Venice: Pure City полностью

The city was thereby also known as a centre of homosexuality and of homosexual prostitution. It was considered by many to be an “eastern” vice, and of course Venice was deeply indebted to eastern culture. It was believed that the men of Venice were, in the words of one eighteenth-century critic, “enervated and emasculated by the Softness of the Italian Musick.” The tenderness and luxuriance of the city were considered to be corrupting. But there was also the ambiguous status of land and water, of frontier and mainland. Anyone of weak sensibility might thereby be aroused or stimulated into transgressing ordinary boundaries. The love of boys is reflected in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, where the elderly Aschenbach is lured to his death by the sight of Tadzio. In the course of this novella Mann hits the perfect note to depict the sensuous genius of the city: “our adventurer felt his senses wooed by this voluptuousness of sight and sound, tasted his secret knowledge that the city sickened and hid its sickness for love of gain, and bent an ever more unbridled leer on the gondola that glided before him.”

Venice appeals to those of ambiguous sexuality—Proust, James, “Baron” Corvo, Diaghilev, and many others. As the French writer, Paul Morand, put it in Venises, “in Venice homosexuality was nothing more than the most subtle of the fine arts.” In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, it was the most feared and punished of all sex crimes. The shops of apothecaries, and pastry-makers, were denounced as centres of this criminal activity; the porticoes of certain churches, and the schools of gymnastics, were also considered to be dangerous. Venice was full of dark passageways, in any case, where Sodom might rise again. It was believed that homosexuality might “engulf” the city. It was believed that it was against nature and natural law, but then was not this also the case of Venice itself?

The city, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was being characterised as a whore. It was known for its apparent “decadence” and for its mercantile greed. The Queen of the Sea was transmogrified into “the whore of the Adriatic,” just as Byzantium was once derided as “the whore of the Bosphorus.” There seems to be something deeply troubling about cities of luxury and of sensation. In sixteenth-century London there was a brothel known simply as “Venice.” The city was a decrepit courtesan, sporting its baubles of gold. The futurist, Marinetti, described it at the beginning of the twentieth century as “steeped in exotic lewdness.” The English poet, Rupert Brooke, depicted it in a “tawdry and sensual middle-age.” It was perhaps inevitable. A place that continually asserts that it is a sacred centre, a city of the Virgin Mary, will inevitably incur disgrace and disillusion. That reputation has since changed for the better. Is it a matter of degradation that Venice has become a museum city? There is no reason to believe so.

The pervasiveness, or at least the acceptance, of prostitution may have led to a change in public morals. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at least, there was a perceptibly more indulgent culture. When the women of Venice wore their dresses so low that their breasts were exposed, they may have been copying the example of their frailer sisters. The discipline of Venice, essential to its early survival, had relaxed.

In particular the presence of the confidant or lover, the cicisbeo, became noticeable in patrician circles. He became the intimate partner of the married woman; he, rather than her husband, escorted her to festivities or sat with her in the opera box. He dined with her, and travelled with her. He became her devoted servant. There was no remonstrance from the patrician husband. In fact the husband encouraged such a liaison; a wife without a gallant would lose prestige. Certain marriage contracts stipulated their presence in the household. The relationship may not have been a sexual one. It is possible that many of the cicisbei were in fact homosexual. But it was a sign that the desires of women were not altogether ignored.

The sensuousness of the women of Venice was the stuff of travellers’ tales. “The women kiss better than those of any other nation,” Byron wrote, “which is notorious, and is attributed to the worship of images, and the early habit of osculation induced thereby.” So Romanist piety is associated with profligacy. This was nowhere more evident than in the reputation of Venetian nuns.