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San Marco, Byzantium and the Myths of Venice (review)

“This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.” So wrote the German writer, social critic, and 1929 Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, whose visit to the city provided the inspiration for his novella Death in Venice. Such descriptions correctly apply to the city that at once can be called both “La Dominante” and “La Serenissima” and play into what historians refer to as “the myth of Venice.” The socalled myth refers to the view by Venetians during the Middle Ages that they were exceptional or unique — politically, religiously, culturally, socially, and even artistically — from the rest of Italy. Both a city and a nation, Venice had a form of government that combined specific features of a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a republic, with the doge appointed as the head of state by a complex series of committees designed to prevent any one faction from becoming too powerful. Artistically and religiously, Venice, as opposed to the other Italian citystates, purposefully resurrected and reconstructed the declining Byzantine Empire within its churches and important public spaces. The myth of Venice may be traced back to at least 1204 when the blind, though cunning, Doge Enrico Dandolo redirected the Fourth Crusade from the Holy Land to have it attack and occupy Constantinople. A rising Mediterranean power, Venice began to assume the mantle of direct successor to the ancient republic of Rome and the “sec-