Giovanni Dario's scripted legacies:textual self-presentation in Renaissance Venice

Abstract

Growing critical interest in the Cretan-Venetian ducal secretary, polyglot diplomat, confraternity warden and palace builder Giovanni Dario has thrown important light on his biography and career, especially on his outstanding diplomatic work in successive spells brokering peace between Venice and the courts of Mehmet II and Beyazid II. The best known of his surviving writings, his 22 diplomatic letters (1484-1485) from Ottoman Turkey, are referred to, and occasionally excavated, by historians of Venice and the Levant. Dario’s texts are striking for their high degree of self awareness, with consistent foregrounding of a curated image which has no parallel among Venetian public servants of the Quattrocento. They have never been considered together in this performative light, and the precise nature of the language and lettering they deploy has been overlooked. The present essay is the first attempt at rectifying this situation. My guiding contention is that Dario’s letters, wills and lapidary inscription were crafted, in both message and medium, to project a carefully controlled legacy persona to their respective audiences: the political elite of the Serenissima; executors and beneficiaries; Venice and posterity. All evidence for this from Dario’s written inheritance has been transcribed anew in the study. Particular scrutiny is reserved for three representative primary sources: the dispatch of December 6th 1484 from Adrianople, the will of 1492 and the Ca’ Dario epigraph from the late 1480s. These are offered in philological first editions, with translations, illustrations and contextual analysis