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Crusade Propaganda in Word and Image in Early Modern Italy: Niccolò Guidalotto’s Panorama of Constantinople (1662) *

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby
Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby*
Affiliation:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
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Abstract

The focus of this article is a vast seventeenth-century panorama of Constantinople, which is an exceptional drawing of the city, currently displayed at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The panorama is an elaborate piece of anti-Ottoman propaganda designed by the Franciscan friar Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. Guidalotto also prepared a large manuscript, held in the Vatican Library, which details the panorama’s meaning and the motivation behind its creation. It depicts the city as seen from across the Golden Horn in Galata, throwing new light on both the city and the relationships between the rival Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. It also trumpets the unalloyed Christian zeal of Niccolò Guidalotto and serves as a fascinating example of visual Crusade propaganda against the Ottomans in the early modern period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , Summer 2014 , pp. 503 - 543
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2014

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 157/10) and was presented at the 2012 RSA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, and at the 2012 conference for the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto, “Early Modern Migrations: Exiles, Expulsion, and Religious Refugees.” I would like to thank Dr. Doron J. Lurie, chief conservator and senior curator of the Old Masters section in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art for his generous help. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers for Renaissance Quarterly for their encouragement, constructive comments, and suggestions. All translations are by the author.

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