Painters and Patrons in Venetian Documents

Illuminierte Urkunden. Beiträge aus Diplomatik, Kunstgeschichte und Digital Humanities/Illuminated Charters. Essays from Diplomatic, Art History and Digital Humanities, 2018

The top officials who led Venice, including the doge as head of state, and the many rettori, or rulers of Venetian territories abroad, were elected from a hereditary class of patricians. For some of these elected positions, a manuscript document (Promissione ducale, Commissione ducale, Capitolare, or Commissione/Giuramento, depending upon the office) containing variously the commission and oath of office and the statutes governing conduct, was produced for each new office-holder. This paper examines such Venetian documents now in Vienna, to summarize how illumination evolved in them, and to argue that painting was encouraged to some extent by the state to glorify the office-holders as a collective, but that because production and decoration could be partly over-seen and financed by the recipient, these acts served increasingly as vehicles to celebrate individuals. The article concludes with discussion of the potential benefits of expanding and publishing the database of ducali which underpins my study, for various historical fields including art history, prosopography, paleography, the history of binding, of textiles, and of costume.

Historical Journal, 2016

A B S T R A C T . This 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 - war with the Ottoman Empire. Through a broad array of singlesheet 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.

Studi di storia, 2020

A presentation of the 15cILLUSTRATION database and website, a searchable database of 15th-century printed illustrations developed by the 15cBOOKTRADE Project in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford, is the first comprehensive and systematic tool to track and investigate the production, use, circulation, and copying of woodblocks, iconographic subjects, artistic styles, within 15th-century printed illustrated editions. The paper illustrates the potential of the 15cILLUSTRATION website as a research support tool for art historians, book historians, philologists and historians of visual and material culture.

Renaissance Studies, 2019

Although the systematic study of Venetian drawing of the late sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century was initiated about ninety years ago, it remains incomplete. Certainly, much more is to be accomplished compared with the available research on Florence, Roman or Bolognese drawing of the same period. This shortfall accounts for a great deal given the widely held opinion-advocated in 1568 by the Florentine biographer Giorgio Vasari-that Venetian artists were born rather as painters and fine colourists than as draughtsmen, and so they scarcely worked on paper but from the outset used the canvas as their artistic medium. Fundamental research on Venetian drawing from the early Renaissance to later periods by Detlev von Halden, Hans and Erica Tietze-Conrat, Michelangelo Muraro, Nicola Ivanoff and Terisio Pignatti has refuted this viewpoint. Finally, recent exhibitions of the three giants of Venetian painting-Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese-their workshops and wider artistic context have accompanied or kick-started new studies of draughtsmanship conducted, for example, by scholars like

Artibus et Historiae, 2018

Jacopo Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese were two of the most prolific draftsmen of Renaissance Venice, as testified by the relevant number of surviving drawings attributed to them. The black chalk, occasionally heightened with white, had been Tintoretto’s preferred medium, whereas Veronese always preferred pen and ink. Moreover, drawings of the latter belonged to different categories (sketches, studies of figures, chiaroscuro drawings), while Tintoretto drew chiefly single figure studies. The reason behind these differences should be sought in the use these artists made of drawings: Tintoretto used it exclusively as a vehicle in his progress towards the finished painting and not as an intellectual tool, as Veronese did. It is well known that Tintoretto and Veronese had reciprocally studied themselves, but their approach to drawing has never been compared before. Highlighting the differences of their corpus graphicum, this article aims to compare the drawing practice inside Tintoretto and Veronese’s workshops and their working methods.

Art Libraries Journal, 1988

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