society and the sexes in the venetian republic 355
bystanders made no effort to stop them.11 For the first time in his life, he
saw women perform on stage.12 In somewhat more detail, he discussed
the mountebanks, mostly men but a few women, who hawked their wares
and entertained the public in Piazza San Marco.13 Like other foreign tour-
ists, Coryate had nothing to say about Venetians who were not strikingly
different in dress and/or behavior from people at home.
Public and Private Spaces: Elites
For a fuller understanding of gender in Venice and its subject cities, we
must go beyond Coryate to other sources and scholarly interpretations
of them. Projected back into the early modern period, the 19th-century
notion of the “public sphere” as the domain of men and the “private” one
as the natural and proper environment of women is wildly anachronistic.
As I intend to show in this and the next section, issues of gender and
space were more complex than often assumed.
A series of woodcuts by Matteo Pagan (Fig. 8.1), Procession of the Doge
in Piazza San Marco on Palm Sunday (1556–59, Museo Civico Correr),
provides a vivid example from which to start. Both men and women
are present in Pagan’s depiction, but they inhabit different zones of this
space. Arranged by rank, secular and religious notables, all men, wind
their way around the piazza. From second-story windows, women (pre-
sumably elite but perhaps also courtesans) observe the procession. That
women, not nearly as visible to the viewer, also gaze down from the win-
dows in a painting produced two generations earlier (Fig. 8.2), Gentile
Bellini’s Procession of the True Cross in Piazza San Marco (1496, Gallerie
dell’Accademia), indicates that such a separation of men and women was
a constant feature of Venetian processional life.
Many foreign visitors, though not Coryate, remarked on the extraor-
dinarily rigid seclusion of well-born Venetian women in their homes.14
Twenty years ago, Dennis Romano contended “that the division of the city
into male and female space was one of the marked and powerful dichoto-
mies in the Venetian urban landscape.”15 Piazza San Marco, at the political
and ritual core of the city, and Rialto, its financial and commercial center,
11 Coryate, Coryats Crudities, 1:413–14.
12 Coryate, Coryats Crudities, 1:386.
13 Coryate, Coryats Crudities, 1:409–10.
14 Davis, “The Geography of Gender,” pp. 21–23.
15 Dennis Romano, “Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice,” Journal
of Social History 23 (1989), 339–40; second quotation in this same paragraph, p. 347.