La "Republica de'Viniziani': Ricerche sul repubblicanesimo veneziano in eta moderna.

As Giovanni Silvano notes in the forward to this valuable book, he approaches Renaissance Venetian republicanism with an eye to issues he has explored in work on Florentine political thought, notably his critical edition of Donato Giannotti's Republica fiorentina (Geneva, 1990). The present work consists of analyses of well-studied treatises on Venetian government by Giannotti, Gasparo Contarini, Francesco Sansovino, and Paolo Paruta. Silvano links them to each other, to contemporary political events, and to broader currents in Italian political thought, by discerning in each lineaments of an alternative to the Florentine version of republicanism most authoritatively formulated in Machiavelli's reading of the Roman model. That distinctive "repubblicanesimo veneziano" emerges in his treatment as a consistent feature of Venetian political culture constituting, Silvano argues, a formidable antithesis to the canonical Machiavellian version. The dialectic between the two republicanisms gives the book its coherence. The focus is on Venice, but the Florentine-Machiavellian-Roman model is a constant dialogic companion to the Venetian one.

Silvano locates his book in a double historiography, merging the Bouwsma-Lane-Pocock stream of inquiry into the intellectual content of Renaissance republicanism with an orientation to more recent efforts, notably those of Tafuri, Cozzi, Muir, and Finlay, to mark the different phases of Venice's political culture. Two moments of political tension are informing contexts for Silvano's commentators. The first is the dogeship of Andrea Gritti (1523-38) which Silvano sees as a period of new departures in Venetian public life in reaction to the psychological devastation caused by the War of Cambrai (1508-17); Contarini's and Giannotti's treatises are viewed as conservative responses to these innovations. The second is the 1580s, marked by reaction to the wars against the Ottoman Turks in the previous decade and by a struggle over the nature of the patrician regime. The writings of Paruta and Sansovino appear as defenses of governmental traditions in this tense environment.

Silvano connects the four writers and the two periods by tracing a common conviction of the superiority of Venetian institutions over the Roman model, in both virtue and governmental effect. The key is Venetian consistency versus Roman changeability. Where for Machiavelli Rome's greatness evolved by means of the bracing effects of conflict among the orders, Silvano's writers instead celebrated peace and interclass harmony in Venice. Thus Giannotti (82) and Paruta (161) are shown explicitly rejecting the military virtues so dear to Machiavelli. Far from strengthening citizens' commitment to their polity, they argued, martial qualities cause disorder. Indeed, for them Venice's non-martial character proves its superiority: while it took internal conflict and military prowess to achieve mixed government and world dominion for Rome, Venice enjoyed peace and prosperity from its very founding. That it did so with a society including a small ruling patriciate and a large populace attests to the divinely-inspired intelligence of the "ordini," the ensemble of governmental principles and institutions responsible for the great ethical achievement that distinguished the Venetian model of republicanism: justice for all.

Much of this is familiar in the literature on myth and reality in Venetian politics, well covered in Silvano's synoptic introduction. His own contribution to this literature is both substantive and synthetic. First, he escalates J.G.A. Pocock's discussion of non-Machiavellian tendencies in Giannotti and Contarini into a distinct anti-Machiavellism, in them and in Sansovino and Paruta as well, and indeed in the entire tradition of writing on Venetian republican ideology (see Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 272-330). Thus his conclusion (referring explicitly to the last two writers but applicable to all four) that they shared an "antiromanismo che assume sempre la forma di una critica senza frontiere del punto di vista machiavelliano sulla repubblica" ("anti-Romanism consistently expressed in an unrelenting critique of Machiavelli's ideas on republicanism," 169). Secondly, he sees this embedded tradition as providing ideological continuity between the struggle over political culture during the Gritti dogeship and the crisis of the 1580s centering on the reform of the Council of Ten. In both moments, innovative departures, despotic in the 1520s and oligarchic in the 1580s, clashed with older conventions of broadly based patrician government. Silvano places the four writers firmly on the latter side, to which they provided intellectual support by ascribing to the ancient traditions now threatened the peace and justice that distinguished Venice from Rome.

Charting relations between intellectual formulations and sociopolitical context is difficult, because not only the linkages but the linked substantives are usually interpretively charged issues; they certainly are in the political history of sixteenth-century Venice. Silvano's book offers interesting purchase by its secure orientation to literatures on both sides of the equation. But its chief interest lies in its strong assertion of the anti-Roman, anti-Machiavellian focus of Venetian republicanism, elucidated in his readings of his four commentators. These persuasive readings make his synthesis a worthy new entry into the well tilled field of Venetian political ideology in the Renaissance.

STANLEY CHOJNACKI University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill