Giannotti and Contarini

This chapter discusses Venice figured as paradigm and as myth. It first looks at the political thought of Donato Giannotti, the intellectual heir of Machiavelli and the last major thinker in the Florentine republican tradition, and his conceptions of Venice through the Repubblica de' Vineziani . Here, the chapter shows that the Renaissance obsession with time and fortune ensured that the mito de Venezia would endure, despite the fact that Giannotti's own nonmythical account had become one of the standard books in the literature of the mito . The chapter then moves on to the work of Gasparo Contarini, a Venetian aristocrat and churchman, whose account of Venice in the Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum had a far more pronounced mythical element.