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Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform

University of California Press

The Contarini family was at the center of Venice virtually from the beginning of the city's existence. According to Venetian tradition, the first doge, Paolo Lucio Anafesto, was elected in the early eighth century. The families who later claimed descent from his electors took great pride in their putative ancestry, regarding themselves as superior to others in both dignity and devotion to the state.

One of these families was the Contarini, whose many branches were prominent in Venetian history for centuries. Like many noble clans, the Contarini constructed more or less imaginary genealogies linking them to important ancestors. One version traces the family back to a Roman official supposedly in charge of defending the area where the river Reno flows into the Pothe "Conte di Reno," whence the name Contarini.1 Other versions of the family legend mention that the first Contarini came from Constantinople via Capo d'Istria,2 from Concordia to Torcello and then to Venice,3 or from Concordia via Loreto.4

One such genealogy, is Venice, Biblioteca Civica Correr (hereafter cited as VBC), Cod. Cicogna 2327: "Portione de Huomeni Illustri della Famiglia Contarini di Venetia."

Archivio di Stato, Venice (hereafter cited as ASV), Marco Barbaro, Arbori de' patritii Veneti , vol. II, fol. 437.

VBC, Cod. Cicogna 1613: "Tute le caxade de zentilhomeni de Venetia dal principio fin al presente, MDVII," fol. 9r.

VBC, Cod. Cicogna 2330 (without title or page numbers), gives brief summaries of family histories together with their coats of arms.

The last two accounts inform us that the Contarini were tribunes characterized by a particular faculty for acquiring possessions.5 In historical times the clan gave the Republic eight doges, the first of whom, Domenico, is remembered for supporting the start of the construction of St. Mark's basilica in the eleventh century. There were Contarini among holders of every Venetian political and ecclesiastical office, including twenty-two bishops and four patriarchs of Venice. By the sixteenth century the Contarini had far more members in the Great Council than any other clan,6 and their genealogy in the detailed Arbori by Barbaro runs to almost eighty pages.7

The branch of the family to which Gasparo Contarini belonged was neither the wealthiest nor the best known. Its palazzo stood distant from the center of the city, indeed at its very edge, facing the islands of San Michele and Murano. Far from resembling the graceful Contarini Fasan or the imposing Contarini degli Scrigni on the Grand Canal, the palazzo was a large, plain building in a compound of warehouses, artisans' quarters, and smaller rented dwellings. Its distinction still derives from a garden that is unusually large by Venetian standards and from a small mid-sixteenth-century building constructed at its farthest corner, which has come to be known by the romantic name of "il casino degli spiriti."8 The proximity of the church of the Madonna dell'Orto gave this branch of the Contarini the name by which it continued to be

The term tribunes was used as the title for late Roman administrative officials, and later became an honorific title signifying elevated social status; see Ernst Rodenwaldt, "Untersuchungen ber die Biologie des venezianischen Adels," Homo: Zeitschrift fr die vergleichende Forschung am Menschen 8 (1957): 4, who thinks that the Contarini possibly had Germanic ancestors, since a document of 1116, preserved in Venice, was signed by a Berengarius Guntarenus and a Peter Guntarinus, from whom the family name might have originated.

In 1513, 147 families were represented among 2,622 members of the Great Council, of whom 188 were Contarini; the next most numerous were the Morosini with 85; Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (hereafter cited as VBM), MSS It., Cl. VII, 90 (=8029). In June 1527, among 2,708 male members of Venetian noble families in the Great Council listed by Marino Sanuto in his diary, the Contarini had 172, followed by the Morosini with 102 and the Malipiero with 81; Sanuto, I Diarii (Venice, 1879-1903), 45:569-72 (all references to Sanuto, Diarii , are to vol. and col. nos.).

ASV, Barbaro, Arbori , vol. II, fols. 437-516.

The derivation of the name is not certain. The explanation given by Giulio Lorenzetti, Venice and Its Lagoons (Trieste: Edizioni LINT, 1975), is attractive: the building was "at one time the site of mere, parties and literary gatherings" (405), and "the meetings and literary discussions held in the nearby garden overlooking the lagoon in the Casino degli Spiriti . . . were well known" (408). But there is no evidence for such meetings, presumably linked with the fame of Gasparo Contarini as a writer and thinker. The Contarini family must have constructed the casino between 1537 and 1566: it appears in the tax declaration of the latter date only. See below, note 15.

known until its extinction in the male line in 1688.9 A small, elegant chapel there with an altar painting by Tintoretto, busts of family members (including that of Gasparo), and funerary inscriptions remains as a memorial to the Contarini "della Madonna dell'Orto" (see figs. 1 and 2).10

Gasparo, born in 1483, was the eldest of seven sons and four daughters of Alvise Contarini and Polissena Malipiero. Alvise also had two illegitimate children, a daughter whose name is not mentioned in the documents (daughters were often anonymous in the records: "a girl") and a son, Angelo. Probably all grew up together, since Contarini's later references to his "fratel natural" and "nostra sorella natural" show the same affectionate concern that he extended to other members of his family.11 Three of his sisters and his half-sister married Venetian patricians,12 while one became a nun. Of the brothers, only

Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna, Delle inscrizioni veneziane (Venice, 1824-53), 2:250; ASV, Barbaro, Arbori , vol. II, fol. 466; VBC, MS Gradenigo Dolfin 131, fols. 293-294.

For the church, see Ashley Clarke and Philip Rylands, eds., Restoring Venice: The Church of the Madonna dell'Orto (London: Elek, 1977); V. Zanetti, La chiesa della Madonna dell'Orto in Venezia (Venice, 1870); Giuseppe Bigaglia, La chiesa della Madonna dell'Orto in Venezia (Venice: A. Vidotti, 1937); and Lino Moretti, La chiesa della Madonna dell'Orto in Venezia (Turin: Scaravaglio, 1981).

His illegitimate sister was married to Vincenzo Belegno, a Venetian nobleman, in 1514; ASV, Avogaria di Comun, Reg. 106, Cronaca Matrimoni , fol. 1; VBC, Cod. Cicogna 2171, fol. 29. Contarini writes about the wedding festivities celebrated by the family, and mentions that "the whole house was topsy-turvy"; Hubert Jedin, "Contarini und Camaldoli," Archivio italiano per la storia della piet 2 (1959): 59-118; also published separately as a preprint by Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura (Rome, 1953), spanning pp. 3-67, which version I use; see p. 27. His interest in her and her family continued, as can be seen in a letter to his sister Serafina, nun in the convent of S. Chiara in Murano (n.d., but probably 1540 or 1541), in which he asks her to treat their...