From celebrated gardens in private villas to the paintings and sculptures that adorned palace interiors, Venetians in the sixteenth century conceived of their marine city as dotted with actual and imaginary green spaces. This volume examines how and why this pastoral vision of Venice developed. Drawing on a variety of primary sources ranging from visual art to literary texts, performances, and urban plans, Jodi Cranston shows how Venetians lived the pastoral in urban Venice. She describes how they created green spaces and enacted pastoral situations through poetic conversations and theatrical performances in lagoon gardens; discusses the island utopias found, invented, and mapped in distant seas; and explores the visual art that facilitated the experience of inhabiting verdant landscapes. Though the greening of Venice was relatively short lived, Cranston shows how the phenomenon had a lasting impact on how other cities, including Paris and London, developed their self-images and how later writers and artists understood and adapted the pastoral mode. Incorporating approaches from eco-criticism and anthropology, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice greatly informs our understanding of the origins and development of the pastoral in art history and literature as well as the culture of sixteenth-century Venice. It will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of sixteenth-century history and culture, the history of urban landscapes, and Italian art.

"As the sixteenth century opened, members of the patriciate were increasingly withdrawing from trade, desiring to be seen as "gentlemen in fact" as well as "gentlemen in name." The author considers why this was so and explores such wide-ranging themes as attitudes toward wealth and display, the articulation of family identity, the interplay between the public and the private, and the emergence of characteristically Venetian decorative practices and styles of art and architecture. Brown focuses new light on the visual culture of Venetian women - how they lived within, furnished, and decorated their homes; what spaces were allotted to them; what their roles and domestic tasks were; how they dressed; how they raised their children; and how they entertained. Bringing together both high arts and low, the book examines all aspects of Renaissance material culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Originally published in 1987. Since Machiavelli, historians and political theorists have sought the sources of the stability that earned for Venice the appellation La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic. In Patricians and Popolani, Dennis Romano looks to the private lives of early Renaissance Venetians for an explanation. Fourteenth-century Venice escaped the tumultuous upheavals of the other Italian city-republics, Romano contends, because the patricians and common people of the city did not divide sharply along class or factional lines in their personal associations. Rather, Venetians of the era moved in a variety of intersecting social networks that were shaped and influenced by an overriding sense of civic community. Drawing on the private archives of Venice—notarial registers, collections of testaments, and records of estates maintained by the procurators of San Marco—Romano analyzes the primary social bonds in the lives of the city's inhabitants. In separate chapters, Patricians and Popolani examines the forms of association in everyday Venetian life: marriage and family structure; artisan workshops and relations among tradesmen; the role of the parish clergy and the "sacred networks" that formed around convents, hospitals, and confraternities; and neighborhood and patron–client ties. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Romano argues, all these networks of association had been transformed as a new hierarchical spirit took hold and overwhelmed the older, more freewheeling tendencies of Venetian society. The old sense of community yielded to a new and equally compelling sense of place, and La Serenissima remained stable throughout the later Renaissance.

This book explores the cultural dimensions, the expressive potential, and the changing technologies of greenery in the art of the Italian Renaissance and after.

Venice's reputation for political stability and a strong, balanced republican government holds a prominent place in European political theory. Edward Muir traces the origins and development of this reputation, paying particular attention to the sixteenth century, when civic ritual in Venice reached its peak. He shows how the ritualization of society and politics was an important reason for Venice's stability. Influenced in part by cultural anthropology, he establishes and applies to Venice a new methodology for the historical study of civic ritual.

The idea of a Venetian forestry service might strike one as the beginning of a joke. The statement that it began in the fourteenth century would surprise most people. Venice is built on a lagoon with no timber resources. This book reveals the story of Venice's attempt to establish protected forests in order to have a constant supply of wood. Beyond the need for wood for heating and cooking, tall beams of oak and beech were needed for ship building and the shoring up of breakwaters that kept the sea from flooding the city. The author follows the practice of forest conservation and management from its inception in the 1300s to the end of the eighteenth century. He details the administrative and legal debates as well as problems with the implementation of policies. This study is a corrective to histories that assume a lack of interest in forest conservation in Europe at this time. The experience of the Venetians also serves as an example for timber use and conservation today.