Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale
cloth or velvet. Formerly they wore very large hoods, but these have gone out of fashion. They wear trimmings of four sorts – marten, weasel, fox or even sable … Soled stockings and clogs are worn in all weathers, silk undershirts and hose of a black cloth; to conclude, they wear black a lot.9
The more important members of government were required, sometimes on pain of fines, to wear the special colours of their offices – scarlet, crimson or a deeper violet-crimson known as pavonazzo with stoles in the same or a contrasting colour.10 White or cloth of gold was worn only by the doge and Venetian knights. Close attention was paid to the colour and cut of official robes, which could indicate mood or subversive tendencies as well as status. The cut of sleeves inset into robes varied. The more modest ones were straight and narrow. Some were voluminous and gathered at the wrist like bags. The most important sleeves were bell shaped and open at the wrist to show off expensive fur linings, the widest and grandest of all being the dogale, or ducal sleeves, a sartorial privilege the doge shared with procurators, doctors of medicine, ambassadors and governors on the mainland.
The civil servants who administered the day-to-day business of government wore the same basic black toga as nobles without office – it was something like the equivalent of the bowler hat and umbrella that professional Englishmen used to wear. They were drawn from the cittadini originari, native-born citizens, who formed the next caste down from the nobles. Since only 5 per cent of the male population were cittadini and since they had no vote, they were hardly what we would call citizens; their status was more that of second-rank nobility, and they sometimes married patrician wives. The cittadini notaries who comprised the ducal chancery – which consisted of the grand chancellor, the four secretaries of the Council of Ten and eight secretaries of the Senate – served for life and were thus in a position to influence long-term policy-making. The grand chancellor, whose position commanded a salary of 300 ducats a year plus 50 as a housing allowance, was the most powerful man in Venice after the doge and the procurators. Known as the ‘people’s doge’, he preceded the doge in ceremonial processions, dressed in scarlet, and accompanied him on his daily rounds of government departments, attending the Collegio in the mornings, meetings of the Senate or Council of Ten after lunch, and the Great Council on Sunday afternoons.
The cittadini civil servants were on the whole better educated and more cultivated than their patrician employers. In the chancery school at San Marco they were taught the core subjects of sixteenth-century learning: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy based on the study of ancient Latin and Greek authors, as well as calligraphy to ensure that their handwriting reflected well on the state, and modern languages to enable them to act as interpreters and to translate letters from foreign governments that could not be entrusted to outsiders. There was a strong emphasis on rhetoric, which was taught by imitating Latin models, especially Cicero. Previous education was not a prerequisite, but some entered the chancery after attending the state-run University of Padua. Although their education was primarily intended to equip them with practical skills, some were connoisseurs of modern art who admired and befriended Titian, helped him in his negotiations with government and sat to him for their portraits.
The cittadino caste was not entirely impermeable. It was sometimes possible for wealthy immigrants to attain that rank, which gave them, as well as social standing, certain legal rights, business contacts and trading concessions. But it was a process that could take twenty years or more of residence, and normally required them to own a prominent palace in the city. These new cittadini further established their positions in Venice through generous patronage of the arts – Titian would count several of them among his patrons; and many served as officers in the Scuole Grandi, the charitable confraternities that were a distinctive feature of Renaissance Venice and a powerful force for social stability. Membership of the Scuole, which was mostly restricted to cittadini and richer members of the lowest class, the popolani, was a mix of businessmen, artists, artisans, industrialists, merchants and state functionaries. In Titian’s day patricians sometimes acted as patrons of the Scuole, but were explicitly prohibited from membership later in the century.
The Scuole Grandi were unique to Venice and distinct from the Scuole Piccole, smaller brotherhoods devoted to particular religious rites or trades, or representing foreign communities, which numbered over 200 by mid-century. In Titian’s youth there were five Scuole Grandi, each with a membership of five or six hundred: Santa Maria della Carità (the oldest of the foundations, now the Accademia Gallery), San Giovanni Evangelista, Santa Maria della Misericordia, San Rocco and San Marco. A sixth, San Teodoro, was founded in 1552. About 10 per cent of the male population belonged to one or another of the Scuole, which were administered by a rotating governing board, or banca, of cittadini, elected by the membership and chaired by a grand guardiano, who had to be over fifty and served for one year. The Scuole Piccole were run along similar lines except that the chief executive was usually called a gastaldo. All the Scuole were highly competitive and vied with one another to commission, often with the aid of government grants, the most magnificent buildings, decorations and paintings. Titian, who joined the Scuola di San Rocco in 1528 and was later a board member, would paint for two Scuole Piccole, and for two Scuole Grandi, including his Presentation of the Virgin for the boardroom of the Scuola della Carità.
Francesco Sansovino, author of the first guidebook to Venice,11 described the Scuole as representing ‘a certain type of civil government in which, as if in a republic of their own, the citizens enjoy rank and honour according to their merits and qualities’. As well as looking after their poorer members, they ran almshouses and hospitals, administered private estates and trusts, and in wartime supplied men for the army and galleys. As representatives of the state, their chief officers wore crimson or pavonazzo in processions on feast days or in celebration of victories. The members of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista can be seen gliding through the city on Corpus Christi Day in the narrative cycle painted by Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Mansueti, Vittore Carpaccio and other Venetian artists between 1494 and 1500.
Venetians who were neither patricians nor cittadini were popolani, which meant everyone from immigrant labourers living in shantytowns to merchants, industrialists, artisans and great artists (although the Bellini brothers and Carpaccio were cittadini originari). Some members of this diverse lowest class made fortunes – in 1506 a rich merchant popolano died without heirs leaving 60,000 ducats to the procurators to distribute to charity. But unlike the working classes of other Italian cities, where the members of guilds had at least in theory a voice in government, the popolani of Venice didn’t even have a distant memory of democratic or quasi-democratic government. Some foreign observers wondered at their failure to rise up and demand a say in the way they were governed. According to Luigi da Porto, a nobleman from the neighbouring city of Vicenza, their passive acceptance was due to the high proportion of foreigners in the city:
apart from a few [Venetians] with long-established citizenship … all the rest are such new people that there are very few of them whose fathers were born in Venice; and they are Slavs, Greeks, Albanians, come in other times to be sailors, or to earn money from the various trades pursued here … These people are so obsequious towards the nobles that they almost worship them. There are also many people who have come from diverse places for dealing and warehousing, as from Germany and all of Italy, and have thereafter stayed on to make money and been residents a long time; but the majority also have families in their own countries, and many after a little while leave for home, and in their place send others, who care for nothing except making money; and so from them can come no disturbance whatever.12
But there are other explanations for the absence of social unrest. Cramped living conditions enforced at least a degree of interaction between the classes and foreign residents. Throughout the city the little houses of the poor were clustered around the great palaces. Rich and poor, patricians and popolani attended the same parish church, sometimes sharing the cisterns that were the only supply of fresh water. Everyone marked the passage of time according to the same rhythms in an age when time was a flexible dimension and the hours sounded by church bells varied in length according to the season. The twenty-four-hour clock began