Gloria Moorman (Oxford and Manchester), Enrico Zucchi (Padua) and Alessandro Metlica (Padua): 'Contending Representations of Power in Baroque Republics and Monarchies'

Alessandro Metlica, Introduction: Comparative Histories for Contending Representations

Gloria Moorman, Crowning the Republic: Books, Globes, and Celebrating State Power at the Seventeenth-Century Courts of Venice and France

With loss of territory and the waning glory of the Serenissima’s socio-cultural supremacy, in late seventeenth-century Venice the sting of defeat lingered in cultural consciousness. This stimulated Vincenzo Coronelli (1650-1718), a cosmographer active at the service of both the Republic of Venice and the French crown, to pursue unprecedented, celebratory strategies in the printed book and beyond. In years otherwise marked by the ongoing Morean War (1684–1699), which led to the highly significant Venetian reconquest of parts of Greece, Coronelli started to complement and re-combine an already immense output in new ways. By shedding light on some of the unstudied iconographies that appear in books and on globes formerly owned by Doge Francesco Morosini (1619-1694) and King Louis XIV (1638-1715) this paper will argue that Coronelli adjusted his regal representation of heaven and earth—first developed for the Sun King and his courtiers—to the worldview of republican audiences in Venice. I will show just how visual and textual representations of the so eagerly aspired, though ultimately short-lived, Venetian success in the Aegean archipelago did allow for Doge Morosini (r. 1688–1694) to symbolically rise to fame through the re-evocation of the lingering myth of Mediterranean—Venetian—imperialism marked by its Roman predecessors. By imaginatively using the geographies of former empires as the stage for a glorious past—put to work as a palimpsest on which to inscribe the present—Coronelli’s politically charged atlas books and globes seemingly reflect Morosini’s preoccupation with the shifting balance of power in seventeenth-century Europe.

Enrico Zucchi, A Local Hero, More Than a Christian Captain. The Underlining of Ligurian Origin in Genoese Literature Representing Ambrogio Spinola (1608-1652)

This paper surveys seventeenth-century Italian literary texts meant to represent the heroic deeds of Ambrogio Spinola, with particular emphasis on Genoese literature. While in baroque poems written at that time in Spain or in the Southern Netherlands, Ambrogio is portrayed as a supranational hero of the Respublica Christiana, Genoese literature underlines the Ligurian origin of Spinola, giving a very different image of the marquis. By depicting him as a local hero, Genoese baroque literary texts challenge the representation of Spinola as the Catholic champion, defender of the Spanish Empire, told for instance by Lope de Vega. However, the stress on the Marquis’ Genoeseness was due not only to a patriotic spirit. The last part of the paper focuses on the political intent that animated this reframing of Spinola’s image within the Genoese republican context, showing that poets such as Ansaldo Cebà tried to represent the marquis as the hero of the repubblichisti’s party. Even if this attempt turned into a fiasco, since Ambrogio was unanimously perceived as a princely figure, it granted to Spinola inclusion in the pantheon of early modern Genoese republican heroes.

Biographies

Alessandro Metlica is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies (DISLL). He completed his Master’s degree in Modern Literature and Philology (2009) and his PhD in Italian Literature (2013) at the University of Padova, and his diploma in Humanities (2010) at the Scuola Galileiana of Higher Education. He has been a Marie Curie CO-FUND Fellow (2013-2015) and FNRS chargé de recherche (2015-2018) at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He also received a Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Padova (2016-2018).

His research focuses on the representation of power in early modern Europe, in terms of both subversion (libertinism, free thinking) and containment (eulogy, propaganda). He has published two critical editions with in-depth commentary on key texts by Italian libertine authors, such as Ferrante Pallavicino (1615-1644) and Giovan Battista Casti (1724-1803). He has edited two volumes of essays dealing with the staging of absolutism through lyric poetry in Vienna and in Paris. His studies on the political ritualization of power during the Ancien Régime are thus significant on a European scale (Papal Rome, Tsarist Russia, the Hapsburg Empire, and Bourbon France). In 2020 he has published the research monograph Le seduzioni della pace. Giovan Battista Marino, le feste di corte e la Francia barocca. The book investigates the role played by poetry, and namely by Marino’s poem Adone, in the staging of Louis XIII of France’s and Maria de Medici’s power.

Gloria Moorman investigates the visual representation of power across early modern Italy, with a special emphasis on Rome and Venice. Gloria received her PhD from the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (2019), followed by a three-year postdoctoral appointment at the University of Padua. There the research for her present paper first emerged in the context of the ERC project RISK: Republics on the Stage of Kings. Representing Republican State Power in the Europe of Absolute Monarchies (Late 16th-Early 18th Century), led by Professor Alessandro Metlica. In 2025, she will be Mellon Foundation Long-Term Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her new project, provisionally entitled Catacombs, Sacred Archaeology, and the Early Printed Book: The Global Ownership of Discovery (c. 1578-1700), looks at the historical appropriation of the Jewish, Christian, and pagan catacombs (subterranean cemeteries) of the former Roman Empire. By studying their representation over time, this project aims to further our understanding of the global reception of cultural interconnectivity in the Mediterranean, newly revealed through the lens of book ownership. Gloria currently works at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester, where she is an AHRC Research Associate on the project Envisioning Dante, c. 1472–c. 1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page, led by Professors Guyda Armstrong and Simon Gilson.            
 

Enrico Zucchi is lecturer and tenure-track researcher at the University of Padova, where he gained his PhD in 2017. His research interests focus mainly on 17th- and 18th-century European theater, particularly on the political contents of Italian tragedy, the literary theory developed by the Accademia d’Arcadia, theatrical criticism, and the literary historiography of the 18th century. Recently he has published editions of Carlo de’ Dottori’s Aristodemo (2023), Giovan Mario Crescimbeni’s La bellezza della volgar poesia (2018), and Pietro Calepio’s Paragone della poesia tragica d’Italia con quella di Francia (2017). He carried out his research projects, thanks to different fellowships and grants, in Turin (Fondazione 1563 per l’arte e la cultura), Paris (Sorbonne – Paris IV), Strasbourg, Leiden (Scaliger Institute), and Bergen. Zucchi was a member of the ERC project RISK – Republics on the Stage of Kings, working on the republic of Genoa, and he published several essays on the representation of Genoese republicanism in Genoese, Dutch, Venetian and Spanish literature. He edited, together with Alessandro Metlica, the book Questioning Republicanism in Early Modern Genoa (2024), published Brepols. Enrico is now PI of the National Research Project (PRIN) Representing Arcadia before and after the Arcadia (2022-2024), meant to investigate the representation of landscape in early modern pastoral literature (pastoral plays and novels).

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