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From the Myth to the Margins: The Patriarch’s Piazza at San Pietro di Castello in Venice*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abstract
This study analyzes the campo of San Pietro di Castello from its mythologized origins to the Renaissance, paying particular attention to the architectural and political forces that shaped it. Although San Pietro was Venice’s cathedral from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, civic leaders marginalized the site, which incarnated the contentious relationship between the Roman Church and the Venetian republic. The essay places the campo at the center of inquiry because the episcopal complex’s significance is best discerned through diachronic analysis of the urban landscape. The building activities of its medieval and Quattrocento patrons generated a heterogeneous campo that incorporated morphological elements from two Venetian urbanistic types: the parish campo and the monastic island. Its sixteenth-century patriarchs created a new architectural vision of the campo, contesting its slippage from the center of Venetian life and forging a distinctive ensemble that differs markedly from the better-known piazzas at San Marco and Rialto.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2011
Footnotes
Please see the online version of this article for color illustrations.
I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Alan K. and Leonarda F. Laing Endowment, and the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for their generous support of this research project, which emerged from investigations launched during an NEH Summer Seminar in Venice in 2006. I would like to thank the seminar’s participants; the organizers, panelists, and audiences at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Chicago in 2008 in a session on the city of Venice and at the November 2008 symposium Innenraum und Außenraum: Wie formt der Platz die Stadt, held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence; as well as Niall Atkinson, Patricia Fortini Brown, Lorenzo Calvelli, Diane Cole Ahl, Tracy Cooper, Mia Genoni, Seth C. Jayson, Robert G. La France, Heather HydeMinor, Vernon HydeMinor, Paola Modesti, Debra Pincus, Gary Radke, Dennis Romano, Daniel Savoy, Marvin Trachtenberg, Francesco Turio Böhm, this journal’s editors, and the manuscript’s anonymous reviewers for their insights and assistance during the manuscript’s gestation. All translations are mine except when noted otherwise.
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