Associate Professor Karen Barzman will be presenting a talk this Saturday, March 24, at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Washington, D.C. Follow the link for time and location.
“Mapping Dalmatia: Cartography and the Management of the Venetian Stato da Mar”
In the prevailing economy of the sovereign state, territorial boundaries are essential to establish and maintain. Hence the centrality of lines on maps. What marks off one state from another are width-less cracks signed and sealed, as it were, by the logic of the line – that which has length but no thickness or distance across. Purely discursive (with no material referent), such lines nonetheless have tremendous authority in modern statecraft, permitting informed discussion and decision-making from dispersed locations about site-specific matters concerning jurisdiction and the limits of rule.
Lines on maps were an innovation of early modern Europe. It was there and then that cartography became part of a developing “information-technology” tied to the governance of local, regional and trans-regional polities with an increasing dependence on the collection, archiving, and delivery of data across vast distances, including information in pictographic form. This was a system of managing the state in which a clear vision of (and consensus about) boundary lines became desirable – for Venice along the eastern Adriatic, with increasing urgency over the years.
This paper focuses on a hand-drawn map produced before the Venetian “stato da mar” (maritime state) was composed of bounded units. It represents Venetian Dalmatia, a province of porous and shifting limits for almost 300 years, until that part of central Europe was fully surveyed by all parties, with borders fixed on printed maps in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Raising questions about the efficacy of maps in the “paper management” of the state when territories, realms, and kingdoms were summoned forth merely toponymically, this map, I argue, nonetheless stands at the beginning of practices of modern statecraft employing new media – an early, mobile form of display-based data-management we take for granted today.
Binghamton Art History 