The conception of this book is excellent: to examine the surviving corpus of Venetian illustrations of ships and boats from the earliest surviving to the end of the fifteenth century and to analyze and categorize them against the archaeological and (to a much lesser extent) historical records.
However, one of the suprising things about it is that in a study devoted primarily to iconography, which includes a section devoted consciously to "Methodology", no methodology of analysis of the iconography of ships and boats is in fact developed. For example, there is no use of the principles which could have been adapted from Lucien Basch's seminal article. Nor does Martin ever attempt to develop any methodology of her own for interpreting the distortions and choices of concentration of medieval artists, most of whom had little knowledge of matters maritime and were not even attempting to depict ships and boats realistically. There is no effort to distinguish artists' intents and how that may have affected the ships and boats which for the most part were merely a backdrop to their subjects, "as Venetian ships are likely to reflect the contemporaneous Mediterranean nautical technology, ..." (7). Did they? In fact there is considerable evidence to suggest that Venetian ships had their own technological idiosyncracies, as did those of Genoa and elsewhere.
Against that, one of the strengths of the book is that Martin is highly aware of what have been the effects over the centuries of reconstructions and restorations of the original depictions of ships and boats. She frequently points out features that historians have taken to be medieval but which are in fact the product of poor restorations. She also includes some material which is less well known; for example, some of her graffiti, especially that of a galley from a prison cell wall in the Doganal Palace.
Martin's expertise is in the field of art history. She is weaker in archaeology and weaker still in the history of Venice. Chapter One, "A brief overview of Venetian history and art", is studded throughout with inaccuracies and extravagent claims. "By the tenth century Venetian merchants were trading directly with the peoples of the Levant, Black Sea, Crete and Alexandria ..." (10). Really! What evidence is there for any Western maritime republics trading directly to the Black Sea before 1204? "Venice succeeded in arranging advantageous trade agreements not only with ... but also with 'the infidels', the Fatimids of North Africa and, later, the Ottoman Turks." (10). Venice never had any treaty with the Fatimids of Ifriqiyya (ante 972), nor even with them when they moved to Egypt after that. And with the Ottoman Turks, well yes, but in the fifteenth century! The entire sub-chapter is studded with ill-considered claims. "The introduction of pulleys in about 1300 facilitated the use of both steering devices and rigging." Well, apart from the fact that blocks and tackles for controlling rudders and yards are depicted in art stretching back to antiquity, archaeological examples also survive. "Venice was the only state that actually succeeded in establishing and maintaining trade relations with all sides, an enterprise that required much diplomacy and some military aggression." No doubt, but the Amalfitans, Pisans, and Genoese would be surprised to learn that they did not trade with "all sides": Byzantium, the Muslim world, and Western Europe.
Martin is the first to acknowledge that "Venetian artists were strongly affected by the Byzantine style. Byzantine themes were repeated stylistically, carefully reproducing earlier designs." Of course, she is absolutely correct. But why does she not then examine the Byzantine artistic record of ship depiction as a predecessor to the Venetian? It was the obvious place to begin. There are many, many Byzantine depictions of ships and boats in Psalters, collections of sermons, mosaics, and other sources. Martin uses a few late Roman mosaics and the famous sixth-century "port of Classis" mosaic from S. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, but nothing else. Yet it is clear that the ship depicted in the translatio of St Mark enamel panel of the Pala d'Oro is in the same artistic tradition as others from manuscripts from Mt Athos.
Against the failure to consider the Byzantine influences on both Venetian art and Venetian maritime architecture is an inexplicable consideration of iconographic representations of what may have been supposed to be Venetian ships in non-Venetian contexts, for example, the floor mosaics from San Giovanni Evangelista, Ravenna, of the Fourth Crusade (Figs 18-20). But these ships have much more in common with Pisan representations of sailing ships than with Venetian ones. Why should representations of ships supposedly having some connection to some aspect of Venetian of history be included, even when the the ships depicted are clearly not Venetian? This is a kind of lateral anachronism.
The same applies to the illustration from the Bodleian Library manuscript of Le livres du Graunt Caam (Travels of Marco Polo) (Fig 55). Polo came from Venice, admittedly. But the Bodleian manuscript was produced in France ca. 1380-1400 and the ships depicted are north European and have nothing to do with Venice. And why include frescoes, manuscript illustrations, and paintings from places in what might be loosely described as Venetia: Bolzano, Udine, Imola, Padua, Pomposa, Belluno, Rimini Verona, and as far afield as Parma, Bologna, and Arezzo. Most of these are in very poor condition and add little to our knowledge of Venetian ships in any case. If it was considered necessary to include them, then the author should have explained why, which she rarely does. Admittedly, Martin does say in her Introduction that she includes Venetia, not just Venice; however, the methodology of selection is never properly explained. One excepts "St Ursula and Pope Ciriaco travel to Colonia" by a Venetian artist in a church at Belluno and also the five paintings from the St Ursula diptych and polyyptych by Paolo Veneziano or his school.
Similarly, why include illustrations of ships from a fourteenth-century French manuscript of the Roman de Troie of Benoit de Saint-Maure of ca. 1330-40, just because it ended up in the Marciana in the seventeenth century (Figs. 41-5)? "[T]hey are included here because they are informative for Mediterranean shipbuilding in general," writes Martin. Maybe so, but if that's the case, why exclude anything? There are hundreds of other works which could have been included by those criteria. There is no discipline in Martin's methodology.
Again just because a manuscript may be found today in a Venetian library, it need not have anything to do with Venetian shipping. This applies to Fig. 31, a tenth-century Constantinopolitan manuscript in Rome but later copied in Venice, and the copy now in the Marciana, and to Figs 32-4, the famous manuscript of the Cynegetica of pseudo-Oppian, again in the Marciana but produced in Constantinople in the eleventh century and having nothing to do with Venetian ships per se.
Then there are problems of selection. Why, for example, include illustrations from the late-fifteenth or early-sixteenth-century manuscript Arte de far vasselli in the Austrian National Library, which is a copy of the earlier (ca. 1410) manuscript Fabrica di galere in the Biblioteca Nazionale Florence, and not include those of the latter? Perhaps the latter was inaccessible to Martin but, if so, she should have said so, or otherwise explained the decision. It is useful to have Alvise Chiggiato's reconstruction of the hull of a Flanders galea del sexto from the Fabrica di galere, but it would have been better to have had all of the manuscript's drawings. The Flanders galley is at folio 12v but there are also many other drawings of Romania galleys, light galleys, cogs, sails, anchors, etc.
The heart of the book is Chapter 2: "Catalog: Venetian maritime images". Here Martin examines systematically 129 images of ships and boats associated with Venice, including mosaics, enamels, manuscript illuminations, other manuscript illustrations, frescoes, paintings, etc. The watercraft are assigned to Types, I being small craft and lagoon or river boats, II being seagoing warships, and III being seagoing sailing ships. There are various sub-types. Most of the images are well-known but even there Martin's anaylsis has the benefit of pointing out restorations which may have altered or degraded the original features. Some other images are valuable since they are less well known. Martin has taken many of the photographs herself and although she is obviously skilled with a camera she has frequently not had good access. The reproductions of the mosaics of San Marco are, for example, much inferior to those of Otto Demus. Angles are frequently poor and inscriptions missing, which is annoying since Martin then attempts to transcribe them.
Here some methodological problems arise. To begin with it appears that Martin cannot read Latin. She certainly cannot transcribe even simple inscriptions where the medieval Latin has abbreviations and frequently goes astray in both transcription and translation, for example, in the two mosaics of the translatio of St Mark's body from Alexandria to Venice which still have their inscriptions. The mosaic of the relics of the saint being hidden amongst pork on the ship at Alexandria (lower tier of east side of the vault of San Clemente Chapel) bears the inscription Carnib(vs) absconsvm qvervnt fvgivntq(ve) retrorsv(m) with the words "kanzir kanzir" (pork pork) above the body of the saint on the ship covered by a sail. Then the two figures at the bow of the ship are titled Tribvn(vs) and Rvstic(vs). There is a clear "us" abbreviation above the "c" of Rvsticvs. But Martin gets it all wrong and transcribes: "Carnibvs absconsvm v vervnt fvgivntq ve retrorsvm kanzir kanzir tribvn rvstic". She does, however, translate correctly. Dozens of similar cases can be adduced, along with many cases of mistranslation. I am afraid that Martin was not linguistically and palaeographically competent to undertake this book. How it passed the Press's readers defies comprehension.
When it comes to the actual analysis of the iconography of the ships depicted, Martin is on surer ground. However, even here she gets things wrong, frequently because it appears that her lateral knowledge is not very broad. For example at Fig. 10 the "steering oar or quarter rudder" of the ship's boat is in fact a sweep as found commonly depicted on ship's boats. They were the ideal steering system for boats intended to operate through surf to a shore (as is still the case today) and are found depicted in Byzantine and Western medieval art. Likewise, in the floor mosaics of the Fourth Crusade from San Giovanni Evangelista, Ravenna, Martin characterizes what are clearly representations of the five largest sailing ships, from whose masts the assault bridges to the walls of Constantinople were run, as usiache/usciere, the horse transports. A cursory reading of the accounts of the Fourth Crusade would have dispelled such misunderstanding. The horse transports were all oared galleys, as Robert of Clari makes perfectly clear, and it was not they which assaulted the walls. They lacked the height to do so.
At Fig. 29, of the famous enamel of the translatio of St Mark from the Pala d'Oro, it is claimed that "two shrouds run beneath the yard and masthead. For sailors to tack a lateen-rigged ship, however, the shrouds needed to be fixed above the parrel." In fact, the reverse is the case and the enamel has it quite correct. Similarly with "the halyard...would have passed through the clearly depicted hook-like calcet at the masthead." A calcet was a "blockmast", a masthead with a block set into it through which the halyard was rove. The hook-heads depicted in the iconography from late antiquity to the twelfth century were not calcets but rather another means of holding the yard forward of the mast when tacking.
There are also missed opportunities. For example, Martin misunderstands the fact that oars were rowed again their grommets rather than against their thole pins. In other words, oarsmen facing the stern had their oars forward of the the tholes so that their weight rested on the grommets during the stroke rather than against the thole pins. Rarely is this made apparent in ancient or medieval art, yet the "Stilling of the Tempest" mosaic shows it extremely clearly. Martin doesn't take the opportunity to point it out.
There are also numerous factual mistakes. The manuscript illustration in Fig. 31 from the treatise of siege warfare attributed to Heron of Byzantium (Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Gr. 1605, fol. 40r), is not from an eleventh-century Venetian manuscript but rather from a tenth-century Constantinopolitan one. Fig. 49 shows the port profile of a ship and its boat, not the starboard. Fig.113, a supposed "bronze coin or medallion minted in honor of the Doge Peter Candianus," is in fact an 18th-century reproduction by a famed forger named Alvise Meneghetti and the present location is not unknown: it is in the Croatian National Museum in Zagreb (see G. Gorini, et al., "I falsi di Meneghetti," Bollettino del Museo Civico di Padova 80 (1991), 321-57). Reinhold Mueller is shortly to publish another study of the medal and other fabrications of Meneghetti. This one is useless for the study of Venetian shipping.
In Chapter Three: "Venetian watercraft: diversity to meet every need", Martin attempts to examine the archaeological and written records in order to classify and categorize the various types of ships. She examines types of rigs (lateen and square) and construction methods (shell-first and frame-first), concluding from the archaeological evidence for small boats dating from the fourth to eleventh centuries found in various places south of the Po that, up to this point, the ancient shell-first technique continued to be used for small boats and from the evidence of the Contarina, Porto Fuori and Logonova ships that by the fourteenth century larger ships at least were all built by the frame-first technique. All of this is undoubtedly correct, and Martin also examines the evidence for rudders, both quarter rudders and stern-post rudders, and anchors. This is perhaps the best section of the book. But then she attempts to compile "Textual evidence for a functional Venetian ship and boat typology." By her own admission (172), she hasn't actually looked at any documents or texts but rather has compiled the section from mentions of ship types in Giovanni Casoni's Venezia e le sue lagune of 1847 and Marco Bonino's Archaeologia e tradizione navale tra la Romagna e il Po of 1978. No documentary collections or chronicles appear in her bibliography. Casoni is hardly to be considered a reliable source today and Bonino's work is only peripheral to Venice. Martin finds in "Venetian documents of the fifth and sixth centuries" mentions of boats such as the campolo, cursorie, acazie, and liburniche. From the seventh century, the marciliane, varchette, pandora, and tarete. From the eighth, the sandon, scafa, cymba, and bucintoro, as well as the generic navis. She then proceeds to tabulate the frequency of mentions of the three types, lagoonal and river craft, seagoing warships, and seagoing merchantmen by century (Fig. 154). However, the oldest surviving Venetian private charter in the collection of Morozzo della Rocca and Lombardo is a quitclaim probably dated to 1021 and the oldest surviving Venetian chronicle was probably compiled around 1000 (although it used the eighth-century work of the Lombard Paul the Deacon). Where do all the citations from the fifth to seventh centuries come from? It would be interesting to know; however Martin provides no documentation. Her attempt to create a typology cannot be relied upon because of her own methodology.
Nor can it be for later centuries because the documentary collections and chronicles have not been consulted. Moreover, in the following section there is continuous confusion between what were indeed ship types, dromones, galee, chelandia, etc. and what were generic terms for ships used for certain purposes, especially as transports and horse transports: naves onerarie, ippagoghi, usserii, etc. A final slip occurs in Fig. 153, which is a line drawing of the famous illustration of a galley transporting the empress Constance to Sicily from the manuscript of the Liber ad honorem Augusti of Peter of Eboli. Martin calls it a "dromon or bireme galley," because that is what her source (Bragadin, Le repubbliche marinare [1974], 28) called it and he did so because he copied from R. C. Anderson, Oared fighting ships (1962), plate 7B. Of course it wasn't a dromon at all but rather a bireme galea of the new Western type, with both oars rowed from the same bench above deck, what became known as the a zenzile method, rather than in two levels as Martin claims (184).
This is a disappointing book, for its topic is very important and it is clear that Martin has put a great deal of effort over many years into it. Yet in the end there is little in it that can be accepted at face value. The construction of the book and its methodology have serious flaws. Martin's linguistic and palaeographical skills are inadequate. And her reliance on secondary sources leads her to conclusions that cannot be substantiated.