From celebrated gardens in private villas to the paintings and
sculptures that adorned palace interiors, Venetians in the
sixteenth century conceived of their marine city as dotted with
actual and ...imaginary green spaces. This volume examines how and why
this pastoral vision of Venice developed.
Drawing on a variety of primary sources ranging from visual art
to literary texts, performances, and urban plans, Jodi Cranston
shows how Venetians lived the pastoral in urban Venice. She
describes how they created green spaces and enacted pastoral
situations through poetic conversations and theatrical performances
in lagoon gardens; discusses the island utopias found, invented,
and mapped in distant seas; and explores the visual art that
facilitated the experience of inhabiting verdant landscapes. Though
the greening of Venice was relatively short lived, Cranston shows
how the phenomenon had a lasting impact on how other cities,
including Paris and London, developed their self-images and how
later writers and artists understood and adapted the pastoral
mode.
Incorporating approaches from eco-criticism and anthropology,
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice greatly informs our
understanding of the origins and development of the pastoral in art
history and literature as well as the culture of sixteenth-century
Venice. It will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of
sixteenth-century history and culture, the history of urban
landscapes, and Italian art.
From celebrated gardens in private villas to the paintings and sculptures that adorned palace interiors, Venetians in the sixteenth century conceived of their marine city as dotted with actual and ...imaginary green spaces. This volume examines how and why this pastoral vision of Venice developed.
Drawing on a variety of primary sources ranging from visual art to literary texts, performances, and urban plans, Jodi Cranston shows how Venetians lived the pastoral in urban Venice. She describes how they created green spaces and enacted pastoral situations through poetic conversations and theatrical performances in lagoon gardens; discusses the island utopias found, invented, and mapped in distant seas; and explores the visual art that facilitated the experience of inhabiting verdant landscapes. Though the greening of Venice was relatively short lived, Cranston shows how the phenomenon had a lasting impact on how other cities, including Paris and London, developed their self-images and how later writers and artists understood and adapted the pastoral mode.
Incorporating approaches from eco-criticism and anthropology, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice greatly informs our understanding of the origins and development of the pastoral in art history and literature as well as the culture of sixteenth-century Venice. It will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of sixteenth-century history and culture, the history of urban landscapes, and Italian art.
The type and frequency of artists' signatures generally varied among Italian Renaissance painters. The artists' names appeared in fictively carved inscriptions in stone, in handwritten notes ...fictively appended to the surfaces of the paintings or placed somewhere within the represented scenes, and in the borders of the picture frames. The interpretations given to these early modern signatures by art historians have been somewhat less diverse, however, and, despite slight nuances, most fall under the general category of self-referential statements of artistic authority. But these interpretations overlook the internally divided agency demonstrated by some of the signatures executed by the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Titian, several of which are difficult to find; these signatures simultaneously fail to demand our attention and figure their own vulnerability. This article will situate Titian's furtive signatures within the complex social dynamic of early modern courts, while at the same time considering how his signatures engage with early modern conceptions of the rich textuality-the indeterminacy-of signatures and proper names.
FLOATING ARCADIA Cranston, Jodi
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice,
05/2020
Book Chapter
Jacopo de’ Barbari’s woodcut View of Venice, ca. 1500 (fig. 13), announces through its magisterial size, millennial date, and aerial view the emergence of a new orientational moment in the ...visualization of the city.¹ High above the detailed urban landscape and expansive seascape, the viewpoint floats in an aerial zone occupied by deities, whether the Olympian Mercury, depicted in clouds in the upper center of the sheet, or the implied Christian God. (Neptune remains at sea level in his aquatic home.) Both the idea of Venice as a city favored by God and the artist’s technical challenges in representing its
Pastoral landscapes gained popularity in the visual arts in Italy sometime around the last quarter of the fifteenth century.¹ Green spaces inhabited by sheep and shepherds started to frame devotional ...depictions of the Virgin and Child (fig. 23), and Pan and other mythological deities associated with woodland existence emerged as subjects for independent paintings.² Artists in Florence, especially those connected to the humanist circle around Lorenzo il Magnifico (de’ Medici), first explored these pastoral subjects and themes in the late quattrocento, while new editions of ancient bucolic eclogues by Theocritus and Virgil joined contemporary poetic compositions by Poliziano, Bernardo and
THE GREENING OF VENICE Cranston, Jodi
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice,
05/2020
Book Chapter
Venice could be called a pastoral city long before it actively supported and hosted the literary and visual production of pastoral worlds in the sixteenth century. Only a few centuries beforehand, ...and continuing into the mid-quattrocento, parts of the lagoon resembled the countryside, with extensive garden plots far removed from residential areas, and uncultivated and uninhabited green islands that sustained and fed pasturing sheep and cows.¹ Herds wandered from the shore to islands, between islands, and on the lidi until concerns about the damage being done to the terrain by the animals prompted land reclamation for urban-development and-expansion projects.² The
PASTORAL SCULPTURE Cranston, Jodi
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice,
05/2020
Book Chapter
Green worlds, whether actual or imagined, whether enclosing shepherds in verdant groves or giving sweeping vistas of Venice, are also constructed by another type of artifact: small-scale bronze ...sculptures of shepherds, satyrs, nymphs, and goats. Produced during the first few decades of the sixteenth century, these pastoral bronzes took the form of freestanding statuettes and of functional objects such as inkstands, oil lamps, and candlestick holders (figs. 59–61).¹ They appeared during a period of great productivity in bronze casting in northern Italy, and especially in the Venetian city of Padua, during which time several artists reproduced in small scale
THE EXPORTED PASTORAL Cranston, Jodi
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice,
05/2020
Book Chapter
Pastoral elements lingered in the cultural life of Venice throughout the sixteenth century. Shepherds and green landscapes continued, with variations, to appear in the visual arts, poetry, theater, ...and festivals produced in Venice, but continued nonetheless with almost no interruption. The situation changed in the early seventeenth century, when art collectors throughout Europe started to buy Venetian artworks of all types and when Venetian theater and the city’s thriving book-publishing market began to undergo significant changes.¹ In the seventeenth century places other than Venice, such as Rome, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, and London, became the creative nodes for the pastoral mode.²
