Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy (original) (raw)

Towards an Italian Renaissance Theory of Landscape

Towards an Italian Renaissance Theory of Landscape This dissertation reconstructs the sixteenth-century view of landscape painting by allowing authors of the period to describe for themselves what the genre signified. Ultimately, the thesis proposed is that there was always an "unspoken" theory of the genre that understood landscape as a feminine, non-rational subject to be both rendered and discussed as a lower mode of colorful details designed to engage only the senses. The dissertation is composed of four interconnected essays which progress from more general historical analyses of the literary and material factors that contributed to the rise of landscape painting and Academic landscape theory to an in-depth examination of Renaissance descriptions of landscape. Landscape differed from earlier genres in that it had no suasive content. This distinction set it at odds with the prevailing Horatian justification for art, that beauty and ornament existed to direct the soul towards a moral message. Thus, in Chapter One, "The Sensual Justification for Landscape," the concrete physical and psychological benefits thought to accrue from visual delight are explored in order to show that sensual pleasure had a vindication prior to the development of an autotelic aesthetic philosophy. Chapter Two, "The Feminine Language of Landscape," analyzes how landscape depictions were characterized as colorful, irrational embellishments the only end of which was pleasure. As a result, landscape's seductive charms were often addressed in the vocabulary of feminine beauty, a terminology gleaned from Petrarchan poetry and sixteenth-century treatises on beauty. Chapter Three, "Parerga and the Renaissance Theory of Landscape," furthers this investigation of detail and content versus form with a historical analysis of the word parerga. In the sixteenth century, parerga, a Greek word that can be literally translated as "beside the work," came to be used as a term for landscape, and this chapter traces the antique uses of the word, especially its link to mimesis, that conditioned the Renaissance definition of landscape. Finally, Chapter Four, "Vasari's Theory of 24.

Cinema and landscape, Italian heritage and widespread museum

2021

Historical and artistic beauty is pervasive, it enters every corner of the territory." The landscape is a fundamental identity factor for Italy. The landscape has long been considered a multiplier of the value of The Italian historical-artistic and architectural heritage. Over time the way you tell the landscape changes. Writers and travelers with their stories have helped to create the myth of the Italian landscape by retracing the narrative matrix back in time of the "great tours" in the 18th and 19th centuries, often describing it as "garden of Europe", or "beautiful country ". In the twentieth century the history of the landscape used different forms of artistic expression. Painters, poets, artists, musicians use the landscape to give value to their works. Today we tell it with cameras, cinema, digital. The report aims to investigate the relationship between landscape and storytelling in cinema, between landscape and characters, between landscape and gaze. The intent of the report is to analyze the transgressive function that the landscape has often had in cinema, and in particular in the Italian one, in order to make it one of the most interesting experiences of the twentieth century. It's not just about aesthetics, it's also about ethics, because learning to look is an important step to get to know ourselves, our world and our limits.

Modes of Viewing the Urban Landscapes and Public Gardens of Early Imperial Rome

Adalya, 2021

It has been claimed that with Augustus, the Roman Empire and its capital underwent a transformation that divided them into well-defined and controllable spaces based on a rational use of information. Emperors like Domitian established a sort of symbolic and physical domination over their subjects by creating a medium of surveillance which is observable in architecture and sculpture as well as in literature. Yet the functions of early imperial public gardens and urban landscapes like the Campus Martius and the plot on which the Domus Aurea rose have not been fully explored in this respect. This article aims to demonstrate how viewing, gazing and surveilling operated symbolically in these spaces through architecture and sculpture by using Foucaultian concepts such as “heterotopia” and “surveillance” as well as “imperial gaze.” The gaze of the emperor was directed to the heterotopic microcosms created in public gardens and urban landscapes, and also to individuals - elite and commoners alike - within them. This is an “imperial gaze,” a subjective, epistemological, juridical mode of viewing that tends to categorize the landscape, its constituents and its activities within from an elevated point.

Ut pictura hortus/ut theatrum hortus : Theatricality and French Picturesque Garden Theory (1771-95)

Art History, 2010

The picturesque vogue in eighteenth-century garden design is primarily understood today in the context of a close relationship at the time between landscape painting and gardening. However, in reality the picturesque had a much wider relevance for the eighteenth-century garden. As garden theorist and historian John Dixon Hunt stated, 'the term picturesque was originally used to refer to material that was suitable for inclusion in a painting or, by extension, material in the actual world that could be conceived of or viewed as if it were already part of a picture.' 1 The use of the picturesque during the eighteenth century not only refers to landscape, but draws even more infl uentially on history painting, where the depiction of a human action is at stake. Saying that a garden should be like a painting-Ut pictura hortus-means then that the picturesque garden should provide the perfect setting in which human action can be depicted, a viewpoint that ultimately comes to transform the garden into a silent poem. For this reason, the picturesque is still fi rmly rooted in the Ut pictura poesisdoctrine. Horace Walpole, for instance, famously declared that 'Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the science of Landscape, will forever by men of Taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn nature.' 2 In discussing Gardening, or 'the Science of Landscape', one should include a fourth sister: theatre. The idea that a garden might provide a perfect setting in which one could represent human action was also closely related to the eighteenth-century understanding of the purpose and nature of stage scenery. 3 Both gardens and stage sets functioned as backcloths in front of which a story or a drama unfolded, and this long before the picturesque became paradigmatic for eighteenth-century gardening. The theatre, theatrical machinery and scenography were considerable infl uences on gardening theory and practice in the gardens of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque and, subsequently, in the French classical garden. Late sixteenth-century gardens like Francesco de Medici's garden at Pratolino surprised visitors with their theatre automata, 4 while in Baroque and classical gardens like André Le Nôtre's at Versailles or the Grosser Garten at Herrenhausen near Hannover (plate 1), open air theatres were substantial elements in garden design. Sometimes even entire gardens, with their spatial structuring along lanes, through porticoes, statues, and tricks of perspective that recall Palladian scenography, functioned as theatre space. 5 During the reign of Maria Theresia, the gardens of Schönbrunn were a favourite setting in which to recite the verses of Pietro Metastasio, which expressed the emotional states the delights of nature could arouse. 6 The intimate relation between garden and theatre is also noticeable in paintings of gardens. Garden historian Marianne Roland Michel, for Detail from Tintoretto, Bathing Susannah, 1555, (plate 3).

The Scenic from the Aesthetic and Political Perspective: A Baroque Look

Journal of Political Science and International Relations, 2024

This work has attempted to understand the modern era of representation from the metaphor of "Theatrum Mundi" and not so much from the perspective of systematic order, of rationalist mathesis. This represents a turn that questions the primacy of the epistemological perspective and puts it in relation to modern contractualist models of organization of society and political power. Natural law and theater appear on the scene simultaneously during the 16th century. But it is not only about the way in which the modern concept of society is constituted between the 16th and 18th centuries, but rather, about how the positions of the new social actors are defined, and also about how the prescriptions and regulations work. rhetorics that are used to consolidate those positions. It is about the new public sphere, but also about the ways in which the individual is constituted as a new modern subject. The individual, a citizen converted into a sovereign by contractualism, undergoes a transformation that has involved internalizing a system of mediation that turned him into a mere vassal, but a satisfied, grateful, subject who applauds his lords and cheers them on. This leads us to conclude that the enjoyment of the alienated subject is accompanied by the increasing invisibility of power in the new spectacular order.