Description
Book SynopsisNatural hazards punctuate the history of European towns, moulding their shape and identity: this book is devoted to the artistic representation of those calamities, from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century. It contains nine case studies which discuss, among others, the relationship between biblical imagery and the realistic depiction of urban disasters; the religious, political and ritual meanings of “destruction subjects” in early modern painting; the image of fire in Renaissance treatises on architecture; the first photographic campaigns documenting earthquakes’ damages; the role of contemporary art in the elaboration of a cultural memory of urban destructions. Thus, this book intends to address one of the main issues of Western civilization: the relationship of European towns with their own past and its discontinuities. Contributors are Alessandro Del Puppo, Isabella di Lenardo, Marco Folin, Sophie Goetzmann, Emanuela Guidoboni, Philippe Malgouyres, Olga Medvedkova, Fabrizio Nevola, Monica Preti and Tiziana Serena.
Table of ContentsContents Preface vii List of Table and Figures xv List of Contributors xix xxi Part 1 The Representation of Urban Disasters in a Long-Term Perspective 1 Transient Cities: Representations of Urban Destructions in European Iconography in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries 3 Marco Folin 2 When Towns Collapse: Images of Earthquakes, Floods, and Eruptions in Italy in the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries 33 Emanuela Guidoboni PART 2 Images of Ruination and Hopes for Redemption 3 Urban Responses to Disaster in Renaissance Italy: Images and Rituals 59 Fabrizio Nevola 4 In the Beginning, There was Fire: Vitruvius and the Origin of the City 75 Olga Medvedkova 5 “Cities of Fire”: Iconographic Fortune, Taste and Circulation of Fire Paintings between Flanders and Italy in the early Sixteenth Century 100 Isabella di Lenardo 6 The Destruction of the City: A Pledge of Salvation? Some Reflections about Monsù Desiderio and the Genre of “Destruction Painting” 116 Philippe Malgouyres PART 3 Urban Disasters on Display: Art, Documentation, Remembrance 7 Catastrophe and Photography as a “Double Reversal”: The 1908 Messina and Reggio Earthquake and the Album of the Italian Photographic Society 137 Tiziana Serena 8 Meidner’s Urban Iconography: Optical Destruction and Visual Apocalypse 164 Sophie Goetzmann 9 Destruction and Construction in Contemporary Art. Three Cases in Twentieth-Century Italy (Gibellina 1968, Friuli 1976, Napoli 1980) 179 Alessandro Del Puppo Index of Names 193 Index of Places 203
