Venezia e il senso del mare, storia di un prisma culturale dal XIII al XVIIII secolo.

Alberto Tenenti. Venezia e il senso del mare, storia di un prisma culturale dal XIII al XVIIII secolo.

Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici, Saggi 34. Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1999. L 120,000. 653 pp. ISBN: 88-83350-51-8.

Of Italian historians of the Renaissance, the late Alberto Tenenti was perhaps the most conspicuous heir to the particular Annaliste brand of cultural history that was created and developed by Lucien Febvre in the middle years of the last century. After his pioneering work on the sense of love and death in the culture of the Renaissance, Tenenti contributed major studies on Venice as a maritime power--maritime insurance and shipwreck, the problem of piracy, and the Venetian merchant marine before Lepanto. In this collection of twenty-five essays, Tenenti returns to Venice and the sea, organizing his studies around the richly suggestive term, senso, perhaps best defined as "multiple meanings." He views the Mediterranean world as the prism that focuses Venice's achievement in the early modern period.

Tenenti has organized his essays under four general headings: medieval aspects, encounters with other worlds, maturity (on various aspects of Venetian culture and history in the sixteenth century), and lights and shadows (on the world of seven-teenth- and eighteenth-century Venice). As might be expected for a mature scholar of international stature, almost all these essays were originally commissioned as contributions to collaborative histories or as conference papers. Five essays originated as chapters in the monumental twelve-volume Storia di Venezia, published in the last decade by Treccani in Rome, which Tenenti helped to plan and edit. These papers are among the most weighty in the volume, usually based on extensive research in Venice's Archivio di Stato and intended as authoritative treatments of their subjects. After a brilliant synthetic essay on Trecento Venice, Tenenti returns to his earlier concern with death in the Renaissance with a discussion of the Black Death and its political, economic, and cultural effects on Venice in the second half of the fourteenth century. The most challenging and innovative essay is Tenenti's extensive treatment of "The Sense of the Sea," which ranges from the effects of night, storms, and distance on seaborne voyages to battles, myths, and everyday shipboard life. This is twinned with a lengthy paper on "The Sense of the State," where, making extensive use the unpublished deliberations of the Senate, Tenenti discusses the concepts of polity, empire, commerce, and service that helped to define the relation between the Venetian noble and his community during the Renaissance. A final contribution drawn from the Storia di Venezia is an extended discussion of Venice's commerce, merchant marine, and navy in the seventeenth century. All these papers show Tenenti's genius for a penetrating reading of literary and historical texts and capacity for arresting generalization, although they are reprinted without the stunning color illustrations that enhanced the original essays.

The bulk of the essays originated as conference papers often first delivered at the thematic convegni on the various aspects of Venetian history held over the past four decades under the auspices of the Cini Foundation and later published by Olschki in Florence. These papers admirably demonstrate Tenenti's incredible range and changing interests over the period. Studies on Renaissance themes range from an early essay on Venice's response to piracy in the Levant from 1300 to 1460, to two treatments of Venice's diplomatic and cultural relations with Hungary in the late Quattrocento, to a discussion of the writings of Francesco Barbaro and Leon Battista Alberti on marriage and family, to the Italian version of his famous essay on "The Sense of Space and Time in the Venetian World of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," that first appeared in Renaissance Venice, edited by J. R. Hale (1973).

Tenenti's allegiance to the Annaliste variety of cultural history is perhaps best represented in his studies of early modern Venice. Here he treats the use of ritual, spectacle, theater, and art in the service of the state, discusses the context of Giorgione's and Paolo Veronese's artistic achievements and of Galileo's scientific breakthroughs, and returns to issues of time and space in the defense and governing of Venice's Levantine empire. The volume concludes with studies of the images of Venice and the Veneto in the (largely French) travel literature of the Grand Tour and of Venetian ambassadorial reports from Paris during the first stage of the French Revolution. Unhappily, there is no index to guide the reader through this rich collection of studies.

This volume deserves wide circulation among students of Venice and the Renaissance. Indeed, a selection of these papers in English translation would serve to disseminate Tenenti's important scholarship to a much broader audience. While few scholars will read the volume straight through, I confidently predict that every serious student of Renaissance Venice will have occasion to consult this book.

BENJAMIN G. KOHL

Vassar College, Emeritus