The Paradox of Perfection
Reproducing the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2109463 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jutta Sperling, Jutta Gisela Sperling (Hampshire College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 3-32 |
| Publication date | 1999-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0010417599001851 |
| PMID | 20120553 |
| OpenAlex | W2024438301 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
The gorgons had thus the same effect as paradoxes. For paralysis means: immobility; and immobility: to be unable to observe (Niklas Luhmann).Niklas Luhmann, “Sthenographie und Euryalistik,” Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht und K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. (Frankfurt a. M., 1991), 58. Recently, the “paradoxical” character of sixteenth-century Venetian politics and culture has become the focus of attention among scholars of early modern Venice. In her book on City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice, Martha Feldman states that “Venice was above all a paradoxical city,” given the “divided consciousness” of Venetians whose urban culture oscillated “in a peculiarly ambivalent counterpoise” to contemporary court culture.Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995), 10. Margaret Rosenthal has examined how Veronica Franco, poetess and prostitute in sixteenth-century Venice, portrayed herself as an “honest courtesan,” ingeniously appropriating the oxymoronic Venus-Virgin paradigm in Venetian iconography.Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1992). According to Edward Muir, the doge's “two contrasting personae, one so humbled and the other so splendid,” were the complementary features of a “paradoxical prince.”Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton University Press, 1981), 261. I would like to contribute to this debate by analyzing how the social practice of marriage among the patriciate and the language of perfection in sixteenth-century political discourse followed the logic of paradoxical constellations. Rather than arguing for a causal connection between social practice on the one hand and political theory on the other, I propose to apply one analytical framework to investigate the paradoxical qualities of different social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena which were at the center of politics and society in Late Renaissance Venice
Ambivalence · Art · Art history · Body politic · Iconography · Perfection · Political culture · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Renaissance · Theology · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,18 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2024 (16) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |