The Queen of Genoa and Early Modern Territorial Aesthetics

My dissertation explores the concept of territory as a political, devotional, and ecological category within aesthetic discourses. It examines how territories emerge in images and how images shape terrestrial, aquatic, and coastal environments. It looks at traces of the territorial in paintings, sculptures, and prints: sometimes an elaborate model of a city, sometimes a view of a coastline, or the personification of a real (or imagined) territory, sometimes just a minor detail in the background of an altarpiece. Looking at the aesthetic emergence of territory not so much through the lens of what a territory represents in visual media, but how it produces meaning through form, the project investigates how artists and patrons created an aesthetic discourse of territory. 

The dissertation centers on the visual and material culture of the Republic of Genoa—including Liguria, Corsica, and the islands of the North African coast and the Aegean Sea—between the 1620s and 1650s, while also considering transregional and transhistorical connections. During this pivotal phase in the Republic’s political, artistic, and economic history, its diverse territories were mediated through art in multiple ways. The first section examines the iconography of the Virgin Mary as Queen of the Republic of Genoa and its diffusion across the Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast as part of a political (and artistic) project to symbolically establish the Republic as a royal dominion. The second section critically reassesses urban and extra-urban iconographies of Genoa, Liguria, and Corsica, while the third focuses on the relationship between bodies and territories. Through an analysis of the male personification of Genoa’s military achievements and the female personification of Corsica, this section foregrounds ecocritical and postcolonial perspectives in the debate on allegory. Finally, the last section considers the temporal dimensions of territorial representations, reflecting on how images of the Ligurian Sea and the islands of Corsica, Chios, and Tabarca have been used to construct political landscapes, memorialize colonial histories, and reaffirm extractivist practices.