the venetian intellectual world 601
The university of Padua, Venice’s own, to which it committed for training
its future elite, also validated the education achieved by this young woman
who succeeded to the tradition of women’s freedom in which Venice had
uniquely pioneered. She was uniquely privileged, it is true, having been
provided by her father with the best tutors in latin, Greek, and hebrew;
and her venture was very much a stratagem to enhance her father’s status,
much as Tarabotti’s monastic confinement served to protect her father’s
wealth. nonetheless, it is a signal achievement, trumpeting to the world
the capacity of women and the claim they would make, in time, to enter
the sacred precincts of advanced learning. Yet there is something empty
about the triumph of cornaro Piscopia, less a sounding of her own instru-
ment than a trumpeted celebration of her father’s lineage and her native
Venice. not surprising; by 1678, Venetian culture in general had turned
from innovation to preservation.
Venice PreservedBy the late 16th century, even before the late masterpieces of contarini
and Sarpi, Venice had begun to retreat within itself. in these later years,
its intellectual production was typified above all by antiquarianism: a
comprehensive and meticulous collecting of all things Venetian, both
material and verbal.99 already in the 16th century, Giovanni Battista
egnazio (1473–1553) published his De exemplis illustrium virorum venete
ciuitatis [Examples of Illustrious Men of the City of Venice] in 1554,100 and
Francesco Sansovino (1521–83) his Venetia città nobilissima et singolare
[Venice, Most Noble and Singular City] in 1581, surveying the visual
and cultural marvels of the city.101 Similar works proliferated in the
Patricia h. labalme, “Women’s roles in early Modern Venice: an exceptional case,” in
labalme, ed., Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (new York, 1980),
pp. 129–52.
99 For Venetian collectionism, see lanfranco Franzoni, “antiquari e collezionisti
nel cinquecento,” in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 3 (1981): Dal primo Quattrocento al
Concilio di Trento, part 3, pp. 207–25; Simona Savini Branca, Il collezionismo veneziano nel
’600 (Padua, 1964); and cesare augusto levi, Le collezioni veneziane d’arte e d’antichità dal
secolo XIV, ai nostri giorni (Venice, 1900).
100 Giovanni Battista egnazio, De exemplis illustrium virorum venete ciuitatis, atque
aliarum gentium, ed. Marcus Molinus (Paris, 1554); see also ross, “Venetian Schools and
Teachers Fourteenth to early Sixteenth century.”
101 Francesco Sansovino, Venetia, città nobilissima, et singolare (Venice, 1581; rev. edn
ed. Giustiniano Martinioni, Venice, 1663; repr. Farnborough, 1968); see also elena Bonora,
Ricerche su Francesco Sansovino: imprenditore, librario e letterato (Venice, 1994).