Anxieties and Influences: Italian Cultural Entanglements with the Ottoman Empire, 1400 - 1600

This project examines the cultural specifics of cross-cultural interaction and artistic mobility in four distinct Italian sites connected to the Adriatic world as it seeks to trace out larger networks of exchange. The first portion of the project looks to current academic models of exchange as they relate to Venice and interrogates their applicability within the peripheries of the Venetian Empire: sites like Bergamo and the Venetian Adriatic colonies. The second half of the project looks to Southern Italy, where Venetian cultural expansion comes into direct competition with Naples as both polities attempt to wrest control of the Adriatic in the wake of Ottoman aggression. Integral to this project is the role of Ottoman goods, culture, and encroachment within the Adriatic in shaping artistic response within local contexts. A final stage of this project seeks to synthesize the various modes of cultural contact explored throughout weave them together into a more cohesive theoretical model that juxtaposes horizontal (cotemporaneous) and vertical (historical) modes of cultural transmission.