Curatorial Proposal for an Exhibition: The Economic and Cultural Life of Early Modern Printed Books in Venice

This thesis develops a curatorial proposal for an exhibition on the economic and cultural life of early modern printed books in Venice, treating the book as a material artefact whose production, circulation, and afterlife generated value, reputation, and public meaning. Blending historical research with exhibition planning, the study adopts a case study structure that foregrounds lesser-known yet revealing episodes in Venetian print culture and translates them into an actionable selection of objects and display strategies. The first chapter examines print as a technology of visibility through Tommaso Giannotti and Pietro Aretino, where books and editorial choices support self-fashioning and media tactics. The second chapter shifts from authors to printers, proposing a Venetian printers’ bestiary that reads typographic devices as early forms of branding within a competitive marketplace; through lion, phoenix, and cat motifs, it demonstrates how workshop identity and reputational claims were condensed into recognisable visual emblems. The third chapter analyses the Remondinis of Bassano as a proto-industrial publishing enterprise whose catalogues, networks, and Venetian imprint leveraged the city’s symbolic capital. The fourth chapter analyses two recent Venetian exhibitions as museographic laboratories, extracting practical lessons on conservation constraints, mediation, legibility, and the use of facsimiles. A final market-based chapter uses auction evidence to estimate the corpus’ economic footprint, linking scholarly selection to curatorial feasibility. Overall, the thesis argues that Venetian printing history can be read as a history of economic strategies and cultural mediation, offering an exhibition blueprint for a temporary exhibition or a dedicated museum.