introduction 3
title and Sabellico’s approach make clear, was deeply indebted to Livy’s
history of Rome. The reputation of Sabellico’s history has been checkered:
while not particularly innovative or insightful, and occasionally histori-
cally inaccurate, overall he was an effective writer and did a passable job
of surveying the city’s history. Indeed, in recognition of this, his history
received official recognition by venice following its publication. This rec-
ognition was tempered by harsh critiques among contemporaries, which
carried over to subsequent generations, who have seen Sabellico as deriv-
ative, lazy, and “a second-rate humanist.”5
Despite its limitations, Sabellico’s work, and that of Bernardo Giustinian
in 1492, signal the beginning of a shift in venice from chronicle to history,
which would become increasingly important in articulating a venetian
political consciousness that emphasized and was organized around the
state that venice had acquired over the past century. In many ways the
Cinquecento was the “golden age of venetian historiography.”6 The posi-
tion of official historian was formally established in 1516 when Andrea
Navagero was charged to record the Republic’s “constancy and invincible
virtue” in the political crisis of the League of Cambrai. Navagero never
finished his work, and what little he wrote was so severely criticized that
in his will he ordered it burned.7
His successor, Pietro Bembo, inherited the position in 1530 and was sim-
ilarly tasked with writing an elegant Latin history that would redound to
the city’s honor. The result was the Historiae venetae, libri XII, completed
in late 1543, but only published posthumously in 1551. The work picks up
where Sabellico left off and traces the difficult years from 1487 to 1513.
While generally well received by contemporaries, the reputation of the
Historiae venetae deteriorated among subsequent generations of scholars,
who criticized Bembo for the chronicle-like quality of his account and his
emphasis on literary style over historical method.
5 eric W. Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago,
1981), pp. 84–86; William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renais-
sance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 89–91; Pertusi, “Gli
inizi della storiografia umanistica nel Quattrocento,” pp. 320–30; Gino Benzoni, “Scritti
storico-politici,” in Gino Benzoni and Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Storia di Venezia. Dalle
origini alla caduta della Serenissima, 14 vols (Rome, 1992–2002), vol. 4 (1996): Il Rinasci-
mento. Politica e cultura, ed. Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci, pp. 763–65.
6 Gaetano Cozzi, “Cultura politica e religione nella ‘pubblica storiografia’ veneziana
del ’500,” Bollettino dell’Istituto di storia della società e dello stato veneziano 5–6 (1963–64),
219–22.
7 Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, p. 139.