TREVISO, Diocese of. - The city of T. is the capital of the province of the same name (pop. 29,377); the diocese is a suffragan of the patriarchate of Venice, with 541,500 inhabitants, 2,193 sq km, 238 parishes of which, in the province of Venice, 37; of Padua, 19; of Vicenza, 2; it has 612 diocesan priests, 180 regulars, it has a major and minor Seminary, 27 male religious communities and 240 female (Ann. Pont. 1953, p. 430).
I. HISTORY
An Eno-Terramare settlement on the southern edge of the resurgences of the Brenta, Tarvisium had the paleo-ethnographic character and, probably, the name of the Illyrian tribe of the Taurisians. Military camps, inscriptions and coins assure us that it was a municipium of ius latinum (perhaps from 91 B.C.), ascribed to the Claudia tribe, enlarged at the fall of Altino.
The late and contaminated legend (12th century) of the "missio apostolica" of St. Peter, and of the "proto-episcopate of Padua" of St. Prosdocimus (titles respectively of the Cathedral and of an ancient adjoining chapel), cannot be accepted, since it does not appear that a bishopric in fact existed at T. earlier than the 4th century (Bishop John, 396), when it probably became necessary to confront, from the Aquileian metropolis, the Arian claim with more fragmented jurisdictions; to this indeed are also linked the Altinate traditions of the preaching and the cult of the bodies of St. Liberalis the confessor (d. 434) and of the itinerant Gothic martyrs, Theonistus bishop and Tabra and Tabrata deacons (d. 396), received as the principal patrons of the diocese.
The uncertain catalogue of the first bishops (lacunose from 541 to 564 and from 590 to 743) and the discordant disguises of later chronicles prevent a sufficient picture of diocesan religious life in the early Middle Ages, when T. was successively a trading post and stronghold of the Gothic comitatus (Cassiodorus, Procopius), the seat (with a mint) of a Lombard duchy (Paul the Deacon, Venantius Fortunatus) and a Frankish county of the March of Friuli (815), of Verona and of the Trevisan March (867).
The territorial upheavals of the neighboring bishoprics of occupied Padua (the bishop of T. from 605 to 743 also united that title) and of Altino and Oderzo destroyed by the Lombards (647; 671); the feudal investitures to bishops of German nationality and imperial faith (1047-1124), in opposition to simultaneous apostolic movements and to the detriment especially of the county (hereditary from its origins [958] in the Collalto family); and moreover the incorporated temporalities of the ancient (589-827) and ceased bishopric of Asolo (diploma of Otto I, 969), not only enlarged the boundaries of the bishop's spiritual jurisdiction (bull of Eugene III to Boniface, 1152), but raised his feudal power to the rank (not the title) of "dominus dux comes et marchio", with a vast defensive system and a considerable mass of allodial and feudal properties and fiscal rights, from which historically and juridically the present so-called parochial "quartesi" also derive their dominical nature (Statute of 1231). To this period likewise belong the most ancient vestiges and memories of the vanished small monasteries of Sts. Peter and Theonistus of Casier (777, Zenonian), of St. Fosca, of St. Paul of Lansago (898, Nonantolan); of the Cassinese rural abbeys of St. Mary of Mogliano (995), of St. Mary of the Pero of Monastier (1017), of St. Eustace of Nervesa (1062), of St. Euphemia of Villanova (1085); of the leprosaria of St. Peter and Vitus in Foro (991) and of St. James of the Schiral (11th century); of the first capitular Library (catalogue of 1135); of the most ancient parish churches.
The presence of only the lesser ecclesiastical feudality and of the forensic bourgeoisie in the most ancient testimonies of citizen participation in government; and, on the other hand, the almost universal origin of the rural Commune from the especially ecclesiastical practice of emphyteutic and judicial concessions to collectivities of the district (plebi, vicinis, etc.), do not allow us to establish with exactness the part undoubtedly played by the Church in the constitution and legal recognition of the first citizen Commune (beginning of the 12th century). Indirect, in any case, and not officially attested was the influence of the hierarchy on the orientations and ordinances of the already fully autonomous Commune, under a podestà regime (1176) and wholly intent on substituting its own jurisdiction for the various particular ones, especially those of the count and the bishop (Pusterla Statutes, 1193-94): thus, at least, to judge from the fact that in the most ancient statutory compilation (original codex 1207-18) no regulation of relations with the Church is to be found; from the grave financial crisis that, under Ambrose (1199-1207) and Tiso (1209-1245), the temporalities of the bishop passed through, gradually confiscated or colorably ceded to the Commune (1218) and reduced, from 322 fiefs in 1178, to 63 in 1189 and to 15 in 1209; and, finally, from a significant turning of the religious sentiment of the time toward extra-hierarchical forms and institutes and of greater spirituality, such as the new Mendicant Orders of the Dominicans and the Friars Minor, then invited and subsidized by the Commune (statute 1231) to build in the city the great churches and convents of St. Nicholas and St. Francis. The ambitious expansionist policy of the oligarchic and anti-corporatist Commune (statute 1231) and the struggles between the Caminesi and the Ezzelini for predominance in government and for lordship over the city and the district reduced the so-called "marca gioiosa", first into the hands of Ezzelino IV, the excommunicated imperial vicar (1237), then under the dark and ferocious tyranny of his dissident brother Alberico (1239-60), from which the Commune did not succeed in freeing itself except through the crusade proclaimed in Venice by the exiled bishop Albert (1257) and through the macabre popular justice of 24 Aug. 1260 at the castle of S. Zenone: occasions not least for the penitential movements (1262) from which later originated the school and hospital of St. Mary of the Battuti (statute 1299), and the lay order of the Cavalieri Gaudenti (1261); having until then exercised great spiritual influence throughout the region also the Minorite St. Anthony of Padua (Camposampiero, 1231), the Benedictine Bl. Jordan Frozatè (hostage of Ezzelino in S. Zenone, 1237-38), the Camaldolese St. Parisio of Bologna (d. at T. in 1267) and the Benedictine nun Bl. Giuliana da Collalto (d. at Venice in 1264). The dark and sumptuous Guelph lordship of "good Gherardo" da Camino in exchange for political independence (original statute 1284), gave the State splendid prosperity and also public religious observance, not always sincere (cf. G. Biscaro, La correità di Gherardo e Rizzardo da Camino nell'uccisione di Jacopo del Cassero, 1298, vesc. di Feltre, Venice 1915; id., Eretici e inquisitori nella Marca Trivigiana, 1280-1308, Turin 1921), and gave a fellow countryman to the pontificate: Bl. Benedict XI (Niccolò Boccasini, Dominican).
The diocese, then bounded by Tolberto Calza and as extensive as it is today, counted 35 monasteries and hospitals, 56 parish churches, 208 chapels (cf. Rationes decimarum Italiae, Venetiae [Studi e testi, 132], Vatican City 1941, 129, 1295). After the ferocious Rizzardo fell into the ignoble "ragna" (1312) — the sumptuous mausoleum of the Caminesi in S. Francesco was destroyed in 1612 — an unbloody revolution by Bishop Salomone Castellano (1310-22) saved the city from the betrayal of his brother Guccellone to Can Grande della Scala: T. then lived the brief existence of the restored Comune delle Arti (1315-18), proud of its incomparable Statuta, of a refined Universitas studiorum, of well-attended public Studia of philosophy, theology and law, at the Eremitani, the Conventuals and the Dominicans (1313-1797); and it witnessed the extraordinary death, the great amnesty and the popular cult that immediately sprang up over the thaumaturgic remains of the blessed woodcutter Enrico da Bolzano (10 Oct. 1315): to whom the city dedicated a carved ark in the Cathedral and Boccaccio a skeptical novella of the Decameron. During the successive dominations of Gorizia (1318-28), Scaliger (Can Grande died in the episcopal palace in 1329), Venetian (1338-81) and Austrian (1381-84), there occurred: the founding of the charterhouse of Montello (1340); the last episcopal election by the clergy (P. Paolo Dalla Costa, 1336); and the long and industrious episcopate of Fr. Dom. da Baone (1359-84), a familiar of Petrarch, witness of his death and author of a Vita b. Henrici, founder of a confraternity and boarding school of S. Liberale (1365) for the training of priests and notaries. Violent, rapacious and sacrilegious was the five-year Carrarese occupation that surrounded the aged Da Baone, seized his successor in Padua, Nic. Beruti (1386-94), and left to T. only noble Petrarchan offshoots and the remains of Francesco Petrarch buried in S. Francesco: where the sepulchral monument of Pietro di Dante, who also died here in 1364, is now likewise reassembled.
With the second dedication to Venice (1389), T. lost all political importance and, even from the religious point of view, felt, besides undeniable advantages (defense of orthodoxy and public morality), also the negative effects of Venetian jurisdictionalism: a humanistic and secular direction of the culture and life of the clergy; courtliness, nepotism and non-residence of the bishops, largely of Venetian origin and election; an ecclesiastical policy of interference and fiscalism (the "Provisori sopra monasteri e luoghi pii", 1449). The Libri visitationum (1429) and the Constitutiones Synodales of Giovanni Benedetti (1422), the memorable preaching of St. Bernardino of Siena (July 1423) and still more the spirit of the Cassinese reform, brought there by Lud. Barbo (1437-43), testify that in their pastors there was still a confidence of inspiring the Renaissance in a Christian manner, a Renaissance that had already officially entered T. with the twenty-two-year-old podestà Fr. Barbaro (1422) and had risen to the episcopate with his humanist nephew, Ermolao (1443-53). From then on, except for the interval of M. Barbo (1455-61), the non-residence of the bishops who followed was almost normal, especially of Zanetto da Udine (1477-86), who had himself portrayed by P. Lombardo in the stupendous cenotaph of the Cathedral (1481-83); of Nic. Franco (1486-99), founder of the confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament and of the Monte di Pietà (with the intervention of the blessed Bernardino Tomitano, 1496); of Bernardo De Rossi — pontifical prolegate at Bologna, military commander at Ravenna, governor of Rome, during the siege of Castel S. Angelo — whose too long absence (1511-26) the city Councils themselves lamented; and of the successor Cardinal Pisani, whose entry into his see had to be awaited for more than 10 years, while for another twelve they contented themselves with his suffragan nephew Giorgio Corner (1552-64): the last two episcopates memorable, more than anything else, for dissensions and idylls with the civil powers (cf. G. Biscaro, Il dissidio tra G. Contarini podestà e Bernardo De Rossi vesc. di T. e la congiura contro la vita del vescovo, Venice 1930); for vast and deplored demolitions, including of churches and convents, for splendor of arts, called to the service of worship; and for very severe disciplinary measures against the clergy, the nuns and heretical depravity.
The Reformation counted more proselytes in the Treviso area than elsewhere: the Augustinian fra Muses, promoter of the imposing anti-Lutheran Synod of 1526 (800 fathers), was in 1537 in turn accused and absolved of suspected heresy; Luther in 1542-43 was in epistolary correspondence with the "fratres deditissimi" of T.; and, between 1547 and 1576, some fifteen villages were found infected with Moravian anti-Trinitarian Anabaptism
(Paul III sent a special inquisitor there), with ministers and bishops trafficking also abroad, with lists of adherents, propaganda memorials, manuscripts of prayers in verse (Libro de oration dei puti dal tedesco in italian), with fanatical confessions and paradoxical and ridiculous abjurations (Processi del S. Uffizio: Arch. di Stato, Venice).
The Tridentine Restoration (anything but superfluous: cf. Processus et decreta of the apostolic visitor Cesare De Nores, 1584) had in T. an exceptional interpreter in Giorgio Corner (1564-67), a friend of Borromeo and — together with his uncle Francesco Pisani, dean of the Sacred College — a father signatory of the Council in the last session, which he himself closed with the Mass of the Holy Spirit (3 Dec. 1563); to whom are due, among other things, a classic First post-Tridentine Synod (1564); the Scuola della dottrina cristiana, with the first Libretti (= Catechisms); the Regole (reforms) of the female monasteries; and, above all, the Tridentine Seminary, opened in 1566 at the canons' houses of the Duomo. The interdict of Paul V against the Venetians of Sarpi (17 Apr. 1606) produced in T. neither apostates nor martyrs, since in general the force of the principle affirmed was not felt so much as the disputability of the political motive. Even the learned, pious and patrician bishop Fr. Giustiniani (1605-23), threatened with deposition by Rome and with reprisals by Venice, yielded to the pressure of intimidated relatives and abandoned the diocese to the mercy of the civil power; all the religious communities, except the Jesuits, the Capuchins, the Reformers and a few other isolated individuals — soon searched, deprived of their revenues, imprisoned or expelled — bowed to the Senate; the secular clergy was obliged to make a declaration of conformism that is still read in the registers of certain parishes; and the populations continued in good faith in the practices of worship; only later, on the withdrawal of the interdict, to rush all together to the penitentiaries to have the censures lifted.
Until the middle of the 18th century, when with the suppression of the patriarchate of Aquileia (bull of 6 July 1751 of Benedict XIV) the diocese passed to the ecclesiastical province the Church enjoyed freedom and protection from the State, including in the charge of the public schools (the only ones existing, before the Napoleonic reforms), entrusted to the Somaschi (grammar and rhetoric, 1624-1806) and to the Seminary (humanities and philosophy, 1668-1797); and, thanks also to the personality of the blessed Barbarigo and of the bishops Morosini, Zacco, De Luca and P. Giustiniani (1710-87), the last Venetian bishop, it remained almost completely immune from Jansenist influences. The municipalist meteor of 1796-97 inaugurated the series of secularizations and confiscations, later perfected, during the incipient episcopal government of Bernardino Marini (1788-1817), by Napoleon (1806) and by the Kingdom of Italy (1810). The Austrian Restoration (1813), having reserved for itself the right to appoint the bishop (1818-80) and having inflicted on the diocese a six-year vacancy because of the failed imperial candidacy of Jappelli, looked with favor on the solid administration of bishop G. Grasse (1822-29), kept a vain watch over Sebastiano Soldati (1829-49), was not alarmed by the pious baron G. A. Farina (1850-60) and did not find the hoped-for «instrumentum regni» in the «Austrophile and temporalist» theologian of the Basilica of St. Mark — relator of the Commission «de Fide» of the Vatican Council — Federico Zinelli (1861-79): bishops of the Risorgimento; the latter having succeeded, through doctrine and charity, in making even the local sectarianism forget the Austrian bayonets and the infernal machines among which he had entered the diocese; deserving, above all, of having given to the hierarchy, in the person of its most faithful interpreter and collaborator, canon Giuseppe Sarto, the blessed Pius X.
II. SANCTUARIES
S. M. Maggiore (Assunta): of very ancient origins; in 780 it was in the hands of the Nonantolans, then of the Canons Regular of St. Salvatore, now of the Somaschi, because St. Jerome Emiliani deposited there on Sept. 27, 1511 the shackles and the key of the fortress of Quero. Rebuilt in 1474, in Venetian Gothic style, it preserves an image of the Virgin (the third), restored by Tomaso da Modena (1352). It has been a basilica since 1917 and is the most frequented sanctuary of the diocese.
III. ILLUSTRIOUS FIGURES
Rambaido dei conti Azzoni Avogadro (b. Nov. 2, 1719, d. Sept. 23, 1790), munificent primicerius of the Cathedral, most erudite librarian of the Capitular Library, which he largely rebuilt, enlarged and endowed, author of 33 printed works, among them: Memorie del b. Enrico; Trattato della zecca e delle monete che ebbero corso in Trevigi; Considerazioni sopra le prime notizie di Trevigi; a monumental manuscript Raccolta of extracts from the Capitular Archive, in 20 vols.; and an original Carteggio with the most illustrious contemporaries, in 27 vols. (Capitular Library).
IV. ART
Above the modest architectural panorama of the city rises, unchallenged, the Gothic mass of St. Nicholas (88 x 27.50 x 33.35 m), standing out for the pronounced verticality of its brick-faced mass, lightly banded with stone. Begun by public decree, on a more modest design, in the middle of the 13th century, and continued slowly throughout the following century on the present model - perhaps with the assistance of Cardinal Niccolò Boccassino (1305), whose monument, the work of G. Comin, is in the presbytery - the construction remained unfinished in the height of the central nave until 1858. Like the contemporary churches of St. Francis and St. Margaret, and their cloisters, St. Nicholas was, for a long time, a temple of illustrious burials and a church for great occasions and crowded Dominican preachings.
The present fabric of the Cathedral results from elements welded together in different eras: the crypt of the ancient Romanesque cathedral with the urn of Sts. Florentius and Vendemmalis; the Renaissance reconstructions (chapel of the Immaculate Conception, by the Lombardi, 1481-88) with the cenotaph for Bishop Zanetto, by P. Lombardo, and for Alexander VIII, by the Bonazza; chapel of the Sacrament, by the Bregno, with the Lombardesque monument to Bishop Niccolò Franco (1501-1514); chapel of the Annunciation (1519-23) with the frescoes by Pordenone and the panel by Titian: munificences of the canon vicar Broc. Malchiostro, buried there; and the 18th-century body, adapted to the terminal chapels by G. Riccati, in replacement of the now dilapidated three Romanesque naves (the atrium is from 1836). The hagiographic frescoes (choir) are by Seitz; the apotheosis of Pius X (presbytery), by Biagetti.
The oldest pictorial testimony in T. is given by the Byzantine-Romanesque frescoes of the apse of St. Vitus (Christ and the Apostles, 12th century); but T. preserves the largest and most characteristic part of the work of Tommaso da Modena (1349-60): the frescoes of the churches of St. Francis, St. Mary Major, St. Lucy, St. Nicholas, St. Catherine, the former St. Margaret (Stories of St. Ursula, now in the Pinacoteca), and - stupendous for truth and variety of psychological studies and for expressive realism - the gallery of the Forty Illustrious Personages of the Dominican Order, in the former Chapter House of St. Nicholas (Seminary). In the adjoining monastery of St. Theonistus (Benedictine), there was until 1692 the enormous lunette (7.60 x 3.79) of the Marriage at Cana by P. Veronese (1580), which is now at Montecitorio; and from the same church the Calvary by J. Bassano has recently migrated to the Pinacoteca.
Considerable is the artistic heritage of the diocese: paintings and sculptures, even by the greatest masters; vestments, furnishings, and goldsmith work of the 13th-18th centuries (Treasury of the Cathedral).
The art of paper, imported from Fabriano, caused that of printing to flourish quite early in T., thanks also to the arrival of skilled foreign masters (Gerardo de Lisa, Flemish, 1460-86), who enriched the city libraries of the time (now the Capitular and the Municipal) with splendid editions, also woodcut and illuminated.
Glorious traditions are also boasted by the musical Chapel of the Cathedral, which arose in the middle of the 14th century and became famous, especially between 1500 and 1633, for its master composers, organists and singers (Gabrieli, Anerio), for polyphonic and orchestral performances, at home and abroad, and for the rich repertoire of unpublished codices and rare editions that were partly lost in the fire of the Capitular Library and Archive (bombardment of 7 April 1944). Between the Capitular and the Municipal Library are divided other precious collections of codices and parchments of the 10th-16th centuries; among them the most complete original series of ancient communal statutes of Italy (1207-1555). - See plate LI.
Bibliography24 works
Giuseppe Liberali.