The Patriarchate of Venice and the interaction between archival and architectural orders: politics, social dynamics and credibility (15th-18th c.)

Based on the sources of the Archives of the Patriarchate of Venice and the Vatican Archives, the project explores the interaction between architectural realisation, administrative activity, and documentary conservation for the policies of the Venetian Patriarchate. These reciprocal influences do not follow a linear path, but are the product of interactions, reactions, negotiations, resistances, and multiple initiatives of several actors that determine a multifunctional use of both the sacred buildings and those intended for the production and preservation of documentation.

The aim of the project is

1) first, to present the institutional development of the Venetian diocese, analysing the intertwining of its architectural and archival policies and trying to highlight the influence that both the Venetian State and the Roman Curia, and sometimes other dioceses, have exerted on it;

2) to address the social dynamics that accompanied, supported, and hindered the pastoral and architectural representational policies of the Patriarchate, highlighting their documentary implications; and

3) to address the problem of the genesis of documentation, its appropriation, and the credibility that contemporaries have attributed to these sources.