For medieval and early modern Europe, Venice was an attempt—the greatest attempt—to resolve the dilemma of Babel, to resolve it not by insisting on a single language or culture, but by constructing a city that could accommodate strangers and flourish with diversity. William Thomas, a mid-sixteenth-century Welshman who wrote the first English history of Italy, was astonished by what he saw in Venice:
No man there marketh another’s doings, or …meddleth with another man’s living. If thou be a papist, there shalt thou want [lack] no kind of superstition to feed upon. If thou be a gospeler [Protestant], no man shall ask why thou comest not to [the Catholic] church. If thou be a Jew, a Turk, or believest in the devil (so thou spread not thine opinions abroad), thou art free from all controlment… And generally, of all other things, so thou offend no man privately, no man shall offend thee, which undoubtedly is one principal cause that draweth so many strangers thither.
At around the same time, Jean Bodin, the most distinguished French jurist of the sixteenth century, allowed himself to have an elaborate daydream. In the midst of some of the most ferocious religious intolerance that Europe has ever seen—almost daily hangings and burnings at the stake—Bodin imagined a long, frank, and utterly peaceful conversation among a Jew, a Muslim, a pagan, a skeptic, a Catholic, a Calvinist, and a Lutheran. He allowed the speakers to express their convictions openly, disagreeing energetically with one another, and he did not envisage that in the end any one of the positions would “win.” Rather he imagined that, with their understanding and their respect for one another deepened, they would look forward to further exchanges in the future. There was only one place in the world where Bodin could, in his mind’s eye, picture such an unprecedented event:
…a port common to almost all nations or rather the whole world, not only because the Venetians delight in receiving strangers hospitably, but also because one can live there with the greatest freedom. Whereas other cities and districts are threatened by civil wars or fear of tyrants or harsh exactions of taxes or the most annoying inquiries into one’s activities, this seemed to me to be nearly the only city that offers immunity and freedom from all these kinds of servitude.
How did Venice do it? What made it possible may be glimpsed in a sculpture on the southwest corner of the Doge’s Palace. This was the corner facing the great wharf where the ships that arrived from all over the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, and beyond would have docked. It is significant, I think, that the authorities in the fourteenth century did not choose to adorn this corner with a sculpture of Christ or the Virgin or Saint Mark. Instead, they commissioned one of the palace’s designers, the sculptor Filippo Calendario, to create an image of Adam and Eve.
Visitors to this most global, multicultural of spaces were greeted with the sight of the first humans, humans conceived of as prior to any ethnic or religious or national identity. Adam and Eve are depicted just at the moment when they are about to violate the commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The sculpture then defines the great city as an ethical sphere, an arena where humans interact with other humans within the strictures of morality and the law applies equally to everyone. If you obey the law, you remain in paradise; if you disobey, you are punished.
As it turned out, Calendario was accused of participating in a plot against the reigning doge. On April 16, 1355, convicted of treason, the sculptor was hanged from the balcony of the palace, his body swaying above the stony figures of Adam and Eve.
Stephen Greenblatt’s most recent book is Die Erfindung der Intoleranz: Wie die Christen von Verfolgten zu Verfolgern wurden. He is currently writing a biography of Christopher Marlowe.
