Perceptions of the New World in Early Modern Venetian Print Culture

FAIN: FA-58099-15

Elizabeth Anne Horodowich
New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, NM 88003-8002)

This research project examines Venetian perceptions of the Atlantic world in the age of discovery. Very few Venetians actually traveled to the Americas in the early modern period, yet Venetians produced more maps and printed texts about the Americas than almost any other European city, prompting questions about how they obtained their knowledge and what they had to say about lands they had never seen. In the sixteenth century, a variety of Venetian armchair travelers—writers, editors, mapmakers, artists, and cosmographers—developed a specifically Venetian vision of the age of expansion. This proposal seeks funding to complete the research and writing of a book manuscript that will explore how Venetians denied, ignored, and resisted the developing Spanish and Portuguese empires in the age of exploration, as well as how by contrast, Venetians at times embraced the emergence of these new empires by seeing curious and surprising reflections of themselves in images from the New World.

Associated Products

The World Seen From Venice: Representing the Americas in Grand-Scale Wall Maps (Book Section)
Title: The World Seen From Venice: Representing the Americas in Grand-Scale Wall Maps
Author: Elizabeth Horodowich
Editor: Daniel Savoy
Abstract: Large-scale, printed Venetian wall maps represented the New World an arena of luxurious wealth and ethnographic contrast, as well as one of self-reflection, commensurability, and compatibility. They aimed to convince early modern viewers that the Americas were both wildly different from and, at the same time, eerily similar and familiar to early modern Europeans and Venetians in particular, especially in their most surprising component: the way that they quietly but insistently pointed to Venetian participation in the Age of Encounters
Year: 2018
Publisher: Brepols
Book Title: The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review

The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters (Book)
Title: The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters
Author: Elizabeth Horodowich
Abstract: Few Renaissance Venetians saw the New World with their own eyes. As the print capital of early modern Europe, however, Venice developed a unique relationship to the Americas. Savvy Venetian printmen, including a variety of editors, mapmakers, translators, writers, and cosmographers, represented the New World at times as a place that the city’s mariners had discovered before the Spanish, a world linked to Marco Polo’s China, or another version of Venice, especially in the case of Tenochtitlan. This book explores these various and distinctive modes of spinning the New World, including Venetian rhetorics of firstness, similitude, othering, comparison, and simultaneity, often generated through forms of textual and visual pastiche that linked the wider world to the Venetian lagoon. These wide-ranging stances allowed Venetians to argue for their different but equivalent participation in the Age of Encounters. Historians have traditionally focused on the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World, and the Dutch and English mapping of it, while the wide circulation of Venetian Americana has been less noted. This book demonstrates how with their printed texts and maps, Venetian newsmongers embraced a fertile tension between the distant and the close and in doing so, played a crucial yet heretofore unrecognized role in the invention of America.
Year: 2018
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---