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This book examines for the first time how ancient Egypt is reflected in early modern Venetian sources. As a center of the printing industry, Venice was an important hub for the accumulation and dissemination of direct information on the Near East and the Levant. Therefore, ancient Egypt played a significant role in the cultural memory of Venice due to the lagoon city's religious and mercantile orientation towards the East. The book explores how the acquisition, selection, and interpretation of Egyptian objects took shape in Venice, and which actors were involved in the circulation of knowledge about ancient Egypt. Venice can be used as a lens through which to understand the reception of ancient Egypt in the early modern period. Meaningful and partly unpublished sources from primarily Italian archives highlight the visual imagination of ancient Egypt and its lexicographical codification. The author draws upon these sources to examine the Venetian image of ancient Egypt in the early modern period and the epistemic change that accompanied it.
List of contents
.- Introduction.
.- Part I. The Beginnings: Venice and the East in the Tre and Auattrocento.
.- 2. Accumulation, Integration and Assimilation: The Reception of Antiquity as Part of the Venetian Civic Identity.
.- 3. Ancient Egypt in Literature: The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
.- 4. Beyond Egypt: The Discovery of the Ancient Near East in Venice.- Part II. The Ancient Metropolises of Alexandria and Cairo.
.- 5. The Old in the New: The Urban Transformation of Alexandria.
.- 6. Cairo: The "New" City and the Ancient Monuments.- Part III. The Discovery of Upper Egypt.
.- 7. Upper Egypt: An Unknown Geographical Area?.
.- 8. The Ancient Monuments of Upper Egypt.- Part IV. Collecting Ancient Egyptian Objects.
.- 9. Materiality, Space and Self-fashioning: Aegyptiaca in Early Modern Collections.
.- 10. The Sixteenth Century.
.- 11. The Seventeenth Century.
.- 12. The Eighteenth Century.- Part V. Conclusions.
.- 13. Conclusion.
About the author
Sabine Herrmann is an independent scholar based in Venice, Italy. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Stiftung (IGM), the Georg-August University of Göttingen, and the University of Tübingen, all in Germany.
