Myths of Venice

“Sophisticated, yet easily read.”—CHOICE

“Prodigiously learned in iconography, David Rosand has provided an impressive account, with copious illustrations, of the 'visualization of political ideal' in late medieval and early modern Venice. . . . Rosand’s exposition of the decorative schemes and their allusions is thorough and convincing, and will appeal to all but the most iconoclastic historians of Venice.”—Times Literary Supplement

“Rosand’s Myths of Venice provide[s] expert guidance through the intricacies of this more private Venetian artistic symbolism, revealing its underlying sense much as a good map will reveal the basic rationality behind the city’s complex web of islands, paths, and waterways. Designed for the curious general reader, physically compact, fluidly written. . . . [An] ideal . . . traveling companion.”—New York Review of Books

“An impressively learned volume. . . . The book also provides numerous illustrations, some in color, extensive endnotes and a wide-ranging bibliography. . . . [This book] helps us better understand just why this beguiling city has, for so many centuries, fascinated the world.”—Washington Post Book World

“Venice has inspired . . . Rosand to write [a] remarkably laudatory [book] on the artistic legacy generated by the Renaissance mythmakers and propagandists of that city. . . . Rosand stresses the importance of English writers in propagating the myth of Venice as a unique state possessing an exemplary political constitution. . . . Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.”—Library Journal

“Scholars across the disciplines, as well as the wider reading public, can be grateful to David Rosand for so elegantly laying out how the Venetian elites expressed in visual form their highest ideals and aspirations.”—Renaissance and Reformation

“The scholarship in back of this deceptively straightforward presentation is what we have come to expect of Rosand as one of the leading scholars of Venetian Renaissance art. In evidence are his great interpretive strengths: close and illuminating readings of the image, masterful formal analyses, and the contextualization of the work of art in its immediate physical context.”—Patricia Fortini Brown, Professor of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, and author of Venice & Antiquity: the Venetian Sense of the Past (Yale, 1996) and other works on Venetian art and culture.

“David Rosand stands at the summit of art historical scholarship on Renaissance Venice and Myths of Venice shows his masterly hand. Based on deep learning worn lightly and gracefully, Rosand’s book describes the myth of Venice’s exceptional governmental sagacity, its grounding in the city’s distinctive social, political, and religious values, and its expression in sublime visual imagery. Rosand here provides specialists with a synthesis of his authoritative studies of Venetian culture; at the same time his accessible eloquence will claim a wide readership among Venice’s many non-specialist admirers.”—Stanley Chojnacki, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill