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N.4 /2000
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Stenio Solinas |
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Venice - "Venezia e il senso del mare" ("venice and the sense of the sea"), Guerini & Associati Publisher, is the title of the impressive volume care of Alberto Tenenti and devoted to the amphibian nature of Serenissima. The subtitle: "History of a cultural prism from the XIII century to the XVIII century".And never an image fitted better the sole case of a plattform town, neither an harbour nor a naval base, ever tending to "weave water" and the Republic's state reasons, an intellecttual laboratory devoted to a "marine architecture" that in the Vettor Fausto's work inside the Arsenale will find the motivations and the bases for a new renaissance science to conjugate with ancient experience.Those are the years when it is restored the naumachia and in the sheet of water in front of San Marco twenty-four brigantines besiege and storm a wooden caste built at purpose, "one hundred thousand people besides the infinitive number of little crafts plenty of persons" that acts as spectotors, the duke of Milan seat beside the Doge, the duke of Ferrara, incognito, attends from the balcony of the Great Council.Never venice will succeed in conciliating as then the grandeur as a state and the depth of the cast of mind. What books, tales, deepening, documents suggest is nothing when you can also please the eye, measure and compare, astonish and wonder.The three lanterns beacon of the captain galley of the XVI century, supported by a two-cornucopia.shaped wooden platform, that from the stern gives the position and the lightening, recalls an epoch when the names of the patrician stocks competed in magnificence with the hulls.Portolanos, charts, the "celestial sphere" by Coronelli, "cosmographer of the Serenissima Republic" are the other side of the wooden, papier-maché, plaster, stucco models of Candia and Canea, of Famagosta and Zara with wich Venice studied its possessions and other's, fortified its defences and prepared itself to conquer the enemy ones.And then the models.The three oars galley of the XVI century, the galleas that will replace it, with the artillery mounted for the first time along the side, the winning move in the Lepanto battle, the square veiling ships when the winds'strength replaces the arms'strength, the last Buceantur launched in 1768, pure magnificence and power. When venice closes his history, two thousand workers are employed at the Arsenale. When Dante gets there in 1312, sent by Guido Novello da Polenta, Sir of Ravenna, to celebrate Marino Zorzi and this ascent to the rank of duke, they were five times as much. The Doge Tomaso Mocenigo's testament, died in 1423, lists in sixteen thousands workers and one hundred galleys can be produced in one hundred days under the menace coming from the east.The venice-system held still for the entire seventhhenth century. If Candia fell in i669, soon after is the South Greece to be subtracted to the Turks in the clash that once more opposes them. The Morea's conquer sees the Doge at the lead of the navy and the patriciens playing thei elite role at the lead of an empire. After each defeat, R.Pallucchini remarks in one of the most captivating essays, Venezia e il senso del mare, "Venice counterattacks, between the utmost and of the seventtenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, Its victories and its conquers will not bring it neither the expected results bor enduring positions.But how nod admit that such a duel, repeated and renewed in the course of these three centuries, must be deemed, instead af a succession of separated events, substantially as a unit, that is as a prove of an exhausted ability of collective energy and of war value, in a body in which so many historians saw an irrecoverable extintion?"In the Pavillins of the Sea annexe to the Historical Museum, placed in the ancient "workshop of the oats" at the Arsenale, the life-size dimensions ships allow making an idea about the magnificence and the lucid madness having passed trough a human and political adventure, among the most prestgious. In Navis (Einaudi publisher), Ennio Concina catches the highest level when, in that first half of the 1500 when Vettor fausto seems destned to be the "proto-maestro" of naval biulders, and so to sanction the victory af architects against artisans, the Council of th Ten names Proto of San Marco Jacopo Sansovino and put him at the lead of the works of th Ducal basilica, of the square and public biuldings.The coming of the "Sae renaissance", an idea in dvance of two centuries over that will be the modern navy.There's too much daring and too much advance of times to allow it being imposed, and indeed the intellectual ambition will be defeated at the end by the prosaic reality of corporations and prohibitions, political games and psycological fears for something new of which nobody succeeded in catching wholly the real limit.Notwithstanding it is staggering to see ad the intelligence, the will, the taste for challenges and the great enterprises contribute to the creation of a myth that today, notwithstanding invading tourism and native mediocrity, keeps on being a defiant expression of stone and ghosts of memories.
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