Description
TitleGlobal designs
Date Created2015
Other Date2015-01 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (viii, 348 p. : ill.)
DescriptionMy dissertation examines how in the fourteenth century, the rival republics of Pisa, Venice, and Genoa each commissioned major civic monuments that featured Old Testament and cartographic references as well as local saints, traditions, and themes. I argue that their complex programs were intended to assert their respective republics’ supremacy in the Mediterranean world and to legitimize their claims to global empire by establishing unsurpassable pedigrees. Chapter one and two examine the extensive fresco cycles adorning the Pisan Camposanto, the miraculous cemetery composed of soil stolen from Jerusalem. As the frescoes charted two thousand years of Pisan impact on Asia, Africa, and Europe, they testified that, in fact, Pisa was the center of the world. Chapter three analyzes the grand epigraph encircling the nave of San Lorenzo Cathedral in Genoa with an encomium to the republic’s prestigious descent from Abraham, Noah, and Janus. Working in conjunction with the other Old Testament references and the very material of the church, the inscription touted the cathedral’s position as the heart of Genoa’s empire through which its international resources were funneled. Chapter four explores how the Trecento façade of the Venetian Palazzo Ducale combined Old Testament imagery, cartography, an international style, and allusions to diplomatic exchanges with the peoples of the world—including the Mongols and the Turks—to visualize the vast pursuits and ancient heritage of the Venetian empire. My analyses crystalize how, as their mariners navigated the Mediterranean Sea, these three ports became filters that synthesized and reconciled pagan and Judeo-Christian knowledge. The monuments facilitated this syncretic process using the Old Testament—with its unparalleled early history, its cross-cultural relevance, its rare topographic descriptions of the East, and its connection to medieval cartography—as a familiar framework upon which to graft changing notions of space and time. Like contemporary texts, the artistic programs of each monument employed the Old Testament to compose more nuanced and cross-cultural (though still hierarchical) geographical world histories that supported their global designs. The monuments thereby fostered a new model of geographically and historically conscious communal identity that transformed how Europeans saw the world and ushered in the Renaissance.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Hilary Haakenson
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.