Contents

KEY TO BRIEF CITATIONS

INTRODUCTION Athens of the Renaissance

PART ONE: Imperial Disciplines


CHAPTER ONE Contract with Mark

CHAPTER TWO Declarations of Independence

CHAPTER THREE The Lion's Wings

CHAPTER FOUR The Lion's Tread

CHAPTER FIVE Disciplines of Time

CHAPTER SIX Disciplines of Work

PART TWO: Imperial Personnel


CHAPTER SEVEN Doge

CHAPTER EIGHT Patricians (Nobili)

CHAPTER NINE Notables (Cittadini)

CHAPTER TEN Golden Youth

CHAPTER ELEVEN Commoners (Popolani)

CHAPTER TWELVE Women

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Artists

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Outsiders

PART THREE: Imperial Piety


CHAPTER FIFTEEN Christ's Blood

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Christ's Cross

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Venetian Annunciations

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Vulnerable Mary

CHAPTER NINETEEN Mark: The Relic

CHAPTER TWENTY Mark: The Life

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE War Saints: George and Theodore

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Plague Saints

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The Other Lion: Jerome's

PART FOUR: Imperial Learning


CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Franciscan Learning

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Dominican Learning

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Book Learning

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Learned Architecture: Codussi

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Learned Architecture: Sansovino, Palladio

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Learned Sculpture

CHAPTER THIRTY Learned Politics

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Learned History

EPILOGUE A Farewell to Empire

NOTES

SOME LEADING DATES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

PHOTO CREDITS

Garry Wills's Venice: Lion City is a tour de force -- a rich, colorful, and provocative history of the world's most fascinating city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was at the peak of its glory. This was not the city of decadence, carnival, and nostalgia familiar to us from later centuries. It was a ruthless imperial city, with a shrewd commercial base, like ancient Athens, which it resembled in its combination of art and sea empire.

Venice: Lion City presents a new way of relating the history of the city through its art and, in turn, illuminates the art through the city's history. It is illustrated with more than 130 works of art, 30 in full color. Garry Wills gives us a unique view of Venice's rulers, merchants, clerics, laborers, its Jews, and its women as they created a city that is the greatest art museum in the world, a city whose allure remains undiminished after centuries.

Like Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches, on the Dutch culture in the Golden Age, Venice: Lion City will take its place as a classic work of history and criticism.