From celebrated gardens in private villas to the paintings and sculptures that adorned palace interiors, Venetians in the sixteenth century conceived of their marine city as dotted with actual and ...imaginary green spaces. This volume examines how and why this pastoral vision of Venice developed.
Drawing on a variety of primary sources ranging from visual art to literary texts, performances, and urban plans, Jodi Cranston shows how Venetians lived the pastoral in urban Venice. She describes how they created green spaces and enacted pastoral situations through poetic conversations and theatrical performances in lagoon gardens; discusses the island utopias found, invented, and mapped in distant seas; and explores the visual art that facilitated the experience of inhabiting verdant landscapes. Though the greening of Venice was relatively short lived, Cranston shows how the phenomenon had a lasting impact on how other cities, including Paris and London, developed their self-images and how later writers and artists understood and adapted the pastoral mode.
Incorporating approaches from eco-criticism and anthropology, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice greatly informs our understanding of the origins and development of the pastoral in art history and literature as well as the culture of sixteenth-century Venice. It will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of sixteenth-century history and culture, the history of urban landscapes, and Italian art.
Against the backdrop of England's emergence as a major economic power, the development of early modern capitalism in general and the transformation of the Mediterranean, Maria Fusaro presents a new ...perspective on the onset of Venetian decline. Examining the significant commercial relationship between these two European empires during the period 1450–1700, Fusaro demonstrates how Venice's social, political and economic circumstances shaped the English mercantile community in unique ways. By focusing on the commercial interaction between Venice and England, she also re-establishes the analysis of the maritime political economy as an essential constituent of the Venetian state political economy. This challenging interpretation of some classic issues of early modern history will be of profound interest to economic, social and legal historians and provides a stimulating addition to current debates in imperial history, especially on the economic relationship between different empires and the socio-economic interaction between 'rulers and ruled'.
Historian Eric R Dursteler reconsiders identity in the early modern world to illuminate Veneto-Ottoman cultural interaction and coexistence, challenging the model of hostile relations and suggesting ...instead a more complex understanding of the intersection of cultures. Although dissonance and strife were certainly part of this relationship, he argues, coexistence and cooperation were more common.Moving beyond the "clash of civilizations" model that surveys the relationship between Islam and Christianity from a geopolitical perch, Dursteler analyzes the lived reality by focusing on a localized microcosm: the Venetian merchant and diplomatic community in Muslim Constantinople.While factors such as religion, culture, and political status could be integral elements in constructions of self and community, Dursteler finds early modern identity to be more than the sum total of its constitutent parts and reveals how the fluidity and malleability of identity in this time and place made coexistence among disparate cultures possible.
It is the first monograph in which the concertos of all composers active in this field in the Republic of Venice in the years 1695–1740 are methodically discussed. The Venetian instrumental concerto ...from Vivaldi’s time is portrayed here through an extensive and thorough survey of the most complete and representative musical material that allowed for the making of conclusions as to its typology, form, style and technique. The concertos discussed here include 974 works by fifteen composers active in Venice, Brescia, Bergamo and Padua. Such an approach not only gives an exhaustive but also a more objective view on the history of the Baroque concerto in its Venetian variant. It shows Vivaldi’s work in a new and broad context, which allows us to better understand its unique character.
Mining private writings and humanist texts, Erin Maglaque explores the lives and careers of two Venetian noblemen, Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo, who were appointed as colonial administrators and ...governors. InVenice's Intimate Empire, she uses these two men and their families to showcase the relationship between humanism, empire, and family in the Venetian Mediterranean.
Maglaque elaborates an intellectual history of Venice's Mediterranean empire by examining how Venetian humanist education related to the task of governing. Taking that relationship as her cue, Maglaque unearths an intimate view of the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. In their writings, it was the affective relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, humanist teachers and their students that were the crucible for self-definition and political decision making.Venice's Intimate Empirethus illuminates the experience of imperial governance by drawing connections between humanist education and family affairs. From marriage and reproduction to childhood and adolescence, we see how intimate life was central to the Bembo and Coppo families' experience of empire. Maglaque skillfully argues that it was within the intimate family that Venetians' relationships to empire-its politics, its shifting social structures, its metropolitan and colonial cultures-were determined.
Considered the first specimen of a theoretical literature on Jewish political economy, the Discourse is much more. Initially conceived as an apology for the Jewish community of Venice, it is actually ...replete with sceptical ideas.This volume will essentially aim at refreshing the approach to this work by highlighting and analysing its sceptical background and implications, especially as far as it involves the realm of politics and fashions a sceptical political appraisal of the Jewish people.
The establishment of permanent embassies in fifteenth-century Italy has traditionally been regarded as the moment of transition between medieval and modern diplomacy. InThe Refugee-Diplomat, Diego ...Pirillo offers an alternative history of early modern diplomacy, centered not on states and their official representatives but around the figure of "the refugee-diplomat" and, more specifically, Italian religious dissidents who forged ties with English and northern European Protestants in the hope of inspiring an Italian Reformation.
Pirillo reconsiders how diplomacy worked, not only within but also outside of formal state channels, through underground networks of individuals who were able to move across confessional and linguistic borders, often adapting their own identities to the changing political conditions they encountered. Through a trove of diplomatic and mercantile letters, inquisitorial records, literary texts, marginalia, and visual material,The Refugee-Diplomatrecovers the agency of religious refugees in international affairs, revealing their profound impact on the emergence of early modern diplomatic culture and practice.
Throughout history, marriage has been used as a method of creating and strengthening bonds between elites and the societies over which they ruled. Nowhere is this more apparent than in early modern ...Venice, where members of the patriciate looked to marital alliances with outsider brides to help maintain their position and social distinction in a fluid society. This book explores the parameters of upward social mobility, contemporary evaluations of social status and moral behaviour, and the place of marriage and concubinage within patrician society. Drawing heavily on the records of the Avogaria di Comun, which had the task of examining the social backgrounds and moral reputations of women from outside the patriciate who wished to marry patricians, this study provides a fascinating reconstruction of Venetian society as it was seen by individuals at every level.
While Le Corbusier's urban projects are generally considered confrontational in their relationship to the traditional urban fabric, his proposal for the Venice hospital project remained an exercise ...in preserving the medieval fabric of the city of Venice through a systemic replication of its urban tissue. This book offers a detailed study of Le Corbusier's Venice hospital project as a plausible built entity. In addition, it analyses it in the light of its supposed affinity with the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. No formal attempt to date has been made to critically analyse the hospital project's design considerations in comparison to the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. Using a range of methodologies including those from architectural theory and history, using archival resources, on-site analysis, and interviews with important resource persons, this book is an interpretation of the conceptual basis for Le Corbusier understanding of the structural formulation of the city of Venice as mentioned in The Radiant City (1935). In doing so, it deciphers the diagrammatic analysis of the city structure found in this work into a set of coherent design modules that were applied in the hospital project and that could become a point of further investigation. Architects and other architecturally interested laypeople with an interest in Venice will find the book a valuable addition to their knowledge. For architectural historians the book makes an important link between modernism and the historically grown Venice.
Dr Mahnaz Shah is a Lecturer in Design Theory at the Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Contents: Foreword, Robert Maxwell; Foreword, Tim Benton; Introduction; History of the project; The urban context; Analysis of the project; Important findings; Table of important events; Bibliography; Index.
