The changing nature of Brescia's Romanitas: political rhetoric and material culture in the early modern Venetian mainland

Brescia, a city of Roman origins, became in 1426 a part of the Republic of Venice. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during both war-and peacetime, the ruling class enacted deliberate strategies to re-functionalize the city’s Roman material heritage to convey political meanings that negotiated republican and imperial identities depending on current needs and shifts in the relationship with the Venetian rettori. Public spaces provided the perfect canvas to articulate political messages that helped Brescia find its place in the terraferma state without giving up assertions of its autonomy; in this sense, antiquarianism was configured not just as a cultural phenomenon, but (especially in times of warfare) as instrumental to defining the contours of the city’s political identity. The graphic signs of this communicative policy can still be ‘read’ and deciphered today, having left the most visible evidence in the Platea Magna (now Piazza della Loggia). This article aims to analyse how epigraphs, frescoes, sculptures, and the urban fabric in general came to serve as the material tools through which Brescian civic identity was negotiated in public spaces, in constant conversation with the Republic of Venice.