Molmenti, Stud. e Ric., and Cecchetti, Corte di Roma.
No heretic was ever burned alive in Venice; death was inflicted by strangling, beheading, or hanging. Each Doge promised, indeed, on his election, to burn all heretics, but it is amply proved that only their dead bodies or their effigies were really given to the flames.
The tribunal of the Holy Office sat in a very low vaulted room in the buildings of Saint Mark’s, which was reached by a narrow staircase after passing through the Sacristy. The Court had no prisons of its own. Persons who were arrested by it, or sentenced by it to terms of imprisonment, were confined in the prisons of the State, probably in those of the Ponte della Paglia. It is likely that the Court had at its disposal two or three cells near its place of sitting, for the detention of the accused during the trials. Signor Molmenti has ascertained precisely how the members of the tribunal were placed, and has published a diagram which I here reproduce for the benefit of those who like such curious details.
As will be seen by the diagram, one half of the personages used one entrance, and the rest came in by the other. Until the year 1560, the Inquisitor himself was a Franciscan monk, but afterwards he was always a Dominican.
The hall was gloomy and ill-lighted, the furniture poor; it did not please the Republic to spend money for the delectation of a court which it did not like.
It was here that two famous trials took place in the sixteenth century, namely, that of Giordano Bruno, the renegade monk, dear to Englishmen who have never read the very scarce volume of his insane and filthy writings, and that of the celebrated painter Paolo Veronese. The contrast between these two documents is very striking, but both go to prove that the Holy Office in Venice was seldom more than a hollow sham, and that its proceedings occasionally degenerated towards low comedy.
Having escaped from Rome, Giordano Bruno left the ecclesiastical career which he had dishonoured in
Previti, Vita di Giordano Bruno.
every possible way, and wandered about in search of money and glory. In the course of time he came to London, where his coarseness and his loose life made him many enemies. Thence he went on to Oxford, where, by means of some potent protection, he succeeded in obtaining the privilege of lecturing on philosophy; but the university authorities were soon scandalised by his behaviour and frightened by the extravagance of his doctrines; in three months he was obliged to leave. He revenged himself by writing a libel called ‘La Cena delle Ceneri,’ in which he described England as a land of dark streets in which one stuck in the mud knee-deep, and of houses that lacked every necessary; the boats on the Thames were rowed by men more hideous than Charon, the workmen and shop-keepers were vulgar and untaught rustics, always ready to laugh at a stranger, and to call him by such names as traitor, or dog. In this pleasing pamphlet the Englishwoman alone escapes the writer’s foul-mouthed hatred, to be insulted by his still more foul-mouthed praise. One may imagine the sort of eulogy that would run from the pen of a man capable of describing woman in general as a creature with neither faith nor constancy, neither merit nor talent, but full of more pride, arrogance, hatred, falseness, lust, avarice, ingratitude and, generally, of more vices than there were evils in Pandora’s box; one might quote many amenities of language more or less senseless, as, for instance, that woman is a hammer, a foul sepulchre, and a quartan fever; and there are a hundred other expressions which cannot be quoted at all.