Sansovino's Venice. A Translation of Francesco Tatti da Sansovino's Guidebook to Venice of 1561. Edited by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Sansovino’s Venice
A Translation of Francesco Tatti da Sansovino’s Guidebook to Venice of 1561
Edited by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks

New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2017

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro

A few months ago, reviewing Marco Antonio Sabellico's Del sito di Vinegia (On the site of Venice), I complained about the absence of modern critical editions of Venetian guides. I am therefore equally glad of and surprised by the sudden English translation of Delle cose notabili della città di Venezia (On the Notable Things Which are in Venice), a work published by Francesco Sansovino. The curators are two famous architecture scholars, Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks; among others, they signed the English translation of the first five books of the Trattato di architettura (On Architecture) by Sebastiano Serlio (1996) and of two reports of Palladio on the city of Rome, presented together and printed with the title Palladio's Rome (2009). In particular, both from the comparison of the titles (Sansovino's Venice and Palladio's Rome) and from the similar formats (tall and narrow, like those of Lonely Planet), it is evident that, in the intentions of the curators, Sansovino's Venice is a follow-up of Palladio's Rome. For both of them, they proposed a compact format, typical of the guides, almost to suggest to visit the city with the book in hand. The one provided by Hart and Hicks - be it clear - is not a critical edition, but a richly annotated version (with more than 1000 notes) that no doubt deserves to be praised, even if there is a risk of misrepresenting the true spirit of Sansovino’s text, as I will try to explain below. 

Venezia, Basilica di San Marco
Fonte. Andreas Volkmer via Wikimedia Commons

  

Venezia, Palazzo ducale
Fonte: gaspa via Wikimedia Commons

Francesco Sansovino and his program to celebrate Venice

Francesco Sansovino (1521-1586) was the son of the architect and sculptor Jacopo (1486-1570), the official architect ("proto-architect") of the Venetian Republic for almost forty years, still alive at the time of the release of the work by the son. Jacopo had produced most public buildings of Renaissance Venice (in Saint Mark's area only, the Loggetta, the Mint, the Marciana Library, and the Saint Geminianus church, demolished at Napoleon's time). Francesco did not follow his art legacy, but after studying law with little profit and even less interest, found his fortune as author and publisher in the book editing community. The publishing industry - as it is well-known - was one of the most thriving activity of Venice in the sixteenth century, in the wake of a tradition that went back to Manuzio and encompassed other operators like Giolito and Marcolini, who carried out extremely ambitious projects. Francesco was active on both sides: in fact, he was both either an author or a curator of his own texts, of vernacular translations or of anthologies almost always on history (we know that he curated about ninety works), as well as a publisher. In particular, Hart and Hicks point out that the Notable Things Which are in Venice were, chronologically, just a step of a sequence of three publications dedicated to the city. 

The joint project began in 1556 with a 24-page booklet titled Tutte le cose notabili e belle che sono in Venezia (All notable and beautiful things that are in Venice), published under the pseudonym of Anselmo Guisconi, continued in 1561 with the Notable Things, and ended twenty years later in 1581, with Venetia città nobilissima e singolare. Descritta in XIII libri (Venetia, the most noble and singular city, described in XIII books), undoubtedly the most comprehensive work. All three works, in fact, experienced a great fortune and were released anew, even after the release of the next works, although the latter could also be considered as their physical expansion. The 'enlargement' process is obvious: in fact, Sansovino did not hesitate (and this had no negative connotation) to 'recycle' portions of text from the previous editions, which survived therefore in works having a different title. To simplify, Hart and Hicks refer to the three titles as the 'draft' (1556), the 'guide' (1561) and the 'encyclopedia' (1581). If Sansovino had been the publisher of a magazine, the publication of 1556 would be a sort of 'zero number', the second work would be Venice's true 'guide' and, finally, Venetia, the most noble city would seal the birth of a true Venetian 'encyclopaedia'. Sansovino’s triptych, however, shared the same objective: to celebrate the greatness of the Serenissima. The guides in 1556 and 1561 pursued that goal more 'informally', because they were drafted in the form of a dialogue, using a quite customary solution at the time (only in the field of art, think of Pinos’ Dialogo di Pittura - Dialogue on Painting, and the one entitled Aretino by Lodovico Dolce), which allowed to give lightness and immediacy to the narration, assuring somehow a 'theatrical' dynamic to the pages of the work (the two protagonists have just meet and are talking, walking in St. Mark's Square; the Venetian invites the foreigner to his house to eat, when some of the characters mentioned in the dialogue are immediately met among the pedestrians). Instead, the 1581 encyclopaedia (i.e. Venetia's most noble city) did not have a dialogic format anymore and lost therefore its immediacy, in favour of a more structured explanatory power, supported by the thirteen books composing it, the first six of which refer to each single sestriere, i.e. each Venice’s partition. But, as was said, the celebratory intent remained unchanged.

Venezia, Palazzo della Zecca
Fonte: Nino Barbieri via Wikimedia Commons

Venezia, Libreria Marciana
Fonte: Wolfgang Moroder via Wikimedia Commons

Venice as ideal city: a fortunate model

“V[enetian]: Tell me, please, kind sir, what do you think of this city?
F[oreigner]: If I were to tell you the truth, uoy would not believe me.
V. No, please, tell me; for by saying it you will be praising God.
F. She (as far as I can tell) con only be the work of the divinity, whether because of her site via which the city receives everything she needs, of because her marvellous buildings an the great congregation of peoples here. [...] It seems to me a extraordinary thing beacuse I have seen the impossible within the impossible” (p. 77).

From the first lines of the book, Sansovino's celebratory intent is evident. Venice is meant to be an 'impossible' city, because it is built on the sea, which in turn implies a second impossibility, i.e. the perfection of its institutions, freedom, religion, justice and, last but not least, its palaces. It is important, in my view, to remember these words, since it often happens to hear about Sansovino's books as guides. Both Schlosser in his Kunstliteratur and Hart and Hicks in their commentary argued that the author was addressing the need to offer a guide of the town to the tourists who were beginning to visit it. With all due respect, I disagree. Venice was a city in which people from all corners of the world lived, but they were certainly not tourists. Rather, they were merchants, soldiers, nobles, ambassadors and so on. Moreover, Sansovino would have most probably written a city guide for tourists (not necessarily an artistic guide) in Latin, and used instead his perfect Tuscan. In addition, the text did not offer any route to visit the city, nor a subdivision for sestieri, nor finally any systematic analysis of art works. The Notable things, in fact, were not a guide, but brought to completion a genre originating from the humanistic tradition of the chorographic descriptions and from the Mirabilia Urbis Romae (Marvels of Rome), to pursue a single goal: to set forth a myth. In this sense, Sansovino's writings were aimed primarily at his fellow citizens (Francesco declared himself as Florentine by birth, but as a Venetian by adoption and adherence to the ideals of freedom and justice that were practiced in the city). Sansovino encoded a myth (that of the city born at the same time free and Christian - cf. 92), which all Venetians would honour for the remaining two centuries and half of the life of the Republic (and many for the following decades too). The Venetians’ nostalgia for the XVII-XVIII century (a feeling on which I cannot comment in this review) was therefore based on Sansovino’s descriptions.

If one however wants to stick to the definition of On the Notable Things as a guide, he must add the goal that Sansovino said to pursue from the second page of his work: not to dwell on the historical facts of the past (from the foundation onwards), as they were known to everyone (circumstance that is, however, widely disproved in the text), but to accommodate the request of a foreigner who would like to learn "the way people used to dress, how they behaved and other such particulars not described by anyone else". In order to capture the reader's attention, the work was thus conceived as a "curious guide" to the city, a text conveying things that were not written anywhere else. It should be made clear that these 'things' did not include art works and in particular paintings (if not to a minimum, i.e. some works in the ducal palace). Sansovino was not a 'connoisseur', although, of course, he focused on his father's architectural and sculptural work and expounded its symbolic meaning within the city.

The Notable Things, therefore (and not even the other two writings, the one preceding of 1556 and the next following in 1581) were not a historical-artistic guide. And instead, the format of the modern edition of the work actually suggests this. Someone reading the work of Hart and Hicks in five hundred years will probably have the historical perspective to identify in this edition a semantic shift that is turning a celebratory work into a guide (this is the risk I mentioned at the beginning).

Venezia, Campanile di San Marco
Fonte: Luca Aless via Wikimedia Commons

Venezia, La Loggetta del Sansovino
Fonte: Nino Barbieri via Wikimedia Commons

Venice dies, Venice is reborn

It is not exaggerate to say that the 'myth’ of Venice materialised (just like it happened for all other Italian states of that time) when their political weight was falling. Sansovino celebrated a city that, in reality, had already been set in crisis by the opening of the Atlantic routes, which was threatened by the Turkish danger in its own sea (the Lepanto battle was 1571), and which at the beginning of the century had known particularly difficult times, coinciding with the establishment of the League of Cambrai and the Battle of Agnadello (1509). If one looks at this carefully, his most acclaimed artist, Titian, owed his personal fame to the ability to propose himself as a reference to the new European powers, beginning with Charles V.

Sansovino's description took on a particular significance because, in architectural and urbanistic terms, it sanctioned the triumph of a 'second' Venice on a former one that was in some way set aside. The second Venice was the one of classicism, with palaces built on adherence to classical orders and (from a pictorial point of view) of a 'mannerism' which was sometimes markedly Florentine, sometimes (and fortunately) much more Venetian (think of Veronese and Tintoretto) [1]. At the same time, the 'Lombard' or 'Gothic' buildings were entering a shadow cone. In Venice, the most noble city (this section is presented in the appendix), the author wrote that the Goths remained in Italy for many years, filling everything with their barbarous and corrupted costumes, almost extinguishing the Roman beauty. The 'new' Venice had its creator (in architectural terms) first in Jacopo Sansovino, i.e. in the father of the author of the guide, and only later on in Palladio. And the real core of the guide was to describe the palaces erected by his father in the Saint Mark area, as they had redesigned (or were redesigning, since the Library was not yet finished) the urban layout. The celebration of the city and the celebration of the father's work, inspired by the most rigid classicism, therefore coincided, so much so that one of the aspects of the Library was the combination of ingenuity and substantial respect for the ancients, in the solution adopted by the father for the rendering of metopes and triglyphs at the corner of the building. St. Mark's Square, as a place concentrating civil and religious power, but also as the seat of the cultural heritage of the city (first of all, the codes of Cardinal Bessarione), was therefore the true main focus of the guide. The two interlocutors talked there and examined the individual buildings from time to time, with particular attention, as mentioned, to Mint, Library and Loggetta, his father's works.

The painters 

While the quotations of painters were not frequent, it is worth mentioning the names whom Francesco referred to in a short section devoted specifically to the most famous artists in the city (pp. 105-108). Obviously, he started with the Bellinis (while the Vivarinis were not quoted). They were so esteemed that one was required by the "Grand Turk" (Gentile, who painted the portrait of Mohammed II): “their style was very careful, almost like that for a miniature; indeed, their excessive attention to detail was a fault because their figures in the way they were painted came out lacking plasticity and almost flat” (p. 106); Giorgione was judged “livelier” and was reminded for the now lost frescoes at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the headquarters of the city's German merchants. From this moment onwards Sansovino listed his "contemporaries": Paris Bordone, Bonifacio Veronese and Pordenone. The latter was given the lead because he "in his painting had more vivacity, and the colours were better than in the works of others. His technique was solidly grounded, his poses were all lifelike and [...] he was quite excellent in his foreshortening". Finally, Sansovino mentioned the trio of the great ones: Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Speaking of Tintoretto, Sansovino could not help but resort to the common commonplace of his excessive hurry (he called it ‘lack of patience’) with whom he performed his works. A quick reminder of Giuseppe Salviati concluded the list. What to say? This is what Sansovino handed over to us. In some specific cases, these quotations were precious because they related to works burnt in the 1577 fire of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio (the Hall of the Great Council of the Ducal Palace in Venice). On the one hand, one can only regret that the author avoided any direct examination of the paintings. On the other hand, we must not be surprised by this: his work was not - as said - a historical-artistic guide, but had other more general purposes. And - it must be recognised as a merit to the author – his text has kept for centuries such freshness and effectiveness that makes it really enjoyable to read it even today.

NOTES

[1] For a review of the peculiarities of the Venetian Renaissance, see the review by Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, Venezia, l'altro Rinascimento (Venice, the other Renaissance).