Leakage, Contagion, and Containment in Early Modern Venice
Two well-known architectural types of enclosure in early modern Venice – the Jewish Ghetto and the plague hospitals or lazaretti – are examined within the spatial dynamics of quarantine and the larger geographic sphere of the Mediterranean. Architectural and urbanistic mechanisms for maintaining purity against influences the Christian Venetians understood as harmful, the ghetto and the lazaretto worked to visually recognize, bureaucratically identify, and physically seclude ‘dangerous’ individuals. Both were also porous: the ghetto was open to all during daytime hours, when Jews were also allowed to exit into the city, and the lazaretto’s population grew and shrank as new people sickened and patients recovered or died. This ‘leakage’ broke through any ideal of containment, and could be productive, benign or malign.