the venetian intellectual world 581
government by political leaders drawn from the middling group of wealthy
merchants and literati.
in the 16th century, younger generations of patrician humanists contin-
ued to dominate the discussion of politics in Venice. conspicuous among
these are the two luminaries, Gasparo contarini and Paolo Paruta: the
former a thinker of great depth who migrated from an early career as
statesman to a later one as church reformer and, eventually, cardinal;
the latter a statesman as well, and a prolific author of treatises and his-
tories. contarini’s La republica e i magistrati di Vinegia [The Republic and
Magistracies of Venice, 1544; first published in latin, 1524] describes the
apparatus of Venetian government councils as a perfect system and the
skeleton of an ideal republic;26 it is, as angelo Ventura characterizes it, a
“summa ideologica degli ottimati veneziani,”27 a culminating statement of
Venetian patrician ideology. Paolo Paruta, like the two Morosinis before
him, applauds the service of the nobleman to Venice, if obliquely, in his
dialogue discussing the relative merits of the active and contemplative life
(the Della perfezione della vita civile [On the Perfection of Civic Life], 1579)
which more greatly approves the active, by which the well-born and well-
bred may serve the state.28 in the same vein is the second of his Discorsi
26 Gasparo contarini, La republica e i magistrati di Vinegia ed. Vittorio conti (Florence,
2003) [repr. facsimile of 1544 ed. [italian]]; De magistratibus et Republica Venetorum (Basel,
1544) [latin, based on orig. latin ed. 1526]; De repvblica venetorvm libri quinque (leiden,
1628) [latin, expanded ed.]. For contarini, see especially Gigliola Fragnito, Gasparo
Contarini: un magistrato veneziano al servizio della cristianità (Florence, 1988); Gigliola
Fragnito and Francesca cavazzana romanelli, eds., Gaspare Contarini e il suo tempo: atti del
convegno, Venezia, 1–3 Marzo 1985 (Venice, 1988); constance M. Furey, Erasmus, Contarini,
and the Religious Republic of Letters (cambridge, 2006); elisabeth G. Gleason, Gasparo
Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley, 1993); also Felix Gilbert, ed., “religion and
Politics in the Thought of Gasparo contarini,” in Gilbert, History: Choice and Commitment
(cambridge Mass., 1977), pp. 247–67; James B. ross, “The emergence of Gasparo contarini:
a Bibliographical essay,” Church History 41.1 (1972), 22–45; and James B. ross, “Gasparo
contarini and his Friends,” Studies in the Renaissance 17 (1970), 192–232.
27 angelo Ventura, “Scrittori politici e scritture di governo,” in Storia della cultura
veneta, vol. 3 (1981): Dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento, part 3, p. 532.
28 For Paruta, see a. Baiocchi, “Paolo Paruta: ideologia e politica nel cinquecento
veneziano,” Studi veneziani n.s. 3 (1976–76), 203–82; also cirillo Monzani’s introduction
to Paolo Paruta, Opere politiche di Paolo Paruta, which contains the Della perfezione and
the Discorsi politici. See also discussions of Paruta in oliver logan, Culture and Society in
Venice, 1470–1790: The Renaissance and its Heritage (new York, 1972); William J. Bouwsma,
Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter
Reformation (Berkeley, 1968); and in the essays of Gino Benzoni, “la cultura: contenuti e
forme,” in Storia di Venezia, vol. 6 (1994): Dal Rinascimento al Barocco, ed. Gaetano cozzi
and Paolo Prodi, pp. 515–88, and Ventura, “Scrittori politici.” Selections from Paruta’s Vita
civile are published in Gino Benzoni and Tiziano Zanato, eds., Storici e politici veneti del
Cinquecento e del Seicento (Milan/naples, 1982), at pp. 493–642; the same volume also