Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy: Art and the Verdant Earth (Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700)

✍ Scribed by Karen Hope Goodchild (editor), April Oettinger (editor), DR. Leopoldine Prosperetti (editor)

• Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 319
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The 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 Contents

Half title page
Series information
Title page
Copyright information
Table of Contents
List of Plates and Figures
Introduction: A Fresh Vision of the Natural World in Renaissance Italy
Earlier Green Voices
Part One: Devotional Viridescence
Part Two: Green Building
Part Three: Sylvan Exchange
Conclusions
Part I. Devotional Viridescence
1. The Green Places of Fra Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli
Introduction
Sensorial Medicine
Verdant Materials
Fra Filippo Lippi’s Technique
Sandro Botticelli’s Technique
Conclusion
About the author
2. Anthropomorphic Trees and Animated Nature in Lorenzo Lotto’s 1509 St. Jerome
Conclusion
About the author
3. ‘Honesta voluptas’: the Renaissance
Justification for Enjoyment of the Natural World
About the author
Part II. Building Green
4. “The Sala delle Asse as Locus amoenus: Revisiting Leonardo da Vinci’s Arboreal Imagery in Milan’s Castello Sforzesco”
The Sala delle Asse and the Poetics of Vegetation at the Sforza Court
Recent Technical Findings and the Sala delle Asse as Locus Amoenus
The Sala delle Asse and the Gardens of the Castello Sforzesco
About the author
5. Naturalism and Antiquity, Redefined, in Vasari’s Verzure
Ephemeral Courtly Verzure
Vasari’s use of Verzure in the Lives of the Artists
Painted Verdure: ‘Rich, versatile, and abundant in invention and craftsmanship’
Verzure Masters: Giulio Romano and Rosso Fiorentino
The Northern Roots of Verzure
Giovanni da Udine: in alcune cose […] riuscire eccellentissimo
Conclusion
About the author
6. Verdant Architecture and Tripartite Chorography: Toeput and the Italian Villa Tradition
Verdant Architecture
Tripartite Chorography
Conclusion
About the author
Part III. The Sylvan Exchange
7. Titian: Sylvan Poet
A Corner of the Woods
Woodblock Prints and Woodland Imagery
Sylvan Poetics
‘[U]ne belle étude d’arbres’
Silva
Bacchanals
Ecopoesis
Conclusion
About the author
8. From Venice to Tivoli: Girolamo Muziano and the ‘Invention’ of the Tiburtine Landscape
About the author
9. 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
About the author
10. The Verdant as Violence: The Storm Landscapes of Herman van Swanevelt and Gaspard Dughet
The artists
The debut of landscapes with stormy weather
Precedents and origins of the land-storm in seventeenth-century landscape painting
Landscape as metaphor
Bad weather and climate change
The literary traditions
‘We must sing of storms and flashing lightnings…’
Synchronicity between Swanevelt and Dughet
Implications for the future
About the author
Afterword: A Brief Journey through the Green World of Renaissance Italy
About the author
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Works Cited
Index