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Venice and Padua are neighboring cities with a topographical and geopolitical distinction. Venice is a port city in the Venetian Lagoon, which opened up towards Byzantium and the East. Padua on the mainland was founded in Roman times and is a university city, a place of Humanism and research into antiquity.

Museum science, museum analysis, museum history, and museum theory - all this expanding terminology underscores the growing scholarly interest in museums. This volume focuses on the museum as a product of transnational processes of exchange.

To contribute differentiated viewpoints to the currently evolving metadiscourse on the museum, this book seeks to investigate how the institution of the museum has been visualized and translated into different kinds of images and how these images have affected our perception of these institutions.

Images are not neutral conveyors of messages shipped around the globe to achieve globalized spectatorship. They are powerful forces that elicit very diverse responses and can resist new visual hegemonies of our global world. Bringing together case studies from the field of media, art, politics, religion, anthropology and science, this volume breaks new ground by reflecting on the very power of images beyond their medial exploitation. The contributions by Hans Belting, Susan Buck-Morss, Georges Didi-Huberman, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Ticio Escobar among others testify that globalization does not necessarily equal homogenization, and that images can open up alternative ways of picturing what is to come.