Sieges of the Morea War in the celebratory cycle of Francesco Morosini. Art, topography and military history

The forty-eight paintings executed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to celebrate the military campaigns of Francesco Morosini (1619-1694) are an exceptional repertoire of military genre painting. The canvas uses different figurative registers to represent naval battles, cities and territories, siege operations. If the relations with war literature and propaganda prints, which spread across Europe and which had their official “historiographer” in Vincenzo Coronelli in Venice, are evident, equally strong relationships can be established between the paintings, war reports and the plans made on the battlefield by military engineers. This paper deals with the paintings dedicated to the sieges of Corone and Negroponte are examined here.