402 cecilia cristellon and silvana seidel menchi
The Venice in which the third figure in this small gallery, saint gregorio
Barbarigo (1625–97), reached his maturity was a marginal entity on the
european political scene. Born into a family of great prestige, Barbarigo
was raised with an eye to a political career. indeed, just such a career
was imminent when, after studying civil law at the university of Padua,
he was chosen to accompany the Venetian ambassador Alvise Contarini
to Munster as an observer in the negotiations in the final phase of the
Thirty Years’ War. After his return from the mission, during which he had
the opportunity to represent a declining Venice to the european political
forces on the rise, such as the united Provinces of Holland, the young
patrician had a taste of public life with his first government position.
Called away by a late vocation for an ecclesiastical career and recruited
into the secular clergy, however, he moved to Rome following an invita-
tion of Alexander Vii, who had come to value him in Munster, where the
future pope, at that time fabio Chigi, had been present as papal legate.
The success that his qualities earned Barbarigo came in Rome, not in Ven-
ice: canon of the cathedral of Padua, then bishop of Bergamo (1657), nomi-
nated cardinal at a young age (1660), and bishop of the wealthy diocese of
Padua (1664), he would be a serious candidate for the papal throne. His
dedication to the poor and sick during a plague epidemic provided one of
the basic prerequisites for Counter-Reformation sainthood.50 The Church
whose reform he sought was, however, substantially the clergy: his com-
mitment to promoting the preparation of the clergy and the decorum of
ecclesiastical buildings came through in the erection of the seminary in
Padua and the care he invested in the pastoral visits of his diocese. His
opposition to the conferment of a degree in theology to elena lucrezia
Corner Piscopio, due to her gender, was consistent with the values of the
institution to whose service he had dedicated his life.51
giustiniani, Contarini, and Barbarigo are only three examples of a wide
array of Venetian patricians for whom a political and ecclesiastical career
were interchangeable: men devoted to the spiritual life who took on pub-
lic roles of great symbolic value for the Republic, or magistrates of proven
treatise De potestate pontificis quod divinitus sit tradita, and the treatise De immortalitate
animae (datable between 1535 and 1537).
50 Peter Burke, “How to Be a Counter-Reformation saint,” in Burke, The Historical
Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge,
1987), pp. 48–62.
51 liliana Billanovich and Pierantonio gios, eds., Gregorio Barbarigo: Patrizio veneto,
vescovo e cardinale nella tarda Controriforma (Padua, 1999). Also see his biography in Dizio-
nario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 59 (Rome, 2002), pp. 247–52.