New Saints in Late-Mediaeval Venice, 1200–1500

A Typological Study

Karen E. McCluskey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351103558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

This book focuses on the comparatively unknown cults of new saints in late-mediaeval Venice. These new saints were near-contemporary citizens who were venerated by their compatriots without official sanction from the papacy. In doing so, the book uncovers a sub-culture of religious expression that has been overlooked in previous scholarship.

The study highlights a myriad of hagiographical materials, both visual and textual, created to honour these new saints by members of four different Venetian communities: The Republican government; the monastic orders, mostly Benedictine; the mendicant orders; and local parishes. By scrutinising the hagiographic portraits described in painted vita panels, written vitae, passiones, votive images, sermons and sepulchre monuments, as well as archival and historical resources, the book identifies a specifically Venetian typology of sanctity tied to the idiosyncrasies of the city's site and history.

By focusing explicitly on local typological traits, the book produces an intimate and complex portrait of Venetian society and offers a framework for exploring the lived religious experience of late-mediaeval societies beyond the lagoon. As a result, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Venice, lived religion, hagiography, mediaeval history and visual culture.

1 Global aspirations

Venice as locus sanctus

DOI: 10.4324/9781351103572-1

The myths of Venice

No study of Venetian religion can ignore the Myth of Venice: the ­commonly held beliefs that perceived Venice as, amongst other things, divinely ordained and both blessed and protected by the heavenly guardianship of Mark the Evangelist and other saints. However, to insist that the Myth of Venice had an impact on the way Venetians expressed their religious beliefs and experienced devotion is a potentially contentious argument. As William Wurthmann writes, ‘many modern historians openly distrust the myth of Venice as too facile an interpretation of historical reality’.¹ Nevertheless, Wurthmann and many other respected historians have convincingly shown how this myth, or more properly this body of myths, has influenced generations of Venetians in their policymaking, international relations, religious affairs and much more.² Gabriele Fiamma’s assertion in his Vite dei santi (1583) evidences the conventional Venetian attitude to the myth:

1 William B. Wurthmann, ‘The Council of Ten and the Scuole Grandi in Early Renaissance Venice’, Studi veneziani 18 (1989), 16. 2 There is general consensus amongst a number of scholars from Fasoli to Fortini Brown which agrees that although the Myth of Venice should not be viewed as a representation of Venetian realities, it has nonetheless played an important role in shaping Venetian society, politics and culture. The literature on the myth of Venice is vast. Only a handful of relevant works can be cited here but each includes more extensive bibliographic information. Gina Fasoli, ‘Nascita di un mito’, Studi storici in onore di Gioacchino Volpe (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), 445–479; Franco Gaeta, ‘Alcune considerazioni sul mito di Venezia’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance, 23 (1961): 58–75. S. Sinding-Larsen, Christ in the Council Hall: Studies in the Religious Iconography of the Venetian Republic (Rome: L’erma di Bretschneider, 1974); E. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Franco Gaeta, ‘L’idea di Venezia’, in Storia della cultura veneta, ed. G. Arnaldi, vol. 3, no. 3 (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982), 565–641; Giorgio Cracco, Un altro mondo. Venezia nel medioevo: dal secolo XI al secolo XIV (Turin: Grugliasco, 1986); James Grubb, ‘When Myths Lose Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography’, Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 43–94; David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant. The Horizons of a Myth, trans. L. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and eadem, ‘Sopra le acque salse’: Éspaces, pouvoir, et société à Venise à fin du Moyen Age, 2 vols (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1992). Also useful are the many essays in J. Martin and D. Romano, eds. Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilisation of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), esp. the introductory essay, 1–35, which outlines important elements in the historiography of the myth. Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

I was born a Venetian and live in this happy homeland, protected by the prayers and guardianship of St. Mark, from whom that most serene Republic acknowledges its greatness, its victories and all its good fortune.³

3 [Son nato Veneziano e vivo in questa felice patria, difesa dall’orationi e dal presidio di S Marco, da cui reconosce quella Serenissima Repubblica le grandezze, le vittorie e tutte le felici avventure sue.] Fiamma, Vite dei santi. Muir, Civic Ritual, 91, as quoted in Silvio Tramontin, ‘San Marco’, in Culto dei santi a Venezia, 64.

In my view, the impact of the myths on religious experience was palpable and had a profound influence not only on attitudes to and visual expressions of official civic devotion, but also on the piety practised in the city’s micro-communities—its convents, parishes, squares, homes.⁴

4 For a historical overview of early Venetian history and development, see Sauro Gelichi and Stefano Gasparri, eds. Venice and its Neighbors from the 8th to 11th century: Through Renovation and Continuity (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

In this chapter, I will establish the extent to which these beliefs were adopted and absorbed into Venetian civic life, practices and identity by demonstrating the links between civic piety and the Venetian foundation legends embedded within the larger state mythology. Firstly, I will identify key elements in these myths which impacted upon the way Venetians saw themselves as divinely sanctioned and prototypically Christian and their city as a locus sanctus above all others.⁵ Secondly, I will examine the manifestations of the myths that are scattered throughout the city, in its vast number of churches and relics—both present forceful visual testimony to the locus sanctus myth. Finally, I will examine the most powerful visual expression of the myths of Venice in the cult of the state patron, Mark the Evangelist, and particularly its representation in the Basilica of San Marco. This tour de force, I argue, provides unquestionable testimony for the locus sanctus myth and, importantly for this book, both a hagiographic and iconographic foundation for the cults of new saints in Venice between 1200 and 1500. The myths of Venice’s foundation bore heavily upon the ways in which Venetians understood, portrayed and practised their faith more widely. Indeed, as the broader thesis of the book asserts, such particularism encouraged a ‘venetianisation’ of standard typologies of sanctity, stimulating in Venice a unique hagiographic tradition.

5 See Alan Thacker, ‘Loca Sanctorum: The Significance of Place in the Study of the Saints’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, eds. A. Thacker and R. Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–43.

We can start to appreciate the role of myth in the construction of the Venetian self-image by exploring the principles of myth-making from the philosophical point of view espoused by Roland Barthes in his seminal work ‘Myth Today’. According to Barthes’s study, the best strategy in successful myth-making is to ‘naturalise’ myths, in order to render them believable; that is, to make myths appear real by grounding them in natural, incontestable fact.⁶ In Venice, the ‘natural, incontestable facts’ of its history were often convincingly relayed through monumental visual statements. As noted by Martino da Canale in his Cronaca dei veneziani (1267), images could be trusted as truth, and by implication, they could convey messages with authority. After describing the events of Mark’s translation to Venice in his Cronaca, Martino adds:

6 Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, in Mythologies (1957), trans. A. Lavers (London: Les Lettres Nouvelles, 1972), 109–159.

… and if anyone wants to know the truth, just as I have related it, let him come and see the beautiful church of Monsignor St. Mark in Venice, and let him look at everything in front of the beautiful church, where this whole story is written just as I have told it.⁷

7 [… e se alcuno vorrà savere la verità, tutto in così come io la vi ho contata, venga vedere la bella chiesa di Monsignor San Marco in Vinegia, e guardi tutto davanti la bella chiesa, che evvi scritta tutta questa istoria così com’io ve l’ho racconta …] da Canale, ‘Chronique des veniciens’, 291. Also see Stefania Gerevini, ‘Inscribing History, (Over)Writing Politics: Word and Image in the Chapel of Sant’Isidoro at San Marco, Venice’, Sacred Scripture/Sacred Space: The Interlacing of Real and Conceptual Spaces in Medieval Art and Architecture, eds. Tobias Frese et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 323–350.

Here, Martino is referring to the mosaic decoration of the then newly erected narthex of San Marco, which portrays Mark’s translatio, the official transfer of his relics to Venice. The passage clearly shows his regard for the mosaics as absolute proof of the presence of the saint’s body in the church.

The actual event commemorated in the mosaic stands as one of Venice’s grandest visual gestures. In the year 829, the alleged physical remains of Mark were ceremoniously placed in the ducal chapel in Rivoalto’s civic centre.⁸ This event had great symbolic significance, as the arrival of the apostolic relics coincidentally, and beneficially for Venice, came in the midst of a power struggle between two dominant claimants to the patriarchal see of the northern Adriatic: Aquileia and Grado (associated with Venice). Both seats laid claim to ecclesiastical authority through Mark.⁹ Ultimately, the relics’ arrival in Rivoalto offered ‘natural, incontestable’ proof of Venetian hegemony in the region by virtue of the implied approval of Mark himself, a point that was not lost on the early chroniclers.¹⁰ Despite the relics, Aquileia maintained its primary position until Grado rose to prominence in the eleventh century.¹¹ Nevertheless, even from this very early date, one can see Barthes’s ‘naturalisation’ at work in the lagoon.

8 The presence of Mark’s body in Venice was crucial to the city’s religio-political standing in relation to Rome, Aquileia, the Holy Roman Emperor and Byzantium, as already noted in 1267 by da Canale, ‘Chronique des veniciens’, 275–277; and Sanudo in ‘Vite dei dogi’, ed. G. Monticolo, RIS, vol. 22, part 4 (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1900), 89. The literature on the subject is vast, however some pertinent examples include: H. C. Peyer, Stadt und Stadtpatron im mittelalterlichen Italien (Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1955); Silvio Tramontin, Il culto dei santi a Venezia (1965); idem, ‘Realtà e leggenda nei racconti marciani veneti’, Studi veneziani 12 (1970), 35–58; Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 88–94; S. Bettini, Venezia: nascita di una città (Milan: Electa, 1988), 125–132; G. Cracco, ‘Santità straniera in terra veneta’, 447–465; T. Dale, Relics, Prayer and Politics in Medieval Venetia: Romanesque Painting in the Crypt of Aquileia Cathedral (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 9 As Thacker reveals, from about the sixth century the term ‘patriarch’ was used loosely in ecclesiastical power struggles, especially in Italy, to evoke higher episcopal authority. In fact, Aquileia was a metropolitan see, with only Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem claiming the title of patriarchate. In 1451, Venice was officially given the title of patriarcha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Santi novellini in the later Middle Ages
• 1 Global aspirations: Venice as locus sanctus
• 2 Cults in the state
• 3 Cults in the cloister
• 4 Cults in mendicant communities
• 5 Cults in the parish
• Conclusion: Sanctity alla veneziana
• Bibliography
• Index