A Venetian Affair (2 page)

In those happier years the house of Consul Joseph Smith, a rich English merchant turned art collector, was one of the busiest and most interesting places on the Venetian scene—a meeting point of fashionable artists, intellectuals, and foreign travelers. It was in Smith’s art-filled drawing room at Palazzo Balbi, on the Grand Canal, that Andrea met Giustiniana sometime in late 1753. He was twenty-four; she was not yet seventeen. Andrea was tall and vigorous—handsome in a Venetian sort of way, with the long, aquiline nose that was typical of many patrician profiles. His sharp mind was tuned to the new ideas of the Enlightenment, and he was possessed of the natural self-confidence that came with his class— assured as he was of his place in the Venetian oligarchy. His elders already looked upon him as one of the brightest prospects of his generation. And indeed he must have seemed quite the dashing young man to a girl eight years his junior—wise beyond his age and so much at ease in Consul Smith’s rather intimidating
salon.
But Giustiniana too stood out in those assemblies. Behind that innocent, awestruck gaze was a lovely girl brimming with life. She was bright, alert, and possessed of a quick sense of humor. Andrea was instantly taken with her. She was so different from the other young women of his set—familiar, in a way, for after all she was a Venetian born and raised, yet at the same time very distinctive, even a little exotic, not only on account of her English blood but also because of her unique character.

Andrea and Giustiniana met again and again at Consul Smith’s. The physical attraction between them was plain to see: soon they could not bear to be apart. But something deeper was going on, too, more magical and mysterious: it was the blending of two souls that were very different and nevertheless yearned for each other. “My passion for him swallowed everything else in my life,”
⁵
Giustiniana recalled many years later. Andrea too was overwhelmed by his feelings in a way he had never been before.

Alas, the earliest part of their love story has remained blurred. If they wrote letters to each other during that time—as is probable— those letters have never surfaced. But in the later correspondence there are echoes of their first enchanted days together, as they chased each other in the rooms of Palazzo Balbi searching for a darkened corner where they could hold each other and kiss in the full rapture of new love.

From the very beginning the love story of Andrea and Giustiniana bore a note of defiance toward the outside world. Carried along by the sheer power of their feelings, they pursued a relationship in the face of social conventions that were clearly stacked against them. It is true that by the mid–eighteenth century, as pre-Romantic stirrings spread through Venetian society, young men and women who loved each other were beginning to challenge the rigid customs of the aging Republic. The number of clandestine marriages, secretly sanctioned by the Church, saw a considerable increase in those years. But the costs of breaking the rules were still very high. As one historian has put it, “Any patrician who attempted a secret marriage put himself quite inevitably in direct conflict with his family and institutions. By bringing dishonor on himself he renounced any political career and lost the privilege of seeing his own children recognized as members of the patriciate. He might lose all economic assistance from the family and be disinherited.”
⁶

The clandestine marriages that did take place mostly involved impoverished patricians or members of the lesser nobility, who did not have much to lose by defying their elders. To Andrea, with his family history, his education, his strong sense of duty toward the Republic, the idea of secretly marrying Giustiniana seemed completely irrational. Apart from the shame it would have brought on his family, it was hard to see how the marriage would have survived from a practical point of view. Where would they have lived? What would they have lived on? Despite her youth and her intense emotions, even Giustiniana was realistic enough to see that if they fought the time-honored customs of the Republic they would be crushed.

A few months into their affair, Giustiniana’s mother stepped in. Mrs. Anna had one pressing task, which was to find a suitable husband for her eldest daughter. This meant she had to keep Giustiniana at a safe distance from hot-blooded young Venetian patricians—who might try to seduce her for the sake of intrigue and entertainment but would never marry her—while she looked out for a sensible if less glamorous match. She could not allow Giustiniana to wreck her plans with a relationship that in her eyes had no future and would only bring dishonor upon the family. So in the winter of 1754 she told Andrea never to call on Giustiniana at their house again and forbade the two lovers from seeing each other.

Mrs. Anna’s ban seemed to spell the end of their forbidden love. But their timeworn letters have continued to surface over the years—in the archives in Padua, in the attic at Palazzo Mocenigo, at Randolph Macon College—to reveal that in fact this was only the beginning of a remarkable love story.

CHAPTER One

Early in the evening Andrea caught up with Giustiniana at the theater. She was radiant in her brocaded evening cape, and the anxious way she was looking around for him made her seem lovelier than ever. She smiled as she saw him, and they exchanged a few signals from a safe distance, apparently without raising Mrs. Anna’s suspicions. After the play, Andrea followed mother and daughter to the Ridotto, keeping close to the walls of the narrow streets and casting nervous glances ahead. In the gambling halls, among the late-night crowd of masked men and women hovering around the faro tables, he had a much harder time avoiding Mrs. Anna as she flitted in and out of the shadows in the candlelit rooms. He was terrified she might suddenly come upon him and make a horrible scene. Unnerved by all the difficulties, he finally gave up and went home without having had his cherished moment alone with Giustiniana.

That night he hardly slept, shifting restlessly in his bed, wondering if he had abandoned the Ridotto too abruptly and not made it sufficiently clear to Giustiniana why he was leaving the scene. The next morning he rose early and wrote to her at once:

My beloved,

I am very anxious to know whether your mother noticed anything last night—any act of imprudence on my part—and if you
yourself were satisfied or had reason to be cross. Everything is so
uncertain. At the theater things didn’t go badly, but at the
Ridotto—I don’t know how it all ended at the Ridotto. As long as
I was in your mother’s range I tried to conceal myself—as you
probably saw. And rest assured that when I did not show myself to
you it was because Mrs. Anna was looking in my direction. Once
you left the rooms I no longer saw our tyrant and imagined we
had lost her for good—your own gestures seemed to suggest as
much. . . . But I asked around and was told she was still there. . . .
I waited a while to see for myself, and sure enough there she was
again. So I resolved to put myself out of her sight.
¹

Mrs. Anna clearly hoped that, thanks to her intervention, the passion so perilously ignited in the house of Consul Smith would subside before any irreparable damage was done to her daughter. But she had wrenched them apart just as they were falling deeply in love. Their need to be together was stronger than any obstacle she could put in their way; the thrill of their forbidden relationship only drew them closer. As Andrea pointed out to Giustiniana, her mother’s relentless watch and the atmosphere of general disapproval she helped to foster around them made their desire to be together “even more obstinate.” In fact, there had been no separation to speak of in the wake of Mrs. Anna’s pronouncement. The two lovers continued to look for each other ever more frantically, playing a highly charged game of hide-and-seek in the streets of Venice, at the theater, among the crowd at the Ridotto.

It is easy to see Mrs. Anna in the role of the insensitive and overly censorious mother—a tyrant, as the two lovers called her. But she had good reason to be firm. She was a woman of experience who had worked hard to gain respectability, and she well understood the intricate workings of Venetian society, in which the interests of the ruling families were supreme. She was also very much aware of Andrea’s special place in that society—and what a formidable opponent he was in her struggle to protect her daughter.

The Memmos were among the founding fathers of Venice in the eighth century—historians have even traced the lineage of Andrea’s family as far back as the
gens Memmia
of Roman times. There was a Memmo doge as early as the year 979, and over the next eight centuries the family contributed a steady flow of statesmen and high-ranking public servants to the Republic. By Andrea’s day they were still very influential in Venetian politics—an elite within the elite, at a time when many other patrician families living in the city had become politically irrelevant.
²
But they were not among the richest families; by the 1750s, their income had dwindled to about 6,000 ducats a year, and they would have needed at least double that amount to face comfortably the expenditures required of a family of such elevated rank (the wealthiest families had incomes ten times as large). They earned barely enough from their estates on the mainland to live with the necessary decorum at Ca’ Memmo, the large family palazzo at the western end of the Grand Canal.
¹

Andrea’s father, Pietro Memmo, was a gentle, virtuous man long weakened by ill health. His mother, Lucia Pisani, came from a wealthy family that had given the Republic its greatest and most popular admiral—the fierce Vettor Pisani, who had saved Venice from the Genoese in the fourteenth century. Pietro was always a rather remote figure—he and Andrea could find little to say to each other—and Lucia was not especially warm with her children either; her stiff manner was fairly common among the more old-fashioned patrician ladies of that time. Nevertheless, she was by far the more forceful of the two parents, and Andrea felt closer to her than he did to his father. The one person in the family he truly adored was Marina, his older sister by six years: a sensitive, kind-hearted young woman whom he could always confide in. Andrea had two brothers: Bernardo, who was one year younger than him, and Lorenzo, who was four years younger. The three boys, being fairly close in age, spent much of their time together when they were growing up. There was also a younger sister, Contarina.

The family patriarch was Andrea Memmo, Andrea’s venerable uncle, known for his courage and strength of character; he had been imprisoned and tortured by the Turks while he was ambassador to Constantinople in 1713. The senior Andrea served the Republic with great distinction and ended his political career as procuratore di San Marco, the second most prestigious position in government after the supreme office of doge. He went on to become a respected elder statesman whom his peers considered “possibly the greatest expert in Venetian matters.”
²
He died at the age of eighty-six in 1754—the same year Andrea and Giustiniana’s secret love affair began.

Andrea’s uncle ruled over the family with a steady hand for decades, overseeing everything from political alliances to business decisions, from household expenses to the education of the younger Memmos. During his long stewardship, Ca’ Memmo was known for its strong attachment to tradition. But it was also considered a progressive house where writers, artists, and composers were always welcome. The new ideas from Paris, especially the political writings of Montesquieu (Venetians had a predilection for anything involved with the machinery of government), were discussed spiritedly at the dinner table.
³
Their friend Goldoni, the great playwright, was a frequent lunch guest. So was the German composer Johann Adolph Hasse, the “divine Saxon” who had married the diva Faustina Bordoni and ran the music conservatory at the Incurabili, one of the hospices where young orphans were trained as musicians and singers.

Very early on, Andrea senior had chosen his favorite nephew and namesake as his successor. Over the years he instilled in him a sense of duty toward family and nation that would remain with him all his life. And he prepared him for a career in the service of “our wise Venetian Republic, which has seen the largest and wealthiest kingdoms fall over the past ten centuries and more, and yet has managed to stand firm amid everyone else’s misfortune.”
³

Andrea received his first formal education from Eugenio Mecenati, a Carmelite monk who worked as preceptor in several patrician families. But his mind wasn’t really turned on until he met Carlo Lodoli, a fiery and charismatic Franciscan monk. During the 1740s Lodoli established himself as Venice’s controversial resident philosopher. He was a brilliant scholar and teacher, equally at ease talking to his students about astronomy, philosophy, or economics. Lodoli’s great passion was architecture, a field in which he applied the principles of utilitarianism to develop his own visionary theories about function and form. Wrapped in his coarse habit, the monk had a rugged, unkempt look about him that could be quite intimidating: “The red spots on his face, his wild hair, his unshorn beard, and those eyes like burning coals—he very nearly scared off the weaker spirits,”
⁴
Andrea wrote many years later. Lodoli’s disciples came from the more enlightened families in Venice. He never wrote books but kept students under his spell through the force of his personality and the probing power of his Socratic “conversations.” His mission, as he saw it, was to open the mind of young patricians. The Venetian authorities were wary of the strong influence the monk had on his disciples. But Lodoli was not interested in subverting the established political order, as his conservative critics suggested: he wanted to improve it—by improving the men who would soon be called upon to serve the Republic.

Andrea remained devoted to Lodoli all his life, but the moral rigor of the Franciscan, his ascetic lifestyle, could be a little hard going. It is easy to see why Andrea’s sensual side was somewhat starved in his company, and why he spent more and more of his time in the splendid house-museum of Consul Smith on the Grand Canal, just a short walk down the street from Ca’ Memmo. He spent hours studying the vast collection of paintings and sculptures the consul had assembled over the previous thirty years and happily buried himself in the library—an exceptional treasure trove of classics and moderns in beautifully bound volumes.

Smith had arrived in Venice in the early years of the century, when the city still attracted a good number of foreign merchants and businessmen. He had gone to work for the firm of his fellow Englishman Thomas Williams and had been successful enough to take over the company when Williams retired a few years later and returned to England. Smith went on to build a considerable fortune trading in the East, buying goods from Venetian merchants and selling them on the British market. In 1717 he married Catherine Tofts, a popular singer who had made a name for herself in the London theaters before coming to Venice. Wealthy and well connected, Catherine was certainly the major drawing card of the Smith ménage in the early years of their marriage. But over time she gradually withdrew from society, perhaps never recovering from the loss of their son, John, who died in 1727 at the age of six.

As his business flourished, Smith purchased Palazzo Balbi, which he had rented ever since his arrival in Venice, and commissioned the architect Antonio Visentini, a friend and protégé, to renovate the façade. After some plotting within the English community in Venice and a great deal of pleading with the government in London, he eventually obtained the consular title in 1740. Much to his chagrin, he never became the British Resident (ambassador).

Consul Smith would probably have long faded into history had he not branched out into art and become one of the greatest dealers of his time. He made a habit of visiting artists, many of whom had studios a short walk away from his home. Smith had a good eye, and he delighted in friendly haggling. His collection included beautiful allegorical paintings from Sebastiano Ricci and Giovan Battista Tiepolo, grand vistas by Francesco Guardi, intimate scenes of Venetian life by Pietro Longhi, and several exquisite portraits by Rosalba Carriera. But his special admiration was reserved for Canaletto’s clean and detailed views of the city, and over the years he developed a close professional relationship with the great Venetian
vedutista.

Smith combined the eye of an art lover with the mind of a merchant. He realized he was living at the heart of an extraordinary artistic flowering and was in a unique position to turn his patronage into a profitable business. He commissioned works from his favorite artists and sold them to wealthy English aristocrats just as the fashion of collecting art was spreading. (He was so successful in marketing his beloved Canaletto that the artist eventually moved to London to paint views of the Thames for his growing clientèle.) In the process, Smith built up his own collection, enriching it with important paintings by old masters. Works by Bellini, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Rubens adorned the walls of his
palazzo.
Books, perhaps even more than paintings, were his true passion. He purchased valuable editions of the great classics as well as original manuscripts and drawings, and he participated directly in the publishing boom that was taking place in Venice. Smith invested in Giovan Battista Pasquali’s printing shop and bookstore, and together they published the works of Locke, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot and his fellow Encyclopédistes (the first volumes of the revolutionary
Encyclopédie
appeared in 1751). Pasquali’s shop soon became a favorite gathering place for the growing Venetian book crowd. “After having enjoyed the fresh air and shared the pleasures of Saint Mark’s Square,” wrote the French traveler Pierre Jean Grosley, “we would go to Pasquali’s shop or to some other bookseller. These shops serve as the usual meeting point for foreigners and noblemen. Conversations are often seasoned with that Venetian salt which borrows a great deal from Greek atticism and French gaiety without being either.”
⁵

Smith’s drawing room was, in a way, an extension of Pasquali’s shop in more elegant surroundings. It was the center of the small English community (and it somehow never lost its touch of English quaintness). But more important, it was a place where artists, intellectuals, and Venetian patricians could congregate in an atmosphere of enlightened conviviality. Carlo Goldoni dedicated one of his plays—
Il filosofo inglese—
to Smith. In his flattering introduction, he wrote: “All those who enter your house find the most perfect union of all the sciences and all the arts. You are not a lover who merely gazes with admiration but a true connoisseur who is keen to share the meaning and beauty of the art around him. Your good taste, your perfect knowledge have inspired you to choose the most beautiful things, and the courage of your generous spirit has moved you to purchase them.”
⁶
Andrea spent many happy days at Palazzo Balbi. It was in the consul’s library that he learned his Vitruvius, studied Palladian drawings, and pored over the latest volume of the
Encyclopédie
(he got into the habit of copying out long passages to better absorb the spirit of French Enlightenment). Smith, his only child having died so many years earlier, developed a genuine affection for Andrea and as he grew older came to depend on him as a confidant and assistant. By 1750 he was already in his seventies. He had lost his sure touch in business transactions, and his weakened finances would only get worse. Having no heir and less and less money, he conjured up the deal of his lifetime—an ambitious plan to sell his huge art collection and his library to the British Crown.
⁷
He enlisted Andrea to help him catalogue all his paintings and books.