The low literary creativity
of Venice is discussed in
Therivel's GAM/DP Theory of Personality and Creativity.
Venice's Creativity?
Why Did Venice Have No Great Writers
When It Had Great Painters,
Architects And Musicians
The above is the title of chapter 13 of volume 4 of
William A. Therivel's The GAM/DP Theory of Personality
and Creativity (G stands for genetic
endowment, A for assistances of youth, M
for misfortunes of youth, DP for division of
power, UP for unity of power). For an introduction
to the GAM part of the theory click "Introduction
to GAM"; for an introduction to the DP
part click on "Introduction
to DP".
In this website, the reader is also offered a shortcut:
The GAM/DP Synopsis
and an expanded version, The GAM/DP
Summary of volumes 1 through 4.
Hereafter, I report a few pages from this chapter:
Introduction
Venice is an extraordinary
place, praised for centuries by such connoisseurs as
Goethe and Ruskin, for its architects, painters, and
composers. Everybody comes back enchanted. However,
little of this praise goes to its writers. On this point,
the silence is nearly universal. Indeed, none of the
great Italian writers were Venetian, not Dante, Petrarch,
Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Ariosto or Tasso. Even the stars
of second and third magnitude of Italy's golden centuries
(14th, 15th and 16th), like Guicciardini, Castiglione,
Pulci, Boiardo, Vasari, were not Venetian.1
Others have noticed this
too. Even the Venice-friendly William McNeill, in his
Venice: the Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797, was forced
to admit that "until after 1481, when Venice's
imperial power was already entering on a downward path,
the city remained a follower, not a pace-setter in matters
cultural" (1974, p. 92).
Similarly, the Venice-friendly
Vincent Cronin--in his The Flowering of the Renaissance--could
only assemble four names in praise of the Venetian classical
revival: "Aldus Manutius [b. 1450], who typifies
Venetian freedom of the press; Sperone Speroni [b. 1500],
a characteristic Venetian humanist in that he thought
for himself; the poetess Gaspara Stampa [b. 1525], who
expressed without inhibition the sensuous, passionate
element in the Venetian character; and lastly, Pietro
Aretino [b. 1492], an outspoken champion of political
and intellectual freedom" (1969, p. 180). However,
the first is neither a writer nor Venetian (he was born
of Roman parents, and educated in Rome and Ferrara),
the next two are little known even in Italy, and the
last, again, is no Venetian given that he was born in
Arezzo (Aretino means "of Arezzo" from the
Latin Arretium), moved first to Perugia in his adolescent
years, then to Rome, and finally to Venice at the relatively
advanced age of 35.
On the other hand, as
soon as we move to painting and architecture, Venice
comes into its own: Giovanni Bellini (1430), Carpaccio
(1465), Giorgione (1478), Titian (1490), Palladio (1508),
Tintoretto (1518), Veronese (1528), were all Venetian.2
Later came a string of great musical composers: Andrea
(1510) and Giovanni (1556) Gabrielli, Vivaldi (1665),
Alessandro (1684) and Benedetto (1686) Marcello, Tartini
(1692), Galuppi (1706).
Usually, this combination
of few great thinkers (poets, novelists, essayist, philosophers,
historians) and many great painters, sculptors, architects
and composers is the result of many centuries of unity
of power. In the case of Venice it was the unity of
power of its oligarchy and of its cultural Byzantine
roots.
1Dante (born in 1265), Petrarch (1302), Boccaccio
(1313), Machiavelli (1469), were all Florentines; Ariosto
(1474) came from Mantua-Ferrara, and Tasso (1544) from
Sorrento-Naples; Pulci (1432) and Guicciardini (1483)
were again Florentines; Castiglione (1478) from Mantua
in Lombardy; Boiardo (1441), from Scandiano-Ferrara; Vasari
(1511) from Tuscan Arezzo, 40 miles south-east of Florence.
A partial exception could be Paolo Sarpi (b. 1552), the
author of History of the Council of Trent first
published in London in 1619. Later there will be such
writers as Goldoni (b. 1707), and autobiographers like
Casanova (b. 1725), but they already belong to a different
world: Goldoni wrote his Mémoires in French
and dedicated them to King Louis XVI, and Casanova also
wrote his Histoire de ma vie (History of my life)
in French.
2 On the other hand, there is no aut
aut, and great painting, sculpture, and architecture
can go along with great writing as proved by the following
eminent Florentine (or Tuscan) artists: Giotto (1266),
Donatello (1382), Fra Angelico (1395), Ghiberti (1378),
Masaccio (1401), Piero della Francesca (1415), Pollaiuolo
(1431), Botticelli (1445), Leonardo da Vinci (1452),
Michelangelo (1475).
