venetian literature and publishing 625
ing patrician males and consequent limits on their freedom of action and
ability to command their own destiny. these factors were accompanied
by a new dependence on wives’ dowries that, moreover, with the decline
in international trade, were invested in more passive and lower-yielding
state bonds and agricultural property.9 arriviste non-patricians including
peasants, mercenary soldiers, and foreign merchants had assumed greater
prominence in the city’s life as the republic required a standing defense
force and patricians decreased commercial voyages. the control of these
subordinates by the patriciate was no longer as simple as it had been por-
trayed in the bulesca, in which the impending fight between two strong
men is settled by the intervention of a patrician. indeed, by the middle of
the century it would take a special trip from heaven by the goddess Peace
to do the job in Marin negro’s La Pace [Peace].
not coincidentally, in this period patricians began retreating into a
new aristocratic leisure that began to find a locus amoenus in the exclu-
sive and private country villa. Concomitantly, their intellectual activity
increasingly took place within closed circles of shared cultural and politi-
cal values known as accademie [academies].
Other writers involved in expressionistic and satirical genres were the
outsider poligrafi. Many of them initiated their careers in aretino’s circle,
although the Vicentine girolamo Parabosco, a musician and novelist, was
part of Venier’s circle. their works were snapped up by publishers, certain
of whom, such as Marcolini, Zoppino, da sabbio, and giolito, specialized
in vernacular genres. their subjects focused on a rejection of humanistic
learning and criticism of the lack of political talent and leadership that
had triggered the wars and their loss by italian states. the poligrafi con-
nected those phenomena with a subsequent general decline, including
moral decay and neglect of justice. With potential reprisals against such
criticisms extending even to state assassination, the poligrafi made them
against anonymous leaders and carefully prefaced their books with praise
of named princes. heterodox religious and moral reform movements,
including those energetically pursued in northern europe, attracted the
interest of the poligrafi and their readers. anton Francesco doni, for
example, was involved in the second publication of thomas More’s Uto-
pia in italy, in 1548, translated into italian by the poligrafo Ortensio Lando
(the first had occurred in Florence in 1519) and created alternative worlds
in several of his works.
9 stanley Chojnacki, “La posizione della donna a Venezia nel Cinquecento,” in Tiziano e
Venezia, pp. 65–70; idem, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice (baltimore, 2000).