Renaissance Venice Research Paper

According to Peter Burke, “The most favourable environment for artists to grow up in

seems to have been a city which was oriented towards craft-industrial production, such as

Florence, rather that towards trade or services, such as Naples or Rome. It was only when

Venice turned from trade to industry at the end of the fifteenth century, that Venetian art

caught up with that of Florence.” Artisans in Venice like the Bellini Brothers and others such

as Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese have arguably surpassed artists in other regions of Italy in

their specialties.

Peter Humfrey expresses, “In his later years Giovanni Bellini presided over one

of the largest painters’ workshops anywhere; in addition to the usual apprentices and
Commission streamed from a host of private ecclesiastic, and civic

sources, not to mention many foreign clients, and this thriving market supported numerous

painters of varying reputation and specialization.”

In Venice, according to Clarie Judde De Lariviére, it was the patriciate, not the king or

the emperor, who embodied sovereignty. The status of Venetian artists is another interesting

peace of this puzzle. Edward Muir, in his article, “Images of Power: Art and Pageantry in

Renaissance Venice” expounds upon the importance and the social standing of artists in

Renaissance Venice. Muir conveys, “The Venetian creation of a civic cult around the

achievements of a distinguished past is evident in the ornamentation of the Ducal Palace.

Although many of the palace’s early art treasures were lost in a series of disastrous fires,

huge canvases on historical and allegorical subjects, much like the late sixteenth- century

ones that today dominate the vast halls of the palace, must have served to extort earlier

generations of aristocratic magistrates to emulate the virtues of their
“By appropriating the tangible symbols of imperial power and authority”, according to

David Buckton and John Osborne, authors of the article, “The Enamel of Doge Ordelaffo Falier

on the Pala D’Oro in Venice”, “Venice laid claim to that power, and there was no more

appropriate place to make such a claim than on the high alter of the state church, a church

which served in so many ways as a metaphor for the Venetian republic itself.” Specifically,

horses are a subject that can be seen constantly through Venetian sculpture and architecture.

Marilyn Perry reports, “While the horses were certainly admirable, in medieval eyes, for their

lifelike quality, far greater value lay in their provenance, monumentality and rarity as gilded

bronze, and care was taken to achieve an appropriate impression of dominance in their

display.”

Revisiting the theme of public and private, Richard Mackenney observes, “The

juxtaposition of the two locations as political, and therefore ‘public’ and commercial,