Margaret King shows what the death of a little boy named Valerio
Marcello over five hundred years ago can tell us about his time.
This child, scion of a family of power and privilege at Venice's time of
greatness, left his father in a state of despair so profound and so
public that it occasioned an outpouring of consoling letters, orations,
treatises, and poems. In these documents, we find a firsthand account,
richly colored by humanist conventions and expectations, of the life of
the fifteenth-century boy, the passionate devotion of his father, the
feelings of his brothers and sisters, the striking absence of his
mother. The father's story is here as well: the career of a Venetian
nobleman and scholar, patron and soldier, a participant in Venice's
struggle for dominion in the north of Italy.
Through these sources also King traces the cultural trends that made
Marcello's century famous. Her work enlarges our view of the literature
of consolation, which had a distinctive tradition in Venice, and
shifting attitudes toward death from the late Middle Ages onward.
For the depth and acuity of its insights into political, cultural, and
private life in fifteenth-century Venice, this book will be essential
reading for students of the Renaissance. For the grace and drama of its
storytelling, it will be savored by anyone who wishes to look into life
and death in a palace, and a city, long ago.
