Academic literature on the topic 'Political realism – Venice (Italy) – History'

@FP = CHARLES DICKENS ADAMANTLY DECLARES he will not indulge in “any grave examination into the government or misgovernment of any portion” of Italy, because “that beautiful land” requires only aesthetic reflections that “have ever a fanciful and idle air” (1); and John Ruskin relentlessly insists on turning attention away from the action in the Italian streets and inward toward the motionless stones of buildings, because Venice, “Queen of Marble and of Mud,” has no political dimension (“Stones of Venice” 9: xxix). Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by contrast, masterfully tackles the problem of the emerging nation’s political image in Victorian England. These comments by prominent Victorian men of letters reflect the conventional British formulation of Italy through the nineteenth century “as the locus of the feminine and silent properties of space, painting, nature, and the body — a place outside of history where temporal motion had ceased” (Bailey 94).1 Indeed, a commonplace implicit in the British definition of pre-national Italy is the idea of la bella Italia as apolitical and even ahistorical. But from 1815 onwards, as Italians became increasingly dissatisfied under their new Austrian rulers, the British equation between Italy and art, Italy and beauty, became increasingly out of touch with the Italian republican movement.2

The interactions between operas and the societies in which they were composed and first heard are of interest to both historians and musicologists, especially because operas since the seventeenth century have had significant connections with political and social change. The essays in this special double issue of the journal, entitled “Opera and History”, pursue the connection in six settings: seventeenth-century Venice; Handel's London; Revolutionary Europe from 1790 to 1830; Restoration and Risorgimento Italy; Europe during the birth of Modernism from 1890 to 1930; and twentieth-century America.

Throughout the twentieth century the International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale was seen as a major event by the art world of Belgrade and, more broadly, of Serbia and Yugoslavia. After the Second World War this biggest and most important international show of contemporary art provided Belgrade?s artists and art critics with an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the latest developments on the international art scene. At the same time, it was used as a platform for the leading figures of Belgrade?s artistic and cultural-policy establishment to create, through the exhibitions mounted in the national pavilion, an image of the country?s artistic contemporaneity aimed at achieving its desired standing in the West. The attitude of Belgrade?s art scene to the Venice Biennale went through a particularly interesting phase in the 1950s. Its transformations offer an opportunity to observe, analyse and expand the knowledge about the changes that marked that turbulent decade in the history of Serbian art, which went a long way from dogmatically exclusive socialist realism to the institutionalization of a high-modernist language as the dominant model. Based on the reconstruction of Yugoslavia?s sustained participation in the Venice Biennale (1950-60), this paper analyses the models of the representation of Serbian art in the international context of the Biennale within a broader context of the intensification of Serbian-Italian artistic contacts during the period under study.

Regimes and families: historians have recently enriched our understanding of the patrician regimes of late-medieval and Renaissance Italy by analyzing relations among their component social units. This essay will contribute to this literature by throwing some light on the social structure and practices of the ruling class of fifteenth-century Venice. For a long time, but with quickening rhythm in the last decade or so, historians of Venice have been charting various currents that ran through the Venetian patriciate. On the whole, though, they have preferred to concentrate on political and economic groupings, less on the family and kinship patterns that fascinate investigators of other cities, notably Florence.

Franklin Hugh Adler,Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism. The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, xv + 458 pp., ISBN 0–521–433406–8 hbk, £40.00Giuseppe Berta,Il governo degli interessi. Industriali, rappresentanza e politica nell'Italia del nord-ovest 1906–1924, Marsilio, Venice, 1996, xv + 175 pp., ISBN 88–317–6342–3 pbk, 32,000 LireGiorgio FioccaStoria della Confindustria 1900–1914, Marsilio, Venice, 1994, 266 pp., ISBN 88–317–5850–0 hbk, 70,000 LireThe three books under review trace the organization of industrial interests in Italy from the foundation of the Lega industrial di Torino (LIT) in 1906 to the insertion of Confindustria into the Fascist totalitarian state. As Franklin Hugh Adler's ambitious and detailed account relates the Lega (LIT) begat first a Federazione Industriali Piemontesi (1908) and then the Confederazione Italiana dell'Industria (CIDI) in 1910 which was relaunched as the Confederazione generale dell'industria Italiana (Confindustria) in 1919. All of these organizations came under the effective direction of Gino Olivetti, the first secretary of the Lega who emerges from Adler's analysis as the principal theorist of a liberalproductionist ideology that the author regards as the central value system of the Italian industrial bourgeoisie. The slimmer volumes (in both scope and size) of Giuseppe Berta and Giorgio Fiocca diverge from Adler's account in stressing the discontinuities in the process of association which are attributed to the triumph of one industrial faction over another, and the changes in direction consequent upon this. By presenting these organizations within the broader context of entrepreneurial and associational activity, their accounts also call into question the extent to which the positions of Confindustria can be assumed to be representative of Italian industrialists as a whole.

This article sets out to throw light on the intellectual and scientific activities of a group of Spanish humanists associated with the diplomat, aristocrat, and writer Diego Hurtado de Mendoza in the course of his fifteen years in Venice, Trent, and Rome, focusing on two aspects that have been neglected to date. These are (a) the integration of practices connected with the study of nature (herborizing expeditions and the production of herbaria) with the work of collating, translating, and commenting on classical texts dealing with natural history and materia medica; and (b) the insertion of these scientific activities in Italy by the Spanish subjects of the Emperor Charles V within the broader context of a specific cultural policy. This policy would later be fleshed out in the scientific project of the Spanish Crown under Philip II, inseparable as it was from the monarch’s political and religious policy.

AbstractShimʻon Günzburg’s Yiddish collection of customs, first brought to press in Venice in 1589 and reprinted dozens of times over the following centuries, is often considered a mere translation of the Hebrew Minhagim put together by Ayzik Tyrnau in the 1420s. Another claim often made about the book is that, although it was first printed in Venice, it was intended less for the Italian book market than for export. This article sets out to test these assumptions by examining Günzburg’s compilation from the perspective of minhag, or prayer rite. Drawing on Yiddish manuscripts preserved from sixteenth-century Italy, as well as early printed editions overlooked by scholars, it argues that Günzburg’s Minhogim are, in fact, more Italian than has been recognized. It also points up their potential for a comparative history of Ashkenazic book culture across the political and linguistic borders of Europe.

As a consequence of its dismal experience in the War of Cambrai (1509-1517), the Venetian Republic adopted a military policy of avoiding battlefield encounters. As a commander in the war and as doge of Venice after 1523, Andrea Gritti was the foremost proponent of this strategy, earning for himself the appellation of "Fabius Maximus," the Roman general who opposed Hannibal by delay and defense in the Second Punic War. In the 1520s, the Republic aspired to play the role of a great power — or at least that of an independent, balancing force between France and the Spanish-Habsburg Empire; but its refusal to commit its troops to battle fatally weakened the political coalitions opposing Charles V and thereby significantly contributed to the rise of Habsburg hegemony in Italy. A major step toward Charles V's triumph was the infamous Sack of Rome in 1527, a calamity for which the Fabian policy of Venice bears some responsibility.

Studies of medieval society in recent years have laid increasing stress on the effectiveness of the power of the saints. They enriched their churches, defended their possessions, created great centres at once of pilgrimage and commerce and provided for the healing of the sick and the care of the poor. The cults of the saints formed a model for secular government. Kings appeared before their people as walking reliccollections and exercised the power of healing, and patron saints (like St Mark at Venice and St Denis in France) helped to define the identity of the political communities over whose well-being they were thought to preside. Often such saints, even those whose cults were rapidly developing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, were figures from the New Testament or from the ages of conversion: St James at Compostella, Mary Magdalen at Vézelay, and Benedict at Fleury. On occasions, however, a charismatic figure in contemporary society emerged as the centre of a healing cult and a focus for widespread devotion.

The article covers international and diplomatic aspects of the conflict of Sigismund of Luxembourg, the King of Hungary and the Romans, and the Republic of Venice in 1411—1413. Venetian claims to Dalmatia that nominally belonged to the Hungarian Crown were the formal reason of the conflict. The article notices that the main battleground was in Italia, not Dalmatia. The author thereupon concludes that the actual factor of the events was the competition between Italian states. But contrary to the traditional opinion the researcher assigns the part of the main power that competed with Venice to Florence, not Genoa. In the early fifteenth century it entered into the struggle for the outlet to the sea and sought the extension of its influence for account of new trade lines that connected the Mediterranean with Central and North Europe. Meanwhile, the head-on clash of the republics was ruled out because their relations guaranteed them both the safety of the political balance of Italy and the defence of the peninsula from external actions. But Florence could force Venice by the manipulation by the Italian policy of the King Sigismund. The instrument of the pressure was the potential union of the King and the Pope John XXIII. It was the interests of Florence that made it possible to explain the reason that kept them from direct official contacts. The investigation of the nature of the conflict reveals also its indirect connection with historical events related to West European states, Poland, the Teutonic Order, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans and the Golden Horde.

This thesis, presented as a theoretical contribution to the discipline of International Relations, describes the intellectual origins of the idea of the territorial state. The idea of the territorial state has a privileged place in International Relations for it is an integral element of Realism, the discipline's dominant intellectual tradition. Realism assumes that the primary actors in the modern international system are states, as identified by their exercise of sovereignty over a delimited space or territory. In Realist history, the territorial state and the modern territorial international order emerged together, twin products of seventeenth century political theory and practice, as signified by political settlement of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This thesis challenges the Realist narrative of the idea of the territorial state on two counts: methodologically and historically. First, it rejects the view that it is possible to account for the idea of the territorial state exclusively in terms of political practice and knowledge. It argues that the Realist idea of the territorial state needs to be understood as one expression of a much broader and more complex matrix of narratives - social, political, philosophical and cultural - about man's capacity to know, represent and order the spaces of modernity. Second, the thesis rejects the Realist history that dates the emergence of the territorial state to the seventeenth century. An alternative chronology is put forward that dates the origins of the idea of the territorial state to fifteenth and sixteenth century Renaissance Italy. The thesis argues that the first signs of the idea of the territorial state can be identified in various Renaissance spatial discourses: political, cosmological, artistic and cartographic. These spatial discourses and the practices they led to established the templates for thinking about and representing space in modernity, including those underlying the articulation of the idea of the modern territorial state.

Defence date: 30 November 1998
Examining board: Prof. Gerard Delille, European University Institute ; Prof. Olwen Hufton, Merton College, University of Oxford (thesis supervisor) ; Dr. Richard Mackenney, University of Edinburgh (external supervisor) ; Prof. Brian Pullan, University of Manchester
First made available online 29 August 2017
This study seeks to account for the political tranquillity of the Venetian people in early modem Venice (1550-1700). According to the ideology of the aristocratic elite, this was primarily attributable to its unique system of justice. Gasparo Contarini, the classic exponent of the 'myth' of Venice, derived the republic’s famed political stability from its guiding principle that, justice should be equally administered to all. Many studies have sought to explode this myth of Venetian justice by comparing these high principles with their operation in practice. The study focuses on the operation of the justice system in a specific area which touched the lives of all Venetians: the regulation of the internal market. As in other European cities, the market had a corporate structure, being divided up among guilds - privileged interested groups which possessed a monopoly on a limited sector of the market. While unusually, Venetian guilds were denied any formal political participation, alternative channels of communication between guilds and government existed in the courts, where the laws regulating the market might become the object of negotiation. The study of the courts therefore illuminates the whole question of guild-state relations in Venice. The role of the government in market justice was a dual one: it prosecuted lawbreakers in the name of the public interest, but was also the adjudicator of civil disputes between the rival private interests of the guilds. This is reflected in the division of the thesis into two halves. The first half examines the relation between public and private in the administration of the public law, while the second half focuses upon the resolution of private disputes, both between the guilds and within them. The study begins with a historiographical introduction to the problematic of political stability, justice and the world of the guilds. The first chapter examines the structure of the government courts and the extent to which the system was in fact governed by private interests. The gap between the law of the court-room and the reality of the street is examined in chapter two. The unreliability of the police forced the government to rely upon a system of self-interested policing by the guilds, and this gave the guilds significant influence over the implementation of policy in practice. Chapter three shows how government efforts to implement its own agenda in the public interest were often compromised by this need to cooperate with the guilds. The fourth chapter turns aside from issues of public law and looks within the boundaries of the guilds, seeking to determine to what extent they were genuinely popular institutions. Government regulations to protect ordinary guildsmen from dominance by a minority were also motivated by the desire to prevent the emergence of a wealthy class of elite guildsmen, who might have demanded political participation. Chapter five examines the nature of the external boundaries between guilds - their definition, violation and formation. The increasing rigidity of these boundaries in the seventeenth century and the consequent intensification of disputes between guilds were related to the imposition of an inflexible system of taxation by the government. Chapter six goes on to examine the resolution of such disputes, in terms of costs and legal procedures, and the consequences of this for rich and poor. Government attempts to impose an efficient system of summary justice were resisted by 'parasitic' elements within the courts - in particular those poorer nobles who earned their living from civil litigation. Tensions at the heart of the ruling elite therefore ensured that the free play of wealth in the court system was allowed to continue. The implications of the study are summarised in the conclusion.

This book is a collection of essays in honour of Giovannella Cresci Marrone, Professor of Roman History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, on the occasion of her retirement on 1 October 2021. The volume explores Giovannella’s interests through the eyes of a group of colleagues, who, over the years and since the very beginning of her academic career, have shared with her significant experiences in a professional and personal capacity. The essays cover the main domains of Giovannella’s scientific research: epigraphy and regional history, ancient writing cultures, historiography and political history, from the Greek classical period to the uses of the past in the twentieth century. Specific attention is given to the multiple patterns through which different areas of Italy were incorporated into the Roman world and to the scrutiny of several key figures of ancient history, such as Themistocles, Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Augustus, as well as their receptions. They also consider Giovannella’s innovative teaching methodologies and her commitment to the institutions at which she worked. The book is conceived as a tribute to the crucial role that Giovannella has played for her many pupils, for her countless students, and for all those who have had the privilege of benefiting in different ways from her mentorship.

AbstractIn general, historians of science and historians of ideas do not focus on critical appraisals of scientific ideas such as vitalism and materialism from Catholic intellectuals in eastern and southeastern Europe, nor is there much comparative work available on how significant European ideas in the life sciences such as materialism and vitalism were understood and received outside of France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Insofar as such treatments are available, they focus on the contributions of nineteenth century vitalism and materialism to later twentieth ideologies, as well as trace the interactions of vitalism and various intersections with the development of genetics and evolutionary biology see Mosse (The culture of Western Europe: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Westview Press, Boulder, 1988, Toward the final solution: a history of European racism. Howard Fertig Publisher, New York, 1978; Turda et al., Crafting humans: from genesis to eugenics and beyond. V&R Unipress, Goettingen, 2013). English and American eugenicists (such as William Caleb Saleeby), and scores of others underscored the importance of vitalism to the future science of “eugenics” (Saleeby, The progress of eugenics. Cassell, New York, 1914). Little has been written on materialism qua materialism or vitalism qua vitalism in eastern Europe.The Czech and Slovene cases are interesting for comparison insofar as both had national awakenings in the middle of the nineteenth century which were linguistic and scientific, while also being religious in nature (on the Czech case see David, Realism, tolerance, and liberalism in the Czech National awakening: legacies of the Bohemian reformation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010; on the Slovene case see Kann and David, Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918. University of Washington Press, Washington, 2010). In the case of many Catholic writers writing in Moravia, there are not only slight noticeable differences in word-choice and construction but a greater influence of scholastic Latin, all the more so in the works of nineteenth century Czech priests and bishops.In this case, German, Latin and literary Czech coexisted in the same texts. Thus, the presence of these three languages throws caution on the work on the work of Michael Gordin, who argues that scientific language went from Latin to German to vernacular. In Czech, Slovenian and Croatian cases, all three coexisted quite happily until the First World War, with the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s being particularly suited to linguistic flexibility, where oftentimes writers would put in parentheses a Latin or German word to make the meaning clear to the audience. Note however that these multiple paraphrases were often polemical in the case of discussions of materialism and vitalism.In Slovenia Čas (Time or The Times) ran from 1907 to 1942, running under the muscular editorship of Fr. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) devoted hundreds of pages often penned by Ušeničnik himself or his close collaborators to wide-ranging discussions of vitalism, materialism and its implied social and societal consequences. Like their Czech counterparts Fr. Matěj Procházka (1811–1889) and Fr. Antonín LenzMaterialismMechanismDynamism (1829–1901), materialism was often conjoined with "pantheism" and immorality. In both the Czech and the Slovene cases, materialism was viewed as a deep theological problem, as it made the Catholic account of the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the real presence untenable. In the Czech case, materialism was often conjoined with “bestiality” (bestialnost) and radical politics, especially agrarianism, while in the case of Ušeničnik and Slovene writers, materialism was conjoined with “parliamentarianism” and “democracy.” There is too an unexamined dialogue on vitalism, materialism and pan-Slavism which needs to be explored.Writing in 1914 in a review of O bistvu življenja (Concerning the essence of life) by the controversial Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik) Ušeničnik underscored that vitalism was an speculative outlook because it left the field of positive science and entered the speculative realm of philosophy. Ušeničnik writes that it was “Too bad” that Zarnik “tackles” the question of vitalism, as his zoological opinions are interesting but his philosophy was not “successful”. Ušeničnik concluded that vitalism was a rather old idea, which belonged more to the realm of philosophy and Thomistic theology then biology. It nonetheless seemed to provide a solution for the particular characteristics of life, especially its individuality. It was certainly preferable to all the dangers that materialism presented. Likewise in the Czech case, Emmanuel Radl (1873–1942) spent much of his life extolling the virtues of vitalism, up until his death in home confinement during the Nazi Protectorate. Vitalism too became bound up in the late nineteenth century rediscovery of early modern philosophy, which became an essential part of the development of new scientific consciousness and linguistic awareness right before the First World War in the Czech lands. Thus, by comparing the reception of these ideas together in two countries separated by ‘nationality’ but bounded by religion and active engagement with French and German ideas (especially Driesch), we can reconstruct not only receptions of vitalism and materialism, but articulate their political and theological valances.

In this essay Wight clarified the importance of dynastic legitimacy—that is, hereditary monarchy—in European history. In the Middle Ages and subsequent centuries, rulers were mainly princes who inherited their crowns. The principal exceptions were the leaders of republics, including Venice, Ragusa, Genoa, and Lucca in Italy; the Swiss confederation; and the United Provinces of the Low Countries. Dynastic principles included the theory that the ruler was chosen by God through hereditary succession, and that the monarch represented his or her subjects, notably with regard to the official religious denomination of the country. Such principles made dynastic marriages valuable means to provide heirs to the crown, to clarify succession to the throne, to consolidate alliances, to gain influence and wealth, and to legitimize territorial gains. Despite imprudent and egocentric behaviour by some royal leaders, monarchs were increasingly expected to pursue national rather than personal dynastic interests. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna reaffirmed dynastic principles of legitimacy, including in Venice and the Netherlands; the Swiss confederation was a conspicuous exception. Dynastic rulers have, however, tended to become symbols and instruments of national unity and self-determination. Popular support for dynastic houses has in many cases led to popular legitimacy for constitutional monarchies.

The chapter offers a comparative study that traces the evolution of fifteenth-century conspiracy literature, illustrating its distinctive features, narrative approaches, and political perspectives. The analysis focuses on the multiform operation of recasting classical models, which matches and, at the same time, underpins the ideological viewpoint in these texts. Specific attention is also paid to the multifunctional role of history in this literature, as it exploits historical narrative, historiographical techniques, and principles, in order to construct a historical memory that conveys a precise political message. This message coincides with the condemnation of the conspiracy as an attack against the state and the ‘prince’, who is now the dominant figure in the political discourse. The key elements that frame this political outlook in the texts are: the function of the author–narrator (as a poet, letter writer, historian, witness); the speeches delivered by historical characters; the stress on the exceptionality of the historical event; the portraits of the conspirators; the representation of the common people; the image of the revenge against the plotters; and the uneasy balance between clemency and vengeance in the ruler’s reaction to the conspiracy. Through the interplay of these components the texts reflect, and contribute to, the development of a theory of statecraft that is informed by a blossoming notion of political realism and plays a crucial role in the definition of a new model of state. Significantly this strand of political thought also emerged in mirrors for princes, which display many elements in common with works on plots.

The essay aims to outline the history of the teaching of Modern Greek at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice: it started with its foundation in 1868, with Costantino Triantafillis, and was interrupted for more than a century from 1890. This paper also deals with the history of the discipline from 1868 until today, with an eye on the connection with the political and cultural life of the country and on the relationship with other disciplines (such as Ancient Greek language and literature and Byzantine civilization). After an interval of a century classes of Modern Greek started up again at Ca’ Foscari in 1994-95 thanks to the teaching of Lucia Marcheselli Loukas. Since 1998 the teaching has been revived with a tenured professor and, in the last twenty years, it has trained graduate students and young scholars who today play a cultural and linguistic role of mediation between Italy and Greece.

This introduction explains the importance of the 1984 international gathering of anarchists in Venice and grounds Volontà in the history of 20^th century anarchism. After May 1968 and the militant radicalism in 1970s Italy, the leading intellectuals of the international anarchist movement were trying to think through “what now?” Anarchism, like the revolutionary left more broadly, was caught between a series of epochal shifts. The early 1980s saw the onset of what we would now call “neoliberalism”, entailing a dramatic transformation of the role of the state, work, rates of inequality, and the rise of consumerist individualism. Industrial employment went into freefall across the Global North, reconfiguring the global geographies of exploitation and class. Anarchism itself endured an existential challenge, subsumed in its political form under the so-called “new social movements”, with the ecological and feminist movements in particular taking the lead. These issues are not historical curiosities: the essays in this volume have lost none of their power in attempting to address these paradoxes not only in theory, but with the urgency of renewing a sense of what anarchism is (and could be) within a libertarian movement that can realistically strive to change the world.