This article introduces two manuscript editions of a richly illustrated costume album dated ca. 1548–49. Commissioned by Christoph von Sternsee (d. 1560), the captain of Charles V’s German guard, and composed using visual material sourced from Dutch master Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (ca. 1500–59), the costume album records the diversity of subjects, customs, and costumes that the guard witnessed across imperial Habsburg Europe. Shaped by Sternsee’s personal experiences of travel, war, and empire, his costume album paints a vivid picture of imperial propaganda and personal ambition, demonstrating the significant role that Habsburg networks and relationships had upon the period’s visual culture.
Two well-known architectural types of enclosure in early modern Venice – the
Jewish Ghetto and the plague hospitals or lazaretti – are examined within the
spatial dynamics of quarantine and the larger geographic sphere of the Mediterranean.
Architectural and urbanistic mechanisms for maintaining purity against
influences the Christian Venetians understood as harmful, the ghetto and the lazaretto
worked to visually recognize, bureaucratically identify, and physically
seclude ‘dangerous’ individuals. Both were also porous: the ghetto was open to
all during daytime hours, when Jews were also allowed to exit into the city, and
the lazaretto’s population grew and shrank as new people sickened and patients
recovered or died. This ‘leakage’ broke through any ideal of containment, and
could be productive, benign or malign.
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