Conjuring a Sea-State: Maritime Imagination in Renaissance Venice

This project examines how literary and artistic representations of the sea shaped competing ideas about what it meant to rule over and live in the far-flung community of Venice in the period of rapid global change between 1267 and 1623. It posits that, contextually to the molding of political and mercantile structures, a whole maritime imagination was generated to empower the Republic of Venice as a ‘sea-state.’ The Venetian myth of the spontaneous origins of the city from the foam of the Adriatic and the ritual marriage of Venice to the sea—a lavish ceremony held every Ascension Day since the eleventh century—symbolize a political, environmental, and economic union between city and sea. Yet over the course of the Renaissance, as the Venetians were building and maintaining their maritime empire, they gave expression to increasingly complex ways of thinking about ecology and social relations and they did so across a range of literary genres and artistic media. Investments made by governmental agents and private citizens led writers, artists, and geographers to adapt existing textual genres, and even to create and codify new ones, in ways that would accommodate a particular conception of the sea as a geopolitical body. Read through an interdisciplinary lens, the map-making, painting, poetry, and prose of the period document a story of ongoing debate about politics, personal life, and the stewardship of natural resources in which dominion over the maritime world was central. This dissertation aims to unearth the tropes that the Venetians leveraged to conflate politics, history, and geography on a maritime backdrop and to show that collectively, these depictions gave rise to a unique vision of life on and near the sea. Chapter 1 analyzes the environmental metaphors deployed in the symbolic figurations of the Republic; chapter 2 describes the Venetian acclimatization of ancient marine mythology during the Renaissance; chapter 3 looks at the function and meanings of watery foregrounds in paintings, sculpture, and poetry; chapter 4 turns to maritime backgrounds in art and tracks the emergence of sea-centered models in geography and cartography; and the conclusion briefly addresses the significance of religious, historical, and fictional maritime narratives for Venetian identity and memory.