Yet in one respect there was nothing oriental about the Venetian noble of the sixteenth century. When he ordered his women to appear in public at all, he sent them out adorned like those miraculous images which are covered with ‘ex voto’ offerings, and they mixed in the crowd that filled the Piazza of Saint Mark’s, shoulder to shoulder with the shameless free.
The Venetian gentleman, so sensitive about his technical honour, was not even displeased when the chronicler, the reporter of his day, confounded ladies and courtesans in pompous praise of their beauty and dress. One of the nobleman’s principles seems to have been that a woman was never in danger in public, nor when her door was locked on the outside and the key was in her husband’s pocket, but that any intermediate state of partial liberty was fraught with peril.
At home the Venetian ladies suffered the pains of boredom in common with the Georgians and Circassians, who not infrequently lived under the same roof, but who presumably saw something more of their masters. The young mother had not even a resource in her children, for it was necessary that the latter should be brought up to be precisely like their fathers and mothers, and in order to accomplish this the fathers kept the boys with themselves, and made them serve in the Senate when they were still quite small; whereas it seems that the girls were brought up largely in convents, such as that of the Vergini, lest they should learn too well from their mothers what it meant to be the wife of a member of the Great Council.
Does any one remember, in all the portraits of Venetian ladies by Carpaccio, Tintoretto, Veronese, or Titian, to have seen a mother accompanied by her little child? There is the conventional flower, there is the jewel, there is often the lap-dog; but the child is as conspicuously absent as the effigy of Brutus at Junia Tertia’s funeral. Children were born and were splendidly baptized; but after that they had no part in their mothers’ lives. And the ladies themselves had no great part in Venetian social life, except on its great occasions of baptisms, marriages, and funerals, or in public ceremonies, when they appeared in a body, by order of the Ten, in their richest clothes and as a part of the decoration. It is no wonder that they had few friends and were bored to extinction.
As a specimen of what a young and noble Venetian girl could become if emancipated, one cannot do better than take Bianca Cappello. She was
Mutinelli, Annali.
born in 1548 in the magnificent palace which her father, Bartolommeo Cappello, had built for himself near the Ponte Storto. Her mother died when Bianca was a little child, a misfortune which probably had no very great influence on the girl’s education or character, seeing how little the Venetian ladies occupied themselves with their children. She received the usual teaching, and learned to read and write after a fashion, and such of her letters as have been preserved show that her writing was anything but good. No doubt she had the usual number of pet birds and lap-dogs to play with, and plenty of sweetmeats, and when she was sixteen she was very like other girls of her class and age.
In Italy young girls are taught not to look out of the window in town. Bianca was terribly bored, and she looked out of the window. Opposite her father’s palace was a house occupied by two Florentine burghers, uncle and nephew, Bonaventuri by name, who represented the great Tuscan banking-house of Salviati.
Bianca looked out of her window, dreaming, no doubt, of the dancing lessons which she would be allowed to have when she should be married, and of other similar and harmless frivolities; and young Pietro Bonaventuri also looked out of the window, neglecting his ledgers.
The girl was very lonely and excessively bored. She never left the palace except to go with her father