The Lost Map of Matteo de' Pasti: Cartography, Diplomacy, and Espionage in the Renaissance Adriatic (original) (raw)
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in Ben-Aryeh Debby N. Katrin Kogman Appel, Ingrid Baumgarten ed., Maps and Travel: Knowledge, Imagination and Visual Culture, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 342-61., 2019
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The Ottoman Mediterranean and the Renaissance Venetian Isolarii
Studii şi Materiale de Istorie Medie , 2015
The main contention of this article is that from the very beginning of the genre to its very end, the Venetian isolarii viewed the Levant as a network of islands fractured by the Ottomans’ conquest. Cartographical narratives of a historical trauma, the Venetian isolarii adopted different strategies for tackling a highly sensitive topic. As the Ottomans were steadily advancing along the Eastern Mediterranean archipelagos, the Venetian cartographers, such as Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti and Benedetto Bordone, were carefully editing the content of their isolarii, expecting from their readers to mentally map the invisible confrontation between the Sultan’s army and the Serenissima. The Lepanto victory brought a radical change of tone, and the mapmakers, such as Tomasso Porcacchi, Giovanni Camocio or Simon Pinargenti, manifestly joined the choir of those who were looking forward to the Venetian resurgence in the Levant. The fracture of the Eastern Mediterranean space was no longer suggested, but visibly exposed. However, it was only a change of tone, as the mapmakers continued to convey the same fundamental ideas. Thus, the Venetian isolarii display a remarkable continuity through time, from its beginnings to the post-Lepanto era and illustrate both the enduring format of this cartographic genre and its adaptability.
Germania et Italia. Liber amicorum Hubert Houben, Francesco Filotico, Lioba Geis, Francesco Somaini [Eds.], 2 vols, (Salento: Università del Salento, 2024), II: 729-744., 2024
The late seventeenth-century Adriatic and Ionian Seas saw the martialing of Venetian and Hospitaller forces to contest the Ottoman presence in the Balkans and Greece. General Francesco Morosini (1619-1694), commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force sent by Venice, and Fra Giovanni Battista Brancaccio (1611-1686), Captain General of the Hospitaller galley squadron, met at Corfu to prepare their advances against the Ottomans in early July 1684. The two military leaders, together with their advisors, pored over plans and maps of their intended targets: Santa Maura (Leukas) and Prevesa (Preveza). This subtle vignette describing the planning of military actions by the two generals and their staff reminds us of what Braudel called the «significance of anecdote», where such «apparently trivial details tell us more than any formal description about the life of Mediterranean man». Yet, while these maps and plans provided the Venetian and Hospitaller forces with essential information for their assault, they also provided an imaginative space to project their worldview on lands and peoples. For maps, with their place names, illustrations, and decoration, are more than an objective, one-dimensional representation of geographic space on paper: they are a window into a time, place, and mentality of their creators.