The social lives of paintings in Sixteenth-Century Venice

This thesis studies Venetian painting in its golden age, the sixteenth century, from an unconventional, anthropological point of view. Paintings of masters like Titian are demonstrated to have had social lives. Together with human beings they were embedded in social networks in which humans and paintings interacted; this happened to such an extent that paintings indeed became person-like. These interactions could take many forms; examples that are analysed include the miraculous image that is believed to supernaturally heal the faithful; images that suffer from violence (iconoclasm); and the veneration of female portraits that became substitutes for their absent sitters. Making use of a wide variety of sources, such as chronicles, letters, poetry, treatises, and legal documents, this study argues that the remarkable agency of these paintings was the result of a highly complex interplay of forces; religious, political, social, cultural and artistic factors all carried weight. One of its major conclusions is that the role of the artist, the one who physically produced the work, was relatively unimportant for the way these paintings functioned. Using a framework that is both anthropologically and historically informed, this thesis offers a new model for the study of pre-modern European art that is less biased by conceptions of art in the modern West.LEI Universiteit LeidenNWOMedieval and Early Modern Studie