The picture of poverty : Cristoforo Moro and patronage of San Giobbe, Venice

Abstract

This dissertation explores the art and architectural patronage of Doge Cristoforo Moro (1462-71) in Renaissance Venice. Given that Moro ruled over a Venice that was dealing with new threat to its territory, its religion, and its public health, I seek to understand what the ideological charges were that informed Moro's acts of patronage throughout Venice and how they diverged from understood modes of ducal representation. Moro's sponsorship of San Giobbe, a charitable institution in one of the poorer neighborhoods of fifteenth-century Venice, serves as the point of departure for this study. Drawing on a wide range of sources including testamentary bequests, building and confraternity histories, and landholding policies, I examine how Moro transformed a site that was associated with social and spiritual abjection into a showcase of ducal power. In formulating a set of questions for Moro's work at San Giobbe, I try to move beyond questions of attribution and chronology that have typically dominated studies of Doge Moro's work. I examine in particular Moro's tomb, a burial slab placed in the ground in the high altar chapel of San Giobbe; his funerary slab represents a temporary break from ducal burial tradition in Venice. I root my study of the tomb in the evolving nature of Renaissance commemoration practice by devising an approach for the study of a commemorative object that can not be read as an iconographic text like many other contemporaneous ducal tombs. After establishing the nature of Moro's work at San Giobbe, I reconsider Giovanni Bellini's San Giobbe Altarpiece both in the history of fifteenth-century Venetian painting and as a reflection of the ducal legacy of the church for which it was painted.

(cont.) My study of the San Giobbe Altarpiece draws on the iconographical and symbolic analyses of previous scholars, but shifts the emphasis of the inquiry from iconography to issues of representation and gesture in the Altarpiece. I argue that the full-figured representation of Job is essential to understanding the role of salvation not only of the worshippers at the altar of San Giobbe, but of the entire Venetian Republic.