Byzantium and Renaissance
The Greco-Byzantine Colony in Venice and its Significance in the Renaissance
From Byzantine East & Latin West: Two Worlds of Christendom in Middle Ages and Renaissance. Edit. The Academy Library Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1966.
Chapter II
So much for the social-economic and religious background of the colony and its role in the life of Venice. Let us now turn to its contribution, direct or indirect, to the development of humanistic studies. As is well-known, Venice at the end of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth century became indisputably Europe's principal center of Greek studies. Previously the primacy in Greek studies had long been held by the Florence of the Medici, beginning with the teaching there in 1396-97 of the Byzantine diplomat-scholar Manuel Chrysoloras. His instruction had brought to Florence for study some of the leading humanists of the day, some of whom later went also to Ferrara to work under his great pupil Guarino of Verona. Both Chrysoloras and Guarino lectured for a brief time in Venice. But the rise of Venetian interest in humanistic studies, in its initial stage, was owing rather to the influence of the nearby university of Padua, which after 1409 became the state University of all Venetia. Padua rather early had developed an interest in classical Latin letters through the activities of such persons as the jurist Lovato dei Lovati and the rhetorician and poet Mussato. And it was the combination of this interest with the age-old relations of Venice with the Greek East that eventually induced the Venetians to turn their attention to Greek studies.(24)
Scholars have emphasized the significance of Venice's eastern colonies in this respect but they have overlooked the importance of the Greek community in Venice itself. The celebrated Venetian Cardinal Pietro Bembo put it well when, probably in 1539, he delivered a speech before the Venetian Senate panegyrizing the study of Greek in his native city. He said:
'There are special reasons and the most cogent of motives which impel the Venetians to undertake and constantly to strive to bring to a happy conclusion the revival of Greek letters. You have been provided most liberally with the means of bringing to fruition this very noble undertaking; you have living among you Greeks as your neighbors, you have under your hegemony not a few of the Greek cities and islands, and you suffer from no lack of as many teachers and books as are needed for this task.’(25)
Bembo was referring here not only to Venetian possession of various Greek territories in the East, but more specifically, it would seem, to the Greek colony within Venice with its inhabitants of all types, including teachers of Greek, who, as he put it, 'live among you as your neighbors'. In the Greek community, then, the Venetians had, so to speak, a built-in natural resource.
As pointed out, the colony was in close communication with the Greek East, especially Crete, and its population was constantly being replenished by new arrivals from the East. It was these Greeks, those with an extensive knowledge of Greek literature, who helped to carry Greek letters from Venice to many of the principal areas of Western Europe. To cite only two examples: that of the Cretan, Demetrius Ducas, who was summoned from Venice to Spain to teach Greek at the University of Alcala and there supervised the Greek New Testament version of Cardinal Ximenes' celebrated Complutensian Polyglot; and also the Cretan Calliergis, who after establishing a press in Venice moved to Rome, where he became the pioneer printer of Greek in the papal capital.(26)
The historian may point out those centuries earlier merchants of Venice living in her colony at Constantinople had possessed some knowledge of Greek. But that was the spoken vulgar Greek, necessary for commercial transactions, rather than the classical literary language which was considerably different. As we have noted, it was rather the inspiration affecting Venice from the early Latin humanism of Florence and neighboring Padua that seemed first to have induced Venetian noblemen to turn from the business of trade to the contemplation of literature and philosophy. But if the initial impetus to Latin humanistic studies in Venice came from elsewhere in Italy, it was from the environment of the Greek colony there, with its close connections with the East, that the Greek scholars who were so important in gaining for Venice the primacy in Hellenic letters received much of their stimulus and inspiration.
The most prominent name associated with this brilliant period of Venetian primacy is of course that of the Italian, Aldus Manutius. Before inaugurating his press Aldus had realized that only one city in Italy, Venice, could fulfil all the complex requirements of a Greek press. Venice possessed a class sufficiently wealthy to buy, and the leisure to read, the printed classics. Venice was less subject to papal pressures than other Italian cities. Important too in Aldus' thinking must have been Venetian possession of the precious collection of Greek manuscripts bequeathed by Bessarion—manuscripts which could serve as paradigms for his books. And hardly less significant for him must have been the presence in Venice of a large, thriving Greek community, from which he could secure the services of copyists, typesetters, and editors in the difficult work of preparing textual editions. His principal editor was to be the Cretan Musurus (who edited no less than 11 or 12 of the 30 Greek first edition s of Aldus), while Aldus' compositors were in large part Cretans (the chief being John Gregoropoulos),(27) given the difficulty of finding persons competent to read the Greek script from which the printing was done.
We have no wish to diminish the importance of the extraordinary contribution of Aldus to the development of Greek letters. He was after all the central figure around which most of the Hellenists of Venice revolved.(28) But it is not generally realized that in the publication of Greek works he was anticipated in Venice by certain little-known Greek emigres, the Cretans Laonikos and Alexander, at least one of whom seems to have been a priest in the Greek colony, and quite possibly also by the Cretans, Zacharias Calliergis and Nicholas Vlastos. In instituting his own Greek press Calliergis was, in part at least, influenced by a desire to preserve the Greek masterpieces as a heritage for his countrymen, while for Aldus of course it was more of a business proposition. Calliergis' staff consisted exclusively of Greeks, all of whom were drawn apparently from the Greek community of the city.(29)
Aldus was certainly the leading force behind the establishment of his celebrated press. He himself edited or collaborated in printing the works of Greek authors. And, of course, he offered a means of employment, an outlet as it were, for the talents of the Greek emigres. On the other hand, it is improbable that without the reservoir of talent provided by his Byzantine workmen and associates, with their mastery of the language and technical skill, he could have offered to the public, in the relatively short period of less than two decades, as much as he did of the corpus of classical authors. As Aldus himself said about one of his Greek collaborators: 'The aid of Musurus in the edition of texts is so precious to me that, had Greece produced two more of his merit as councillors of mine, I would not despair of giving before long to people of taste, in very correct editions, the best work of both Greek and Latin.' By the time of Aldus' death in 1515, his press had given to the world practically all the major Greek authors of classical antiquity.
With the Cretan John Gregoropoulos and the Italian Scipio Carteromachus as a nucleus, Aldus gathered around him a group of western and Greek Hellenists and established a Neakademia, where it was prescribed that at meetings the Greek language alone could be spoken. There the problems involved in the projected publications of his press were analyzed. There western Hellenists, in friendly cameraderie with eastern exiles, could exchange manuscripts and ideas, while often western visitors could benefit from their association, to return later to their homelands enriched by their experience. The great Erasmus profited in this manner. Erasmus was very fond of Musurus and expressed his amazement at the generosity of Musurus and other Greek emigres, who, without hesitation, presented to him valuable manuscripts in their possession, along with advice on literary problems. As I have shown in a recent work, a great deal of the material for Erasmus' famous Aldine edition of his Adages, the book which made his European reputation, was acquired from the Greeks of Venice.(30)
It is true that in the archives of the Greek colony we find almost no mention of the names of the more illustrious Greek humanists of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries— Musurus, Calliergis, Ducas, Janus Lascaris. (Those of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, do appear.) But this should not be taken to indicate that they had no connection with the colony. The colony's official records were not regularly kept until 1549, and even then generally only vital statistics such as baptisms, marriages, and deaths were recorded. Moreover, the church of San Giorgio had not yet been built. Finally, it was only natural that the more important of the Greek scholars, like their western humanist counterparts, were drawn to and for practical reasons often lived in, the households of their Italian patrons. Thus Musurus, to judge from Erasmus' colloquy Opulentia Sordida, resided for a time, along with Erasmus and some thirty others including many Greeks, at the press of Aldus at San Paterniano. And another Greek with the most prestigious position of all, Janus Lascaris, ambassador of King Francis I to Venice, probably lived in quarters provided by the French government.(31) Yet, from sporadic references I have been able to collect from the sources (for example, that Erasmus later visited Musurus and his father at their home with the Cretan scholar John Gregoropoulos present; a statement that Calliergis lived for a time with Musurus at the Borgo Zocco in Padua; a reference that George Trivizios, the scribe and employee of Cardinal Bessarion, was the very first priest of the Greek colony),(32) there can be absolutely no doubt that these Greeks, even if they did not always live strictly within the limits of the Greek quarter, frequently corresponded and in general had a very close rapport with one another.
With the death of Aldus in 1515, then of Musurus in 1517, and finally of Janus Lascaris and Arsenios Apostolis in 1534 and 1535 respectively, the hegemony in Greek studies moved to northern Europe. Across the Alps in France, Bude came to the fore, and in Germany and England Reuchlin and Erasmus had already become important. But the role of Venice was not ended. Because of her economic prosperity, the fact that she was still the main center of the book and manuscript trade, and not least because of the growth of her Greek colony, she continued to remain a center for the dissemination of Greek learning. Many more presses were now established in the city by Greeks. Some of these, like the Glykys, specialized, as Calliergis (unlike Aldus) had done earlier, in the publication of Greek ecclesiastical texts.(33) Indeed, until the very end of the nineteenth century almost all the Orthodox ecclesiastical books printed in Greek emanated from the presses of Venice. Prayer books, psalters, gospels, liturgical and pietistic works, homilies—all these, in a format strongly reminiscent of Byzantine manuscripts, the Venetian Greek presses spread throughout the Greek world, thereby helping also to preserve the Byzantine tradition. Some of the Greek scholars of lesser importance who continued to come to Venice from the East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of whom were copyists, were Anthony Eparchos, Nicholas Sophianos, Angelos Vergikios, Andreas Darmarios and Constantine Palaeokappas. Not all, to be sure, remained in Venice. Some, like Vergikios and Eparchos, went north to France and elsewhere. And others even returned to the East. But the fact remains that they resided for a time at least in the Greek community and it was through the Greek colony that they made their way to other areas of Europe.(34)
Another consideration to be mentioned in this respect, hitherto briefly alluded to, was the attraction of the nearby University of Padua. This Venetian-owned institution, with its long intellectual tradition, became the center of studies of higher learning for students coming from the entire Greek East.(35) There in fact several of their countrymen held high professorial posts. In 1463 Demetrius Chalcondyles of Athens was appointed the first professor of the newly established chair of Greek.(36) There the Uniate Greek priest Alexander Zeno also taught. Most important, Marcus Musurus, in the early sixteenth century, made this Greek chair the Mecca for students from all areas of Europe. More than a score of western students who benefited from his teaching at Padua or Venice later became leaders in the humanistic movements of their own countries.(37) At Padua, following the customary practice, Cretan stemmata or crests of the chief Cretan families held a place of honor in the aula of the university far into the seventeenth century.(38) It seems that there was also a kind of small Greek colony in Padua (though apparently without a church), and relations between it and the community in Venice were close.(39) Indeed, because of the constant intercourse between the two cities, Venice and Padua formed virtually a single center of culture.
In the later sixteenth century, when the Greek colony of Venice began to reach its zenith from the point of view of numbers and economic wealth, the colony was under the leadership of the forceful Bishop of Philadelphia, Gabriel Severus. At this time Greek ships came regularly from the east to load and unload their cargo on the Rio dei Greci, the canal running adjacent to the community. 'Stratiotesch' Greek songs such as the famous 'Barzellette dei quattro compagni strathioti', in a kind of mixed Greco-Venetian dialect, were often to be heard in the Greek quarter and in other sections of the city. The Greek costume of the East was the typical mode of dress in the colony, and in the church of San Giorgio men, women, and children crowded on feast days to participate in the colorful religious celebrations conducted by a bishop, at least three priests and as many deacons and chanters, while pious nuns and monks from San Giorgio were more than mere spectators. On ordinary days children would attend classes in Greek and Latin in the school established nearby.(40) Some Greeks had become more or less assimilated to the Venetians through intermarriage and were living in other sections of the city. But they, too, often returned to the quarter to consort with their fellow countrymen. Indeed many of the emigres had now achieved the coveted honor of Venetian citizenship.
In this period the chief Greek scholarly figure was Maximos Margounios, the Cretan ecclesiastic. Forbidden for political reasons by the Venetian government to assume the bishopric of Cythera to which the patriarch of Constantinople had appointed him, he had been granted a yearly pension by the Venetian senate. He spent his time teaching Greek publicly in Venice and, perhaps earlier, in the school of the community of San Giorgio. Or he might busy himself with preparing editions of classical Greek or ecclesiastical works, translate Greek works into Latin, engage in polemics with Bishop Gabriel Severus over the question of the filioque, or even correspond with learned western scholars such as the German Protestant humanist Martin Crusius of Tübingen University. Margounios, it seems, lived within the confines of the Greek colony. From his will we observe that he bequeathed his fine library of Greek books to the monastery of St. Catherine of Sinai in Candia, Crete, his birthplace, 'for the benefit', as he put it, Of the students of this monastery and universally of all the Greek nation'. Other books in Latin, as we shall see in a later chapter devoted to his carer, he willed to the monastery of Iviron on Mt. Athos. Still other bequests he made to various Greeks of Venice, specifically to the monks attached to San Giorgio, and as executors of his estate he appointed Greeks living in the colony headed by Metropolitan Severus. Although his career has been generally overlooked by western scholars, Margounios, who spent all his later years in close relation with the colony, was probably the most significant figure in the intellectual life of the Greek colony, and in fact of the Orthodox church, in the later sixteenth century.(41)
Besides intellectual activity we may cite examples of an extraordinary artistic production in the Greek colony. Indeed still being clarified in the development of Venetian art is the influence of late Byzantine painting, especially of the so-called 'Cretan school', which extended from approximately the fourteenth to the seventeenth century and was the last great flowering of the traditional Byzantine manner. The term 'Cretan school' (to be distinguished from the more realistic 'Macedonian') is a broad one, referring loosely to several related but distinguishable areas or aspects of late Byzantine painting—to the half-Italian icons of the post-Byzantine period, to the wall frescoes of churches on the island of Crete itself, and to the remarkable sixteenth century frescoes on Mt. Athos, especially those at Lavra of the monk called Theophanes the Cretan.(42) Some scholars regard the 'Cretan' influence on Venetian painting as of importance. (We must not forget that with Crete a Venetian possession communications were easy.) Others are less impressed, or believe that the influence flowed rather from Venice to Crete.(43) In any case we know that in the post-Byzantine period under discussion there was a large number of Greek painters in Venice who plied their craft in the Greek colony and often exhibited their works on the Rialto.(44) Among these were many commercial, that is generally inferior artists called Madonneri, who on demand could produce icons of the Virgin in the old Byzantine style and of which practically every Venetian family of any means possessed at least one specimen.(45) An important collection of Madonneri paintings, that of Likhachev, consisting of some 250 icons, is preserved today in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. It is striking to note the similarity of many of these icons (most are from Venice, others from another center of Madonneri painting, Otranto in southern Italy) to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century pre-Renaissance icons of Italy.(46)
In addition to the Madonneri there was also a number of artists of genuine talent living in Venice's Greek community. To name a few: John of Cyprus and the Cretan Michael Damaskinos (often called, erroneously, the teacher of El Greco), both of whom have left beautiful examples of their work at San Giorgio in Venice or in Crete, as have the Cretans Emmanuel Zanfurnaris and the miniaturist George Klontzas, and later in the seventeenth century Emmanuel Tzanes.(47) All or most of these men could paint alla greca or all' italiana, that is in both the old traditional Byzantine (Cretan) or the new Renaissance Italian style.
The celebrated El Greco, born the Cretan Domenikos Theotokopoulos, was himself also probably strongly influenced as a young man by the Cretan tradition of his native island (we are not here, of course, referring to the hacks called Madonneri.) A remarkable notarial document in fact has been recently discovered referring to a 'Maestro Menegos Theotokopoulos' as a painter (Zgourafos, it calls him) living in Candia, Crete in 1566.(48) If this refers to El Greco, as it certainly seems to ('Menegos' is a diminutive Cretan form of the name 'Domenico'), it indicates that El Greco, at that time probably twenty-five and already a guildsman with the title of Maestro, was old enough to have been strongly affected by the artistic milieu of his birthplace, that is by the Byzantine-Cretan style then prevalent there.(49) In any event, if we accept this as correct El Greco seems to have spent some four years in Venice, and it is impossible to believe that as a proud Cretan who usually signed his pictures 'Domenikos Theotokopoulos Kres' (the Cretan) and always in Greek letters, he was not drawn into the life of the Venetian Greek community, the population of which was then in fact largely Cretan.(50) Thus, even had he left Crete at the age of eighteen, as was formerly believed, he would still probably have been influenced by the Greek painters of Venice's Greek colony, thereby reinforcing the Byzantine influence.
To be sure El Greco may have become a Uniate early in life, but by this time in Venice this would have posed no problem to close association with his fellow countrymen. Other documents found in the Venetian archives refer to a certain Manoussos Theotokopoulos, evidently El Greco's brother, who twice failed to win election to the Council of the Greek community and collected ships' dues from Cretan seamen for their 'Mutual Benefit Association', of which he was treasurer.(50a)
To conclude: in our discussion we have had to omit the names of many other Greeks connected with the Greek colony who made a contribution to the intellectual and artistic history of Venice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We should emphasize here, however, not so much the importance of individuals as the underlying significance of the total cultural contribution made under the influence of the existence of an entire Greek community situated in the heart of Venice. Constantly reinforced by new arrivals from the East, including many skilled in the Greek language and literature, the colony, for over two centuries, was able to become the focal point of social and intellectual interaction between Venice and the entire Greek world. And at the same time it served as a kind of funnel for emigrés wishing to move still further into the West. This magnet-like attraction of Venice for the Greek exiles, in connection with Venice's favorable location, economic prosperity, and the work of Aldus and other Latin Hellenists, was one of the basic factors which permitted Venice to supersede Florence as the chief center and disseminator of Greek learning to Western Europe. This is an important point, the significance of which is not usually appreciated by western scholars of the Renaissance.
Certainly even without a Greek colony the Venetians would sooner or later have succumbed to the interest in Greek studies which was attracting practically all of the learned circles of Renaissance Italy. Yet we may be reasonably sure that, had the colony not existed, considerably fewer Greeks from Crete and the rest of the East would have been drawn to Venice. It was no small satisfaction to the exiles that upon arrival in the Serenissima they would be among their own people and could carry on virtually unhindered the practice of their own customs and religion. This sentiment is not infrequently expressed by the Greeks, intellectuals or otherwise, resident in Venice.
It is obvious that the colony could not have existed apart from the city of Venice itself, and one should take care therefore not to exaggerate the community's significance in the sense that it alone was responsible for Venetian primacy in Greek scholarship. Earlier Florence had enjoyed this predominance, owing primarily to the teaching there of one individual, the Byzantine Manuel Chrysoloras. And during his tenure there existed no Greek colony to speak of in Florence.(51) But this was much earlier, during the late fourteenth century, and before the large-scale emigation of Greeks to Italy. Moreover, Chrysoloras' teaching served to draw to Florence only western Hellenists yet unschooled in Greek, not learned Greeks from the East. It would seem to be more than mere coincidence that Venice's displacement of Florence as the leader in Greek studies and her establishment as the main center of Greek printing occurred at the very time that the Greek colony in Venice began to flourish and its population to burgeon.
It is difficult to divorce the reasons for the cultural growth of the colony from the commercial prosperity of Venice and from the latter's strategic position as intermediary between East and West. And we certainly cannot overlook the remarkable achievement of Aldus, whose vision, organizational ability, and publications did so much for the dissemination of Greek learning in Europe. All of these factors interact with and depend upon one another. But the point even more to be emphasized is that the lives and careers of the Greek exiles, many of whom were Aldus' chief associates, and without whose aid his work would have been far less effective if not virtually impossible, take on much more meaning when viewed, as they have not been, against the background of the Greek colony of Venice. With the addition of this new dimension to the Venetian scene, a more complete and accurate picture is provided to explain the primacy of Venice in Greek letters during the period of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when she became the leading intellectual center of all Europe.
It is clear then that the community imbued the Greek emigrés, whether they chose to live within the colony or not, with a feeling of security, a sense of belonging, which permitted them to look upon Venice as a second homeland. We should discard therefore the stock image of the Byzantine or post-Byzantine scholars coming to Italy during the Renaissance as for the most part lone, friendless refugees with no particular place for themselves in the West. To be sure, certain Greeks, especially in more distant northern Europe, remained aloof, isolated, forgotten. But for most of the Greeks of the diaspora, particularly in Italy, there was for several centuries a substitute motherland to be found in the Greek colony. According to the nineteenth century Greek historian Veludo, it was this community in Venice which in the period of the Greek nation's disappearance best preserved the Hellenic tradition. Cardinal Bessarion had put it even more succinctly as he bestowed what was for him the ultimate accolade: 'Venice is truly another Byzantium'.(52)
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