The Artistic Patronage of the Confraternities of Schiavoni/Illyrians in Venice and Rome: Proto-national Identity and the Visual Arts

Early modern immigrants across Europe often organized themselves in confraternities, creating durable institutions that acted as patrons of the visual arts. The shared origin of the members of these confraternities provides a platform to discuss and compare strategies of visual communication with the host society. It further affords the opportunity to examine how they differentiated themselves from other brotherhoods of Schiavoni/Illyrians in the competitive environments of Italian cosmopolitan and artistic centers. This article focuses on the two 16th-century painted programs related to Schiavoni/Illyrian confraternities in Venice and Rome, executed by Vittore Carpaccio and Giovanni Guerra with assistants, respectively, and offers a new interpretative strategy of proto-national identity to elucidate their messages.