Description
Book SynopsisThe green mantle of the earth! This metaphor is a poetic image that borrows from the vocabulary of weaving and epitomizes the Renaissance interest in "fashioning green worlds" in art and poetry. Here it serves as a motto for a cultural poetics that made representing living nature increasingly popular across Italy in the Early Modern period. The explosion of landscape art in this era is often associated with the rise of interest in the literary pastoral, narrowly defined, but this volume expands that understanding to show Green’s broad appeal as it intrigued audiences ranging from the ecclesiastic to the medical and scientific to the humanistic and courtly. The essays gathered here explore the expanding technologies and varied cultural dimensions of verzure and verdancy in the Italian Renaissance, and thus the role of visual art in shaping the poetics and expression of greenery in the arts of the 16th-century and beyond.
Table of ContentsList of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction A Fresh Vision of the Natural World in Renaissance Italy Karen Goodchild, April Oettinger, Leopoldine Prosperetti Part I. Devotional Viridescence The Green Spaces of Fra Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli Rebekah Compton Anthropomorphic Trees and Animated Nature in Lorenzo Lotto's 1509 St. Jerome April Oettinger, 'Honesta voluptas': the Renaissance Justification for Enjoyment of the Natural World Paul Holberton, Part II. Building Green The Sala delle Asse as Locus Amoenus: Revisiting Leonardo da Vinci's Arboreal Imagery in Milan's Castello Sforzesco Jill Pederson Naturalism and Antiquity, Redefined, in Vasari's Verzure Karen Goodchild Verdant Architecture and Tripartite Chorography: Toeput and the Italian villa Tradition Natsumi Nonaka Part III. The Sylvan Exchange Titian: Sylvan Poet Leopoldine Prosperetti From Venice to Tivoli: Girolamo Muziano and the 'Invention' of the Tiburtine Landscape Patrizia Tosini Of Oak and Elder, Cloud-like Angels, and a Bird's Nest. The Graphic Interpretations of Titian's The Death of St. Peter Martyr by Martino Rota, Giovanni Battista Fontana, Valentin Lefebre, John Baptist Jackson, and Their Successors Sabine Peinelt-Schmidt The Verdant as Violence: The Storm Landscapes of Herman van Swanevelt and Gaspard Dughet Susan Russell Afterword A Brief Journey Through the Green World of Renaissance Venice Paul Barolsky
