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This book deals with the Netherlandish merchant community in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice. It examines the merchants commercial activities, their social and communal relations, as well as their interaction with the Venetian state, which was accustomed to protect its own trade. The Netherlandish merchants in Venice, as part of an extensive international trading network, were ideally placed to connect Mediterranean and Atlantic commerce. They quickly became the most important group of foreign merchants in the city at a time of rapid economic changes. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, this book shows how these immigrant traders used their strong commercial position to secure a place in Venice. It demonstrates how the changing balance of international commerce affected early modern Venetian society.
Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters provide the first contemporary single-volume survey of the three arts of Venice -- painting, sculpture, and architecture. They offer an important counterbalance to the traditional orientation toward painting as the city's preeminent art by focusing on architecture as the essential Venetian artistic medium. In the process, they define the distinctly Venetian terms by which the city and culture should be understood. Huse and Wolters begin their study with 1460, when Venice was one of the key powers of Italy, and end their discussion with the death of Tintoretto in 1594, a period of waning international power. Wolfgang Wolters outlines the city's development an...
The Greek pandocheion, Arabic funduq, and Latin fundicum (fondaco) were ubiquitous in the Mediterranean sphere for nearly two millennia. These institutions were not only hostelries for traders and travelers, but also taverns, markets, warehouses, and sites for commercial taxation and regulation. In this highly original study, Professor Constable traces the complex evolution of this family of institutions from the pandocheion in Late Antiquity, to the appearance of the funduq throughout the Muslim Mediterranean following the rise of Islam. By the twelfth century, with the arrival of European merchants in Islamic markets, the funduq evolved into the fondaco. These merchant colonies facilitated trade and travel between Muslim and Christian regions. Before long, fondacos also appeared in southern European cities. This study of the diffusion of this institutional family demonstrates common economic interests and cross-cultural communications across the medieval Mediterranean world, and provides a striking contribution to our understanding of this region.
How is a life defined by a city, and a city by the lives within? Where do an individual and a culture coincide? Perhaps more than any city in the world, Venice inspires these questions and suggests intriguing answers. This book focuses on people who have been shaped by Venice and have shaped Venice in their turn. The author considers them in five groups: the "mutilated culture heroes" (e.g., the eunuch Narses), who despite or because of some great sacrifice helped the city define itself and its mission; the "fugitives from splendor" (e.g., St. Pietro Orseolo or El Greco), so overwhelmed by beauty that they fled the city; the "prisoners of Venice"-the convicts, the cloistered, the mad; the "symbiotics," who lived in close communion with the city for long periods of time (e.g., Titian) and the "fugitives from self" (e.g., Igor Stravinsky), who have come from elsewhere seeking a new identity, and who ended up helping to create a new identity for the city itself. More than a collection of biographies, this richly textured and insightful work examines the roots of people's "Venice-ness" as well as the city's own humanity.
Metabolism was a movement launched in Japan that took inspiration for buildings and cities from biological systems. With interviews and commentary and hundreds of images, Project Japan unearths a history that casts new light on the key issues that both enervate and motivate architecture today.
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Renaissance art history is traditionally identified with Italian centers of production, and Florence in particular. Instead, this book explores the dynamic interchange between European artistic centers and artists and the trade in works of art. It also considers the impact of differing locations on art and artists and some of the economic, political, and cultural factors crucial to the emergence of an artistic center. During c.1420-1520, no city or court could succeed in isolation and so artists operated within a network of interests and local and international identities. The case studies presented in this book portray the Renaissance as an exciting international phenomenon, with cities and courts inextricably bound together in a web of economic and political interests.
The Republic of Venice was the only Catholic territory in which an Anabaptist community formed in the 16th century. The history of Venetian Anabaptism, hitherto little known in Reformation Studies, is the focus of this book. Using a large quantity of archival material and rare printed sources Riccarda Suitner reconstructs the lives of the Republic's Anabaptists and the inquisitorial repression they suffered, and analyses the doctrinal specificities of the Radical Reformation in this area. This story represents a fundamental stage in the relations between German, central-European and Italian culture in the early modern period. Events in Venice are presented within a broader comparative framework, paying particular attention to the German states, Switzerland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Transylvania, Moravia, Tyrol, and the Kingdom of Naples. It will emerge that its Venetian history cannot be ignored if we are to gain a true understanding of the European Reformation.
From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a prec...