City, Image, and Orientation in Venice around 1500

Since the late 15th century, Venice, with its lagoons and islands, its monuments, and provinces served as the “backdrop” for history paintings, especially the picture cycles of the lay fraternities. In contradistinction to the established interpretation, that such phenomenon was evidence of a realist concept of art, this project argues that the city’s depiction helped to shape a collective identity for the Venetian citizens suffering an identity crisis on the epochal cusp of early modernity and as the result of far-reaching historical transformations. Three perspectives will shape the discussion of the painterly depiction of Venice: 1) In light of the threat to Venice’s trade and colonial system a political dispute broke out around 1500 that focused on the question whether the Serenissima should dedicate itself to either a terrestrial or maritime orientation of its policy. It is argued that the Scuole’s history paintings, which depict Venice as a port and trading town, give expression to a “thalassocratic” ideology. 2) The project’s aim is to demonstrate that this maritime orientation also inserted itself in painting on a sub-iconographic level. The organizing structures of pictorial space, the specific use of perspectival construction, etc. testify to a very specific, technical knowledge that originated with seafaring (cartography, visual means of navigation). 3) Paintings of Venice frequently depict fantastic urban designs that, it is argued, can be read as asserting specific viewpoints on the contemporary political and cultural disputes. Around 1500, Venetian architecture changed and began supplanting regional building traditions. Roman antiquity supersedes references to Byzantine and Islamic architecture. Not least in its imago urbis Venice portrayed itself either as the urbane center of a maritime republic with outposts in the Eastern Mediterranean or as the capital of a territorial state competing with others states on mainland Italy.