society and the sexes in the venetian republic 357
Figure 8.2. Men processing, women watching. Matteo Pagan, Procession of
the Doge in Piazza San Marco on Palm Sunday (engraving, 1556–59), detail.
Courtesy of Museo Civico Correr.
were exclusively male spaces. Fearing threats to women’s chastity, politi-
cal authorities and patriarchs made sure that “virtually all female sites in
Venice’s gender-specific geography were enclosed and bounded”: women
were restricted to their homes and one or two adjacent contrade (more
or less conterminous with parishes).
Only to a limited extent is this blanket assertion accurate.16 As regards
elite women, it may be partially valid for the 15th and 16th centuries, though
not for the doges’ wives. On occasion, dogaresse appeared in public, usually
in gondolas, when they escorted important female visitors around the city.17
In the 16th century, two of them were accorded coronation ceremonies: Zilia
Dandolo Priuli in 1557 and Morosina Morosini Grimani in 1597.18 Romano’s
16 Edward Muir, “In Some Neighbors We Trust: On the Exclusion of Women from the
Public in Renaissance Italy,” in David S. Peterson and Daniel E. Bornstein, eds., Florence
and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy: Essays in Honour of John M.
Najemy (Toronto, 2008), pp. 271–89.
17 Holly S. Hurlburt, The Dogaressa of Venice, 1200–1500 (New York, 2006).
18 Bronwen Wilson, “ ‘Il bel sesso, e l’austero Senato’: The Coronation of Dogaressa
Morosini Grimani,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999), 73–139; Hurlburt, The Dogaressa of
Venice.