1. Francesco Sansovino, Venezia città nobilissima et singolare descritta in XIIII libri (Venice, 1581), 13v.
3. BCV MS Cicogna 969, ff. 8v-19r. All quotations and page references are to the translation by David Chambers published in Venice: A Documentary History, 1450-1630, David Chambers and Brian Pullan, eds. (Oxford, 1992), hereafter abbreviated as Sanudo, Laus.
6. Sanudo, Laus, 5. This would appear to be in consonance both with Sorte's map of Venice and with portolan maps. The Grand Canal is almost a sea to be navigated or sailed upon.
7. Sanudo, Laus, 10. This is one of two places where Sanudo mentions pavements. The other is a reference to the Riva del Vin and the corresponding quay for wood sales, both on the Grand Canal (Sanudo, Laus, 13).
10. Sanudo, Laus, 13. Note that his listing of the various lagunar areas from which fish enter the city is a clockwise one.
11. Rodini, "Translatio Sancti Marci," 84-87, discusses the relationship between memory palaces and mapping with specific reference to Venetian exposure to classical memory training.
12. This is almost always the case, but the times when the rule breaks down are particularly revealing. In the Collegium Cerimoniale (henceforth abbreviated ASV Coll. Cer. I) , the first Redentore festival after the 1576 plague required considerably more detail to describe, because the ceremonies, including the now-famous "bridge of boats," were new.
16. Jonathan Glixon, "Music and Ceremony at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista: A New Document from the Venetian State Archives," in Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Kalamazoo: 1991), 56-89.
18. Marin Sanudo, I Diarii. In published form, as edited by Rinaldo Fulin, these diaries comprise 58 volumes, some running to as many as 400 pages.
19. Scuole de battuti were scuole that were founded specifically for the purpose of public self-flagellation by its members.
20. For the scuole, see Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge MA: 1971) and Le scuole di Venezia, ed. Terisio Pignatti (Milan: 1981). For ritual activities of the scuole, see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: 1981).
21. ASV Coll. Cer. I and BMV MS Latin III. 172 (2276), Rituum ecclesiasticorum cerimoniale, respectively.
23. To a religious scholar, ritual is "those conscious and voluntary, repetitious and stylized symbolic bodily actions that are centered on cosmic structures and/or sacred presences" (Evan M. Zuesse, "Ritual," Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade [New York, 1987], 405). Rituals bind together those "few parts of society shared by all," and tie together otherwise fragmented social units (Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe [Cambridge, 1997], 4). The ritual itself is seen either as a process or as a series of actions (Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure [Chicago, 1969]). It must be repeatable and repeated, and scriptable; "the order of [events] is known in advance of their practice," and there should be "conspicuous regularity" (Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events [Cambridge: 1990], 11, discussing Bruce Kapferer, Social Analysis 1 [1984], 194; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember [Cambridge: 1989], 144). There is the implication that there is a means, generally oral or written, of publicizing and recording the expected occurrences, further implying that ritual is specifiable in narrative terms (Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 4). In ritual, as in all theater, the events "are marked off temporally and spatially," and are persistent, "not limited in . . . effect to the ritual occasion" (Connerton, How Societies Remember, 44).
Ritual has a symbolic connection with aspects of the real, social and spiritual worlds, employing movement within a space; and, as part of its process, ritual disconnects its participants from everyday existence. Many rituals serve to commemorate historical occurrences and to promote "social memory." Many of these rites that connect the present with the past accomplish their task by a ritual re-enactment of selected portions of that past, whether real or imagined; in some views, a performative element is in fact required in order for commemoration to occur at all (Connerton, How Societies Remember, 4, 45).
Many ritual events, narrative or otherwise, may be cast in the form of the so-called "hero's journey" in which the actor leaves his customary attachments and undergoes hardships or trials, while in pursuit of a goal, be it material or transformative. The main ritual analogue to the symbolic quest is the pilgrimage (Thomas Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place: Myth, Ritual and Meaning in Architecture [Boston: 1996], 27; Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society [Ithaca NY: 1974]). Pilgrimages, "hero's journeys," and rites of passage, in which the participant is transformed or initiated by his actions, are all effectively the same process; in all these performances the participants encounter the spatial metaphors of "separation, initiation, and return" (Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place, 21).
The chief feature of undergoing a rite of passage is the transforming step or initiation. As a consequence of the separation step, which frequently is a physical modeling of the casting off of social or other binding ties, the actors have entered a "liminal" or "threshold" state. For van Gennep, the originator of the concept of rites of passage,
in all ritualized movements there was at least a moment when those being moved in accordance with a cultural script were liberated from normative demands, when they were, indeed, betwixt and between. . . . In this gap between ordered worlds, almost anything may happen (Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 13).
24. For a technical discussion as to the point of such ritual, see Connerton, How Societies Remember, 38-45; for a detailed examination of the Venetian state's orchestration and presentation of the "Myth of Venice," see Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. For the idea of settlement as creation myth, see Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place, 53.
26. Asa Boholm, The Doge of Venice: The Symbolism of State Power in the Renaissance (Gothenberg: 1990), 263-65.
31. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: 1980), 17.
32. Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place, 47. See: Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: 1982, originally published 1966), chapter 6; James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston: 1950, reprinted Westport CT, 1977), chapter 5; Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore, Body, Memory and Architecture (New Haven: 1977).
33. Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place, 50. I rely on Barrie for much of the ensuing discussion, because he is the only source to deal with ritual behavior, kinesthetics, visual perception and architecture in a single integrated fashion.
35. An important feature of spaces, at least in the visual sense, is the texture of their boundaries or edges--in particular, wall articulation and/or decoration. None of the descriptors address this point, although, in an orientational sense, landmarks work to provide a focus, and therefore texture or articulation might be considered as a special case of multiple landmarks.
36. Jekle, Visual Elements of Landscape, 139. The visual experience may be seen in terms of transitions from one space to another via the edges between the two spaces. The transition itself is through the phenomenon of the "emergence-from-behind": visualize walking down a hall to an open doorway, and at some point you start to see the room behind the doorway as being equally as important as the hall itself, and then the room seems to become larger as it takes over your field of vision. It has emerged from behind the doorway wall, or "edge." Thus, one view leads to another in a series of connected sequences (James J. Gibson, "A Theory of Pictorial Perception," in Sign Image Symbol, edited by Gregory Kepes [New York: 1966], 206-07).
41. Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place, 61-4. Many examples of the representation of the sacred city exist, including the Temple in Jerusalem, built as the earthly version of the heavenly city, and the Basilica San Marco in Venice, which functions in the same way by its believed architectural derivation from the Jerusalem structure.
42. Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place, 54, quoting Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 50.
45. Although Barrie noted that the Greek cross itself is an example of a "quadrative plan," all examples of which Eliade labels as imago mundi. (Spiritual Path, Sacred Place, 115).