Nevertheless, in a port city frequented by tourists, foreign merchants and pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, who often had to wait for a month or more for the tide to carry their galleys on their ongoing journeys, prostitution flourished. From the middle of the fourteenth century the government had decreed that prostitutes were entirely necessary to the state and founded a public brothel near the Rialto. Prostitution soon employed a significant proportion of the population – if we include pimps, innkeepers and servants as well as the whores themselves.20 Most street prostitutes were poor young working-class women for whom the oldest profession was more profitable than domestic service or making sails for the arsenal for a salary of twelve ducats a year. But some went about so well dressed that they were confused with respectable ladies. Occasional legislation to force them to wear distinguishing marks, to ban soliciting on the streets or from gondolas and to forbid cross-dressing, a favourite technique of seduction, was half-heartedly enforced by a government that was concerned less with moral questions than with protecting its own members from syphilis, the ‘French disease’ that had invaded Italy with the armies of Charles VIII. ‘Our praiseworthy prostitutes’,21 as a frank official called them, were recognized as a necessary outlet for bachelors, good for the tourist trade and a douceur that could be offered to visiting dignitaries. Red-light districts were under the control of the state, and there was no move towards suppressing a – possibly tongue-in-cheek – tariff of whores printed in 1535 that gave the names, addresses, prices and specialities of 110 prostitutes. Prostitution, however, is always a dangerous job, and women who took money for sex had no recourse to the law if they were hurt or maimed. Angela Zaffeta, the most beautiful courtesan in Venice, was, according to a pornographic fantasy written in the early 1530s,22 taken to an island in the lagoon and raped by a succession of patricians in order of their social position.
The distinction between common whores and high-class courtesans – some of the latter educated and talented women kept by rich men – was first established at about the time Titian was making his name as a young painter. The most successful courtesans dressed and decorated their houses in the same fashion as wealthy married women. Some had been brought to Venice by their fading prostitute mothers from less sexually tolerant cities. Some were talented singers, actresses or poets. A few came from respectable Venetian families. Some courtesans became the long-standing mistresses of married noblemen. Marin Sanudo recorded a wedding between a widowed nobleman and a certain Cornelia Grifo, ‘a most beautiful and sumptuous widowed prostitute’:
She is rich and has been publicly kept by Ser Ziprian Malipiero, and for a while she belonged to Ser Piero da Molin dal Banco, and to others, who have given her a dowry of [blank] thousand ducats. The wedding was held at the monastery of San Zuan on Torcello and has cast great shame on the Venetian patriciate.23
Shortly after that the Council of Ten, one of the most powerful of the government committees, clamped down on such intrusions into the patrician bloodline with a law requiring the registration of all noble marriages within one month of the ceremony.
Prostitutes and courtesans nevertheless continued to serve the needs of the large percentage of Venetian men who remained unmarried. The population, which had tripled in the previous hundred years, was also proportionately younger, but competition for wives was intense, and men rarely married until they had inherited from their parents or established careers, by which time they were likely to be at least in their forties. Until the Counter-Reformation marriage was a secular arrangement, not celebrated in church but established by contract between families whose only considerations were financial and social. Those able to provide a daughter with a large dowry could be selective about the social status and wealth of the groom. But dowry inflation, which was rampant throughout the sixteenth century, meant that even well-off families could not necessarily afford to marry more than one daughter. It was a problem for all Venetian fathers who hoped to marry their daughters well, one that the Senate tried to control in the case of patrician families because it transferred a high proportion of their wealth, which might otherwise have been spent on investment and mercantile activity, to daughters, who were sometimes left so dowry-rich after the deaths of their husbands that they were in a position to lend back to their brothers and fathers.
Unmarried girls, who were on the shelf by twenty-five at most, were often placed in convents, some of which had reputations as high-class bordellos. Titian’s friend Pietro Aretino, who occasionally wrote pornography, described a convent24 where the abbess presided over group orgies, the walls were frescoed with erotic scenes, and the nuns were pleasured by lusty young friars and supplied with baskets of dildos made of the finest Murano glass. Although this was, of course, another fantasy (and was deliberately set not in Venice but in Rome), young nuns, often with the support of their families, did resist attempts to curtail their freedom of behaviour. One disapproving member of government identified more than fifteen convent-brothels, and recommended burning them to the ground along with the nuns, ‘for the sake of the Venetian State’.25
In the oriental tradition passed down from the city’s Byzantine past, respectable women were supposed to be kept at home or closely chaperoned on permissible outings. Some of the sequestered women must have led very boring lives. The two sulky ladies on a terrace in Carpaccio’s famous painting, which is now thought to portray a bride and her companion, might have looked less miserable had they been the courtesans they were once thought to be. In the upper panel their men are enjoying a day out duck hunting in the lagoon. Even the shopping for groceries was done by the men of the household, who could be seen strolling or riding on horseback through the markets, judging value for money with the trained eyes of professional merchants, while their housebound women supervised the cleaning or did it themselves; although there were fewer domestic servants than one might expect in a wealthy city, foreigners commented on the sparkling cleanliness of Venetian houses. When they did go out, perhaps to church or to attend a wedding or to shop for clothes and accessories in the boutiques on and off the Merceria, they teetered along on their zoccoli, the ridiculously high-platformed clogs that restricted their pace and emphasized their vulnerability, making them look like dwarfs on stilts and requiring the support of servant chaperones: the longer the train of servants the higher the status of the woman.26
Venetian women’s addiction to the latest bizarre fashions may in some cases have been a compensation for otherwise dull lives, but it would be anachronistic to infer that the displays of breasts and jewels were primarily intended to brand women as their husband’s sexual property. Their dowries, the larger part of which was returned to them as pensions on the death of their husbands, meant that wives and widows enjoyed a high degree of economic independence. It says something about their literacy and the respect accorded them by their husbands that women were increasingly designated as executors of their husbands’ estates; and since their husbands were usually at least twenty years older, there were a good many rich Venetian widows. Some women discovered along with their freedom a talent for investing in property and made money on their own account. Venetian women of all classes, although certainly not ‘liberated’ in our sense of that condition, were more active in business than women in other cities. Despite a dictate