The Queen of Genoa and Baroque Territorial Aesthetics

My dissertation project is an interdisciplinary exploration of 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, drawings, 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 through art.

The focus is on the visual and material culture of the Republic of Genoa (Liguria, Corsica, and the islands of the North African coast and the Aegean Sea) between the 1620s and the 1660s and its transregional and transhistorical connections. In a crucial phase for the political, artistic, and economic history of the Republic, its diverse territory was mediated in multiple ways through art. The first part of the dissertation considers the iconography of the Virgin Mary as Queen of the Republic of Genoa and its geographical expansion in the western Mediterranean as a palimpsest of devotional practices and political interests. The second part focuses on the personifications of Genoa’s military, infrastructural, and technological achievements and the idea of an ‘embodied wilderness’ in Corsica’s female allegories. Considering the temporal dimensions of territorial representations, the final part critically reflects on how the islands of Corsica, Chios, and Tabarca have been used to construct political landscapes, memorialize colonial histories, and reaffirm extractivist practices through images.