Enlightenment between the Conflicting Priorities of Critique and Power Between Omnipotence and Impotence: Aristocratic Writing in 18th-Century Venice

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Robert Fajen

Duration of project: ongoing

In the 18^th century, the Venetian Republic experienced a final cultural boom before it lost its independence in 1797. In this period of change the patricians, from whom all the power in the City and the State came, took a much greater part in the literary life of Venice than has hitherto been assumed. 

The research project focuses on a dimension that already played an important role my book, The Transformation of the City. Venice and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Paderborn: Fink, 2013) but could not be fully developed there. The book showed among other things that the Venetian aristocracy influenced much more than hitherto assumed the literary developments of the City of Water in the age of the Enlightenment. All the themes addressed in Venetian self-descriptions in the eighteenth century were directly related to social and cultural transformations which put in question the homogeneity and self-understanding of the old leadership of the city. In essence, these issues had to do with the increasing impoverishment of further parts of the nobility, the growing limitations of the Republic’s political options, the transformation of the semantics of love and of marital practices, the new role of noblewomen, and the reception of modern “enlightened” ideas. The analysis of Venetian literature in an urban context also showed that the Venetian nobility itself took a great part in the city’s literary life. Thus, the most unusual and original Italian novels of the eighteenth century, La mia istoria ovvero Memorie del Signor Tommasino, was written by a Venetian patrician: Francesco Gritti (1740-1811). In addition to Gritti, a number of other aristocrats, such as Giorgio Baffo, Angelo Maria Barbaro, Marco Foscarini, Andrea Memmo, Girolamo Antonio Morelli, and Marc'Antonio Zorzi, were active as lyricists, playwrights, historians and art theorists. The corpus of this literature, however, is so extensive that it could only be considered more closely in the context of a habilitation. The aim of the research project is therefore to provide a systematic overview of the works of patrician writers, to make their work accessible for further research and to analyze their forms and functions in the literary context of the time.

In 2020, together with Barbara Kuhn (Eichstätt), I published an anthology entitled La città dell'occhio. Dimensioni del visivo nella letteratura e pittura veneziane del Settecento / Die Stadt des Auges. Dimensionen des Visuellen in der venezianischen Malerei und Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. This includes my contribution "Goldoni e il teatro delle spie", which takes a closer look at the practice of omnipresent (patrician-initiated) observation, surveillance and control by the state in literary texts of the 1750s and 1760s.

• Barbara Kuhn and Robert Fajen: „La città dell’occhio“. Dimensioni del visivo nella pittura e letteratura veneziane del Settecento / „Die Stadt des Auges“. Dimensionen des Visuellen in der venezianischen Malerei und Literatur des 18.  Jahrhunderts. Rom 2020, 457 p.