Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [71]
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1. Andrea Memmo, Lucia’s father, was elected Procuratore di San Marco, the most prestigious political office in the Venetian Republic after the one of doge, in 1785, when he was serving as ambassador in Rome.
2. Sebastiano Mocenigo, Lucia’s father-in-law, was a complicated man and a difficult father. His rampant homosexuality and outrageous behaviour during his tenures as ambassador to Madrid and to Paris put an end to his diplomatic career: Maria Theresa of Austria refused to accept his credentials as ambassador to Vienna.
3. This ivory miniature of Lucia and her sister, Paolina, when they were little girls was commissioned in the mid-1770s. Their father probably took it with him to Constantinople, where he served as ambassador for four years (1779–82), to lessen the pain of his separation from his two daughters, who remained in Venice with their mother.
4 and 5. Lucia (left) and Paolina, aged sixteen and fifteen, sat for Angelica Kauffmann in the summer of 1786, in the artist’s studio in Rome.
6. In the same year Alvise Mocenigo wrote to Andrea Memmo asking for the hand of his daughter Lucia. This is Lucia’s reply to her future husband—a man ten years older than her, whom she did not know and who had already been married and divorced.
7. As Venetian Ambassador to Rome, Andrea Memmo and family lived in Palazzo San Marco, the “immense palace.” The Venetian ambassador lived in one wing, the Venetian cardinals in the other—an arrangement that led to constant bickering about keys and bills.
8. “I feel so lost when you are away from me,” Lucia wrote to her husband, Alvise, shortly after moving into Palazzo Mocenigo, the sprawling family home on Venice’s Grand Canal. It was, indeed, an intimidating world to enter for a seventeen-year-old bride, with its grand staircases, its endless halls and its innumerable apartments distributed on four floors, where a crowd of Mocenigo relatives lived on fairly unfriendly terms.
9. A highly symbolic moment in the fall of Venice: the lowering of the four bronze horses from the facade of Saint Mark’s Basilica by Bonaparte’s troops. The horses, which the Venetians had brought back from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade, were shipped to Paris and placed atop the new arc de triomphe in the Place du Carrousel.
10. During the siege of Venice in 1849, the Austrians dropped bombs carried by air balloons that were strung together by very long ropes. To counter this move, Venetian engineers planned to launch projectiles with ropes attached.
11. Lucia’s husband commissioned this statue of Napoleon from Angelo Pizzi with the intention of placing it in the main square in Alvisopoli. Then Napoleon fell and Lucia no longer wanted it. Reluctantly, Lucia had the statue shipped up the Grand Canal to Palazzo Mocenigo. She put it in a shadowy corner on the water-level ground floor, where it stands today.
12. Alvise Mocenigo was especially proud of this etching of Emperor Napoleon and Empress Marie Louise; it was “the first work of art produced at Alvisopoli.”
13. The pro-French municipal government established in Venice proclaimed 4 June as a national holiday. The ceremonies were held in Saint Mark’s Square. In the foreground, Marina Querini Benzoni, clad in a light Greek tunic, is dancing with Fra’ Nani, a priest with strong Jacobin leanings. According to eyewitness reports, there were fewer spectators than those depicted in the painting, and the atmosphere was not cheerful.
14. Facade of the main villa at Alvisopoli and the ground-floor plan. Alvise Mocenigo wanted the main house to be simple, functional and well integrated into the working community. The estate remained in the family until my grandfather sold it in the 1930s.