V. QUEEN OF THE ADRIATIC

Between Milan and Venice some minor cities lolled in the sun. Bergamo had to be content, in this half century, with painters like Ghislandi, composers like Locatelli. Verona presented operas in her Roman theater, and had an outstanding man in Marchese Francesco Scipione di Maffei. His poetic drama Merope (1713) was imitated by Voltaire, who honorably dedicated his own Mérope to him as “the first who had courage and genius enough to hazard a tragedy without gallantry, a tragedy worthy of Athens in its glory, wherein maternal affection constitutes the whole intrigue, and the most tender interest arises from the purest virtue.”32 Even more distinguished was Maffei’s scholarly Verona illustrata (1731-32), which set a pace for archaeology. His city was so proud of him that it raised a statue to him in his lifetime.—Vicenza, with its buildings by Palladio, was a goal of pilgrimage for architects reviving the classic style.—Padua had a university then especially noted for its faculties of law and medicine, and it had Giuseppe Tartini, acknowledged by all (except Geminiani) to be at the head of Europe’s violinists; who has not heard Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill”?

All these cities were part of the Venetian Republic. So, in the north, were Treviso, Friuli, Feltre, Bassano, Udine, Belluno, Trento, Bolzano; so in the east was Istria; in the south the state of Venezia extended through Chioggia and Rovigo to the Po; across the Adriatic it held Cattaro, Preveza, and other parts of today’s Yugoslavia and Albania; and in the Adriatic it held the islands of Corfu, Cephalonia, and Zante. Within this complex realm dwelt some three million souls, each the center of the world.

1. Venetian Life

Venice herself, as the capital, contained 137,000 inhabitants. She was now in political and economic decline, having lost her Aegean empire to the Turks, and much of her foreign commerce to Atlantic states. The failure of the Crusades; the unwillingness of the European governments, after the victory at Lepanto (1571), to help Venice defend the outposts of Christendom in the East; the eagerness of those governments to accept from Turkey commercial privileges denied to her bravest enemy33—these developments had left Venice too weak to maintain her Renaissance splendor. She decided to cultivate her own garden—to give to her Italian and Adriatic possessions a government severe in law, political censorship, and personal supervision, but competent in administration, tolerant in religion and morals, liberal in internal trade.

Like the other republics of eighteenth-century Europe, Venice was ruled by an oligarchy. In the flotsam of diverse stocks—Antonios, Shylocks, Othellos—with a populace poorly educated, slow to think and quick to act, and preferring pleasure to power, democracy would have been chaos enthroned. Eligibility to the Gran Consiglio was generally restricted to some six hundred families listed in the Libro d’oro; but to that native aristocracy some judicious additions were made from the ranks of merchants and financiers, even though of alien blood. The Great Council chose the Senate, which chose the powerful Council of Ten. A swarm of spies circulated silently among the citizens, reporting to the lnquisitori any suspicious action or speech of any Venetian—of the doge himself. The doges were now usually figureheads, serving to polarize patriotism and adorn diplomacy.

The economy was fighting a losing battle against foreign competition, import dues, and guild restraints. Venetian industry did not expand into free enterprise, free trade, and capitalistic management; it was content with the fame of its crafts. The wool industry, which had fifteen hundred employees in 1700, had only six hundred at the end of the century; the silk industry declined in the same period from twelve thousand to one thousand.34 The glass workers of Murano resisted any change in the methods that had once brought them European renown; their secrets escaped to Florence, France, Bohemia, England; their rivals responded to advances in chemistry, to experiments in manufacture; the Murano ascendancy passed. The lace industry similarly succumbed to competitors beyond the Alps; by 1750 the Venetians themselves were wearing French lace. Two industries flourished: fisheries, which employed thirty thousand men, and the importation and sale of slaves.

Religion was not allowed to interfere with the profits of trade or the pleasures of life. The state regulated all matters concerning ecclesiastical property and clerical crime. The Jesuits, expelled in 1606, had been recalled in 1657, but under conditions that checked their influence in education and politics. Despite a governmental ban on the importation of works by the French philosophers, the doctrines of Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, and Diderot found their way, if only by visitors, into Venetian salons, and in Venice, as in France, the aristocracy toyed with the ideas that sapped its power.35 The people accepted religion as an almost unconscious habit of ritual and belief, but they played more often than they prayed. A Venetian proverb described Venetian morals with all the inadequacy of an epigram: “In the morning a little Mass, after dinner a little gamble, in the evening a little woman.”36 Young men went to church not to worship the Virgin but to examine the women, and these, despite ecclesiastical and governmental fulminations, dressed décolleté.37 The perennial war between religion and sex was giving sex the victory.

The government permitted a regulated prostitution as a measure of public safety. The courtesans of Venice were famous for their beauty, good manners, rich raiment, and sumptuous apartments on the Grand Canal. The supply of cortigiane was considerable, but still fell short of the demand. Thrifty Venetians, and aliens like Rousseau, clubbed together, two or three, to maintain one concubine.38 Despite these facilities, and not content with cavalieri serventi, married women indulged in liaisons dangereuses. Some of them frequented the casinos, in which every convenience was provided for assignations. Several noble ladies were publicly reproved by the government for loose conduct; some were ordered confined to their homes; some were exiled. The middle classes showed more sobriety; a succession of offspring kept the wife busy, and filled her need for receiving and giving love. Nowhere did mothers lavish more ardent endearments upon their children—“Il mio leon di San Marco! La mia allegrezza! Il mio fior di primavera!” (My lion of St. Mark! My joy! My flower of spring!)

Crime was less frequent in Venice than elsewhere in Italy; the arm ready to strike was held back by the abundance and watchfulness of constables and gendarmes. But gambling was accepted as a natural occupation of mankind. The government organized a lottery in 1715. The first ridotto, or gambling casino, was opened in 1638; soon there were many, public or private, and all classes hastened to them. Clever sharpers like Casanova could live on their gambling gains; others could lose the savings of a year in a night. The players, some masked, bent over the table in a silent devotion more intense than love. The government looked on amiably (till 1774), for it taxed the ridotti, and received some 300,000 lire from them in annual revenue.39

Moneyed idlers came from a dozen states to spend their savings, or their declining years, in the relaxed morals and plein-air gaiety of the piazzas and the canals. The abandonment of empire lowered the fever of politics. No one here talked of revolution, for every class, besides its pleasures, had its stabilizing customs, its absorption in accepted tasks. Servants were pliant and faithful, but they brooked no insult or contumely. The gondoliers were poor, but they were the lords of the lagoons, standing on their gilded barks in the confident pride of their ancient skill, or rounding a turn with lusty esoteric cries, or murmuring a song to the sway of their bodies and the rhythm of their oars.

Many different nationalities mingled in the piazzas, each keeping its distinctive garb, language, and profanity. The upper classes still dressed as in the heyday of the Renaissance, with shirts of finest linen, velvet breeches, silk stockings, buckled shoes; but it was the Venetians who in this century introduced to Western Europe the Turkish custom of long trousers—pantaloons. Wigs had come in from France about 1665. Young fops took such care of their dress, hair, and smell that their sex was imperceptible. Women of fashion raised upon their heads fantastic towers of false or natural hair. Men as well as women felt undressed without jewelry. Fans were works of art, elegantly painted, often encrusted with gems or enclosing a monocle.

Every class had its clubs, every street its caffè; “in Italy,” said Goldoni, “we take ten cups of coffee every day.”40 All kinds of amusement flourished, from prize fights (pugni) to masked balls. One game, pallone— tossing an inflated ball about with the palm of the hand—gave us our word balloon. Water sports were perennial. Ever since 1315 a regatta had been held on January 25 on the Grand Canal—a race between galleys rowed by fifty oars and decorated like our “floats”; and the festival was climaxed by a water polo game in which hundreds of Venetians divided into shouting and competing groups. On Ascension Day the doge sailed in glory from San Marco to the Lido on the richly decorated ship of state, the Bucintoro (Bucentaur), amid a thousand other craft, to remarry Venice to the sea.

Saints and historical anniversaries lent their names and memories to frequent holidays, for the Senate found that bread and circuses were an acceptable substitute for elections. On such occasions picturesque processions passed from church to church, from square to square; colorful carpets, garlands and silks were hung from windows or balconies on the route; there was intelligible music, pious or amorous song, and graceful dancing in the streets. Patricians chosen for high office celebrated their victories with parades, arches, trophies, festivities, and philanthropies costing sometimes thirty thousand ducats. Every wedding was a festival, and the funeral of a dignitary was the grandest event in his career.

And there was Carnival—the Christian legacy from the Saturnalia of pagan Rome. Church and state hoped that by allowing a moral holiday they could reduce, for the remainder of the year, the tension between the flesh and the Sixth Commandment. Usually, in Italy, Carnevale extended only through the last week before Lent; in eighteenth-century Venice, from December 26 or January 7 to Martedi Grasso (“Fat Tuesday,” Mardi Gras); perhaps from that final day of permissible meat-eating the festival took its name—carne-vale, farewell to flesh food. Almost every night in those winter weeks the Venetians—and visitors converging from all Europe—poured into the piazzas, dressed in gay colors, and hiding age, rank, and identity behind a mask. In that disguise many men and women laughed at laws, and harlots thrived. Confetti flew about, and artifical eggs were cast around to spread their scented waters when they broke. Pantalone, Arlechino, Columbine, and other beloved characters from the comic theater pranced and prattled to amuse the crowd; puppets danced, rope walkers stopped a thousand breaths. Strange beasts were brought in for the occasion, like the rhinoceros, which was first seen in Venice in the festivities of 1751. Then, at midnight before Ash Wednesday (Mercoledi della Ceneri), the great bells of San Marco tolled the end of Carnival; the exhausted reveler returned to his legal bed, and prepared to hear his priest tell him on the morrow, “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem redieris” (Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return).

2. Vivaldi

Venice and Naples were the rival foci of music in Italy. In its theaters Venice heard twelve hundred different operas in the eighteenth century. There the most renowned divas of the age, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, fought their melodious battles for supremacy; and each from one foot of board moved the world. Cuzzoni sang opposite Farinelli in one theater, Bordoni sang opposite Bernacchi in another, and all Venice was divided between their worshipers. If all four had sung together the Queen of the Adriatic would have melted into her lagoons.

At antipodes to these citadels of opera and joy were the four ospedali, or asylums, in which Venice cared for some of her orphan or illegitimate girls. To give function and meaning to the lives of these homeless children they were trained in vocal and instrumental music, to sing in choirs, and to give public concerts from behind their semi-monastic grills. Rousseau said he had never heard anything so touching as these girlish voices singing in disciplined harmony;41 Goethe thought he had never heard so exquisite a soprano, or music “of such ineffable beauty.”42 Some of the greatest of Italy’s composers taught in these institutions, wrote music for them, and conducted their concerts: Monteverdi, Cavalli, Lotti, Galuppi, Porpora, Vivaldi ...

To supply her theaters with operas, to furnish her ospedali, orchestras, and virtuosi with vocal and instrumental music, Venice called upon the cities of Italy, sometimes of Austria and Germany. She herself was the mother or nurse of Antonio Lotti, organist and then maestro di capella at St. Mark’s, author of indifferent operas but of a Mass that brought tears to Protestant Burney’s eyes; of Baldassare Galuppi, famous for his opera buffe, and for the splendor and tenderness of his operatic airs; of Alessandro Marcello, whose concertos rank high in the compositions of his time; of his younger brother Benedetto, whose musical setting of fifty psalms “constitute one of the finest productions of musical literature”;43 and of Antonio Vivaldi.

To some of us the first hearing of a Vivaldi concerto was a humiliating revelation. Why had we been ignorant of him so long? Here was a stately flow of harmony, laughing ripples of melody, a unity of structure and a cohesion of parts, which should have won this man an earlier entry into our ken, and a higher place in our musical histories.*

He was born about 1675, son of a violinist in the orchestra of the Doges’ Chapel in St. Mark’s. His father taught him the violin, and obtained a place for him in the orchestra. At fifteen he took minor orders; at twenty-five he became a priest; he was called II Prete Rosso because his hair was red. His passion for music may have conflicted with his sacerdotal ministrations. Enemies said that “one day, when Vivaldi was saying Mass, a subject for a fugue came to his mind; he at once left the altar, … and repaired to the sacristy to write out the theme; then he came back to finish Mass.”44 A papal nuncio charged him with keeping several women, and finally (it was said) the Inquisition forbade him to say Mass. Antonio in later years gave quite a different account:

It was twenty-five years ago that I said Mass for … the last time, not due to interdiction, … but by my own decision, because of an ailment that has burdened me since birth. After being ordained a priest I said Mass for a year or a little more; then I ceased to say it, having on three occasions been compelled by this ailment to leave the altar without completing it.

For this same reason I nearly always live at home, and I only go out in a gondola or coach, because I can no longer walk on account of this chest condition, or rather this tightness in the chest [strettezza di petto, probably asthma]. No nobleman invites me to his house, not even our prince, because all are informed of my ailment. My travels have always been very costly because I have always had to make them with four or five women to help me.

These women, he added, were of spotless repute. “Their modesty was admitted everywhere. … Every day of the week they made their devotions.”45

He could not have been much of a rake, for the Seminario Musicale dell’ Ospedale della Pietà kept him through thirty-seven years as violinist, teacher, composer, or maestro di coro— rector of the choir. For his girl students he composed most of his nonoperatic works. The demands were great; hence he wrote in haste and corrected at what leisure he could find; he told de Brosses that he could “compose a concerto faster than a copyist could copy it.”46 His operas were equally hurried; one of them bore on the title page the boast (or excuse) “Fatto in cinque giorni”— Done in five days. Like Handel, he saved time by borrowing from himself, adapting past performances to meet present needs.

In the interstices of his work at the Ospedale he composed forty operas. Many contemporaries agreed with Tartini that they were mediocre; Benedetto Marcello made fun of them in his Teatro alla moda; but audiences in Venice, Vicenza, Vienna, Mantua, Florence, Milan, and Vienna welcomed him, and Vivaldi often deserted his girls to travel with his women through northern Italy, even to Vienna and Amsterdam, to perform as a violinist, or to conduct one of his operas, or to supervise its staging and décor. His operas are now dead, but so are nearly all those composed before Gluck. Styles, manners, heroes, voices, sexes have changed.

History knows of 554 compositions by Vivaldi; of these 454 are concertos. A clever satirist said that Vivaldi had not written six hundred concertos, but had written the same concerto six hundred times;47 and sometimes it seems so. There is in these pieces much sawing of strings, much hurdy-gurdy continuo, an almost metronomic beating of time; even in the famous series called The Seasons (1725) there are some deserts of monotony. But there are also peaks of passionate vitality and wintry blasts, oases of dramatic conflict between soloists and orchestra, and grateful streams of melody. In such pieces48 Vivaldi brought the concerto grosso to an unprecedented excellence, which only Bach and Handel would surpass.

Like most artists, Vivaldi suffered from the sensitivity that fed his genius. The power of his music reflected his fiery temper, the tenderness of his strains reflected his piety. As he aged he became absorbed in religious devotions, so that one fanciful record described him as leaving his rosary only to compose.49 In 1740 he lost or resigned his post at the Ospedale della Pietà. For reasons now unknown he left Venice and went to Vienna. We know nothing further of him except that there, a year later, he died, and received a pauper’s funeral.

His death passed unnoticed in the Italian press, for Venice had ceased to care for his music, and no one ranked him near the top of his art in his land and time. His compositions found a welcome in Germany. Quantz, flutist and composer for Frederick the Great, imported Vivaldi’s concertos, and frankly accepted them as models. Bach so admired them as to transpose at least nine for the harpsichord, four for the organ, and one for four harpsichords and a string ensemble.50 Apparently it was from Vivaldi and Corelli that Bach derived the tripartite structure of his concertos.

Throughout the nineteenth century Vivaldi was almost forgotten except by scholars tracing the development of Bach. Then in 1905 Arnold Schering’s Geschichte des Instrumentalkonzerts restored him to prominence; and in the 1920s Arturo Toscanini gave his passion and prestige to Vivaldi’s cause. Today the Red Priest takes for a time the highest place among the Italian composers of the eighteenth century.

3. Remembrances

From the Indian summer of Venetian art a dozen painters rise up and ask for remembrance. We merely salute Giambattista Pittoni, whom Venice placed only after Tiepolo and Piazzetta; and Jacopo Amigoni, whose voluptuous style passed down to Boucher; and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who carried his colors to England, France, and Germany; it was he who decorated Kimbolton Castle, Castle Howard, and the Banque de France. Marco Ricci makes a more striking figure, since he killed a critic and himself. In 1699, aged twenty-three, he stabbed to death a gondolier who had slighted his paintings. He fled to Dalmatia, fell in love with its landscapes, and caught them so skillfully with his colors that Venice forgave him and hailed him as Tintoretto reborn. His uncle Sebastiano Ricci took him to London, where they collaborated on the tomb of the Duke of Devonshire. Like so many artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he loved to paint real or imaginary ruins, not forgetting himself. In 1729, after several attempts, he succeeded in committing suicide. In 1733 one of his paintings was sold for $500; in 1963 it was resold for $90,000,51 illustrating both the appreciation of art and the depreciation of money.

Rosalba Camera is more pleasant to contemplate. She began her career by designing patterns for point de Venise lace; then (like the young Renoir) she painted snuffboxes; then miniatures; finally she found her forte in pastel. By 1709 she had won such fame that when Frederick IV of Denmark came he chose her to paint for him pastel portraits of the most beautiful or celebrated ladies of Venice. In 1720 Pierre Crozat, millionaire art collector, invited her to Paris. There she was welcomed and feted as no other foreign artist since Bernini. Poets wrote sonnets about her; Regent Philippe d’Orléans visited her; Watteau painted her, and she him; Louis XV sat for her; she was elected to the Académie de Peinture, and offered, as her diploma piece, the Muse that hangs in the Louvre. It was as if in her the soul of rococo had been made flesh.

In 1730 she went to Vienna, where she made pastel portraits of Charles • VI, his Empress, and the Archduchess Maria Theresa. Back in Venice, she so absorbed herself in her art that she forgot to marry. The Accademia there has a roomful of her portraits, the Gemäldegalerie of Dresden has 157, almost all characterized by pink faces, blue backgrounds, rosy innocence, dimpled delicacy; even when she pictured Horace Walpole52 she made him look like a girl. She flattered every sitter but herself; the self-portrait in Windsor Castle shows her in her later years, white-haired, a bit somber, as if foreseeing that she would soon be blind. For the last twelve of her eighty-two years she had to live without the light and color that had been to her almost the essence of life. She left her mark on the art of her time: La Tour may have taken fire from her; Greuze remembered her idealization of young women; her rosy tints—la vie en rose— passed down to Boucher and Renoir. Giovanni Battista Piazzetta was a greater artist, superior to sentiment, disdaining decoration, seeking not so much to please the public as to conquer the difficulties, and honor the highest traditions, of his métier. His fellow craftsmen recognized this, and though Tiepolo had led in establishing (1750) the Venetian Accademia di Pittura e Scultura, it was Piazzetta whom they chose as its first president. His Rebecca at the Well53 is worthy of Titian, and makes even less concession to conventional conceptions of beauty; enough of Rebecca is revealed to stir the savage breast, but her Dutch face and snub nose were not fashioned for Italian ecstasies. It is the man who moves us here, a figure worthy of the Renaissance: a powerful face, an insinuating beard, a feathered hat, a gleam of sly inducement in his eyes—and all the picture a masterpiece of color, texture, and design. It was characteristic of Piazzetta that he was the most respected of Venetian painters in his day, and died the poorest.

Antonio Canale, called Canaletto, is more famous, for half the world knows Venice through his vedute, or views, and England knew him in the flesh. He followed for a while his father’s profession of scene painting for theaters; in Rome he studied architecture; returning to Venice, he applied compass and T square to his drawing, and made architecture a feature of his pictures. From these we know the Queen of the Adriatic as she looked in the first half of the eighteenth century. We note from his Baccino di San Marco54how crowded with vessels was the main lagoon; we watch A Regatta on the Grand Canal,55 and see that life was as full and eager then as it had ever been; and we are pleased to find the Ponte di Rialto ,56 the Piazza San Marco ,57 the Piazzetta,58 thePalazzo dei Dogi,59 and Santa Maria della Salute60 almost as we find them today, except for the rebuilt Campanile. Such pictures were precisely what tourists needed in the cloudy north to remember gratefully the sun and magic of Venezia la Serenissima. They bought and paid, and took their mementos home, and soon England demanded Canaletto himself. He came in 1746, and painted extensive views of Whitehall61 and The Thames from Richmond House; this last, astonishing in its combination of space, perspective, and detail, is Canaletto’s masterpiece. Not till 1755 did he return to Venice. There in 1766, aged sixty-nine, he was still hard at work, and proudly wrote, on The Interior of St. Mark’s, “Done without spectacles.”62 He handed down his technique of precise measurement to his nephew Bernardo Bellotto Canaletto, and his flair for vedute to his “good scholar,” Francesco Guardi, whom we shall meet again.

As Canaletto showed the outer view of the splendid city, so Pietro Longhi revealed the life within the walls by applying genre painting to the middle class. The lady at breakfast en négligé, the abbé tutoring her son, her little girl fondling a toy dog, the tailor coming to display a frock, the dancing master putting the lady through the steps of a minuet, the children wide-eyed at a menagerie, the young women frolicking at blindman’s buff, the tradesmen in their shops, the maskers at Carnival, the theaters, the coffeehouses, the literary coteries, the poets reciting their verses, the quack doctors, the fortunetellers, the vendors of sausages and plums, the promenade in the piazza, the hunting party, the fishing party, the family on its villeggiatura holiday: all the mentionable activities of the bourgeoisie are there, even more fully than in the comedies of Goldoni, Longhi’s friend. It is not great art, but it is delightful, and shows a society more orderly and refined than we should have imagined from the aristocrats of the gambling casinos or the cursing stevedores of the wharves.

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FIG. 49—JOHANN GOTTFRIED SCHADOW: The Quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate. German Information Center.

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FIG. 50—KARL GOTTHARD LANGHANS: The Brandenburg Gate (1788-91). German Information Center,

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FIG. 51—ANGELICA KAUFFMANN: The Vestal Virgin . Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

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FIG. 52—ANGELICA KAUFFMANN: Stanislas Poniatowski . Uffizi, Florence,

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FIG. 53—DANIEL CHODOWIECKI: A Gathering in the Zoological Garden. Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

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FIG. 54—JOHANN HEINRICH TISCHBEIN: Lessing in Youth . National Gallery, Berlin.

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FIG. 55—ANTON RAPHAEL MENGS: Self-Portrait, pastel. Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. Reproduced from Max Osborn, Die Kunst des Rokoko (Berlin: Pro-pyläen Verlag, 1929).

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FIG. 56—ENGRAVING BY KARL BARTH AFTER A DRAWING BY STOBBE: Immanuel Kant.

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FIG. 57—JOHANN FRIEDRICH AUGUST TISCHBEIN: Schiller.

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FIG. 58—ANTON GRAFF: The Actress Korona Schroter. Schlossmuseum, Weimar.

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FIG. 59—JOHANN HEINRICH WILHELM TISCHBEIN: Goethe in the Roman Cam-pagua. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frank-furt-am-Main.

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FIG. 60—ASMUS JAKOB CARSTENS: The Birth of Light, drawing. Schlossmuseum, Weimar.

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FIG. 61—ALEXANDER ROSLIN (1718?-53): Gustavus III. National Museum, Stockholm.

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FIG. 62—The Bridgewater Canal at Barton Bridge (1794). Reproduced from A. S. Turberville, Johnson’s England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); Vol. I.

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FIG. 63—THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH: George III. Windsor Castle. Copyright reserved.

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FIG. 64—SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS: Edmund Burke, 1774. The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

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FIG. 65—ENGRAVING BY JOHN JONES AFTER A PAINTING BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS: Charles James Fox. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953.

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FIG. 66—JOHN HOPPNER: William Pitt the Younger. The Tate Gallery, London.

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FIG. 67—GEORGE ROMNEY: Actress Mary Robinson . Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.

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FIG. 68—ROBERT PINE (1742-90): David Garrick . National Portrait Gallery, London.

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FIG. 69—ENGRAVING BY JOHN HALL (1739-97) AFTER A PAINTING BY REYNOLDS: Richard Brinsley Sheridan . National Portrait Gallery, London.

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FIG. 70—FROM A PRINT AFTER A DRAWING BY CANALETTO: An Inside View of the Rotunda in Ranelagh Gardens. Reproduced from A. S. Turberville, Johnson’s England, Vol. I.

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FIG. 71—SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS: Portrait of the Artist as a Deaf Man. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery, London.

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FIG. 72—CHIPPENDALE AND HAIGH IN THE STYLE OF ROBERT ADAM: Side Table of Gilt and Silvered Wood. Courtesy of Lord Harewood, Leeds. (Photo by Mr. Bertram Unné.)

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FIG. 73—THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH: Mrs. Sarah Siddons. National Gallery, London.

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FIG. 74—ROSALBA CARRIERA: Horace Walpole. Lord Walpole Collection, Wolterton Hall, Norwich,

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FIG. 75—PAUL SANDBY, Strawberry Hill c. 1774, drawing. Reproduced from the original drawing, engraved by E. Rooker.

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FIG. 76—THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH: The Honorable Mrs. Graham. National Gallery of Scotland.

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FIG. 77—ARCHIBALD SKIRVING: Robert Burns . National Gallery of Scotland.

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FIG. 78—HENRY RAEBURN: Lord Newton . National Gallery of Scotland.

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FIG. 79—THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH: The Market Cart . Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery, London.

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FIG. 80—SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement.

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FIG. 81—GEORGE DANCE (1741-1825): James Boswell. National Portrait Gallery, London.

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FIG. 82—SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS: Laurence Sterne. Reproduced with permission. (Photograph courtesy of the University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, London.)

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FIG. 83—GEORGE ROMNEY: William Cowper . National Portrait Gallery, London.

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FIG. 84—STUDIO OF REYNOLDS: Oliver Goldsmith . National Portrait Gallery, London.

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FIG. 85—MME. VIGÉE-LEBRUN: Marie Antoinette . Reproduced from Max Osborn, Die Kunst des Rokoko.

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FIG. 86—SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS: Dr. Samuel Johnson . Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery, London.

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FIG. 87—JEAN-ANTOINE HOUDON: The Artist’s Wife . Louvre, Paris. Reproduced from Max Osborn, Die Kunstdes Rokoko .

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FIG. 88—JEAN-BAPTISTE PIGALLH: Denis Diderot . Louvre, Paris. From Max Osborn, Die Kuvst des Rokoko.

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FIG. 89—HOUDON: Voltaire. Comédie Française. (Photo Jean Roubier.)

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FIG. 90—HOUDON: Mme. de Sérilly . Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.

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FIG. 91—HOUDON: Mirabeau.

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FIG. 92—CLODION (CLAUDE MICHEL): The Intoxication of Wine (Nymph and Satyr ), terra-cotta statue. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913.

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FIG. 93—JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID: The Oath of the Horatii . Louvre, Paris.

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FIG. 94—HOUDON: Diana , bronze. Louvre, Paris. Reproduced from Max Osborn, Die Kunst des Rokoko .

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FIG. 95—NATTIER: Beaumarchais . Private Collection. Reproduced from French Art of the 18th Century , ed. Stéphane Faniel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957).

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FIG. 96—HOUDON: George Washington . Louvre, Paris.

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FIG. 97—MME. VIGÉE-LEBRUN: Portrait of the Artist and Her Daughter , Louvre, Paris.

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FIG. 98—ENGRAVING BY J. E. NOCHEZ AFTER A PAINTING BY ALLAN RAMSAY: Jean Jacques Rousseau . The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Edith Root Grant, E. W. Root, and Elihu Root, Jr., 1937.

4. Tiepolo

The Venetian who made Europe believe for a moment that the Renaissance had returned was Giambattista Tiepolo. Any summer’s day will see a procession of students and tourists entering the Residenz of the Bishop of Würzburg to see the staircase and ceiling frescoed by Tiepolo in 1750-53; these are the peak of Italian painting in the eighteenth century. Or look at The Trinity Appearing to St. Clement in the National Gallery at London; observe its skillful composition, its precise drawing, its subtle handling of light, its depth and glow of color; surely this is Titian? Perhaps, if Tiepolo had not wandered so, he might have joined the giants.

Or, possibly, he was handicapped by good fortune. He was the last child of a prosperous Venetian merchant who, dying, left a substantial patrimony. Handsome, bright, frolicsome, Gian “soon acquired an aristocratic scorn of anything plebeian.”63 In 1719, aged twenty-three, he married Cecilia, sister of Francesco Guardi. She gave him four daughters and five sons, of whom two became painters. They lived in “a fine house” in the parish of Santa Trinità.

His talent had already bloomed. In 1716 he exhibited his Sacrifice of Isaac,64 crude but powerful; he was visibly at this time under Piazzetta’s influence. He studied Veronese too, and assumed a maniera Paolesca of sumptuous raiment, warm colors, and sensuous lines. In 1726 the Archbishop of Udine invited him to adorn his cathedral and palace. Tiepolo chose themes from the story of Abraham, but the treatment was not quite Biblical: Sarah’s face, emerging from a Renaissance ruff, is a corrugation of wrinkles revealing two vestigial teeth; the angel, however, is an Italian athlete with an engaging leg. Tiepolo seems to have felt that in a century that was beginning to laugh at angels and miracles he could let his humor play with reverend traditions, and the amiable archbishop indulged him. But the artist had to be careful, for the Church was still one of the chief sources of pictorial commissions in the Catholic world.

The other source was the layman with a palace to be adorned. In the Palazzo Casali-Dugnani at Milan (1731) Gian told in frescoes the story of Scipio. These were not typical Tiepolo, for he had not yet formed his characteristic style of figures moving easily and loosely in undefined space, but they showed a skill that made a stir in northern Italy. By 1740 he found his forte, and achieved what some65 have thought his chef-d’oeuvre—the ceiling and banquet hall of the Palazzo Clerici in Milan. Here he chose, as vehicles for his fancy, The Four Parts of the World, The Course of the Sun, and Apollo with the Pagan Gods. He was happy to leave the somber world of Christian legend and disport himself on Olympian heights where he could use the Greco-Roman divinities as figures in a realm free from the laws of motion, the chains of gravity, and even the academic rules of design. Like most artists, whose moral code melts in the heat of their feelings, he was at heart a pagan; moreover, a fine body might be the product of a resolute and formative soul, and be therefore itself a spiritual fact. For thirty years now Tiepolo would send gods and goddesses—garbed in gauze and nonchalantly nude—frolicking through space, chasing one another among the planets, or making love on a cushion of clouds.

Back in Venice, he returned to Christianity, and his religious pictures absolved his mythologies. For the Scuola di San Rocco he painted a canvas, Hagar and Ishmael, notable for the fine figure of a sleeping boy. In the Church of the Gesuati—renamed by the Dominicans Santa Maria del Rosario—he pictured The Institution of the Rosary. For the Scuola dei Carmini, or School of the Carmelite Monks, he depicted The Madonna of Mount Carmel; this almost rivaled Titian’s Annunciation. For the Church of St. Alvise he made three pictures; one of these, Christ Carrying the Cross, is crowded with powerful figures vividly portrayed. Tiepolo had paid his debt to his native faith.

His fancy moved more freely on palace walls. In the Palazzo Barbaro he showed The Apotheosis of Francesco Barbaro —now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For the Palace of the Doges he portrayed Neptune Offering to Venus the Riches of the Sea. To the Palazzo Papadopoli he contributed two delightful snatches of Venice in Carnival—The Minuet and The Charlatan. And (topping all his palace pictures in Venice) he embellished the Palazzo Labia with frescoes telling the story of Antony and Cleopatra in magnificent scenes brilliantly realized. A fellow artist, Girolamo Mengozzi-Colonna, painted the architectural backgrounds in a burst of Palladian splendor. On one wall the meeting of the two rulers; on the opposite wall their banquet; on the ceiling a wild array of flying figures representing Pegasus, time, beauty, and the winds—these blown about by jolly puffing imps. In The Meeting Cleopatra descends from her barge in dazzling raiment revealing twin mounds calculated to lure a tired triumvir to fragrant rest. In the still more effulgent Banquet she drops a pearl without price into her wine; Antony is impressed by this careless wealth; and on a balcony musicians strum their lyres to double the jeopardy and triple the intoxication. This masterpiece, recalling and rivaling Veronese, was one of the pictures that Reynolds copied in 1752.

Such work in the grand style raised Tiepolo to a height visible across the Alps. Count Francesco Algarotti, friend of Frederick and Voltaire, spread his name through Europe. As early as 1736 the Swedish minister in Venice informed his government that Tiepolo was just the man to decorate the royal palace in Stockholm; “he is full of wit and zest, easy to deal with, bubbling over with ideas; he has a gift for brilliant color, and works at a prodigious speed; he paints a picture in less time than it takes another artist to mix his colors.”66 Stockholm was already beautiful, but it seemed so far away.

In 1750 a closer invitation came: Karl Philipp von Greiffenklau, Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, asked him to paint the Imperial Hall of his newly built Residenz, or administrative palace. The proffered fee moved the aging master. Arriving in December with his sons Domenico, twenty-four, and Lorenzo, fourteen, he found an unexpected challenge in the splendor of the Kaisersaal, which Balthasar Neumann had designed; how could any picture catch the eye amid that radiance? Tiepolo’s success here was the crown of his career. On the walls he depicted the story of the Emperor Frederick Bar-barossa (who had kept tryst with Beatrice of Burgundy at Würzburg in 1156), and on the ceiling he showed Apollo Bringing the Bride; here he reveled in an ecstasy of white horses, gay gods, and the play of light upon prancing cherubs and filmy clouds. On a slope of the ceiling he represented The Wedding: handsome faces, stately figures, flowered drapery, garments recalling Veronese’s Venice rather than medieval styles. The Bishop was so pleased that he enlarged the contract to include the ceiling of the grand staircase, and two altarpieces for his cathedral. Over the majestic stairway Tiepolo pictured the continents, and Olympus—the happy hunting ground of his fancy—and a lordly figure of Apollo the Sun God circling the sky.

Rich and weary, Giambattista returned to Venice (1753), leaving Domenico to finish the assignment at Würzburg. Soon he was elected president of the Academy. He was of so amiable a disposition that even his rivals were fond of him, and called him II Buon Tiepolo. He could not resist all the demands made upon his waning time; we find him painting in Venice, Treviso, Verona, Parma, and doing a large canvas commissioned by “the court of Muscovy.” We should hardly have expected another major work from him, but in 1757, aged sixty-one, he undertook to decorate the Villa Val-marana near Vicenza. Mengozzi-Colonna drew the architectural setting, Domenico signed some pictures in the guest house, Giambattista deployed his brush in the villa itself. He chose subjects from the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Orlando furioso, the Gerusalemme liberata. He gave his airy illusionism full rein, losing color in light, and space in infinity, letting his gods and goddesses float at their ease in an empyrean raised above all care and time. Goethe, marveling before these frescoes, exclaimed, “Gar fröhlich und brav” (Very joyful and bold). It was Tiepolo’s last riot in Italy.

In 1761 Charles III of Spain asked him to come and paint in the new royal palace at Madrid. The tired Titan pleaded age, but the King appealed to the Venetian Senate to use its influence. Reluctantly, aged sixty-six, he set out once more with his faithful sons and his model Christina, again leaving his wife behind, for she loved the casinos of Venice. We shall find him on a scaffold in Spain.

5. Goldoni and Gozzi

Four figures, paired, stand out in the Venetian literature of this age: Apostólo Zeno and Pietro Metastasio, both of whom wrote librettos that were poetry; Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, who fought over Venetian comedy a comedy that became Goldoni’s tragedy. Of the first pair Goldoni wrote:

These two illustrious authors effected the reform of Italian opera. Before them nothing but gods, devils, machines, and wonders were to be found in these harmonious entertainments. Zeno was the first who conceived the possibility of representing tragedy in lyrical verse without degradation, and singing it without producing exhaustion. He executed the project in a manner most satisfactory to the public, reflecting the greatest glory on himself and his nation.67

Zeno carried his reforms to Vienna in 1718, retired amiably in favor of Metastasio in 1730, and returned to Venice and twenty years of peace. Metastasio, as Goldoni noted, played Racine to Zeno’s Corneille, adding refinement to power, and bringing operatic poetry to an unprecedented height. Voltaire ranked him with the greatest French poets, and Rousseau thought him the only contemporary poet who reached the heart. His real name was Pietro Trapassi—Peter Cross. A dramatic critic, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, heard him singing in the streets, adopted him, rechristened him Metastasio (Greek for Trapassi), financed his education, and, dying, left him a fortune. Pietro ran through the fortune with poetic license, then articled himself to a lawyer who exacted the condition that he should not read or write a line of verse. So he wrote under a pseudonym.

At Naples he was asked by the Austrian envoy to provide lyrics for a cantata. Porpora composed the music; Marianna Bulgarelli, then famous under the name of La Romanina, sang the lead; all went well. The diva invited the poet to her salon; there he met Leo, Vinci, Pergolesi, Farinelli, Hasse, Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti; Metastasio developed rapidly in that exciting company. La Romanina, thirty-five, fell in love with him, twenty-three. She rescued him from the toil of the law, took him into a ménage à trotswith her complaisant husband, and inspired him to write his most famous libretto, Didone abbandonata, which twelve successive composers set to music between 1724 and 1823. In 1726 he wrote Siroe for his inamorata; Vinci, Hasse, and Handel independently made operas of it. Metastasio was now the most sought-after librettist in Europe.

In 1730 he accepted a call to Vienna, leaving La Romanina behind. She tried to follow him; fearing that her presence would compromise him, he secured an order forbidding her to enter Imperial territory. She stabbed her breast in an attempt at suicide; this effort to play Dido failed, but she lived only four years more. When she died she left to her unfaithful Aeneas all her fortune. Stricken with remorse, Metastasio renounced the legacy in favor of her husband. “I have no longer any hope that I shall succeed in consoling myself,” he wrote, “and I believe that the rest of my life will be savorless and sorrowful.”67a He sadly enjoyed triumph after triumph till the War of the Austrian Succession interrupted operatic performances in Vienna. After 1750 he repeated himself aimlessly. He had exhausted life thirty years before his death (1782).

Opera, as Voltaire had predicted, drove the tragic drama from the Italian stage, and left it to comedy. But Italian comedy was dominated by the commedia dell’ arte— the play of improvised speech and characterizing masks. Most of the characters had long since become stereotyped: Pantalone, the good-humored, trousered bourgeois; Tartaglia, the stammering Neapolitan knave; Brighella, the simpleton schemer caught in his own intrigues; Truffaldino, the genial, carnal bon vivant; Arlecchino—our Harlequin; Pulcinello—our Punch; diverse towns and times added several more. Most of the dialogue, and many incidents in the plot, were left to extempore invention. In “those improvised comedies,” according to Casanova, “if the actor stops short for a word, the pit and the gallery hiss him mercilessly.”68

There were usually seven theaters operating in Venice, all named after saints, and housing scandalously behaved audiences. The nobles in the boxes were not particular about what they dropped upon the commoners below. Hostile factions countered applause with whistling, yawns, sneezes, coughs, cockcrows, or the meowing of cats.69 In Paris the theater audience was mostly composed of the upper classes, professional men, and literati; in Venice it was chiefly middle-class, sprinkled with gaudy courtesans, ribald gondoliers, priests and monks in disguise, haughty senators in robe and wig. It was hard for a play to please all elements in such an olla-podrida of humanity; so Italian comedy tended to be a mixture of satire, slapstick, buffoonery, and puns. The training of the actors to portray stock characters made them incapable of variety and subtlety. This was the audience, this the stage, that Goldoni strove to raise to legitimate and civilized comedy.

Pleasant is the simple beginning of his Memoirs:

I was born at Venice in 1707. .. . My mother brought me into the world with little pain, and this increased her love for me. My first appearance was not, as is usual, announced by cries; and this gentleness seemed then an indication of the pacific character which from that day forward I have ever preserved.70

It was a boast, but true; Goldoni is one of the most lovable men in literary history; and despite this exordium his virtues included modesty—a quality uncongenial to scribes. We may believe him when he says, “I was the idol of the house.” The father went off to Rome to study medicine, and then to Perugia to practice it; the mother was left at Venice to bring up three children.

Carlo was precocious; at four he could read and write; at eight he composed a comedy. The father persuaded the mother to let Carlo come and live with him in Perugia. There the boy studied with the Jesuits, did well, and was invited to join the order; he declined. The mother and another son joined the father, but the cold mountain air of Perugia disagreed with her, and the family moved to Rimini, then to Chioggia. Carlo went to a Dominican college in Rimini, where he received daily doses of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae. Finding no drama in that masterpiece of rationalization, he read Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence; and when a company of actors came to Rimini he joined it long enough to surprise his parents in Chioggia. They scolded him, embraced him, and sent him to study law at Pavia. In 1731 he received his degree, and began to practice. He married, and “was now the happiest man in the world,”71 except that he came down with smallpox on his wedding night.

Gravitating back to Venice, he succeeded in law, and became consul there for Genoa. But the theater continued to fascinate him; he itched to write, and to be produced. His Belisarius was staged on November 24, 1734, with inspiring success; it ran every day till December 14, and his old mother’s pride in him doubled his joy. Venice, however, had no taste for tragedy; his further offerings in that genre failed, and he sadly took to comedy. Nevertheless he refused to write farces for the commedia dell’ arte; he wanted to compose comedies of manners and ideas in the tradition of Molière, to put upon the stage no stock characters frozen into masks, but personalities and situations drawn from contemporary life. He chose some actors from a commedia troupe in Venice, trained them, and produced in 1740 his Momolo cortesan {Momolo the Courtier). “The piece was wonderfully successful, and I was satisfied.”72 Not quite, for he had compromised by leaving all the dialogue unwritten except for the leading part, and by providing roles for four of the traditional masked characters.

He advanced his reforms step by step. In La donna di garbo {The Woman of Honor) he for the first time wrote out action and dialogue completely. Hostile companies rose to compete with his, or to mock his plays; the classes that he had satirized, like thecicisbei,plotted against him; he fought them all with success after success. But no other author could be found to furnish his troupe with suitable comedies; his own, too often repeated, forfeited favor; he was compelled, by the competition, to write sixteen plays in one year.

He was at his peak in 1752, hailed by Voltaire as the Molière of Italy. La locandera (The Mistress of the Inn) had in that year “a success so brilliant that it was … preferred to everything else that had yet been done in that kind of comedy.” He prided himself on having observed the “Aristotelian unities” of action, place, and time; otherwise he judged his plays realistically: “Good,” he said, “but not yet Molière.”73 He had written them too rapidly to make them works of art; they were cleverly constructed, pleasantly gay, and generally true to life, but they lacked Molière’s reach of ideas, force of speech, power of presentation; they remained on the surface of character and events. The nature of the audience forbade him to try the heights of sentiment, philosophy, or style; and he was by nature too cheerful to plumb the depths that had tortured Molière.

Once at least he was shocked out of his genial humor and touched to the quick: when Carlo Gozzi challenged him for theatrical supremacy in Venice, and won.

There were two Gozzi involved in the literary turmoil at this time. Gasparo Gozzi wrote plays that were chiefly adaptations from the French; he edited two prominent periodicals, and began the revival of Dante. Not so genial was his brother Carlo: tall, handsome, vain, and ever ready for a fight. He was the wittiest member of the Accademia Granelleschi, which campaigned for the use of pure Tuscan Italian in literature, rather than the Venetian idiom which Goldoni used in most of his plays. As the lover orcavalière servente of Teodora Ricci, he may have felt the sting when Goldoni satirized the cicisbei. He too wrote Memoirs— the white paper of his wars. He judged Goldoni as one author sees another:

I recognized in Goldoni an abundance of comic motives, truth, and naturalness. Yet I detected poverty and meanness of intrigue; … virtues and vices ill-adjusted, vice too often triumphant; plebeian phrases of low double meaning; … scraps and tags of erudition stolen Heaven knows where, and brought to impose upon a crowd of ignoramuses. Finally, as a writer of Italian (except in the Venetian dialect, of which he showed himself a master) he seemed not unworthy to be placed among the dullest, basest, and least correct authors who have used our language.... At the same time I must add that he never produced a play without some excellent comic trait. In my eyes he had always the appearance of a man who was born with a natural sense of how sterling comedies should be composed, but who—by defect of education, by want of discernment, by the necessity of satisfying the public and supplying new wares to the poor comedians through whom he gained his livelihood, and by the hurry in which he produced so many pieces every year to keep himself afloat—was never able to fabricate a single play which does not swarm with faults.74

In 1757 Gozzi produced a volume of verses expressing kindred criticisms in “the style of good old Tuscan masters.” Goldoni replied in terza rima (Dante’s medium) to the effect that Gozzi was like a dog baying at the moon—“come il cane che abbaja la luna.”Gozzi retorted by defending the commedia dell’ arte from Goldoni’s strictures; he charged that Goldoni’s plays were “a hundred times more lascivious, indecent, and harmful to morals” than the comedy of masks; and he compiled a vocabulary of “obscure expressions, dirty double-entendres, … and other nastinesses” from Goldoni’s works. The controversy, Molmenti tells us, “threw the city into a kind of frenzy; the case was discussed in playhouses, homes, shops, coffeehouses, and streets.”75

Abate Chiari, another dramatist stung by Gozzi’s Tuscan asp, challenged him to write a better play than those he had condemned. Gozzi answered that he could do this easily, on even the most trivial themes, and by using only the traditional comedy of masks. In January, 1761, a company at the Teatro San Samuele produced his Fiaba dell’ amore delle tre melarancie (Fable of the Love of the Three Oranges)— merely a scenario that showed Pantalone, Tartaglia, and other “masks” seeking three oranges believed to have magic powers; the dialogue was left to be improvised. The success of this “fable” was decisive: the Venetian public, living on laughter, relished the imagination of the tale and the implied satire of Chiari’s and Goldoni’s plots. Gozzi followed with nine otherfiabe in five years; but in these he supplied a poetic dialogue, thereby in part admitting Goldoni’s criticism of the commedia dell’ arte. In any case, Gozzi’s victory seemed complete. The attendance at the San Samuele remained high, that at Goldoni’s Teatro Sant’ Angelo fell toward bankruptcy. Chiari moved to Brescia, and Goldoni accepted an invitation to Paris.*

As his farewell to Venice Goldoni produced (1762) Una delle ultime sere di Carnevale (One of the Last Evenings of Carnival). It told of a textile designer, Sior Anzoleto, who with a heavy heart was leaving in Venice the weavers whose looms he had so long provided with patterns. The audience soon saw in this an allegory for the dramatist regretfully leaving the actors whose stage he had so long supplied with plays. When Anzoleto appeared in the final scene, the theater (Goldoni tells us) “rang with thunderous applause, amid which could be heard, … ‘A happy journey!’ ‘Come back to us!’ ‘Don’t fail to come back to us!’”76 He left Venice on April 15, 1762, and never saw it again.

In Paris he was engaged for two years in writing comedies for the Théâtre des Italiens. In 1763 he was sued for seduction,77 but a year later he was engaged to teach Italian to the daughters of Louis XV. For the wedding of Marie Antoinette and the future Louis XVI he composed in French one of his best plays, Le Bourru bienfaisant (The Benevolent Boor). He was rewarded with a pension of twelve hundred francs, which was annulled by the Revolution when he was eighty-one years old. He solaced his poverty by dictating to his wife his Memoirs (1792)—inaccurate, imaginative, illuminating, entertaining; Gibbon thought them “more truly dramatic than his Italian comedies.”78 He died on February 6, 1793. On February 7 the National Convention, on a motion by the poet Marie-Joseph de Chénier, restored his pension. Finding him in no condition to receive it, the Convention gave it, reduced, to his widow.

Gozzi’s victory in Venice was brief. Long before his death (1806) his Fiabe had passed from the stage, and Goldoni’s comedies had been revived in the theaters of Italy. They are still played there, almost as frequently as Molière’s in France. His statue stands on the Campo San Bartolommeo in Venice, and on the Largo Goldoni in Florence. For, as his Memoirs said, “humanity is everywhere the same, jealousy displays itself everywhere, and everywhere a man of a cool and tranquil disposition in the end acquires the love of the public, and wears out his enemies.”79

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