The Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea Creatures in Venetian Renaissance Art

The arts of Renaissance Venice teem with sea monsters. Chief among these are mermaids and mermen, graceful hybrid beings human from the waist up, but with the lower body and tail of a fish, dolphin or sea serpent. Other sea hybrids --- horses, bulls, panthers, even an elephant --- also swim through Venetian art in finned and fish-tailed forms. Such creatures emerge from stone in the shadowy churches and the sunlit courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale, crown the wooden frame of a Giovanni Bellini altarpiece, and encircle the bronze flagpole bases in Piazza San Marco. Their gilded sugar apparitions graced banquet tables for illustrious visitors, and their descendents still glide through the canals in the form of brass seahorses set above the sides of gondolas.

Hybrid sea creatures, while not unique to Venice, had obvious relevance for a city whose wealth, power, and physical character depended on the sea. This book focuses on the conceptions of artists who made marine hybrids some of the most engaging inventions of the Renaissance in Venice and its subject city Padua. The chapters deal with five functional contexts in which sea-hybrid imagery spread through Venetian intellectual, religious, political and domestic life. These are book decoration of the 1470s and 80s, a key source of inspiration for the following four; tomb monuments of the 1480s and 90s; church decoration of the same years, particularly at Santa Maria dei Miracoli, where pagan sea hybrids found Christian meanings; centers of political activity, including civic settings in Venice and the ducal palace in Ferrara, where a powerful mainland patron employed Venetian artists; and finally, private homes, where owners could hold small bronze sea hybrids in their hands, often as objects for use. A prologue introduces the "heritage of monsters" from the ancient and medieval worlds, the better to show how Venetian artists adapted these to new purposes.

According to context and artistic interpretation, the Venetian sea creatures considered may appear as ceremonious emblem-bearers; unruly and libidinous monsters; representatives of the pagan world vanquished by Christianity; yearning spirits; sensuous and genial denizens of a golden age; aquatic angels, and of course, symbols of the sea. In one remarkable case, a late fifteenth-century poet envisioned the city of Venice appearing to him, in a dream, in the form of a mermaid. These wide-ranging sea creatures are brought together here as bearers of various messages related to their Venetian setting, and as a source of delight.