A succession of spectacular public pageants glorifying the government of the Most Serene Republic became more numerous and more elaborate throughout Titian’s lifetime. Ritual celebrations defined everyone’s calendar year and served to focus the attention of all Venetians on their common heritage and destiny. Recent victories were proclaimed by trumpets and fifes in the Piazza while church bells rang all over the city. Every significant event, long past or recent – religious, historical, quasi-historical, legendary; peace treaties, conquests, the arrivals of foreign ambassadors and visiting royalty – was celebrated with a procession, pageant or regatta, all accompanied by the singers and instrumentalists for whom Venice was famous throughout Europe. Carnival, which lasted from 26 December until the first day of Lent, was a psychological safety valve, a time when men and women, patricians, cittadini and popolani, were allowed to mock one another, dress up as one another and get a taste of how the other half lived. Masked criminals could more easily escape detection during the season, but the revelry never led to mob violence against the state.
The Assumption of the Virgin (the subject of Titian’s immense and explosively innovative early painting for the high altar of the church of the Frari) was celebrated on the fortieth day after Easter Sunday with a ceremony that was the most symbolically complex fusion of religion and patriotically adjusted history in the Venetian calendar. On the day of the sensa, as it was known, the doge was rowed on the state barge, the elaborately carved and gilded Bucintoro, into the Adriatic, where he cast a gold ring into the waters. The marriage to the sea, the ‘carefully orchestrated apogee of the state liturgy’,13 commemorated, as well as the Assumption, the most important Venetian secular legend, according to which Doge Sebastiano Ziani in 1177 had acted as peacemaker between Pope Alexander III and the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The rewards were the Republic’s perpetual dominion over the sea and independence in perpetuity from both pope and emperor. Titian’s two large canvases for the doge’s palace of episodes from the Alexandrine story were among the tragic losses to fire in the 1577. The sensa was also the biggest tourist attraction of the year and the occasion of a major fair in the Piazza.
Of course Venice was far from the perfect state as idealized by its contemporary and later mythmakers.14 Two-thirds of the population, including increasing numbers of patricians, were at risk of poverty. In a corrupt and violent age, Venice was not much less corrupt and probably more violent than other Italian cities. Clientism, intrigue and fraud were by no means unknown in government. Although patricians were strictly forbidden to solicit for votes, they struck deals in an area of the Piazzetta known as the brolio – hence the word imbroglio for complicated political intriguing. The crime rate was high. Three patricians who served on a rotating basis as Officials of the Night (Sanudo was one of them for a six-month period) prowled the streets after dark with the authority to search any house, and take a cut in any fines they imposed. But they never succeeded in preventing armed criminals from the Romagna and Marches from sneaking into the city by night. Gangs of bored, arrogant members of the companies of the hose behaved as privileged young dandies do in class-conscious societies, accosting strangers with ironic courtesies that could turn nasty. In 1503 a man was condemned to death for selling cooked human flesh. One of Titian’s servants was murdered in 1528 when he was living in the parish of San Polo, and another later in his life after he had moved to north-east Venice.
Rape, especially of poor women, sometimes by their fathers or putative husbands, was a frequent occurrence that was not always punished. The humblest victims were often too frightened to appeal to the law, and when they did so their assailants were on the whole let off remarkably lightly. The courts, which were of course entirely male, presumably chose to believe that any women foolish or brave enough to venture out alone was asking for it. Perhaps, like St Augustine in his commentary on the story of the rape of Lucretia, they shared the belief that the violation of a woman’s body cannot take place without giving her some physical pleasure. (When Titian was an old man, in three legendary rapes he painted for the delectation of the King of Spain, the Rape of Europa, the Rape of Lucretia and Danaë, the voluptuous victims do not look as displeased by their situation as they should have done.)
The government was far more concerned with sodomy, even within marriage, where it was practised everywhere in Europe as a form of birth control. Doctors were required by law to investigate and report any evidence of heterosexual sodomy, for which the punishment was decapitation followed by burning of the remains. Homosexuality, which was seen as a challenge to the very order of Creation, was condemned in all Christian countries. But in Venice, where charges of sodomy were investigated by the Council of Ten, homosexuals were pursued and punished with even more rigour than elsewhere in Europe, possibly because homosexual networks, which tend to be secret cabals in homophobic societies, were felt to threaten the authority and stability of the Republican government. Some sodomites were left to die in cages hung from the bell tower in the Piazza while the populace was encouraged to throw rubbish at them from below. The obsession with homosexuality made it an easy charge to make against an enemy, and accusations, some probably trumped up, were frequent. Nevertheless, if we are to believe Priuli, who was one of the Venetian patricians most obsessed by sodomy, by 1509:
the vice had now become so much a habit and so familiar to everyone, and it was so openly discussed throughout the city, that there came a time when it was so commonplace that no one said anything about it any more, and it neither deserved nor received any punishment – except for some poor wretch who had no money, no favours, no friends and no relations: justice was done on people like that, and not on those who had power and money and reputation, and yet committed far worse crimes.15
It has been suggested that some of Titian’s portraits – the three men in the Concert, the Man with a Quilted Sleeve, the Man with a Glove, the Portrait of Tommaso Mosti, the Bravo16 and the later Portrait of a Young Englishman have been singled out – have homoerotic overtones.17 There is no way of proving or disproving the idea, but given Titian’s sensitivity to the personalities of his subjects it is not impossible.
Of all the publicly enacted non-liturgical ceremonies for which Venice was famous throughout Europe, executions were the most frequent and popular.18 Punishments for crimes, by mutilation, hanging and/or burning at the stake, which in other cities took place outside the walls, were carried out at the foot of the Rialto Bridge near the market stalls or on the Piazzetta between the two granite columns bearing statues of St Theodore and the lion of St Mark (Venetians to this day avoid walking between the columns). The punishment varied to suit the crime, but in a typical ritual described by Sanudo in 1513 a serial rapist, robber and murderer was transported ‘in the usual manner’ by raft down the Grand Canal to Santa Croce, where he was disembarked then dragged through the city by horse to San Marco, where he was decapitated and quartered, the quarters hung on the scaffold between the columns of the Piazzetta.
The bloodlust extended to what must have been one of the most grotesque rituals enacted in any Renaissance city. On the morning of Giovedì Grasso, the Thursday before Lent, one bull and twelve pigs were solemnly condemned to death by the doge and the highest government dignitaries, who watched as the animals were chased round the Piazza and then decapitated between the columns on the Piazzetta. The ceremony was in memory of an annual tribute supposedly exacted in the twelfth century from the then independent patriarch of Aquileia. But for more than a century after the patriarch’s temporal dominion was abolished in 1420 it continued by popular demand, and the sacrificial animals had to be bought with money from the public purse.
If the real Venice was never the tranquil utopia eulogized by its propagandists, its self-image as a virgin city was justified. Protected from foreign invasion by its shallow ring of water, it had no need of the defensive walls that encased other cities; and the government that sat in the smiling, unfortified pink and white doge’s palace was strong enough to resist insurrection from within as well as from without. By the early sixteenth century,