Giacomo Chiodo

Giacomo Chiodo , also Iacopo Chiodo (born November 11, 1759 in Venice , † January 12, 1842 ) was an Italian archivist . From 1817 to 1840 he was the first director of the Venice State Archives, which he initiated .

Origin, entry into the Jesuit order

In Venice, Chiodo was called Iacopo , while he himself preferred the form Giacomo . Iacopo was born into a family that had lived in Venice since the 17th century and was one of the Veneti cittadini originarij , as Girolamo Dandolo reported in his caduta della repubblica di Venezia ed i suoi ultimi cinquant 'anni of 1855. Accordingly, he began studying with a priest as a child and later joined the Jesuit order. It helped him that his family had good contacts to important families such as the "Zen, da Riva, Memmo, Bragadin".

Magistrate for the compilation of laws (1779–1797), archivist (from 1788)

In 1779, at the age of just 20, Chiodo joined the magistrato della compilazione delle leggi under the direction of Cesare Conti, the body that was responsible for summarizing the laws that were still in force and the associated archives. From 1788 archivist, he first worked for the archive manager Carlo Antonio Marin in the Scuola di San Teodoro, where he also saw the end of the Republic of Venice in 1797.

French rule, return to Venice (1798), legal archive

Chiodo, who disagreed with the political upheavals that Napoleon's rule brought about in the city, and he retired to the Villa di Sabbionera sul Piave. It was not until January 1798 that it appeared again in Venice for the first time.

The French restituted his property and he was appointed Coordinatore degli Atti Veneti legislativi . He decided to organize, collect and annotate the archive material. This is how the Archivio della collezione delle leggi came into being , an archive for the collection of legal texts.

In 1803 Chiodo was commissioned to compile a “collezione per materie di tutte le leggi, decreti, terminazioni disciplinari e di massima della cessata repubblica”, which meant that he should order and list all laws, decrees and implementing provisions. Even if Paris and Vienna confirmed this order in 1804 and 1805, it did not lead to results until much later. Since Napoleon had numerous ecclesiastical institutions dissolved, their archives were transferred to new buildings that were acquired.

Central archive plan

When Venice became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1806 , Chiodo was promoted to Coadjutore al Veneto Archivio .

During the time of Napoleon , who occupied Venice in 1797, the Venetian archives were distributed over three locations, provided that they were not taken to Paris and later to Vienna on Napoleon's orders. The state holdings from the period up to 1797 had been in the Doge's Palace , in the procuraties or in the institutions on the Rialto Bridge , which were mainly concerned with trade and financial issues. The files of the political organs were meanwhile in the Scuola grande di S. Teodoro . Finally, the court files were in San Zanipolo , while the economic files , especially those of the financial authorities, were in a palazzo near San Provolo . The notarial files were initially at Rialto , but have been relocated several times.

Chiodo tried to push ahead with the establishment of a central archive during the change between French and Austrian rule. Both Vienna and Paris agreed to this plan, but it was a long time before it came about. On April 20, 1815 died Chiodos boss and friend Carlo Antonio Marin, known as the author of an eight-volume Storia Civile e politica del commercio de 'veniziani , which was published from 1798 to 1808. Marin was just as enthusiastic about the idea of ​​a central archive as Chiodo. He became Marin's successor in Venice, which had been occupied by Austrians again since 1814.

Establishment of the State Archives under the Austrians (1817)

After the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Venice finally returned to Austria, and in the same year the final decision was made to set up an archive that came close to Chiodo's ideas. The archival material should simply be transferred to the Austrian archive, but Chiodo managed to prevent this. Accordingly, the new archive was created separately from the Austrian administration from 1817 under the name Archivio generale veneto . Its first director was Chiodo himself, who instead of the title archivista received that of a direttore . At the same time, his annual salary was increased from 1200 to 1500 Fiorini. He later received various awards and the title of Imperial Council (plus another 300 Fiorini).

At first he was faced with the daunting task of transferring the republic's archives in an orderly and secure manner to the new location he had chosen himself on imperial orders in the Franciscan Church in the San Polo sestiere . Between 1817 and 1822, the state files from the time of the Republic of Venice were moved there, starting with the holdings from San Teodoro. In addition, there were other holdings, because between 1797 and 1866 there were French and Austrian authorities in the city, whose holdings were now also transferred to the State Archives. Chiodo designed an order system based on factual aspects.

These archival materials were by no means freely accessible. In 1825, Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna and in 1829 Leopold von Ranke had to ask the Kaiser in Vienna for permission. At the same time, documents and entire holdings continued to migrate to Vienna or Milan , which also belonged to Austria. As early as 1805, a full 44 boxes were initially carried across the Alps and then brought to Milan in 1815. They were only brought back to Venice in 1837 and 1842 after complicated negotiations. The diplomatic dispute over stocks continued for a long time. Due to these political conditions, Gottlieb Lukas Friedrich Tafel and Georg Martin Thomas published the documents on the earlier commercial and state history of the Republic of Venice in 1856 in the Fontes rerum Austriacarum series , in which final Venetian publications from the 17th century were also edited.

literature

• Manuela Preto Martini: Una vita per la memoria della Repubblica: Giacomo Chiodo, archivista e direttore dell'Archivio dei Frari a Venezia (1797-1840) , in: Il diritto della regione. Il nuovo cittadino, 1-2 (January to April 2010) 233-290.
• Luigi Ferro: Jacopo Chiodo fondatore del L'Archivio di Stato di Venezia , in: Ad Alessandro Luzio gli Archivi di Stato italiani. Miscellanea di studi storici , Vol. I, Rome 1933, pp. 363-369.
• Girolamo Dandolo : La caduta della repubblica di Venezia ed i suoi ultimi cinquant 'anni , P. Naratovich, 1855, pp. 363-368.

Remarks

1. ↑ Neuer Anzeiger für Bibliographie und Bibliothekwissenschaft, 7 (1858), p. 142.
2. ↑ Girolamo Dandolo: La caduta della repubblica di Venezia ed i suoi ultimi cinquant 'anni , P. Naratovich, 1855, p. 363. Here Guy Dumas is mistaken in his Échos de la chute de la République de la République de Venise dans la littérature popular , Bretonne, 1961, p. 297, who considers Chiodo to be a Veronese.
3. ↑ Girolamo Dandolo: La caduta della repubblica di Venezia ed i suoi ultimi cinquant 'anni , P. Naratovich, 1855, p. 367.
4. ↑ Atti dell'Ateneo Veneto , Series seconda, Vol. III, Venice 1866, pp. 105-108.