Caterina Corner in Venetian History and Iconography Holly Hurlburt

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 Doge’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 Venice 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 Cyprus, 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 program, 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 Tintoretto’s massive Paradise on one wall and, on the ceiling, three depictions of allegorical Venice in triumph by Tintoretto, Veronese, and Palma il Giovane. 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 Brescia, 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 triumphant 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 republics where they could Body of Empire 63 Figure 1. Paolo Veronese, 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 figures. 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 functioned 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 Asolo was the setting for her kinsman Pietro Bembo’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 republican 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 Body of Empire Figure 2. L’ Aliense, Queen of Cyprus Caterina Corner Cedes the Crown of Cyprus to the Republic of Venice, Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Doge’s Palace, Venice, c. 1580-90. (Photograph: Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia). 65 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 depictions 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 Chioggia (1378–81) (fig. 4), and the similarly sized grisaille attributed to L’Aliense (Antonio Vassilachi) shows Corner rendering her crown and kingdom to Doge Agostino Barbarigo 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 Naples 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 War of Chioggia precipitated the greatest threat to the Venetian metropole when the Genovese captured the lagoon city in 1379. Panic ensued, and, according 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 Body of Empire Figure 3. Schematic drawing of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio ceiling. Reproduced from Juergen Schulz, Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance (public domain). 67 68 EMWJ 2009,vol. 4 Holly Hurlburt Holly Figure 4.

Load more