3 - Mary McCarthy, "Venice Observed" (1956)

Mary McCarthy, “Venice Observed”, The New Yorker, 1956

[…]

No stones are so trite as those of Venice, that is, precisely, so well worn. It has been part museum, part amusement park, living off the entrance fees of tourists, ever since the early eighteenth century, when its former sources of revenue ran dry. The carnival that lasted half a year was not just a spontaneous expression of Venetian license; it was a calculated tourist attraction. Francesco Guardi’s early ‘views’ were the postcards of that period. In the Venetian preserve, a thick bitter-sweet marmalade, tourism itself became a spicy ingredient, suited to the foreign taste; legends of dead tourists now are boiled up daily by gondoliers and guides. Byron’s desk, Gautier’s palace, Ruskin’s boarding house, the room where Browning died, Barbara Hutton’s plate-glass window – these memorabilia replace the Bucintoro or Paolo Sarpi’s statue as objects of interest. The Venetian crafts have become sideshows - glass-blowing, bead-stringing, lace-making; you watch the product made, like pink spun sugar at a circus, and bring a sample home, as souvenir. Venetian manufacturers today lay no claim to beauty or elegance, or to being ‘Venetian.’

And there is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities – Rome or Florence or Naples. The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian’s, Quadri’s, Torcello, Harry’s Bar, Murano, Burano, the pigeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto. Venice is a folding picture-post-card of itself. And though it is true (as is sometimes said, sententiously) that nearly two hundred thousand people live their ordinary working lives in Venice, they too exist in it as tourists or guides. Nearly every Venetian is an art-appreciator, a connoisseur of Venice, ready to talk of Tintoretto or to show you, at his own suggestion, the spiral staircase (said to challenge the void), to demonstrate the Venetian dialect or identify the sound of the Marangona, the bell of the Campanile, when it rings out at midnight.

A count shows the Tiepolo on the ceiling of his wife’s bedroom; a dentist shows his sitting-room, which was formerly a ridotto. Everything has been catalogued, with a pride that is more in the knowledge than in the thing itself. ‘A fake,’ genially says a gentleman, pointing to his Tintoretto. ‘Réjane’s,’ says a house-owner, pointing to the broken-down bed in the apartment she wants to let. The vanity of displaying knowledge can outweigh commercial motives or the vanity of ownership. ‘Eighteenth century?’ you say hopefully to an antique-dealer, as you look at a set of china. ‘No, nineteenth,’ he answers with firmness, losing the sale. In my apartment, I wish everything to be Venetian, but ‘No,’ says the landlady, as I ask about a cabinet: ‘Florentine.’ We stare at a big enthroned Madonna in the bedroom – very bad. She would like me to think it a Bellini and she measures the possibility against the art knowledge she estimates me to possess. ‘School of Giovanni Bellini,’ she announces, nonchalantly, extricating herself from the dilemma.

A Venetian nobleman has made a study of plants peculiar to Venice and shows sides on a projector. He has a library of thirty thousand volumes, mainly devoted to Venetian history. In the public libraries, in the wintertime the same set of loungers pores over Venetian archives or illustrated books on Venetian art; they move from the Correr library, when it closes, to the heatless Marciana, where they sit huddled in their overcoats, and finally to the Querini-Stampaglia (sic), which stays open until late at night.

The Venetians catalogue everything, including themselves. ‘These grapes are brown,’ I complain to the young vegetable-dealer in Santa Maria Formosa. ‘What is wrong with that? I am brown’ he replies. ‘I am the housemaid of the painter Vedova,’ says a maid, answering the telephone. ‘I am a Jew,’ begins a cross-eyed stranger who is next in line in a bakeshop. ‘Would you care to see the synagogue?’

[…]

The Venetians were tolerant, but the Ghetto was a Venetian invention, a typical piece of Venetian machinery, designed to ‘contain’ the Jews while profiting from them, just as the doge was ‘contained.’ The word comes from the Venetian word, foundry, and the New Ghetto, into which the Jews were directed, the day after Pentecost, 1516, was the New Foundry, where cannons had formerly been cast. The idea was devised to meet the problem of the Jewish refugees who were fleeing into the city from the mainland towns during the wars of the League of Cambrai. Venetian geography made segregation easy. The area of the New Foundry was an island, on which the Jews were shut up every day at nightfall. The three gates were closed and locked; Christian guards, paid by the Jews, were posted, at first in boats on the canal. The house windows facing outwards were blocked up, by decree, so that the Ghetto turned a blind face to the city. In the morning, when the Marangona rang, the gates were unlocked. The New Ghetto was made for German and Italian Jews; later, the Old Foundry or Old Ghetto was added, for the Levantines. When crowding became a problem, tall houses resembling skyscrapers were built, which still can be seen in the main square of the Ghetto Nuovo – a strange, picturesque sight, as if a modern slum were expressed in an ancient idiom, like a prophecy.

The Venetians, needless to say, are alert to the picturesque aspect. The Ghetto became a tourist haunt almost as soon as it was devised. Thomas Coryat, an Englishman who walked from Somerset to Venice, described his peregrinations through the Ghetto in 1608. The Jews of the time were prosperous and handsome, the women, he said, ‘as beautiful as I ever saw… so gorgeous in their apparel, jewels, chains of gold, and rings adorned with precious stones, that some of our English countesses do scarce exceed them, having marvelous long trains like Princesses that are borne up by waiting women serving for the same purpose.’ He got into a theological dispute with a rabbi and was worsted by him. In 1629, the Duke of Orleans, brother of the King of France, visited the Ghetto in state, with his train, and listened to a sermon in the Spanish synagogue. In 1635, this synagogue was restored and enlarged in Longhena.

I went there on Yom Kippur and stood in the women’s gallery; below, under the dark, massive, carved ceiling, a few men and boys in American-style hats were intoning the service. The Ghetto today is one of the poorest sections of Venice, in the northern quarter, where a melancholy light embraces San Giobbe, image of patience, on the west, and the deserted Abbey of the Misericordia, image of mercy, on the east. It no longer draws many tourists or Venetians either; this is the only area where I have seen children beg. But in the eighteenth century, priests and patricians would come to hear a famous rabbi preach; Benedetto Marcello, the Venetian composer, visited it for inspirations for his Psalms. It was one of the great centers of rabbinical culture in Europe, while outside the Ghetto gates, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian Venice itself was the seat of Hebrew book-printing. The Venetian Jews, in their red hats, were called on to supply learning, lore, and luxurious appointments for the foreign world. Henry VIII enlisted the opinion of a Venetian rabbi in his divorce suit against Katharine of Aragon. Another Jewish prodigy, the gambling rabbi, Leone da Modena, was recruited by Henry Wotton to write an account of Jewish rites and ceremonies for the pedant-king, James I. The ambassador hired most of his furniture for his palace on the Grand Canal from a Jew named Luzzati, who also supplied him with pictures, halberd, bucklers and arms – the decorative accessories of that period. It was customary for visiting foreigners, renting palazzi, to resort to Jewish second-hand dealers for articles de luxe sold or pawned by the nobility: hangings and plate, Veroneses, and Titians, even gondola-trappings.

But for all of this the Venetians exacted a veritable pound of flesh. They bled the Jewish community in every conceivable ways. Since the law forbade Jews to own land, the Republic force them to rent the Ghetto in its entirety on a long lease; the day the Jews moved in, rentals were raised one-third. In the course of years, many Jews left Venice for Holland, because of Venetian rapacity; others died of the plague. But the community continued to pay rent on houses that stood unoccupied – that was the contract. They were gouged for taxes, for tribute, for the army, for the navy, for the upkeep of the canals; they were forced to keep open their loan banks and to pay the government for the privilege, long after these had ceased to be profitable. They were not permitted to go out of business, just as the doge was not permitted to refuse his office or to resign it. This relentless policy continued to the point where in 1735, the Inquisitori sopra gli Ebrei had to confess to the Senate that the Hews under their supervision were insolvent, and the community was declared bankrupt, by official state decree. There was no more to be got from them, the Venetians, as realists, conceded, crossing the account of their books with one of those resigned shrugs commonly thought of as Jewish.

When Napoleon opened the gates of the Ghetto in 1797, it was little but a collection of alms-houses, supported by the handful of prosperous Jews left. A Tree of Liberty was erected in the campo, and the priests from the neighboring churches came in to dance the carmagnole and fraternize with the starveling survivors of Venetian toleration. The Jews were free to move now, but according to Venetian legend they did not have the strength to do so. Hence the are there still.

The Venetians invented the income tax, statistical science, the floating of government stock, state censorship of books, anonymous denunciations (the Bocca del Leone), the gambling casino, and the Ghetto. The idea of the Suez Canal was broached by Venice to the Sultan in 1504. They were quick to hear of new inventions and discoveries and to grasp their practical application. When the news came to Venice, in 1498, of Vasco da Gama’s voyage, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the whole city instantly understood that it was bad news for their commerce: ‘the worst piece of information that we could ever have had.’ The telescope, which was invented in Holland in 1608, was known about in Venice before the end of the year. In 1610, it was being tried out from the Campanile, and a Venetian swindler was able to palm off a fraudulent one (made of plain glass) on the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

A Venetian doctor, Salamon, in 1649, anticipated biological warfare by concocting a plague-quintessence for use in the Turkish war. It was to be sown in the enemy’s camps through the medium of cloth goods of the type the Turks liked to buy – Albanian fez, for instance. ‘The proposition is a virtuous one,’ wrote the Venetian provveditore in Zara to the Inquisitors of State. ‘It is however… unusual and perhaps not admitted by public morality. But… in the case of the Turks, enemies by faith, treacherous by nature, who have always betrayed your excellencies, in my humble opinion the ordinary considerations have no weight.’ The Ten were interested in the proposition and, to make sure of a monopoly on the doctor and his jar of plague-quintessence, they put both of them in jail. In the event, as it seems, the invention may not have been used, possibly because the germs had gone stale – a criticism leveled at the contents of the poison-cupboard in the Doge’s Palace when it was checked in the eighteenth century. The Ten were always ready to listen to any ingenious person with a sure-fire scheme, to a murderer who offered to kill the king of Spain for 150 ducates, exclusive of traveling expenses, to a foreigner who guaranteed that he could forge in all languages…

The altane or roof terraces, now chiefly used for hanging out laundry, were a Venetian invention in the field of beauty. The Venetian ladies used to steep their hair in a chemical solution, and sit out on their altane, constructed for the purpose, in open-crowned hats, with the hair pulled through and spread out on the brim to bleach in the sun. Hence the golden tresses of Venetian painting. A little of that bleach seems to linger in the Venetian water-supply, for though the Venetians today are not, on the whole, blond, they are not brunette either, but dark with blonde highlights. They have kept the fair skin too that the wide-brimmed hat shielded.

The Venetians first developed the glass mirror commercially in the. Muran glass works. They held a monopoly of the art for over a century during the Renaissance. Any mirror-maker who took his art into a foreign state could have his nearest relations imprisoned, and Venetian agents were commissioned to kill him on sight. As late as the seventeenth century, Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister, used poison and women to keep certain Venetian mirror-makers in France, and on his death a Venetian mirror, measuring 42 by 26 inches, was found among his effects and inventoried as nearly three times the price of a Raphael.

The zoccoli, a bizarre form of footwear, like a mule on a pedestal, were developed in Venice. Originally devised to keep the feet out of the mud, they became one of the wonders of Venice because of the lengths to which they were carried by the love of fashion; a pair preserved in the Correr Museum is twenty inches high. The women wearing them seemed to be walking about on jeweled and brocade stilts. It is thought that they may have contributed to domestic virtue during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, since a lady could not go out without two servants to hold her up. Ordinary shoes would doubtless be more convenient, acknowledged the doge in a conversation with the French ambassador. ‘Yes, far, far too convenient,’ one of his councilors interposed. Thus even fashion in Venice was converted to practical use. Another suspicion attaching the zoccoli was that the Venetian women wore them to conceal their shortness of stature. ‘The Piazza San Marco,’ wrote a mainland Italian, ‘seems to be full of dwarfs transformed into giantesses.’