The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

the bodies they could still control – the Collegio and the Ten. Only in the seventeenth
century, when the power of the old families was fatally weakened by the
sale of places on the Maggior Consiglio, did the Senate revert to being the nucleus
of the Venetian state.
Of the paintings here, the finest are a couple of Veronese panels on the ceiling,
painted at the age of 25 – Juno Offering Gifts to Venice and Old Man in Oriental Costume
with Young Woman. The central panel is a copy of a Veronese original that was
packed off to the Louvre by Napoleon’s army and has never made it back.
The unfortunates who were summoned before the Ten had to await their grilling
in the next room, the Sala della Bussola; in the wall is a Bocca di Leone (Lion’s
Mouth), one of the boxes into which citizens could drop denunciations for the
attention of the Ten and other state bodies. Nobody could be convicted without
corroborating evidence, and all anonymous accusations were rejected (or at least
were technically illegal), but nonetheless the legend spread throughout Europe
that one word to the Ten was tantamount to a death sentence. The door in the
corner leads to the office of the Three Heads of the Council of Ten, which in turn
leads to the State Inquisitors’ room, then on to the torture chamber and finally the
prisons – a doleful route that can be followed on the Itinerari Segreti (see p.69). As
for the decoration, the last sentence of the previous paragraph applies.
The armoury and the Andito del Maggior Consiglio
From the landing, steps lead up to the armoury, consisting in part of weapons
assembled for the defence of the Palazzo Ducale, and in part of specially commissioned
pieces and gifts from foreign rulers. Amid the horrifying but sometimes
exquisitely manufactured metalwork you’ll find immense two-handed swords, an
ancient twenty-barrelled gun, early sixteenth-century firearms that could also be
used as swords, crossbows, maces or axes, and two outstanding pieces of armour:
a unique sixteenth-century beaked helmet, and a suit of white armour given to
Henry IV of France in 1603 (both in room 2). There’s also a bust of Marcantonio
Bragadin, whose gruesome demise has kept his name alive (for the story, see p.162),
and one grotesque piece of non-military hardware – a pronged chastity belt.
The Scala dei Censori takes you back to the second floor; here you go along
the Liagò (or Andito) del Maggior Consiglio (Lobby of the Great Council), past
the Sala della Quarantia Civil Vecchia, the seat of the civil court, and the Sala
del Guariento, the old ammunition store, containing the remnants of a fourteenth-century
fresco of Paradise by Guariento that used to be in Sala del Maggior
Consiglio, where it was covered by Tintoretto’s massive image of the same subject.
The veranda at the end now houses the sculptures by Rizzo and Bandini from the
Arco Fóscari; allegedly, the Duke of Mantua offered to buy Rizzo’s Eve for her
weight in gold, but for once the Venetians found it within themselves to resist the
lure of huge sums of money.
The Sala del Maggior Consiglio
Now comes the stupendous Sala del Maggior Consiglio, the assembly hall of
all the Venetian patricians eligible to participate in the running of the city. By the
mid-sixteenth century 2500 men were entitled to sit here, but frequently as few
as half that number were present. This was the forum of the so-called giovani, the
younger men on the bottom rung, and it was here that the voice of the populace
filtered into the system. Technically, the Maggior Consiglio had little direct
impact on government as it voted directly only on administrative legislation, and
for much of the time the giovani kept fairly quiet in order to stay on the right side
of the power-brokers. But if the bosses did something that alienated the majority
san marco
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The Palazzo Ducale
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