Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (review)

This impressively researched and handsomely produced book is thethird installment in Patricia Brown's exploration of tradition and innovation in Renaissance Venetian culture. Her first book, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (1988), identified a distinctive Venetian "eyewitness" style of painting in the later Quattrocento that conveyed the city's civic and religious culture in a pictorial narrative recognizable as true to Venetians' experience of their daily lives. By the 1530s, however, the traditional themes of the eyewitness paintings were giving way to a new Romanizing impulse. Similarly, in her second book, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (1996), she saw Venice's non-Roman origins as the key to a foundation myth in which the Roman heritage claimed by other Italian Renaissance cities was tempered by local legends that fueled Venetians' pride in their city's unique past and the admirable institutions that it had shaped. Yet like the narrative painting tradition, Venetians' sense of their distinctive history came under challenge by the growing appeal of Roman cultural motifs in the early sixteenth century.

Now in Private Lives in Renaissance Venice Brown offers a wide-ranging, lavishly illustrated panorama of material life to argue that in their domestic arrangements and furnishings as well, sixteenth-century nobles veered away from venerable tradition, exchanging the down-to-earth modesty of a merchant patriciate for refined, Roman-inflected aristocratic splendor. The change undermined the shared mediocritas which fostered solidarity across the ruling class, in favor of a magnificentia with which individual families flaunted their distinctiveness. Those two themes, socioeconomic differentiation and the material objects, large and small, that advertised it, are the heart of Brown's account. In expounding her argument, she presents a wealth of detail, in text and images, on the purposes and furnishings of the evolving noble lifestyle. So vivid and exhaustive is her surveyof the nobles' material culture and the uses they put it to, supplemented by chapters on the domestic life of the populace, that her book replaces the middle, Renaissance volume of the modern three-volume editions of Pompeo Molmenti's classic Storia di Venezia nella vita privata (first published 1870). UnlikeMolmenti's, however, Brown's book, reflecting the scholarship of the last quarter-century, applies the material evidence to inquire into a central issue of Venetian patrician society.

Did the cultivation of refined magnificence, inevitably widening the gap between rich and poor nobles, fatally undermine the patrician solidarity that Brown sees as the key to Venice's stability? By way of answering, she charts from a variety of angles ambiguities in patrician culture. In her chapter on domestic architecture, for example, she emphasizes Venetians' use of casa for their houses rather than palazzo: a gesture of old-fashioned modesty belied by the increasing splendor of sixteenth-century buildings such as Sansovino's monumental Ca'Corner. Cinquecento building as a whole, Brown relates, was a mixture of respect for older values and, as in the case of the Romanizing Ca' Corner, the desire to associate one's family with a new magnificentiae exemplum to make one's dwelling a nobilitatis theatrum, as a contemporary described it (39). The ambivalence appears even in individual commissions, for example the Loredan family's ostentatious display of piety in inscribing "Non Nobis Domine" across the façade of the imposingly worldly palace built for them by Codussi; or the even more striking example of Alessandro Vittoria's portrait busts of four members of the Zorzi family, two in familiar Venetian clothing, the other two dressed all' antica (59–60).

Those mixed messages recur throughout, for example, regarding the status of married patrician women. The ideal noble house, which Brown reconstructs from Scamozzi's and Serlio's treatises, consigned women to the rear spaces, away from onlookers' gaze through the generous windows of the Venetian piano nobile, and...