‘Mappy’ Imageries of the Watery City: The cartographic figure of the Venice Lagoon across epochs and media

Abstract

Adopting a cultural approach to cartographic repertoires, this carto-essay highlights the immense visual heritage of the Venetian Lagoon in order to extrapolate a series of ‘mappy’ images that have given shape to the cartographic figure of the city on water. In light of the current convergence of visual culture and cartography, and by adopting visual juxtapositions, the article evokes different cartographic variations of the watery city: from the city sitting on the sea to the city sitting on the lagoon, from the port city to the archipelago, from the maritime city to the (wet) landscape city par excellence. This contribution thus proposes a journey across a range of Venetian cartographic imageries, which include different media and epochs, as well as different genres and registers, from the majestic to the banal, and from the dramatic to the ironic, thus also moving across the different cartographic moods associated with the watery city. As Juergen Schulz used to say during the 1970s while he was investigating modern-age Venetian cartography, the map is not always a map: in past times, the map was often a vehicle for nongeographical ideas. Even today, maps are ideas, they are ways of knowing, thinking and acting, they hold cultural meaning and political messages, but also hopeful imaginings. Indeed, cartographic representations of and rhetoric about the Venetian Lagoon are carried out by different actors, thus contributing to a process of continuous re-figuration and de/re-centralisation of the lagoonal space.