The entrance to the Arsenale, here painted by Canaletto in 1732, was built in 1460, the gate on the left a distinctly renaissance structure based on a Roman triumphal arch at Pola in Istria.
“The old arsenal…contained docks for about a dozen galleys and storerooms for armor, spars, benches, and many other fixings, as well as the shops for sail mending, oar making, and those in which Dante saw the boiling pitch he evoked [in Canto 21 of the Inferno].”
Ships and shipbuilders of the Arsenale.
(Click on images to enlarge)
THE ARSENALE
The term Arsenale derives from the Arabic “darsina’a,” a place of industry, and its adoption in Venice directly
reflects her intimate links with the Muslim world.
“The Venetian Arsenale was one of the wonders of the medieval world, a vast, sprawling industrial complex, greater than any other in Europe. It was the key to the power and prosperity of the Most Serene Republic, source of its naval supremacy and its trading preeminence.”
On Jacopo di Barbari’s 1500 map the arsenal occupies nearly a fifth of the city’s real estate (on the right side, the “tail” of the “fish”). (Click on map to zoom in.)
The biggest of Venice’s medieval industries, shipbuilding and ship repair, had always been located east of St. Mark’s, in the Castello district, closest to Lido and the deep water channels to the Adriatic Sea.
“The Arsenale grew by a series of stages to become the largest single industrial complex in the west, at its peak employing several thousand highly-trained men...”
Galley production at the Arsenale
“…the colonial empire which the Venetians obtained from the Fourth Crusade (1204), combined with their privileged position in the trade and government of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, and the firm hold on Dalmatia which [Doge] Enrico Dandolo had obtained…gave the Venetians undisputed maritime pre-eminence in the Eastern Mediterranean.”
The walled arsenale
originally built in 1104 was primarily used for storing ships and armaments. It more than doubled in size between 1303 and 1325 to provide shipways and sheds for building and outfitting galleys. At its height, the Arsenale was capable of producing a complete great galley a day using a production line in which the ship moved from station to station, a technique later used by Henry Ford.
…within the daunting
confines of its great three-mile-long perimeter walls…it became as much a symbol of the Republic as [St. Mark’s Square], and none in the Doge’s Palace ever doubted its key role in keeping the peppers and silks flowing into the city, and the [Venetian] gold ducat circulating from London to Baghdad.
Richard Goy, Venice | the city and its architecture