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History Italy

The World in Venice

Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity

by (author) Bronwen Wilson

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
May 2005
Category
Italy, Italian
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802087256
    Publish Date
    May 2005
    List Price
    $94.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781487525835
    Publish Date
    Dec 2019
    List Price
    $54.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442682573
    Publish Date
    May 2005
    List Price
    $110.00

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Description

Positing a dynamic relationship between print culture and social experience, Bronwen Wilson's The World in Venice focuses on the printed image during a century of profound transformation. City views, costume illustrations, events, and portraits of locals and foreigners are brought together to show how printmakers responded to an expanding image of the world in Renaissance Venice, and how, in turn, prints influenced the ways in which individuals thought about themselves.

Woodcuts and engravings of cities and inhabitants of Europe, and those of distant lands, initiated a sudden and pervasive experience with alterity that redefined the relations of Europeans to the world. By condensing the world into pictures, print enabled a radically novel and vicarious experience of others. Wilson explores the overlapping and evolving relations between space, vision, print, and identity, and engages with current scholarly debates concerning ethnicities, gender and geography, copies and originals, travel, nationhood, fashion, urban life, visuality, and the body.

Venice was one of the largest cities in Renaissance Europe, a trading crossroads, and a centre of print. The World in Venice shows how Venetian identity came to be envisioned within the growing global context that print constructed for it.

About the author

Bronwen Wilson is the Edward W. Carter Chair in European Art and the Director of the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Memorial Clark Library at UCLA.

Bronwen Wilson's profile page

Awards

  • Short-listed, Roland H. Bainton Prize for Art History and Music / Awarded by The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference