408 cecilia cristellon and silvana seidel menchi
peasants who went to confess on Holy friday. it has been proposed that
some painters were also involved in the movement.68 This exuberant
array of micro-phenomena of religious dissent displayed its full fervor in
the 1540s and early 1550s, retreated into the private sphere in the late 1550s
and early 1560s, and met with harsh repression in the late 1560s and 1570s.
By the 1580s, Protestantism in Venice had been reduced to a handful of
cases that were quickly isolated and eliminated.69
The following paragraphs will illustrate the phenomenon of the recep-
tion of Protestant ideas in Venice, a theme which has also been accu-
rately analyzed70 with respect to its aristocratic ramifications,71 through
a discussion of two of its emblematic representatives: the bishop Vittore
soranzo and the notary Benedetto del Borgo.
Vittore soranzo (c.1510–58) left his homeland and illustrious family at
a young age in order to move to Rome. leaving his study of law in Padua
unfinished, he was ordained, since, like other young Venetian patricians
of modest wealth, he aspired to a career in the Church. His expectations
were not fulfilled, however, until the favor of the cardinal and famous
scholar Pietro Bembo, who had supported him since his early years in
Padua, installed him in the diocese of Bergamo, first as coadiutore to
Bembo (1544) and then, after the latter’s death, as bishop himself (1545).
According to his own accounts, soranzo’s participation with the move-
ment of Church reform dated back to 1543 and was born under the influ-
ence of the spiritualistic tendencies in the milieu surrounding Cardinal
Pole.72 if this is true, soranzo’s theological and ecclesiological maturation
occurred quickly: while the widespread spiritualism in Pole’s circle left
the institutional structures and sacraments of the Church intact, soranzo
came to Bergamo with a plan to reform his diocese in an evangelical-
lutheran direction. The books and writings that he worked from—whose
later confiscation has allowed many of them to survive until the present
68 Massimo firpo, Artisti, gioiellieri, eretici. Il mondo di Lorenzo Lotto tra Riforma e Con-
troriforma (Rome/Bari, 2001); fabrizio Biferali and Massimo firpo, Battista Franco “pittore
viniziano” nella cultura artistica e nella vita religiosa del Cinquecento (Pisa, 2007).
69 silvana seidel Menchi, “italy,” in B. scribner, R. Porter, and M. Teich, eds., The Refor-
mation in National Context (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 181–201; Andrea Del Col, L’Inquisizione
in Italia dal XII al XXI secolo (Milan, 2006), pp. 271–79.
70 John J. Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berke-
ley/los Angeles/london, 1993).
71 federica Ambrosini, Storie di patrizi e di eresia nella Venezia del Cinquecento (Milan,
1999).
72 Massimo firpo and sergio Pagano, I processi inquisitoriali di Vittore Soranzo (1550–
1558 ). Edizione critica, 2 vols, Collectanea Archivii Vaticani 53 (Vatican City, 2004).