We found
ourselves staring at some of the original capitals, arches and corroded
statuary, nearly 1,000 years old, in a museum within the Doge’s museum-like
Palace. There’s nothing to see here, I
thought. I’ll give it one minute, and get out of this place.
I failed to realise that I was about to begin a mental
journey through the ages; one that would reveal many aspects relevant to our
lives today and would produce new perspectives that would awaken new ideas and
emotions. For instance, these old bits of carved stone we were
staring at. They were a conflation of fable and moral, sacred and profane, portraying
beliefs that dominated people’s lives in the other world we were entering.
Arlene among the arches, the lions' mouths and the eight deadly sins.
The
carvings were not mere decoration – they were deeply regarded works inspired by
allegorical religious and political ideas that, unfortunately, were more clear
to people 600 years ago than they are to us today. The crumbling pillars and
arches, deposited in these dark side-chambers, deserve far more viewing than
most of us are willing to give them.
In hindsight I can see they provide a sense of the world that is more
simple, more focused, more deeplyfelt and therefore in some ways more purposeful, more
exciting, than ours. Instead of ‘old ruins’, you are staring at a depiction of
the creation of the universe and the making of Adam. You are absorbing the
value of education and books, as Solomon the Wise clutches two of them and
lectures stone figures such as Pythagoras, Euclid. Aristotle and Cicero.
And you are examining popular morality, portrayed – not as the Ten
Commandments, but in the 800-year-old ‘pop’ version of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Eight, actually, for the sculptors have added Vanity.
Miss Vanity gazes into her mirror to admire herself. Next to her,
pointing to her in disgust, is Envy who realises she herself is no longer an
object of desire. On her right, is Lust, also with a mirror, which allows her
to contemplate her own bared breast.
Pride, Anger,
Avarice, Sloth and Gluttony are here too, concentrating on their own particular
vices. But the most evil, in this medieval world, is Envy, her face distorted,
her head coiled by a serpent as she clutches a dragon. Miss Envy
reminds some sightseers of the biblical injunction not to ‘covet thy
neighbour’s ass’, which they see today as bringing the curse of HIV-Aids.
Lust reminded me of the world’s first scribe,
belonging to the second destprofession on Earth, who interviewed Moses a moment
after he’d received the Tablets. The journalist ran down the mountain to bring
the first news of the event to the anxiously waiting tribes.
“The good news is that only ten things are forbidden.”
“What’s the bad news?” they wailed.
“Adultery is out!” he admonished them.
Well, those rules didn’t last much longer than the Middle Ages. They were strong in King Canute’s day,
though, when he introduced a law stating “If a woman during her husband’s
life commits adultery with another man, her legal husband is to have all her
property, and she is to lose her nose and her ears.” A wife might have managed to confiscate her husband’s
property in that era of recognition of women’s rights. . . but I’m not sure she
was entitled to cut off his nose and ears for such a deed. Anyway, that was English law more than a
thousand years ago. Today morality is very low on the list of priorities of
most of our modern cultures.
(These are the
kind of deep thoughts - religious, sociological, philosophical, political,
profound, profane and mostly inane - that help one to walk through museums for
hours.)
Dropping the bomb Towards the end of our lengthy tour, when I thought I could not walk
another ten steps, we entered the Palace’s 500-year-old armoury with its vast
array of weapons, invented for chopping off heads, bludgeoning, stabbing,
piercing and burning bodies. Even here there were new discoveries. For
instance, I had always believed that the machine gun was invented in Germany in
the 19th century. This was the Maxim, first employed to decimate the Matabele warriors of
Zimbabwe in the 1890s, and by Paul Kruger in the Transvaal in 1895, who used
the Maxim gun to maximum effect in mowing down Jameson’s Raiders on the eve of
the Anglo-Boer War.
But no. Here in the Doge’s
Palace was a 20-barrel gun, mounted on a revolving stand, that caused havoc
with rapid fire nearly four centuries earlier. Here is the father of the Ak-47
that rules a third of the world today. A machine gun in use in the Middle Ages!
A revelation! You could hear a pin drop as a few hardy and weary tourists
tiptoed uncomprehendingly by.
Nor did they know that this palace armoury had escaped obliteration
during the first air raid ever witnessed by mankind. It happened as long ago as
1849. It came from hot air balloonists, flying over Venice and dropping bombs
with set fuses.
It is yet another historic revelation that normally causes distinct
ennui.
The
Golden Stairway All I have described so far was new to me, but the scenes are mere
footnotes to the main purpose of the Palace’s exhibits.
You begin by ascending the Scala d’Oro from the inner
courtyard.
I admit my heart sank as I craned my neck to see the glitteringly
lavish and artistic decorations of the Golden Staircase. This is going to be as oppressive and as
overwhelming as the long walk through the art treasures of the Vatican
galleries, I thought, gloomily.
The stunning art, in fact, is rich in metaphor. Titian, Tinterreto, Veronese, create a paean
to the Serenissima, the serene queen of medieval civilisation. The
wealth of decoration matches all the world’s palaces that are designed to
impress rival nobility. The difference
in the Doge’s Palace is that it was dedicated deep in those Dark Ages 600 year
ago– not to divine kings, barons or
mamelukes – but to a democratic state. The giant chambers of the Major
Council, the Minor Council, the Senate and so on, make this obvious.
But there is another
message which Venice’s designers and artists spelt out. Tinteretto’s famous
decoration of the ceiling of the hallway and waiting room at the top of the
stairs does it best. It depicts the
Doge, of course. But above him, and larger than he, are three figures in the
firmament handing down to him the book, the sword and the scales of Justice.
In the adjoining chamber, redesigned by Palladio and
containing some of the grandest, most lavish paintings known to the world – is
one that depicts “the Legates of Nuremburg Receiving the Laws of Venice.” It is a piquant subject in our own
post-Nuremburg era, but its significance is in the vital role that Law played
in the lives of the people in this Mediterranean State in the Middle Ages.
The dawning
Something dawned on me then that I had never noticed
before: the statue that stands on the
roof of the palace, facing the Lagoon and the sea, is Justice, holding her
scales and sword. And the decoration above what used to be the main entrance to
this great building on Piazza San Marco – standing above the bust of Saint Mark
himself – is also the figure of Justice, displaying the same symbolic accoutrements
of fair laws and retribution.
Within this palace of statuesque Justice are a number
of symbols of St Mark’s famed lions – lion heads, apparently purely decorative
– but with open mouths into which Venetians could slip secret denunciations of
crimes and misdeeds. Each government
department, in fact, had its own bocca de leone 500 years ago. So much for the “new” idea of encouraging
and protecting 21st century whistleblowers who inform on corruption
within their business or bureaucratic ranks.
The law seems to have been protected more efficiently
in the Mediterranean in the old days than they are in the present. For instance, in Venice in 1480, those who
paid taxes had guaranteed rights. ‘No taxation without representation’ was not
a cry for justice, it was a practised creed. (And here I was travelling on a
ship in the 21st century which taxed me a large fee for “service”
without consultation – and another compulsory 18% ‘service’ on every drink I
ordered. What kind of justice was that?)
Deeper reflection on historical precedents made me
appreciate that Venice’s ancient example illustrated yet again how narrow our
‘liberal English education’ has always been. Magna Carta was not the
most significant advance in civil liberties in the Dark Ages. Later, the
guardians of the American Revolution were not making a great leap forward for
mankind. That stuff had long before been old hat to communities around the Med.
who had since lost their freedom several times over. Their loss is our warning.
Liberty. Justice. They were themes that I was to come
across unexpectedly, but delightfully often, in our cruise around the Medieval
Mediterranean.
Arlene among the arches, the lions' mouths and the eight deadly sins.
