders in Zara. Here women and children legitimate spectacle and benefit from Venetian protection. Children were the most significant female contribution to the Venetian state and its empire, an enterprise managed largely by men but peopled by both sexes, who equally consumed, displayed, and benefitted from its riches. The ceiling also depicts some women as victims of war, destined to be rescued by Venice. In Tintoretto’s Defense of , the subject city’s anx- ious female population peek from the ramparts at the battle raging below, while well-dressed women are the terrified prisoners of a turbaned attacker in Veronese’s Defense of Scutari. Similarly, the central ceiling allegory of conquered territories by Palma contains isolated defeated female faces. This imagery echoes the pages of Venetian chronicles, whose authors, when they referenced women at all, frequently situated them as war’s prey or as well-dressed witnesses to triumphant rituals. 3 The female form was also sometimes employed to denote the abstract values of victory and triumph: Venetia (Venice personified) was featured in all three central ceiling images that embodied, according to the program’s author, Girolamo Bardi, “the results of the previously mentioned undertakings and examples of virtue.”4 In Veronese’s Apotheosis, located directly above the tribune of the doge, a regal female personifies the trium- phant city borne to heaven (fig. 1). Allegorical figures, all female save one, surround Venetia, while below her, richly clothed elite Venetian women observe her glorious ascendance—an organized tableau of civic riches, wealth gleaned largely from mercantile trade and landholding on the terra firma–in short, through empire. On the whole, these depictions reflect traditional gender roles in which women functioned as wives and mothers, anonymous casualties, objects of beauty and ornaments of empire, and/or allegories—particularly effective symbols in where they could Body of Empire 63

Figure 1. , The Apotheosis of Venice, Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Doge’s Palace, Venice, c. 1580. (Photograph: Art Resource). 64 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

not easily be co-opted by or closely linked to individual members of the masculine ruling elite.5 Venetia was an anonymous amalgam, and even in triumph could be seen as both a function of masculine civic achievement, and as Hanna Pitkin has written, a “symbol of tamed femininity . . . the obedient daughter.”6 In addition to these categories, two Maggior Consiglio panels depict female agents conceptualized as obedient daughters. Only one features a real historical actor, as distinct from allegorical or anonymous female fig- ures. But, as this article will demonstrate, the body of Venetian noblewom- an and Cypriot queen, Caterina Corner, must be understood as another allegorical triumph (fig. 2). With some variants, its iconography, in which the queen hands her crown, the symbol of her authority, to the doge, would be repeated multiple times in prominent private and public spaces across the city in the early modern period. Together with literary texts dedicated to the queen, these images, many generated by or for the state or Corner’s ambitious family, transformed her abdication into a mythic civic sacrifice. In the centuries after her death, the image and idea of the ex-queen func- tioned in a manner similar to Venetia: a malleable impersonal marker of imperial and familial triumph, her gender and sexuality safely contained in a series of patriarchal abstractions.7 Caterina Corner has been the subject of a vast literature—academic and fictitious, scholarly and literary. While she still lived, Corner’s retire- ment residence of was the setting for her kinsman ’s bucolic poem, Gli Asolani, in which the queen herself appears briefly as the patron, muse, and adjudicator for her courtiers’ debate about love.8 It is not surprising, then, that much scholarship has focused on questions of her patronage. Corner’s court is significant not only for the works it inspired, but also because its patron was Venetian—in the spirit of repub- lican equality few fifteenth-century Venetians glorified themselves with courtly airs—and because she was female. Like that of her contemporary, Isabella d’Este, Corner’s patronage has been interpreted as a manifestation of both power and intellect.9 The other major strand of Corner scholarship pertains to the transfer of sovereignty from Cyprus to Venice; unlike stud- ies of cultural patronage, these works have largely left untouched the key point that Corner was female except to observe that her gender made her Body of Empire 65 Queen of Cyprus Caterina Corner Cedes the Crown of Cyprus to the Aliense, Aliense,

Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Doge’s Palace, Venice, c. 1580-90. (Photograph: (Photograph: 1580-90. c. Venice, Palace, Sala Doge’s del Maggior Consiglio, of Venice, Musei Civici di Venezia). Fondazione Figure 2. L’ 2. Figure 66 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

an easy victim for Venetian expansion.10 While previous scholarship traces every angle of diplomacy and intrigue, political manipulation and motive, the implications of her sex on the visual rhetoric of empire has not been considered until now. In his 1587 explanation of the ceiling program, Bardi identified a group of diminutive images surrounding the three monumental depic- tions of Venetia as examples of virtuous acts, “that in diverse periods of history had been done by the Republic and by its citizens,” that had earned inclusion on the grand stage of Venetian heroism encapsulated on the ceiling.11 Tucked in among the achievements of male citizens are two scenes featuring women (fig. 3, numbers iv, ix). In each case sacrifice was the celebrated asset. A small scene attributed to Palma il Giovane repre- sents patrician women donating their jewels during the War of (1378–81) (fig. 4), and the similarly sized grisaille attributed to L’Aliense (Antonio Vassilachi) shows Corner rendering her crown and kingdom to Doge in 1489 (fig. 2).12 On two occasions when the stato da mar (maritime empire) faced threats, women transcended the roles outlined for them elsewhere on the ceiling and in society. The first of these perils occurred at the apex of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century tensions between Genoa and Venice over sea and trade ambitions in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean. In the fifteenth century, Cyprus, sought after by both the Duchy of Savoy and and nominally claimed by the sul- tan of Egypt, was a key bulwark in Venetian commerce and defense against the Ottoman Turks. The last in a series of wars between Genoa and Venice, the precipitated the greatest threat to the Venetian metropole when the Genovese captured the lagoon city in 1379. Panic ensued, and, accord- ing to Marc’Antonio Sabellico, Venetian women “lamented, raised their hands to the sky and beat their breasts,” while everyone wondered if they should send their money and jewels out of the city, or bury them under- ground in monasteries. 13 Desperately in need of funds to rebuild the fleet and fortify the city, the government instituted a forced loan on the populace, and rewarded the extraordinary generosity of some families with entrance into the closed body of the Maggior Consiglio. After the war, according to some chronicles, the city’s women likewise manifested a spirit of generos- Body of Empire 67 Figure 3. Schematic drawing 3. ofFigure the Schulz, Sala from del Juergen Reproduced Maggior Consiglio ceiling. Ceilings of the (public domain). Painted Renaissance Venetian 68 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt enetian Women Offer Their to V enetianJewels the Women Republic of il Giovane, Palma 4. Figure (Photograph: 1580. c. Venice, Palace, Sala Doge’s del Maggior Consiglio, Venice, Musei Civici di Venezia). Fondazione Body of Empire 69

ity, raising funds to clothe prisoners of war. In his account, Bardi revised the chroniclers’ reports of generosity and parsimony recounted above to conclude that “both women and men saw the danger” to the city, “and vol- untarily offered to the doge and Signoria their ornaments.”14 Yet L’ Aliense’s depiction features only women, contributing to the salvation of the city by presenting the doge and male governmental representatives with the very accoutrements that decorated their bodies in some civic rituals. On occasions such as the greeting of foreign dignitaries, Venetian noblewomen participated in processions, garbed in elaborate gowns and bedecked in the very jewels they divest themselves of in the ceiling image, accoutrements paid for by and representing the tremendous wealth of the stato da mar. Such government-sanctioned exhibitions of wealth in clothes and jewels operated both at public rituals and more private social events in Venice’s equally ornate palaces, despite an ever-growing litany of sumptuary restrictions. The preambles of sumptuary laws and other anecdotal evidence make clear the fear that display (sometimes specifi- cally female display) would bankrupt the republic and be displeasing to God, an attitude especially prevalent during moments of crisis.15 When employed properly, that is, harnessed for state occasions, female display amplified familial and civic honor, but left to their own impulses, women might stray into the vice of individual conceit.16 It was the responsibility of male heads of household, at home and in the magistracies, to direct such display towards glorifying the city: in this case, women’s markers of vanity were transformed into civic charity. This patriotic act, characterized in one later account as “manly magnanimity,”17 allowed them to surpass traditional gender assumptions and to earn a place in the exultant program. Given family and state awareness of the importance of display, on the one hand, and alarm concerning its expense, on the other, it should not be surprising to find the ambiguous ambience of individual parsimony and civic munifi- cence recorded by War of Chioggia chroniclers transformed into a rejec- tion of female consumption and elevated on the ceiling to heroism. These fourteenth-century women knew the value of wealth, and the significance of its sacrifice. The female actors in the donation image are anonymous. By contrast, the other grisaille dedicated to a woman on the Maggior Consiglio ceiling 70 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

portrayed perhaps the most well-known woman in Venetian history, out- side the allegorical Venetia—Caterina Corner. Her family, one of the oldest and most powerful in Venice, had embraced the geography and opportuni- ties of Venice’s burgeoning empire long before one of its ranks became a Cypriot queen. The queen’s great-great-grandfather, Doge Marco Corner, took as his second wife an earlier Caterina, likely from , a terri- tory loosely and occasionally held by Venice in the fourteenth century.18 The queen’s grandfather Giorgio either established or enhanced existing family commercial ties on Cyprus itself, and her father Marco was already in possession of several Cypriot fiefs and was a creditor to King Jean II of Cyprus in the 1430s.19 Like his namesake, Doge Marco, this Marco Corner combined business, politics, and marriage in his Mediterranean dealings. In 1444, he wed Fiorenza Crispo, who was descended from the Emperor of Trebizond on her mother’s side and from the ruling family of the Archipelago, a valued group of islands near the Greek mainland, on her father’s.20 Caterina was born in a period of tremendous expansion for Venice, and like many citizens of both genders, became a in the republic’s imperial machine.21 Initially a mostly maritime empire of islands con- trolled by the Signoria or overseen by Venetian citizens, Venice’s imperial- ism turned to the mainland in the first decades of the fifteenth century. Through persuasion and coercion of formerly independent cities such as and , the republic created a diversified empire that encom- passed overland trade routes and natural resources to the north and west as well as continued dominance in the eastern Mediterranean. But Corner’s birth also coincided with Mehmet the Conqueror’s 1453 victory at and Turkish advances on land and at sea in the eastern Mediterranean and Adriatic. Before Corner was ten, Venice had embarked on a nineteen-year war with the Ottomans that saw not only significant territorial losses, but also the suffering, capture, and death of Venetian civilians resident in Scutari and Negroponte. Their torment was visualized on the Maggior Consiglio ceiling and attested to in petitions for ransom filed on behalf of Negroponte survivors, mostly wives and daughters.22 The Kingdom of Cyprus, ruled since the twelfth century more or less independently by the Lusignan family, French crusaders, saw its own share Body of Empire 71

of difficulties in the mid-fifteenth century. In addition to the Ottoman threat, an invasion by the Mamluks in 1426 left it owing the Egyptian sultanate a hefty annual tribute. The island’s Greek, French, Genovese, and Venetian residents did not share a common language or even religion. In 1458, the King of Cyprus died, and his daughter Carlotta inherited the throne. However, her illegitimate half-brother Jacques usurped it in 1460.23 Searching for both financial support and political legitimacy to sustain his shaky claim from other covetous parties, Jacques turned to Venice, and to Caterina’s uncle Andrea Corner, a Venetian merchant who resided on the island. Both Andrea and the advised marriage, but it was several years before an alliance with Caterina was proposed in 1468. A marriage to a Corner heir no doubt appealed to the king for its promises of debt relief and Venetian alliance. Yet some sources allege that a portrait depicting her great beauty clinched the engagement.24 If true, this is the first of many instances that the queen’s appearance embodied imperial significance. The Venetian leadership quickly inserted themselves into the marital proceedings. As the contemporary chronicler Domenico Malipiero wrote, “to have a crowned king request as a wife the daughter of a private Venetian citizen: it seemed to everyone that the Signoria would have acquired a realm which, thanks to God, happened.”25 The republic laid the ground- work for its future claims on Cyprus with an unprecedented strategy: it adopted Corner, formalizing its ties with Jacques and Cyprus (newly under Venetian protection), while limiting the right of Corner’s natal family to claim royal prerogatives there. Corner’s wedding by proxy, at which the doge acted the part of father, providing the ring and escort, took place in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, where Corner would be immortalized over one hundred years later. Soon after, the title “Daughter of the Republic” began to appear in Venetian and Cypriot correspondence in reference to the queen. The Republic regularly employed such familial metaphors through- out Corner’s reign, both to secure the stability and equanimity of its governing patriciate and more importantly to firm up ties to Cyprus, thus increasing the strength of its overseas empire, which was threatened by the Turks with whom Venice was at war. After the death of both Corner’s 72 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

spouse (1473) and her child (1474), successive and governments would continue to assert paternal authority over this daughter, deploying patriarchal rhetoric and acting upon their fictive parental relationship to assure that Corner never enjoyed complete authority over a realm in which Venice constantly interfered. However, as threats mounted from the Turks, as well as from principalities covetous of the well-placed island, Venice moved to force her out.

The queen, however, would not be removed quietly. In his History of Venice, Pietro Bembo reported that she protested and would not be prevailed upon to abandon her wealthy kingdom, accustomed as she was to a royal way of life and the honors paid to royalty. She well knew that she would have no special prerogatives, and greatly reduced cir- cumstances, if she lived at Venice; it was enough, she said, if the island were to come back under the control of the republic at her death. 26

Whether the queen’s speech here is literal or Bembo’s creation, it is clear that both historian and queen knew that republican civic life was gendered strictly masculine, and that, returning home, she would lose the visibility, authority, and relative freedom that she possessed as queen of Cyprus. She had become accustomed not only to her power, however limited, but also its manifestations. Her letters document passionate pleas to the doge to be allowed to live in the manner due someone of her royal status. Some accounts suggest that her pursuit of magnificence–a trait expected of male Renaissance rulers–may even have contributed to her recall.27 The queen’s mother, Fiorenza Crispo Corner, blanched at her daughter’s airs— “the extreme spending that to her did not seem appropriate to a Venetian lady.” Chronicler Florio Bustron observed that this attitude, combined with the Turkish threat and the queen’s rumored remarriage prompted the state to act. 28Neither Bustron nor the queen’s mother was Venetian by birth, but both knew that Venice’s ethos of individual humility cautioned against lavish personal expenditure, and that the city fathers were especially sen- sitive to female expenditures, blaming them for the republic’s economic woes and misfortunes.29 For Fiorenza Corner, the values of her adopted homeland trumped her daughter’s royal airs and pretensions. Once again a woman was caught in the contradictory expectations of conspicuous Body of Empire 73 consumption: because Caterina Corner’s alleged lavish lifestyle reflected no glory onto a husband, and only dimly onto her civic adopted parent, in the eyes of Venice it fulfilled no public function,and was categorized as female vanity, parallel to how female dress was often characterized in period pre- scriptive writings and sumptuary legislation.30 In Bembo’s narrative, Giorgio Corner’s fervently implored his sister to consider the value of Cyprus to Venice at this time of Turkish incursions. Moreover, he offered her eternal fame in the service of her nation:

What in the end would be more apt and conducive to the eternal glory of her name than for her to make over that splendid realm to her fatherland, so that history might say that the was increased and enhanced with the rule of the wealthy island of Cyprus thanks to its own citizen? She would obtain a royal renown in every land…. Never was a woman’s arrival, nor even a man’s so gratifying to the Republic as hers would be.31

According to Bembo, Corner acquiesced with tears in her eyes, saying that the city received her kingdom more from Giorgio than from her. Her sacrifice, one forced upon her by family and state, permitted her to bypass the standards of her gender, equating her with the male champions dear to the republic. We have seen that Venetian women’s surrender of their jewels during the War of Chioggia, an act of charity particularly associated with their gender, became a “manly” act when committed in service of the state. Likewise, Corner’s surrender earned her a place in the pantheon of mascu- line heroism in history, memory, and on the Maggior Consiglio ceiling.32 Corner, her brother, and her mother left Cyprus in March 1489, with much grieving from the people (perhaps as much for any hope of self-rule as for their queen), according to the Cypriot chronicler George Boustronios.33 In Venice, the doge and Senate met the brother and sister at San Nicolò on the Lido, a traditional ceremonial entrance point to the city. Following a route commonly used by visiting dignitaries, the queen entered the city on the doge’s ceremonial barge, the bucintoro, which bore her and countless ladies to the palace of the Duke of Ferrara on the , where she remained for a few days at the republic’s expense. The formal surrender took place in the Piazza San Marco. In exchange for her realm, 74 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

Corner received lifetime suzerainty over the nearby hill town of Asolo, along with the promised pension. At the same event the doge granted Corner’s descendants the right to display the Lusignan arms in perpetuity and granted Giorgio Corner a knighthood “as a sign of gratitude for things well done.”34 Most accounts of these proceedings highlight Giorgio’s role (as the queen had predicted in Bembo’s account), and indeed, this moment was a high point in his illustrious career in service to the state. Yet it is his sister’s female body that marks the acquisition of Cyprus, the expansion of empire, and the victory of republic over monarchy among the triumphs of the Maggior Consiglio ceiling (fig. 2).35 An ornately dressed Corner, accom- panied by two ladies, obediently hands her crown to the elderly doge, who is flanked by a youthful page and an older advisor in a gesture of sacrifice echoing that of the Venetian ladies’ surrender of their jewels. Although she is dressed in finery, her appearance as the only historical female individual on the ceiling indicates far more than an ambivalent attitude toward female consumerism. Unlike other women depicted on the ceiling, Corner’s body language and gesture betray no hint of defeat; she meets the doge’s eye and does not kneel. In this reimagining of Corner’s forced abdication, she is not conquered, as are the women in Palma’s allegory. Her demeanor instead radiates with honor derived from duty. During her lifetime and after, the state and the ceiling’s programmers emphasized her sacrifice–a kingdom rather than jewels—for the sake of the patria. This sacrificial imagery resonated in Venice, and was repeated sev- eral times, with few variations, in prominent locations throughout the private and public spaces of the city at precisely this moment, in the wake of Venice’s loss of Cyprus to the Turks. The most visible of these was a contemporaneous tomb project for the queen, executed under the aegis of her grand-nephews in the church of San Salvador. At her death in 1510, Corner had been buried in Santi Apostoli, the location of her family’s chapel, overseen by her brother and containing a classicizing monument dedicated to her father. However Giorgio Corner had greater ambition for his sister’s final resting place. In 1518, he gained permission from the monks of Santi Giovanni e Paolo to construct a tomb for her on its façade between the main door and rose window. Had this tomb been executed, it Body of Empire 75 might have been the most monumental in Venice, situated above the main door on the façade of a church founded by a doge that hosted ducal funer- als and ducal tombs.36 The death of the queen’s nephew, Cardinal Marco Corner, in 1524, may have prompted his father’s decision to shelve plans for the façade tomb in favor of dual facing tombs for queen and cardinal in the nearly completed San Salvador; Giorgio Corner secured a vast and valuable space for massive wall tombs facing each other across the apse of the church in June, 1525. At the same time, Corner engaged Giovanni Maria Falconetto to design them. According to , Falconetto executed for the project “two beautiful drawings,” unfortunately no longer extant.37 However, various events delayed the tombs’ execution: Giorgio Corner died in 1527, and the Corner palace at San Maurizio, where they stored marble for several projects, burned in 1532. Corner’s will had urged his heirs to fol- low through on the tombs, but those of his sons Francesco and Giovanni, written in 1543 and 1551 respectively, indicate that by mid-century no progress had been made. Finally, in his Venetia: città nobilissima et singolare of 1581, Francesco Sansovino noted the existence of a tomb commemorating three Corner cardinals, brothers Francesco and Marco, and nephew Andrea, in the church. “Facing these,” Sansovino observed, was the tomb dedicated to the queen, where work “has commenced”(fig. 5).38 As executed by the largely unknown artist Bernardino Contino, the Corner monuments consist of two massive classicizing structures dedi- cated to the queen and her nephews, which faced each other across the vast domed apse. Precise dating for these tombs is unknown. Sansovino’s com- mentary, quoted above, suggests that the cardinals’ tomb was completed first. Documents from the San Salvador archive suggest that the family continued to embellish the queen’s tomb well into the eighteenth century, and indeed some scholars believe that the portion of the project dedicated to the queen remained unfinished.39 As seen today, each monument features a central decorative frieze, with a narrative scene flanked by the Corner coat of arms supported by putti. The narrative for the cardinals’ tomb (fig. 6A) depicts a kneeling figure (usually identified as the queen’s nephew Marco Corner) receiving the distinctively shaped hat of a cardinal from the , witnessed by other cardinals and bishops. To the left, separated from this group by a column, 76 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

Figure 5. Bernardino Contino, Tomb of Caterina Corner, San Salvador, Venice, c. 1580. (Photograph: Fototeca Böhm). Body of Empire 77

a group of men, women, and children dressed all’antica may represent the cardinal’s warrior father Giorgio and kin, or may even suggest the Roman general Scipio Africanus, his daughter Cornelia, and her children, includ- ing Gaius and Tiberius Gracchi, from whom the Corner family claimed descendance. The figures, their style, and the friezes themselves call to mind Roman antiquity.40 In the corresponding frieze (fig. 6B), the queen, also dressed in classical garb and accompanied by five female figures, presents her crown on a pillow to the doge and five officials. Unlike her nephew, the queen shows no obeisance to authority; she does not kneel or incline her head. Indeed, except for medium, size, and minor details (cos- tume, the presence of a pillow and/or page to convey the crown, number of figures), the tomb and ceiling images are virtually the same, suggesting that one artist influenced the other.41 In each, queen and women appear on the right and doge and men on the privileged left. In each, the queen meets the doge’s eye as she parts with crown and kingdom, proud despite her loss. In both images the queen is the doge’s equal in size and stature; they are sepa- rated only by regalia, which the doge wears and the queen surrenders. It is significant that these two images, one in Venice’s main municipal building and the other in one of its best known and most central churches, may have been produced at roughly the same time, the 1580s, shortly after the dev- astating loss of Cyprus to the Ottoman Turks. Two nearly identical images of the queen appearing contemporaneously in prominent spaces indicates that the triumphal iconography of the queen’s sacrifice resonated in the years following the War of Cyprus, a period of nostalgia that informed the triumphal context of the Maggior Consiglio ceiling. In the context of family burial, the queen’s sacrifice takes on addi- tional familial meaning. Her abdication not only enhanced Venetian glory, but also did the same for the Corner family. As Giorgio Corner had pre- dicted in his plea to his sister to renounce her throne, she shared “her glory with her brothers, sisters, relations and household, in a word, with the city in which she was born and raised.”42 The fame generated by the queen’s sacrifice and her brother’s role in it certainly facilitated (as did the family’s tremendous wealth) the promotion of her nephew Marco to the office of cardinal at the very young age of eighteen. Moreover, the queen’s enormous dowry made possible the rebuilding of the Corner palace at San Maurizio 78 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt Figure 6A. Bernardino Contino, Frieze from the Tomb of Francesco, Marco and Andrea Corner, Corner, Andrea and Marco of Francesco, Tomb from the Frieze 6A. Bernardino Contino, Figure Böhm). Fototeca (Photograph: 1570. c. Venice, San Salvador, Body of Empire 79 Figure 6B. Detail of6B. Figure 5. Figure 80 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

after a 1532 fire. Through the centuries, the Corner family were quick to acknowledge that the queen had brought them unprecedented distinc- tion. Her image became a form of visual synecdoche, a mnemonic device to recall centuries of her kin’s loyalty to the city. In 1587, Girolamo Bardi dedicated his account of the ceiling’s iconography to Giovanni Corner, the queen’s great grandnephew and a future doge. Not surprisingly, Bardi underscored the Corner family as epitomizing Venetian values; the ceil- ing represented “the valor of diverse glorious citizens of this most famous fatherland: among which were, in every age, many from the house of Corner.” Bardi suggested that Corner service to the state, “particularly the donation of the realm of Cyprus graciously yielded by the ancestor of your illustriousness, Caterina Corner . . .” 43 functioned similarly to their Grand Canal palaces, tremendous wealth, and monumental tombs in the city’s prominent churches, elevating the Corner family to first among Venetian patrician clans.44 Thus it is not surprising that the iconography of the queen’s abdica- tion became omnipresent in Corner monuments and spaces across Venice. In his 1663 additions to Sansovino’s Venetia, Giustiniano Martinioni described the art collection that Nicolò Corner housed in the family pal- ace at San Maurizio, which included an image of the queen “placing her realm in the hand of Agostino Barbarigo, represented admirably by Paolo Veronese.”45 Martinioni likely referred to the same work as that attributed by Carlo Ridolfi to Veronese’s sons Carlo and Gabriele, which is now in a private collection. Again the queen, dressed in black, this time wearing a simple crown and an expression that might reflect the ambivalence she felt at surrendering her throne, accompanied by several ladies in damask, hands another, more elaborate crown to the doge. In an image intended for the personal consumption of the Corner family itself, the queen’s retinue occupied considerably more space than that of the doge, and she continued to wear a crown, perhaps as a reminder that the family had been granted the right to decorate their arms with a crown in perpetuity.46 By contrast, in public images, such as those discussed above, and in the relief decorating a Corner family monument erected by Doge Giovanni II Corner in the church of San Nicolò ai Tolentini in the eighteenth cen- tury, the only crown shown is that which the queen, this time seated, passes Body of Empire 81

Figure 7. Giuseppe Torretti, Tomb of Doge Giovanni II Corner, San Nicolò ai Tolentini, Venice, c. 1720. (Photograph: Fototeca Böhm). 82 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

to the doge by the means of a page (fig. 7).47 The same basic elements of queen, crown, and doge, repeated in religious and secular, residential and public spaces across the city and across centuries, recur here. Yet in this case the queen no longer offers the crown, or even touches it, and her pose is more deferential. Seated, her resigned gaze falls on the crown rather than meeting that of the doge; she seems less his equal and more his “obedient daughter.” The aging doge and masculine republic have not only “tamed femininity,” in Hanna Pitkin’s sense, but also monarchy itself.48 As in the San Salvador frieze, the mature figures of senators and ladies, the wizened doge, and the aging queen contrast notably with both the youthful page who presents the crown to the doge, and with the young boy with a dog to the right. As the only narrative element in a monument that also features twelve busts of famous Corner men, the contrast of youth and age in this frieze again suggests the continuity of generations of Corner service to Venice. As the singular female in this pantheon of male fame, the image of the widowed, childless, middle-aged queen here is akin to Cornelia Gracchus, the virtuous widow claimed by the Corner as a kinswoman. Although the queen’s son died in infancy, and thus did not achieve the renown of the Gracchi, Corner’s sacrificial act did make possible the politi- cal and ecclesiastical careers of her brother, nephews, and their successors. Her forced abdication—refashioned as patriotic offering—gave birth to generations of family fame and achievement. The earliest known depiction of Corner may likewise have influenced the iconography of these images of her surrender. The late fifteenth-cen- tury sarcophagus of Doge Pietro Mocenigo by Pietro in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (fig. 8A), rife with references to the doge’s glorious military career, features a relief depicting Corner’s receipt of the keys to the rebellious city of from her Venetian protec- tor, then Capital General Mocenigo, in 1473 (fig. 8B).49 Mocenigo played a fundamental role in guaranteeing the queen’s rule in the aftermath of her husband’s death. He visited the distraught Corner two times, also attend- ing her newborn son’s baptism. After sending troops and support during an attempted coup, Mocenigo himself returned to Cyprus in January of 1474. In Famagusta, according to captain and historian Coriolano Cippico, Body of Empire 83

. . . in the Piazza San Nicolò in the midst of the city in front of the royal palace, and in the presence of the queen and all the elite Cypriots, he made show and inspection of his troops. The queen and barons, seeing the grand display, were stupefied, marveling at the immediacy and diligence of our general, who in the middle of the winter, in tur- bulent seas . . . had put together such a beautiful exercise.50

At his departure, the queen praised and thanked the Venetian Senate and Mocenigo, calling the latter father and liberator of her realm, and pre- sented him with a standard bearing the royal insignia, perhaps one of those displayed in the tomb relief. Like the abdication imagery of a century later, Corner, flanked by ladies on the right, meets (future) doge and soldiers on the left, a separation that emphasizes the vulnerability and instability of female rule, visualizing the queen’s need for masculine support and assis- tance. Here Mocenigo and the soldiers and sailors under his command surround the queen and her ladies–literally and figuratively buttressing her. Crucially, in the relief Corner receives the key to Famagusta from the representative of Venice, a reversal of her abdication, when she is depicted as willing agent, surrendering the crown she wears on Mocenigo’s tomb to another doge. Seen together, these images imply that, as Venice furnished and guaranteed Corner’s power in 1474, so it could seize that power in 1489. In short, the republic, represented by the bodies of men in these depictions, defined the extent and limits of her authority. The frequent depiction of Corner with a doge, whether her rescue by Mocenigo and the Venetian in 1473, or her salvation through sacrifice to Barbarigo and the Venetian empire fifteen years later, also may have recalled a third ducal interchange: her marriage by proxy in 1468, at which the doge, rather than her father, played the main paternal role, and her subsequent adoption by the state. Indeed, the doge was often an embodiment of a collective civic masculinity in rituals that used the language of marriage. Sometimes, as in Corner’s career, the doge acted as father: as Francesco Sansovino noted, it was common practice for brides to appear before the doge as part of their marriage ritual.51 At other times, the doge, as metaphysical incarnation of the city and its masculinity, became the groom: the doge wed the abbess of the convent of Vergini in one com- mon ritual, and annually he married the sea on the feast of Ascension. 84 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

Figure 8A. Tomb of Doge Pietro Mocenigo, Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, c. 1480. (Photograph: Art Resource). Body of Empire 85

Figure 8B. Detail of Figure 8A. 86 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

In this quintessentially imperial rite, Venetians could imagine that they controlled the sea and all it embraced (including the wealth and territories of their dominions) in the same way that patriarchy allowed a husband to expect obedience from his wife and the use of her dowry.52 Similarly, in ritual interactions with the body of Caterina Corner, a real woman, Venice expected and exacted obedience and came to enjoy the fruits of her mar- riage—the island of Cyprus—which likewise facilitated their maritime dominance. These female bodies, real and imagined, became the vocabu- lary of conquest and control. No female body exemplified Venetian triumphalism more than that of the iconic amalgam Venetia, featured prominently on public buildings from the fourteenth century, and centrally on the Maggior Consiglio ceil- ing. As David Rosand and others have shown, Venetia combined features of allegorical Justice, the Virgin Mary, and Venus who had been born, like the city of Venice, from the sea. As rendered by Veronese in his Apotheosis (fig. 1), Venetia combines all these elements with a demonstration of spectacular wealth, prosperity, and beauty. Her ample body type and her garments and jewels, those forbidden to Venetian women by sumptuary law, yet increasingly displayed through exemptions, were celebrated in art and literature, and perhaps cultivated by Caterina Corner as an expres- sion of her royal, feminine identity and power.53 Although Venetia herself occasionally acts—crowning the doge or distributing offices–more often she sits motionless and resplendent, the benefactress and marker of male achievement. She thus functioned in a manner analogous to historical women, whose bodies likewise signified and perpetuated family wealth, pride, and continuity. The figure of Corner on the Maggior Consiglio ceiling (fig. 2) echoes the Venetia of Veronese’s Apotheosis in a variety of telling ways. The gri- saille of Corner’s donation is proximate to Veronese’s allegory in the ceiling’s layout, just above or to the east of the allegory so that Venetia (fig. 3, C) ascends toward Corner (fig. 3, ix). Queen and allegory both wear elaborate fashions, perhaps exaggerated versions of sixteenth-century noblewoman’s dress, that rendered them symbols of the Venetian commercial empire. Furthermore, the erstwhile queen resembles Venetia in her generous pro- portions and hairstyle. Although these artists may be adopting a general Body of Empire 87

female “type” for these depictions, for poet Filomeno Gallo, the similitude between queen and allegory was not coincidental but familial. In his Rime a (c. 1494), the author recounts a vision in which he encounters a woman in distress. She is Venetia, and she laments the loss of her beloved, beautiful, and virtuous daughter, Caterina Corner.54 Moreover, both queen and allegory possess crowns: the crown that Corner hands to the doge is similar in style to the crown that Venetia receives from Veronese’s foreshortened angel. For both women the crown suggests authority over the stato da mar, site of numerous former king- doms, including Cyprus; in some ways Venetia gains her crown precisely because Corner surrenders hers. In Tintoretto’s ceiling image, Venetia appears with the doge, as Corner frequently had in imagery discussed ear- lier. Each grants the doge headgear that signifies authority: Venetia a lau- rel, Corner her crown. The crown is itself significant because of the danger it posed as a symbol in republican Venice: the headgear worn by the doge was emphatically not a crown. Crowns were even rarer for women; the doge’s wife could neither rule nor bear the next generation of rulers, unlike a queen, and was thus disassociated from many of the temporary trap- pings of her husband’s office. Early images of the depicted her with headgear visibly distinguishable from the corno; images of her with a diminutive ducal corno appeared only in the late sixteenth century.55 Thus the crown itself denoted something special, foreign, and often male, and, as seen above, even the Corner family exercised caution in its deployment as a symbol. Venetia, too, wears a crown in her guise of Queen of the Adriatic, but the figures of both Venetia and Corner were nevertheless employed as allegorical markers of patriarchal dominion. In addition to physical and political parallels between Caterina Corner and her fatherland’s feminine allegory, these female bodies shared a further association crucial to the myth of Venice, sustaining imperial hopes in the bleak days of the 1570s when Venice failed to protect Corner’s gift and Cyprus was lost to the Turks. By the late sixteenth century, the virginal element of iconic Venetia eclipsed other facets of her identity, particularly those of the sexualized goddess of love. Poets and political theorists from Maffeo Venier to Paolo Paruta applied the metaphor of virginity to the purity of the Venetian noble class and juxtaposed restrained chastity with 88 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

the disease and strife caused by the passions of Venus. Although its empire was threatened by external and internal threats, military and social forces, the city itself remained inviolate. In this context Venetia became, to quote Peter Stallybrass, “the emblem of the perfect and impermeable container, and hence a map of the integrity of the state.”56 Caterina Corner was neither a literal allegory nor a virgin—and she had ruled over the island thought to be the birthplace of Venus, a point of comparison not lost on Gian Francesco , who lauded Corner’s queenship as “a supernatural thing … it was said that Venus had again returned to Cyprus.”57 However, her offspring did not survive, and at the insistence of her metaphorical adoptive father, she had not remarried. Indeed, according to some interpretations, her chosen lifestyle and sacri- fice allowed her to recapture virginal status. In his 1489 oration, Taddeo Bovolini proclaimed,

you, most illustrious queen, such an inexperienced young woman, in the midst of the realm of Venus, surrounded by so many royal delights, fragile from your feminine sex … should be praised all the more for your continence, that you remained as if a virgin … fleeing the marriage knot in order to make an offering of your chastity to God.58

For Bovolini as for Corner’s mother, “royal delights” signified a men- ace, but one that the queen, despite her naïveté (sexual and otherwise), resisted; in giving back her crown, Corner renounced marriage and regal pleasures, and regained her maidenhood. Bovolini positioned the queen’s true heroism in the simplicity of chaste widowhood, a choice amounting to ultimate loyalty to her adopted father and fatherland. In a twist on the traditional life cycle by which women were categorized, Caterina Corner married in order to become a daughter, and in widowhood reclaimed her virginity. The queen’s virginal state further equated her with Venetia, described famously by sixteenth-century poet Veronica Franco as “a truly maiden city, immaculate and inviolate, without the stain of injustice, and never shattered by foreign wars.”59 In the imagination of sixteenth-century Venice, Corner’s sexual and territorial sacrifice, presented on the ceiling of its most important civic Body of Empire 89

space and across the city in churches and homes frequented by patricians and visitors alike, became another feminine imperial allegory. She simulta- neously represented fertility of empire, chastity of woman, and supremity of the masculine, self-perpetuating republic.60 This enticing, persuasive embodiment of ideal obedient womanhood, patriotic sacrifice, and civic was multivalent in early modern Venetian texts and images. For the state, Corner’s image spoke of imperial ambition, victory, and perhaps also nostalgia. For her kin, she became a symbol of illustrious family his- tory and of individual and collective glory found in the service of republic and empire.

Notes

1. Monique O’Connell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 17–38; and Elisabeth Crouzet- Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 56–81. Generous grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the American Historical Association as well as a 2007–2008 fel- lowship at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies facilitated this research. I also thank Laurinda Dixon, whose graduate seminar on women in early modern art fostered my interest in Caterina Corner, along with Jana Byars, Andrew Bynom, Julia DeLancey, Blake de Maria, and Mariola Espinosa. I am grateful to staff members at the , Fototeca Böhm, and Art Resource for their assistance, and to these institutions for permission to use the images presented here. Finally, I am indebted to the anonymous readers and the editors for their excellent editorial assistance. 2. Staale Sinding-Larsen, Christ in the Council Hall: Studies in the Religious Iconography of the Venetian Republic (Bretschneider: , 1974), 1–2; Wolfgang Wolters, Storia e politica nei dipinti di Palazzo Ducale: aspetti del autocelebrazione della Repubblica di Venezia nel cinquecento (Venice: Arsenale, 1987). 3. Chroniclers and historians occasionally saw women as more than passive victims in imperial battles. In Giovanni Palazzi’s account, for example, a Brescian woman took arms to defend the city against the Visconti of ; see Giovanni Palazzi, La virtù in giocco overo dame patritie di Venetia famose per nascita, per lettere, per armi, per costumi, vol. 2 (Venice: Centro Internazionale della Grafica, 1990), 134–8. 4. “Li quadri grandi…che saranno i risultati da esse imprese, et esempi.” Girolamo Bardi, Dichiaratione di tutte le historie che si contengono ne I quadri posti nuova- mente nelle Sale dello Scrutinio & del Gran Consiglio del Palagio Ducale della Serenissima Republica di Vinegia (Venice, 1602), fol. 45v. On Venetia, see Wolters, Storia, 228–38; David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: University of 90 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

North Carolina Press, 2001), 6–46; and Jutta Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 83–114. 5. Lynn Hunt observed that female allegories were particularly appropriate for republics because they neither represent the father/king, nor can they be “associated with particular political leaders”; see her The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 85. See also Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of Female Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 6. Hanna Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 243. Pitkin empha- sized that while cities and states are gendered female in language and presentation, the institutions that control those states, in Machiavelli’s interpretation, were “preeminently masculine enterprises, wrested from and threatened by feminine powers” (241). The fatherland is feminine, she continues, because it is “the land of the (fore) fathers, founded by and belonging to fathers” (243). Similarly, the Paduan professor Pompeo Caimo imag- ined the republic as “a masculine soul that gave form and shape to an amorphous, female urban matter” (as quoted in Sperling, Convents, 87). Although we rarely see Venetia in such explicit terms, as a creation or property of the republic, according to Wolters, Venetia was occasionally and significantly depicted as the bride or ward of Saint Mark, the city’s patron saint, as in Bonifacio de’Pitati’s Saint Mark as Venetian Protector; see Wolters, Storia, 232. 7. Wolters first identified Corner as the only “illustrious” woman on the ceil- ing; Storia, 69, n. 1. For scholarship on the intersections and implications of gender and modern empires, focusing on the actions of men and women in colonies, how empire influenced gender in the metropole, and how empire itself came to be seen in terms of masculine/feminine juxtaposition, see, for example, Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Similar scholarship is much less com- mon for late medieval imperial projects. 8. In his introduction to the poem, Bembo writes, “with her family, which goes by the name of Cornelia and is much honored in our city of family, my own is joined by blood as well as friendship and familiarity”; see Gli Asolani, trans. Rudolf B. Gottfried (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1954), 8. The queen may have been related to Bembo through her cousin Marco, the son of one of her aunts, who died in the 1473 coup attempt on Cyprus; see Hill, History, 651, 671–3. Bembo’s character Lavinello later com- ments, “If fortune had provided me with an auditor and judge suitable to the greatness of my subject, it ought not make me unhappy, for you might extend your generous aid where I fell short…to have the Queen of Cyprus hear my arguments on love would be the very pledge of my success” (Asolani, 152). Corner’s role here is in many ways analogous to that of Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, published a few years after Gli Asolani. 9. On Venetian mediocritas, see n. 44. On Corner and d’Este’s 1502 meeting, see Katherine Ward-Jones, “ and Her Time: Men of Letters, Artists,” Body of Empire 91

in Il barco di Caterina Cornaro regina di Cipro e signora di Asolo: tra oriente e occidente (: Canova, 2000), 90–1. Elena Povoledo traces Corner’s courtly activities through the whole of her life in “Accademie, feste, e spettacoli alla corte di C. Cornaro,” in La let- teratura, la rappresentazione, la musica al tempo e nei luoghi di , ed. Michelangelo Muraro (Rome: L Jouvence, 1987), 133–61; Corner’s period in Asolo is the focus of Luigi Comacchio’s Splendore di Asolo ai tempi della Regina Cornaro (Castelfranco : Tecnoprint, 1969). See also the popular biography by David and Iro Hunt, Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus (: Trigraph, 1987); and Sally Hickson, “Caterina Cornaro in Asolo: The Art and Architectural Patronage of a Renaissance Queen” (MA thesis, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, 1995). 10. Giovanna Magnante, “L’acquisto dell’isola di Cipro da parte della repub- blica di Venezia,” Archivio Veneto, ser. 5, 5 (1929): 78–133 and 6 (1929): 1–82; Benjamin Arbel, “The Reign of Caterina Corner (1473–1489) as a Family Affair,” Studi Veneziani 26 (1993): 67–85, and “A Royal Family in Republican Venice: The Cypriot Legacy of the Corner della Regina,” Studi Veneziani 21 (1988): 131–52; and most recently, O’Connell, Empire, 36–37. A number of biographies on Corner also fail to analyze fully her gender and unique placement in Venetian politics and rhetoric: recently, Francesco Dorigo, La Regina di Cipro (Venice: Filippi, 1982); and David and Iro Hunt, Caterina Cornaro. 11. “Et nell’ultimo ordine de I compartimenti di I vani di questa nobilissima Sala sono stati collocati gli essempi virtuosi & publichi & particolari, che in diversi tempi furono essercitati dalla Republica & da I suoi cittadini” (Bardi, Dichiaratione, fol. 41v). Interestingly, in the edition of Bardi used by Wolters (Archivio di Stato, Venezia), deeds of citizens are described as “deeds of men” (as quoted in Wolters, Storia, 351). 12. Bardis’s text and subsequent scholarship attributed the donation of jewels to L’ Aliense and the queen’s abdication to Leonardo Corona. The most recent attribution credits Palma Giovanne with the former and L’ Aliense with the latter. Elena Viviani, Archivio Fotografico, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Correspondence with the author, May 14, 2009. 13. “Le donne, per tutta la Città, dimonstravano grandissimi segni di dolo- re, hora lamentandosi, hora levando le mani al Cielo, & hora battendosi il petto” (Marc’Antonio Sabellico, Le historie vinitiane [Venice, 1554], fol. 107v). Contemporary chroniclers Raphaino de Caresini and Antonio Morosini did not provide these details, but they did describe in detail the generosity of those citizens who were allowed to enter the Maggior Consiglio; see Caresini, Chronica, ed. Ester Pastorello, in Rerum italicarum scriptores vol. 12, pt. 2 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1922), 56; and Morosini, The Morosini Codex, ed. Michele Pietro Ghezzo, John R. Melville-Jones, and Andrea Rizzi, vol. 2 (Padua: Unipress, 1999), 83. On the women’s efforts for prisoners, see Sabellico, Historie, f. 122; Giovanni Battista Egnazio, De exempliis illustrium virorum Venetae civitatis atque aliarum gentium, (Venice: Aldus, 1554), fols. 168v–169r; and Pietro Giustinian, Historie Venetiane (Venice, 1576), 155. The earliest specific textual reference to women’s dona- tion of jewels that I have located occurred after the inception of the ceiling, in Bardi’s Dichiaratione (1587); and Luigi , Aggiunta al vago & dilettevole giardino del r.p. 92 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

Luigi Contarini Crocifero (Vicenza, 1590), 146. Giovanni Palazzi included both acts of female heroism in Virtù, 38–41, 83–5. 14. “… veduto le donne & gli huomeni il pericolo … volontariamente ad offerire al Principe, & alla Signoria gli ornamenti …” (Bardi, Dichiaratione, fol. 42r). The “Signoria” consisted of the doge, his elected advisors, and the three heads of the . A similar legend about jewelry, empire and feminine sacrifice surrounds Isabel of Castile, who allegedly pawned her jewels to fund Columbus’ expedition; see José Luis Abellán, “Isabel and the Idea of America,” in Isabel la Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays, ed. David Boruchoff (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 80. 15. Debate about consumption and gender began in fourteenth-century sump- tuary legislation as regimes worried that display diminished funds to be invested in trade; later, republics such as Venice concluded that defeat in war reflected God’s displeasure with female vanity, and that female expenditure is “the ruin of men.” See Diane Owen Hughes, “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 84. Yet on some occasions female dress was an asset to be displayed: in 1459, the Senate twice encouraged the women of the city to wear forbidden finery to impress visiting dignitaries; see Margaret Newett, “The Sumptuary Laws of Venice in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Historical Essays by Members of Owens College, Manchester (London, 1902), 250. But, Marin Sanudo observed, when a female dignitary visited the city, dozens of elite women greeted her in such finery that the government had to restrict their lavishness; see De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae, ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò (Milan: Cisalpino-La Goliardica, 1980), 23. 16. Venetian humanist Francesco Barbaro argued both sides of this dichotomy when he observed that jewels are “evidence of the wealth of the husband rather than to impress wanton eyes …” but also that “excessive indulgence in clothes is a good sign of great vanity;” see Barbaro, De re uxoria, in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. Benjamin Kohl and Ronald Witt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 208, 207. 17. “ . . . con magnaminità virile, le Dame Venete, portando à piedi del Principe li loro monili e più pretiosi ornamenti . . . ” (Palazzi, Virtù, 39). 18. The natal name of Dogaressa Corner is unknown: her wills demonstrate ties to Scaradona (Skradin) in Dalmatia. This relationship posed a challenge to the doge’s election in 1365; see Holly S. Hurlburt, The Dogaressa of Venice, 1200–1500: Wife and Icon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 28. 19. G. Gullino, “Corner, Giorgio,” Dizionario biografico degl’Italiani (hereafter DBI), vol. 29 (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1983), 210–12; Arbel, “Reign,” 71. 20. Arbel, “Reign,” 71; G. Gullino, “Corner, Marco,” DBI 29, 251–54. John IV sought to build alliances east and west against Ottoman expansion—another daughter, Theodora, married Uzun Hasan, called by some sources the “King of Persia”; see Donald Nicol, The Byzantine Lady: Ten Portraits, 1250–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Body of Empire 93

Press, 1994), 121. On the Crispo, originally from Verona, see P. Schreiner, “Crispo, Francesco,” DBI 30, 804–06. Giovanni Grevembroch noted the marriages of the Crispo daughters; see Gli abiti de veneziani di quasi ogni età con diligenza raccolti e dipinti nel secolo xviii, vol. 4 (Venice: Filippi, 1981), 12. See also Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Index 86 ter., Avogaria di Comun, Matrimoni patrizi per nome di donna. 21. For an example of Venetian manipulation of its citizen Fiorenza Sanudo delle Carceri, fourteenth-century ruler of Negroponte, see Raymond Loenertz, Les Ghisi: Dynastes Vénitiens dans L’archipel (Florence: Olschki, 1975), 168–72. For an overview of the queen’s life, see F. Colasanti, “Caterina Corner,” DBI 22 (1979), 334–42. 22. For example, see the Senate’s deliberation on behalf of the wife and daugh- ters of Pietro Taiapetra and Benedetto Barbarigo, “murdered in Negroponte,” as well as “other noble ladies and their daughters taken captive by the Turks” (ASV, Senato, Mar, reg. 9, fol. 95r). 23. On Carlotta’s reign and her brother’s usurpation, see George Hill, A History of Cyprus, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 548–60. 24. Corner’s biographer, Antonio Colbertaldo, identified Dario of Treviso as the artist of the portrait, of which no trace exists; see Colbertaldo in Trattato di Catterina Cornelia Regina di Cipro e delle antichità d’Asolo di cui ella fu signora, MS Gradenigo 60, Biblioteca di Museo Civico Correr, fol. 21v. The Venetian Senate suggested to the king in 1466 that he marry Zoe Paleologa, daughter of the former ruler of ; see Hill, History, 628–29. The pope refused to allow the marriage, perhaps because the king had taken Cyprus from its rightful ruler, his sister Carlotta Lusignan. 25. “habbiando un Re de corona domandà per mogier una fia d’un privato cittadin Venetian; e pareva a ogn’un che la Signoria havesse aquistà un regno, come, per gratia de Dio, successe”; see Domenico Malipiero, Annali veneti dall’anno 1457 al 1500, in Archivio storico Italiano, vol. 7, part 2 (1844), 598. 26. Bembo, History of Venice, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Robert W. Ulery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 43. An identical version also appeared in Florio Bustron’s mid-sixteenth-century chronicle; see Chronique de l’île de Chypre, ed. M. Rene de Mas Latrie (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1884), 455–57. Corner’s conclusion that women had more opportunities in courtly societies than in republics has echoes in cur- rent historiography; see, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women in Politics,” in Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, vol. 3 of A History of Women, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Boston: Belknap Press, 1993), 169–70. 27. Neopolitan Humanist Guiniano Maio’s treatise “On Majesty” included a chapter on magnificence and the necessity for “splendid and conspicuous sumptuousness” in royal hallmarks such as architecture, clothes, artworks, spectacles. But he subtly gen- ders the concept when he also includes horsemanship and hunting, “worthy training for a knight and for an excellent and magnanimous king”; see Maio in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, vol. 2, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 110–12. 28. “Ritornata adunque a Venetia referse la spesa estrema che a lei pareva non 94 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

conveniente ad una gentildonna Venetiana …” (Bustron, Chronique, 454). By contrast, George Boustronios credits the queen’s mother with convincing her to depart by saying that the “signory of Venice begged her to go and spend a year there and then come back again”; see A Narrative of the Chronicle of Cyprus, 1456–89, trans. Nicholas Coureas (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Center 2005), 173. Transcriptions of the queen’s letters can be found in Louis de Mas Latrie, Histoire, vol. 3; Nouvelles preuves de l’histoire de Chypre sous le règne des princes de la maison de Lusignan (Paris: J. Baur, 1873); Luigi Comacchio, Splendore di Asolo ai tempi della regina Cornaro (Castelfranco: Tecnoprint, 1969); and Storia di Asolo, vol. 17, La Regina Cornaro (Asolo, 1981). 29. The early sixteenth century saw repeated references to female destruction of the city through exorbitant spending: see, for example, an anonymous letter quoted by Sanudo in 1507, as referenced in Patricia Labalme and Laura Sanguinetti White, Venice Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, trans. Linda Carroll (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 305. Likewise, women were implicated, if not mentioned outright, in Doge ’s invective against excessive spending and luxury in the dark days of the League of Cambrai War in 1509 (Labalme and White, 52–53). See also Girolamo Priuli, who on more than one occasion accused female fashion of “ruining husbands”; see I diarii di Girolamo Priuli, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 24, part 3, ed. Arturo Segre and Roberto Cessi (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1912–41), 391. 30. The connection between finery and female honor was manifested earlier in the century, when a handful of Venetian women (including Cristina Corner, perhaps the queen’s relative) had protested restrictive sumptuary laws. Bolognese noblewoman Nicolosa Sanuti likewise linked dress to civic virtue; see Catherine Killerby Kovesi, “Heralds of a Well-Instructed Mind: Nicolosa Sanuti’s Defense of Women and Their Clothes,” Renaissance Studies 13 (1999): 255–82. 31. Bembo, History, 45. Corner also used threats to sway his sister, noting that the Signoria would remove her by force if necessary, after which “nui saremo ruinati!” (“we would be ruined!”); see Sanudo, Le vite dei dogi (1474–1494), ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò, vol. 2 (Padua: Antenore, 2002), 599. 32. In the addendum to his catalog of female virtue and vice, Luigi Contarini linked the jewelry donors and Caterina Corner, praising them for their defense of the republic. His sequential treatment of these two examples suggests that perhaps he knew of plans for the ceiling (Giardino, addition, fol. 78r). 33. Boustronios, Chronicle, 174. 34. “ . . . in signum gratificationis rei bene operate”( Sanudo, Vite, vol. 2, 604). See also Colbertaldo, “Trattato,” fol. 31v. Contemporary audiences and modern scholars have tended to downplay the forced nature of her abdication: for example, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan observed that she “made a gift of the island . . . ” (in Venice Triumphant, 81). The documentation of her Asolo sovereignty is reproduced in Marco Barbaro et al, Arborii patritii Veneti, vol. 11, 35–43. 35. See G. Gullino, “Corner, Giorgio,” DBI 29, 213–15. Giorgio also appears Body of Empire 95

on the Maggior Consiglio ceiling, in a full-sized panel by Francesco Bassano depicting his heroism during the League of Cambrai War (Wolters, Storia, 352). 36. Martin Gaier found and published the permission for the tomb construc- tion in Facciate sacro e scopo profano: Venezia e la politica dei monumenti, dal quattrocento al settecento, trans. Benedetta Heinemann Campana (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere de arti, 2002), 465. Santi Giovanni e Paolo’s ducal associations date to Doge Jacopo Tiepolo’s land grant to the Dominican Order in 1234. Both this doge and later his son Lorenzo, a subsequent doge, were buried in relatively simple tombs in front of the church, which were later mounted on its façade. See Debra Pincus, The Tombs of the Doges of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 14–16. 37. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. Gaston de Vere, vol. 6 (London: Macmillan, 1912), 46–47; Giandomenico Romanelli, Ca’ Corner della Ca’ Granda (Venice: Albrizzi, 1993), 75–77. On Corner’s negotiations with San Salvador, see Sanudo, I Diarii, ed. R. Fulin, vol. 39 (Venice: F. Visentini, 1879), 84; and ASV, San Salvador, Busta 25, reg. 50, 101r–v. Gaier suggests that a Palladio drawing of Cornelia and Venere pudica may have been associated with the queen’s tomb project; see “Königin in einer republik: Proekte für ein grabmonument der Caterina Corner in Venedig,” Mitteilungen kunsthistoriches institutes im Florenz 46 (2002): 197–234. The Corner family was fortunate to retain rights to the site selected by Giorgio: on one visit, powerful Doge , an avowed rival of the Corner, declared that “he wished his tomb to be made” in the same place (Sanudo, Diarii, v. 49, 333). 38. “All’incontro di questi si mette in il sepolcro di Caterina Cornara Regina di Cipro”; see Sansovino, Venetia: Città Nobilissima et Singolare (Venice: Filippi, 1998), 121–22. In Vasari’s 1550 edition, he commented that the marble for Falconetto’s tomb project yet languished at Palazzo Corner, another indication of delays in the project (Vasari, Lives, vol. 6, 47). 39. An undated document in the San Salvador archive makes references to additions made to the tombs, perhaps in preparation for the actual burial of the queen and her nephews there, which took place only in 1737; see ASV, Archivio di San Salvador, b. 44, reg. 91, fasc. 33, fol. 88r–v; on the burial itself, see ASV, Archivio di San Salvador, b. 25, fol. 25. In the nineteenth century, Francesco Zanotto published a drawing of the monument by G. Simonetti, which included reclining figures above the main frieze, echo- ing the iconography of the cardinals’ monument. Zanotto explained that the drawing was meant to reflect the appearance of the monument had it been completed, but was missing a central bust; see Le fabbriche e i monumenti cospicui di Venezia, as quoted in Aikaterinē Kornaro, hē teleutaia Vasilissa tēs Kyprou, 1473–89 (Nicosia: Politistiko Kentro Laïkēs Trapezas, 1995), 202–3. In the same publication, an exhibition catalog, Giandomenico Romanelli posits that the tomb was intentionally left unfinished, that it was “too embar- rassing, too strong to be displayed on a monument in a strategic church” (50). Female tomb effigies were extremely unusual in Renaissance Venice (as were monumental tombs for women); perhaps fear of controversy prevented the inclusion of Corner’s effigy. See Hurlburt, Dogaressa, 128–55. 96 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt

40. I thank my anonymous reader for the suggestion that figures in these friezes resemble those from the Ara Pacis. Similarities exist in terms of style of relief carving and the costume and demeanor of some figures. As their service to the papacy required frequent travel to Rome, the queen’s descendants (and perhaps the tombs’ art- ist) may well have been familiar with the ancient monument. In his funerary oration for Marco Corner (1479), Pietro Contarini links the Corner clan to their Roman ancestors, descended from Scipio Africanus, victor over Hannibal in the Second Punic War; see Contarini in Orazioni, elogi e vite scritte da letterati veneti patrizi, ed. Girolamo Ascanio Molin (Venice, 1795), 130. In his oration to the queen upon her arrival in Asolo (1489), Taddeo Bovolini developed the connection, commenting not only on Scipio, but also the eloquence and morality of his female kin (including Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi), and noting that the Corner family had made both Rome and Venice great (as reprinted in Luigi Comacchio, Splendore di Asolo, 145–50). Subsequent poetic works dedicated to the queen and other family members likewise emphasize Corner ancestry. The queen’s nephew, and occupant of this tomb, Francesco Corner, commissioned frieze-like works by Mantegna and on Scipio and other members of his illustrious family, which might have influenced the tomb’s style: see Allan Braham, “A Reappraisal of ‘The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele at Rome’ by Mantegna,” Burlington Magazine 115 (1973): 457–58; and Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 252–53. 41. It seems possible that the queen’s descendants, responsible for overseeing the tomb in the 1570s–1580s, might have seen or heard of plans for the ceiling which influenced the imagery in her tomb, because at least one Corner (Giorgio, who may have been the queen’s kin) was briefly a member of the commission overseeing ceiling decora- tion while another Corner (Giovanni, the queen’s great-grandnephew) was the dedicatee of Girolamo Bardi’s Dichiaratione, a lengthy description of the ceiling’s iconography; see note 42, and see Wolters, Storia, 34. The Museo Civico di Asolo possesses a panel painting depicting the abdication in the Piazza San Marco, which is dated 1515. In it, the queen and her entourage take up a tiny portion of the picture plane, on the right, while the doge and a long retinue extend to the left, with the Doge’s Palace and San Marco behind them. The museum attributes it to the workshop of Gentile Bellini. Michela Andreatta dates the work to the sixteenth century, and observes that radiography shows a previous inscrip- tion which is no longer legible; see “L’iconografia di Caterina Cornaro attraverso I secoli” (tesi di laurea, Università di Ca’Foscari, 2004, 47). Its iconography was not influential on the works discussed here, suggesting that if it is indeed a cinquecento work, it was perhaps not known outside of Asolo. 42. Bembo, History, 45. On her nephews’ quest for Corner’s dowry, see Arbel, “Royal Family,” 142–44. 43. “ . . . il valore di diversi gloriosi cittadini di questa chiarissima patria: tra I quali sono stati in ogni tempo molti di casa Cornara …” and “… particolarmente la dona- tione del regno di Cipro gratiosamente ceduto alla Republic all’auola di VS Illustriss. Caterina Cornaro . . . ” Bardi, Dichiaratione, fol. 2v. Body of Empire 97

44. On the breakdown of the Venetian ethos of mediocritas, beginning in the late fifteenth century as some noble families (including the Corner) increasingly engaged in conspicuous consumption, especially in Grand Canal palaces, see Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 26–37. As Brown notes, only two patrician palaces merit mention in Marin Sanudo’s narrative list of notable things, written in the late fifteenth century: one was the palace recently purchased and refurnished by Giorgio Corner, “most worshipful knight and brother of the Queen of Cyprus” (26). Even in Sanudo, as well as Francesco Sansovino, the queen acted as a modifier for her brother and a marker for family honor. For Corner patronage inspired in part by the queen, see also, Romanelli, Ca’ Corner, 71–119. 45. “L’istessa cessione fatta alla Republica rassignando il Regno in mano di Agostino Barbarigo, Doge. Attione rappresentata mirabilmente da Paolo Veronese” (Sansovino, Venetia, 375). Martinioni claimed that the Corner collection also housed images of Caterina by Tintoretto and . See also Ridolfi, Le meraviglie d’arte, vol. 1 (: G. Grote, 1914), 356. The Veronese image (attributed now to his work- shop) is illustrated in Romanelli, Ca’ Corner, 90–91. In the late nineteenth century, Attilo Centelli recorded the work’s provenance, tracing it to the collection of Armand à Passy in Paris, in Caterina Cornaro e il suo regno (Venice: 1893), 138–39. The queen’s face, dress, crown, expression, and gesture in the image discussed here are identical to several por- traits identified as copies of a lost work executed of the queen dressed in mourning, suggesting either that the Caliari workshop drew on the portrait attributed to Titian, or that the portrait copies, likely of the late sixteenth century or later, used the Caliari abdi- cation image as prototype. On the lost Titian, see Harold Wethey, The Paintings of Titian (London: Phaidon, 1969), 196; and Hill, History of Cyprus, 3: 759–60. Descendants of Doge Andrea Barbarigo likewise capitalized on the imagery of the queen’s abdication: Vincenzo Guarana’s interpretation of the queen’s surrender is still housed in the Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza in Venice; see “Guarana, Vincenzo,” in Art Resource, http://www.artres.com/c/htm/CSearchT.aspx?V=CSearchT&SID=JMGEJ NDV1N69R&E=S_22SIJMB4QUAZ9 (accessed April 29, 2009). 46. Samuele Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia, vol. 4 (Venice: Fuga edi- tore, 1913), 436. Interestingly, the coats of arms on the queen’s tomb are surmounted by a cardinal’s hat rather than crowns. In that image, the only crown is that which the queen surrenders to the doge. Conversely, a podium to the queen’s right in the ceiling image is decorated with a crown, perhaps a subtle reference to the Corner arms. 47. L. Salerni, Repertorio dell’opere d’arte… (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1994), 223; Andrea da Mosto, I dogi di Venezia (Florence: Giunti editore, 1977), 362. The date 1490 beneath the narrative panel must be an erroneous reference to Corner’s abdication in 1489. 48. See n. 6. 49. Scholarship on the Mocenigo tomb is somewhat sparse, although general studies of ducal tombs have addressed its authorship and date, and its employment of all’antica style. Debra Pincus noted that it was the first Venetian monument to include 98 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt biographical detail in the reliefs; see Pincus, To m b s , 223 n. 32. See also Brown, Venice and Antiquity, 112–13. 50. “Dappoi nella piazza di San Nicolo nel mezzo della città dinanzi al palazzo regio, alla presenza della stessa Regina e di tutti li principali Cipriotti, fece la rassegna e la mostra di tutte le sue genti. La Regina e I baroni vedutone il grande apparato, si stupirono, meravigliandosi dell gran sollecitudine e diligenza del nostro Generale, il quale nel mezzo dell’inverno, col mare turbato… avesse messo insieme sì bell’esercito”; see Coriolano Cippico, Delle guerre de’ Veneziani nell’asia dal 1470 al 1474 (Venice: Carlo Palese, 1796), 67. 51. Sansovino, Venetia, 400. On the tensions inherent in the understanding of the doge as a civic father, see Dennis Romano, The Likeness of Venice: A Biography of (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 316. 52. Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 119–34; and Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant, 48–50. William Wordsworth highlighted the complexity of Venetian gender politics when, in “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic,” he described the spouse of the usually feminine sea as the “maiden City” of Venice (as quoted in Rosand, Myths of Venice, 37). 53. Evidence points to the frequent wearing of notable jewels by Corner. Upon her return to Venice in 1489, she wore jewels “a la Cypriota,” according to Sanudo: Vite dei dogi (1474–94), ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò, vol. 2 (Padua: Antenore, 1989), 617. Likewise, Gentile Bellini’s famous portrait of her (c. 1500), and her identical depiction in his Miracle at San Lorenzo, both highlight her difference and status through her elaborate gown, jewels, and crown. In his third-century text, The Art of Rhetoric, Longinus argued that allegory should apply the means of persuasion, “pleasant dressings and allurements, just as by rich and fine cookery” (as quoted in Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens, xx. Warner emphasized the gendered nature of this characterization: not only are women regarded as the persuasive gender, but, Warner observes, “it is because women continue to occupy the space of the Other that they lend themselves to allegorical use so well” (292). 54. L’Aliense, the artist currently credited with the work, was Veronese’s pupil. The female figures may intentionally look alike. If, on the other hand, Corner was depict- ed by Leonardo Corona, then the image was “rather clumsily modeled on the work of the more famous artist, according to Filippo Pedrocco”; see Pedrocco, “Corona, Leonardo,” in Grove Art Online, http://www.groveart.com.proxy.lib.siu.edu/shared/views/article. html?from=search&session_search_id=1086717422&hitnum=2§ion=art.019562 (accessed September 7, 2006); and Filomeno Gallo, Rime, ed. Maria Antonietta Grignani (Florence: Olschki, 1973), 350–76. 55. In fourteenth-century images of the dogaressa, she wore only a veil; see Hurlburt, Dogaressa, 128–34. In the fifteenth century, Dogaressa Giovanna Dandolo Malipiero appeared on a portrait medal, again without the corno (Hurlburt, Dogaressa, 106). Only in the 1580s and 1590s did the Libro Cerimoniale and artists such as Palma il Giovane depict the dogaressa in a diminutive version of her husband’s hat. 56. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting Body of Empire 99 the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 129. On the change in the meaning of Venetia, see Jutta Sperling, Convents, 96–106. 57. “Veniva la Regina … come cosa sopranaturale e costumavano di dire che Venere era di nuovo ritornata a Cipro”; see Gian Francesco Loredan, Historie de re Lusignani (Bologna, 1647), as quoted in Elena Povoledo, “Accademie,” 135. On Venice as Venus, see Rosand, Myth, 117–19. 58. “ma Voi, illustrissima Reina che così acerba giovanetta in mezo al Regno di Venere, circondata da tante delite regali, fragile per il sesso femminile … che assai più lode apporta alla continenza, che se verginella fosti stata … fuggisti il nodo maritale per far voto della vostra pudicita a Iddio.” In this context, the author compares Corner to Ulysses’ spouse Penelope; see Bovolini, in Comacchio, Splendore, 148. On the third day of Gli Asolani, Pietro Bembo recounts the story of a virgin queen who renounced marriage and surrounded herself with those who loved “to talk to her amid music, songs and rounds of endless pleasure.” This is Bembo’s departure point for a discussion of Neoplatonic love, and perhaps likewise recalls Corner’s recaptured chastity; see Bembo, Gli Asolani, 184– 85. Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo used these virginal references to suggest a link between the queen and the image of the Virgin in ’s Asolo altarpiece: “Lorenzo Lotto,” 99–102, 110. n.34. 59. Franco plays repeatedly with the notion of Venice as virgin: in her letters as quoted above (Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret Rosenthal [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 29) and in her poetry, where Venice is the “high ruler of the sea, lofty virgin, inviolate and pure …” (127). 60. As Hanna Pitkin has written, republics have “generative authority: the patriarchal power to create manhood” (Pitkin, Fortune, 49). Republics recreate themselves through elections; monarchies on the other hand require a female to procreate. Not only does the abdication of Corner mark the end of centuries of monarchical rule in Cyprus, then, but it also suggests the superiority of Venice’s republic.