politics and constitution 63
the ways in which demands for protection and the defense of privilege
were reconciled, or clashed with the demands of control and discipline
on the part of the center.
Already during the 15th century, the lexicon of power employed in the
new legislation was coherently utilizing essential labels—dominium, re
publica—to describe a vast territorial space over which the Serenissima
Signoria could exercise its powers of command.28 The history of the dif-
ferent representations of the dominii in the rooms of the Doge’s Palace
between the 15th and 16th centuries might also be interpreted as the pas-
sage from a military/defensive perception of the stato da terra to a more
overall evaluation of the tensions that marked relations between the capi-
tal and the jurisdictions of the dominii. In 1460, the Council of Ten had
asked the rectors to send to Venice detailed maps of the territories subject
to their jurisdiction. Mountains, rivers, communities: the maps were to
describe the state as coherent whole, visible from the center. The minia-
turizing of spaces as demanded by the creation of maps was to transmit to
those in power an illusion of control over cities, seigniorial and ecclesiasti-
cal jurisdictions, and distant lands which, in reality, enjoyed a significant
degree of autonomy. But above all, the detailed knowledge of the topog-
raphy of the dominions responded to the demand of military control of
the borders. During the 16th century, the extraordinary collection of maps
of the Veneto provinces designed by Cristoforo Sorte would add the note
of aesthetic delight and the classicizing pleasure of vision to the cognitive
demands of “reason of state.”29 Interestingly, during the more than two
centuries that separate Sorte’s achievement from the fall of the Republic,
there were no further plans for collections analogous to those just cited.
Was this a renunciation on the part of the Venetians to represent their
government as the “center” in which differences were reconciled? Was it
an intuition of the irreducible political, cultural, and/or religious diversity
of the territorial components? Tensions within the patriciate and the cre-
ation of new magistracies can better explain the tension between the lack
of a will to centralize, and the intensification of various forms of control.
It must immediately be noted that, during the 16th century, Venice,
that city of liberty and pleasure, was also theater to the enforcement of
the forms of social discipline and control with regard to customs, gestures,
28 Alberto Tenenti, Stato: un’idea, una logica. Dal Comune italiano all’assolutismo
francese (Bologna, 1987), pp. 85–88.
29 Roberto Almagià, Cristoforo Sorte, il primo grande cartografo e topografo della Repub-
blica di Venezia, in Id. Scritti geografici (Rome, 1961), pp. 613–18.