Amazon.com Review
The tiny island city-state of Venice was, for a time, one of the greatest maritime powers the world has ever known, its influence extending far beyond the Mediterranean. Garry Wills, well known for his studies of American political history, travels far afield to explore Renaissance Venice at the height of its power.
Venice, Wills writes, was "not an ideal state." Its champions would claim otherwise; they held a view of Venetian "exceptionalism," an idea that the city-state, like its classical Athenian model, was somehow destined for great things. It achieved many of them, gathering phenomenal wealth through the monopolies of its many guilds, floating great navies that controlled the seas, and building a splendid, renowned city. Wills profiles the leaders, great families, corporations, and institutions (including what he calls a "gerontocracy" of elder statesmen) that allowed such growth, as well as women, ordinary workers, and other actors who do not often figure in histories of the period. He examines the religious beliefs and worldly wisdom that motivated and justified the Venetian impulse to achieve wealth and power, and he takes his readers on a learned tour of Venice's architectural and artistic glories--many of which survive today.
No, it was not ideal, Wills concludes, "just better than most of those around it--better able to sustain, over a long period, whatever ideals it had." His account of those ideals and the city they made will appeal to a wide audience of readers. --Gregory McNamee
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
What Simon Schama's An Embarrassment of Riches did for Renaissance Holland, Wills prolific author, historian, translator and critic (John Wayne's America) tries here with Renaissance Venice. He organizes the book strictly into four "Imperial" sections: "Imperial Discipline" contains chapters on Venetian ideas of time and work while "Imperial Personnel" covers the doges, patricians, notables, "Golden Youth," women, artists, etc. Wills' intense interest in church matters comes through throughout, but most clearly in the section "Imperial Piety," which is subdivided into art-based chapters like "Venetian Annunciations" and "The Vulnerable Mary." Although extremely earnest, Wills is certainly not a specialized scholar, and he relies heavily on such academic art historians as Otto Demus and Erwin Panofsky to document the city's great art. The result is a rather dense and extremely ambitious book that does not wear its learning lightly, unlike Mary McCarthy's still-scintillating overview of the city. Lacking the style and dash of a popular historian like John Julius Norwich, whose A History of Venice is still a standard text, Wills often comes across as dutiful here, hardly communicating the passion he no doubt feels about his subject. His reactions to certain artworks seem haphazard, such as his confession that a painting of the Annunciation by Lorenzo Lotto made Wills think "of Jacqueline Kennedy turning to clamber out of her car when the tremendous blow fell on her in the Dallas motorcade." This book gets points for its obvious efforts to organize a sprawling history into comprehensible bites, but too many of its judgments are uncertain, and its smoothly ahistorical analogies, as above, can be distracting. 16-page color insert not seen by PW. (Sept.)Forecast: While the cognoscenti will seek out McCarthy or Norwich for more commanding views on the same material, Wills's book will be the prevailing popular history of the sinking city for the foreseeable future, sought out pre-trip by the thinking hordes who descend yearly. Look for an initial spike on the strength of Wills's name, and steady sales thereafter.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
