Venice incognito Johnson, James H
2011., 20110402, 2011, c2011., 2011-03-02
eBook
"The entire town is disguised," declared a French tourist of eighteenth-century Venice. And, indeed, maskers of all ranks--nobles, clergy, imposters, seducers, con men--could be found mixing at every ...level of Venetian society. Even a pious nun donned a mask and male attire for her liaison with the libertine Casanova. In Venice Incognito, James H. Johnson offers a spirited analysis of masking in this carnival-loving city. He draws on a wealth of material to explore the world view of maskers, both during and outside of carnival, and reconstructs their logic: covering the face in public was a uniquely Venetian response to one of the most rigid class hierarchies in European history. This vivid account goes beyond common views that masking was about forgetting the past and minding the muse of pleasure to offer fresh insight into the historical construction of identity.
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.
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.
By the second decade of the fifteenth century Venice had established an empire in Italy extending from its lagoon base to the lakes, mountains, and valleys of the northwestern part of the peninsula. ...The wealthiest and most populous part of this empire was the city of Brescia which, together with its surrounding territory, lay in a key frontier zone between the politically powerful Milanese and the economically important Germans. Venetian governance there involved political compromise and some sensitivity to local concerns, and Brescians forged their distinctive civic identity alongside a strong Venetian cultural presence.Based on archival, artistic, and architectural evidence, Stephen Bowd presents an innovative microhistory of a fascinating, yet historically neglected city. He shows how Brescian loyalty to Venice was repeatedly tested by a succession of disasters: assault by Milanese forces, economic downturn, demographic collapse, and occupation by French and Spanish armies intent on dismembering the Venetian empire. In spite of all these troubles the city experienced a cultural revival and a dramatic political transformation under Venetian rule, which Bowd describes and uses to illuminate the process of state formation in one of the most powerful regions of Renaissance Italy.
Men of Empire O'Connell, Monique
2009, 2009-04-27, Volume:
127
eBook
The city-state of Venice, with a population of less than 100,000, dominated a fragmented and fragile empire at the boundary between East and West, between Latin Christian, Greek Orthodox, and Muslim ...worlds. In this institutional and administrative history, Monique O’Connell explains the structures, processes, practices, and laws by which Venice maintained its vast overseas holdings.
The legal, linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity within Venice’s empire made it difficult to impose any centralization or unity among its disparate territories. O’Connell has mined the vast archival resources to explain how Venice’s central government was able to administer and govern its extensive empire.
O’Connell finds that successful governance depended heavily on the experience of governors, an interlocking network of noble families, who were sent overseas to negotiate the often conflicting demands of Venice’s governing council and the local populations. In this nexus of state power and personal influence, these imperial administrators played a crucial role in representing the state as a hegemonic power; creating patronage and family connections between Venetian patricians and their subjects; and using the judicial system to negotiate a balance between local and imperial interests.
In explaining the institutions and individuals that permitted this type of negotiation, O’Connell offers a historical example of an early modern empire at the height of imperial expansion.
Dana E. Katz examines the Jewish ghetto of Venice as a paradox of urban space. In 1516, the Senate established the ghetto on the periphery of the city and legislated nocturnal curfews to reduce the ...Jews' visibility in Venice. Katz argues that it was precisely this practice of marginalization that put the ghetto on display for Christian and Jewish eyes. According to her research, early modern Venetians grounded their conceptions of the ghetto in discourses of sight. Katz's unique approach demonstrates how Venice's Jewish ghetto engaged the sensory imagination of its inhabitants in complex and contradictory ways that both shaped urban space and reshaped Christian-Jewish relations.
Originally published in 1987. Since Machiavelli, historians and political theorists have sought the sources of the stability that earned for Venice the appellation La Serenissima, the Most Serene ...Republic. In Patricians and Popolani, Dennis Romano looks to the private lives of early Renaissance Venetians for an explanation. Fourteenth-century Venice escaped the tumultuous upheavals of the other Italian city-republics, Romano contends, because the patricians and common people of the city did not divide sharply along class or factional lines in their personal associations. Rather, Venetians of the era moved in a variety of intersecting social networks that were shaped and influenced by an overriding sense of civic community. Drawing on the private archives of Venice—notarial registers, collections of testaments, and records of estates maintained by the procurators of San Marco—Romano analyzes the primary social bonds in the lives of the city's inhabitants. In separate chapters, Patricians and Popolani examines the forms of association in everyday Venetian life: marriage and family structure; artisan workshops and relations among tradesmen; the role of the parish clergy and the "sacred networks" that formed around convents, hospitals, and confraternities; and neighborhood and patron–client ties. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Romano argues, all these networks of association had been transformed as a new hierarchical spirit took hold and overwhelmed the older, more freewheeling tendencies of Venetian society. The old sense of community yielded to a new and equally compelling sense of place, and La Serenissima remained stable throughout the later Renaissance.
Paolo Sarpi Kainulainen, Jaska
2014, Volume:
180
eBook
This book is an intellectual biography of the Venetian historian and theologian Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623). It analyses Sarpi's natural philosophy, religious ideas and political thought and argues that ...he was a Christian mortalist and a champion of absolutism.
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.
