Renaissance Venice Research Paper

According to Peter Burke, “The most favourable environment for artists to grow up in

seems to have been a city which was oriented towards craft-industrial production, such as

Florence, rather that towards trade or services, such as Naples or Rome. It was only when

Venice turned from trade to industry at the end of the fifteenth century, that Venetian art

caught up with that of Florence.” Artisans in Venice like the Bellini Brothers and others such

as Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese have arguably surpassed artists in other regions of Italy in

their specialties.

Peter Humfrey expresses, “In his later years Giovanni Bellini presided over one

of the largest painters’ workshops anywhere; in addition to the usual apprentices and
studio

hands, he employed as assistants at least half a dozen lesser masters, generically known as the

‘Belliniani’.” Unlike other regions known for art production Frederick Ilchman notes in Venice,

“Rather than artistic taste being dictated by a single ruling family or court, art patronage in

Venice was broadly based.
Commission streamed from a host of private ecclesiastic, and civic

sources, not to mention many foreign clients, and this thriving market supported numerous

painters of varying reputation and specialization.”

In Venice, according to Clarie Judde De Lariviére, it was the patriciate, not the king or

the emperor, who embodied sovereignty. The status of Venetian artists is another interesting

peace of this puzzle. Edward Muir, in his article, “Images of Power: Art and Pageantry in

Renaissance Venice” expounds upon the importance and the social standing of artists in

Renaissance Venice. Muir conveys, “The Venetian creation of a civic cult around the

achievements of a distinguished past is evident in the ornamentation of the Ducal Palace.

Although many of the palace’s early art treasures were lost in a series of disastrous fires,

huge canvases on historical and allegorical subjects, much like the late sixteenth- century

ones that today dominate the vast halls of the palace, must have served to extort earlier

generations of aristocratic magistrates to emulate the virtues of their
forefathers.”

The public and private spheres of daily life in Venice influenced every aspect of daily life

in the republic. Richard Mackenney, in his article “Public and Private in Renaissance Venice”

articulates, “In the event, once the documents are related to a physical context, their

relationship within the urban space becomes so close and so clear that they prompt an

examination of the relationship between public and private in Venetian art.”

Venice, contrary to the Renaissance and period of renewal that followed, was very

legalistic in its government. However, in its prime, Venice prided itself on its ability to balance

these various aspects. Edward Muir furthers this notion by stating, “To legitimize their new

empire, the Venetians adopted two complementary policies, both of which found expression in

art. One policy was the arrangement of symbols of sovereignty around San Marco to portray

the idea that the conquered territories were now under the rule of Saint Mark and that the

administration of divine justice had become the temporal duty of an imperial Venetian state.”

The Renaissance period was not only a pivotal one in the emergence of Venice as a truly

imperial city. Noting such changes, Richard J. Goy stated, “It was a period of fundamental

cultural change; but it was also the era in which to the role of the architect finally emerges as

something like that which we recognize today.” Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters

comment, “The Venetian palaces were built and furnished by rich aristocrats, the nobili and the

rich bourgeois, the cittadini.” David R. Coffin presents the specific case of the Venetian

gardens, “The gardens of Venice were hidden away, removed from the view of casual visitors,

so that a French tourist in 1480 could assert that the city, “Is more inhabited that one has ever

seen, for one does not see the gardens and empty squares and all the streets are very

narrow.” Such an anecdote also visits the theme mentioned previously of public and private

spheres.
“By appropriating the tangible symbols of imperial power and authority”, according to

David Buckton and John Osborne, authors of the article, “The Enamel of Doge Ordelaffo Falier

on the Pala D’Oro in Venice”, “Venice laid claim to that power, and there was no more

appropriate place to make such a claim than on the high alter of the state church, a church

which served in so many ways as a metaphor for the Venetian republic itself.” Specifically,

horses are a subject that can be seen constantly through Venetian sculpture and architecture.

Marilyn Perry reports, “While the horses were certainly admirable, in medieval eyes, for their

lifelike quality, far greater value lay in their provenance, monumentality and rarity as gilded

bronze, and care was taken to achieve an appropriate impression of dominance in their

display.”

Revisiting the theme of public and private, Richard Mackenney observes, “The

juxtaposition of the two locations as political, and therefore ‘public’ and commercial,
and

therefore ‘private’, neglects the physical links between them. These were provided not only

by the city’s main waterway, the Grand Canal, but also by the main pedestrian thoroughfare,

the Mercerie, which was paved in 1269 and which culminated at the Piazza in the Clock

Tower, built in 1500-6.” In an effort to balance secular and religious artistry, according to

Edward Muir, “Memorials to individual patricians were legally excluded from San Marco, and

tradition frowned on any exuberant artistic celebration of individual doges in the Ducal Palace.

No doges were buried in San Marco after 1354, and expressions of power or personal tastes of

a doge were usually confined to his family’s private palace or a tomb in a Dominican church,

Santi Giovanni e Paolo, distant from the government center at San Marco.”