To these must be added 16,000
shipwrights. The houses in Venice were valued at seven millions, and
brought in a rent of half a million. These were 1,000 nobles whose
incomes ranged from 70 to 4,000 ducats. In another passage the ordinary
income of the State in that same year is put at 1,100,000 ducats;
through the disturbance of trade caused by the wars it sank about the
middle of the century to 800,000 ducats.
If Venice, by this spirit of calculation, and by the practical turn
which she gave it, was the first fully to represent one important side
of modern political life, in that culture, on the other hand, which
Italy then prized most highly she did not stand in the front rant. The
literary impulse, in general, was here wanting, and especially that
enthusiasm for classical antiquity which prevailed elsewhere. The
aptitude of the Venetians, says Sabellico, for philosophy and eloquence
was in itself not smaller than that for commerce and politics. George
of Trebizond, who, in 1459, laid the Latin translation of Plato's Laws
at the feet of the Doge, was appointed professor of philology with a
yearly salary of 150 ducats, and finally dedicated his 'Rhetoric' to
the Signoria. If, however, we look through the history of Venetian
literature which Francesco Sansovino has appended to his well-known
book, we shall find in the fourteenth century almost nothing but
history, and special works on theology, jurisprudence, and medicine;
and in the fifteenth century, till we come to Ermolao Barbaro and Aldo
Manuzio, humanistic culture is, for a city of such importance, most
scantily represented.
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