The Art and Archaeology of Venetian Ships and Boats (review)

The Art and Archaeology of Venetian Ships and Boats. By Lillian Ray Martin. College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+236. $77.50.

Historians of technology are likely to be triply misled by the title of this work, which is not intended to be a complete study of the history of Venetian ships and boats, or a complete study of the history of Venetian art relating to ships and boats, or a complete study of the archaeology of Venetian vessels. What the book does set out to do, however, is establish a typology of mostly medieval Venetian vessels based on the analysis of a large number of images of all types.

Not many historians of technology engage in the construction of such classification schemes these days, but typologies are standard tools of great utility in archaeology. As is most famously the case with studies of pottery, typologies can be very useful for both the identification and the dating of artifacts. However, whereas land archaeologists may discover thousands of pots or shards on a site, nautical archaeologists have not yet been able to raise or even study enough vessels to provide a similar basis for classification. Accordingly, Lillian Ray Martin has done the next best thing, carrying out a systematic collection of all the images of Venetian ships and boats she could find in order to build her typology on a broader numerical basis.

The book is divided into two main parts. The first and larger part contains the catalog of all the depictions found, complete with very clear photos of the different kinds of images. These will be of considerable and enduring interest to those interested in the history of ships, although the styles of representation used prior to the Renaissance frequently make the images difficult to interpret. The second part of the book contains brief analyses of such technical matters as rig types, anchors, and construction techniques, followed by the presentation of the typology itself. Oddly, the catalog is organized in terms of the media used (mosaic, painting, graffito, and so on), rather than in terms of the typology, which is largely based on an assessment of the use of the vessels shown, subdivided by the number of masts and kind of rigging employed. Also odd is the fact that, while the images in the catalog are dated, the categories of the typology are not (although the author does provide five graphs that plot the number of representations of some categories against their dates).

Such problems make the catalog and typology somewhat more difficult to relate to each other than need be, but may also be explained by what the author herself says is the preliminary nature of her classification scheme, which she fully expects to be corrected as it is extended to cover other parts of the Mediterranean.

Ultimately, the utility of the classification scheme presented here will be judged by the nautical archaeologists for whom the book is primarily intended. In the meantime, the author is to be complimented for turning her attention to images, attempting to come to grips with a class of evidence that remains underutilized in the history of technology.