Venice: Pure City полностью

There were certain areas devoted to venality. There were brothels in certain favoured streets (some thirty or forty streets altogether) with a fair selection of them in the area of the city known as Castelletto. In one house thirteen prostitutes shared an apartment. The main centre was from the fifteenth century the Campo S. Cassiano, known as Carampane, close to the inns and hostels of the Rialto. Saint Mark’s Square itself was used as a meat market by Venetian mothers—“every mother,” a French traveller of the seventeenth century put it, “that is willing to be rid of her Daughter, carries her thither every Day as to a Market … nor are you oblig’d to buy a Pig in a Poke, for you may view and handle her as much as you will.” In the memoirs of Casanova there is an account of just such a transaction. Casanova met a mother and daughter in a coffee house where, on understanding his intentions, the mother asked for money; her daughter was not to lose her virginity “without making a good profit out of it.” Casanova offered ten sequins for her maidenhood, but wanted to assure himself first that he was not being swindled. And this, in his inimitable manner, he proceeded to do. This was an everyday story of Venetian folk.

The genteel courtesan, or “honest” courtesan, was a Venetian speciality. She was not to be confused with the common prostitute or meretrice. She was deemed to be a “free” woman, cultivated and refined. Coryat, who had become something of an expert in the flesh trade, described the courtesan as “decked with many chaines of gold and orient pearles like a second Cleopatra (but they are very little), divers gold rings beautified with diamonds and other costly stones, jewels in both her eares of great worth.” He recommended that travellers carry with them a herb called “moly” or “Ulysses herb,” a type of garlic, to ward off her attractions. But the merits of the courtesan were not merely carnal. She was disposed to intellectual conversation, to repartee and to poetry. She was considered to be the embodiment of the Renaissance ideal, of sensuality leading to the salon if not to sublimity. She also became the embodiment of a new type of woman, and a new form of female consciousness; the courtesans of Venice were significant figures, achieving a social and even intellectual dominance that other women could not equal. That is why they became notorious all over the European world. If Venice is indeed a female city, then it is best represented by the courtesan.

Sexuality also led to the painter’s studio. The status of the unnamed women in Venetian paintings is not at all certain—although it must be the presumption, for example, that Titian’s nudes were indeed courtesans. Images of the repentant whore, Mary Magdalen, may also have been based upon living originals. The ambassador of Ferrara in Venice revealed in a letter to his sovereign that “I suspect that the girls whom he often paints in different poses arouse his desires, which he then satisfies more than his limited strength permits.”

The city was a market in most commodities, so why not in the human body? You had to be able to see what you were purchasing. “By the light of a candle,” according to one Venetian proverb, “you do not judge women or paintings.” A false mole placed by the nose indicated insatiability; in the cleft of the chin, it signified an adventuress.

The state itself condoned, and encouraged, these venereal practices. The prostitutes of the city had their own guild, and they traded under the auspices of the department of public health. The reasons for this toleration have more to do with money than with morals. The tax revenues from the earnings of prostitution were reputed to be worth twelve warships for the protection of the state. The prostitutes also encouraged what might be now called the tourist trade. The adult males would spend money on other commodities, thus increasing the general prosperity of the city. In the process the women helped to parade the famous “liberty” of Venice. They became part of the “myth of Venice.” When Othello says to Desdemona, “I took you for that cunning whore of Venice,” everyone in the audience would understand the allusion.

There were other social forces at work. It was argued that the presence of prostitutes meant that the more respectable women of the city were safer and purer. It was suggested, too, that the ready availability of women was a means of preserving order among the lower classes. They were also considered to be a guard against homosexuality. In the fifteenth century, in a period of sodomitical excess, the prostitutes of the city were ordered to bare their breasts as they leaned out of the windows. Some of them, however, decided to dress as young men.