Giovanni
Dario between his friends, the Bellini brothers.
Gentile
Bellini, Procession at San Marco, 1496.
Every
week the New York Times interviews a famous person and asks which
three people would be the best dinner guests. I would need several
dinners, but for one I would choose Giovanni Dario, Cyriaco of
Ancona, and Cardinal Bessarion. We know that Dario and Cyriaco were
acquainted, and I can demonstrate the likelihood that Bessarion knew
both of them. It is possibly not correct to chose only men for
guests, but I would prefer an all- women's dinner another time with
Cleofe, Paola, and Battista Malatesta. I have written
about Cyriaco and Bessarion in
recent months, but it has been a long time since Giovanni Dario was a
guest here.
He
came to mind because a recent publication by Nicky Tsougarakis
in Dumbarton Oaks Papers of 14th-century Cretan
notarial documents includes a number from 1356-57 with a Giovanni
Dario as witness. This is surely my man's great-grandfather: we know
he was a notary, as was my Giovanni – or Zuam or Zuan or Zan (I
have all three names in a letter to him from the Signoria).
Dario
was born about 1414 in Crete, a citizen of the stato
da mar. He
was at
least the fourth generation of his family to be trained and certified
as a notary, following his great-grandfather Giovanni (who also owned
sheep) and his grandfather and father (both named Marco). Marco
Dario fils was
also a gold-worker and jeweller, protomaestro of
the goldworker’s guild, a
procurator of the cathedral of St. Titus, and a merchant who combined
business with travels as an emissary for the duca of
Crete. I
am quite sure, without evidence, that Marco Dario had something to do
with Commander Giovanni Delfino's acquisition of the most beautiful
small antiquity in existence, that Cyriaco
wrote about in 1445. Cyriaco
had visited the Dario property at Pediada in Crete, possibly
arranging for a shipment of cheese or wine, while looking for
antiquities.
Giovanni joined his father in business and political ventures to Constantinople, Venice, Rhodes, and other ports of the eastern Mediterranean, apparently picking up useful bits of Arabic and Turkish to add to his Venetian and Italian. He was licensed as a notary in 1450, which certified him as doctissimus in litteris grecis et latinis, which means that he was compentent to write legal documents in both languages. That same year he interpreted for Nicolò da Canale, Venetian ambassador first to the court of Constantine XI in Constantinople, then to the court of Murad IV, and finally to the court of Thomas Palaiologos in the Peloponnesos, and may have translated the final agreements from Greek into Latin for Venetian records. Tradition puts him in the camp of Mehmed II as an observe during the 1453 siege of Constantinople, but documents put him in Sitia in eastern Crete.
Like
his father, Dario combined government responsibilities with his own
business as a merchant. His knowledge of Greek and Latin extended to
the classical forms, and he found his friendships among
humanists—writers and artists. One of them was the humanist and
hunter of antiquities, Cyriaco of Ancona. Both of them them were
engaged in the same kind of work, some of it diplomatic, some of it
brokering objets des fines
arts between Italy, Crete, Egypt,
and Constantinople: both were men of great good humor and good
conversation, Cyriaco hyperactive and ebullient, Dario quiet and
inclined to sit.
By
1465 Giovanni was employed in the cancelleria in
Venice which involved him in most aspects of the Venetian government,
especially diplomacy within Italy. He received regular raises of
salary, and promotions in titles and responsibilities, but it was was
clearly the exhausting Venetian-Ottoman war (from July 1463 to
January 1478/79 ) that demonstrated his unique value to the Signoria:
he was sent at least four times to Constantinople with various
patrician ambassadors to negotiate peace, on one trip negotiating
with Mehmed's emissary on Mount Athos. It was to his great
advantage that he could speak Turkish. He went at least twice to
Egypt to protest abuses against Venetian merchants in Damascus and
Cairo. He continued his own business—just before he left on the
second Egyptian voyage, he and his brother contracted with a Paduan
goldworker to buy metal and worked silver in Cairo, and exchange a
silver cup for a pearl, and then he arranged in Alexandria to export
wheat, always needed in Crete.
In
Venice, he lived near S. Apostoli (just off the Rialto bridge) with a
woman to whom he was devoted, though all we can be sure of is her
name, Chiara. Their child Marieta was
born, probably, in 1473. The household included his sister Salamona's
sons—Francesco, Giovanni, and Andrea Pantaleo (who eventually took
Dario for their last name), whom he expected to regard Chiara as if
she were their mother.
Because
the official ambassador to the Sultan had died, exhausted from his
many trips between Venice and Constantinople in the last year of the
war, Dario was given broad discretion to negotiate, persuade, and
cajole the final peace agreement from Mehmed. Mehmed
gave him his cahd-name on
25 January 1478(9), and presented him with a
horse, and three cloth-of-gold robes. Mehmed sent
a kyahya,
Lüfti Beg, back with Dario to Venice to receive the Signoria's
confirmation of the agreement, and the Signoria gave Lüfti Beg
cloth-of-gold robes of his own in return. Mehmed asked for artists:
when Dario returned to Constantinople in early summer, he took with
him Gentile Bellini and a sculptor.
In
Gentile's painting above, Dario is shown as an elderly man. The
painting was made two years after he died, in 1494 at the age of 80.
He had been troubled for some years with heart trouble. In
Turkey in 1485 he had pled with the Signoria to allow him to return
to Venice:
To
stay here in order to spend uselessly seems to me unnecessary;
besides my age and
the condition of my valetudinarian body require a better place than
this. because if I should have another attack, it
will take me with no coming back Here there is neither doctor nor
medicine, nor any tending, either physical or spiritual, and one who
dies here dies like a dog. It makes me extremely afraid when I think
of such danger, and so I hope in the clemency of Your Most
Illustrious Signoria that it will not want such a faithful servant to
perish in this way, entreating from you a particular grace in reward
for my fatigue, that you grant me welcome permission to come home,
and that you do not leave me here to die unnecessarily – because if
I live it might happen that some other time I might be a useful
instrument for some need of Your Most Excellent State . . .
The Venetian bailo in Constantinople wrote:
He
is much loved by the paşas.
Frankly, Most Serene Prince, I will say that it would be a sin to
lose this man because of his fine service, because he is profoundly
fatigued because of his personal condition, incurably sick, he has
spent the winter in Adrianople with the greatest discomforts of
living and continual fatigue . . . I respectfully request that Your
Most Illustrious Signoria grant that he be permitted to return with
me on the galleys.
It
was another year before he was permitted to return, but he came back
to the lovely
little house on the Grand Canal that the Signoria gave him
in appreciation for his work. I have written about its
decoration here,
and about its inscription (and Cyriaco) here.
Despite
his age and ill health -- he wrote three wills between then and his
death in 1494 -- Dario made a final trip to Turkey in 1487, to
persuade Beyazid that Venice would not join the Knights of St. John
at Rhodes for a crusade against the Ottomans. In his last,
handwritten, will of 1493, he directed his procuratori to
free his slaves -- some of them Turkish -- with ten years of service
and provide them with adequate clothing and money for the next stage
of their lives.
In
one of his wonderful
letters he wrote: io
che son de natura quieta et de etade ormai inclinata a la quiete—"I
am by nature quiet and now at my age inclined to rest." That
quietness shows in the mild face that gazes from Gentile Bellini's
great Procession
in the Piazza San Marco. Towards
the lower left, where the white-robed figures break, standing between
the Bellini brothers, is an elderly balding
man, somewhat overweight, in the red patrician "toga" with
old-fashioned sleeves to which he was entitled as a Secretary, and
Guardian Grande of the scuola of S.
Giovanni Evangelistra. The
Bellini brothers were members, too, and Dario was the one who paid
them for their work.
There
are two clear reminders of Dario's Turkish experience in Venice
today, in addition to his letters
and the cahd-name with
its great
gold tugra. One is the small
Turkish fountain room he had put in his house at the end of
the great L-shaped room of the piano
nobile.
Marble benches center on a fountain in a small square pool, and
windows look out on the garden behind. The second is in that Bellini
painting. Dario
had taken Bellini to Constantinople to paint for Mehmed. In the
painting, Bellini
shows Dario carrying
a Turkish handkerchief. He never saw the work: it was
painted two years after he died, a tribute from a friend.
Much
of this blog was taken from this
article,
published in The
Turkish Studies Association Journal. In
it you can read translations of Dario's letters about stratioti,
the Kladas affair, and exotic visitors and gifts to the Sultan's
court. Giovanni Dario's web page is here.
