Abstract
The twenty-first century city of Venice, Italy is a striking mélange of old and new, whimsy and reality, hints of modernity amidst history and nostalgia. Nowhere is this more evident than to the traveler who disembarks at the Santa Lucia train station in the sestiere of Cannaregio. The station itself, a mid-twentieth-century construction, is named for and occupies the former locale of the twelfth-century home for the yet much older relics of the early Christian martyr Saint Lucy. This first experience with the city is emblematic for its layers of accumulated history. Broad, widely traveled streets wind from the station towards the historic center of the city, lined with posh hotels, Internet cafés and above all shops bursting with glass, lace, leather, and the eager consumers these goods attract. Ambiguity, anachronism, and even continuity also linger here, tying the city’s glorious past as a mercantile center, communications hub, and pilgrim outpost to its bustling present.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
On the early office of doge and its transition, see Gina Fasoli, “Comune veneciarum,” in Scritti di storia medievale, ed. F. Bocchi, A. Carile, and A.I. Pini (Bologna: La Fotocromo Emiliana, 1974), pp. 472–97
Agostino Pertusi, “Quedam regalia insignia: ricerche sulle insegne del potere ducale a Venezia durante it medioevo,” Studi Veneziani 7 (1965): pp. 3–123
Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 195–203
Stefano Gasparri, “Dagli Orseolo al comune,” in Origini—età ducale, ed. Lellia Cracco Ruggini, Massimiliano Pavan, Giorgio Cracco, and Gherardo Ortalli, vol. 1 of Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1992), pp. 791–826.
Marino Sanudo described the election process and the duties of the doge in De origine, situ, et magistratibus urbis Venetae, ed. Angela Caracciolo Arich (Milan: Cisalpino-La Goliardica, 1980), pp. 85–90.
Frederic C. Lane, “The Enlargement of the Great Council of Venice,” in Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, ed. J.K. Rowe and W.H. Stockdale (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), pp. 236–74
Stanley Chojnacki, “In Search of Venetian Patriciate: Families and Factions in the Fourteenth Century,” in Renaissance Venice, ed. J.R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 47–90
Gerhard Rösch, “The Serrata of the Great Council and Venetian Society, 1286–1323,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 67–88.
Robert Finlay, “The Venetian Republic as a Gerontocracy: Age and Politics in the Renaissance,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1978): 157–78.
Maximilian Tondro, “Memory and Tradition: The Ephemeral Architecture for the Triumphal Entries of the Dogaresse of Venice in 1557 and 1597,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK, 2001)
Bronwen Wilson, “Il bel sesso, il austere Senato’: The Coronation of Dogaressa Morosina Morosini Grimani,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): pp. 73–139. The sixteenth century has a much richer documentary record on the dogaresse, including multiple eyewitness accounts of rituals by Venetians and foreigners alike, and the inclusion of the dogaresse in fashionable costume books. See below chapter five.
Giovanni Palazzi, Fasti ducales ab Anafesto I ad Silvestro Valier venetorum ducem (Venice: Hieronymi Albrizzi, 1696);
Giovanni Palazzi, La virtù in giocco: ovvero dame patritie di Venetia famose per nascita, per lettere, per armi per costumi, ed. Lucia Nadin Bassani (Venice: Centro Intemazionale della grafica, 1990). Giovanni Grevembroch provided a brief paragraph that contained some historical highlights on the dogaresse, and several images meant to illustrate their garments in Gli abiti di Veneziani di quasi eta con diligenza raccolti e dipinti nel secolo xviii, 4 vols. (Venice: Filippi, 1986), 1: pp. 111–113; 2: p. 114. A manuscript prepared for British Consul Joseph Smith by Giovanni Lesleo, Museo Civico Correr (MCC), MS Gradenigo 72, Donne Venetiane, also contained several short biographies of dogaresse, the information for which may have been drawn from Palazzi. See also Appendix I.
Edgecumbe Staley, The Dogaressas of Venice (New York: C. Scriber’s Sons, 1910), p. xxvi. Idem, Heroines of Genoa; idem, Famous Women of Florence (London: A. Constable, 1909).
Giovanni Scarabello, “Le dogaresse,” in I Dogi, ed. Gino Benzoni (Milan: Electa, 1982), pp. 163–82
Mirella Pasquinucci and Olga Premoli Taiti, “La Dogaressa,” in II Serenissimo Doge, ed. Umberto Franzoi (Treviso: Canova, 1986), pp. 225–83. The former of these works followed Molmenti closely; the latter is more prone to romantic exaggeration and errors.
On the Venetian chronicle tradition, see Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
Laura Morreale, “Chronicle and Community in Northern Italian Towns, 1200–1340,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, 2004), chapter 1. Diane Owen Hughes observed the connection between women’s restriction from public office in medival republics and chroniclers’relative silence on them; “Invisible Madonnad,” p. 30. As Hughes noted, Marino Sanudo provided moer detail on women’s activities than his predecessors (ibid., 39), perhaps because his aunt was Dogaressa Cristina Sanudo Moro; see Sanudo, I Diarii, ed. Rinaldo Fulin, vol. 1 (Bologna: Forni Editore, 1969-70), pp. 101–09.
Adrian Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)
Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
Natalie Tomas, Positive Novelty: Women and Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Melbourne, Australia: Monash University Press, 1992) and idem, The Medici Women.
Copyright information
© 2006 Holly S. Hurlburt
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hurlburt, H.S. (2006). Introduction. In: The Dogaressa of Venice, 1200–1500. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-03782-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-03782-4_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-63506-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-03782-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)