Venetian Inscriptions: Vernacular Writing for Public Display in Medieval and Renaissance Venice by Ronnie Ferguson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Venetian Inscriptions: Vernacular Writing for Public Display in Medieval and Renaissance Venice by Ronnie Ferguson Brian Richardson Venetian Inscriptions: Vernacular Writing for Public Display in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. By Ronnie Ferguson. (Italian Perspectives, 50) Cambridge: Legenda. 2021. x+424 pp. £80. ISBN 978–1–78188–638–0. The Italian Perspectives series, founded by Zygmunt Barański and Laura Lepschy in 1998, reaches its half-century in impressive fashion with this outstanding work of scholarship, in which Ronnie Ferguson publishes an annotated corpus of 109 inscriptions in the vernacular, dating from around 1300 to the 1520s, that survive today in the city of Venice and the islands of the lagoon. Ferguson's title echoes that of Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna's Delle inscrizioni veneziane, published in six volumes between 1824 and 1853, the still invaluable but incomplete outcome of Cicogna's exhaustive and digressive research into the city's Latin and vernacular epigraphs from around the year 1000 onwards. 'Writing for public display' alludes to the concept of 'scritture esposte', theorized in the 1980s and 1990s by Armando Petrucci, who defined them as writings intended for reading at a distance by a group of people or by the public at large. Petrucci considered that their formal nature called for the highest level of written expression. At least until the nineteenth century, this factor often led to the choice of Latin as a medium, but the language spoken in the community could be preferred because such texts need to communicate their message especially clearly and widely. Ferguson suggests that in Venice the vernacular played a much more important role in epigraphy than in other Italian cities: using Cicogna's research, he estimates that it was used in some 30 per cent of inscriptions from the fourteenth century and some 19 per cent of those from the fifteenth (p. 6). Ferguson outlines and contextualizes his corpus in two substantial chapters before analysing each inscription in roughly chronological order. He considers an inscription as 'a multi-dimensional artefact' (p. 20), and his meticulous commentaries include a double transcription (one semi-interpretative, the other fully interpretative), a translation into English, and information on dating, location, the current state of the object, historical background, lettering and technique, language, and critical history. The beauty of the original inscriptions can be admired in photographs, many of them skilfully executed by Annie Ferguson. Individual catalogue entries are linked through cross-references and through indexes of persons mentioned in the inscriptions (but not of those mentioned elsewhere in the text), locations, and linguistic features. The accounts are never dry, and the Venetian cityscape is evoked with colourful touches. Most of the inscriptions in the corpus, around 70 per cent, were engraved on stone or metal, while the others were painted, printed from woodcuts, handwritten, or embroidered. About half were commemorative in function. Ferguson notes a [End Page 258] contrast in both form and content between Latin and vernacular inscriptions, the latter being 'firmly rooted in everyday realities, humble or exalted, of individuals and collectivities' (p. 7). Almost half of the corpus inscriptions were commissioned by the lay confraternities known in Venice as scuole, which were administered by the citizen class rather than by nobles and could sometimes include women, who were unlikely to know Latin. There was an 'explosion' of vernacular epigraphy between 1341 and 1370 (p. 19), but from the mid-fifteenth century the influence of humanism led to a marked preference in high-register inscriptions for texts in Latin, set out in roman rather than gothic capitals as previously (p. 3). A few texts are surprisingly lengthy, such as the testament in stone that Angelo Piarini had displayed in Murano (Corpus Inscription 8), a description of the effects of an earthquake and the Black Death of 1348 (CI 14), and a translation of a bull issued by Pope Urban V (CI 30). The vernacular used in the corpus is predominantly Venetian, in which Ferguson is a renowned expert. This language had sufficient prestige for high-status inscriptions, at least until the period around 1525, when the printing of a work by a patrician of the city, Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua, helped...