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The article focuses on the discovery of a footnote in Jacob Burckhardt's book on the Renaissance, which mentions a high-ranking Venetian military officer of Black African ancestry Topics include the limited information available about this commander, the context of his appearance in historical records, and the potential influence of his career on the creation of Othello's character in Shakespeare's play.

During the early modern period, island books ( isolari) were among the major print genres by which the Venetian reading public learned about the Mediterranean and the New World. This article focuses on the intellectual, social and cultural processes through which these books constructed islands as objects of inquiry and created textual and visual knowledge about the Aegean archipelago and the Venetian overseas dominions. It shows how diverse communities of practitioners, networks of information and ways of knowing shaped the production of these cultural artefacts, and analyses the connections between images of insularity and notions of empire in Venetian metropolitan culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Venetian patrician portraits of the late fifteenth century document deeply ingrained expectations of that class. Largely static and impassive, the subjects of independent portraits appear as slight variations on a theme, rather than as studies of individuals. In contrast, Titian's (Tiziano Vecellio, ca. 1488–1576) early portraits seem to represent a significant departure from tradition and reveal the artist's commitment to portraying personality, as well as physiognomy. In this article, I suggest that Titian's success was due in part to his knowledge of and sensitivity to the social constraints of late fifteenth-century Venetian culture. In turn, this allowed him to consciously accommodate traditional expectations of his patrician clientele while incrementally introducing the modern portrait. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Magical texts enjoyed a very wide circulation during the early modern period. Their nature allowed them to satisfy a variety of publics and interests: they represented a popular genre across different social and cultural hierarchies. The particular responses which magical books and papers elicited through reading and reproduction make them a very interesting case study for the analysis of the modes of proposal and reception of texts. The circular relationship between reading and writing - incidentally, an inevitable by-product of censorship - allows us not only to establish the impact of this literature on readers and users, but also to witness the process of constant re-elaboration of contents and forms. Elastic par excellence, addressing both men and women, the literate as well as the illiterate, in early modern Venice magical books and papers were widely popular artefacts. The paper aims to portray some of the key features of this output, by considering the modes and procedures through which texts were created and reading was enacted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the birth and development of the political archives that Venetian patrician families kept in their private palaces for the use of the Republic's officeholders. It will shed light on the different uses made of public documents as well as on the different approaches to recordkeeping, from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. These archives, shared by all family members and transmitted from generation to generation, eventually became extremely voluminous partly because copies from documents in public registries were made and kept, but also because new types of analytical documents based on data extracted from the public record were introduced. Until the eighteenth century, when rational retrieval systems began to be introduced, the documents were kept in 'buste' (containers) and extracted as and when needed by the officeholder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the modern pioneer of Austrian language consciousness Karl Kraus's concept of the word "origin." Kraus's Ursprung or Ziel dichotomy is manifested in a variety of works, in poetic, dramatic and prosaic form. One of the recurrent themes in Kraus research concerns his complex relationship to his Jewish roots. Kraus could be quite acerbic towards the Viennese Jewish community of which he was a nominal member before his conversion to Catholicism, but he also criticized the widespread anti-Semitism prevalent in Vienna. Though Kraus was not a religious man in a traditional sense, he clearly felt a religious reverence for "origin" as an ideal aesthetic and epistemological purpose. Remaining at the origin for Kraus meant attaining the "goal" of wisdom, of an extraordinary insight into and understanding of worldly affairs. He was of the belief that when one is open to the way creation is still touched by origin, one will find beauty, and feel the divine presence of the cosmos.

Presents an approach to estimating the cost of living in 14th century Venice, Italy. Similar attempt by Gino Luzzatto, economic historian; Significant use of record of probate; Related information on rents, clothing, pay of servants and inflation.

This article reports that half-century before 1470 was an era in which many notable palaces were built in Venice; collectively they can be regarded as a paradigm of the Serenissima's imperial age, the period in which the maritime Republic acquired a wealthy and extensive Terraferma Empire to complement the ancient Empire da Mar. The great houses of the Venetian merchant-nobility were already a well-established building typology; they fulfilled two distinct but complementary functions within a single building envelope; the fòndaco or warehouse for the goods in which the merchant-noble traded, and, above it, the spacious apartment in which he and his family lived. The fòndaco was provided with direct access to the water for the delivery of goods, and already by 1400 much of the length of the Grand Canal was lined with such houses.