Veronica Franco and the Courtesans of Renaissance Venice by Kristin Gleeson

Renaissance Venice

 Travellers who visited in Venice in the 15^th, 16^th and 17^th century never failed to marvel at the number of courtesans in the city. Thomas Coryat writing in 1608 was astonished to note that there were as many as twenty thousand courtesans operating in Venice and said that “many are esteemed so loose that they are said to open their quivers to every arrow.”

Venetian Courtesans

The courtesans often dressed in clothing that had revealing cleavage to the point even where the breasts were completely exposed. Travellers on occasion mistakenly thought these were the ordinary female citizens of Venice. But just as much as they might condemn the numbers and their behaviour, the travellers’ descriptions of Venetian daily life in which the courtesan featured prominently the city is praised as an example of civic and social harmony. Two myths lying side by side. 

Venice in fact was a vibrant and complex city then, filled with merchants profiting from expanded trade opportunities and proud of its republic standing. The government was organized around a multitude of magistracies and councils and ruled by a doge, elected by a closed patrician group, called the Great Council. 

The people were generally a sober lot and the women of their class and the nobility were seldom seen in public. When they did, they too were sombrely dressed, in dark colours.

Venetian widow

Venice was also crowded with people who worked at the shipyards, at the fisheries, the glassworks and other manufacturers in this blossoming commercial centre. Housing was difficult to find, even among the wealthier classes, and few had the luxury (at least in the 15^th and 16^th century) of owning their own palazzo. Most had apartments or rooms in buildings, and some of the poorer classes shared rooms.  These conditions among a booming commercial centre created intense rivalries among the young men of various trades. Such competition often gave rise to faction fighting- sometimes fought desperately over bridges like the Rialto. Enemies of any class could be despatched in a dark alley and tossed in the canal.

Poised between these two sides of Venice were the courtesans. There were two classes of courtesans that existed in Venice. The first, cortigna onesta, honest courtesan or intellectual courtesan and the cortigna lume, the lower class prostitutes who lived near and frequented the Rialto Bridge.

The women from the first class of courtesan, the honest courtesan, were often born into patrician or merchant family they were raised as educated and cultured women. But in a society that dictated exorbitant dowries that could often bankrupt a family, extra daughters were often given no opportunity to marry. They could go into a convent and become a nun, but that still required a dowry, though not as large. They could remain in the household an ageing spinster tending to family member, forever dependent and submissive perhaps to a new mistress of the household if it should pass to a brother and his wife. Or circumstances, like poverty from funding a dowry to an older sister, or failed commercial activities could encourage a young woman to consider the life of a courtesan. Often, in these situations, a courtesan could end up being the sole support of their family. 

Venetian Courtesan

Among the Venetian men generally, courtesans were seen as cultured women who provided entertainment for wealthy noblemen and merchants.  In Venice, a man wouldn’t be expected to marry until well into his thirties and courtesans could provide these young men pleasure and culture and hopefully disease free. An older man might take a courtesan as his mistress and enjoy a less inhibited sexual experience than he would from a wife who had most likely been raised in a convent-like atmosphere.

Successful courtesans could enjoy a luxurious life filled with parties and salons. They often moved in influential circles and had access to artists, poets, politicians and the thinkers of the day. In such circles a courtesan had the opportunity to wield influence if she was skilled enough to do so. Aside from the potential for power and influence the honest courtesan still faced the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, something that observed no class barriers.

One of the most celebrated and well known Venetian courtesans was Veronica Franco, born in 1546. Born to the courtesan, Paola Fracassa and the merchant, Francesco Franco she also had three brothers.  Her intellectual life began with sharing her brothers' education by private tutors in the family home and while still in her teens she married the physician Paola Fracassa. Probably an arranged marriage, it ended badly shortly afterwards and Veronica was forced to support herself.

Veronica Franco

Franco became a cortigiana onesta (honest courtesan) in the mid to late 1560s and soon became famed for the intellectual and culture entertainments she provided. She continued her education by frequenting literary gatherings of writers and painters in Venice during the 1570s and 1580s and mingled with politicians, poets, artists and thinkers. She captured the interest of Domenico Venier (1517-1582), a Venetian poet and the head of the most renowned vernacular literary academy in Venice, who became her reader and protector. A frequent visitor to his private literary salon at Ca' Venier (the Venier palace), Franco composed sonnets and capitoli in terza rima for exchange with male poets.

By her mid-twenties, Franco was requesting sonnets for publication from male poets for anthologies that she assembled to commemorate men of the Venetian elite. One such volume, the Rime di diversi eccellentissimi autori nella morte dell'Illustre Sign. Estor Marteninengo Conte di Malapaga, in honor of the Count Martinengo, was published in 1575; she was not only the editor but also included nine sonnets she herself had written.

In 1575, during the epidemic of plague that ravaged the city, Veronica Franco was forced to leave Venice and lost much of her wealth when her house and possessions were looted. On her return in 1577, she defended herself with dignity before the Inquisition on charges of witchcraft (a common complaint lodged against courtesans in those days). The charges were dropped. She died in 1591. 

Listening to Scent - by Lesley Downer

The Tale of Genji, Chapter 34

Catching the scent 

of orange trees that wait to bloom
until the fifth month
I recall from long ago
the scented sleeves of one now gone
Kokinshu poem number 139 (published 915 AD)

Of all the senses, perhaps smell has the greatest power to evoke and transport, to bring sudden sharp memories flooding back of a person or place once beloved and long forgotten.

A thousand years ago in Japan, while on another small island on the other side of the world Beowulf was fighting Grendel, the Wanderer was sitting desolately by the seashore bewailing his fate and monks were putting together the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Japanese poets were examining their senses and probing their feelings in a way that would not be unfamiliar today.

In the Heian period, around the eleventh century, one of the most highly appreciated artistic skills among the noble class was the art of blending perfumes. While we developed oil-based perfumes, Japanese perfected the art of heating the woods which formed the basis of their scents so that they produced no smoke, only fragrance. 

Wakamurasaki, Tale of Genji, Chapter 5

In this society - depicted in the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji - noblewomen lived hidden away in their palaces, occasionally allowing a brocade sleeve to waft its scent from a carriage window as a hint of their beauty. Noblemen would exchange poems with them, decide on the strength of their poetic skills and the beauty of their calligraphy if they were worthy of pursuit, then creep in to visit them at dead of night. No matter how dark it was the ladies always knew exactly who the visitor was by his distinctive perfume. 

In the perfume competition chapter in The Tale of  Genji the judge, Prince Hotaru, complains that it’s so smoky that he finds it very hard to judge the perfumes properly. The author, the court lady know as Murasaki Shikibu, describes one of the perfumes as ‘a calm, elegant scent,’ another as ‘full and nostalgic’, one as ‘bright and up-to-date with a slightly pungent touch’ and another as having ‘a gentle aroma and rather touching tenderness.’ 

The exquisite world of the Heian nobles was as fragile as the scent of orange blossom. It faded away but the tradition of creating and appreciating scent lived on. 

Kimono laid over rack above censer to scent

Till the mid-nineteenth century women scented their kimonos overnight, laying them on a wooden framework over an incense burner, and draped their glossy long black hair over incense burners to scent it. 

A woodblock print at the Tokyo National Museum shows a courtesan reclining languidly, her kimono suggestively parted at hem and neck, with an incense burner between her feet. We can imagine the perfume coiling up through her clothes and emerging from the loose folds of her kimono at her breast. 

Young men about town, geisha and courtesans carried pieces of scented wood in their sleeves and rubbed powdered scent onto their hands and neck. 

When I lived in Japan I once went to the great city of Kanazawa on the Japan Sea coast. A friend had put me in touch with a celebrated master of the Noh theatre. Japanese tend to be rather formal around each other, especially if they are famous as this gentlemen was. But they relish the chance to relax with foreigners who are not such sticklers for the proper Japanese ways of behaviour. 

Preparing for incense guessing game

He introduced me to the incense ceremony. It’s somewhat more recherché than tea ceremony and while tea ceremony ends with a cup of tea, the incense ceremony is more like a game. In fact it’s a bit like wine tasting.

There’s a whole connoisseurship of the different incenses, much like wines. To the novice they may seem similar but to the trained nose they’re quite different. Some are musky, some more like sandalwood or pine or plum blossom. The most exquisite and expensive scent of all is kyara. Imported from Vietnam, it’s an ancient wood that takes thousands of years to develop and, so I’m told, costs many times more than the equivalent weight of gold.

As with tea ceremony, the implements are works of art. There is an ash smoother, chopsticks to handle small incense pieces, an answer sheet holder and tweezers. The central piece of equipment is the incense censer which holds hot ashes on top of which you put a tiny fragment of incense.

Listening to incense

In a game there are five or six scents to choose from. Players kneel in a row or a square and pass the censer around, holding it in the prescribed fashion. You take turns to inhale long and slow and guess which of the scents it is. The referee writes down your guess. Then you go on to the next. The person who gets the most right is the winner.

It’s a social activity yet also peaceful and contemplative. Instead of guessing you can just sit back and ‘listen’ to the incense as they say in Japanese or compose a poem or talk about the scent.

The fragrance -
more alluring than the colour -
whose scented sleeves have brushed
the blossoms in my garden?
Kokinshu

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic and fragrant tale set in nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Top 2 images: The Tale of Genji chapter 34 (18th century Japanese painting, Honolulu Museum of Art) 

Wakamurasaki, traditionally credited to Tosa Mitsuoki (1617 - 1691),part of the Burke Albums, property of Mary Griggs Burke

Both courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Other images mine.

The Spell of Glamour by Debra Daley

Henry Norman. The ladies promenading in the Yoshiwara, 1890.
Cambridge University Library.

English journalist Sir Henry Norman travelled to Japan in 1890 to write a series of essays, which he illustrated with his own photographs.  Of the courtesans whom he discovered processing in the Yoshiwara, Tōkyō’s officially licensed pleasure district, he writes, ‘It is difficult to give in words an adequate notion of the extraordinary effect of this procession. The costly and gorgeous clothes… the exaggerated bow of her obi tied in front (the courtesan is obliged by law to distinguish herself in this way), the pyramidal coiffure, the face as white as snow… women servants walking solemnly behind… her slow and painful hachimonji [figure-of-eight walking]; her stony gaze straight before her, half contemptuous and half timid; the dense and silent crowd ­–– all these go to make a spectacle apart from anything one has ever seen…’ 

In fin-de-siècle Japan, these glamorous figures still generated a powerful mystique in spite of Yoshiwara’s decline from its heyday, when it was the shimmering essence  of that arty, sensuous, extravagant urban lifestyle known as “ukiyo” or the “floating world”. By the time Henry Norman arrived at Yoshiwara, the floating world was sagging under the weight of its implausibility – but that a trace of the old magic still lingered is a testament to the forcefulness of the concept.

The Yoshiwara was an irresistible subject for Edo-era writers and artists, who flocked to record every aspect of its demi-monde. Gorgeous woodblock prints amplified the enclave’s appeal and turned the most prestigious courtesans into celebrities. Songs and poems wove webs of allusion that wrapped the reality of the Yoshiwara’s business – women trafficked and enslaved as sexual commodities – in elegant evasions. “Last night a peach was wetted by the rain” sounds rather more charming than “last night a fifteen-year-old’s virginity was sold to the highest bidder”.

Utagawa Kunisada. The courtesan Mayuzumi in the
Yoshiwara of Edo, c.1830.

The presentation of the pleasure district in poems and pictures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the very expression of determined glamour. Images and literary musings that took the Yoshiwara as their subject created a transcendent world, distant yet alluring, populated by unknowable beauties. They project the kind of dazzling glamour that causes things to appear other than they actually are.

Yoshiwara was constructed in 1617 as an enclave of 394 teahouses and 153 bordellos on a marshy plain two miles outside of the city of Edo (as Tōkyō was known then). In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu had eyed with suspicion the kinds of loose establishments – tea houses and unruly houses of ill-repute – that might harbour political agitators and threaten his power. When a brothel owner petitioned authorities for a tract of land with the aim of securing a monopoly on sex-work, it occurred to the Shōgun’s government to establish a designated pleasure district, where brothels could be monitored and taxed. A restricted quarter of this kind would make it easier for the government’s taxation service to obtain revenues from prostitution and for secret police and informants, on whom the shogunate relied to keep political threats in check, to go about their eavesdropping work – since brothels and tea houses had always been a reliable source of intelligence about adversaries and criminals.

The business of the Yoshiwara was highly regulated fantasy, with sex as the consumable product. Even the quarter's name involved some dissembling in order to make it more attractive to customers. Yoshiwara meant “Rush Moor” or, equally prosaically, “Sedge Plain”. But a convenient switch to another kanji (character) transformed the meaning into something more felicitous – the “Moor of Good Luck”.  The term "ukiyo" had got a makeover, too. Its original Buddhist meaning was "suffering world" – a place where chasing after desire inevitably results in sorrow. "Uki" was interpreted as "sad, gloomy" from the Chinese yuu, but in the upbeat, thrusting Edo period, "uki" was repurposed as the Chinese fu, which gave the sense of floating and cheerfulness and drifting on a pleasant current. Even in the matter of timekeeping, Yoshiwara was not exactly commensurate with reality. City regulations required bordellos to close at ten o’clock in the evening, but Yoshiwara’s brothelkeepers got around this inconvenience by calling midnight ten o’clock and having the night watchmen – who struck the hours with wooden clappers – alter the count.

Okumura Masanobu. Nakanochō in the Yoshiwara, c.1710-20.
Art Institute Chicago.

The pleasure district covered twenty acres of gridded streets. It was surrounded by a moat and barred by an imposing Great Gate. Booths outside the gate sold cheap straw hats that could be pulled down low to hide the wearer’s identity. The individuals sporting hats in the print above are probably samurai, who were technically forbidden to visit the Yoshiwara, but as the district grew in prestige, this regulation lapsed. A notice posted on the Great Gate prohibited persons other than doctors from entering in a palanquin or sedan chair, and long weapons were forbidden. Even the most illustrious of visitors must go unarmed and on foot into the Yoshiwara. He understood straight away that the conventions of ordinary society no longer prevailed and that the only mark of distinction a man might have, after passing through the Great Gate, lay in the amount of money he was prepared to pay for services. A representative of the lowly merchant class who managed to secure an assignation with a ranking courtesan might fancy himself a prince of the city – at least for twenty-four hours.

Utagawa Hiroshima. Cherry blossom time, Yoshiwara Nakanochō, c.1839-42.
Honolulu Museum of Art.

Yoshiwara was all about first impressions. From the outset it presented a beguiling face to the visitor. In spring hundreds of cherry trees planted in tubs along the wide central boulevard of Nakanochō offered a breathtaking display. The main thoroughfare was flanked by two-storied tea houses and “green houses” (the term comes from the Chinese custom of painting brothels green). Shops in the side streets sold sex aids, aphrodisiacs and love potions, and food and drink. The banners fluttering from tall bamboo poles, the sound of music everywhere, the countless flickering lanterns that lit this “nightless city" after dusk, and the sumptuous style of its denizens all contributed to an excited atmosphere, while strict rules of comportment added an air of refinement that justified Yoshiwara’s high prices.

Kitagawa Utamaro. Cherry blossoms at Yoshiwara, c.1793.
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Chōbunsei Eishi. Courtesans at the Great Gate of the Yoshiwara: (right)
Utaura with kamuro Hanaki and Chidori; (centre) Misayama with kamuro
Wakaba and Teriha; (left) Shinowara with kamuro Takeno and Sasano, c.1792,
Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

In the morning hours the courtesans exercised a semblance of liberty as they strolled the streets attended by young female pages, known as kamuro. When they turned thirteen or fourteen, kamuro might begin training to become prostitutes themselves, or shift into the role of servant or office administrator. Clerical work abounded. Transactions of the Yoshiwara were recorded in detail and encounters charged in time units measured by incense sticks. A ledger recorded the brothel’s sales based on the number of sticks burned for each transaction. Accounts were then made up for customers.

Japanese timekeeper with incense sticks and name tags.
National Science Museum, Tōkyō.

Yoshiwara was a sophisticated bureaucratic enterprise that prospered on finely honed time-and-efficiency principles. Every hour of the courtesan’s life was accounted for – she worked whether she was ill or menstruating. At twilight, as a tolling bell announced the evening display, crowds of sightseers gathered to watch the women take up seats in a latticed room at the front of the bordello. Higher ranked courtesans were not exhibited in this way, but they were in the minority. Potential customers might have consulted one of the many directories available, which contained practical information about the brothels, the women in their employ and a price list of services. Tea house girls arranged meetings with customers, who could buy company for a whole or half day or for periods of time known as “cuts” or “flowers”. High-class courtesans were generally listed at a day-rate basis only, while lower-ranking women were available for shorter sessions. It was assumed that the customer, while waiting a response from a woman of the first echelon, would spend generously on sake and entertainment. It was a drawn-out and expensive business masquerading as idealised courtship.

Okumura Masanobu. Courtesans in the Yoshiwara, c. 1710-20.
Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Most women in the Yoshiwara had been sold to brothelkeepers at a young age by poverty-stricken peasant families. News of natural disasters sent procurers rushing to the afflicted region, where desperate people could be persuaded to sign away their daughters. Every expense from then on, food, clothes, servants, and accommodation, was loaded on to the girl’s contract and indebted her for years to the brothel owner. The reality of her life was one of indenture with little hope of escape. No woman could leave the Yoshiwara without a police pass and even then she must be accompanied by a male attendant. Any attempt to flee was met with severe penalties.

Henry Norman gives an insight into the process of indenture in his dispatches to the Pall Mall Gazette. He recounts a visit in 1890 to Tōkyō’s Department of Police, where the Bureau of Prostitution allows him to watch the application process for a girl to become a licensed yujo, or “lady of pleasure” at the Yoshiwara. “Three persons appear in front of the officials,” Norman writes, “the girl, her parent or guardian, and the brothelkeeper. The girl is questioned, she replies automatically with downcast eyes; the parent is questioned, he replies apologetically, with many explanations; the keeper is questioned, he replies profusely, with practised fluency. The official makes many entries in an elaborately ruled ledger before him. Then the three retire, in a moment the sliding doors open again to admit another trio, and so on without variation, without emotion, formally and relentlessly the stream of victims is rolled on. I could not help being reminded of the automatic pig-killing at the stockyards of Chicago. Some of the girls are no longer young, but coarse in person and brazen in manner. Others are delicate and pretty and very frightened. Some look little more than children, bewildered.”

Once the girl signed her contract, the brothelkeeper would advance the parents the sum of money agreed – in 1890 that was somewhere between twenty and fifty dollars – and the girl was bonded to the keeper’s brothel until he had recouped his investment from her earnings. In fact the ever-expanding debt made it nearly impossible for the girl to leave the Yoshiwara unless a patron bought out her contract.

Postcard. Yoshiwara prostitutes, c.1910.

There was nothing very ideal about day to day life in the pleasure quarter. The mosquitos that thrived in the moat must have been a hellish nuisance in summer and when it rained the streets would have churned to mud. Typhoid broke out from time to time. Many lives were lost to fires – over a period of two hundred years Yoshiwara was burned down at least thirty times. At least a third of Yoshiwara’s women were dead by their early twenties of infectious diseases or from complications of childbirth. Others were slowly poisoned by the toxic lead makeup they painted on their faces and necks. The majority of them passed into death as anonymously as they had lived, their bodies wrapped in straw and dumped at the gates of the Jokanji temple ­– the Throw-Away temple, as it became known. A total of 25,000 prostitutes met this fate.

As the hour of the dragon arrived, and dawn began to break, Yoshiwara's customers came to the end of their sessions. In typically euphemistic style, this departure at dawn was termed “the parting of the robes”, an echo of the courtly language used to describe the poignant separation of two lovers. The morning bell sounded and the Great Gate was pushed open – but not for the women within.