Join Marie-Louise Lillywhite (Oxford) and Giulia Zanon (Ca' Foscari, University of Venice) in conversation with Alex Bamji (Leeds) and Philip Cottrell (UCD) as they celebrate the publication of Reforming Art in Renaissance Venice and Cittadini of Venice: Shaping Identities between Networks and Patronage (c. 1530-1690) with friends, colleagues and well-wishers.

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In Reforming Art in Renaissance Venice, Marie-Louise Lillywhite considers the impact of religious reform on the devotional art and architecture of sixteenth-century Venice. Interrogating early modern censorship, artistic liberty, notions of decorum tied to depictions of the body, and the role of sacred images in the shaping of local identity, she shows how Venice, a crossroads city exposed to a rich gamut of religious and artistic currents, serves as a fascinating case study through which to explore these themes. Her study reconstructs the conditions that enabled artistic invention to prevail and how artists became interpreters of spiritual values.

In Cittadini of Venice: Shaping Identities between Networks and Patronage (c. 1530-1690), Giulia Zanon sheds new light on our grasp of social hierarchy and the possibilities for social mobility in pre-modern Italy. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines deep archival research with a multitude of artistic and architectural artefacts, this work breaks new ground by contextualizing the part played by social relationships and the arts in publicly affirming and displaying the prestige of the middling sorts, the cittadini, in early modern Venice.

Book Launch: Marie-Louise Lillywhite and Giulia Zanon