Marieta Dario

Carpaccio, Unknown Woman

Marieta was the only child of one of the most interesting men ever known in Venice. At the age of 26, on 6 February 1499, she made a testament, "

considering that nothing is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the hour of death, not wanting to die without a testament so that my affairs are left disordered, sound of mind, intellect and body, but close to childbirth  . .

She lived six more years, dying in 1505 from an unrecorded cause.   She was born in about 1473 to the woman Giovanni Dario called "mia Chiara," in their house at S. Apostoli near the Rialto bridge.  In 1478 and 1484-85, Dario had won Venice such concessions from two Ottoman sultans that the city presented him with Ca' Dario, which he so charmingly restored, and 1000 ducats for Marieta's dowry. He was Cretan, and perhaps Chiara was, too, though he was a Venetian citizen, and Marieta was born out of wedlock, but for a few years he was the most valuable person Venice had.

 "to Chiara, mother of my daughter Marieta":
from Giovanni Dario's will of 1 October 1493, made just before he died.

She was married, in 1493, to the boy next door -- Vicenzo Barbaro, the son of Giacomo Barbaro and Nicolosa Bochole.  He may not have been a boy at all: his parents were married in 1448, so he may have been considerably older than she.  All that is known of him is that a particularly violent outburst of temper got him excluded from the Great Council -- all patrician males over the age of 20 were members -- for ten years.  That, and the fact that he is almost unmentioned in her will -- she identifies herself as his wife, but her children are left in the care of her mother Chiara, and Ca' Dario is left to her son at the age of 25 -- and any other that might be born -- with Chiara to be in charge. (Her daughter could inherit at 20.)

Dario loved Chiara dearly, that comes through in his various testaments. He had adopted his sister's sons and brought them to Venice from Crete to share his business ventures: in his testaments he asked that they regard Chiara as their mother.  Only one of them, Francesco Pantaleone, was alive when he made his will, and Dario left Ca' Dario jointly to him and Marieta . When Marieta made her testament she left Francesco half of something, probably the house, but it is not perfectly clear what.  What is is clear that Marieta controlled several pieces of real estate, including an estate near Padua, and had a variety of investments. Dario had given her 1000 ducats at marriage, in addition to the 1000 from Venice, so she had considerable financial autonomy.

When she made her 1499 testament, Marieta had one son, Gasparo, born about 1496.  Giacomo was born about 1501 and Giovanni probably 1502-3, unless he was the child with which she was pregnant when she wrote the testament.  So much personal material involves the words "about," "may," "probably".

Marieta was buried, at her request, in her father's tomb at Sta. Maria della Grazie, on a small island near S. Giorgio Maggiore. Much later, the church was used as an Austrian ammunition depot: the ammunition exploded in 1849, destroying the church and all its tombs.

What happened to Ca' Dario after Marieta died is vague, but she had specified that it be rented out.  The next we know of it, Ca' Dario was used as a residence for the orators -- ambassadors -- of Signor Turco at least three different times starting in 1514.  The office of the governor of one of the state banks was responsible for preparing the house for visitors, and for their expenses.  When a Turkish ambassador arrived, his ship was met at Lido by sixteen patricians dressed in scarlet who escorted him to Ca' Dario.  The ambassadors must have been delighted with the Turkish fountain room Dario had installed.  In 1515, the ambassador was provided 6 ducats a day for expenses, but by 1517 that was reduced to 5 -- rank ingratitude when that year the ambassador had brought with him the head of a commander from Bulgaria where the Turks had won an important battle.

In 1522, when Gasparo was of age, he and his brothers made claim for possession of Ca' Dario and this was granted. The document survives, with the signature of Doge Antonio Grimani. After that, information on Ca' Dario disappears until the early 1800s.

The notary's draft of Marieta's testament (click to enlarge).

My thanks to Emanuela Brusegan Flavel of Venice who transcribed Marieta's testament for me.

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2008/08/most-beautiful-red-parrot.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/09/genio-vrbis-johannes-darivs.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2010/09/interlaced-circles.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/03/valor-of-our-stratioti.html

Interlaced Circles

I wrote earlier about the inscription on the facade of Ca' Dario.  This entry is about the interlaced circles on the facade, three of them.

This is what four of the top names in Venetian architecture have to say about them:

1. No house front is richer in colored stones, and this has often been pointed out as a consequence of Dario's years in Byzantium.  . . . Rather than Byzantium, it may instead reflect Dario's ego.  If he wanted to make a pretty show, he succeeded.
2. . . . Cima da Conegliano's Healing of Anianus . . . the polychrome marble intarsias on the building are remarkably similar to those on the facade of Palazzo Dario.  Giovanni Dario wanted for his house what he had seen in the work of this impressionable painter; he wanted freedom of invention untrammeled by the rules and limitations of architectural dogma.
3. Little is known of his earlier missions to Cairo . . . but while there he seems to have noticed the "telephone-dial" motif that he chose to adorn his own house.   . . .  The Venetian masons, unfamiliar with the Egyptian precedent, set the marble discs in their interlaced Byzantinizing borders by reference to local cosmatesque mosaic pavements such as that of San Marco.
4. The architect may also have had descriptions of byzantine palaces in mind, . . .

We don't have any documentation for Dario's restoration of the little Gothic house he was given on the Grand Canal, but various things make 1486 look about right.  After he returned from Constantinople in 1485, Dario was treasurer of the scuola of S. Giovanni Evangelista which Pietro Lombardo was redecorating in 1485. During the 80s, Lombardo was also supervising the construction and ornamentation of the Miracoli. 

So it would not have been unlikely for him to have worked with Dario on turning the little Gothic house into a jewel box.  The Lombardo new constructions were highly symmetrical, Venetian Gothic wasn't, and apart from the asymmetry, the slanting slightly-drunk walls show the medieval fashion for building Venetian walls wider at the bottom than at the top.

As you can see, there has been a remarkable amount of extravagant prose expended in an attempt to explain Dario's choice of ornamentation, and especially for the interlaced circles.  They are infinitely pleasing, but they are no more Byzantine than they are late Roman and Venice was always a part of the Byzantine world.  We find these circles all over the place in the 5th and 6th centuries, and they reappeared in the late 12th century as far away as Westminster Abbey 

when the Cosmati set the fashions for church ornamentation a century and a half before that Egyptian "precedent."  S. Marco was nothing if not fashionable, and they ended up all through the rebuilt 13th C church in explorations of the variety of ways of interlacing circles -- on crosses antique even then,

in the treasury,

on carvings over the doors, 

on the floor of the narthex, 

on the floor by the pulpits.  

And on the south side, facing you when you come up from the water.

The Cretan, Giovanni Dario, was in love with Venice and called her quella cità sancta.  Ego? He had pulled Venice out of lethal situations, twice, with the Ottomans, and had several times worked wonders in Cairo.  Venice thanked him with what has become everyone's favorite house in Venice.  It seems silly to go to so much trouble for explanations -- Byzantine (the lack of survivals in Constantinople make this anyone's guess), Cairo?

a painting (a painting done several years after Ca' Dario)?  Dario saw  interlaced circles all over S. Marco and all over most other Italian churches he visited.  He saw them on the Miracoli.  Why would he not have chosen Venetian motifs for this house he dedicated the Spirit of the City?

GENIO. VRBIS. JOHANNES. DARIVS

 

There are more details here.

GENIO. VRBIS. JOHANNES. DARIVS

GIOVANNI DARIO TO THE SPIRIT OF THE CITY.

This is the inscription at canal-level across the facade of that charming house with the fake chimneys on the Grand Canal, and if you dated it to 1490, you would be close enough. There is only one other similarly inscribed house on the Grand Canal, built just after 1500, but its inscription is of an unconvincingly Christian ilk and says NON NOBIS DOMINE NON NOBIS SED NOMINI TUO DA GLORIAM -- NOT TO US LORD BUT TO YOUR NAME GIVE THE GLORY.**

Dario was a Christian, too -- everyone in Venice was-- but more important, he was a Venetian citizen. This citizenship was a gift for his service. He had not been born to it, and he had dedicated his whole life to the service of quella cità santa -- his earlier, more personal expression of pria Veneziani poi Cristiani, or siamo Veneziani. First Venetians, then Christians. Few meant it with the particular intensity that Dario felt, and his letters from abroad yearn toward his Venice, and his bed in Venice, with all the yearning another man might have extended towards a beloved. Say, Sigismondo Malatesta for his Isotta.

A brief article on Sigismondo's Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini discusses an excerpt from a Greek inscription on the exterior of the church: ΘΕΟΙ ΑΘΑΝΑΤΩΙ ΚΑΙ ΤΗΙ ΠΟΛΕΙ ΤΟΝ ΝΕΩΝ -- THIS TEMPLE TO THE DEATHLESS GOD AND THE CITY. The beginning of the inscription reads, SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA . . . HAS ERECTED. And this is where Cyriaco of Ancona comes in.

Cyriaco came in often during the first half of the 15th century. He and Sigismondo Malatesta had met at the church council in Florence in 1439, if not before, but in 1432 Cyriaco had visited Naples and copied down a temple inscription in Greek he found there which read TIBERIUS JULIUS TARSUS TO THE DIOSCOURI AND THE CITY. Stay with me on this.

In the late 1440s, Malatesta commissioned the dazzling Alberti to fix up a 13th-century Franciscan gothic church in Rimini. Alberti fixed it up, all right, baffling the Franciscans with a Renaissance reliquary full of elephants, pagan deities, and dancing cherubs to enshrine the bodies and the love of Malatesta and his brilliant wife Isotta. Piero della Francesca who was also at Florence in 1439 painted Malatesta's portrait in a fresco in the interior. Cyriaco visited Rimini in 1449 and that article on the Tempio suggests that Cyriaco gave Malatesta this Neapolitan inscription which was then adapted and carved on Alberti's confection. But Cyriaco surely did not change the Greek "temple" from the ordinary ΝΑΟΝ of the Naples inscription to the showy ΝΕΩΝ of Rimini.

Malatesta had Greek scholars on staff, and it could have been done that way, but another person whom Malatesta had met at Florence in 1439, and one who chronically employed such hyper-classical Greek was Georgios Gemistos Plethon of Mistra. Malatesta admired him intensely, so intensely that when he was leading the Venetian war in Greece in the 1460s and briefly captured Mistra, he brought back Plethon's body as his personal souvenir and buried him in a sarcophagus on the exterior of the Tempio.

(There are more connections: Malatesta was a nephew of Cleofe, Plethon had talked way too much at her funeral, and Malatesta may have felt a certain personal entitlement at Mistra. Certainly the Venetians thought he did. Would you be surprised to know that Cyriaco had visited Plethon at Mistra at least twice?)

One more thing about this inscription and then back to the one on Ca' Dario. There is another element that is so Cyriaco, and that is the two letters above the inscription: Τ Α. These letters stand for ΑΓΑΘΗΙ ΤΥΧΗΙ, To the Benevolent Fortune -- letters common on dedicatory inscriptions from Hellenistic Greece, and letters which Cyriaco sometimes used at the beginning of his letters. When Cyriaco visited Rimini in 1449, he had copied hundreds of such inscriptions, many with this prefix, and had exchanged a number of letters with Malatesta.  So when the Venetian Senate gave Giovanni Dario the house on the Grand Canal in appreciation for his exceptional services to Venice in tidying up the end of Malatesta's war which went from 1464 to 1478 -- other services, too -- the house needed fixing up. This probably began in 1486 when Dario was 73 or so (but then it could have been about 1480). The facade of the brick gothic house was fixed up with a brightly colored marble cladding, rather like the meticulously symmetrical Miracoli which became the reliquary for a miraculous icon, but looks much more like a casket for jewels. However, Venetian gothic is asymetrical and the marble cladding with its intertwined circles gives Ca' Dario the affect of someone who has had too much prosecco standing unwisely in a gondola. Dario knew Malatesta. (Would you be surprised to know that Dario also knew Plethon, and had visited Mistra?) Dario and Cyriaco had long been friends, probably first meeting in Crete in 1445. It is not difficult to envision Dario's learning about Malatesta's inscription and making his own version, especially when he, too, was enshrining a great love. (Of course, one could envision Dario's seeing an inscription of his own, perhaps at some Adriatic port.)    Whatever the genesis of GENIO. VRBIS. JOHANNES. DARIVS, Dario had it carved large, hand-sized, at eye-level where no one floating past could help but read it and feel some sense of possession. ** This building, Ca' Vendramin-Calergi, is now the Casino of Venice, whose clients, no doubt recite the inscription with anxiety. For notes on the history and decoration of Ca' Dario, and more pictures, go here