Commerce, Peace, and the Arts in Renaissance Venice: Ruzante and the Empire at Center Stage

With the playwright Angelo Beolco, aka Ruzante, as a focal point, this study sheds new light on his oeuvre, times, and Venetian patrician supporters by embedding the Venetian aspects of his life within the monumental changes taking place politically, economically, socially, and artistically. Linda Carroll uncovers a political grouping in the Venetian Republic in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that has heretofore gone unrecognized, the economic basis for it, and its expression in patronage of the arts.