10 eric r. dursteler
of his contribution, he was memorialized with a bust by Augusto Benv-
enuti in the Palazzo Ducale.25
The “fetishism” of the document was similarly manifest in the publica-
tion of numerous collections of primary sources over the course of the
19th century. The first of 15 volumes of eugenio Albèri’s famed Relazioni
degli ambasciatori veneti al senato was published in 1839, and was sup-
plemented by several subsequent collections, including Niccolò Barozzi
and Guglielmo Berchet’s set of 17th-century reports. The second half of
the century witnessed the publication of other documentary sources,
including Sanudo’s Diarii, the Rome dispatches of Paruta, and Predelli’s
Commemoriali.26
An enduring fascination with venice and a growing awareness of its
archival riches drew many non-Italian scholars to the city over the course
of the century. The great Leopold von Ranke was among the first research-
ers to gain access to the archives in 1828. Others followed, including
Armand Baschet, who in 1869 was tasked by the french foreign ministry
to collect and copy manuscripts related to french history and who joined
the chorus against his countryman Daru, accusing him of blatant falsifica-
tion of documents.27 The englishman Rawdon Brown was commissioned
in 1862 to canvas the “vast magazine of universal history” of the frari for
documents pertaining to British history. His labors were collected in the
monumental six volumes and more than 5000 pages of the Calendar of
State Papers Venetian, published over the course of the next 20 years.28
This work was taken up by another english gentleman scholar, Horatio
Brown (no relation), who spent four decades in venice working on the
next five volumes of the Calendar. He also published a very conventional
work, Venice: An Historical Sketch of the Republic (London, 1895), which
focuses primarily on the political narrative.
Returning to venice, alongside Romanin, the other chief figure of
19th-century venetian historiography was Pompeo Molmenti, who has
been described as “the standard-bearer of the army of historians seeking
25 Benzoni, “Dal rimpianto alla ricostruzione geografica,” pp. 365, 368–69.
26 Gino Benzoni, “Ranke’s favorite Source: The venetian Relazioni: Impressions with
Allusions to Later Historiography,” in Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, eds., Leopold
von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, 1990), pp. 49–50; Benzoni,
“La Storiografia,” p. 609.
27 De vivo, “Quand le passé résiste à ses historiographies: venise et le XvIIe siècle,”
p. 224; Pemble, Venice Rediscovered, pp. 95, 202 n. 15.
28 Pemble, Venice Rediscovered, pp. 75, 80–81; Paul Kaufman, “Rawdon Brown and his
Adventures in venetian Archives,” English Miscellany 18 (1967), 288–89.