CAMPO S. BARTOLOMEO, STATUE OF GOLDONI
Look at Longhi’s ‘Fortune-Teller’ or ‘Dancing-Master,’ at his ‘Tailor,’ his ‘Music-Master,’ or his ‘Toilet,’ and you may see precisely what the Republic was when it died of old age; there are all the successions of light colours, as in a pastel-painter’s box; you can hear the high running laughter that rings from rosy lips, you can guess what dreams of pleasure fill those pretty heads, and yet there is something sad about it all; unless one belongs to that little band of human beings who love the eighteenth century, it sets one’s teeth on edge—like the dance music in the ‘Ballo in Maschera,’ danced while Riccardo is dying. Something rings false; I think there is too much discrepancy between what we see or read and what we really know about that time. About other centuries, even the nineteenth and twentieth, we can still have illusions, but the eighteenth was all a sham that went to pieces with the French Revolution.
As for the position of women at that time, it was never lower. They were dolls, and nothing more. They were perhaps more neglected in the sixteenth century, but, at least in theory, there was still some respect for them. In the eighteenth they existed only to adorn places of amusement, theatres, and gambling houses. The biographer of that remarkable woman, Giustina Renier Michiel, says they were so little esteemed that it seemed useless to teach them anything, and he adds that the Signory looked upon an educated woman as a being dangerous to society and the State.
Most young girls of noble family were brought up in convents, where the most crass ignorance accompanied the loosest ideas of morality. The greater number of these convents were only nominally connected with the ecclesiastical authorities. In practice
Rom. viii. 351.
they were controlled by lay inspectors, ‘Provveditori sopra Monasteri,’ who were commissioned by the government to superintend the morals of convents in general, but found it much more diverting to help in undermining them.
While the girls were being brought up in such places, their father was chiefly preoccupied in assuring and increasing the fortune which was to be inherited by his eldest son. The natural consequence of this was that the marriage portions of the daughters became smaller and smaller, so that it was found hard to marry them at all, and much less troublesome to leave them in their convents for life. Each of the fashionable convents was a little court of noble ladies; in the one, Her Most Reverend Excellency the Mother Abbess was a Rezzonico; in another, the Noble Dame Eleonora Dandolo was Mistress of the Larder.
The scholars did not leave the convent at all while their education lasted, but nothing was neglected which could amuse them, and their principal lessons were in dancing, singing, and reciting verses. In Carnival, the convent parlours were turned into theatres or ballrooms; dames and cavaliers danced the minuet or the ‘furlana’; ‘Punch,’ ‘Pantaloon,’ and ‘Pierrot’ vied with each other to make the bevies of aristocratic young ladies laugh at jests they should never have understood.
Even during the rest of the year the convents were what would now be called brilliant social centres, to