Portal of empire and wealth: Jacopo Sansovino's entrance to the Venetian mint

The Venetian Zecca, or mint, boasts an impressive portal (Fig. 1). Two overlife-size herms of bearded, bare-chested, muscular men--almost mirror images of each other--support a Doric entablature and frame the rusticated, round-arched opening through which one passes into the building. The outer hands of the herms point across their bare chests to guide visitors to the doorway, (1) while their lowered inner hands hold ample folds of drapery that cascade down the fronts of the tapered, smooth shafts that support the figures' torsos, which seem to pulse with the full vigor of life. Their stern faces turn toward the opening to scrutinize those who enter. In the Doric frieze above, six of the roundels decorating the metopes display figural reliefs that are very hard to decipher in the gloom into which the door is plunged by the barrel vault above.

Despite its being part of a major Venetian building designed by the premier architect of Venice in the sixteenth century, Jacopo Sansovino, and despite its prepossessing nature, this door has received almost no scholarly attention. (2) This fact is the more remarkable in that the door has served for almost a century as the entrance to the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the principal library of Venice. (3) Scholars (myself included) seemingly have been so intent on the work awaiting them in the reading rooms of the Marciana that they have passed through the door without paying it much mind.

A careful examination of the masonry of the portal reveals that the herms and their entablature are a later addition to the rusticated, round-arched doorway. (4) Because this observation forms the basis of all that follows here, it is necessary to pursue it in detail. The smooth shafts of the herms do not fit easily against the indentations of the rustication, which had to be filled with scalloped, backward extensions of the shafts (Figs. 2, 3). Indeed, the herms are spliced to the rustication by thin pieces of stone that were fitted to the existing masonry before the heavier figures and the shafts were put in place. The bottom of the entablature also had to be cut to suit the existing rustication; a central part of that rustication even had broken off before the entablature was fitted over it (Fig. 1). The heads of the herms do not touch the Zecca wall behind them (Figs. 4, 5). Rather, there is a space between the heads and the rustication of the original doorway. The voussoirs of the rusticated round arch number thirteen, precisely the same number of voussoir blocks of the arch on the western, or water, side of the Zecca (Fig. 6). This arch marks the western terminus of an interior corridor that has as its eastern terminus the door with the herms. The two doorways form a pair, that with the herms providing entrance from the land, the other allowing for arrival by water. The water entrance is set into a rectangular panel of rustication that stands alone in an otherwise flat, stuccoed wall originally largely hidden from view by the medieval granaries that rose across a rio (canal) from the Zecca on what is now the site of the Giardino Reale. Both doorways repeat the same sunburst pattern of thirteen rusticated voussoirs that characterize all the other arches of the ground floor of the Molo facade of the Zecca (Fig. 7), of its interior courtyard, and of the east-west corridor connecting the land and water entrances (Fig. 8). (5) Clearly, the herms and the entablature they carry had been added to the rustication of the ground floor of the Zecca at some point after the completion of the building.

During the sixteenth century the Venetian government created one of the greatest public spaces in Europe, if not the world. The Zecca doorway is no minor player in this splendid urban theater. This essay will begin with a determination of the date, 1554-56, of the added doorway and its attribution to Jacopo Sansovino. We need to know the date and the author before we can explore the richly layered meanings of the doorway with confidence. The combination of rustic and Doric orders, the presence and particular forms of the herms, and the subjects of the reliefs on the metopes bring up a remarkable range of political, economic, and artistic issues. These include the position of Venice as an imperial and commercial power, the constitution of the Venetian republic, the evaluation of painting and sculpture as rival arts, and even bawdy puns. Dating and attributing the doorway also allow us to recognize that it formed part of a conscious program of figural portal sculpture, all connected to Sansovino and commissioned in 1553-54, set around the Piazzetta, the political and ceremonial core of the city. Recent scholarship has made us increasingly aware of the highly political nature of the art sponsored by the Venetian state in the sixteenth century. (6) The doorway, we will discover, fits this pattern admirably.

In order to establish a date for the addition of the herms to the doorway, we will have to consider what is known of the building histories of the Zecca and its close neighbor, the Libreria di S. Marco, also designed by Sansovino (Fig. 9). The Zecca doorway finds itself in a rather peculiar, even hidden position, at the end of a barrel-vaulted corridor that opens off the portico of the Libreria behind the fifth arcade from the southern, or water, end of that building (Figs. 10, 12). Because the Libreria stands between the Zecca and the open public space of the Piazzetta, one has to pass through the former to enter the latter.