762 deborah howard
defense against Turkish invasion, never had to prove its military worth,
but its form became celebrated across Europe through maps and engrav-
ings (Fig. 20.4).72 Such was the skill of the military strategists and archi-
tects in the 16th century that fortifications evolved relatively little over the
next three centuries.
In the last few decades, research into public building in Venice’s over-
seas colonies and on the terraferma has begun to allow a fuller understand-
ing of the ways in which architecture both projected Venetian authority in
the empire and sought the loyalty of the subject peoples.73 As if to affirm
the reorientation of the focus of study in this direction, a recent study
of Venetian architecture of the Quattrocento devotes the first third of its
72 A useful introduction to the erection of Palmanova is Silvano Ghironi and Antonio
Manno, Palmanova: Storia, progetti e cartografia urbana (1593–1866) (Padua, 1993). See also
Howard, Venice Disputed, pp. 193–211 (with further bibliography).
73 See, for example, Maria Georgopoulou, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture
and Urbanism (Cambridge, 2001).
Figure 20.4. Plan of the Venetian fortress town of Palmanova in eastern Friuli,
from Georg Braun and Frans Hogenburg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, woodcut
(Amsterdam, 1598).