Published in 2021—marking the 450th anniversary of the titular battle—Lepanto and Beyond: Images of Religious Alterity from Genoa and the Christian Mediterranean contains entries drawn from a conference held several years earlier in Genoa entitled Picturing Alterity: Images of Islam, Encounters and Clashes (from Lepanto to Matapan). That conference was sponsored by the research group Before Orientalism: The Images of Muslims in Iberia and Their Mediterranean Connections, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. This origin explains the twin aims of the volume: to examine artistic depictions of the battle of Lepanto as a window into the ways in which the religious and cultural “other” was understood in early modern Europe, and to present the importance of Genoa in both the battle and its subsequent representations. To those ends, Laura Stagno and Borja Franco Llopis bring together work on the historical, political, artistic, religious, and economic facets of Lepanto.
Using alterity as a heuristic, especially in historical studies, can run the risk of reifying the very categories the practice seeks to investigate. The editors address this by foregrounding a methodological piece by the literary historian Steven Hutchison. He argues that postcolonial notions of what it meant to be “other” must be reconsidered when studying the 16th century, a time when European dominance was not assured (and when the very concept of a cohesive Europe was still coming into being). Rather than approach alterity as describing self-conscious Europeans/Christians on one side and Ottomans/Muslims on the other, Hutchison uses the examples of renegades to highlight the fact that “there might be more alterity within a group than between groups, (emphasis added)” even in literary and artistic expressions (71).
In his chapter on the iconographic overlap between depictions of the battle of Lepanto and of the biblical Flood and the Last Judgement, Víctor Mínguez demonstrates the multiple registers on which otherness can operate. Connecting the frescoes of Lepanto drawn by Giorgio Vasari to Michelangelo’s depiction of the Last Judgement, Mínguez argues that there was an early and explicit connection drawn between the Turk and the hordes of the damned. At the same time, however, the Vasari frescoes drew from the image of the “The Ship of the Church,” a symbol developed and deployed actively in the Catholic response to Protestantism especially popular in the late 16th century. It is thus impossible to read the depictions of Lepanto solely as symbols of a cohesive dichotomy in which Christian Europe defeats a singular other. At the same time, other entries in Lepanto and Beyond highlight the very real implications of alterity between Christians and Muslims on both sides of the Mediterranean (of which Andrea Zappia’s comparative study of the conditions of Muslim slaves in Genoa and Christian Genoese slaves in the Maghreb is a prime example).
The central chapters in Lepanto and Beyond are focused on the role of Genoa and the reputation of the Genoese admiral Giovanni Andrea Doria in the battle and its subsequent representation. Emiliano Beri provides an overview of the battle itself in order to assess the question of Doria’s character during the fighting. More importantly, however, Beri’s use of the Tapestries of the Battle of Lepanto (commissioned by Doria himself for the Palazzo del Principe in Genoa twenty years later) demonstrates one of the underlying theses of the volume: that artistic analysis can be profitably used alongside textual narrative to better understand historical events. Stagno’s own contribution focuses on the Tapestries, as well as the multiple other works commemorating the battle commissioned by Doria. She argues that the fact that the media campaign glorifying the victory came from powerful Genoese families rather than the government reflects the unique situation of Genoa more broadly as less structured and more diffuse than the other Italian states (and certainly more so than Spain). In so doing she makes the case that it is that same uniqueness which has prevented contemporary historiography from appreciating the role of Genoa in Lepanto.
For those who are interested in seeing how the study of alterity can expose the lines of connection between art, politics, and religion, the entries in Lepanto and Beyond have much to commend them. In addition to the eleven essays, the volume includes twenty-nine color images of paintings and drawings depicting either the battle itself or individuals associated with it, such as Doria and Philip II. The image gallery alone makes this volume of value to historians of the 16th century, most especially to those specializing in art and in the print and media landscape of the period.
Brent Gordon, SJ is a graduate student in Early Modern European History at Saint Louis University.
Brent Gordon
Date Of Review:
March 1, 2023
