582 margaret l. king
politici [Political Discourses], published posthumously in 1599, in which he
celebrates the political apotheosis of the Venetian republic. With Paruta,
as Gino Benzoni writes, the Venetian polity ascends to its final perfection:
it is a “utopia achieved,” ruled by philosophical patricians under whose
optimal governance cheerful and obedient subjects flourish in order and
concord.29
read throughout europe, contarini’s work was the principal vehicle for
the dissemination to a broad audience of a view of Venice as a flawlessly
functioning republic embodying the perfection of justice. But his work
was only the clearest and most available statement of the arguments also
presented by Quirini, the Morosinis, Paruta, and other patrician human-
ists, delineating the profile that Venice projected of itself as uniquely well
ordered and benevolent—what scholars have called the “myth of Ven-
ice.” Modern historians had no need to construct that myth of Venice;
Venetians themselves already inhabited a misty Parnassus of their own
construction. That happy state was the fruit of a symmetry between gover-
nance and culture, specifically humanist culture: in both realms, the patri-
ciate ruled, tolerating no resistance or dissent. it is their dual hegemony
that accounts for what Ventura sees as the “theoretical poverty and scarce
originality” of Venetian political production.30 The same may be said of
the historical writing generated by the same patrician humanist milieu.31
contains a large selection from the same author’s Della istoria della guerra di Cipro, at
pp. 5–132.
29 Benzoni, “la cultura: contenuti e forme,” p. 536.
30 Ventura, “Scrittori politici,” p. 515.
31 For historical writing in Venice of the 14th to 16th centuries, see Pertusi ed., La
storiografia veneziana fino al secolo xvi; also an overview in eric W. cochrane, Historians
and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (chicago, 1981), pp. 62–74, 77–86; for the
15th to 16th centuries, see Benzoni, “la cultura: contenuti e forme”; Benzoni, “Scritti
storico-politici”; Gaaetano cozzi, “cultura politica e religione nella ‘pubblica storiografia’
veneziana del ’500,” in Bollettino dell’Istituto di Storia della Società e dello Stato Veneziano,
5–6 (1963–64), 215–94; Franco Gaeta, “l’idea di Venezia,” in Storia della cultura veneta,
vol. 3 (1981): Dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento, part 3, pp. 565–641; Gaeta,
“Storiografia, coscienza nazionale e politica culturale nella Venezia del rinascimento,”
in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 3 (1980): Dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento,
part 1, pp. 1–91; Felix Gilbert, “Biondo, Sabellico and the Beginings of Venetian official
historiography,” in T. K. rabb and J. e. Seigel, eds., Action and Conviction in Early Modern
Europe: Essays in Memory of E. H. Harbison (Princeton, 1969), pp. 90–106, repr. in J. G.
rowe and W. h. Stockdale, eds., Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson (Toronto, 1971),
pp. 275–93; Ventura, “Scrittori politici”; for the 16th and 17th centuries, see Gino Benzoni,
“la storiografia e l’erudizione storico-antiquari: gli storici municipali,” in Storia della
cultura veneta, vol. 4 (1984): Dalla Controriforma alla fine della Repubblica. Il Seicento, part 2,
pp. 67–93; Benzoni, “la vita intellettuale,” in Storia di Venezia, vol. 7 (1997): La Venezia
barocca, ed. Gino Benzoni and Gaetano cozzi, pp. 813–919; Benzoni and Zanato, eds., Storici