The republic at work: S. Marco's reliefs of the Venetian trades

Many Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals throughout Italy and France featured sculptural cycles on their portals depicting the Labors of the Months. (1) A traditional subject showing a solitary, usually male, figure tending the fields, domesticating animals, or struggling to fend off the winter cold, the Months formed part of the encyclopedic character of the medieval church facade. Meyer Schapiro defined the identificatory function of these sculptures on a religious building as revealing "the earthly activity of man in an art devoted chiefly to a supernatural order." (2) One of the best preserved and most dynamic Italian examples of this subject appears on an arch over the central door of the basilica of S. Marco in Venice. Sculpted in the mid-thirteenth century, the cycle shows individuals performing tasks appropriate to the given month--such as harvesting grapes in September (Fig. 1)--and the astrological sign associated with the time of year, accompanied by a banderole bearing the name of the month in Italian.

Despite Venice's possession of some rural territory on the mainland, it is unlikely that the Venetian viewer walking through the portal of S. Marco would have glimpsed such rustic labors on a daily basis. The French and Italian towns with similar sculptural programs on their cathedral portals dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, like Chartres, Parma, and Ferrara, were agriculturally based regional hubs and market towns rather than major economic powers or centers of production. Medieval Venice, instead, was a sea-based empire based on trade and industry--the most flourishing economy in Europe, with the most extensive shipbuilding complex in the world and a thriving mercantile network stretching to Alexandria and Constantinople. As pilgrims and merchants from all over Europe passed through the city, they regularly commented on the high quality and diversification of Venice's artisanal workshops and the wealth of goods available in its market stalls. Perhaps in recognition of Venice's singularly diversified modern economy, the builders of S. Marco decided to further refine the presentation of labor over the central door of the basilica by adding a second set of sculptures showing individuals at work. This cycle of Trades, which has no obvious forerunner among thirteenth-century European sculpture, was unquestionably meant to signify as taking place within the fabric of medieval Venice. As opposed to the pastoral vision of the Months, the cycle of the Trades illustrates city-based, mercantile occupations like shipbuilding and shoemaking (Fig. 2), portraying workers in contemporary clothing and bearing the tools utilized in the thirteenth century. With a remarkable amount of observational detail, the Trades reliefs signify the Venetian Republic productively at work: fishermen dropping lines into the bountiful lagoon (Fig. 3), a pair of sawyers halving a massive tree trunk (Fig. 4), cheese sellers cutting wedges for their customers, masters training apprentices. Set in stone over the central doorway of the city's most important religious structure, the Trades introduced a new visual paradigm to celebrate the work of the Venetian Republic. It suggested to everyone in Venice from the patricians to the popolo that the highly specialized, protoindustrial labor of their urban republic was as worthy of representation as the traditional agricultural labors defining the rest of Europe.

With few exceptions, depictions of work in medieval art have tended to be viewed through the lens of iconography and style rather than social history. (3) Imagery from disparate parts of Europe has all too frequently been lumped together into broad categories irrespective of local conditions or the historical moment that created them. Scholarly interest typically focuses on the origins and transmission of such images at the expense of other methodologies. The work of economic and social historians, Marxist and otherwise, has scarcely been brought to bear on representations of the artisan class, particularly those commissioned by the nobility. The Venetian Trades, however, offer a rare opportunity to investigate the social and cultural contradictions that such imagery perpetuates, since the images themselves were made at a time of significant class tensions within Venice. The cycle's patrons were members of the city's nobility, who would have intended a meaning beyond celebrating the city's workforce or documenting the conditions of the city's working class. The basilica's Procurators--a small group of nobles from the city's leading merchant families--selected the subjects and dictated their placement, but gave no clear indication of what they intended in commissioning this unusual cycle. By studying these reliefs alongside contemporary thirteenth-century Venetian laws regulating workers' rights, we discern that the monumentalization of local work becomes yet another Venetian myth, a projection of an ideal at odds with contemporary experience. The cycle was sculpted at a moment when the real power of Venice's working population was in fact on the wane, as the republic's wealthiest families closed ranks to exclude the representatives of the workers--the guilds--from having any significant say in the rule of the republic. In light of such exclusion, images that at first glance appear to valorize and dignify the artisan class on closer examination reveal fissures expressing the patrons' increasing fear of the collective strength of the popolo.