Anita Markmiller (Doctoral Research Fellow) - September 2025

Anita Markmiller presented her paper “Ships, Humans, and the Sea. Visualising and Instrumentalising Aquatic Environments in 16th-century Art” at the 2025 study course Das Meer als Heterotopie. Ist auf dem Meer alles anders? (The sea as a heterotopia. Is everything different at sea?) at the German Study Centre in Venice. She examined depictions of ships and maritime environments both as central motifs and in the background. Through three case studies, she demonstrated that ships function not only as emblems of political power but also as vehicles for pictorial narrative. Their interpretation requires cultural and political contextualisation, as well as technical, navigational, geographic, and maritime knowledge, revealing how images and depictions of the ships and the sea operate at the intersection of distinct epistemic registers.