There were certainly a great many intellectual centres in Venice at that time, and one might fill many pages with the names of the so-called academies that were founded and that flourished for a time. Almost every special tendency of human thought was represented by one of them, from the Aldine, devoted enthusiastically to classic Greek, to those academies which adorned their emptiness with such titles as ‘The Seraphic,’ ‘The Uranian,’ and the like, and which gave themselves up to the most unbridled extravagance of taste. Of such follies I shall only quote one instance, which I find in Tassini under the name ‘Bernardo.’
In the year 1538 the will of that academician was opened. He therein directed his heirs to have his body washed by three famous physicians with as much aromatic vinegar as would cost forty ducats, and each physician was to receive as his fee three golden sequins absolutely fresh from the mint. The body was then to be wrapped in linen clothes soaked in essence of aloes, before being ‘comfortably’ laid to rest in a lead coffin and enclosed in one of cypress wood. The coffin was then to be placed in a marble monument to cost six hundred ducats. The inscription was to enumerate the actions and virtues of the deceased in eight Latin hexameters, of which the letters were to look tall to a spectator placed at a distance of twenty-five feet. The poet who composed the verses was to receive one sequin for each. Moreover, the history of the dead man’s family was to be written out in eight hundred verses, and seven psalms were to be composed after the manner of the Psalms of David, and twenty monks were to sing them before the tomb on the first Sunday of every month.
We read without surprise that this will was not executed to the letter, and the tolerably reasonable monument erected to Pietro Bernardo by his descendants,
ENTRANCE TO THE SACRISTY, FRARI
twenty years after his death, may still be seen in the church of the Frari.
There were also academies which bore names, devices, and emblems of a nature that might well shock and surprise us, were they not the natural evidences of that coming decadence, moral and artistic, whereof all Italy, and Venice in particular, already bore the germs.
Amongst the great names that belong to the end of the fifteenth century, as well as to the sixteenth, hardly any has more interesting associations for scholars than that of Aldus Manutius.
The founder of the great family of scholars and printers was born at Sermoneta in the Pontifical States in 1449, and was over forty years old when he finally established himself in Venice.