A Fickle Power-crazed Seductress: Misogyny and Republicanism in Late Seventeenth-century Venetian Representation of Sophonisba

Sophonisba was a sort of cult figure in sixteenth-century Venetian literature since the publication of Trissino’s tragedy, in which she appears a heroine of liberty, ready to sacrifice everything in order to be kept in Rome as a slave. The long afterlife of Trissino’s Sofonisba undergoes a drastic change in the second half of the seventeenth-century Venice, when theatric plays and novels began to shape her as a very different character: in that framework the Carthaginian noblewoman suddenly becomes a fickle seductress and a power-crazed woman. This article addresses the political and aesthetical reasons that lie behind this upheaval.