Towards 1591, the patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, an enthusiastic collector of books, found in the shop of a Dutch bookseller a little volume, entitled Eroici Furori, which contains some astrological calculations and some hints on mnemonics. The purchaser asked who the author might be, learned from the bookseller that it was Giordano Bruno, entered into correspondence with him, and at last invited him to Venice.
Bruno, it is needless to say, accepted the invitation eagerly, as he accepted every thing that was offered to him, but it was not long before Mocenigo regretted his haste to be hospitable. He had begun by calling his visitor his dear master; before long he discovered the man to be a debauchee and a blasphemer. Now it chanced that Mocenigo had sat in the tribunal of the Holy Office as one of the three senators whose business it was to oversee the acts of the Father Inquisitor, and he was not only a devout man, but had a taste for theology. He began by remonstrating with Bruno, but when the latter became insolent, he quietly turned the key on him and denounced him to the Holy Office. A few hours later the renegade monk was arrested and conveyed to prison. He was examined several times by the tribunal, but was never tortured, and as the judges thought they detected signs of coming repentance they granted him a limit of time within which to abjure his errors. But the trial did not end in Venice, for the Republic made an exception in this case and soon yielded to a request from the Pope that the accused should be sent to Rome. He was ultimately burnt there, the only heretic, according to the most recent and learned authorities, who ever died at the stake in Italy. He was in reality a degenerate and a lunatic, who should have ended his days in an asylum.
M. Yriarte has published in the appendix to his study of the Venetian noble in the sixteenth century the verbatim report of the proceedings of the Holy Office on the eighteenth of July 1573. The prisoner at the bar was Paolo Veronese. I quote the following from M. Yriarte’s translation:—
Report of the sitting of the Tribunal of the Inquisition on
Saturday July eighteenth, 1573.
This day, July eighteenth, 1573. Called to the Holy Office before the sacred tribunal, Paolo Galliari Veronese residing in the parish of Saint Samuel, and being asked as to his name and surname replied as above.
Being asked as to his profession:—
Answer. I paint and make figures.
Question. Do you know the reasons why you have been called here?
A. No.
Q. Can you imagine what those reasons may be?