The Great Council Chamber

What was the Great Council of Venice?

The Great Council grew out of the Consilium Sapientium, the council of wise men that sat beside the doge in the early commune. It became a sovereign assembly in 1172, made up at first of thirty-five members and later of one hundred, to which the members of the Council of Forty were added by right from 1178 (Ravegnani, 2017, p. 14). Members were named originally by the popular assembly, and from 1207 they were chosen by three electors, a number later raised to ten. A second account puts the founding membership much higher, at 480 (Molinari, 2018, p. 2), so the body's early size is not settled.

The two dates that matter for the Council's standing are 1032, the end of a doge who was hereditary in practice, and 1172, the creation of a parliament that became the ultimate source of political legitimacy in Venice (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 756). A session ran for one year and began in October (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 780).

Men took their seats at 25. A lottery known as the Balla d'Oro let a limited number in earlier, at 18 in one account (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 784) and at 20 in another, which records thirty names drawn each year (Ravegnani, 2017, p. 15). Before 1297 the qualification that counted was commercial wealth rather than descent.

What was the Serrata of the Great Council?

The Serrata, or closure, is the period 1297 to 1323 in which the Council shut itself. Four earlier motions failed between 1286 and 1296. The landmark vote came on 28 February 1297, and it handed control over Great Council elections to the Council of Forty, a body that had never before claimed a leading role in the state and that the older powerful families controlled (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 784).

The mechanism was an asymmetry. Anyone who had served in the Council in the previous four years was re-elected automatically provided 12 of the 40 votes in the Council of Forty supported him, while everyone else faced obstacles (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 784). A Venetian account adds that forty descendants of sitting members were drawn by lot each year (Ravegnani, 2017, p. 14).

Measures in 1298, 1300 and 1307 widened the gap between insiders and outsiders, and from 29 June 1310 approval required thirty votes in the Forty and a two thirds majority of the Great Council (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 786). In 1310 the word nobiles was first defined, as a man who was or could be a member of the Council. The Libro d'Oro was ordered in 1315 to record who was entitled to a seat at eighteen (Ravegnani, 2017, p. 15). In 1319 the election of new members was abolished, and the last Serrata law, in 1323, limited seats to men whose fathers and grandfathers had held them (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 784).

Who was let in, and who was shut out

Closing the Council also meant buying off the people who might have fought the closure. Of the 257 families present in the Council in 1323, 150 had held seats in 1293 to 1296 and were effectively guaranteed hereditary membership. The other 107 were co-opted: 31 had sat recently and lost their seats in the churn of the previous decades, and 76 had never appeared in the Council in any year for which records survive (Puga and Trefler, 2014, pp. 786 to 787). This one-off enlargement happened quickly, essentially between 1297 and 1310.

Being admitted was not the same as being powerful. Twenty-four per cent of noble families held no seats at all in 1261 to 1296, and none of them became important in the marriage network or in the galley trade that followed (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 801). Membership of the nobility was no guarantee against poverty: through the difficult years from the plague of 1348 to the Battle of Chioggia in 1379 and 1380, most nobles were poor, and the Republic rebuilt its patronage system into what one study of it calls welfare jobs for poor nobles (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 803).

Counting families rather than men gives the same picture. There were 206 families of oligarchs in the late thirteenth century, the list was closed in 1297, and only 532 families in all sat in the Great Council between that date and the fall of the Republic (Mowbray and Gollmann, 2007, p. 4).

How many nobles sat in the Great Council?

The Council kept lists of its members, and they survive for the sessions of 1261 to 1262, 1264 to 1271, 1275 to 1284 and 1293 to 1296, carrying 8,178 legible names (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 780). From them the average size of the body in 1261 to 1296 works out at 415 members. By the time membership became fully hereditary in 1323 it had more than doubled, to around 950 (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 786). Counts after 1297 are estimates, because no systematic records survive: the 1323 figure is reconstructed from the 670 and 664 votes cast at the procurator elections of 1320 and 1324 and a typical absentee rate of 30 per cent (Puga and Trefler, 2014, pp. 786 to 787). The museum gives 1,200 to 2,000 noblemen for the chamber's working life (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).

Seats were concentrated from the start. In 1261 to 1296 the Dandolo held 4.7 per cent of seats and the Contarini 4.6 per cent; 21 families held half of them, 52 families held three quarters, and 162 families held all of them (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 781).

Before the Serrata the body still turned over. Fifty new families entered and ended up with 13 per cent of the seats, while 47 of the original 162 dropped out, an exit rate of 1.2 per cent a year. After 1323 that rate fell to 0.14 per cent (Puga and Trefler, 2014, pp. 781 to 783).

What did the Great Council control?

The Council had the right to call to account all the other authorities and bodies of the state, and the noblemen in it treated themselves as guardians of the laws those authorities rested on (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).

Its first target was the doge. The reforms of 1172 bound him by an oath of office listing what he could not do, among it seizing state property, and the Council added to that list at each new election. In all important decisions the doge had to consult a strengthened six-member ducal council that the Great Council elected and that answered to it. By 1192 the doge could do almost nothing without the council's approval (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 767). From the election protocol of 1268 the doge was chosen by Great Council members, the first lot drawn from those aged thirty and above (Molinari, 2018, p. 2).

The Council also made commercial law, passing the civil statutes that gave legal form to Venetian business contracts including the colleganza (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 760). Public employment came under it late: a law of 1367 required Great Council approval of every candidate for a government job, and it passed only on the fifth vote (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 804).

One body escaped. The Council of Ten, first convened on 10 July 1310 after an armed revolt, was neither appointed by the Great Council nor accountable to it (Puga and Trefler, 2014, p. 785).

What the Sala del Maggior Consiglio was for

The chamber is 53 metres long and 25 metres wide, the largest room in the palace and one of the largest in Europe, and it exists because the Council met in it (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). Next to it the Liagò, a glazed gallery, was where members gathered between items of business. Weapons were banned inside the chamber, which is why Boccono, a commoner, and eleven associates were a credible threat when they forced their way in during early 1300 to make the Council re-enfranchise those the Serrata had excluded. The plot was overheard, the twelve were executed that night, and their bodies were left hanging in St Mark's Square (Puga and Trefler, 2014, pp. 784 to 785).

Almost nothing of the medieval decoration remains. A fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin, painted for the chamber between 1365 and 1368, was badly damaged in the fire of 1577, and its fragments now hang in the Guariento Room next door. The present scheme dates from the restoration after that fire: twelve wall paintings in facing groups of six, showing acts of valour and episodes of war, under a ceiling of Virtues around a central allegory of the Republic.

Behind the doge's throne hangs the Paradiso, oil on canvas, 765 by 2451 centimetres, by Jacopo Tintoretto and his workshop, 1588 to 1592 (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). Below the ceiling runs a frieze of the first 76 doges, continued in the neighbouring Chamber of the Scrutinio.

Why one doge's portrait is a black drape

One place in the frieze carries no face. It belonged to Marino Falier, doge for seven months, beheaded in 1355 for an attempt to overthrow the Great Council that the Council of Ten put down quickly (Puga and Trefler, 2014, pp. 785 to 786).

The erasure came later than the execution. His portrait, made in the new Great Council hall as custom required, was removed by order of the Ten in December 1366, eleven years after the conspiracy. The decree ordered the figure taken out completely, the space left blue, his arms removed, and words written in the empty field recording that this had been the place of a doge beheaded for the crime of treason. The gap was duly painted blue with the inscription in white (Ravegnani, 2017, p. 109).

When the series of ducal portraits was renewed after the 1577 fire, the blue field became the black drape still visible today, with slightly different wording: Hic est locus Marini Faletri decapitati pro criminibus, this is the place of Marino Falier, beheaded for his crimes. A proposal by the head of the Ten and a ducal councillor to depict him instead in the manner of a shaming portrait was not taken up (Ravegnani, 2017, p. 110).