Cittadini Veneziani del Quattrocento: Il due Giovanni Marcanova, il mercante e l'umanista (review)

Students of late medieval Venice have long considered social networks an important part of understanding the inner workings of the famously peaceful republic. Many historians have focused exclusively on the Venetian patriciate —the closed, hereditary ruling class that had a monopoly on officeholding —but recently scholars have increasingly included the Venetian citizens in their investigations. This book is a welcome addition to the studies available on Venetian citizen families. Comprised of three independent essays by Elisabetta Barile, Paula Clarke, and Giorgia Nordio, the volume is a detailed reconstruction of the social, economic, and cultural world of the Marcanova family.

The clan's patriarch was Giacomo Marcanova, a doctor established in Verona who emigrated to Venice in 1365 and won the legal privilege of citizenship in 1381. The essays are centered on his son and grandson, the two Giovannis of the title. Giovanni di Giacomo was an international merchant specializing in the London-Venice trade. His sister's son, Giovanni di Tommaso, was a humanist, antiquarian, and collector, who taught first at Padua and then Bologna and who was best known for his extensive library and collection of antique coins and medals. Examined separately, the two men might be seen as part of discrete cultures of knowledge and of commerce, but this book demonstrates that they participated in a society where commerce, politics, collecting, and the classics were inexorably intertwined.

Barile's essay, "La famiglia Marcanova attraverso sette generazioni," anchors the book with a meticulous reconstruction of the family's history. She begins with Giacomo's move to Venice in the mid-fourteenth century and traces the family's shifting fortunes to its extinction in 1582. Her contribution is an archival tour de force, using evidence scattered throughout Italy and beyond to offer a well-rounded picture of the family's marital, commercial, professional, and cultural connections. The Marcanova, like many other citizen families, had kinship, business, and social ties with the Venetian patriciate, but ultimately the family's history demonstrates the fragility of the networks of citizen families, particularly when compared to the resources patrician families could muster. Barile argues that the Marcanova family's rapid ascent in the early fifteenth century and subsequent decline in wealth and prominence follows a pattern seen in many other citizen families, particularly in the sixteenth century.

Clarke's contribution, "The Commercial Activities of Giovanni Marcanova di Giacomo," focuses on the merchant career of the first Giovanni. He established himself in London from 1417 to 1438, developed a wide range of connections with English merchants, and eventually married an Englishwoman. As many merchants did, Marcanova then returned to Venice for the second part of his career and invested in a variety of commercial ventures reaching to Egypt and Constantinople. Clarke suggests that this network, while broad, was vulnerable to changes in economic conditions, and she very effectively inserts the rise and fall of Marcanova's fortunes into the larger picture of commercial trends in the fifteenth century. Marcanova prospered during the 1420s and 1430s, when trade was booming, but his business took a sharp downward turn during the more turbulent 1440s and 1450s, ending in near-bankruptcy at his death in 1458. Clarke suggests that citizens like Marcanova were ultimately in a more fragile position than were patrician merchants because citizens did not have the same kind of landed patrimonies and political connections at their disposal to sustain their business ventures during difficult times.

Nordio's brief essay, "Lorenzo Marcanova in Inghilterra, fattore dello zio Giovanni," looks at the commercial traffic of Italian merchants in England from 1440 to 1444 and English controls on that trade. The article focuses particularly on Giovanni's nephew Lorenzo, who acted as the family's representative in England after Giovanni's return to Venice...