The Republic Of Venice In The 18th Century

This book traces the last century of life of the Republic of Venice. It aims to show why the “Serenissima”, unlike large countries such as France or England, was not on the way to becoming a modern nation. Until its end, the city of Venice never took the shape of a real national capital, but remained the dominant centre linking wide-ranging and diverse territories around the Adriatic. The particularism, or rather polycentrism, of its state apparatus is the key to understanding its limitations, as well as the legacy left in Venice’s vast domains, reaching from Corfu to Lombardy. In the 18th century the Republic was weak compared to the great European states. Its institutions and leadership had been frozen for two centuries and there was no political reform, although Enlightenment culture diffused widely over the century. On the economic level, however, there was little sign of “decay”: merchant traffic continued to prosper and there were a number of new developments in the manufacturing sphere.

From Canaletto to Tiepolo, eighteenth century Venetian painters created brilliant works of art that are now considered to be the last flowering of the long Venetian tradition of painting. This beautiful book provides an introduction to eighteenth century Venetian painting, discussing the various types of painting--portraiture, genre, landscape, history paintings and religious works--as well as the society, patronage and intellectual climate of Venice at this time.

_Abounds in inspiring ideas and proposals. A helpful bibliography completes Beghtol's noteworthy and recommendable study..._ --KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION

For over a millennium, the Italian coastal state of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, or La Serenissima, flourished as a center for sea trade and the arts. Here an important final phase of late Baroque mythological and Biblical painting took place. Venice also became an important destination on the Grand Tour, where its aquatic setting and unique network of canals, palaces, and churches inspired a talented group of view painters, especially during the eighteenth century. Today, collections throughout North America hold many works from this prolific period. La Serenissima presents new scholarship on works that have not received due public attention in recent years and brings together approximately 65 works of art from more than 25 collections. Together, they represent important regional developments in religious and topographical painting as well as genre and portraiture. These artworks display the inimitable aspects of Venetian taste and culture in the age of the Grand Tour and through the decline of the Republic. La Serenissima also casts new light on the achievements of Venetian view painters, including master painter Antonio Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Luca Carlevarijs, and Francesco Guardi.

This book studies the nature of Venetian rule over the Slavs of Dalmatia during the eighteenth century, focusing on the cultural elaboration of an ideology of empire that was based on a civilizing mission toward the Slavs. The book argues that the Enlightenment within the “Adriatic Empire” of Venice was deeply concerned with exploring the economic and social dimensions of backwardness in Dalmatia, in accordance with the evolving distinction between “Western Europe” and “Eastern Europe” across the continent. It further argues that the primitivism attributed to Dalmatians by the Venetian Enlightenment was fundamental to the European intellectual discovery of the Slavs. The book begins by discussing Venetian literary perspectives on Dalmatia, notably the drama of Carlo Goldoni and the memoirs of Carlo Gozzi. It then studies the work that brought the subject of Dalmatia to the attention of the European Enlightenment: the travel account of the Paduan philosopher Alberto Fortis, which was translated from Italian into English, French, and German. The next two chapters focus on the Dalmatian inland mountain people called the Morlacchi, famous as “savages” throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. The Morlacchi are considered first as a concern of Venetian administration and then in relation to the problem of the “noble savage,” anthropologically studied and poetically celebrated. The book then describes the meeting of these administrative and philosophical discourses concerning Dalmatia during the final decades of the Venetian Republic. It concludes by assessing the legacy of the Venetian Enlightenment for later perspectives on Dalmatia and the South Slavs from Napoleonic Illyria to twentieth-century Yugoslavia.

"The entire town is disguised," declared a French tourist of eighteenth-century Venice. And, indeed, maskers of all ranks—nobles, clergy, imposters, seducers, con men—could be found mixing at every level of Venetian society. Even a pious nun donned a mask and male attire for her liaison with the libertine Casanova. In Venice Incognito, James H. Johnson offers a spirited analysis of masking in this carnival-loving city. He draws on a wealth of material to explore the world view of maskers, both during and outside of carnival, and reconstructs their logic: covering the face in public was a uniquely Venetian response to one of the most rigid class hierarchies in European history. This vivid account goes beyond common views that masking was about forgetting the past and minding the muse of pleasure to offer fresh insight into the historical construction of identity.