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Eric R Dursteler, Patricia Fortini Brown. The Venetian Bride: Bloodlines and Blood Feuds in Venice and its Empire., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 454–455, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae479
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For more than four decades Patricia Fortini Brown has been one of the leading scholars of early modern Venice. An art historian by trade, she has produced a steady stream of important works that have fundamentally shaped our understanding of the history of Venetian art, from Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (1987) to Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (1996) to Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture and the Family (2004). Her interdisciplinary explorations of Venetian art during its early modern highpoint have always overlayed deeply with their cultural and social historical milieus, and with The Venetian Bride, history moves to center stage.
The bride at the center of the book is Giulia Bembo, who in 1549, at age eighteen, married Count Girolamo Della Torre. Giulia belonged to one of the most illustrious Venetian patrician families, whose most noteworthy sixteenth-century member was Giulia’s great-uncle, the distinguished Venetian humanist, historian, and cardinal, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547). Her husband came from an important feudal family from the region of Friuli, the often-restive northeastern frontier of the Terraferma, the Venetian mainland state. The marriage was celebrated against the backdrop of the decades-long vendetta between the Della Torre and another powerful Friulian feudal family, the Savorgnan. Indeed, the marriage was a rushed affair because the bridegroom was under a sentence of exile for his role in avenging the murder of his father, and immediately after the ceremony, the couple set sail for the island of Crete, one of the jewels of Venice’s maritime territories, the Stato da mar. With this union, the Della Torre gained kinship ties to a powerful and influential Venetian family that might assist them in their rivalries, and the Bembo gained an alliance with a wealthy Terraferma family with an established noble pedigree.
