Venetian Culture Research Articles

The Palazzo Foscarini in Venice and the Celebration Honoring the Dukes of Modena (1749) in a Getty Research Institute Manuscript

The Palazzo Foscarini in Venice and the Celebration Honoring the Dukes of Modena (1749) in a Getty Research Institute Manuscript

PRINTING EMPIRE: VISUAL CULTURE AND THE IMPERIAL ARCHIVE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY VENICE

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the relationship between imperial expansion and popular visual culture in late seventeenth-century Venice. It addresses the impact of the military on the marketplace of print and examines the cultural importance of commercial printmaking to the visualization of colonial motifs during the 1684–99 war with the Ottoman Empire. Through a broad array of single-sheet engravings and illustrated books encompassing different visual typologies (e.g. maps, siege views, battle scenes, portraits of Venetian patricians, and representations of the Ottomans), the article re-examines key questions about the imperial dimensions of Venetian print culture and book history. In particular, it shows how warfare and colonial politics militarized the communication media, and highlights the manner in which prints engaged metropolitan viewers in the Republic's expansionist ventures. In so doing, the analysis demonstrates how the printing industry brought the visual spectacle of empire onto the centre stage of Venetian cultural life.

“Sons of the Truth, Lovers of Virtue”: Painting the Patrician in Renaissance Venice

Venetian patrician portraits of the late fifteenth century document deeply ingrained expectations of that class. Largely static and impassive, the subjects of independent portraits appear as slight variations on a theme, rather than as studies of individuals. In contrast, Titian's (Tiziano Vecellio, ca. 1488–1576) early portraits seem to represent a significant departure from tradition and reveal the artist's commitment to portraying personality, as well as physiognomy. In this article, I suggest that Titian's success was due in part to his knowledge of and sensitivity to the social constraints of late fifteenth-century Venetian culture. In turn, this allowed him to consciously accommodate traditional expectations of his patrician clientele while incrementally introducing the modern portrait.

The Modern Reconception of the Early Modern Venetian Adriatic

For Fernand Braudel, the early modern adriatic appeared, as it did on Venetian maps, as the Golfo di Venezia. Venice, ruling also over the Dalmatian coast and the Ionian Islands, controlled shipping on the Adriatic and made the Adriatic into the Venetian basis for commercial activity all over the eastern Mediterranean. Braudel also credited to Venice the establishment of an Italian cultural sphere of influence around the Adriatic: “The gulf was Venetian, of course, but in the sixteenth century it was more than this; it was the sphere of a triumphant Italian culture. The civilization of the peninsula wove a brilliant, concentrated web along the east coast of the sea.” Braudel, carrying out his research in the 1930s and publishing in 1949, might have been well aware that the Italian trans-Adriatic presence, even when triumphant—as in the case of Mussolini's occupation of Dalmatia—might not be something to celebrate as brilliant. Furthermore, reconsidering the early modern Adriatic, one might today wonder whether the term “Italian”—with its modern national meaning—should be used with caution in describing early modern cultural influence. Indeed, one might simply suggest that Venetian power on the Adriatic was the vehicle of Venetian culture—not Italian culture—on the Adriatic, an early modern imperial rather than a modern national idiom, and present even at Ragusa, which was independent of Venice.

A calendar of Venetian opera

Eleanor Selfridge-Field has been a major contributor to research on music in 17th- and 18th-century Venice for over 30 years. Readers may be familiar with her Venetian instrumental music from Gabrieli to Vivaldi (Oxford, 1975), based on her doctoral dissertation, or her thematic catalogue of The music of Benedetto and Alessandro Marcello (Oxford, 1990). Her less well known ‘Pallade Veneta’: writings on Venetian music in society, 1650–1750 (Venice, 1985), a collection of edited extracts from a Venetian journal of the period, bore witness to her interest in Venetian culture and history in general. Her achievements are now crowned by the publication of A new chronology of Venetian opera…1660–1760, an encyclopaedic volume of 778 larger-than-A4 pages. Opera in Venice has been chronicled or catalogued many times before—by Ivanovich (1681, revised 1687), Bonlini (1730, with printed and manuscript additions to 1742), Groppo (1745, with Ms. addenda to 1767), Allacci (1755; first...

A dialogue on spying in 17th-century Venice1

This article is a dialogue on the role of spies in 17th-century Venetian culture. It discusses topics such as the circulation of information through different channels and media, legal notions of proof in relation to the evidence provided by spies, and the cultural meanings of secrecy.

The Theatre of Angelo Beolco (Ruzante): Text, Context and Performance by Ronnie Ferguson (review)

MLRy 100.4, 2005 1127 describe its style as anything other than stodgy. Sometimes, indeed, a good deal of pudding needs to be dug through in search of the plums. But the plums are there; and, in the absence of any serious rival to this erudite and comprehensive study as an English-language introduction to Cecco Angiolieri's work, they should be savoured. University of California, Berkeley Steven Botterill The Theatre ofAngelo Beolco (Ruzante): Text, Context and Performance. By Ronnie Ferguson. Ravenna: Longo. 2000. 253 pp. ?25.82. ISBN 88-8063-259-0. More than any other anglophone critic, Ronnie Ferguson has helped correct Richard Andrews's trenchant 1993 observation (in his Scripts andScenarios: The Performance ofComedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 143) that Ruzante has been the 'great unapproachable' of Italian Renaissance playwrights be? cause of the obscurity (for modern readers) of the Paduan dialect in which he chiefly wrote and the performance-oriented nature of the scripts written by this consummate man of the theatre. Ferguson's study is meticulously researched (the fruitof his long engagement with Ruzante), elegantly organized, sensibly reasoned, and beautifully written. It should do much to help English readers both with and without Italian indeed draw nearer to this great early sixteenth-century figure. The initial chapter provides a wealth of information regarding the fourteen-work corpus?extant manuscripts, original titles, genre affiliations, plot summaries, first and modern editions, English translations, critical bibliography?that makes the book immediately useful even before one reads it in its entirety. From this close, material look at Ruzante's corpus the book proceeds to the contemporary and subsequent reception of the playwright (an important issue since he was both popular and con? troversial); an examination of Ruzante's life and his all-important relationship to his patron, Alvise Cornaro (especially revealing to the critical interpretation of his plays, although Ferguson sensibly desists from undue psychologizing); a trenchant analysis of the complex workings of genre and dialect in the plays (about which the author is particularly eloquent); a discussion of staging and stagecraft that provides theatrical ballast for the preceding literary discussion; and a final thematic chapter that discusses Ruzante's 'ethics of the natural', convincingly linking him to Paduan Aristotelianism and ending with a moving evocation of Ruzante's cyclical, materially based understanding ofnature and 'eternity'. The six-chapter structure of Ferguson's book therefore appropriately matches its matter, forthe ideas and themes of Ruzante never emerge but from a material basis (most notably, for Ferguson, from Ruzante's deep attachment to the Paduan countryside, comparable to Rabelais's homage to the Touraine and, it might be added, Shakespeare's to Warwickshire?does any other Renaissance playwright mention more birds than Ruzante or Shakespeare?). Ferguson's book coherently establishes the many contextual factors that made the Ruzante phenomenon possible. It was the very moment, he explains, when elite Paduan and Venetian culture (the university, young Venetian patrician males who made up the various Compagnie della Calza, aristocratic patrons such as Cornaro) displayed a persistent interest in popular forms such as the villanesca, buffonesca,and bulesca (the urban 'bravo', or 'bully-boy' play). That Ruzante had exposure to so many differentcultural worlds?philosophical, Venetian patrician, Paduan elite, the rural wealthy, the rural destitute?does much to explain the extraordinary range and power of his work. Ferguson's Ruzante is a relentless explorer of new literary and theatrical forms: he infused popular formswith social and political animism (not in his plays are we comforted with the stereotypical yokel of traditional villanesca); the tragic demographic encounter of country and city in II parlamento, Bilora, and La moscheta ii 28 Reviews is formally shaped by the melding of the country villanesca and the urban bulesca and animated by the theatrical energies of buffonesca;the 'commedia regolare' stage of Ruzante's career (1532-35) displays the wide-ranging contaminatio oiseveral New Comedic sources as well as a felicitous melding ofpopular and elite formsand energies. A progressive, but complex and non-linear, narrative of Ruzante's dramatic 'are', illuminated by a brilliant account of why certain dialectal alignments predominated in the roughly five stages of his dramatic corpus, gives us a...

The Venetian Images by Bellini and Carpaccio: Job as Intercessor or Prophet?

The role held by Job in fifteenth-century Venetian culture will be evaluated through the study of three High Renaissance paintings. The master artists Giovanni Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio each painted Job in a unique, visual manner. The analysis of the formal compositional characteristics, the iconographic elements and the historical context of the San Giobbe altarpiece and the Sacred Allegory by Giovanni Bellini and the Meditation on the Passion by Vittore Carpaccio compose a visual alternative for understanding Job. The issues of patronage, compositional artistic sources, and contemporary theological sources will be identified. Their direct relevance to these paintings contributes to the full understanding of how and why some of the artist's decisions were made for each commission. The specific Joban iconography is presented and interpreted as it relates to these three works of art. Bellini and Carpaccio are contemporaries who live, worship, and compete for work in the same city. They interpret the role that Job plays for the contemporary viewer/worshipper in different ways. The question of Job as an intercessor or prophet becomes essential in ascertaining their significance then and now to both the student of art and religion.

Two allegories by Lorenzo Lotto and Petrarchism in Venice around 1500

Abstract In 1481 the Landino edition of Dante's Divine Comedy was published in Florence. It is significant that it did not appear in Venice until ten years later. Dante did not become as dominant a figure in Venetian culture as Petrarch. As opposed to the speculative but rigid Florentine attitude towards certain philosophical schools and doctrines, the most prominent of which being the Neoplatonic circle around Ficino, Venetian culture and science at the close of the fifteenth century were characterized by a readiness to embrace and absorb a variety of traditions and forms ofknowledge. Venetian culture and taste were wide ranging; and this is best illustrated by the remarkable men who gathered at the Academy around Ermolao Barbaro.1

THE VENETIAN ‘FIGLIE DEL CORO’: THEIR ENVIRONMENT AND ACHIEVEMENT

THE DEVELOPMENT of women's choirs in Venice during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries forms part of the general welfare activities of the city's social institutions. Religious principles and expediency were the motivating forces that produced a unique phenomenon midway between the splendour of opera and the spirituality of sacred music. The present article attempts to focus attention on the various factors that contributed to the creation of this expression of Venetian culture and to show how the choirs, which sprang from the component aspects of Catholic charitable institutions, not only furthered the development of music but served eventually to alter the direction and image of the institutions to which they owed their formation. The designation luoghi pii (or pii luoghi as it often appears in the records) appears frequently in the Venetian archives from the inception of these institutions right to the end of the eighteenth century, when the organization of welfare work in Venice changed under the Napoleonic regime. There were several pii luoghi, which were created to meet specific needs at different times, and the purposes they fulfilled covered some of the fundamental needs of society. The post-Reformation period brought a fresh upsurge of religious fervour that was expressed in its material effects by the establishment of some of the most renowned social institutions of Venice, which soon became centres for the training of women singers and instrumentalists. Several further institutions sprang up to assist women against the evils of prostitution, either by prevention or by rehabilitation-such were the Zitelle, the Soccorso, the Penitenti and the Convertite. Others served, among other things, as hospitals, for example the Incurabili, which was for syphilitics only. The Derelitti and the Mendicanti provided for all febricitanti, as patients suffering from then undiagnosable diseases were generally described. These last three pii luoghi contained orphanages for abandoned children, as did the earlier Pieta, renowned in Venice as a foundling institution from the mid fourteenth century. The common aim of all four of these pii luoghi was, as is frequently reiterated in their records, to provide various forms of charity for the needy. Their functions were multiple, and in many respects they coincided. As well as containing orphanages, all

Rappresentazioni allegoriche dell'America nel Veneto del Cinque e Seicento

The age of geographical discoveries and of the rise of the great colonial empires did not bring the Venetian Republic into competition with the sea-faring nations which came to subject to their dominion one area or other of the vast territories of the New World. More than enough reasons desuaded a small state like Venice from embracing any illusions of expanding across the Atlantic, in slow but inexorable decline as it was from its time-honored position of international prestige. However, in spite of the definitely marginal, though not irrelevant, position the concept of America had in the Venetian culture of the 1500's and 1600's, it is not unreasonable to ask if this culture itself had produced, or at least known and accepted some form or other of iconological and iconographic transcription of this concept and what their nature and ideological significance might be. This present work aims at finding an answer to this question.

Shakespeare Survey. An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study & Production.

List of illustrations 1. Shakespeare translation as cultural exchange Inga-Stina Ewbank 2. Shakespeare, theatre production, and cultural politics John Russell Brown 3. 'Amphitheaters in the body': playing with hands on the Shakespearian stage Michael Neill 4. 'Shakespur and the Jewbill' James Shapiro 5. Wilhelm S and Shylock Laurence Lerner 6. Pilgrims of Grace: Henry IV historicized Tom McAlindon 7. Holy war in Henry V Steven Marx 8. Hamlet and the anxiety of modern Japan Yasunari Takahashi 9. Hamlet's last words Tom Matheson 10. Venetian culture and the politics of Othello Mark Matheson 11. 'My music for nothing': musical negotiations in The Tempest Pierre Iselin 12. The Tempest and cultural exchange Jean-Marie Maguin 13. Caliban and Ariel write back Jonathan Bate 14. Shakespearian rates of exchange in Czechoslovakia 1945-1989 Zdenek Stribrny 15. 'Are you a party in this business?' Consolidation and subversion in East German Shakespeare productions Maik Hamburger 16. The martyred knights of Georgian Shakespeariana Nico Kiasashvili 17. Shakespeare performances in England, 1993-1994 Peter Holland 18. Professional Shakespeare productions in the British Isles, January-December 1993 Niky Rathbone 19. The year's contributions to Shakespeare studies David Lindley, Mark Thornton Burnett and H. R. Woudhuysen Books received Index.