Viewing the World: Women, Religion, and the Audience for Maps in Early Modern Venice

Abstract

Marietta Morosini’s home contained seven maps among her collection of over fifty images. Elisabette Condulmer displayed a map of the world next to images of the Madonna and Mary Magdalene. Cornelia Bellon also paired her map of Italy with religious images. These women lived in sixteenth-century Venice, the center of the cartographic world. This article assesses women as an audience for cartographic and geographic works by placing maps into their early modern context: the home. As this article will show, living with maps in early modern Venice often meant reading them through a religious lens.