The City-State Cardinal Gasparo Contarini ( - ) writes about the democratic government of his city-state in The Commonwealth and Government of Venice ( ). ‘…to come to the institution of our Venetian commonwealth, the whole authority of the city…is in that council, into which all the gentlemen of the City being once past the age of years are admitted... Now first I am to yield you a reckoning how and with what wisdom it was ordained by our ancestors, that the common people should not be admitted into this company of citizens, in whose authority [lies] the whole power of the commonwealth... Because many troubles and popular tumults arise in those cities, whose government is swayed by the common people… many were of contrary opinion, deeming that it would do well, if this manner of governing the commonwealth should rather be defined by ability and abundance of riches.
Contrariwise the honest citizens, and those that are liberally brought up, oftentimes fall to poverty... Therefore our wise and prudent ancestors... ordered that this definition of the public rule should go rather by the nobility of lineage, than by the estimation of wealth: yet with that temperature [proviso], that men of chief and supreme nobility should not have this rule alone (for that would rather have been the power of a few than a commonwealth) but also every other citizen whosoever not ignobly born: so that all which were noble by birth, or ennobled by virtue, did...obtain this right of government.’ G. Bellini’s ‘The Recovery of the Relic of the Holy Cross’ was painted in , to recall an event of , and is set in fifteenth-century Venice.