Art as politics in the Baptistery and Chapel of Sant’Isidoro at San Marco, Venice

This article addresses questions of artistic diversity and political identity in the late medieval Mediterranean through analysis of the visual programs of the Baptistery and Chapel of St Isidore in the basilica of San Marco, Venice. The two rooms were embellished with extensive mosaic cycles during the dogate of Andrea Dandolo (r. 1343-1354), and have been described as ‘the great enigma of Trecento art in Venice’ on account of their ostensible juxtaposition of contemporary Byzantine and western visual elements. Moving away from binary approaches to artistic interaction, this article attends to the nexus between aesthetics and politics by examining the two cycles and their composite visual language in the context of the increased geopolitical instability of the Mediterranean in the mid-fourteenth century, and in relation to the important political challenges that Venice faced on the international stage at this time.