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Venice
Lion City: The Religion of Empire
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by Garry Wills
Simon and Schuster
Due/Published
September 2001, 424 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0684871904
"Garry Wills's Venice: Lion City is a tour de force - a rich, colorful, and provocative history of the world's most fascinating city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was at the peak of its glory. This was not the city of decadence, carnival, and nostalgia familiar to us from later centuries. It was a ruthless imperial city, with a shrewd commercial base, like ancient Athens, which it resembles in its combination of art and sea empire. The structure of Venetian society was based on its distinctive practice of religion: Venice elected its priests, defied the authority of papal Rome, and organized its liturgy around a lay leader (the doge.)" "Venice: Lion City presents a new way of relating the history of the city through its art and, in turn, illuminates the art through the city's history. In their culture, their governing structures, and their social life, the Venetians themselves speak to us with extraordinary immediacy, whether at work, warfare, prayer, or acting out their victories, celebrations, and petitions in the colorful festivals that punctuated the year." Venice: Lion City is illustrated with more than 130 works of art, 30 in full color. Garry Wills gives us a unique view of Venice's rulers, merchants, clerics, and laborers, its Jews, and its women as they created a city that is the greatest art museum in the world, a city that continues to lure an endless stream of visitors. |
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Review
Today many view Venice as a pristine, delicate and timeless city — more museum than actual living space. And before that it was seen as a city of extravagance and decadence — where Byron visited, sojourned, escaped, vacationed, luxuriated and Casanova lived and loved. These impressions of the city starkly contrast the historical Venice of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when it was a disciplined, wealthy and powerful empire. Garry Wills’ rich, insightful and evocative history takes a wide-ranging look at the city’s institutions, social structure, and economy, and at the idea of Venetian exceptionalism. Wills discusses all elements of Venetian society — rulers, laborers, Jews, women, etc. — and reads the city’s history and sense of itself through its art and architecture. He examines how its navy and strong mercantile economy allowed it to amass wealth, develop a cosmopolitan feel, and strengthen the moral fiber of its society. The book argues that Venice’s fusion of the religious and the civic, embodied in the role of the Doges, and its particular republicanism reinforced the city’s confidence and its power. Wills brilliantly captures the atmosphere of Renaissance Venice, from its social fluidity to its religious practices to its many contradictions, offering a vivid and insightful portrait of the city. Garry Wills is also recently the author of Papal Sin: Structures of Sin For other recent titles in related subjects: |
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