BOOKS
Grandeur and decay
J. G. Links
Venice: The Greatness and the Fall John Julius Norwich (Allen Lane pp. 400, £12) Ruskin and Venice Jeanne Clegg (Junction Books pp. 233, £12.50) The Stones of Venice John Ruskin, ed. Jan Morris (Faber:pp. 239, £12.50) The London palaces of the English noblemen have gone, but you pass their sites on the tourist bus. Somerset, Norfolk, Essex, Northumberland, Devonshire — landowners all, taking their names from their land and their power from the king who gave it to them. From the Venice tourist bus down the Grand Canal you can still see most of the noblemen's palaces. The owners have gone but their names remain — Querini, Contarini, Morosini, Foscari — businessmen all, keeping their own names since they had no land, their power deriving from their money since they had no king. Instead, these merchant princes created their own doge, generally a docile, often a senile, member of their class and went about their own business and the affairs of state. He reigned but they ruled. While the English barons were fighting John, their king, the Venetians were conzocting a business deal with the crusaders which led to their doge becoming Lord of a Quarter and Half a Quarter of the Roman Empire — not that they were very interested in the Roman Empire, except insofar as it provided them with ports through which they could safely expand their business. By 1400, instead of living like sea-birds, as they had been described 1,000 years earlier, they had built themselves 'a city of graceful arcades and gleaming walls, veined with azure and warm with gold' (Ruskin, of course) and they were still living under more or less the same system of government. It was a republic, but had nothing to do with equality. It was a self-perpetuating oligarchy based on the acquisition of wealth, and those inside its circle trusted no one outside. But they did trust one another.
Such is the triumphal story John Julius Norwich told us in Venice: The Rise to Empire. Now comes The Greatness and the Fall; the present volume is the same story carried to its inevitable conclusion and, for once, history almost seems to have a shape to it.
The tempo of the book is soon set and it is the tempo of a Bond film. Nothing could delay the Golden Age for Venice except the threat from Milan and, with the sudden death of the unspeakable Gian Galeazzo Visconti, that was removed (his death was only the first of a long series of interventions by Nature to put the protagonists on a snake or a ladder). Carmagnola appears, the condottiere who would fight for anyone who could afford to pay him (until the other side offered more, and only until August, when he retired for the winter). This absolved the Venetians from having to maintain a standing army so that they could concentrate on their navy which had the advantage of being available for business use when there was no war.
All too soon the Greatness ceases to be a matter of course and the reader senses that the Fall has begun. Not on 8 May 1418 as Ruskin was able to pinpoint it. Nor in 1497 on that black day for Venice when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope (taking to India the syphilis Columbus had only just brought from the Caribbean to Europe). The Fall, we are gently but firmly led to conclude, began with a change of aspiration rather than of circumstance, although one doubtless led to the other. In time, the thoughts of the merchant princes turned from mercantilism to princeliness. As their trading posts fell gradually to the Turks, two more lost for each one recovered, their eyes turned to the mainland, to west rather than east. Instead of stocks and ships the repository of their wealth became land, and in land their investment lost its liquidity. Worse was to follow. The taste for land turned their heads; its ownership became respectable and trade no longer the occupation of a gentleman. They forgot that without trade they would never have become gentlemen. And when the time came that they lost their land, they lost everything, above all the will to preserve what their forefathers had bequeathed them.
Of course it was not as simple as that. Nothing was simple in a State that took nine elections or ballots to produce 41 electors who could take weeks to elect a doge who, on election, was virtually deprived of power; a State, moreover, in which the 2,000 noblemen who owned practically everything allowed ten men to do whatever they chose to do, in absolute secrecy, but only for a year; a State which could order brothers to remain single, except for one who should produce an heir on whom the family wealth could be concentrated. Yet for centuries this extraordinary government was the only stable one in Europe.
Its ups and downs, for there were plenty of both over 400 years, make a thrilling story and Lord Norwich has the gift of historical perspective, as well as clarity and wit. Few can tell a good story better than he, or carry his reader more deftly over the occasional stony ground. If it is a gossipy story so much the better, but inside him is a scholar who will warn us that vol. 128 of Patrologia Latina does not entirely confirm it. Those privileged to read his annual miscellany Crackers (a circle now to be enlarged by its reissue) will know his taste for the bizarre, the curious or entertaining sidelight. Erasmus appears briefly and finds the food at the Alduses uneatable; Filippo Tron might have been doge had he not 'simply burst' during the elections; a general is struck on the nose by a snowball and victory plucked from his grasp.
Always the reader is reminded that he is reading about a city that still exists, one that contains, as well as the stage on which so many of its scenes were enacted, the monuments that commemorate its heroes' deeds; some of them inspire informed but original comments from the author. Next time we are in Venice we must certainly go to see Francesco Morosini's embalmed cat: we may forgive its owner for blowing up the Parthenon.
Hard on the heels of Robert Hewison's 1978 Louisville exhibition, Ruskin in Venice, comes Jeanne Clegg's book of the same title, dealing with Ruskin's 11 visits to the city. The author has certainly done her homework, as her 800-odd source notes testify, and she has found some nuggets by Mr Ruskin senior which were crowded out of Cook and Wedderburn: what those two threw away a poor man could live on. Her discovery that The Stones of Venice is 'less consistent than criticism has recognised' makes one wonder what critics ever recognised consistency in the book. Not Ruskin, whose later comments on it show him at his most endearing CA great deal of this talk is flighty and some of it fallacious,' he noted on the chapter about Torcello, but he did not change a word). A whiff of the thesis, perhaps, but some splendid old photographs and a must for those who love reading about Ruskin and Venice while hesitating on the brink of the Stones itself.
Jan Morris, on the other hand, takes us over the brink with a sumptuously illustrated abridgement of The Stones of Venice to which she has contributed an introduction of dazzling stylishness. This encapsulates all that most readers will want of Ruskin's 450,000 words, although at the cost of omitting almost all the first volume (largely irrelevant) in which he showed us how to build for ourselves in simple language; the penultimate chapter, with its final destruction of the 'pestilent art of the Renaissance' has also had to go. There is plenty left, though, for us to learn what Ruskin was driving at if we are ever to do SO. But we do not read Ruskin for his judgment, any more than we go to the opera for the story line. It is his quirkiness, his power to shock us into thinking for ourselves and, above all, the majesty and music of his prose that enslave us — the very qualities he so despised us for admiring while we all missed the substance'.
John Julius Norwich's book may lack the Purple passages of Ruskin (although he is Perfectly capable of writing in Gibbonian vein when he wants to). It also lacks the flighty talk and, as far as this unlettered reader can judge, the fallaciousness (although Napoleon did set foot in Venice — in 1815). It is excellently printed and proof-read, sensibly illustrated, and well worth waiting four years for since the first volume appeared. We are fortunate indeed that he has now so triumphantly completed a task which has daunted English historians for so long.
Previous page
