Political iconography in the Italian city-states: The case of Lucca

In this project, the political iconography of a central Italian city-state is being analyzed, taking Lucca as an example. Differently from previous investigations that were focusing on very narrow periods of time, this project will research a period encompassing more than a millennium from the 9th to the 20th century. In this context it is possible to obtain much more specific results regarding the political and historical self-fashioning of the city-state. Differently from other Italian city-states, a highly developed culture of extraverted propaganda was lacking in Lucca. The investigation of a phenomenon that may be called "disguised political propaganda" has yielded surprising results.