Imagining Social and Political Relations in the View: From Piazza San Marco to Murano
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Published:December 2023
Maartje van Gelder, Claire Judde de Larivière, 2023. "Imagining Social and Political Relations in the View: From Piazza San Marco to Murano", A View of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance City, Kristin Love Huffman
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Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View is a beautiful portrait of the city of Venice, yet almost no people appear. One’s imagination is required to envision the many inhabitants who would have maintained Venice as a dynamic political, economic, and cultural center. Chapter 22 discusses the View as a representation of Venetian society around 1500, considering buildings and spaces as embodiments of the population. It attempts to reconstruct the many social and economic interactions as well as the political relations and tensions that constituted the Venetian state. It also shows how the View highlights spaces where patricians and non-elite Venetians met and socialized and where power was negotiated. Moving across the city, from the San Marco area in the south to the island of Murano in the north, this contribution traces how the city’s inhabitants would have filled the View’s empty spaces and thus how Venetian society functioned.
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