Workshop

Since the central Middle Ages, the Mediterranean area and Europe have seen a steady increase of highly specialized objects produced in large quantities, involving a variety of materials, techniques, ornaments, images, and functions, the very first of which was to be sold.
More than any other city, Venice lived off of the trade of portable goods – trading foreign imports, but engaging as well in intense local production, manufacturing objects characterized by their exceedingly rich forms and complex production processes. Those questions are the topic of a forthcoming collection entitled Typical Venice? Venetian Commodities,     13^th–16^th Centuries, edited by Ella Beaucamp and Philippe Cordez. Their lecture will show how Venice designed and exported its own identity through all kinds of its goods, addressing the complexities of this art of commodities that remain a challenge for today’s art history.

Ella Beaucamp prepares a PhD at LMU Munich on Waren und Bilder in der mediterranen Handelsexpansion (11.–13. Jahrhundert). She is a fellow of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani.

Philippe Cordez is deputy director of the German Center for Art History Paris. Primarily a medievalist, he previously led a research group on object studies in art history at LMU Munich.
Scientific organization: Elisabetta Scirocco