Venice: Lion City- The Religion of Empire [Hardcover]

Garry Wills (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 2001

Garry Wills's "Venice: Lion City" is a tour de force -- a rich, colorful, and provocative history of the world's most fascinating city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was at the peak of its glory. This was not the city of decadence, carnival, and nostalgia familiar to us from later centuries. It was a ruthless imperial city, with a shrewd commercial base, like ancient Athens, which it resembles in its combination of art and sea empire. The structure of Venetian society was based on its distinctive practice of religion: Venice elected its priests, defied the authority of papal Rome, and organized its liturgy around a lay leader (the doge).

"Venice: Lion City" 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, whether at work, warfare, prayer, or acting out their victories, celebrations, and petitions in the colorful festivals that punctuated the year.

"Venice: Lion City" is illustrated with more than 130 works of art, 30 in full color. Garry Wills gives us a unique view of Venice's rulers, merchants, clerics, and laborers, its Jews, and its women as they created a city that is the greatest art museum in the world, a city that continues to lure an endless stream of visitors.

Like Simon Schama's "The Embarrassment of Riches," on the Dutch culture in the Golden Age, "Venice: Lion City" will take its place as a classic work of history and criticism.

Editorial Reviews

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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (September 18, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684871904
• ISBN-13: 978-0684871905
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #771,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An intelligent book in an unsatisfactory edition, July 8, 2002

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Venice: Lion City- The Religion of Empire (Hardcover)

Gary Wills's VENICE: LION CITY is a very intelligent study in cultural criticism by a popular and eminent American historian: as the book's dustcover makes clear, Simon and Schuster wants to market this as Wills' entry into Simon Schama territory. Basically, he's trying to interpret the most famous works of Venetian Renaissance art and architecture through the pervasive imperial ideology of what was an odd throwback to a Hellenistic city-state. The book works best for someone with a strong familiarity with the art of Venice already, and Wills answers some very intriguing questions along the way both on a factual level (why is the winged lion used to represent St. Mark, the city's patron? Why were Christians in earlier times so obsessed with saints' relics?) and on the interpretive level as well (why are Bellini's Madonnas so inward-looking?). But Simon and Schuster have not served this book well on many levels. It deserves a much fancier format than it is allowed, with much larger reproductions and more full-colored plates: some works Wills discusses (like Titan's "Assumption") are not reproduced at all, and a massive work like Tintoretto's "Crucifixion"--so important to Wills' argument--deserves a two-page (or fold-out) reproduction than the mere one page it receives. Also, someone needed to edit the book much more vigorously. I counted several times when Wills basically repeats an entire paragraph of interpretation from earlier in the work. This is a good book, but not for the casual reader, and it deserves in the future a much more sophisticated revision and re-issue.

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The merger of history and art!, October 8, 2001

By 

Michael Williams "mike-on-peakview" (Boulder, Colorado USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Venice: Lion City- The Religion of Empire (Hardcover)

An extraordinary book! History, religion, art, political theory all blended together. I pulled out all my other books and travel guides from Venice and was bouncing back and forth studying art and architecture from a whole new point of view. Read this book before you visit Venice and take it with you as a whole new kind of guide.

The Venice Chamber of Commerce ought to be happy, I am planning my next trip now.

Garry -- Please do this for 5 other great cities. How about Amsterdam? Paris?

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Venetian art as reflection of politics/history/economics, September 15, 2005

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book. While Wills has been criticized as a non-specialist in these reviews, in many ways I found that an asset in this book. It is beautifully written - he has a uniquely clear and flowing style of writing that is a continual pleasure for me - and as he presents the essence of the many subjects he wishes to cover, he rarely gets bogged down in detail. In addition, many of the things that he investigates are wonderful surprizes for non-specialized readers such as myself (e.g. that the body of St. Mark was stolen by Venetians and set up in a shrine to establish the legitimacy of the city's unusual political culture).

THe book is organized in several theme sections. First, in Imperial Disciplines, there are the historical origins and unique structure of this Renaissance state, which allowed it to escape the power struggles that dogged medieval Italy, i.e. unlike the innumerable city states re-fought the same territorial battles every generation under different egomaniacs. Second, in Imperial Personnel, Wills looks at the various members of society, from the frozen aristocracy (built on the expectation of duty rather than priviledge) to the workers who made the city's arsenal such as great and unique strategic asset as well as the "outsiders," such as the Jews (the word "ghetto," we learn, was coined for Venetian brass foundaries); how the state functioned, who held power and how it was exercised (in a diffused bureaucratic balance), are expertly described while avoiding the heaviness of a comprehensive history. Third, in Imperial Piety, there is the religious iconography and ritual, which in part allowed Venetians the sense of legitimacy they needed to defy Rome and the Pope over centuries. As I am quite ignorent of Christian history, this was fascinating and valuable for me, e.g. that St George was a Christianized Hercules, who also "fought" the many plagues that inevitably arose in the Venetian environment. Finally, in Imperial Learning, there is the Renaissance scholarship that came late to the city, and how it altered the art, politics, book scholarship, and the like - all set in geo-political context. Throughout - and sometimes with too much descriptive detail for me - Wills interprets the art and architecture of Venice in light of these themes. The result is simply dazzling, in my view, a masterwork by a great populariser and philosophical moralist.

At any rate, this was exactly what I was looking for, and from reading many of WIlls' books, what I expected. It is not for graduate-level academics, but rather for those well informed on European history who are curious to learn more on Venice.

Warmly recommended.