Territorial Aesthetics: Genoa's Visual Politics across Mediterranean Ecologies, 1625–1655

This dissertation examines the emergence of territory as a political, devotional, and ecological category within early modern aesthetic discourses. It investigates how territories take shape in images and how, in turn, images participate in shaping terrestrial, aquatic, and coastal environments. It traces the visual presence of the territorial in paintings, sculptures, and prints—at times as a model of a city, a coastal view, a personification of a real or imagined land, or a marginal detail in an altarpiece. Focusing less on what a territory represents than on how it produces meaning through form, the study explores how artists and patrons articulated an aesthetic discourse of territory.

The dissertation centers on the visual and material culture of the Republic of Genoa between the 1620s and 1650s, across a wide transregional horizon—from Liguria, Corsica, and Southern Italy to the Iberian Atlantic, North Africa, and the Aegean Sea. The first section examines the iconography of the Virgin Mary as Queen of the Republic and its diffusion across the Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic, framing it as part of a broader effort to establish Genoa symbolically as a royal dominion through visualizations of territory. The second reassesses urban and extra-urban iconographies of Genoa, Liguria, and Corsica, while the third analyzes the relationship between bodies and territories through ecocritical and postcolonial perspectives. The final section investigates the temporalities of landscape, particularly in archipelagic contexts, revealing how visual constructions of territory defined political geographies, memorialized colonial histories, and sustained extractive practices.

By exploring images through the category of territory, this dissertation reassesses the visual history of Genoa’s dominion in the first half of the seventeenth century. Its aim is to map how different actors defined and negotiated its territories through art, offering a more nuanced and complicating perspective on Genoa’s art history at a moment of profound transformation. By situating Genoa’s visual politics within Mediterranean ecologies, the study redefines territory as an aesthetic operation: an unstable, generative process through which images become sites of resonance, interference, and diffraction between geopolitics and geo-aesthetics.