Giustina Renier Michiel was an aristocratic woman who helped intellectual and social Venetian life flourish.
Background
She was born on 14 October 1755 to Andrea Renier, later Doge and son of Paolo Renier (penultimate doge), and Cecilia Manin, sister of Ludovico, the last doge, in Venice. They followed her father to Rome, not long after, where he had been named the Venetian ambassador to Pope Pius VI.
Career
She learned English, French, Music, Art, Mathematics and Natural History when she was sent to a convent of Capuchin nuns at Treviso at the age of three. She was brought back to Venice at the age of nine and placed in a fashionable boarding school kept by a Frenchwoman. She was considered a bookworm and a woman with an independent mind.
There was a particularly Venetian character to her salon and it was frequented by well-known literary figures such as Ippolito Pindemonte, Marina Querini Benzon, Ugo Foscolo, Giustiniana Wynne (Countess Rosenberg), the French Madame de Staël and the English Lord Byron.
She built connections between people, introducing scholars to one another, and promoted socializing and intellectual conversation. Her salon was not all about intense intellect.
lieutenant had a good stream of recreational pleasure. Vittorio Malamani had said that her guests often arrived after midnight once the theater finished in order to discuss the works that they had just seen and to play “society games.” When Napoleon invaded Venice, she closed her salon and pursued the study of botany and the publishing of her Shakespeare translations for the next ten years.
She translated Othello and Macbeth in 1798 and Coriolanus in 1800 from English to Italian.
She eventually reopened her salon and held it thus till her death. She was a patroness of Canova and a correspondent with Chateaubriand. In her later years she had to wear an ear trumpet for she became deaf.
Views
This collection of Venetian traditions was one way in which she tried defending Venice and its history.