Volume 42, Number 6 · April 6, 1995
Venice: Going for Glory
By Benedetta Craveri
The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello
by Margaret L. King
University of Chicago Press, 484 pp., $64.95; $19.95 (paper)
The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice
by Margaret F. Rosenthal
University of Chicago Press, 391 pp., $50.00; $18.95 (paper)
The central character in Margaret King's book is a high official of the Venetian Republic who passed himself off as a military commander. The subject of Margaret Rosenthal's book is a beautiful Venetian courtesan who wanted to be thought of as virtuous and cultured. Separated by a century, the lives of Jacopo Antonio Marcello (1398–c.1464) and Veronica Franco (1546–1591) had two things in common: they both lived when Venice was at the height of its splendor and they both wished to seem other than they were. Both the official and the courtesan tried to use literature to construct a new image of themselves. Marcello hired professional writers to celebrate, in fine manuscript Latin, the hero he would like to have been; Franco wrote about herself in the fresh vernacular that had recently taken over from Latin as the language of modern Italian culture, and she had her work published.
Review, 4950 words
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