The Venetian Discovery of America : Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters

Few Renaissance Venetians saw the New World with their own eyes. As the print capital of early modern Europe, however, Venice developed a unique relationship to the Americas. Venetian editors, mapmakers, translators, writers, and cosmographers represented the New World at times as a place that the city's mariners had discovered before the Spanish, a world linked to Marco Polo's China, or another version of Venice, especially in the case of Tenochtitlan. Elizabeth Horodowich explores these various and distinctive modes of imagining the New World, including Venetian rhetorics of 'firstness', similitude, othering, comparison, and simultaneity generated through forms of textual and visual pastiche that linked the wider world to the Venetian lagoon. These wide-ranging stances allowed Venetians to argue for their different but equivalent participation in the Age of Encounters. Whereas historians have traditionally focused on the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World, and the Dutch and English mapping of it, they have ignored the wide circulation of Venetian Americana. Horodowich demonstrates how with their printed texts and maps, Venetian newsmongers embraced a fertile tension between the distant and the close. In doing so, they played a crucial yet heretofore unrecognized role in the invention of America. Cover......Page 1 Half-title......Page 3 Title page......Page 5 Copyright information......Page 6 Dedication......Page 7 Contents......Page 9 List of Figures......Page 11 Acknowledgments......Page 15 One Introduction: Printing the New World in Early Modern Venice......Page 19 Two Compiled Geographies: The Venetian Travelogue and the Americas......Page 39 The New World in Venetian Printed Texts: An Overview......Page 40 The Americas in Venetian Prefaces......Page 44 The First Printed Venetian Travel Compendia: The Libretto de tutta la navigatione (1504) and the Paesi novamente retrovati (1507)......Page 50 The Manuscript Compendia of Alessandro Zorzi: New World Marginalia......Page 59 Appendix: Venetian Americana......Page 77 Three Giovanni Battista Ramusio's Venetian New World......Page 81 Ramusio's Summario (1534)......Page 82 Ramusio's Navigazioni e viaggi (1550-1559)......Page 84 Ramusio, Christopher Columbus, and Marco Polo......Page 86 Venice and the Black Legend......Page 94 The Travel Compendium in Venice: The Movement of Information in a Globalizing Genre......Page 101 The Legacy of Ramusio's New World......Page 104 Four The Venetian Mapping of the Americas......Page 107 Venetian Maps, an Overview: Worldliness, Authorship, and the Transmission of Iberian Knowledge......Page 111 Maps for Armchair Travel: The Wealth, Exoticism, and Marvels of the New World......Page 123 Marco Polo in the New World: America as Asia......Page 144 Venice and Spain......Page 151 The Venetian Cartographic Legacy: Northern Europe and the Atlas......Page 153 Five Venetians in America: Nicolò Zen and the Virtual Exploration of the New World......Page 161 The Zen Family in Venice......Page 164 Credibility in the Early Modern Travelogue......Page 165 The Creation of a Venetian America: Pastiche......Page 168 The Creation of a Venetian America: Substitution......Page 174 Nicolò Zen's Venetian New World......Page 178 Ferdinand Colombus's Historie: A Coda......Page 182 Six Venice as Tenochtitlan: The Correspondence of the Old World and the New......Page 191 Venice and Tenochtitlan in Venetian Isolarii......Page 192 Venetian Costume Books and the New World......Page 211 The Venetian New World: Marvel and Correspondence......Page 229 Conclusion......Page 237 Chapter 1......Page 245 Chapter 2......Page 253 Chapter 3......Page 264 Chapter 4......Page 275 Chapter 5......Page 287 Chapter 6......Page 293 Conclusion......Page 302 Printed Sources......Page 305 Secondary Sources......Page 310 Index......Page 331