The Mastery of Space in Early Modern Political Thought Giovanni Botero, the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican and the fusion of the civitas and urbs in sixteenth-century Italy

Abstract

Before the sixteenth century there was a strong emphasis in Renaissance political thought on the difference between the political city (the civitas) and the physical city (the urbs). The body politic ‘floated’ above the landscape—it was not rooted in a specific territory as we understand states to be today. In 1588 the philosopher-priest Giovanni Botero argued that wealth underpinned political power; challenging humanist narratives about the corrupting forces of wealth for the civitas. These narratives were rooted in a classical ‘politics’, which saw the civitas as a morally oriented body. Botero conceived his arguments in the context of ‘reason of state’, where politics became the art of maintaining one’s ‘stato’. While arguing that wealth was the source of civitas’ power he grounded it in the economic capacity of the urbs. Physical space became an object of political power. I argue in this thesis that the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican was a potent visual exposition of these ideas—ideas which had important implications for the rise of the territorial mercantilist ‘state’.