The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373–1457 (review)

Rarely do books live up to their enthusiastic dust-jacket endorsements, but Dennis Romano’s learned, detailed, and sophisticated study of the life and rule of Doge Francesco Foscari is an exception. Touted as “the best book ever written about Venetian politics and political culture,” The Likeness of Venice is certainly that. It is also the best biography ever of a Venetian doge and a subtle investigation of intersection of high politics, family ambition, and artistic production in Quattrocento Venice.

This book has much to recommend it. It is founded upon long and exhaustive research in scores of registers of the deliberations of Venice’s principal councils, the Maggior Consiglio, the Dieci, and the Senato, in its several series. I count more than eighty citations from the twenty registers of Senato, Secreti, 1400–1457, which document Venice’s foreign policy and diplomacy in the period. Equally important for an authoritative narrative of politics and occasional insights into motivation has been Romano’s close reading of several contemporary chronicles, mainly Giorgio Dolfin, Agostino Agostini, and Antonio Morosini, which are still largely unpublished but contain little-known details on political events and rivalries. This research has been supplemented by extensive study of published sources — notably a recent critical edition of the section of Marin Sanudo’s Vite dei Dogi that treats Foscari’s reign, and Dieter Girgensohn’s edition of Foscari’s Promissione ducale 1423 (2004) — and virtually all the relevant secondary literature. Here Romano’s task has been aided by the work of two contemporary historians. Giuseppe Gullino’s authoritative articles on members of the Foscari family for the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 49, gathered into a recent book, La saga dei Foscari (2005), provide accurate and accessible biographies of the doge and his family, while Girgensohn’s prosopographical study of some forty Venetian nobles active in the early Quattrocento details the careers of many of Foscari’s contemporaries. In other words, the increasingly sophisticated scholarship on Quattrocento Venice published in past decades as well as the author’s unremitting archival research has enabled Romano to write this thorough and fascinating biography.

I take the burden of the book to be a qualified attack on several aspects of Venetian exceptionalism, the myths of a governing class without factions and of doges without ambitions. From the time of his election in 1423 until his deposition in 1457, Francesco Foscari strove, in a certain sense, to be a Renaissance prince. The novel ritual of his installation as doge, the lavish wedding of his sole surviving son, Jacopo, and the sumptuous entertainment of foreign dignitaries all bespoke the values of a court culture that Venice had heretofore conspicuously lacked. This taste for magnificence was further manifested in architectural monuments, the Porta della Carta and the Arco Foscari in the Ducal Palace and the Ca’ Foscari on the Grand Canal, that the doge had built during his rule. At the same time, these cultural and political ambitions were attended by political and personal tragedies: an assassination attempt, costly and unpopular wars with Milan, and the death of several of his children, so that on two occasions Foscari attempted to abdicate. Romano depicts well the stresses of the office of doge, and notes that a letter of consolation from Francesco Barbaro to Jacopo Foscari on the early death of his brother Domenico also expressed concern for the doge’s capacity to carry out his office. Nowhere do the doge’s problems emerge more clearly than in the career of his son Jacopo, who was tried twice for treason and was to die in exile in Crete. The latter part of the doge’s reign was very much the story of “i due Foscari,” as later writers called it. Romano’s expert handling of Jacopo Foscari’s trials documented in the records of the Dieci...