Polytopos: Venice, Empire, Art

Presenter: Letha Ch'ien

Presenter Status: Faculty

Department: Art

Funding Source/Sponsor: RSCAP

Screenshot URL: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1JVRLVLDXTRQIfvqPatl71zBKc5TEuZfr

Abstract:
Examination of Venetian polytopic practice reveals new aspects of empire and greater cultural continuity over time than previous stylistic and period studies have suggested. My new modal approach supplies substantial contributions to art history and early modern studies of identity. I analyze the Basilica San Marco and its eponymous piazza as a Noranian lieu de memoire, producer of identity. Through investigation of the polytopic translation into imagery, I have discovered the creation and use of spectacular images before the complete government mastery Guy Debord stipulated as a condition of the Society of the Spectacle in his 1967 treatise. The persistence of polytopos in Venetian polytopic imagery supplies a history for the Society of the Spectacle that has been absent from the literature. Indeed, the introduction of polytopos reveals nothing less than a major political and personal conceptual model and mode of idea generation that has been overlooked by previous scholarship.

Polytopos proved an enduring and effective strategy for Venetian viewers even as geopolitical circumstances and artistic styles changed. By focusing on modality rather than genre or style, we learn how images produced a spectacle enabling an enduring unequal and contradictory society. In settings ranging from government stages to prestigious confraternities to homes furnished with private devotional images, polytopos pervaded Venetian visual culture, continuously reflecting to Venetian eyes pictures in which Venice was defined as a paradox: the local that contained the foreign.