584 margaret l. king
Sabellico was not a Venetian patrician but a professional man of letters
and an immigrant from small-town Vicovaro, and he was surely gratified
to be assigned a well-paid sinecure (200 ducats per year) in recognition
of his service.
once established, the tradition of official historiography was contin-
ued without interruption from the renaissance through the Baroque era.
Sabellico was followed by Pietro Bembo (of whom more below), writing
in humanist latin, and then, variously in italian and latin, by Paolo Par-
uta, andrea Morosini, niccolò contarini (whose more realistic and ironic
account was not, uniquely, published),36 Battista nani, Michele Foscarini,
and so on into an 18th-century blur: a “Settecento silence.”37 Produced
self-referentially by the ruling class for its own purposes as well as for
propagandistic use abroad, and characterized, with the exception of the
future doge contarini’s maverick contribution, by a mounting blandness,
these histories try the patience of the modern scholar: “Without inter-
ruption the overabundance of the historiographical production,” laments
Gino Benzoni, the myth of Venice “can also die of boredom!”38
even as the public historians supplied their bland narrative of politi-
cal events, patrician memorialists and diarists recorded the ripe details of
current events without humanist polish or pretense. an early instance of
the genre is the chronicle of antonio Morosini, only recently recovered.39
While the earlier parts of the extant work are based on previous chroni-
cles, the remainder is quite different: it is a journalistic record of events as
they occurred during the author’s lifetime (Morosini died in 1433), as news
reached him, studded with transcriptions of letters and other documents
that came to his hand, with his sometimes sour comments attached and
36 a large selection in Benzoni and Zanato, eds., Storici e politici, pp. 135–442. For
contarini, see Gaetano cozzi, Il doge Nicolò Contarini: Richerche sul patriziato veneziano
agli inizi del Seicento (Venice, 1958).
37 Benzoni, “la storiografia e l’erudizione storico-antiquaria,” p. 75. These histories,
contarini’s excepted, are published in vols 2–10 of Zeno, ed., Degl’istorici delle cose
veneziane.
38 Benzoni, “la storiografia e l’erudizione storico-antiquaria,” pp. 76, 74.
39 antonio Morosini, The Morosini Codex, vol. 1: To the Death of Andrea Dandolo
(1354); vol. 2: Marino Falier to Antonio Venier (1354–1400); vol. 3: Reign of Michele Steno
(1400–1407), ed. Michele Pietro Ghezzo, John r. Melville-Jones, and andrea rizzi (Padua,
1999, 2000, 2005). although the three volumes published to date take us to 1407, Morosini
was still writing up to 1413/14. domenico Malipiero’s Annali veneti dall’anno 1457 al 1500,
ed. Francesco longo and agostino Sagredo (Florence, 1834–44), written later in the 15th
century, may also be seen as representative of this genre.