Course description
This multicultural course studies the rich cartographic imagination of Venice and the territories of its Republic in literary and visual examples from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, and situates this creative approach within the broader history of diplomatic and ambassadorial exchanges that have long connected the city with and beyond the East. The textual examples under investigation span from Marco Polo’s ventures to China and India (among other destinations) in his Il Milione to the various relazioni produced by ambassadors from Venice and elsewhere. Students will be introduced to polyglots like Giovanni Battista Ramusio, whose examples in the Navigationi et Viaggi (Navigations and Travels) will be read parallel to the narrative representation of travels by Magellan and Giosafat Barbaro, as well as the Descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa) by Leo Africanus.

Engagement with the literary history of early mapping of lands between the East and West will guide students in their examination of various maps produced in the early modern world (e.g., Peter Apian’s Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1550), Claudius Ptolemaeus’ Geographie opus novissima (Strasbourg, 1513), Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Cronicarum cum figuris (Nuremberg, 1493), Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1595), among others). A collection of textual and visual examples will be available to students in Cesare Vecellio’s The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas (1590, 1598), a two-volume set of illustrated costumes associated with different geographical regions of the world that seeks to represent figures from doges and farmers. Examination of the various visual allegories of continents and geographical centers will accompany this unit of the course. So as to welcome other art historical examples of the cartographic imagination into the seminar, students will study visual works by Paolo Veronese, Palma Vecchio, Vittore Carpaccio, and Rosalba Carriera. Direct engagement with these examples will feature throughout the course (when appropriate) at various Venetian cultural institutions.

As students interact with textual and visual modes of representing the cartographic imagination, they will discuss the following questions: what information is conveyed in imagining space, peoples, lands, and territories in visual and textual examples? What presumptions emerge from the cartographic imagination and upon what notions of difference, identity, and power do they depend? What tools (aesthetic, epistemological, analytical, etc.) are used to translate the cartographic imagination into text and art? To what modern examples of the cartographic imagination can we compare our various course materials? How is the legacy of the Venetian cartographic imagination remembered today?

Course evaluation
Active Participation and Attendance (25%)
Weekly Response Papers (1–2 pages max) (15%)
One Discussion Leader, responsible for 3 discussion questions to be posed in class (10%)
Three Cultural Artifact Reflection Posts, based on site visits (250 words each) (15%)
Two Literary Analysis Close Reading Mini-Papers (3–4 pages max each) (15%)
Final Research Paper and Presentation, a comparative or single case study analysis of themes related to course content (8–10 pages max) (20%)

Primary readings include (in full and selections), to be made available in English:

Marco Polo, Il Milione
Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigationi et Viaggi
Cesare Vecellio, The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas
Antonio Pigafetta, First Voyage around the World
Leo Africanus, Descrittione dell’Africa
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Charles Dickens, “An Italian Dream,” Pictures of Italy, ch. 7
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey
Georg Simmel, “Venice”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Critical scholarship on mapping, geography, spatial theory, and anthropology will feature in the course and include such authors as Homi K. Bhabha, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Benedict Anderson, Zygmunt Bauman, and Pierre Bourdieu.

Last updated: May 29, 2024