Pistols! Murder! Treason!

This article attempts to do a number of things: Firstly, it describes the assassination of a priest called Giulio Cazzari in Venice in 1622, using the reports of a spy named Gerolamo Vano as a principal source. It confronts the distance between the experience of death and the representation of death, and explores possible connections between our understanding of death and our understanding of time. It uses formal experimentation and deliberate anachronism (inspired by Futurist literature and photography and the graphic novels of Alan Moore) to dramatise these themes. It does not, however, contain any detailed discussion of seventeenth-century espionage or diplomatic culture, or much in the way of context. This omission is itself part of an implicit argument about the nature of historical knowledge: i.e. that a meditation upon time and death is a natural and appropriate subject for a historian and that archival documents can be used as raw material for such a discussion. Historians should have the courage ...