The Religion of Empire: VENICE: LION CITY, By Garry Wills, Simon and Schuster: 416 pp., $35

The first paragraph of the jacket copy for “Venice: Lion City� hails it as a tour de force. Blurb writers, like writers of epitaphs, are not on oath, but in this case I can only agree. Of Garry Wills’ 23 previous books, more than half are on American history and several on various aspects of religion; he is also an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. There is no indication anywhere that he knows anything about Venice. But he does; my word, he does. He seems to have left not a book unread, not a church unvisited, not a painting, sculpture or mosaic unconsidered. Not a single one of Ruskin’s stones has been left unturned. I have been in love with Venice all my life and writing about it for more than 30 years, yet it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that I have learned something new about the city on every page.

The second paragraph on the dust jacket, on the other hand, strikes me as questionable. This book, it declares, “presents a new way of relating the history of the city through its art and, in turn, illuminates the art through the city’s history. In their culture, their governing structures and their social life, the Venetians themselves speak to us with extraordinary immediacy ....� It is true that we learn a great deal about Venetian art, a good deal about Venetian politics and a certain amount about Venetian history; frequently, too, the author is able to analyze or interpret a work of art in such a way as to illustrate some major historical event, just as he sometimes describes such an event to explain a painting. But I doubt whether such an exercise is particularly new, and if the Venetians have been speaking to me more immediately than they usually do, I can only say that I have failed to hear them. Primarily, “Venice: Lion City� is an extended essay on the culture and civilization of the city during the 15th and 16th century Renaissance--and a very good one, too.

At the outset, Wills very properly emphasizes both the most important single fact about Venice and the most significant single event in its history. The first is, quite simply, the lagoon. Had it not been for that vast expanse of shallow water--which is, let it never be forgotten, a far more effective defense than deep water, which any fool can sail across--there would have been no refuge for those first Venetians from the invading barbarian tides; the survivors would probably have built themselves just another northern Italian city, subject to the same endless internecine strife, the same constant and pitiless destruction. Thanks to the lagoon, the Serenissima--Wills translates the word as “most undisturbed,� though I think “most serene� would have been a better translation--was safe, and its residents knew it. (If you want proof, you have only to look at the palazzo pubblico in any mainland Italian city. Invariably it is a fortress, designed above all for defense. Now look at the Doge’s Palace, whose delicate Gothic filigree makes it one of the most indefensible buildings ever constructed.) For 15 centuries, the lagoon was Venice’s protector--even in the 20th, when it saved the city from that greatest of modern scourges, the automobile. It is a sad irony that with increasing flooding it should have become the city’s greatest threat, but that is another story.

The city’s most significant event was the theft of the body of St. Mark by two Venetian merchants in 828 and its transportation from Alexandria to Venice. (As the author himself puts it in another connection, “in a hotly competitive field, the Venetians were probably the champion body-snatchers.� They were also to snatch St. Nicholas in 1100 and St. Roch in 1485.) Nowadays we find it hard to understand the importance attached during the Middle Ages to religious relics; suffice it to say that before that moment in 828, Venice was looked down upon by the princes of Europe. It had no classical past, no ancient monuments; it was seen as a nouveau riche sort of place, a parvenu among nations, if indeed it could be reckoned a nation at all. The arrival of St. Mark changed the entire situation overnight. For this was no ordinary relic. It was not the collar bone, or even the skull, of some obscure saint; it was the whole body--or at any rate what was left of it--of an Evangelist, and the possession of it instantly conferred upon Venice the prestige it had so long been seeking. Of immense importance, too, was the fact that the body was not placed in the cathedral--which was then the remote and seldom visited church of San Pietro di Castello--but in a new building specially designed for its reception: the first Basilica of St. Mark (the present one, consecrated in 1094, is the third) which was, like both of its successors, technically the private chapel of the doge, physically connected to his palace and thus exempt from ecclesiastical authority.

Wills has many interesting things to say about the St. Mark story, as told in the mosaics both inside and on the west front of the basilica. (Of the latter, that above the northernmost of the five doors, showing the body of the Evangelist being carried into the building, is the only one surviving from the 13th century.) When he discusses another feature of the facade, however, I cannot help feeling that he falls--for the first but by no means the last time--into a trap. Those four bronze horses, brought triumphantly to Venice after the fourth Crusade: Were they really intended, like those of the Apocalypse, to signal “the end of the world, the time of judgment, the arrival of Christ’s reign�? Did the Venetians who put them there consciously mean them to represent the Quadriga Domini, each standing for one of the four symbols of the Evangelists, with Christ Pantocrator--the Ruler of All--as the charioteer? It seems to me far more likely that, recognizing the horses as the supreme work of art that they indisputably are, they very sensibly set them up in the only location in the city that was worthy of them.

Succeeding chapters cover Venetian shipbuilding in the Arsenal--capable when pressed of turning out 50 galleys a month--and several of the republic’s historic naval victories, including those of Chioggia (1379, against Genoa) and Lepanto (1571, against the Turks). Wills stresses the immense effect of this last battle--arguably the greatest naval engagement between Actium and Trafalgar--on Venetian morale and quotes Fernand Braudel on its immediate political importance; the fact remains that it had little long-term effect on the steady Turkish advance. Venice did not even regain Cyprus, lost only the year before; less than 100 years later, its last and most valuable remaining colony, Crete, went the same way. He then turns to the acquisition of Venice’s empire on terra firma--an opportunity for a fascinating disquisition on the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni and Verrocchio’s superb memorial--surely the greatest equestrian statue in the world--at Santi Giovanni e Paolo. We are also directed to the Veronese paintings and Carpaccio’s glorious lion in the Doge’s Palace, to Giovanni Bellini’s portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, now in London, and to Titian’s astonishing “Flaying of Marsyas,� clearly inspired by the similar fate suffered in 1570 by the surrendering governor of Cyprus, Marcantonio Bragadin.

The second part of the book is devoted to the Venetian system of government and its social structure, with chapters on the doge (elected), the nobles (hereditary), the cittadini or notables (hereditary but also honored by virtue of long residence) and the commoners; others cover youth, women, artists and “outsiders.� The final section of this last chapter, on the Jewish community, is more informative on this endlessly fascinating subject than anything else I have read. We are given highly perceptive analyses of the statuary in the Doge’s Palace and of other paintings and sculptures in several of the churches--notably the largest and richest--which are, ironically enough, those of the two Mendicant Orders, the Franciscans at the Frari and the Dominicans at Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

There is a particularly interesting section on the scuole, but I do wish the author would not refer to them as “clubs.� They were essentially social and charitable brotherhoods, usually--though not invariably--attached to a trade or occupation, rather on the lines of medieval guilds. All had a firm religious basis; to describe, therefore, the Scuola di San Rocco as “St. Roch’s Club� verges on the ridiculous. (Elsewhere I was also brought up short by “St. Francis in the Vineyard�--San Francesco della Vigna--and “The Church of the Miraculous Mary�--Santa Maria dei Miracoli.) These, and others like them, are called by their Italian names in every English book (including guide books) that I have ever read. To translate them here does little more than confuse.

“Imperial Piety� is the title of Part III, in which we get more excellent analyses of a number of paintings by Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese and others. The author also has some valuable things to say about Ave/Eva, the contrast between Eve and the Virgin. He discusses my favorite picture in Venice--perhaps in the world--Giovanni Bellini’s altarpiece in San Zaccaria. He also includes another favorite of mine, which must be the wildest of all depictions of the Annunciation: that of Lorenzo Lotto at Recanati, in which the Virgin is very understandably fleeing in terror from an unusually aggressive Archangel. (Wills, who often displays a genius for the unexpected, compares her with Jacqueline Kennedy struggling to clamber out of the presidential car in the Dallas motorcade.)

And so we come to “the war saints� (George and Theodore) and “the plague saints� (Sebastian, Roch and Job--Venice had adopted the Byzantine habit of canonizing the major Old Testament figures) before a hugely enjoyable chapter devoted to “The Other Lion: Jerome’s.� After adopting St. Mark as their own the Venetians could never resist a lion, and we are given an especially interesting disquisition on the last three pictures in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. (Incidentally the subject of the last picture, St. Augustine’s divine intimation of St. Jerome’s death, is not based on a legend, as the author suggests; St. Augustine describes it in detail himself.) Rather more open to doubt is the question of whether Carpaccio’s St. Augustine is in fact a portrait of Johannes Bessarion, the Orthodox bishop of Nicaea who subsequently adopted Catholicism and became a cardinal. The author is inclined--as I am--to think it is.

In 1468 Bessarion left his entire library to Venice--no less than 752 manuscripts, more than half of them in Greek; and in the final part of the book, devoted--ostensibly--to learning, Wills convincingly explains why Venice, to its eternal shame, did not bother even to open the packing cases for more than half a century. The Venetians, he points out, were superb artists but had no tradition of scholarship: “they had to carve out time for their literary pursuits from active diplomatic or military careers.... The ironic thing is that Bessarion had given his library to Venice because he was suspicious of the censorship and academic narrowness he had observed in various courts and universities in other parts of Italy--yet Venice’s very freedom from those concerns went with a lack of scholarly zeal in dealing with his gift.�

What conclusions are we to draw from this most impressive work? They are summed up in the epilogue. Although the Venetians believed themselves infinitely superior to any other race on Earth and were outwardly as religious as anyone else, they had little moral or spiritual integrity. What they liked was money. It was for money, not faith, that they joined the Crusades; for money, not power, that they established an empire. If, unlike the Athenians--and a comparison with Athens is a leitmotif of the book--they had few slaves, it was only because they had no mines to be worked, no fields to be tilled. (Freemen, not slaves, rowed the galleys.) In 1453, when the Ottoman army was at the gates of Constantinople and the Byzantines were sending out desperate appeals for help, they did not lift a finger. Finally--although this is outside the scope of the book--when the Turks and the development of the Cape Route to the Indies had reduced the Mediterranean to a backwater, they had no compunction in adopting Mammon as a way of life, turning their exquisite city into the Las Vegas of its day. For all this, as perhaps for a good deal else, they must stand condemned.

And yet there can be no denying that Venice, for its size, made a greater contribution to Western civilization than any other city in Europe or anywhere else, and on that contribution it rests its case. Much of it is brilliantly analyzed in these pages. Wills may be occasionally tempted to read more symbolic significance into a given work of art than it in fact contains, but he is prodigiously informative, consistently stimulating and incapable of writing a dull paragraph. For any true lover of Venice, here is a book to read and reread and treasure.