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

"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."-- Publisher's website Half title page 2 Series information 3 Title page 4 Copyright information 5 Table of Contents 6 List of Plates and Figures 8 Introduction: A Fresh Vision of the Natural World in Renaissance Italy 18 Earlier Green Voices 20 Part One: Devotional Viridescence 23 Part Two: Green Building 25 Part Three: Sylvan Exchange 26 Conclusions 28 Part I. Devotional Viridescence 30 1. The Green Places of Fra Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli 32 Introduction 32 Sensorial Medicine 34 Verdant Materials 36 Fra Filippo Lippi’s Technique 42 Sandro Botticelli’s Technique 45 Conclusion 48 About the author 49 2. Anthropomorphic Trees and Animated Nature in Lorenzo Lotto’s 1509 St. Jerome 50 Conclusion 67 About the author 67 3. ‘Honesta voluptas’: the Renaissance Justification for Enjoyment of the Natural World 70 About the author 87 Part II. Building Green 88 4. “The Sala delle Asse as Locus amoenus: Revisiting Leonardo da Vinci’s Arboreal Imagery in Milan’s Castello Sforzesco” 90 The Sala delle Asse and the Poetics of Vegetation at the Sforza Court 93 Recent Technical Findings and the Sala delle Asse as Locus Amoenus 96 The Sala delle Asse and the Gardens of the Castello Sforzesco 105 About the author 109 5. Naturalism and Antiquity, Redefined, in Vasari’s Verzure 110 Ephemeral Courtly Verzure 110 Vasari’s use of Verzure in the Lives of the Artists 112 Painted Verdure: ‘Rich, versatile, and abundant in invention and craftsmanship’ 115 Verzure Masters: Giulio Romano and Rosso Fiorentino 115 The Northern Roots of Verzure 119 Giovanni da Udine: in alcune cose [...] riuscire eccellentissimo 123 Conclusion 130 About the author 131 6. Verdant Architecture and Tripartite Chorography: Toeput and the Italian Villa Tradition 132 Verdant Architecture 136 Tripartite Chorography 139 Conclusion 152 About the author 153 Part III. The Sylvan Exchange 154 7. Titian: Sylvan Poet 156 A Corner of the Woods 156 Woodblock Prints and Woodland Imagery 161 Sylvan Poetics 195 ‘[U]ne belle étude d’arbres’ 198 Silva 199 Bacchanals 200 Ecopoesis 204 Conclusion 207 About the author 207 8. From Venice to Tivoli: Girolamo Muziano and the ‘Invention’ of the Tiburtine Landscape 208 About the author 228 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 230 About the author 249 10. The Verdant as Violence: The Storm Landscapes of Herman van Swanevelt and Gaspard Dughet 250 The artists 251 The debut of landscapes with stormy weather 253 Precedents and origins of the land-storm in seventeenth-century landscape painting 260 Landscape as metaphor 261 Bad weather and climate change 262 The literary traditions 264 ‘We must sing of storms and flashing lightnings...’ 266 Synchronicity between Swanevelt and Dughet 270 Implications for the future 272 About the author 273 Afterword: A Brief Journey through the Green World of Renaissance Italy 274 About the author 286 Primary Sources 288 Secondary Sources 291 Works Cited 288 Index 310