politics and constitution 73
attempts at normalization that emerge in the provisions of the Council
of Ten between the 16th and 17th centuries: the displays of a widespread
disquiet that emerge from a glance at the court’s sentences demonstrate
the crumbling of the long, successful construction of the republican iden-
tity, both within and without.
It was in this sphere that a genre of self-representation wholly internal
to the Venetian nobility could emerge: a politico-literary genre that would
be coined with the term antimito [anti-myth]. With respect to Contarini’s
already classic codified partition in the 16th century, the authors of the
antimito produced images of the Serenissima’s political body which were
by no means harmonious. The silhouette of the Venetian nobility was now
defined by conflict and violence rather than harmony and wisdom, by
the domination of money rather than the mythical equality before the
law. From the exemplars of the early 17th century, often anonymous or
of difficult attribution, and up to Giacomo Nani in the second half of the
18th century, it seems that a middling nobility on the road to impoverish-
ment and excluded from the most prestigious offices tried to demonstrate
through criticism the legitimacy of their function.60 In his political essay
on the aristrocratic body of the Republic of Venice, Nani would conduct
a sort of anatomical examination of the sovereign body along two lines
of analysis: in one column there would be placed “various situations and
wealth,” in five classes determined by the greater or lesser wealth, and the
political “situation” (chronicling rise and fall) so intimately connected to
that wealth; in the other column, the “costume morale,” or ideological
choices of the different classes: the signori, the buoni (those who supported
the Church and deference to Rome), the spiriti forti-liberi (libertines, those
against Roman intervention), and the poveri (the poor, those who did not
possess sufficient economic fortune to honorably fulfill their duties). The
oligarchy and plutocracy that governed the Republic produced irreparable
fractures both within the nobility and between Venice and its subject ter-
ritories. A sober and frugal political class, in contrast, always willing to
serve in city offices as well as in posts of the stato da terra and da mar,
would have been able to guarantee the necessary mediation.
The above-mentioned literature of the antimito and the so-called
“guerra delle scritture” [the written war], which saw the Republic and
60 See Piero Del Negro, “Venezia allo specchio. La crisi delle istituzioni veneziane negli
scritti del patriziato (1670–1797),” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 191 (1980),
920–26.