Kneelings and sealed Charters: Iconography of the Pacts of Dedication to the Republic of Venice (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)

The constitutional role ascribed to the "patti di dedizione" (pacts of dedication) signed between the Republic of Venice and its subject communitates keeps fuelling an intense historiographical debate. Inspired by an overall rethinking of Weber's "Modern State" paradigm, such debate has put at its heart the territorial dimension of the "Venetian State". Working under the same hermeneutic framework, this contribution examines the visual and iconographic representations of the pacts of dedication made throughout the "Long Fifteenth Century" both by Venice and by its subject cities, interpreting them as a further moment of performative re-elaboration and re-definition of the fundamental juridical institutions which legitimized the dominion of the Serenissima over its territorial state.