A City without Land
All cities are immense collective and evolving artifacts, the products of the human imagination transforming the land through buildings, roads, and shaped spaces. There is at least one city, however, Venice, where this relationship between buildings and land is fundamentally different because the basic ingredient of the land is missing; Venice is built on water, a floating city and the connection to water is the primary consideration in the act of planning. This alienation from land makes it a completely architected place, a completely human-made environment. Another way of putting it is that Venice is probably the first city to have no direct connection to agriculture, which socially made it a city without peasants, run by an elite that was not drawn from a landed nobility. Commerce will assume a disproportionate role in the city's formation and administration, and the state will be managed like a large corporation overseeing many collective aspects of labor and dwelling. Venice is situated on a cluster of closely packed islands about 10 miles from the shore. The beauty of Venice both as a collection of fine buildings and as a complete urban organism is so striking, so seductive, such a lesson for the rest of humanity, that most of the world's cultural organizations have been mobilized to contribute to an international project to save Venice from sinking irretrievably into the Lagoon. The gentle lapping of the waves was historically the source of Venice's good fortune but promises also to be the source of her eventual demise. Venice was not only the first truly mercantile city of Europe, but after its waning influence in the 17th century as a principal player in world events, it became the first city in the world to gain a substantial percentage of its income from tourism, an industry that now employs one out of every nine jobs world-wide. The great wealth accumulated through trade in Venice and reinvested in her buildings, the unique sense of solidarity encouraged by the Venetian state that influenced the coherent aesthetic of the city, and the fantastic shimmering of the atmosphere reflected and refracted by the canals have contributed to the creation of a place that seems unreal and hallucinatory, like a mirage in the midst of the sea. As a result we can report that the actual city, unable to grow beyond its cluster of islands, treasured as the world's patrimony, and crowded with a steady stream of tourists all year round has become an immense museum where time has stopped somewhere in the 18th century. One of the things that makes Venice seem so much of another time is of course the absense of automobiles, which gives it an uncanny silence commanded only by the human voice and the rippling of water.
The Origins of Venice
< The myth of Venice's foundation is placed on March 24, 421--that's a dozen years after the Sack of Rome by Alaric. The city believed it was founded by noble Romans fleeing the mainland which had recently been invaded by the Lombards and other Gothic tribes. Venetians were from the start an amphibious people, completely integrated with their small boats for fishing, commerce, transport of lumber, and piracy. Their access to lumber will make them valued by traders in the east; their naval prowess will turn them into the watchdogs of the Adriatic. The Byzantine empire, which was losing its power in Italy in the 7th century, appointed Venice's first Doge (coming from Dux, or leader) in 697, relying on Venice as a mercenary to defend the interests of the Byzantine empire along the Italian shores of the Adriatic, it is for this reason that Venice was the only large Italian city that did not come under the jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire of the Germans. The city remembered its primary moment of synoikismos in a different manner: according to legend the occupants of each island got in their boats and converged in the lagoon to elect the first Doge by popular fiat. This mythical event was reconsecrated every March 24, in one of the state's many festivals of civic ritual, when the Doge was taken in the famous Bucintoro ship, surrounded by thousands of small boats to a deep part of the Lagoon where he would toss a ring blessed by the city's archbishop into the water to reconfirm the city's marriage with the sea. The exceptional reliance on sea-trade led to a new division of labor unlike any found in earlier cities, as Venice had more easily identified collective interests. There was a large mariner class, a proto-industrial boat building class, prostitutes (who may have numbered as much as 10% of the population), a socially mobile merchant class, an aristocratic elite (who gained their superior wealth through trade) drawn from only 150 families, corporate institutions and state intervention to sponsor and defend shipping investments, and a mixed republic with a monarch and elected officials that was the most stable governing system in the world from the 12th century until the fall of the republic in 1797. Located at the top of the Adriatic between sand bars protecting the Lagoon and the delta of the Brenta River, the site of the city was built up where the islands emerged at lowtide, in a relatively flat sea bed with tides which can vary from three to six feet in difference of level. The city's structure is gathered around the great serpentine curve of the Grand Canal, the 3 mile long course of which was determined by the river-like deep channels running between the islands. Mariner's maps from the 14th century show how detailed a knowledge the Venetians had of the water surrounding them. The first permanent settlements on the islands were Benedictine monasteries, and the sites were chosen for their seclusion and safety like other self-sufficient monasteries appearing throughout the Mediterranean in the 6th century. The monastery was a theocratic antidote to the city, an anti-city, that we will consider in more detail in the next lecture. Monasteries almost always attracted dependent communities and as the population grew the islands were given more definition by dredging the canals between them and shoring up the edges. Each island by the year 1000 had become a separate community with its own parish church. The autonomy of each island is still quite evident today because the streets of one do not line up with those of the next. Most early communication between the islands was done by water vehicle, and it can be assumed that Ventians were as comfortable popping around in their boats and gondolas as Houstonians are in their cars and motorbikes. The bridges connecting the islands were built much later, first out of wood and then later in the 14th and 15th centuries in stone. The only bridge crossing the Grand Canal, the Rialto Bridge, was built in 1175 and remained a wooden structure until the late 16th century bridge we know today.
Venice's Dual System: Figure-Ground, Figure-Acqua
The 60 islands that make up Venice are somewhat like the independent herats in Cairo, each having an internal order that is specifically for a single community. But in general the buildings and the urban settings of Venice are remarkably more open by comparison to the Arab Islamic city. Every island usually has an open piazza or campo, accessible from the water, and usually another one serving its interior. The passage ways are often intricate and indirect and as introverted as those of Cairo--some streets dead-end to the water--and generally, although some streets follow the course of canals, there are no direct routes possible by foot in Venice. The city on foot is a labyrinth. The only direct routes are by water. Most of the facades of the buildings are incredibly porous, with large openings on the ground floor, where merchandise is stored and negotiations take place, and tall windows and balconies occupying most upper stories, often decorated in dainty lace work mullions. This Venetian openness as a building tradition, was both a function of the strongly mercantile society open for business but also reflected the self-regulating nature of the republic where members of the commonwealth felt obliged to be accountable in the interests of civic harmony. By the 12th century, the city's 60 islands had been reorganized into six administrative units called sestrieri. Looking at the sestriere of San Marco you can discern the boundaries of the canals of the dozen or so islands that make up this district. Le Corbusier and many other 20th century architects, not to mention theorists since at least the time of Leonardo da Vinci, have invoked Venice as the great lesson for urban organization because of its dual system of traffic. The water courses between the islands are usually more directly connected and provide quick passage by gondola or cargo-boat-- the Grand Canal with its width and unimpeachable directionality is like a watery freeway. The streets for pedestrians are more for local foot traffic and do not connect conveniently, a much slower and laborious path--a social path for insiders but not one for goods or trade. So the circuits of paths serve separate functions. For Le Corbusier these dual layers of circulation justified the separation of pedestrian and automobile traffic, he declaims in his polemical fashion when presenting the plan for Antwerp "I call on Venice as my witness," using an uncharacteristically historicist strategy to sell his plan. The separation of traffic became one of the key Modernist tenets of replanning cities, and we know that traffic jams were a major problem in most large cities long before the automobile--for instance there is an edict in ancient Rome confining the access of wheeled traffic in the city to the hours before sunrise and after sunset. For Harvey Wiley Corbett, an influential New York architect, a denser version of Venice was imagined for the skyscraper districts of Manhattan in the 1920s--the black tops of the cars relegated to three lower levels described as being as beautiful as the flowing of the canal water, looked over by elegant porticoes and elevated crosswalks for pedestrians. And then of course there's downtown Houston which is a sort of variation on the dual circulation of Venice without realizing it, especially when it rains, with a 7 mile underground tunnel system that provides a network of footpaths independent of the city's grid for fast-moving traffic at ground level. But why is it that when traffic is separated in the modern city it is so unlike Venice? Why does it have such a deadening effect on the city? The scale of Venice is obviously different; it makes this dual traffic system more integrated and visible, always retaining the human dimension and the possibility to move at any time from one mode of travel to the other. The figure-ground, and the figure-acqua are in equilibrium. And of course as an urban process, Venice arrived at its solution not through an integral plan but through the adaptative process of centuries of adjustment. The true lesson of Venice is thus not so much the act of separating traffic as the art of integrating the experience of both types of traffic, of keeping things delightfully amphibious, so that the pedestrian never feels alienated from the water vehicles and vice versa.
Piazza San Marco
when traffic is separated in the modern city it is so unlike Venice? Why does it have such a deadening effect on the city? The scale of Venice is obviously different; it makes this dual There are three major nodes in Venice: the civic pole gathered around the Doge's Palace and Church of San Marco; the commercial center in the area of the Rialto; and the industrial zone of the Arsenal where the ship-building took place. The state was involved in the planning of all three areas, which began to take shape in the late 12th century. If we follow the production of the Piazza San Marco we can observe how each change to the space registers a historical transition. Until about 1000, Venice was a minor trading city with not much connection abroad. One of the city's great acts of civic pride was to abscond in the 9th century with the relics of St. Mark from Alexandria, the so-called "Holy Theft", establishing in the city's legend its origins as pirates. There was a Byzantine church dedicated to the Greek saint San Teodoro on the site of St. Mark's that demonstrate the city's reliance on Constantinople. The Bishop and the Doge both resided at this time in the area called Castello at the northwestern tip of the archipelago. In the 11th century, Venice is awarded trading privileges by Constantinople to areas in the eastern mediteranean and thus the city will emerge as the favored traders with Cairo, the gateway to the spices and silks of the east. The two largest cities of the Mediterrenean, Constantinople and Cairo, will play a strong role in the Venice's development, and this is visible in the style and typology of Venetian buildings. The move in the 11th century to separate the Doge's residence from the bishop's coincides with the political redefinition of the Doge from an appointed monarch of unlimited power to an elected monarch who must be answerable to a series of elected bodies. The move of the palace is accompanied by the decision to build a basilica next to it, the sort of relationship that the imperial palace of the Byzantines had with Hagia Sophia-- but also the sort of relationship that the Fatimid caliph's palace had with the Al-Azhar mosque in the center of Cairo. The Basilica of St. Mark's was not the cathedral of the city, but expressly known as the palatine church, serving for the mixture of sacred and secular ceremonies modelled on those of Constantinople, with solemn processions of the political hierarchy and parading of the sacred spoils being regular events. The plan of St. Mark's, a cruciform with a dome over each quadrant and a fifth one over the crossing was almost identical to the Church of the Holy Apostles built as Constantine's mausoleum in Constantinople. This is the formula that many Greek and Byzantine churches followed, but not one commonly found in Italy or the rest of Europe. The shape of the tall double shelled domes topped with their tumescent lanterns is unlike any Christian precedent and seems closer in spirit to the sort of domes found in Cairo than the saucer shapes of Hagia Sophia. The interior, rendered in golden mosaics, is expressly Byzantine, with the shimmering surfaces dissolving the great mass of the structure. The closest example would be the mosaics in Ravenna at Sant'Apollinare in Classe. The facade of St. Mark's, of which I don't have a good close in photo, also demonstrates an attempt to erode the impact of the mass with the rippling effect of sets of columns, statues of saints and angels, and crusts of filigreed decoration inlaid with mosaics, what John Ruskin described in one of the great hyperbolic passages of architectural history: "as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell and the sea nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst." The adjacent palace grew according to a castle typology, initially with fortified corners. It overlooked on the south side a basin, called the Darsena, which was the first public arsenal, or site for ship-building. On the other side was a compound for the city's mint and other administrative functions that was likewise fortified with corner towers, and here was the state's granary--a most important function for a city that imported all of its food and would eventually subsidize the price of bread. One of the towers of this block, the closest one to St. Marks was extended 180 feet vertically to serve the entire city as a lighthouse and bell tower, the Campanile. The Campanile should remind us of vertical elements found in non-Christian cities--the great Pharos lighthouse in Alexandria, the minaret towers in North Africa--as well as a later Washington Monument, the great obelisk rising above the nation's capitol. The campanile soars to three times the height of most of Venice's evenly spread fabric, creating an insistant point of orientation. The Doge's palace was rebuilt several times due to fires and needed enlargements. As the nature of the government became more dependent on council meetings the space of the palace had to accomodate the regular assemblies of the great council, the Senate, the council of ten, and judiciary committees. The impressive cube of the Doge palace demonstrates qualities of openness that could only be found in this city--the ground level is surrounded by open porticoes, and above it the more delicate perforated screen of an open loggia wraps around the entire building. The floor above this is relieved only be large windows, which are not perfectly alligned and indicate the position of the great chamber halls for the council and the senate--the surface of the planar walls however are covered with diamond patterns of masonry made from pink and white marble. A triumphal balcony is placed just slightly off of center for dogal appearances. Finally the roof line is decorated with finely carved triangular finials that are more reminiscent of Mamluk patterns than anything found in Christiandom. The monumental scale and the overall inflexible presence created by the cube are softened by the carpet-like surface of the patterning, the flaws of unalligned windows, the arabesque cornices, the unmatched columns. The impressive mass of the palace, yet its unusual openness, were signs of the role it played in insuring the stability of the state--solid yet penetrable. Inside the Doge was joined by nine other elected officials, one each from the sestrieri and three from the senate, to form the council of Ten for daily policy decisions. They were held responsible to the Senate which was composed of 300 rotating members drawn from the patriciate. The palace also had to accommodate meetings of the sovereign assembly or Great Council, whose members were limited to 1100 in the 14th century, or about 1% of the total population. From this elite pool of the patriciate the republic would democratically choose its officials. In order to guarantee a lack of corruption the process for electing a Doge was made into an elaborate mixture of lottery and election: 30 electors were appointed and then their number was reduced to 9 by drawing lots, these 9 would vote for 40 candidates, whose number would be reduced to 12, the 12 would then choose 25 candidates whose number was reduced to 9, who choose 45 candidates, reduced by lot to 11 who select the Doge from the final group of 41 candidates. During the short reign of Sebastiano Ziani from 1172-78 three important moves were made for the area of San Marco: the palace was rebuilt to fill the outline it has today, the darsena inlet was filled to create the Piazzeta, and the arsenal was removed to property donated by his family to the state to keep the industrial process with its noise and filth away from the government center. He also was responsible for planning the Rialto bridge and for dividing the city into Sestrieri, so Ziani, although he is little remembered today, was actually one of the great planners of all times. At the edge of the Piazzetta were two columns, one decorated with the winged lion of St. Mark, the other with the sword of St. Teodoro, one the local saint, the other still respectful of the cults of Byzantium. The space between the columns became the locus of public justice where prisoners were brought for execution, their name and crime prominently written on plaques to serve both as a lesson to wrong-doers, but more importantly to show that the system of justice was accountable and carried out in the open. The piazzetta itself took on a particular function as the open space reserved for the nobility, known as the broglio. Here you would find only the black robed patricians, who were required to wear the same, grievous costume so that no one would appear higher than the other. The broglio, from which we get our term "imbroglio" was the space of information for the republic, much like the agora had been for those who negotiated in ancient Athens. The first crusade to retake Jerusalem was organized in 1095 and among other things upset the balance of trade in the mediterranean. Venice did not participate but nonetheless was rewarded with the unexpected benefit of special access rights to the coast of Palestine. The Fourth Crusade was organized in 1204 and was exploited by Venice who provided ships under the condition that the Crusaders first assist Venice in retaking the coastal cities of Dalmatia. Then instead of heading for the Holy Land, the Venetians pursuaded the Christian knights to head north to Constantinople, which up until this point had determined the trading fortune of Venice, and very ungratefully conquer the city, installing a puppet emperor and dividing the city's power. Venice awarded itself three eigths of the Byzantine empire, which it controlled for the next 60 years, and the crusade never made it to the Holy Land. The bronze horses that once proudly rose over the main portal of St. Marks, were removed from the Hippodrome in Constantinople and displayed as a prominent spoil (the horses by the way had been earlier removed from the quadriga on top of Trajan's arch in Constantinople, who had in turn transported them from Nero's arch in Rome, who had borrowed them from a Hellenistic monument in Corinth.) Today they have been substituted by copies due to corrosion of the originals by salt air and pollution. Once free of the power of Constantinople, Venice soared in productivity and the area of St. Mark's demonstrated this new confidence. The piazza in front of St. Mark's was also doubled and the series of buildings that now characterize the space were added in the 13th century and rebuilt in the 15th and 16th centuries. On the side directly across from the Doge's palace were the houses built for the the nine Procurators--the highest elected officials, who like the Doge were elected for life and given a house by the state. The procurators were in charge of public finance and their compound was adjacent to the mint, the treasury, and the granaries. Their houses were rebuilt in the 16th century to the design of Jacopo Sansovino. What is called the Procuratie Vecchie, was rebuilt in 1512 by the architect Mauro Codussi as state sponsored apartments to be rented by the nobility. On the ground floor was an arcade with shops and above were two levels of dwelling space overlooking the piazza. The kitchens and servant spaces were put on the rear of the building. The uniformity of the facade, which is in effect a curtain wall of continuous windows separated only by colonnettes is remarkable--a horizontal highrise--as is the program for collectively organized housing. The republican mandate for the look of equality created a facade that was analagous to the uniform rows of nobles marching in the annual Doge's processions around the piazza. It is interesting to see how subtly Sansovino rebuilt the Procuratie Nuove, the allignment of this second row of buildings was pushed toward the canal to add a wedge of space and make the whole appear more regular. The building pulled back from the campanile which at this time became an independent structure to be read against the regular backdrop of Sansovino's new buildings. The base of the campanile was at this moment provided with a classical loggia for important ceremonies and fanfares. And the shops that ran from the campanile to the water's edge on the Piazzeta were torn down and replaced by the most classically inspired building of its time, the Marciana Library. Facing the Loggia of the campanile where the Doge's palace abutts the basilica was the Porta della Carta, the gate of paper, through which written suits were delivered, built at the end of the 15th century, which led into the courtyard of the palace and the stairway of the Giants built in the 16th century. The L-shaped space of piazza San Marco and the adjacent piazzetta, lined with the formidable buildings of the Venetian republic has a psycho-sensual dimension to it that distinguishes it from the regular shaped spaces of Hellenism that it might vaguely resemble. Though it has repeated elements, like regularly spaced colonnades, there is always a flaw in the pattern, a crink in the axis, a part, like the campanile that cannot be brought into the perfect order of rational geometric figures. The emotional display of the facade of the basilica with its assembly of religious and secular trophies is balanced by the dispassionate repetition of elements in the government office buildings. The architecture is consciously open, even in its most austere moments. It is in this setting, a public space on the order of the Agora in Athens, or the republican forum in Rome, that the civic officials will go on parade dressed in their regalia, carrying the symbols of the republic's independence on six occasions during the year as a signal to themselves and the populace of the continuing prosperity, internal peace, and openness of the city.
The Arsenal
Venice of course did not have walls. The water of the lagoon was her best fortification, and the fleet of ships was her method of security. Ship building was the State's greatest source of income and its best defense. The new arsenal, begun under Ziani and expanded during the next three centuries to occupy about 10% of the city's space, was organized around a large basin with long drydock spaces, surrounded by long warehouse buildings. Over 16,000 people were employed by the various industries of the Arsenal-- that's about 10% of the population, all working in the same place and for the same boss. So close was the arsenal to the state that the elite of the workers became the honor guard of the Doge, accompanying him as oarsmen in the Bucintoro. Some of the long buildings were specialized in making rope which required long spaces. Others in producing pitch, another essential ingredient for naval production. Venice was already a major center for collecting timber from the Alps and the Dalmatian coast. The state sponsored the industry and in turn leased or sold the ships out to Venetian merchants or used them for defense purposes. The complicity of the state with the mercantile activities of her leading citizens was so well established that it led to the first system of public debt, whereby citizens had the confidence to lend the state money at interest for the production of public works, or defense spending. Associated with the arsenal was a collection of row houses built for retired mariners, the first example of state sponsored housing, built sometime in the 14th century. The gateway into the Arsenal district closest to San Marco also had the distinction of emulating a triumphal arch, an nuncharacterisitic use of Roman architecture for Venice. The production of rope, pullies, masts and all the parts that went into making the tall ships and the galleons of the Venetian fleet, required a clear division of labor close to the sort that will arise in the 18th century with the industrial revolution--the only things missing were steam and steel. The ability of Venice to monopolize trade relations with the middle east and the efficiency of her naval production brought unparalleled wealth to the city. It grew to the size of 120,000 and unlike any other city of its times was able to avvert noticable internal conflicts between wealthy nobles on the one hand and between classes on the other. Rome as we saw, defused her class conflicts with the welfare strategy of "Panem et circenses" but the history of Rome is riddled with power struggles at the executive level that led to open strife. The famous Nike riots of 526 in Constantinople, in which mob factions revolted against the Emperor's police force and set fire to the palace compound, destroying the first Hagia Sophia, demonstrate the fragility that all large cities with an urban proletariat are subject to. The Mameluk rulers of Cairo, we mentioned last time, subsidized the price of grain to avoid their masses from rioting. The institution of an anona, or dole program, is thus one of the recurrent methods of very large cities to control the lower end of the population. Venice likewise had a subsidy for bread and was the only large city in Europe in pre-industrial times that did not undergo bread riots. But Venice also kept itself peaceful on the upper end of the social ladder as well through the self-regulating mechanisms of its aristocracy. There was no feuding tradition between the patrician families, who may have competed for markets but never for land rights. The city was ruled by the rich, it was an oligarchy of clearly defined elites, but the ruling class was kept in line by the rigid obligations to the state.
Venetian Fondechi
Along the Grand Canal are the magnificent fondeghi palaces belonging to the Venetian patriciate. They are all similar in scale and in detail-- a few like Ca Dario and Ca d'Oro stick out as slightly more precious in their design, but what is so striking about the facades that line the Grand Canal is how similar they are. This was intentional as Manfredo Tafuri has pointed out--there was a great deal of peer pressure on aristocratic patrons to conform to the prevailing mediocritas--the happy medium--in the production of their palaces. They did not want to build something that would reveal them to be overreaching or seem superior to other members of their class. Thus a certain well-healed uniformity, like the black robe that all were obliged to wear to public events, characterized their palaces. A section of the foundation of a typical palaces shows that all Venetian houses are held up on deepdriven wooden piles. The major entry to the house is from the water, a generous stairway usually allows for the difference in level of the tides. At ground level there is a generous foyer for doing business and areas off of this for storage. A formal courtyard emits light from the other side and in pre-15th centuury buildings is sued for the external stair. The dwelling begins on the piano nobile (what we would call the second floor) which often repeats the space of the foyer now as a grand salon. There was much resistance to the adaption of renaissance style facades with classical columns by the patricians who were aware of the new style sweeping the wealthy commissions in Rome and Florence. The byzantine splendor of Ca d'Oro and Ca Dario show the survival of gothic and eastern=inspired decorations well into the Renaissance period. Those who sustained the republic preferred a simple treatment of the facade; or if it was fancy one that remembered the traditions of San Marco and the Doge's palace. A few palaces such as Palazzo Corner, done for a pro-papal family, broke the code with Roman Renaissance elements and eventually made it a norm for successive generations.
The Rialto
From the fondego palace a wealthy merchant would usually commute by boat to the Rialto district. The Rialto, with its bridge built under Ziani in 1175 was the financial center of Venice. It was a large market place mostly for specialty goods--the bulk goods were sold on the outer docks of the city. There were areas for gold, jewelry, silks and fine cloth,a nd money changing. The nobles, who were all involved in mercantile activities, met every morning in a loggia near the bridge. Merchants would come to the rialto not only to trade but to learn news of their investments and arrange to make deals on joint ventures. It was in this way much like Wall street. Most Venetian companies began as family businesses with one brother staying in the city while the other was sent out either to buy or to sell. Marco Polo's family was arranged this way. Eventually the businesses acquired new partners as joint stock companies. Banking and insurance followed the development of these businesses. In the Rialto we also have the beginning of the Giro bank, which is a system based on promisary notes that does not require the transfer of literal money but only that of theoretical money. These are the basic ingredients of capitalism, especially when one considers the industrial nature of medieval Venice, however most of the rest of Europe was still dominated by the feudal system, and we can only really refer to this as protocapitalism. After the fire of 1514, the city fathers rejected a scheme by Fra Giocondo to rebuild the district on a plan of concentric buildings with a central axis, an idea thought as being alien, or perhaps too classical to the republican tradition. The Rialto was rebuilt as a series of long skinny buildings raised on porticoes. Among the traders who came to the Rialto were foreign communities, who like foreign groups in Constantinople and Cairo lived in separate compounds where they administered themselves according to their laws and customs. Across from the Rialto was the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the German compound, one of the principal trading groups, valued for the metal they brought. Their compound burnt down in the early 16th century and was rebuilt by the state: it is like a good hotel with 72 apartments arranged around a court. About 200 yards down the Grand Canal was the Fondaco dei Turchi, the Turkish Ottoman compound built in the 15th century. The Jews lived both on the Island of Giudecca and in a compound known as the ghetto, a Venetian word meaning foundary. This was the site of a foundary. The Ghetto was not originally an oppressive place and Jews lived relatively unregulated until the conclusion of the Council of Trent in 1563, at which time gates were put on the ghetto and the inhabitants locked up each night and forced to wear identifying clothing, usually yellow hats.
Religious institutions
Just as religious institutions like the mosque and madresa create a soft armature for Cairo, so Christian religious institutions give structure to the otherwise carpet-like pattern of Venice. In the 13th century, the mendicant preaching orders were given permission to build in the less settled districts of the city and today the churches of the Franciscans, the Frari, and the church of the Dominicans, SS Giovanni e Paolo are important nodes beyond the civic spaces. It is curious to observe that there is usually a small piazza in front of most Venetian churches and a larger one to its side or behind it where local markets were held. Another specifically Venetian institution were the Scuole, or schools, which were charitable brotherhoods, or confraternities, meant to administer good works. Their members were composed of both rich and poor and generally were determined by trade or craft. Although nobles were admitted to the scuole, they were not allowed to become elected officials. The elected officials of the scuole participated in the public ceremonies of the state and it was a way of redistributing representation outside of the privileged pool of the patrician nobility. On the feast of thier patron saint they would usually go in procession through the city. Their meeting houses were always attached to a church and often given elegant architectural solutions and ambitious painting cycles on the interiors. The Scuola di San Marco forms an interesting angle with the front facade of S. Giovanni and Paolo. Much of the architecture built in Venice after the 15th century had to follow a polite strategy of insertion as there was no empty space left to build on. The tightly knitted neighborhoods of the islands had evolved into a total work of art that permitted minor incremental changes but resisted monumental reorganization. Only a state project like the customs house which was laid on top of the tip of the Dorso Duro area looking back to St. Mark's across the Grand Canal was allowed a certain brash demeanor. Most new buildings, like Palladio's churches at the end of the 16th century, were set into the city like angular masks against the soft fabric of medieval buildings. With the shift to Atlantic trade in the 16th century, and the rise of European nation states, Venice as a citystate was less important in the world system. The wealth of the previous centuries was used by her aristocracy to obtain huge estates in the Venetian territory where the great villas, some of them the work of Palladio, spread their classical compositions on the landscape. Although these estates were generally very successful economically they did not lead to the sort of reinvestment either in financial institutions or productive industries that was to lead to greater development elsewhere. The wealth of the city was thus relatively dissipated and so was her power. During the 17th century Venice became the playground of Europe, where the first public operahouses and theaters were established with regular performances, and where wealthy visitors from abroad would come to participate in the art of the city. The carnival season was often extended beyond the terms of its ecclesiastical dates and many people took to moving through the city dressed in masquerade. Venice was a city that was totally the fabrication of man, a place saturated with mystery because of its intricate components, and it thus came to inhabit the collective imagination as a special province of freedom, liesure, and transgression. The grandeur of the grand canal and the civic spaces of St. Marks are cheerful reminders that big plans can be carried out without perfect geometry. To repeat Venice in any way, as has been tried in so many places, like the homonymous Venice, California, is to forget the irrepeatable historical process. Venice borrowed certain spatial and built traditions from ancient Rome, Byzantium, and Cairo, and then generated its own rules of form through community settlement, achieving a remarkable level of artistic cohesion because of its republican consciousness, and both things were preconditions for the stunning outcome of her urbanism. That Venice today, or even by the 18th century, no longer corresponds to the productive demands of the city, has been a good excuse for a holiday and has locked the place into a permanent condition of melancholy, the great city that is no longer allowed to be great except as a historic fantasy.
Sources:
Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, New Brunswick, 1980.
Fredrick Lane, Venice a Maritime Republic, Baltimore, 1973.
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, The World System A.D. 1250-
1350, New York, 1989.
Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine, Cambridge,
1989.