With the roads blocked on the mainland it was difficult for small merchants to conduct business. After six months of war a Venetian merchant of modest means wrote in a letter to his brother, who was trying to do business in the Levant: ‘One can think and talk of nothing but of war, plague and scarcity, but most of all about the war. The war makes us forget the plague because the time has come about which our forefathers said that the living will envy the dead.’ At the end of December 1509 he described how the soaring cost of living had affected his household: ‘For more than half the week we must get along without meat, and I must confess that I mix water in the wine when the wine is still in the casket.’22 The doge, Leonardo Loredan, was criticized for his apparent inertia. Sanudo wrote that he was ‘more dead than alive’, and Priuli that he seemed mentally and physically ill.23
As the war progressed Priuli described the worsening economic climate: ‘There is almost no business any more; no trade can develop because the roads are interrupted and often entirely blockaded. Taxes are not paid. The poor cannot pay them and the rich are exhausted, and everyone complains endlessly. Alone the customs produce some income … but that is not enough for expenses required by the war … The Venetian senators are in great desperation and almost worried to death to find one ducat.’24 The tax screw had become unbearable. Indirect taxes had a negative effect on business and made it harder for the people to pay direct taxes. Government officials and members of the ruling nobility were required to pay in tax 50 per cent of the fees for special services with which they traditionally supplemented their modest salaries. Jews, always required to pay for the privilege of living in Venice, now paid even more dearly. With the supply of food from the terraferma unreliable, grain, cattle and wine had to be brought in by ship, and the consequent higher prices were all the harder to bear when most people’s incomes were diminished.
Forced loans were extracted from those who could afford them, and were rewarded by high offices. By 1515, the government went so far as to publish the names of those nobles who had made loans, the sums they had donated and the names of those who had refused. But the most shocking measure to raise money for the war effort, because it went against the grain of long-cherished republican values, was the introduction of the sale of offices in March 1510. For those young patricians whose families were prepared to pay 100 ducats, the age restriction for membership of the Great Council was dropped from twenty-five to seventeen. Two hundred ducats could buy election as one of the Savi. A more substantial offering could smooth even admission to the ranks of the procurators, supposedly the most honourable of all offices but now to be had for 12,000 to 100,000 ducats, while the membership was enlarged to forty. The unprecedented policy of cash for honours scandalized Sanudo. ‘And so’, he sighed, ‘everything is up for sale.’ Nevertheless in 1516 Sanudo, who was not rich, managed to scrape together a loan of 500 ducats which bought him a seat in the Senate. And the sale of offices would remain an accepted practice for years to come.
The war dragged on for nine years. As the members of the League inevitably fell out among themselves, Venice dodged and wove, forming an alliance in 1510 with the pope against the French, in 1513 with the French against the pope and emperor. Thanks more to diplomacy, statesmanship and good luck than to military victories, Venice regained virtually the whole of its terraferma by 1517. Although the conclusion of the war was not the end of Venetian involvement in the wars of Italy, it was nevertheless quickly incorporated into the myth of Venice as a state dedicated to peace. Venice was once again God’s chosen city, saved and eternally blessed by Christ and the saints. No other state, not even those of the ancient Athenians and Romans, had ever succeeded in defending itself against so many powerful enemies. The intervening years, however, had been the most testing and psychologically shocking in the history of the Republic. For many years afterwards Venetians spoke of the days before or after ‘the War’, and nothing after it was quite the same. And it was during those fearful times, when the very existence of his adopted home was threatened, that Titian emerged as an independent master and painted his radiantly serene early masterpieces.
The Fondaco, Giorgione and the Modern Manner
Paintings make no claims, Ma’am. They do not purport to be anything other than paintings. It is we, the beholders, who make claims for them, attribute a picture to this artist or that.
‘ANTHONY BLUNT’ TO ‘HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN’, ALAN BENNETT, A QUESTION OF ATTRIBUTION, 1991
The building opposite the Rialto markets and just upstream from the bridge is one of the largest and plainest of the palaces that line the Grand Canal. After centuries of neglect and radical restorations it is a mere shell of its former self, and most tourists passing it by water are unaware of its former significance.1 Under the Republic it housed an institution that was key to the city’s fabulous wealth: the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. The Venetian Fondaco – the word was an adaptation of the Arab fondouk, meaning exchange house or trading centre – was the residence, warehouse and trading post of the German and Germanic merchants. And of all the frescos that lit up the architecture of the painted city, those executed on its façades by Giorgione and Titian were the most spectacular for their unprecedented monumentality, colour, movement and fantasy.
A German exchange house had occupied the site since the thirteenth century. Trade with northern Europe, the complement to the overseas market, was an essential base of the Venetian economy, and the government exercised strict controls over the merchants to ensure that duties and tolls payable on imports and exports were not evaded. They were obliged by law to rent lodgings and warehouse space in the Fondaco, and Venetian merchants were prohibited on pain of criminal charges from crossing the Alps for the purpose of buying or selling direct. The inmates of the Fondaco were closely supervised by Venetian administrators and spies. Packers, weighers, auctioneers, brokers and the notaries, clerks and servants of residents of the Fondaco were all cleared and appointed by the Salt Office, the government agency responsible to the Council of Ten for its management. Each German merchant was assigned a Venetian broker, chosen by lot to prevent collusion, who acted as his minder. The brokers, known as sansali, negotiated and registered all sales, on which they received a commission, and accompanied their clients when they made purchases to make sure that they bought only from native-born Venetians. There were thirty such brokerages, or sanserie, some of which were sold or awarded as sinecures to people who employed agents to do the actual work. Some were used to pay artists working in the doge’s palace, who received 100 ducats a year tax free. Giovanni Bellini and Titian later in his career were beneficiaries of the system.
The task of frescoing the exterior of the Fondaco was Titian’s first public commission, and he came by it as the result of a fire. On 28 January 1505 the old Fondaco – the one you see on the de’ Barbari map – burned to the ground taking many German lives, consuming thousands of ducats’ worth of merchandise and upsetting the complex mechanism of government control over transalpine trade. Sanudo saw the disaster as one of the many bad omens in the uneasy times that preceded the Cambrai war. While temporary lodgings above the Rialto markets were found for the surviving merchants, the government decided within a week to build a new Fondaco at its own expense and as quickly as possible. Land adjacent to the old site was purchased, and in June Giorgio Spavento and Antonio Scarpagnino were appointed architects of an enlarged building, which was constructed with flat façades that were intended as surfaces for frescos. The foundations were laid and the first floor raised within a year at a cost of 300 ducats a month. The upper storeys, which took the best part of another year, cost 600 a month. The roof was constructed by 5 April 1507; in the following year a celebratory mass was sung in the courtyard, and Venetian shopkeepers signed leases granted by the government for shop spaces on the ground floor opening directly on to the street. Rooms in the newly appointed residential quarters, which were so luxuriously appointed that they were described as having walls like marble, were offered to the German merchants at between eight and