Most rare in marble portraits

The above title is a quote from Giorgio Vasari. They are the words he used, in his famous Lives of the Artists, to describe Alessandro Vittoria (1525–1608), a man who became one of the greatest Italian sculptors of his age.

Vittoria was born in Trento, a city in the far north of Italy, on the border of the Italian and German-speaking worlds. In the mid-16th century, when Vittoria was a young man, it played host to the famous eccelsiastical council convoked to discuss the threats posed by the growth of Protestantism and to agree a response. A portrait of Vittoria exists from this time, painted by another north Italian, Giovanni Battista Moroni, from Bergamo. Moroni, like many other artists, had gone to Trento, attracted by the opportunities presented by the prominent Council delegates, many of whom wished to have their likenesses taken. In Moroni’s portrait (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna), Vittoria appears as a confident young man holding a small marble torso. The musculature of this torso is rather peculiar: either Vittoria was very young at the time and not yet very skilled, or else Moroni had never studied anatomy, but nevertheless it serves as an emblem of the kind of sculpture that would make Vittoria famous. He developed a prodigious skill at sculpting portraits in the style of ancient Roman busts, a genre he effectively re-invented and re-popularised, and he became sought-after by numerous patrons. In Vittoria’s native Trento today, there is a square that bears his name with an early 20th-century statue in it showing a middle-aged man holding a sculptor’s chisel, dressed in a frock coat and looking like a dapper Edwardian official from some municipal board of works. He is nothing at all like the confident and self-aware young man that Moroni depicted and which hangs in Vienna. One suspects that the young Vittoria was very confident indeed.

Portrait of Alessandro Vittoria by Giovanni Battista Moroni. Kunsthistorisches Musem, Vienna.

Vittoria was also skilled in plasterwork. When he first went to Venice, he was taken on by the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino, with whom he worked on the steep barrel-vaulted entrance staircase to the Biblioteca Marciana, a space overwhelmingly encrusted with painted stucco. If Vittoria had stuck to this kind of thing, it is unlikely that today we would know his name. The skill is very great, but the overall effect is too much. It is perhaps lucky for posterity that he quarrelled with Sansovino and found a different outlet for his talents. He went on to sculpt bust after bust of well-fed statesman and administrators, and today they provide a fascinating window on an age. In his native Trento, in the magnificent Castello di Buonconsiglio, there are two characteristic portrait busts of Venetian notables. But by far the best place to admire Vittoria’s work is Venice: in Ca’ d’Oro, in the Frari, the Museo Correr, the Doge’s Palace.

Two examples of Vittoria’s portrait busts of dignitaries of his day. In Castello di Buonconsiglio, Trento (top) and in Ca’ D’Oro, Venice (bottom).

Vittoria was a contemporary of Tintoretto and Veronese, and with them he helped Venice in her project of self-glamorisation in an era when her best days were already beginning to be behind her. We know where Vittoria lived in Venice: his house was just off the Riva degli Schiavoni behind the church of the Pietà. A hotel stands on the site of the building today. Here he had a beautiful garden and a fine collection of works of art, including a marvellous self-portrait by Parmagianino, shown reflected in a convex mirror (also now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum). When he died, he was buried in the nearby church of San Zaccaria: his tomb slab is very simple, a black flagstone laid in the floor of the sanctuary. On the wall next to it, however, is an elaborate monument designed by himself with a portrait bust in the antique style and mourning figures of Sculpture, Painting and Architecture.

Monument to Alessandro Vittoria in San Zaccaria, Venice. The Latin description praises him as someone ‘who when alive drew out from marble the faces of the living’. (The sculptures of Architecture and Painting appear to have been miscaptioned.)

Annabel Barber

See here for details of our relevant titles: Blue Guide Venice and Blue Guide Trentino & the South Tyrol.

Blue Guides: Now in colour

Blue Guide Venice (ed. 10) is now in full colour, the first of a new look for the core series.

Since 1918, when the first Blue Guide appeared, the books have been through a number of redesigns but the quality of the text remains completely unchanged. The detailed focus on history, archaeology, architecture and art is exactly the same, the product of careful study and painstaking on-the-ground research. Now, though, all the maps, plans, illustrations and photographs are beautifully reproduced in colour – essential for presenting works of art, for showing the light and subtle shades of the lagoon, and for making maps that are easy to read and navigate.

Blue Guide Venice (ed. 10) is available in bookshops from March (UK) and May (US). As a taster, here a few sample pages from the new edition:

Venice in Peril

The UK-based Venice in Peril Fund is one of several international charities devoted to safeguarding the future of this unique city. Guy Elliott, Chairman of Venice in Peril, outlines some of its recent projects.

The Venice in Peril Fund was founded in 1971, succeeding an earlier fund instituted in 1966 in response to that year’s devastating floods. Today, more than 50 years later, Venice may be in even greater peril. Climate change is increasing the frequency of high tide occurrences, known as Acqua alta. These, as well as causing flooding, allow saline penetration of the brick which lies above the hard Istrian stone foundations. In certain atmospheric conditions, these saline deposits crystallise, causing the mortar and brick to fragment. Rising sea levels will only accentuate this problem. Other factors, such as more turbulent water traffic and deteriorating air quality, also contribute to the degradation. Taken together these threats pose an existential threat to the city.

Over this long period, Venice in Peril has focused chiefly on the conservation of monuments, especially in stone, for example the Porta della Carta (Doge’s Palace) or the Loggetta around the campanile. But the charity has also conserved works of art and smaller projects ranging from a globe by Vincenzo Coronelli to 18 Goldoni puppets. Over 75 projects have been carried out using its funding alongside the City, Museum and Church authorities. At the same time the charity has aimed to broaden public understanding of the city’s challenges. 

One of Venice in Peril’s most recently completed conservation projects is the monument to Antonio Canova in the Frari church. Within it lies his heart. The rest of his remains—except for his right hand, which is in the Accademia Galleries—are at Possagno, his birthplace. The remarkable pyramid-shaped monument, built according to Canova’s design for a monument to Titian that was never executed, was inaugurated on the 200th anniversary of the great sculptor‘s death. British donors were prominent among those who financed its construction in the 1820s and Venice in Peril’s present supporters carry on the same proud tradition. The conservation project took ten years to complete and its challenges reflect all the environmental assaults described above. In addition, the problems of earlier conservation efforts (which followed best practice at the time) needed to be reversed. Major projects such as this provide training opportunities for young conservators as well as highlighting the harmful effects of neglecting maintenance, which is everywhere accorded low priority.

These same problems of Venice’s foundations being eaten away or suffering other environmental damage have been the focus of the charity in many other projects. One example is at the imposing Gothic church of Madonna del Orto in Cannaregio. Another is at the Basilica of Torcello, where recently the iconostasis was conserved. An ongoing project is at the Archivo de Stato, where following our earlier restorations of its main monumental doorway and its Baroque well-head, further interventions are planned to the archangels guarding the corners of this former cloister, once attached to the Frari. 

The Italian authorities, despite many competing demands placed on them, are not altogether neglecting the challenges which Venice faces. The massive MOSE project, which consists of retractable floodgates built between the outermost islands of the lagoon, has been a welcome development—unfortunately not operational for the Acqua alta of 2019, the worst since 1966. The MOSE barriers were first raised in October 2020. On a smaller scale, a glass barrier has been put in place around San Marco, reflecting the basilica’s position as one of the lowest lying points in the city. Venice in Peril has likewise assisted San Nicolò dei Mendicoli with similar counter-measures, the latest after the 2019 flooding, in a series of interventions at the church made since the 1970s. 

Venice’s challenges are not confined to the environment. As is well known, giant cruise liners have been controversial. Their enormous scale, dwarfing the city’s greatest monuments, caused much offence. Since 2021 ships over 25,000 tonnes are no longer permitted to sail up the Giudecca Canal or moor in the basin of San Marco. They instead take a different route to the port of Marghera on the mainland. While this diminishes the visual impact, nothing changes the disgorgement of very large numbers of passengers who make a negligible contribution to the city’s economy since they tend not to stay overnight. In 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, the city had 5.5 m overnight stays and 13 m overall visitors. The pandemic emptied Venice, but since 2022 tourism has resumed, with all that that entails. 

The city’s overdependence on tourism has changed the housing rental sector. Many residents have quit the old city for the mainland, renting out their apartments, often in an unregulated manner. This undermines the formal hotel and pensione sector. It also accelerates depopulation. Venice’s present population, which has been consistently falling, is around 50,000 as against its peak of 175,000 in the early 1950s. This partly reflects the lack of employment prospects, especially for young people, except in the tourist sector. 

As well as diverting the giant cruise liners, a daily levy has been introduced for day trippers. This innovation, like several others, has been controversial. But the scale of challenges that Venice faces requires considerable imagination. In many areas, solutions have proved elusive. Often, unpleasant choices need to be made in order to safeguard one of mankind’s most sublime achievements. This will not be the last such case. 

Venice in Peril Fund offers a unique and worthwhile channel to those who love the city, enabling them to discover more about Venice while contributing to conservation that can encourage sustainability and assist economic renewal. The website www.veniceinperil.org gives details about past and present projects and enables donations to be made easily. Funds are always needed to keep pace with the seemingly inexhaustible list of endangered buildings, monuments, sculptures and works of art. The charity holds regular events for its supporters, and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram.

Venice in Peril thanks the publishers of the excellent Blue Guide for again giving us space to explain our purpose and why it matters to those who love the city.

Guy Elliott, Chairman, Venice in Peril Fund CIO

The Venetian Empire at Sea

Maritime Museum, Venice. The Venetian Lion with raised sword. Normally he holds a book. When shown brandishing a sword, it means war.

The Venetian Empire, or Stato da mar, depended on a huge number of galleys, galleons and galleasses to protect its trade routes to the east. As Jan Morris has pointed out, ‘in an age when seamen preferred to spend their nights ashore’ the Republic soon set about establishing control of coastal ports in Dalmatia, Corfu, on the Greek mainland, in Crete, Alexandria and Cyprus for her merchant ships plying back and forth between Venice and Constantinople and further east. By the 15th century the ships could depend on being welcomed into ports under the control of the Serenissima throughout their journey. For safety against attacks from pirates or by the Turks they would sail in convoy: the concern for their safe return is wonderfully portrayed in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice

The galleys were of various sizes – small and thin; biremes with two tiers of oars, and triremes with three. By the 16th century the longer quinqueremes were in use, with their five horizontal levels of oars (and with five men to an oar). Galleons, which were armed merchant ships, were even larger, redesigned in the first half of the 16th century by the Venetian Humanist Vettor Fausto (a member of the erudite circle of Aldus Manutius, through whom he was able to study the history of naval construction in Greek and Latin texts). It was Fausto who pioneered the concept of marine architecture. In the 17th century the galleass was designed. A cross between a traditional galley and a galleon, equipped with four masts, broad in the beam and propelled by hundreds of oars, its role was to provide a line of defence preceding the rest of the fleet when naval battles were predicted. 

We know that a flotilla of six great galleasses led the Venetian fleet into battle against the Ottoman Empire in 1571, at Lepanto at the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth. It has gone down in history not only as a famous Venetian victory but also as the last sea battle to be fought with galleons manned by oarsmen. Although there were terrible losses on both sides (at least 8,000 on the Christian side and some 20,000 on the Muslim), it was always considered a great victory by the Venetians and there are painted and sculpted memorials to it in buildings all over Venice. We know that the ship which returned to Venice bringing news of the victory took just ten days to reach the lagoon. 

Some Venetian ships had to be flat-bottomed to transport cavalry horses. Other live animals were kept on deck for food during a voyage. In siege warfare the masts could sometimes be turned into ladders to set up against the walls of enemy fortresses. Because of the shallowness of the lagoon, some of the larger ships had to be raised on pontoons (known as camelli) for their safe passage to the open sea. On their return, the boats would put in at quays all over the city, although the Bacino di San Marco in front of the Doge’s Palace was always the main harbour. This was where illustrious visitors would disembark and where the doge boarded the Bucintoro for the annual ceremony of Venice’s ‘marriage’ with the sea.

The Captain-Generals of the Sea, often became heroes (and even doges) after victories; but if defeated they could be disgraced and imprisoned. The most celebrated Admiral of the Fleet was Francesco Morosini, who came from a well-known Venetian patrician family, many members of which served the Republic over the centuries, four of them becoming doges. After achieving great fame for his military exploits, Francesco himself became Venice’s last great doge. He began his career on the island of Crete, which had been taken by the Serenissima in 1204 as part of her ‘reward’ after the Fourth Crusade. Following the takeover, and once the Genoese were ousted, Venice settled down to centuries of fruitful occupation of the island, having secured it as a roadstead for the merchant galleys bound for Alexandria and for Constantinople and beyond. When the Turks laid siege to Herakleion in the 17th century, Morosini took command of the defence of the town and held out for an incredible 22 years—the longest siege in history. The townspeople endured terrible suffering and when Morosini finally surrendered, in 1669, the island fell to the Turks. Morosini himself survived and his troops were allowed to leave Crete unharmed (but not before Morosini had managed to steal the precious icon of the Madonna from Herakleion cathedral; it has been on the high altar of the church of the Salute in Venice ever since). 

The city of Candia, modern Herakleion (Crete), one of a series of reliefs of Venetian conquests on the exterior wall of the church of Santa Maria del Giglio, in the sestiere of San Marco.

Morosini also enjoyed capturing flags, shields and armour from the Turks (all his trophies have been preserved). He always went to sea with his cat, and parts of the galleys he sailed are today preserved in museums in Venice. He had a prayer book specially made so that it could conceal a small pistol; his sword is one of the most unexpected ‘treasures’ in the basilica of St Mark’s. However, Morosini is best remembered by Venetians for his conquest of the Peloponnese in 1685–7. He had given the Republic its last moment of glory and ever afterwards he was known to its people as the ‘Peloponnesiaco’. The magnificent ancient lions he seized from Greece during these campaigns are still seated outside the gate into the Arsenale. 

Outside Venice, Morosini’s name in history is indelibly linked with the Parthenon, since before he finally took possession of the Peloponnese, he allowed his German mercenary troops to bombard the Acropolis, where the Turks had set up their defences. By the time he reached Athens, the Turks had already demolished what was left of the Propylaia (it had been hit by lightning and ruined in an explosion some years earlier when it served as an ammunition store) and they had totally destroyed the Temple of Athena Nike just inside the entrance gate, setting up their artillery on the bastions. They were using the Parthenon as a powder magazine and one evening in the following year, 1687, a mortar from Morosini’s position on the Mouseion Hill was fired by a mercenary lieutenant directly at the Parthenon. The explosion carried away practically the whole of the temple’s cella and its frieze, as well as eight columns on the north side and six on the south side, together with the entablature. The world-famous temple was effectively cut in half. Morosini, on taking the hill, then added to the damage by attempting to remove the west pediment. He bungled it and the precious sculptures of the chariot of Athena and its horses fell to the ground and were smashed to pieces. The Venetians overlooked this and when Morosini returned home he was welcomed as a hero and was elected doge shortly afterwards. The Peloponnese remained under Venetian control for the next 30 years, but not without forays from the Turks. Fittingly enough, he died in battle within sight of the walls of Nafplion in 1694, yet again fighting the Ottomans. 

by Alta Macadam, author of Blue Guide Venice.

The Venetian Republic in times of plague

The Venetian lagoon at sunset, the time of day when people in isolation traditionally gathered to sing the Te Deum. The island shown here is the old hospital island of Sacca Sessola. Image ©Blue Guides.

The Venetian Republic had to take steps to contain infection in the city as early as the 15th century. Their dependence on trade, bringing merchant ships from the East, meant that they were particularly vulnerable to the spread of disease (just as we are told today that globalisation has favoured the spread of Coronavirus). Venetians held that the ease of infection could well be attributed to flying particles in the air, a theory confirmed by scientists many centuries later.

The Venetians were able to make use of some of the islands in the lagoon, either for isolation hospitals or as quarantine stations. The 12th-century pilgrims’ hospice on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio was taken over by the Augustinian monastery of St Mary of Nazareth in 1423 and became the first-known permanent isolation hospital in Europe. The name Lazzaretto is a corruption of ‘Nazareth’, with a secondary etymology from Lazarus, patron saint of lepers. A lazzaretto or lazaret came to be a general term for a quarantine station. Right up until the 18th century those who were confined on Lazzaretto Vecchio would stand on the bank looking towards Venice at sunset each evening and sing the Te Deum together in thankfulness for their escape from contagion.

Perhaps the most interesting of the Venetian quarantine islands is Lazzaretto Nuovo. Local archaeologists and volunteers have restored some of its buildings and carried out excavations and the island is open to visitors on certain days. In the centre of the island is the Tezon Grande (one of the largest public buildings in Venice, more than 100m long), which was used to decontaminate ships’ merchandise. The goods were fumigated outside, using rosemary and juniper, or soaked in salt water in specially-constructed canals, or covered with vinegar. The splendid wood roof has been restored and the original brick herring-bone pavement survives. On the walls are some interesting inscriptions made by sailors in the 16th century. Some 200–300 sailors, merchants, and travellers could also be housed in isolation on Lazzaretto Nuovo, in small cells built against the perimeter wall, each with its own kitchen, fireplace and courtyard (in old prints the island can always be identified by its forest of Venetian chimneys). Today the island is inhabited by herons, cormorants, swamp hawks, kingfishers and egrets. A sea dyke has been constructed to the west, in an attempt to protect it from acqua alta, and a pilot project has been carried out close to the landing-stage which demonstrates that water can be purified by plant biology. The island also has its own website and a full description of what you can see there is given in our Blue Guide Venice. Ironically, research work for the next edition of Blue Guide Venice was interrupted a few weeks ago by the Coronavirus outbreak.

Another island, San Clemente, housed a quarantine station for overseas visitors until it became a large monastery in 1645. The island of Sacca Sessola (pictured above) was occupied by a hospital until 1980. San Lazzaro degli Armeni, and island just off the Lido, was used from 1182 as a leper colony and after occupation by the Benedictines was given to an Armenian Catholic monastery in 1717.

All visitors to Venice will be familiar with the church of Santa Maria della Salute, which stands guard at the entrance to the city, right at the beginning of the Grand Canal. It was built in 1631–81 in thanksgiving for deliverance from the plague of 1630–1, which had claimed the lives of some thirty percent of the population (46,000 people). The Doge visited the Salute annually on 21st November, in a procession across a pontoon of boats from San Marco. Every year on the same date this Venetian festival is still celebrated and crowds throng to the church to receive a votive candle.

by Alta Macadam