Sublime

The rise of Venice to become the great emporium for the West’s trade with the East was closely connected with the Byzantine recovery; culturally, Venice was really an outpost of the great metropolis at Constantinople – as its architecture revealed.

Nothing would have confirmed Petrarch’s view of Venetians’ material obsessions so much as the journey of Giosafat Barbaro, a merchant and diplomat who set out from Tana with 120 laborers to search a Scythian burial mound on the steppes for treasure. In 1447, he traveled by sledge up the frozen rivers, but “found the ground so hard, we were constrai