Venice was crowded with peasants whose farmsteads on the mainland had been destroyed by the warring armies and who flocked into the city in ever greater numbers, wandering around half starved with their animals. The refugees were housed in monasteries deserted by monks who had escaped the hardships of the city in wartime, but the presence of so many needy mouths put a strain on the already severely limited supplies of food. The Aldine Press was closed. Horses capable of pulling artillery had been conscripted. The city was uncannily quiet. The plague, which claimed Giorgione as one of its victims, intensified in the summer and autumn after Titian’s return when it coincided with an even more lethal epidemic of fever. Nor, unusually, was it checked by winter. It persisted throughout 1511–12 and then, in a milder form, for two more summers. Titian’s first altarpiece, St Mark Enthroned, was commissioned during the plague by the monks of the church of Santo Spirito in Isola. St Mark’s head and left shoulder are in shadow. He is accompanied by Sts Cosmas and Damian, the physicians, and Sts Sebastian and Roch, protectors against plague. St Roch, an aristocrat who survived a plague, was most famous for his miraculous ability to cure other victims. St Sebastian, a Roman soldier, a captain of the praetorian guard who converted many others to Christianity, was associated with the plague because the wounds of the arrows that pierced his body resembled the lumps that were the first symptoms of bubonic plague. He is always shown young and naked, and Titian’s marvellous figure is his first male nude. Once again he looked to the example of Sebastiano, this time for the pose of St Mark on his high throne, which is very close to the figure of Solomon in Sebastiano’s unfinished Judgement of Solomon.
But war and plague were not the only disasters sent by God to punish Venice. Halfway through the previous Lent, when Titian was preparing to leave for Padua,Venice had been shaken by a tremendous earthquake, the first in living memory. Sanudo described the disaster, which hit the city on 26 March 1511, the day after the feast of the Annunciation, which marked the Venetian new year.
It seemed as though the houses were collapsing, the chimneys swaying, the walls bursting open, the bell-towers bending, objects in high places falling, water boiling, even in the Grand Canal, as though it had been put on fire. They say that, although it was high tide, when the earthquake came some canals dried up as though there had been a tremendous drought. The bells in their towers rang by themselves in many places, especially at St Mark’s, a terrifying thing to happen.17
The statues that toppled from the façades of San Marco and the doge’s palace were read as omens. That Prudence was among those that fell was a warning that the rulers of Venice must learn to be wiser than in recent years. It augured well, however, that some stone lilies fell from the roof of the ducal palace, just above the balcony of the Great Council Hall, and smashed in the courtyard: the lily being the heraldic emblem of the French king, the destruction of the lilies was a sign of God’s will that the French ‘barbarians’ would be driven out of Italy by the pope’s Holy League. The statue of St Mark stayed intact, a prediction that Venice would continue to be the preserver of the Catholic faith and defender of the Church. Some fanatical preachers put the blame for hard times on the Jewish war refugees from the terraferma, but what might have developed into a wave of anti-Semitism was immediately stemmed by order of the Council of Ten. Nevertheless, although given some protection, Jews were ordered to leave Venice within a month and meanwhile to stay indoors except for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.
On the day after the earthquake, the patriarch, addressing the steering committee of the Senate, proclaimed that the catastrophe was God’s punishment for the sins of Venice, and the worst of them (as usual) was sodomy. Sodomy had become so rampant that the female whores had sent to him to say they could no longer make a living. He had heard in confessions that fathers were interfering with their daughters, brothers with sisters. He ordered three days of fasting on bread and water with penitential processions morning and evening. The government strengthened the already punitive legislation against homosexuality and blasphemy, passed more stringent laws against sexual relations with nuns and promised to ensure that justice was dispensed more quickly than had become the custom. Crowds processed through the city chanting litanies and imploring God’s forgiveness. The churches were full, and many more people than usual went to confession.
Although for most Venetians the outbreak of religious observance was a temporary reaction, the disastrous times had a more profound effect on the thinking of a small group of intellectuals from distinguished patrician families. Their spiritual guide and mentor was Tommaso Giustiniani, who after a mysterious visit to the Holy Land had been seized by an urgent need to atone for his hedonistic youth. His most prominent disciples were Vincenzo Querini who, as Venetian ambassador to Germany before the war, had become aware of the illwill against Venice and warned the doge of its possible consequences; and Gasparo Contarini, the son of a wealthy merchant who had studied with some of the greatest scholars of his day and was the youngest and later the most famous of these three. They retreated to an austere monastery on Murano for discussion, prayer, meditation and readings of the Bible and classical texts, and became convinced, at a time when Martin Luther was still an obscure theology professor at the University of Wittenberg, of such proto-Lutheran beliefs as the value of preaching and reading the Bible in the vernacular and of the necessity of ridding the Roman Church of worldly abuses. Giustiniani and Querini, who had come to the conclusion that the war was a sign of the futility of life on this earth, rechristened themselves Peter and Paul, and became hermit monks in the monastery of Camaldoli in the wilderness of the Apennines, from which, in 1513, they presented Pope Leo X with proposals for radical reform of the Church.
Contarini wavered. Although deeply troubled by the spiritual condition of the Christian world – ‘our age sins badly’ he wrote later – he had agonizing doubts about his religious vocation and about the value of retreat and penance. They culminated on the Easter Saturday after the earthquake when he confessed to a sympathetic monk an insight that anticipated Martin Luther’s vision in the tower of two years later. Contarini had reached the conclusion that no amount of self-punishment would compensate for his past sins. Justification in the eyes of God was not to be achieved by penance but by deep, abiding love of Christ and gratitude for His suffering and self-sacrifice on behalf of mankind. Having decided to pursue a worldly career, he went on to serve the Venetian government in a number of important posts, notably as ambassador to Charles V during the diplomatically sensitive period in the 1520s when Venice switched its allegiance from France to the emperor. When in 1535 he was unexpectedly made a cardinal by Pope Paul III, the appointment was taken as a sign that the Church intended to institute reforms, and he did play a crucial role as a reforming humanist at the papal court. His famous idealized description of the republican government, De magistratibus et republica