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English Pages 228 Year 2020
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
Green Worlds of Renaissance
Venice
Jodi Cranston The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the CAA.
MM Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cranston, Jodi, 1969– author. Title: Green worlds of Renaissance Venice / Jodi Cranston. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Considers the development of the pastoral in sixteenth-century Venice as an urban phenomenon specific to the lagoon. Studies Venetian urban gardens as actual places, imaginary spaces, and fantasies of urban planning challenged by ecological concerns”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2018031499 | ISBN 9780271082028 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pastoral art—Italy—Venice— 16th century. | Art, Italian—Italy—Venice— 16th century. | Art, Renaissance— Italy—Venice. | Gardens in art. | Gardens— Italy—Venice—History—16th century. | Venice (Italy)—In art. Classification: LCC N8205.C73 2019 | DDC 709.45/311—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc .gov/2018031499
Copyright © 2019 Jodi Cranston All rights reserved Printed in China Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. Frontispiece: Titian, Three Ages of Man, ca. 1512 (fig. 78); page vi, Giorgione, Tempesta, ca. 1506–8 (fig. 9); xii, Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, ca. 1510 (fig. 2); 20, Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, ca. 1508 (fig. 12); 44, Titian, Gypsy Madonna, ca. 1510 (fig. 34); 74, Titian, Rape of Europa, ca. 1562 (fig. 55); 110, Titian, Jacopo Strada, 1567 (fig. 68); 138, Titian, Pardo Venus, 1553 (fig. 75).
Contents
List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice 1 ·1· The Greening of Venice 21 ·2· The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting in Venice 45 ·3· Floating Arcadia: Pastoral Vedute of Venice 75 ·4· Pastoral Sculpture 111 ·5· The Exported Pastoral: Painting After the 1520s 139
Notes 155 Selected Bibliography 193 Index 207
Illustrations
1. Titian, Pastoral Concert, ca. 1510–11. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 2. Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, ca. 1510. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 3. Giulio Campagnola, Landscape with Two Men Sitting near a Coppice, after 1510. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN–Grand Palais / Michael Urtado / Art Resource, New York. 4. Francesco Bertelli, Uomini selvatici, from Il carnevale italiano mascherato (Venice, 1642). Photo: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 5. View of Venice from The Romance of Alexander, produced by the Flemish illuminator Jehan de Grise and his workshop, 1338–44, with Marco Polo, Li Livres du Graunt Caam, added in England ca. 1400. Photo: Art Resource, New York. 6. Sebastiano del Piombo, Death of Adonis, ca. 1511. Photo: Scala / Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 7. Gentile Bellini, Procession in St. Mark’s Square, ca. 1496. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 8. Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, ca. 1514. Photo: Scala / Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 9. Giorgione, Tempesta, ca. 1506–8. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, New York. 10. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, late 1480s. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org. 11. Giovanni Bellini, Saint Francis in the Desert, ca. 1476. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, New York. 12. Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, ca. 1508. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 13. Jacopo de’ Barbari, View of Venice, ca. 1500. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 14. Jacopo de’ Barbari, detail of Giudecca from View of Venice, ca. 1500. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 15. Jacopo de’ Barbari, detail of Murano from View of Venice, ca. 1500. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 16. Jacopo de’ Barbari, detail from View of Venice, ca. 1500. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 17. Jacopo de’ Barbari, detail of Palazzo Trevisan from View of Venice, ca. 1500. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 18. Vittore Carpaccio, Lion of Saint Mark, 1516. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 19. Francesco Colonna, study for a garden, from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499). Photo: De Agostini Picture Library / A. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images. 20. Sebastiano del Piombo, Polyphemus, and Raphael, Galatea, 1508–11 Photo: Angeli Alessandro. Franco Cosimo Panini Editore © Management Fratelli Alinari. Alinari / Art Resource, New York.
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8 8 9 10 11 13 15 16 17 24 24 24 25 28
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21. Giovanni Britto (attrib.), frontispiece for Pietro Aretino’s Stanze di M. Pietro Aretino, 1537. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org. 39 22. Sebastiano Serlio, satyric scene from Libro secondo della prospettiva (1566), fol. 47v. Photo: Avery Library, Columbia University, New York. 41 23. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow, ca. 1505. Photo © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York. 46 24. Giorgione, Enthroned Madonna with Saints (Castelfranco Altarpiece), ca. 1500–1505. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 53 25. Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds, or Allendale Nativity, ca. 1505–10. Photo courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 54 26. Giorgione, A Boy with a Pipe (“The Shepherd”), ca. 1510–15. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017. 54 27. Domenico Campagnola, Rocky Woodland Landscape, ca. 1520. Photo: Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. 62 28. Domenico Campagnola, Two Kneeling Youths in a Landscape, ca. 1517. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York. 62 29. Titian, Pastoral Scene, ca. 1565. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. 63 30. Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, ca. 1483–86. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 65 31. Domenico Campagnola, Two Youths Kneeling in a Landscape. Photo: The Albertina Museum, Vienna. 68 32. Titian, Miracle of the Woman Wounded by Her Husband, ca. 1510–11. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 69 33. Titian, Two Satyrs in a Landscape, ca. 1505–10. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org. 69 34. Titian, Gypsy Madonna, ca. 1510. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 72 35. Giulio Campagnola, Old Shepherd Lying in a Landscape, ca. 1500–1515. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org. 73 36. Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, view of Venice from Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493). Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. 76–77 37. Titian, Gozzi Altarpiece, 1520. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 78 38. Titian, Saint Christopher, ca. 1523. Photo: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York. 79 39. Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, The Virgin in Glory with Christ Child, Angels, and Saints Peter, Dominic, Paul, and Jerome (Pala Pesaro), 1524. Photo: Scala / Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali / Art Resource, New York. 80 40. Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, ca. 1530. Photo: 81 Alinari / Art Resource, New York. 41. Jacopo Sansovino and assistants, allegorical figure from Loggetta di San Marco, 1537–49. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 82 42. Lucantonio degli Uberti, after Francesco Rosselli, “Catena Map,” ca. 1500–1510 Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen / 82 Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, New York. viii
illustrations
43. Piero del Pollaiuolo, Annunciation, ca. 1470. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, New York. 83 44. Jacopo Bellini, Flagellation, ca. 1450. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN–Grand Palais / Jean-Gilles Berizzi / Art Resource, New York. 84 45. Cesare Vecellio, Perspettiva della prima piazza di San Marco, from Habiti antichi et moderni di tutti il mondo (Venice, 1590), fol. 39r. Photo: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 86 46. Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, The Triumph of Venice, 1737. Photo: North Carolina Museum of Art. 87 47. Benedetto Bordone, view of Venice from Isolario (Venice, 1528). Photo: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York. 90 48. Domenico Tintoretto, Saint Mark Blessing the Origins of Venice, early 1600s. Photo: akg-images / Cameraphoto. 92 49. Matteo Pagan, View of Venice (Venice, 1559). Photo © Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Jörg P. Anders). 93 50. Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–23. Photo © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York. 95 51. Giulio Strozzi, Venetia edificata (Venice, 1624), 156, frontispiece to canto 16. Photo: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 97 52. Domenico Tintoretto, Venice, Queen of the Adriatic, Crowning the Lion of Saint Mark, ca. 1590. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. 100 53. Raphael, Madonna of Foligno, 1512. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 103 54. Fra Bartolommeo, Vision of Saint Catherine, 1509. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 103 55. Titian, Rape of Europa, ca. 1562. Photo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. 105 56. Titian, Perseus and Andromeda, ca. 1555. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London / Art Resource, New York. 106 57. Titian, Saint Margaret and the Dragon, 1565. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 107 58. Titian, Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, 1514–15. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York. 108 59. Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, Satyr (Pan?), ca. 1510–20. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org. 112 60. Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, Satyr and Satyress, ca. 1515–20. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 112 61. Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, Drinking Satyr, ca. 1515–20. Photo: KHM-Museumsverband. 113 62. Base for a Satyr and Satyress Group, early 1500s? Photo © The Cleveland Museum of Art. 114 63. Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, The Shepherd Daphnis Playing a Pipe, ca. 1520–30. Photo: The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 115 64. Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, Shouting Horseman, ca. 1510. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 116 65. Venetian, Sleeping Nymph, sixteenth-century Venetian inkstand. Photo courtesy of Daniel Katz Gallery, London. 118 illustrations
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66. Vittore Carpaccio, Saint Augustine in His Study, 1502. Photo: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York. 67. Lorenzo Lotto, Andrea Odoni, 1527. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017. 68. Titian, Jacopo Strada, 1567. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 69. General view of the studiolo, with paintings by Joos van Ghent and Pedro Berruguete, 1472–76. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 70. Giulio Campagnola, The Astrologer, ca. 1509. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Madeleine Coursaget). 71. Attributed to Niccolò Boldrini, Caricature of the Laocoön Group, ca. 1540–45. Photo courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 72. Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1523–26. Photo © Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, New York. 73. Titian, Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine and a Shepherd (Madonna of the Rabbit), ca. 1525–30. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 74. Titian, Venus, Cupid, and the Organist, ca. 1550. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 75. Titian, Pardo Venus, 1553. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. 76. Titian, Nymph and Shepherd, ca. 1570. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 77. Paolo Veronese, landscape, 1560–61, from the interior of the Villa Barbaro, Maser. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York. 78. Titian, Three Ages of Man, ca. 1512. Photo © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, New York. 79. Giovanni Bellini, Feast of the Gods, 1514. Photo courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 80. Ludovico Pozzoserrato, Outdoor Concert, ca. 1596. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York.
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illustrations
120 121 123 124 131 135 140 141 141 142 142 143 146 149 151
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments should be the easiest part of a book to write: the book is done and overdue thanks can finally be issued. But I find it to be the most difficult part, especially for a project like this, which has provided me with the perfect balance of challenge, distraction, and enormous pleasure. I would like for the project to continue indefinitely, and besides, I am not sure that I could adequately express my gratitude to the many individuals who have contributed to my thinking since the time when I first learned about the pastoral as a fortunate undergraduate in one of Thomas Greene’s classes at Yale. I finally chose to work on the subject when my beloved former graduate advisor at Columbia, David Rosand, who wrote so eloquently about the visual pastoral, sadly passed away. Pastoral longing is contagious, it seems. I have tried in the footnotes to express fully my gratitude to the many scholars who have impacted this project. I am especially grateful to the two anonymous readers of the manuscript whose generosity of time, spirit, and intellect significantly improved the book. The warm and supportive audience at the New England Renaissance Conference (2013), where I delivered my first thoughts for the book, provided encouragement at an important moment for the development of the project. The Boston University Center for the Humanities generously supported a research leave at the beginning of the project through a Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellowship (2013–14) and contributed to offset some of the production costs of the book’s publication with a subvention grant. Additional subvention funding was provided by the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University. The Renaissance Society of America also generously assisted the project with the award of the Rensselaer W. Lee Grant in 2015, which facilitated travel to Venice. I am deeply grateful to Ellie Goodman, editor at Pennsylvania State University Press, for having confidence in the project and to the staff at the press for helping to bring the book into the world. The meticulous copyediting by Keith Monley significantly improved the readability of the text. And finally, I am grateful to my family for their patience, love, and support.
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Introduction: The Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
Venice has always been thought of as a city on the sea. Settled over centuries on small islands in a marshy lagoon, Venice treasured any available land by fully developing it into a built environment. Open spaces were limited to the Piazza San Marco and smaller neighborhood squares, and public parks were not introduced to the city landscape until the fall of the republic to Napoleon in 1797. Only the outermost lagunar islands remained undeveloped agrarian expanses. And yet, as this book demonstrates, nearly three centuries earlier, around 1500, Venetians began to imagine, perceive, and experience their marine city as dotted with green worlds, with actual and imaginary green places. Gardens became a celebrated feature of newly built private villas on outer islands; specific garden sites were settings for fictional literary exchanges and poetic inspiration; pastoral paintings, drawings, and sculptures adorned palace interiors; performances of pastoral eclogues and plays occurred throughout the city and on celebratory floats that traversed the canals; and Venice itself was represented frequently as a lagoon city composed of verdant islands. This diverse “greening” of Venice was relatively short-lived, dwindling sometime in the later sixteenth century, but the phenomenon had an immediate impact on how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and artists in other cities in continental Europe and England understood and adapted the pastoral mode for their own distinctive conceptualization and actualization of green worlds.1 Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice considers all of these diverse representations in an effort to enrich our understanding of the broader network of visual, literary, and urban culture in which pastoral painting, drawing, and sculpture participated. Providing the first synthetic analysis of these diverse figurations, this book argues that the specific ecological concerns and geographic identity of Venice 1
Figure 1 Titian, Pastoral Concert, ca. 1510–11. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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as a built island shaped the production and reception of these various green worlds. Before this book, consideration of the beginnings of Venetian pastoral art has been limited to a handful of paintings and drawings—primarily those associated with Giorgione, Titian, and Giulio Campagnola (figs. 1–3)—and the emerging Venetian interest in depicted landscapes has been explained by Venice’s increasing dependence on its territorial possessions on the Italian mainland.2 The situation in fact is richer and more complex: pulled between the economic and social benefits of the terraferma and the pressures to affirm their destiny with the sea, Renaissance Venetians first lived the pastoral mode in Venice.3 Not actually tending sheep or stumbling upon nymphs, Renaissance Venetians instead enacted pastoral situations of love, friendship, loss, and exile through poetic conversations and theatrical performances in lagoon gardens; through comparisons with island utopias found, invented, and mapped in distant seas; and through paintings, drawings, and sculptures that facilitated the imagined experience of inhabiting the depicted green landscapes.4 Renaissance Venetians narrowed the geographic separation between Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
city and country that usually underpins the pastoral mode, such that the two places intertwined—and oftentimes became one and the same place.5 The lagoon city, seemingly miraculous in its existence and perennially threatened by its own ecology, shared both the promise of retreat and the threat of loss that were consistently offered by and found in the pastoral world. In articulating early-cinquecento Venice’s unique approach to the pastoral mode, this book does not intend to claim absolute uniqueness for these Venetian examples. Certainly, other Italian cities, such as Florence, Rome, and Naples, and
introduction
Figure 2 Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, ca. 1510. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Figure 3 Giulio Campagnola, Landscape with Two Men Sitting near a Coppice, after 1510. Brown ink, pen drawing, 13.4 × 25.9 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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areas outside of Italy, such as the Iberian Peninsula and France, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries developed regional versions of the pastoral mode that influentially extended beyond their local boundaries—and frequently to Venice. This book seeks to recognize and bring greater critical attention to these different regional strains by focusing on the particularities of the pastoral mode in cinquecento Venice. Giving attention to a particular place and time, this study also distinguishes and clarifies the production and experience of the pastoral in sixteenth-century Venetian art and literature from those developed in later European and American art and literature, while at the same time recognizing how the latter has inevitably shaped our reception of the former. The challenges of delimiting the structure and characteristics of the pastoral mode—as evidenced by the voluminous writings by and extended debates among literary scholars from late antiquity until today—also afforded enormous creative latitude to Renaissance readers.6 A philologically precise recuperation of pastoral poetry was compromised not only by the limited surviving examples but also by the striking formal variety of those few examples.7 Pastoral painting, because of its limited survival, proved to be even more difficult to retrieve.8 In its most reductive characterization, the pastoral mode involved shepherds tending sheep and joining together in song in verdant isolated landscapes, which nymphs, satyrs, wizards, and bacchic acolytes—and sometimes the god himself—occasionally inhabited. Urban concerns hung distantly at the edges, even though these green worlds were not free of the problems and pleasures of community, such as love, sadness, friendship, music making, and repetitive chores. But beyond this shared cluster of landscape, shepherd, sheep, nymph, and song, the pastoral mode—unlike tragedy and epic—lacked a defined poetic meter, structure, and purpose, and even the pastoral writings of a single poet could vary widely. Given this relative amorphousness, it is not surprising to see why and how Renaissance readers, writers, and artists inserted into the pastoral orbit cultural traditions with seemingly tangential connections, ranging from Petrarchan poetics, explorers’ accounts of the New World, topographical descriptions of imagined and actual islands, and Renaissance histories of the foundation of Venice. The pastoral mode was generously adaptable. Consequently, this book recognizes and approaches all of this diverse and interconnected material through a more expansive concept of “green worlds,” which includes the pastoral mode under its theoretical umbrella while simultaneously broadening the cultural reach and significance of the pastoral mode. The concept of the “green world” is perhaps more familiar to literary scholars from the work of Northrop Frye, who, in his essay “The Argument of Comedy” (1949), identified and framed “green worlds” in several of Shakespeare’s comedies as ritual and dream worlds, which characters create out of their own desires and in which problems are solved. Forests, sheltered green places, islands: each of these acts as a 4
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world of desire that functions not as an allegorical place or as “an escape from reality, but as a genuine form of world that human life tries to imitate.”9 When specifically discussing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a later essay on Shakespeare’s comedies, Frye says that the “green-world structure” appears when “a world presented dramatically as a ‘real’ world, full of courts and order and justice and other conventional attributes of reality, is opposed to a fairy-tale world of magic and enchantment, out of which the comic resolution comes.”10 Later scholars of Renaissance literature, notably Harry Berger Jr., developed and complicated Frye’s “green-world structure” by articulating the broader structure of the heterocosm— or second world—of which the green world is a specific instance. “The second world,” according to Berger, is the playground, laboratory, theater, or battlefield of the mind, a model or construct the mind creates, a time or place it clears in order to withdraw from the actual environment. It may be the world of play or poem or treatise, the world inside a picture frame, the world of pastoral simplification, the controlled conditions of scientific experiment. Its essential quality is that it is an explicitly fictional, artificial, or hypothetical world. . . . Separating itself from the casual and confused region of everyday existence, it promises a clarified image of the world it replaces.11
The structural dynamic of second worlds or green worlds has attached to it a specific historically and regionally determined set of experiences, even though it surfaces outside of the Renaissance.12 Michel Foucault’s immensely popular but sketchily articulated concept of heterotopia, for example, bears a striking resemblance by establishing a family of sites that resemble and distort other spaces.13 Cemeteries, gardens, brothels, prisons, ships, among many others: these actual, locatable places hinge to the rest of space and, according to Foucault, “are at variance somehow”—and seem not unrelated in concept to Berger’s “playground, laboratory, theater, or battlefield of the mind.” Despite their parallel structures, though, both Berger and Foucault would agree that the experience of a Renaissance imagined green world necessarily differed from that of an actual nineteenth-century prison. The structure varies in its historical function and meaning as well as in its negotiation of representation and actuality. Italian Renaissance green worlds most often created a clearing for the suspension of established expectations, for the withdrawal of an individual from courtly and political worlds to magical forest, island, and pastoral settings, which seem devoid of such strictures and expectations—but which are never unproblematic and uncomplicated escapes. Here individuals experience subjective transformations that leave them positively and/or negatively changed upon their reentry into the lives they had left. Ariosto’s enormously popular Orlando furioso (first p ublished introduction
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1516, complete version 1532), for example, offers many of these green-world scenarios, many of which contain poignantly intimate moments of self-change.14 Ruggiero, made captive on the island of the evil sorceress Alcina, loses his identity as the chivalric hero and becomes effeminized to the point of nearly being misrecognized by the good sorceress, Melissa, who reveals to Ruggiero the island and Alcina for the deceptions that they really are (cantos 6.35–8.16). In another canto, the hero Orlando stumbles upon a pastoral landscape in which he deludes himself that his beloved Angelica has remained faithful to him, despite the evidence of Angelica and Medor’s initials carved into the trees. “He came to a stream which looked like crystal; a pleasant meadow bloomed on its banks, picked out with lovely pure colors and adorned with many beautiful trees. / A welcome breeze tempered the noontide for the rugged flock and naked shepherd. . . . Here he stopped, then, to rest—but his welcome proved to be harsh and painful.”15 Within this isolated green world, separate from the chivalric world of battle, Orlando transports himself to another world by losing his sanity because of love, destroys with his slicing sword the green world that had fostered his subjective realizations, and tries to undo the experience by returning to the now-devastated, depastoralized landscape. On impulse he drew his sword, / and slashed at the words and the rock-face, sending tiny splinters shooting skywards. Alas for the cave, and for every trunk on which the names of Medor and Angelica were written! They were left, that day, in such a state that never more would they afford cool shade to shepherd or flock. The spring, too, which had been so clear and pure, was scarcely safer from wrath such as his; / branches, stumps, and boughs, stones and clods he kept hurling into the lovely waters until he so clouded them from surface to bottom that they were clear and pure never again.16
The green world does not necessarily provide a dependably positive and idyllic escape. In Berger’s and Frye’s formulations, the second world is poetic, fictional, and metaphorical and is not, like Foucault’s heterotopia, a localized and real place. But as many scholars have articulated—including both Berger and Frye—the interdependence between the fictional and real prevented any clear distinction in the Renaissance mind. This tension not surprisingly operates as a central hermeneutic within many green-world fictions. Similarly, the described experience of actually being in Renaissance Venice is just as interwoven with the imaginary and resembles the overlapping, even collapsing, of worlds.17 The publisher Francesco Marcolini lived in a house on the Giudecca that was imagined by Pietro Aretino as a locus amoenus with Petrarchan 6
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birds in attendance.18 The Murano garden of the scholarwriter Trifone Gabriele incited the Venetian poetess Gaspara Stampa to willfully mistake it and fully experience it as a garden of love.19 Andrea Calmo imagined the gardens of the Palazzo Priuli on Murano as “a terrestrial paradise . . . [inhabited] by nymphs and semi-gods.”20 The unique sociopolitical structure of republican Venice facilitated these poetic imaginings by broadening the audiences and locations of performances of pastoral eclogues and plays beyond the closed elite court settings that sponsored these performances elsewhere in Italy.21 Pastoral recitations of various types were just as likely to occur in private houses as on the streets and in campi, on barges in the canals, and in temporary and established theaters, and therefore likely attracted audiences with greater diversity and scale than those invited to one-time court celebrations.22 Distinctively Venetian institutions such as carnevale, commedia dell’arte, and the Compagnie della Calza contributed to the diverse manifestations of the pastoral (fig. 4).23 Venetian printing presses provided performers, editors, and readers in Venice with immediate access to a wide range and variety of pastoral literature, which inspired and conditioned experiences in and of a city that itself existed apart from any immediate agrarian realities that could threaten the ideated pastoral constructions in the lagoon.24 Furthermore, the pastoral ideals of social order and harmonious community aligned with the propagandistic goals espoused by the republic for life in Venice, even if, as many scholars have recently asserted, the reality was far different.25 Unlike Venetian mainland territories, whose denizens could observe firsthand the distance separating the privileged literary-shepherd characters and the disadvantaged rustic farmers, Venice existed geographically apart from (but hardly ignorant of or unaffected by) these tensions as untillable islands that provided a distant, and therefore hospitable, environment for the construction of imagined green worlds.26 Developed primarily for discursive or poetic situations, the concept of green or second world seems paradoxically both easily extended to and more challenging to apply to the visual arts. On the one hand, the concept offers a way to approach the depiction of different landscapes or realities within the same painting. Depictions of visions can serve as one type of example (fig. 53).27 Closer to the topic of this project: A section of Venice (the Giudecca) is envisioned as a green wood inhabited by exotic animals in the illustrated Marco Polo (fig. 5),28 and the death of Adonis is imagined on a nonexistent island in the Bacino in Sebastiano da Piombo’s painting (fig. 6).29 But, on the other hand, the notion of second world could be argued as describing every independent painting and drawing, where the properties of the introduction
Figure 4 Francesco Bertelli, Uomini selvatici, from Il carnevale italiano mascherato (Venice, 1642). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2556–728).
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Figure 5 View of Venice from The Romance of Alexander, in French verse, produced by the Flemish illuminator Jehan de Grise and his workshop, 1338–44, with this section, titled Marco Polo, Li Livres du Graunt Caam, in French prose, added in England ca. 1400. ms Bodl. 264, fol. 218r. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Figure 6 Sebastiano del Piombo, Death of Adonis, ca. 1511. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
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object (especially if framed) delineate the entire painted surface as a fictional world—as Berger suggests with his inclusion of the “world inside a picture frame” in his list of second-world examples.30 This concept of painting as second world threatens to become so expansive as to be nearly meaningless—even if it remains limited to figurative, perspectival painting as Berger first did when extending the concept to the visual arts.31 Renaissance theorizations of the art, such as Alberti’s metaphor of the window for painting and his attribution of painting’s origins to Narcissus, acknowledge, respectively, the separateness of the artworks as alternate, fictive worlds and the potential absorption of the viewers into paintings.32 Perspective further emphasizes these conditions by aiming to situate the viewer’s eye in the same position as the artist’s.33 But second worlds—especially green worlds—in Renaissance texts are usually remote, distant, hidden, and not readily available to view, and they tend to place an emphasis on passage, on entry and withdrawal. Not every Renaissance painting enacts these situations and conditions, but a striking number of the earliest Venetian pastoral paintings, drawings, and prints, made between approximately 1500 and 1520, do. (In this book painting stands as shorthand for paintings, drawings, and prints, unless noted otherwise.) Small in scale, pastoral paintings rarely achieve dimensions that place the pictorial field beyond the peripheral vision of the beholder, and pastoral drawings almost always are smaller than a sheet of standard notebook paper (fig. 3). These smaller artworks demand close attention and intimate involvement like other smaller-scale counterparts, such as portraits and half-length devotional images that bring the viewer face-toface with the depicted figure(s) (fig. 10).34 The nearly simultaneous execution of monumental narrative paintings for Venetian scuole (confraternities) (fig. 7) and
introduction
Figure 7 Gentile Bellini, Procession in St. Mark’s Square, ca. 1496. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
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Figure 8 Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, ca. 1514. Galleria Borghese, Rome.
the Palazzo Ducale in Venice would have emphasized the difference for artists and viewers.35 The pastoral paintings also demonstrate a manner of execution that invites viewers to look closely, to be drawn into shadows and amorphous contours that dissolve into pools of pigment and ink (fig. 1).36 The handling of oil paint on canvas and of ink on paper creates visual encounters that make the depicted figures and environment also seem remote, distant, dissolved, hidden, and not readily available to view.37 And as the endless attribution conundrums circulating around these pictures and drawings attest, the stylistic similarities between them suggest a deliberate consistency in mode of imaging such that problems of attribution persist, whereas nonpastoral artworks by the same artists have generally avoided such attribution confusion.38 And yet, not every artwork that could be identified as engaging with pastoral themes fits within this characterization of the green world; the concept of green worlds is not simply a renaming of pastoral. Compare, for example, some of the paintings that are identified as the earliest pastoral examples—Giorgione’s/Titian’s Pastoral Concert (fig. 1) and Giorgione’s/Titian’s Sleeping Venus (fig. 2), for example— with Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (fig. 8), a painting executed only about five years later, which includes pastoral content.39 Disregarding for the time being the irreconcilable differences in art-historical assessments concerning authorship and patronage, we observe in all of the paintings the human figure(s) situated in green, pastoral landscapes sometimes inhabited by sheep and shepherds and with architecture in the distance. All of the figures in the first group withdraw into their painted worlds, either by engaging with one another and failing to address the viewer or by sleeping or tending to a solitary task (such as water pouring in the Pastoral Concert), so that viewers experience their own beholding as some type of encroachment (fig. 9). Sleep, conversation, hiding, retreat, meditative and repetitive chores: all of these activities demarcate the pastoral landscapes as separate spaces similar to green worlds that the viewer is seen as stumbling upon, as finding unexpectedly as Orlando did his ill-fated pastoral pocket. They exist without us. 10
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
Figure 9 Giorgione, Tempesta, ca. 1506–8. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
11
We feel as though they prefer to be without us. And yet we are drawn in by the sensuousness of the figures and the landscapes and by landscape structures that encourage visual ambling. Sacred and Profane Love includes the same pastoral staffage—sheep, shepherds, and green rolling hills—but the obedience to and awareness of the picture plane exhibited by the sarcophagus relief and the frontalfacing personifications of Plato’s conception of twin loves depend upon the rational semiotics of the picture plane and dialectical meaning—seated (clothed), standing (nude)—supplied by the viewer.40 One could argue that the differences articulated here simply depend upon the selection of the comparative examples rather than upon the concept of green worlds. However, I hope to demonstrate in this book that the distinctive categories exemplified above are not eccentric but are instead broadly representative—that there are many artworks that stage withdrawn green worlds and many other artworks that employ pastoral staffage to visualize more populated and socially engaged and directed allegories and mythologies.41 Art historians have inadvertently articulated precisely this distinction by questioning the subject matter of paintings designated here as visualizing “green worlds”: obviously pastoral, but with no clear illustration of a literary pastoral episode, these paintings have led to countless allegorical readings and assertions of having no subject.42 The experiences of physical and emotional withdrawal, hostility, retreat, exile, and hiding— among others—that the figures and landscapes together initiate have been mistaken as the withdrawal of the subject matter itself, when in fact these conditions are all at home in, by virtue of defining, the green world. These pastoral green worlds are related to earlier visualizations of landscapes in portraits and devotional images, especially those executed by Venetian painters, despite their compositional differences. Beginning around the mid-quattrocento, landscape views—both devoid of and inhabited by shepherds—frequently appear behind single-figure portrait sitters and, more often, depictions of the Virgin and Child. Venetian examples often include window ledges and frames, as well as curtains and cloths of honor, which provide both the distinction and connection between the space of the figure(s) and that of the landscape.43 The green space exists beyond the intermediary space of the figure(s) and provides the coordinates for locating the subject; the background landscape creates the sense of the subject’s proximity in the face of expansive and distant panoramas. These landscapes are, for the most part, placeless places that condition the viewer’s interaction with the depicted as intimate, private, and secluded—as in Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child (fig. 10) or Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (Musée du Louvre, Paris) or countless others produced in the later decades of the fifteenth century, just preceding and overlapping chronologically with the Venetian pastoral paintings.44 These backgrounds are the means for shaping the viewer’s experience of interiority, 12
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
rather than just serving as meaningless backdrops.45 These artworks can be seen as demonstrating the subjectivity in and around green worlds. With respect to Italian Renaissance art, then, the concept of green worlds has implications for rethinking how we characterize not only the relationship between figures and landscapes but also the emergence of pure landscape painting as a process of eliminating the figure from the landscape. Much of the history of Renaissance landscape depictions has hinged on the identification of different regional approaches: northern European art, with its emphasis on color and detail, embraced the representation of landscapes more fully than southern European art, which continued to privilege the human figure at the expense of the landscape.46 This oft-repeated story of distinctive visual traditions holds some truth in the sixteenth century: this period offers many more examples of represented landscapes without figures or in which only diminutive figures appear, such as in the paintings of Albrecht Altdorfer or Joachim Patinir;47 some Italian painters employed northern introduction
Figure 10 Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, late 1480s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1908.
13
European artists specifically to execute landscape backgrounds in their paintings;48 and narrative painting continued to privilege urban settings, even in Venetian art. But this focus in Renaissance art history on the dominant presence of the human figure in Italian landscape depictions and the resulting determination of the importance of the landscape based on relative size and/or pictorial space occupied by the human figure ends up reinforcing interpretative approaches rooted in identifiable subject matter and inhibiting recognition of subtle interactions between the depicted figures and landscape.49 The insistent adherence to the idea of a landscape background as secondary, as a subordinate supplement, is inherited from Italian Renaissance art theory, which actually flattened the complexity of the experiential range in and for landscape otherwise found voiced in Renaissance culture—as this book demonstrates. Fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century writers—including Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci—frequently gave suggestions for how to depict individual elements of nature—trees, water, and so forth—and their behaviors in different locations and atmospheric conditions; but the writers’ emphasis remained on pictorial composition and on the depicted space as a container for figures. The privileging of figure over landscape in these writings conveyed the message with ideological overtones, which later art historians reinforced: the landscape belongs to the human figures; the human figures do not belong to the landscape. The landscape is something that we humans own and view.50 When invested as sites of power, represented landscapes often call out to the idea of the “real” landscape—and specific contextual evidence—as their source and justification.51 But even Venetian paintings complicate this approach by depicting nature that has the capacity to act on or in relation to its figures, such as the revelatory solitude motivated by the shimmering natural world in Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert (fig. 11) or the mysteries of nature experienced by the three figures in the tenebrous wooded pocket, which abuts a larger pastoral landscape, in Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (fig. 12).52 Venetian Renaissance pastoral art and poetry, cartographic and exploration writings, and lyric poetry, as this book shows, describe the active and contemplative processes of shaping by humans and nature that turn an ordinary place into a green world, and highlight the interconnection between the impact of landscape on individuals and the human activity of producing and inventing landscapes. The concept of green worlds allows us to think less about landscapes as peripheral components and more about the process through which spaces, places, and their representations become meaningful.53 The interaction between human figures and the landscape was of particular interest to Renaissance Venetians—perhaps somewhat surprisingly because of their limited land. The siting of their city on the sea has redirected most scholarly discussions of landscape—whether specifically the depiction of pastoral landscapes 14
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
Figure 11 Giovanni Bellini, Saint Francis in the Desert, ca. 1476. The Frick Collection, New York.
15
Vienna.
or more generally definitions of Venice as a place—to the importance of the terraferma and its inland territorial holdings during challenging political, economic, and social episodes for the sixteenth-century republic. These interior areas, and especially the idea of them, certainly had an impact on Venetian life: Venetian nobles sought economic benefits from and places of leisure on inland landholdings; many members of the Venetian ruling class were dispatched to take up supervisory residency at villa-farms; upcountry troops assisted with defending the republic and took refuge in the city when their own lands were occupied; and dramatic performances featured tensions between peasant rustics (or villani) and city dwellers.54 Cinquecento Venetians also thought about how human actions toward the environment of the terraferma holdings directly impacted the ecology of the lagoon. Forest management implemented by the republic, as Karl Appuhn has pointed out, revealed the Venetians’ deep concerns for maintaining the existing, yet still vulnerable, equilibrium between the built city, eroding land, and variable waters.55 Venetians devoted significant economic and human resources to ensure the physical and ecological stability of their city—goals that overlapped with but did not repeatedly find visualization in the broader iconographic program to perpetuate propagandistically the idea of Venice as “La Serenissima.”56 The aerial view
16
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
Figure 12 Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, ca. 1508. Kunsthistorisches Museum,
of Venice by Jacopo de’ Barbari (fig. 13), for example, announces the recognition of this stability and the ambition in the year 1500 to find it within the landscape of the lagoon itself. The interaction between humans and landscape in Venice might not actually have occurred within a green expanse of land, but Venetians were thinking about precisely this interaction arguably more than any other early sixteenth- century city in Europe. · · · The first chapter of this book, “The Greening of Venice,” considers the location and design of specific gardens established in early sixteenth-century Venice and the role of these actual green places in contemporary poetry, literary dialogues, and theatrical performances. The topographical abutment of actual Venetian gardens with the sea facilitated the frequent connection between the pastoral landscape and seascape in pastoral poetry, but that has been addressed rarely in pastoral scholarship. Green places in Venice fostered an individual’s exploration of pastoral topoi within the topography of the lagoon as the expression of love, contemplation, discovery, and burgeoning regionalism. Whereas the civic iconography of Venice publicly celebrated the maritime supremacy of the republic, the private gardens served as a medium for subjectivity of the individual and the regional at a transitional moment in Venice’s history. Most of the pastoral paintings executed in the early sixteenth century remained immediately in Venetian palaces, which also often had attached gardens. The second chapter, “The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting in Venice,” asks how including a diverse range of topographical contexts and of poetic and theatrical sources introduction
Figure 13 Jacopo de’ Barbari, View of Venice, ca. 1500. Museo Correr, Venice.
17
impacts our understanding of the pastoral mode in cinquecento Venetian paintings, drawings, and prints, and especially in the work attributed to Giorgione, Giulio Campagnola, and Titian. Pastoral pictures, this chapter concludes, depended less on repeated visual citations of specific poetic scenarios and protagonists and more on creating unique, expansive, and imaginative worlds that are inextricably bound up with subjective experiences as they are expressed visually. Such an approach recognizes the relative autonomy of pastoral painting from, rather than reliance on, pastoral poetry and consequently privileges different facets of pastoral paintings, drawings, and prints as influential for the emergence and development of landscape painting in cinquecento Italy. Cinquecento Venetian painters, especially Titian, produced pictures with views of Venice as the background for mythological and biblical stories—even when these stories were set originally in specific locations other than Venice. The events are depicted as occurring on a nonexistent verdant island and sometimes on an existing landmass that possesses none of its actual, known topographical features. Giving us views of the city that we could never otherwise have, these pictures visualize contemporary literary and cartographic discussions that arose around the discovery and invention of islands—particularly those in the New World. Chapter 3, “Floating Arcadia: Pastoral Vedute of Venice,” considers how these represented islands relate to contemporary interests in island utopias and to anxiety about Venice’s identity at a time of limited participation in New World exploration. Placed in close proximity to these pastoral artworks and gardens were pastoral sculptures, which mostly consisted of small-scale bronze statuettes that were in all likelihood displayed in private studies and collections. Sleeping nymphs, satyrs, sheep, and shepherds adorned functional luxury objects such as inkwells or were created to be collected together and arranged creatively and flexibly according to the wishes of the observer. A few of these pastoral statuettes had detachable bronze backgrounds, which situated the sculptures in miniature pastoral landscapes. Chapter 4, “Pastoral Sculpture,” incorporates this sculpted material into the broader critical consideration of pastoral artworks and addresses how the material and imaginative interactions with made objects in private studies and collections shaped the Venetian conception of the relationship between figure and landscape within the pastoral more generally. The final chapter, “The Exported Pastoral: Painting After the 1520s,” functions as an afterword and assesses the development of the pastoral in the decades after 1520, when the green worlds of Venice were exported to the terraferma and beyond, to areas outside of the lagoon and of Italy. Private gardens were ensconced within larger working farms on the mainland rather than attached to seaside palaces, and artists such as Titian began sending their paintings to patrons outside of Venice, who appear to have valued the socialization—the mythological, courtly, and reli18
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
gious aspects—of the pastoral rather than the quiet and solitude expressed in those earlier artworks that had found homes in Venice. In addition, many of those first pastoral paintings had found new homes far outside of Venice by the early 1600s and contributed to new pastoral movements in England, France, and Holland. This chapter considers the impact of these relocations on both the concept of green worlds that had come to define the Venetian pastoral and the appropriation by other early modern European cities of the “urban pastoral,” which had been developed first in cinquecento Venice.
introduction
19
·1·
The Greening of Venice
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 city became decidedly more urban: building projects flourished, and landowners often annexed and built up new land areas by dredging and accumulating backfill.3 Although gradual, the alterations made to the boundaries and panoramas of Venice resulted in a dense cityscape that elicited amazement among visitors who encountered the smallest garden plot. Yet, as this chapter asserts, the time period between roughly 1500 and 1550 witnessed the widespread “greening” of Venice.4 The term “greening,” although not used by early modern Venetians, is used here to capture their concerted efforts to create actual and imaginary green places in a city that was becoming increasingly aware of its own unique ecology: gardens adorned villa-like retreats on the Giudecca and Murano; specific Venetian gardens served as the settings for literary dialogues, poetic contemplation, and Petrarchan-inspired love encounters; pastoral eclogues circulated among Venetians, some of whom impersonated shepherds, and constituted some part of most civic and dramatic performances; pastoral paintings hung on interior walls of palaces; and piscatory eclogues took Venice itself for their setting. 21
Conservation and sustainability—those concepts usually implied by “greening” in current twenty-first-century parlance—were long-standing concerns of Venetians from the city’s earliest days, and they continued to preoccupy its Renaissance inhabitants, who were intent on preserving the limited natural resources as well as incorporating Venice’s ecology—especially its relationship to the sea—into its sense of civic identity.5 These two categories of “greening”—one ecological, the other aesthetic—potentially overlap in their generalized desire to arrest the effects of time: the efforts to protect Venice from natural impact could be seen as parallel to the aesthetic hinging of actual and imagined green places within the city.6 But in cinquecento Venice these “greenings” not only informed one another, they became nearly inseparable: these actual and imagined green places were not detached worlds or transcendent representations but were experienced, imagined, and lived within Venice.7 Consequently, the topographical distinctions usually made between green places and the sea, and the related generic distinctions between the poetic modes associated with these two different landscapes—the pastoral and the epic, respectively—are creatively manipulated in Renaissance Venice.8 This deep connection of these various manifestations of green places with the place of Venice suggests that the city’s “bucolic fever,” from its beginnings in the later fifteenth century, was conceived of and developed largely as an urban pastoral. The concept of urban pastoral might seem redundant, since the underlying premise of pastoral poetry—and similarly painting—is its production and reception in urban settings, despite the author-narrator’s claim to inhabit the pastoral landscape and live as a shepherd.9 But “urban pastoral” here refers to the lack of distancing between the country and the city, tantamount to the near superimposition, if not interpenetration, of country and city.10 Other cities, such as Florence, which were experiencing a “bucolic fever” of their own, usually located their pastoral visions in the countryside beyond the city walls. Venice’s mainland territorial possessions encouraged similar identifications and inspirational landscapes, as many scholars, especially art historians, have argued.11 But the topography of Venice itself, with its urban center surrounded by a green necklace of outlying, lessinhabited islands and lidi, also facilitated the construction of pastoral worlds and the related establishment of the city/country dialectic within the limited geography of the lagoon itself.12 Waterways and the sea oftentimes provided the actual distance for the metaphorical contrast, allowing otherwise artificial distinctions between two nearby and fairly similar places. Green places have shifting, and sometimes nonexistent, boundaries within Venice. The perception and lived experience of Venice as a green place never replaced the celebration of the maritime republic through the dominant iconography of the so-called myth of Venice. The inviolability and miraculousness of “La Serenissima” continued to find figuration through the Virgin Mary, the personification of jus22
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
tice, and the lion of Saint Mark.13 Not entirely separate from the state, the community that espoused and developed the “greening” of Venice represented a subset of the total population, whether they were the wealthy owners of garden-villas or the poets, artists, geographers, historians, theatrical performers, and festival organizers who imagined and realized various green places. Venetians from all levels of society could observe public performances, such as momarie, which included pastoral tableaux and probably the recitation of eclogues and pastoral plays.14 Oftentimes these actual and imagined green places could strike observers as detached landscapes in which the idealization of nature rigidified the actual experience of a green place.15 But despite their different perspectives, both groups recognized how green places functioned—whether potentially or actually—as an ideological medium for subjectivity.16 Other cities, such as London, under the influence of cinquecento Venice, soon thereafter directed these aspects of the urban pastoral toward their own connection with place and burgeoning national identity.17 But Venice’s green places remained close and personal, and through them Venetians felt the lure of the local.18
Gardens in Renaissance Venice In addition to the pasturing islands, actual planned green places existed in Venice well before the publication of ancient pastoral poetry (around the third quarter of the fifteenth century) initiated the vogue of poetic green landscapes. Churches and monasteries cultivated kitchen gardens, orchards, and vineyards, and many private residences possessed gardens capable of growing produce and offering seclusion.19 The earliest known documentation of privately owned orchards dates to 1317, in association with Bianca Dolfin and the Donà family at San Donato on Murano;20 however, cultivation inevitably occurred even earlier. The precise number and distribution within quattrocento Venice are not known, but surviving inventories indicate that gardens were most densely concentrated on Murano and the Giudecca, as they continued to be in the sixteenth century and thereafter. With the most available and sizeable tracts of undeveloped land, these locations offered development opportunities for a garden to be placed in unified coordination with a palace. The possibility also existed in the other sestieri of Venice, as evidenced by the many gardens enumerated by Francesco Sansovino in his Venetia, città nobilissima, et singolare (Venice, 1581), some of which belonged to palaces that were built centuries before Sansovino’s account.21 Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, ca. 1500 (fig. 13), provides the most detailed visualization of garden design, siting, and distribution within Venice and supports the documentary evidence and few surviving physical remains of these Renaissance The Greening of Venice
23
Figure 14 Jacopo de’ Barbari, detail of Giudecca from View of Venice (fig. 13), ca. 1500. Museo Correr, Venice. Figure 15 Jacopo de’ Barbari, detail of Murano from View of Venice. Figure 16 Jacopo de’ Barbari, detail from View of Venice.
24
gardens. The view shows several large garden plots on the Giudecca (fig. 14), which, even though not shown in its entirety, offers the greatest detail of gardens because of the size distortion given to the lower edge of the view. Murano (fig. 15) appears in reduced scale in the center-right background with indications of gardens but without the precise variety of the overhead view of the Giudecca. Many areas owned by churches, such as the islands of San Giorgio Maggiore, San Pietro di Castello, Santa Maria dei Frari, and San Francesco della Vigna, supported cloister gardens, kitchen gardens with pergolas, and open land—whether undeveloped or functionally open for drying woolens. Edges of the lagoon, especially on the northeastern edge of the city (fig. 16), have more gardens and open land represented than does the more developed center, with palaces facing on a canal and gardens and land extending to the sea behind them. The variety of garden arrangements included in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, as well as the detailed depiction of well-known architectural structures, suggests the general credibility of the representation, even though it was not explicitly intended to document faithfully every corner of the city.22 Some of the more clearly rendered gardens exhibit the front-to-back sequence of palace, courtyard, and garden that became an established Venetian type. In each Giudecca example (the most clearly shown is Ca’ Trevisan; fig. 17), a palace façade fronts onto a major canal and the back of the palace affords from its loggias or series of windows a view of a courtyard with a rain-collecting cistern in its center. The cortile gives visual and physical access to the gardens through a claire-voie, or a latticed fence, which was most likely made out of metal. Most of the gardens have at least one type of pergola—either Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
rounded or flat topped depending on the type of plant growth—which usually appears off to one side of the fence but also occasionally punctuates the center spine of the garden. The plantings, although generalized, seem to be arranged according to type rather than any known principle of garden design. There are no depicted quincunx patterns of trees, for example, but rather depictions of orderly rows of what seem more like crops, with trees clustered randomly in groups against the edges of the fences at the farthest reaches of the property.23 Wattle fences surround the entire garden enclosure and sometimes separate the developed property from the open plots of land that lead to the shores of the sea and sometimes coincide with the shoreline itself. Many of these open stretches of land abutting the fences, especially on the southern shore of the Giudecca, served as sites for fishermen to mend nets and sort their catch.24 Cultivation of sea life and plant life coexisted at the edges of the lagoon. The ca. 1500 View of Venice generally confirms the historical records of palace gardens, monastic hermitages, and villeggiature that were contemporary with its execution. More green places appeared throughout the sixteenth century, with some of the largest and most elaborately planned, formal palace gardens developed in and after the seventeenth century.25 Written records, supplied by both visitors to and longtime inhabitants of Venice, help to specify the locations and owners, since most of these gardens no longer exist or have been completely transformed.26 Some of the better-known sites in Venice proper included palaces owned by Cardinal Grimani (near Santa Maria Formosa), Pier Antonio Michiel (in the parish of San Trovaso), Tommaso Contarini (near Madonna dell’Orto), Giacomo Contarini (near San Samuele), and the Morosini (near San Canciano). On the Giudecca were villas belonging to the Barbaro (Ermolao established in 1484 an academy for natural and botanical philosophy), Gritti, Dandolo, Mocenigo, Vendramin, Trevisan, and Cornaro families; and on Murano villas belonging to the Mocenigo (near Fondamenta Daniel Manin), Trevisan (on Fondamenta Navagero), Priuli, and Cornaro (near Campo San Bernardo)27 families and to Trifone Gabriele (Palazzo Corner-Dolfin, near San Pietro Martire)28 and Andrea Navagero (on Fondamenta Navagero, near Via di San Martino). A few of these palace gardens abutted one another, especially on the Giudecca (the properties near and including Palazzo Mocenigo) and Murano (Andrea Navagero’s house and the Palazzo Priuli and, after the mid-sixteenth century, the Palazzo Trevisan),29 which would have created clusters of green areas or districts from certain viewpoints but which always retained their unexpected and novel quality from their inevitable silhouetting against the built horizon of Venice. The unavoidable comparison resulted in—even necessitated—relatively hyperbolic distinctions and praise. Benedetto Bordone, when describing Venice and Murano in his larger book on actual and imaginary global islands, his Isolario . . . nel The Greening of Venice
Figure 17 Jacopo de’ Barbari, detail of Palazzo Trevisan from View of Venice.
25
qual si ragiona di tutte l’isole del mondo (1528), remarked that Murano is “più di amenitate” when compared to Venice.30 Venetian gardens, whether small and hidden or impossible to miss by travelers entering the port, elicited amazement because of their urban situation and their defiance of seemingly prohibitive natural conditions. While waiting to sail to Jerusalem in 1494, Canon Pietro Casola wrote about his experiences of the “city founded on the sea,” “I cannot refrain from repeating that nothing has surprised me more in this city than the many beautiful gardens which are to be seen here, especially, I must say, those belonging to the different religious Orders.”31 Native Venetians shared the canon’s awe, including Leonardo Giustiniani, procurator of San Marco and humanist scholar, who, walking to the shore from his house on Murano, observed in a 1420 letter to Guarino Guarini da Verona: “I behold in such a great surrounding [circumfusione] of saltiness on all sides very sweet and inexhaustible wells preserved by no human industry but by nature’s work alone. I behold besides [video preterea] on the sterile and unproductive sand so many varieties of fruit trees and plants, such a great variety of vegetables and all kinds of grasses as one can scarcely believe possible to grow in places of that sort.”32 Francesco Sansovino, who, writing well over a century later, stated: “There are also various gardens, besides those with common herbs, notable and famous for noble and rare plants, incredible to foreigners, who think that the salt water cannot accommodate human artifice.”33 The trope of Venetian gardens exemplifying irresolvable contrasts—between sweet and salty water, artifice and nature, city and garden—continued well into the twentieth century: “You think, perhaps, there are no gardens in Venice: that it is all a sweep of palace-front and shimmering sea. . . . Really, if you but knew it, almost every palace hides a garden.”34 The topography of Venice reconfigured some of the fundamental aspects of Renaissance gardens by incorporating the presence of the sea as a critical and unavoidable participant—and, as some of the writers above note, an obstacle. Many of the smaller Venetian gardens—especially those in palaces in the sestieri— were enclosed, elevated, and largely protected from the regularly advancing waters of the canals.35 Gardens along the edges of the lagoon, by contrast, were more exposed, which afforded many of them some enviable panoramic views of Venice and outward toward other gardens and, in the cases of Murano and the Giudecca, toward the sea. Humanist scholar and printer Francesco Priscianese reported that during a meal in the garden of Titian’s house, which was located “in the extreme part of Venice on the sea” (nella estrema parte di Vinegia sopra il mare), the beautiful small island of Murano and other most beautiful places could be viewed (“là onde si riguarda la vaga isoletta di Murano et altri luoghi bellissimi”).36 Leaving aside for the moment Priscianese’s own agenda in choosing the garden setting for his questione della lingua discussion, his textual veduta reminds us that vistas 26
Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
offered by Venetian gardens created a sense of isolation and distance not through the expansive surrounding green countryside, as found in the villa landscapes outside of Florence or Rome, for example, but through the water and the unstoppable life on the sea. In this part of the sea, Priscianese observed “[a] thousand gondolas ornamented by beautiful women and resounding with diverse harmonies” (la qual parte del mare . . . fu ripiena di mille gondolette ornate di bellissime donne, & risonanti di diverse armonie).37 Other gardens gave panoramic views out to the seemingly uninhabited horizon, as did the gardens at the Giudecca house of Sante Cattaneo (near the Convertite Monastery), described by Sansovino: “Through the courtyard one enters the garden, which gives views over the lagoon to Malamocco and Chioggia. . . . Here you have land, sea, hill, plain, city, villa, forest, woods, garden, and, finally, all that can cheer and recreate the spirits and the minds” (Per questo cortile si entra nel giardino, il quale discorre fino sopra la laguna, di ricontro à Malamocco, e Chioggia . . . vi sia la terra, il mare, il monte, il piano, la città, la villa, il bosco, la selva, il giardino, e finalmente, tutto quello che può rallegrare, e ricreare gl’animi, e le menti).38 Sometime in the seventeenth century these seaside views were formalized with shoreline loggias decorated with paintings of landscapes, much as many earlier sixteenth-century waterside gardens marked the abutment of land and sea with stone enclosures punctuated with claire-voie or with more elaborate casini, all of which afforded a view.39 Water and, perhaps more importantly, the idea of the expanse of the sea played a central role in conceiving of the garden as a special, enclosed space that was linked to, yet separate from, the sounds of maritime life (including the slapping of waves and singing of women on gondolas) and the limitless and unbounded space of the sea. (Water within the garden—in fountains, for example—was rare in Venice.) Landscapes, and seascapes, depend on the imposition of boundaries for their creation as such, and Venetians to some extent accomplished this demarcation for both land and sea by imposing a perimeter of walls and fences around their gardens and thereby restricting somewhat the view of the sea.40 The garden arrangement reinforced the idea of enclosure with the frequent grouping of trees against those perimeters, which established and announced the edge of the garden and also obstructed or interfered with the garden-level view over the wall or fence. For viewers looking out over the garden from the loggia on the piano nobile of the palace, the trees and walls repeated the demarcation of concatenated places—courtyard to garden to sea—that extended behind the palace. We can imagine that viewers from the sea, especially those approaching Venice from the south, would have shared in the amazement and, perhaps after months on the water, would have thought of these arboreal shorelines as mirages, as unexpected and welcome oases of sorts.41 These Venetian gardens visually and symbolically punctuated the meeting of sea and land, which, although universally meaningful, already had an important The Greening of Venice
27
Figure 18 Vittore Carpaccio, Lion of Saint Mark, 1516. Palazzo Ducale, Venice.
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valence within the iconography of the “myth of Venice” as a figuration of the arrival of Saint Mark and the triumph of Venice over land and sea.42 Vittore Carpaccio’s Lion of Saint Mark (fig. 18), for example, invests with Venetian significance the particular power and possibility of becoming—whether political, cultural, ecological, horticultural—that resides in any ecotone.43 The littoral gardens in Venice do so as well, just less insistently, propagandistically, and dogmatically. The gardens were created in order to be inhabited, primarily within the walled and fenced perimeters, and they often included design features that reinforced their conception as a Venetian version of a secular hortus conclusus (Latin: “enclosed garden”). Originating in the Song of Songs, the symbolic Christian tradition of the hortus conclusus associates the purity and chastity of the Virgin Mary with the walled garden.44 Representations of these sacred enclosed gardens often include a centrally positioned fountain and pathways that divide the area into regions of paradise. Actual Venetian gardens, especially under the influence of Persian and Islamic precedents, often followed a similar arrangement to create a living paradise; however, many enclosed gardens were simply enclosed to divide and protect land possessions and to maximize agricultural and horticultural production.45 One of the most frequently published books in early-cinquecento Venice to offer such practical instructions on garden planning was Pietro de’ Crescenzi’s fourteenth-century treatise, Liber ruralium commodorum, which recommended enclosing town gardens without concern for sacred connotations.46 Renaissance Venetian gardens seem to align more with this practical vision, despite the contemporary depiction of the Virgin in garden settings and the influence of Islamic architecture, since the lagoon gardens lack axial pathways and fountains—or really any evidence of a concerted integration of built garden features. One exception is the widespread use of pergolas, which appear in nearly every garden in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice (fig. 13),47 as supports for dense growth of climbing plants such as jasmine and grapevines that would further enclose the visitor within the garden.48 Although common and utilitarian in medieval gardens, pergolas, both actual and fictional, became in cinquecento Italy popular structures that conveyed and Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
facilitated the multivalent pleasures of strolling within a protected, shaded space.49 Around the time of Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, the execution of illusionistic paintings on loggias in Rome gave them the appearance of pergolas by adorning mythological scenes with depicted fruit-filled swags of lush greenery, as in Raphael’s Loggia di Psiche (Villa Farnesina, Rome), or by interlacing all’antica representations of vines as a framing device for grotteschi and mythological scenes, as in Raphael’s Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena (Palazzo Apostolico, Rome), ca. 1516–17. The conversion of internal built passageways into simulated garden structures emphasized the ancient Roman custom of walking in similar architectural spaces that were open to the landscape.50 The pictorial tradition of painted interior pergolas arrived in Venice somewhat later, around the mid-sixteenth century, if the socalled Foliage Room in the Palazzo Grimani at Santa Maria Formosa may indeed be taken as the earliest surviving example.51 But the practice of associating pergolas with human activity, such as strolling or walking, is already in evidence in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, in which pairs of figures can be seen occasionally near pergolas.52 Too diminutive to provide any specific information, the figures nonetheless convey how pergolas facilitated the experience of being in the garden and thereby indicate the coincidence of kinesthetic movement and intellectual and emotional activity that later architectural theorists such as Vincenzo Scamozzi articulated for pergolas and other types of walkways.53 Pergolas acquired an additional and related experiential meaning in ca. 1500 Venice, where a number of published editions of texts involving gardens associated the pergola with falling in love. One of the more ostensibly practical manuals for gardening, Pietro de’ Crescenzi’s work referenced above, included in Venetian editions the representation of a walled garden with pergola in which a man serenades his seated beloved, even though the accompanying text makes no mention of such an amorous situation.54 The inspiration for a pergola-adorned garden of love could have come from another highly popular contemporary text, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), attributed to Francesco Colonna, which, far from a gardening handbook, stages a complex dream allegory within a series of related garden settings.55 A lush pergola appears early in the book as the structure that both obstructs the beloved Polia from and reveals her to the lover Poliphilo and, by extension, to the reader/viewer (fig. 19).56 The image illustrating the textual episode shows a landscape with an angled fertile archway that functions in many ways as a perversion of barrel-vaulted spaces used by quattrocento artists to demonstrate and employ one-point perspective:57 instead of bringing a legible clarity to the depicted space and focusing our view, and therefore our comprehension, this green tunnel withholds the viewed object and promotes seclusion and secrecy. It is a spatial structure that potentially cultivates and conveys the emotional love conditions of longing, confusion, frustration, and, occasionally, fulfillment.58 The Greening of Venice
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Figure 19 Francesco Colonna, study for a garden, from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499).
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Specific Venetian gardens elicited the poetic investments of the pergola with love and intellectual discourse (as discussed in the next section of this chapter) and also included other garden-design elements that derived from textual traditions. Some of the most detailed descriptions of an actual cinquecento Venetian garden come from Andrea Navagero’s letters from his trip to Spain.59 In one letter, Navagero requests that more trees be planted at his Murano house during his absence, such that there would seem to be a dense bosco in the middle (“l’Orto di Murano bello, nel quale vorrei che faceste porre tanto spessi gli si gli arbori più di quelli che sono, che almen dal mezzo in giù paresse tutto un bosco [f]oltissimo”).60 Bosco could refer to a variety of planting situations in the Italian Renaissance, ranging from trees enclosed within a park or garden, comprising some or all of the enclosure according to some organizational plan, to sacred groves planted “without rule” that were familiar to readers of ancient texts and, more specifically for Renaissance readers, Neoplatonic dialogues and Jacopo Sannazaro’s pastoral poetry.61 Dark woods as literary places of confusion—such as those woods initiating Poliphilo’s journey in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili—also abound under the influence of Dante, who began his journey in the Divine Comedy lost in a dark wood.62 Although Navagero does not specify any particular type of bosco, his long-distance request, made while touring planned gardens with waterworks and organized plantings in Spain, suggests that he not only wanted to vary the experience of his Murano garden, which had a variety of manicured plantings,63 but to do so in a way that potentially reinforced the connection of his garden to poetic and theatrical activity in Venice, that actualized the lived pastoral of green places in Venice. Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
The Lived Pastoral The sources for these few established garden features in cinquecento Venetian gardens have a rich literary heritage, and additionally—and perhaps not surprisingly— this same literary heritage seems to have affected how Venetians lived and shared their experiences of specific, actual gardens in Venice. These gardens became the sites for a variety of literary experiences, shaped the kinds of poetry produced around and in them, and conditioned how visitors inhabited them. Actual gardens in cinquecento Venice—because of their novelty, their unexpectedness, and their diminutive size—were largely discursive sites manipulated by language as well as inspirational sites for the creation of poetry. Gardens, whether actual or imaginary, supplied for Venice the idea of an established intellectual gathering place that the city—a republic without courts or monarchical and papal structures—otherwise lacked.64 Outsiders familiar with these other types of centralizing structures and their related organization and architecture in other locations helped to articulate this Venetian phenomenon. Pietro Aretino, who arrived in Venice from Rome by 1527, stages his dialogue Ragionamenti delle corti (1538) in the publisher Francesco Marcolini’s garden on the Giudecca.65 At the outset, one of the interlocutors, Lodovico Dolce, describes the location of the conversations: “We could call this little garden of Marcolino the fan of the summer, such that the breath of its wind, the shade of its greenery, the softness of its flowers, and the song of its Petrarchan birds refresh, cover, please, and encourage sleep, and much more enjoyable is the walk now since the heat of August boils less the ninth hour of today than that of yesterday.”66 Dolce’s encapsulation of the dialogue’s setting—especially with the reference to Petrarchan bird songs— more clearly relies on tropes of the locus amoenus than offers a detailed description of the specific garden.67 Marcolini’s garden existed, but in Aretino’s text it became a place made for, and generated by, language and sustained by its inhabitants, which, in this case, were the lively publishing and editorial community in cinquecento Venice. A few years later, in 1540, Marcolini referenced another Giudecca garden, the one at the Palazzo Cornaro, as a literary allusion when he echoed much of Aretino’s description for the beginning of the publisher’s own book, Le sorti . . . intitolato il giardino dei pensieri (1540): Marcolini asks where else but this garden could he find “such deep and fresh shade, such fragrant flowers? Where else could one listen to the songs of innumerable birds, whose Petrarchan music uplifts the spirit . . . ?”68 Actual property has been imagined here as a literary place even though it is, following Aretino, presented as a place of sensual experiences. The subtitle for Marcolini’s book, “the garden of thoughts,” following an established titular tradition of referring to poetry collections as gardens, reinforces the connection.69 The Greening of Venice
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Other specific Venetian gardens hovered between an actual place and an imagined text. In the letter that Priscianese appends to book 6 of his Della lingua latina libri sei (1550), cited earlier in this chapter, his description of Titian’s garden as the setting for an intellectual discussion more explicitly relates the garden delights, and particularly the sweetness of the fruit, to the sweetness of letters.70 The painter’s garden hosts the gathering of Priscianese, Aretino, Sansovino, Giacomo Tatti, and Giacomo Nardi. Other than the approximate location and view, very little detail of the garden itself—aside from generalized praise of its orderliness—is provided, in part because the Venetian garden transports Priscianese into a reverie of memory that causes him to elide Titian’s garden and the Roman gardens of Santa Agata: “the similarity that was offered to my mind of the fertile gardens of Sant’Agata [dei Goti on the Quirinal] of the most Reverend father, our Monsignor [Niccolò] Ridolfi (in which the small things can be assimilated to the large), refreshed the memory of his most Reverend Signoria, and the desire of him, and your dearest friends, that I could not know or discern if the majority of time during that evening I found myself in Rome or Venice, almost like a divination, soon after which I came to myself.”71 Titian’s garden, inhabited by Roman interlocutors, spurs Priscianese in his reverie to confuse small and large green worlds, and consequently it behaves for him like a synecdoche, an encapsulation of place as well as of the conversation—which, courtesy of Aretino’s urgings, turns to the so-called questione della lingua.72 Green places cultivate personal memories and a sense of community and belonging—or, the opposites, exile and exclusion, which underlie Priscianese’s desire to relocate to a more sympathetic green place with more sympathetic company. Titian’s garden hovers as an imaginary in-between place that depends on both soil and language for its existence: an actual garden and a “giardino in aria.”73 Green places as sites for discussion have an intellectual heritage in ancient texts, reaching back to Plato’s Phaedrus, among others; but the citation of specific cinquecento Venetian gardens layers onto the ancient conception of the garden as an inspirational retreat the idea of the garden as figurative of the interrelationship of history, geography, community, and personal memory. Writers praising Venice, like those celebrating other early modern cities in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, turned to the metaphor of the garden to convey the fertility and productivity of the specific place (garden as locus amoenus), as well as the defining boundaries (garden as hortus conclusus).74 Aretino referred to Venice as “il giardino di natura” in his 1537 letter announcing the birth of his daughter, Adria. Addressing the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo, who by then resided in Rome, Aretino, who emigrated in the opposite direction, compared his own disconsolate Roman years to the pleasures of residing in Venice. “This site is the ‘giardino de la natura,’ where I have lived for ten years with more happiness than despair, which I had in Rome” (questo sito è il giardino de la natura; onde io, che ci vivo, ho provato, dieci anni visso, più con32
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tentezze che, chi è stato costì in Roma, disperazioni).75 Functioning as a site of regionalism (and later, for other locations, nationalism), the garden represented a manicured, tended community that would be protected from becoming “prey to barbaric nations” (preda di così barbare nazioni), as Benedetto Varchi wrote in another context.76 Paolo Pino translated this concept into differentiating regional artistic traditions when he compared (perhaps defensively) the wildness of Northern landscapes with the delightfulness of the actual Italian world: “The Northerners show a special gift for painting landscapes because they portray the scenery of their own homeland, which offers most suitable motifs by virtue of its wildness, while we Italians live in the garden of the world [giardino del mondo], which is more delightful to behold in reality than in a painting.”77 Specific Venetian gardens as settings for dialogues can be seen in part as contributing to early modern European efforts to bind together an increasingly diverse population into a discrete community—however that community might be defined. The recurrence of the questione della lingua and the comparisons between Venice and Rome as the topics of conversation within these green places only further reinforces the overlapping concerns of place and identity.78 More generally, these dialogues occurring in specific Venetian gardens demonstrate how discussion—and, by extension, thought—take place in the world and how the garden functions as a medium, rather than as a setting, for thought itself.79 Terry Comito articulates this bond between activity and place through an analysis of Girolamo Fracastoro’s Naugerius (1555), a dialogue in a garden retreat near Verona in which the author-narrator initiates the conversation with the question of whether “poets and philosophers are determined [efficiantur] by their nature or by some art or by their surroundings [loco].”80 The poet Andrea Navagero (participating posthumously) erupts into song, and the philosopher Giovanni Battista della Torre (also participating posthumously) stares into space, until the latter shares the following observation: “This very air . . . that we breathe must be inhabited by diverse spirits, which dwell especially in these solitudes, woods, and fountains, where the poets say the gods themselves are present. These spirits go in and out of our bodies, and different ones affect us in different ways.”81 Like the locus amoenus, the gardens are not designed things or objects; instead, they manifest the feelings of the subjects who create and experience them; they are constructed out of, and simultaneous with, the dialogues, the feelings of love, the mediations in solitude.82 Inhabitants of actual Venetian gardens developed this potency of place by invoking the easy and local contrast between their tranquil gardens on outlying islands and the chaos of Venice’s urban center—which was defined by the garden owners as the Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge. The contrast between the activities of otium and negotium—and the related contrast between their respective locations in the country and the city—had a long history reaching back to antiquity The Greening of Venice
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but had recently been explored and developed by Petrarch, who anchored the life of solitude to green landscapes.83 Petrarch’s prose and poetry initiated a topography of the self and of subjectivity that shaped how later writers understood and interpreted actual topography, whether mountainous terrain or the Venetian lagoon.84 His De vita solitaria served as an important source and model for Trifone Gabriele’s brief Vita . . . nella quale si mostrano apieno le lodi della vita soletaria & contemplativa (1543), in which Trifone’s preference for his garden residence on Murano, which also was the site of meetings of the learned Aldine Academy, initiated and structured the relative dialectic between city and country.85 Trifone’s life of “true wealth” occurs “in a villetta, enclosed by shadowy trees,” where he can escape the “noises, disturbances, and tumults heard in the cities . . . happy with . . . a tranquil and restful life” (che in una villetta, chiusa d’ogni intorno da ombrosi alberi . . . trovandomi. . . . E medesimamente i romori & i tumulti & le frequenze, che nelle città si sentono, fuggendo . . . in assai tranquilla & riposata vita). He prefers “not the Rialto, San Marco, and piazzas, but enclosed valleys, tall hills, and sunny beaches” (non Rialto, S. Marco, & Piazze, ma valle chiuse, alti colli, & piagge apriche). Despite this cited exception, the topography remains fairly unspecific, even though Trifone’s denouncement of greedy seafaring merchants, references to “our Republic,” and repeated allusions to tides, seas, and ports betrays the specific Venetian landscape that he has in mind.86 Around and after the time of Trifone’s death (1549), his garden in Murano— and particularly the water crossing required between city and “country”—continued to inspire related poetic reflections on subjectivity.87 Bernardino Partenio frames his dialogue, Dell’imitazione poetica (1560), with a recreational visit during his vacation in Venice to see Trifone Gabriele, who is already en route in a boat from Venice with Gian Giorgio Trissino to his Murano garden.88 The trip makes the garden, with its pergola covered with thick grapevines and surrounded by jasmine, seem even more refreshing.89 In her Lettera terza Gaspara Stampa describes the aquatic transitions to and from Trifone’s garden as implicit contrasts between city and “country” and, perhaps more predominantly, as passages to and from her dreamlike experience of falling in love with Collaltino (also referred to as Molino), who, Gaspara is told by the guests, is in Andrea Navagero’s neighboring garden:90 “the things said until that time by [Trifone] Gabriele escaped my mind; and while my eye was arrested distractedly by the green of the leaves and by the white of the jasmine, which encircling the pergola made a cover for a good part of the group, my imagination transported itself from new enticements. They are mysteries that cannot be described with words! From that moment, I lost control of myself.”91 Back in Venice, her self-consciousness takes over, as though the moonlit gondola ride home returned her to her senses—to city behavior—even though her love persists.92 34
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The garden can be found anywhere, especially when it serves as the medium for love, and, like all landscapes experienced by the lover, facilitates the imaginative projection of the beloved. In a discussion of love that occurs within an actual garden attached to the palace of Catherine Cornaro in Asolo, one of the interlocutors in Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505) discusses how places are “faithful memoranda” that bring the forms of the beloved to mind. Gismondo observes: If I . . . am out on a country road, there is no green embankment by a limpid stream, no winning prospect of a lovely wood, no happy solitude or cool retreat within the shady mountain’s depths, which does not force me to exclaim, “Would that my lady now were here with me.” . . . But why recall the thoughts aroused in distant places? Right in our city [Venice] no fair lady can appear before I am straightway reminded of my lady’s charms. . . . And if I sometimes take the air in pleasure boats and leave the city tumults far behind, I can draw near no stretch of our shore on which my lady does not seem to stroll and carol to the raucous waves while gathering shells with childlike eagerness.93
Gismondo’s Petrarchan sensibility allows for the fungibility of different types of landscapes and similarly reflects the early modern imagination in finding gardens on the sea—impossibly inhabited by Petrarchan bird songs—and situating Venice in the pastoral vision.
The Littoral Pastoral Bembo’s isolated reference to Venice and its seaside topography in his pastoral text does not initiate a widespread trend in cinquecento pastoral literature, but his reference does indicate the localized efforts among writers with Venetian connections to adapt the literary pastoral landscape to the Venetian seascape. Pastoral poems and theatrical performances produced in Venice incorporate marine metaphors and envision the sea and the seashore as materializing emotional conditions and states of being in much the same way as green places, whether gardens or pastoral worlds. The transitional zone of the coastline, as a dynamic hinge between land and sea, replicates the implicit city-country dialectic that structures the mode of pastoral poetry and that cinquecento Venetian writers had developed between urban Venice and its green outer islands. Ancient pastoral poetry provided the model for occasionally including the sea as a pastoral medium.94 Theocritus, who set his Idylls on the large island of Sicily, mentions in several eclogues the views of the sea and the sounds of surf that accompany the pastoralizing activities of the shepherds. A few eclogues (e.g., 6 and The Greening of Venice
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11) involve the sea and pasture more directly through the story of Polyphemus, the shepherding Cyclops who tried to lure his beloved sea nymph Galatea to the shore from her ocean haunt. “For [Polyphemus], nothing else existed. / Often his flocks would come of their own accord / Back from green pastures to the fold, while he, alone / On the weed-strewn shore, would sing of Galatea.”95 Polyphemus’s laments resonate with the sadness and longing of all shepherds for an absent beloved, only in his situation and from his perspective the distance and separation keeping him from her has a topographical cause. Eventually he entertains the possibility of giving up the land for the sea: “It’s not too late, my sweet, for me to learn to swim; / If only some mariner would sail here in his ship, / Then I could fathom why you nymphs love life in the deep. / Come out, Galatea, come out and forget your home.”96 His story of failed pursuit serves as the basis for a singing competition between two shepherds in another idyll and will shape Ovid’s later treatment of the story in his Metamorphoses.97 Other pastoral poems, such as the Epitaph of Bion, once attributed to Moschus, manipulate the story so that a different shepherd succeeds in luring Galatea to shore.98 And some ancient writers, such as Virgil, make pasturing metaphors—“monstrous herds and unsightly seals . . . pasture[d] beneath the wave”—when describing life under the sea.99 Despite their familiarity with these pastoral texts, Renaissance makers of pastoral worlds appeared to lean toward more landlocked pastoral places in their own productions, but with some notable exceptions. Sebastiano del Piombo and Raphael, working together but on separate panels, produced one of the very few Renaissance depictions of Polyphemus and Galatea, respectively, in Agostino Chigi’s Villa Farnesina (fig. 20), that can perhaps explain the cinquecento experience of the story as manifesting conflicting and irreconcilable poetic worlds.100 Sebastiano executed a large seated Polyphemus in a seaside pastoral landscape that extends, nearly uninhabited, on the other side of Raphael’s fresco. The panel with Raphael’s heroically striding Galatea stands stylistically and structurally apart from the surrounding frescoes, perhaps as an expression of the sea nymph’s disregard for Polyphemus but more likely as an expression of the contemporary associations—or at least the connection in Raphael’s thinking—between the sea and epic poetry.101 The tales of the seaborne travels of Homer’s Odysseus and of Virgil’s Aeneas, for example, easily invest the ocean with heroic struggle and valiance instead of longing and lament—especially for a Roman audience that was developing and visualizing a concern for generic rules and categories.102 The novelty, and relative rarity, of the seaside pastoral eclogue struck many cinquecento readers, who, with the circulation of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Piscatorial Eclogues (1526), frequently celebrated his pioneering accomplishment as slightly genre bending. Lodovico Ariosto, when staging his own imaginative return to shore in the Orlando furioso, sees in the distance the poet Jacopo Sannazaro, “who 36
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persuades the nine / to leave their fountain for the foaming brine”—luring the nine Muses to the less familiar sea.103 As the writer of Arcadia, one of the first and most popular pastoral poems in sixteenth-century Italy, Sannazaro ventured into new literary territory that reflected the poet’s awareness of the range of ancient pastoral poetry, which had encouraged him to substitute his coastal Naples for Theocritus’s Sicily.104 Shepherds, fishermen, and shepherds-turned-fishermen sing of unrequited love, wandering, and fantasies and fears of escaping their current emotional struggles by venturing into the sea. Lycidas, lamenting the absence of Phyllis, sings in Sannazaro’s “Eclogue 1”: “For your sake once the land was pleasing to me and crowds and cheerful cities with their walls; now it is my pleasure to wander the borders of the vasty deep and to roam freely over the stormy waves mingled with crowds of Tritons and amid the monsters of the rocks and rude-shaped seals with fearful forms, where I can never see land.” The “country” is now the ocean, and beeches and elms, springs and shady hills, are joined by, and oftentimes replaced with, kelp, waves, and fishing nets.105 Although not nearly as influential in the cinquecento as Sannazaro’s Arcadia, his Piscatorial Eclogues, composed in Latin, shaped several texts that were later composed in Venice, including Pietro Aretino’s Stanze in lode della Sirena (1537). Published in Venice by Francesco Marcolini, the collection of poems sings the praises of Angela Tornimbena—a Venetian woman married to Giannantonio Serena—as The Greening of Venice
Figure 20 Sebastiano del Piombo, Polyphemus, and Raphael, Galatea, 1508–11. Villa Farnesina, Rome.
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voiced by Aretino’s surrogate, “il Thoscano pastor,” or the Tuscan shepherd. The frontispiece (fig. 21), printed as a chiaroscuro woodcut, presumably from a drawing often attributed to Titian, depicts the author-narrator as the plaintive shepherd who sits at the edge of the shore by shoots of laurel and stares off, above the water and into the distant sky, at the figuration of Angela as siren—a play on her surname.106 Altering the traditional role of sirens as attracting seamen from open water to shore with their song, the woodcut shows Aretino as a variation of Polyphemus, lured from open land to the shore by his unattainable beloved, where the line between sea and land establishes and reinforces the dialectic between Venetian and Tuscan, the love object and the speaking/singing lover.107 The poems, which caused a small scandal for Aretino and the apparently unrequiting Angela, deviate notably from the anti-Petrarchan tendencies in Aretino’s other contemporary published works and from his seeming avoidance of pastoral traditions, whether ancient or contemporary, Arcadian or piscatorial.108 His Stanze interlace all of these traditions, combining the breezes, shadows, echoes, and flowers of green landscapes found in Petrarchan and pastoral poetry with the fish, waves, and shells populating piscatorial eclogues.109 Sometimes the two worlds exist in sequence with each other, and sometimes they exist simultaneously, as exemplified by metaphors such as “liquid furrows” (liquidi solcati).110 The topography of and around Venice also inspired Aretino’s landscape of longing, ranging from his mention of actual rivers that feed into the lagoon to his more Venetian-specific (and Petrarchan-inspired) antitheses between sweet and salty waters and his metaphorizing of the “acqua alta” experienced in Venice during exceptionally high tides.111 As much as Aretino’s experiment could be understood as a foreigner’s literary overburdening of the Venetian landscape to profess love for a Venetian woman, his Stanze gave poetic form to the generic and topographic “mash-ups” found in contemporary theatrical performances of pastoral material in Venice.112 Aretino, like many residents of and visitors to cinquecento Venice, witnessed public performances that were organized in conjunction with civic celebrations. Whether spurred by a foreign state visitor or by a wedding hosted by an aristocratic Venetian family or by carnival, these theatrical entertainments frequently occurred outside with some part of the city of Venice—Piazza San Marco, the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale, campi, canals, or the area in front of the private palace holding the festa—providing their settings.113 Venetian audiences, especially in the early phases of theatrical performance, most often watched pantomimic tableaux (or momarie) and buffoon intermezzi. Private performances also began gradually to occur more frequently between 1500 and 1510—and especially after the ineffective prohibition against public performances that was issued in late 1508.114 The surviving information concerning private performances is fragmentary; however, the best source, the diary entries made by Mario Sanudo, indicate that courtyards and gardens fre38
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quently offered the setting for these private performances of comedies, tragedies, and pastoral eclogues. Sometimes Sanudo mentions the specific title of the play or the names of the actors or performing group, but more often his entry refers to the type of spectacle and its location. What stands out from his list of entries (which extends from approximately 1505 to 1535) is the popularity of pastoral-type plays— which he refers to as “egloga pastorale” or with his catchall category “comedia”— and their situation in gardens in houses on Murano and the Giudecca.115 Mingling pastoral, mythological, and Petrarchan poetry, these brief texts were usually performed by members of the Ortolani or the Zardinieri—two (relevantly named) groups of the aristocratic Compagnie della Calza.116 The enactment of pastoral scenarios in garden settings, which are themselves framed by water, actualized and manifested the Aretine littoral pastoral discussed above. The period during which these pastoral performances occurred regularly in actual places in Venice and without any manufactured scenery that obscured or transformed the garden-scape or cityscape was relatively brief—probably lasting a few decades, from about 1500 to 1530, although this is only a best guess.117 Garden and The Greening of Venice
Figure 21 Giovanni Britto (attrib.), frontispiece for Pietro Aretino’s Stanze di M. Pietro Aretino, 1537. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937.
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pastoral settings were progressively more often painted and/or made with fabric, and elaborate costumes designated the various fictional personages. Sebastiano Serlio mentions in his Secondo libro di prospettiva the stagecraft involved for one pastoral performance in Urbino that, with its inclusion of marine life and activities, seems connected to the actual and poetic examples of the littoral pastoral considered above: What magnificence there was, to see so great a number of trees and fruits, so many different kinds of herbs and flowers, all made of the most delicate silk in a variety of colors. There were cliffs and rocks arrayed with diverse sorts of sea shells, snails, and other little animals, with branches of coral in many hues, mother of pearl, and ocean crabs laid and thrust through between the stones. . . . I say nothing of the Satyrs, of the Nymphs, of the Sirens, and various monsters and other strange beasts, costumes for men and youths (according to their size) so skillfully made, representing those living creatures running along and moving themselves according to their proper nature. And if it weren’t that I should be too prolix, I’d tell you of the superb apparel of certain shepherds, made with rich cloth of gold and silk, lined with the finest furs of wild animals. I would also tell of the trappings of some fishermen, no less rich, whose nets were woven of fine gold filaments, and of others with their instruments entirely gilded. I would describe some shepherdesses and Nymphs, whose dresses were fashioned with no regard to price.118
Serlio’s report contrasts with his relatively minimal description and representation of the satiric scene as unornamented nature that accompanies, and even seems to motivate, his recounting of this specific Arcadian-piscatory hybrid performance. A paragraph or so before this passage, Serlio defines the satyric scene as designed for representing satires, in which [the satires] criticize (in fact, mock at) all those who live licentiously and rudely. In ancient satires they practically identified corrupt men and criminals. However, it is understandable that such license should be granted to those unreserved characters, whom we would call country folk. Thus, Vitruvius, in discussing the scenes, wanted this type to be ornamented with wooded groves, rocks, hills, mountains, greenery, flowers and fountains. He also wished there to be rustic huts, as are shown here.119
Serlio’s depiction of the satyric scene in his treatise (fig. 22) shows an unpopulated woodland view that nonetheless creates a central, perspectival-type recession and thereby evokes his other stage sets for the tragic and comic stages.120 Daniele Barbaro would later capture Serlio’s structural organization with his own translation of Vitruvius, recommending that these rural and rustic features be arranged “in the form of gardens” (in forma di giardini), which not only reflected the earlier use of 40
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gardens as scenery for theater but also indicated the greater formal organization given to later sixteenth-century Venetian gardens.121 The later sixteenth-century staging of the pastoral plays with elaborate costumes and backdrops in interior spaces effectively detaches the performances from the specific places throughout Venice within which they had previously been experienced. However, before this turning point in the mid-cinquecento, there were a few Venetians whose perception of the exclusivity of the performed pastoral led them to criticize the pastoral mode as a detached vision, as a mirage, that alienated, if not entirely suppressed, the actual lives of the peasants in the countryside. Oftentimes, as Serlio mentions in the passage cited above, villani were mocked in satira rustica or appeared alongside expensively costumed shepherds and nymphs as objects of derision.122 This theatrical context seems like a suggestive framework for thinking about Giorgione’s Tempesta (fig. 9), with the elegantly dressed aristocratic youth—possibly a member of a festive performing company, or Compagnie della Calza—and the partially clad woman, who was identified by one sixteenthcentury viewer as a type of villana.123 The youth, rather than a wayfaring Epicurean, as some scholars have asserted,124 could be evocative of rustic pastoral performances, such as those frequently performed in Venice by Compagnie della Calza and in nearby Padua by the playwright Angelo Beolco (whose stage persona was Ruzante, the peasant-clown). The Greening of Venice
Figure 22 Sebastiano Serlio, satyric scene from Libro secondo della prospettiva (1566), fol. 47v. Avery Library, Columbia University, New York.
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Beolco in his earliest play, La pastoral (1517), contrasts the high-minded and idealistic concerns of the pastoral with the “down-to-earthiness” found in the worlds of the villanesca and buffonesca. As Ronnie Ferguson concisely notes, the “fundamental clash in La Pastoral [is] between two types of (literary) rural culture: one decorous, aristocratic, classical and fashionable—but lifeless; the other vulgar, goliardic, satirical and provincial—but alive and rooted in reality.”125 This is reminiscent of the similar contrast established in the Tempesta. Another of Beolco’s earlier plays, La Betía (ca. 1524),126 begins with a parodic discussion of the nature of love in which Bembo’s Gli Asolani, pastoral poetry, Petrarchan poetry, and love treatises are ridiculed.127 Beolco frames the play with a prologue discussion of the elevation of nature (“Does the bird sing more sweetly in a willow tree than in a cage? Does the cow give less milk in the city?”) and uses the contemporary privileging of it (even through artificial, poetic idealizations) to defend the Paduan language against intellectuals and their “affected Tuscan-language arcadias.” The additions made specifically to the prologue for the Venetian audience (“Prologo per recitarla in Venetia”) emphasize the city as unnatural, “as a place abundant in money and goods, where nothing is grown but everything is to be had.”128 Beolco’s plays did not replace, but appeared alongside, the performances of pastoral plays and poetry that he parodied. In fact, many scholars believe that Beolco’s antiurban and anti-intellectual polemics were experienced by Venetian audiences as reinforcing the social harmony within Venice. Additionally, the erudition required to understand fully Beolco’s satirizing of the pastoral mode carries with it the potential to undermine the socio-literary critique. Beolco’s plays remind us of life in the country—regardless of how stereotyped it became in the antagonism that he established between country and city, between earthy dialogue and artificial pastoral poetry. And his plays particularly remind us of how life in the country, regardless of social station, had an enormous impact on Venice’s own efforts to conserve the lagoon and the accustomed ways of life. Beolco had connections to Alvise Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman living in Padua who encouraged the republic to invest in land-reclamation projects in order to protect the ecology of the lagoon.129 Whether or not Beolco’s plays intentionally aligned with and perpetuated Cornaro’s objectives, most Venetians were well aware of ongoing efforts to manage and protect state-owned forests on the mainland, including bans on pastoralism in forests and swidden agriculture.130 The individuals who spent their days discussing land-management legislation at the Palazzo Ducale were the same ones to observe in Venetian palace gardens performances of pastoral eclogues and villani plays; to collect and see inside those same palaces the paintings of pastoral landscapes; to read, write, and exchange pastoral poetry.131 On one hand, one could argue that these pastoral worlds functioned as detached, isolated pockets of refuge that bore little relationship to the realities of the country 42
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and that offered a total escape from the city of Venice; on the other hand, as this chapter has argued, cinquecento Venetians fully incorporated green places and their experiences of green places within the city itself, adapting pastoral structures and content to the particularities of its topographical and ecological situation. The “greening” of Venice in all of its manifestations could be seen as yet another example of how Venetians thought of themselves as “preserving nature with art”132—a mindset in which art reinforces and emphasizes the work of nature rather than alters or disrupts it and which governed Venetian ecological management.133 This sensibility aligns with and facilitates what the next chapter articulates as a specifically Venetian approach to representing pastoral landscapes as holistic environments to be experienced rather than as detached views made by art alone. Paolo Pino’s distinction—that “Italians live in the garden of the world [giardino del mondo], which is more delightful to behold in reality than in a painting”—will start to sound just as disingenuous for Venetian pastoral paintings as for actual gardens, which, as noted above, were sites for the dissolution of reality.
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The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting in Venice
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 Luca Pulci, Mantuan, Boiardo, and Lorenzo il Magnifico himself.3 Almost coincident with this burst of interest in the 1480s, and continuing for several decades thereafter, Venetian artists contributed their own depictions of green worlds that, even if inspired by many of the same literary sources as those Florentine objects, offered a different pastoral vision, one that, despite being relatively short-lived in Venetian art, had a lasting influence on the pastoral mode in European and American painting. This concentrated, yet brief, period of production occurred from approximately 1500 to 1525, years during which Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Giulio Campagnola, and, to a lesser extent, Palma il Vecchio, Lorenzo Lotto, Pordenone, and Domenico Campagnola executed both sacred and secular visions of the pastoral world. (Pastoral paintings, drawings, and prints continued to be produced after the 1520s, but, as discussed in chapter 5 of this book, the approach to the pastoral mode changed from that largely demonstrated by this first wave.) Green landscapes that had previously occupied the backgrounds of pictures expanded to create the entire pictorial space (figs. 1 and 3). Shepherds, rustics, and nymphs became the 45
Figure 23 Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow, ca. 1505. National Gallery, London.
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principal protagonists, only narrowly privileged over grazing sheep and goats. Sacred figures, such as the Virgin, Christ, Saint John the Baptist, and religious hermits, often appear to have been invited into scenes of pasturing rather than the other way around (fig. 11). And all of the creatures came to inhabit and structure lush landscapes that evoke the shady groves, restorative streams, and sunny hillsides of the pastoral world. Historians of pastoral painting (which, in this chapter is again a shorthand reference to paintings, drawings, and prints, unless otherwise specified) have consistently noticed its obvious connections to the bucolic eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil and to the more contemporary penning and publication of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia in the late quattrocento and early cinquecento, respectively;4 however, the pastoral mode in cinquecento poetry is far more diverse and its development and performance far more influential on the visual arts than these few repeatedly cited texts would indicate.5 Furthermore, the relationship that has been identified and articulated between pastoral painting and poetry—especially when the poetic sources have been so limited—actually has weakened, rather than elucidated, the critical recognition of the interplay of these two creative modes. Scholars often expect to find in these artworks specific episodes, stories, and/or protagonists from pastoral poetry, but the direct parallel sought after has failed to yield clarity. Instead, they frequently find only an echo or an evocation, if anything—which Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
heightens the sense of poetics for some scholars and produces frustration for others, especially those conditioned by iconographic approaches.6 Most of the involved artworks have been characterized as pictures without subjects, “monstrous artworks,” and/or evocative, visual poesie.7 These characterizations have led to compelling interpretations of pastoral paintings, and there certainly would be little harm in keeping these interpretative parameters intact. But as this chapter asks, how does the inclusion of a more diverse range of literary material impact our understanding of the pastoral mode in Venetian painting and, more generally, the creative interplay in the Renaissance between texts and images? Theocritus and Virgil indisputably influenced the Renaissance emergence of the pastoral, which also gained inspiration from the Neo-Latin eclogues written by Petrarch and Boccaccio that adapted the pastoral as an allegorical veil for political and autobiographical events.8 But Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s vernacular poetry, as well as quattrocento lyric poetry, with its landscapes of subjectivity and the phenomenology of love, had even more influence on cinquecento pastoral poets.9 Pastoral eclogues, comedies, and intermedi performed in Venice (which were introduced in chapter 1) further affected the contours of the visual pastoral.10 This chapter also foregrounds the importance of the city of Venice as the place for these pastoral productions—whether performed, painted, or written— and considers how this urban seascape negotiated the distant isolation of these green worlds that was implicit in the pastoral mode from its inception. More than simply reinforce the urban/pastoral and sea/land dialectic that surfaced repeatedly in pastoral poetry, the context of Venice as the physical location for viewing these pastoral inventions enhances the specifically Renaissance adaptations of the pastoral mode.11 Foremost among these is the conception of the pastoral landscape as a fictional green world into which the poet-narrator- shepherd self-consciously enters and from which he eventually retreats. An analogous green-world scenario could potentially be established for pastoral paintings simply because of their physical placement in Venetian palaces, many of which afforded the very contrasting, yet adjacent views of water and not of expansive green land. To some extent, of course, this distinction between the actual and fictive worlds is not too different from any representation and its viewing context. But whereas many contemporary Renaissance depictions attempt to bridge this seam through perspective and/or deictic figures, Venetian pastoral pictures produced in the first decades of the sixteenth century usually do not. They instead seal the fictional green world into their pictorial structure, indicating to the viewer in various ways—the small scale of the artworks, the depicted figures that actively exclude the viewer, and the like—that the green world is not coextensive, even fictively, with the world outside of the picture, as The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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many other contemporary artworks strive to be. These depicted green worlds appear distant, remote, and hidden, and consequently they tend to situate the viewer in a parallel pastoral situation of entry and withdrawal. When we approach these pictures not as pastoral versions of narrative painting—in which figures enact a story, just against a lush background—but instead as imagined environments similar to green worlds in Renaissance pastoral poetry and nonpastoral literary traditions, then their figures and landscape interact with phenomenological complexity and without the usual separation given to them in art-historical interpretation. We find that these pastoral pictures depend less on repeated visual citations of specific poetic scenarios and protagonists and more on creating unique, expansive, and imaginative worlds that are inextricably bound up with subjective experiences as they are expressed visually. Such an approach recognizes pastoral painting not as codependent on pastoral poetry but as a fully realized partner to its poetic relatives. Consequently, this chapter does not provide detailed interpretations of individual pastoral paintings—and therefore extended exegetical readings—but instead acknowledges how these pastoral paintings, like poetry, offer the coordinates and circumstances of greenworld experiences, which are created to be multiple and open-ended.
The Emergence of Pastoral Painting in Venice Pastoral settings and themes appear to gain popularity in Venetian painting in the later fifteenth century, with sheep and shepherds occasionally appearing in landscape settings in several devotional artworks. Most scholars find early indications of the mode in Venice specifically in the work of Giovanni Bellini, who sometimes situated the Virgin and Child or saints in green spaces of solitude that encourage the quiet and reflective meditation enacted both inside and outside of the picture (figs. 11 and 23).12 The precise inspiration for these paintings is difficult to locate, however, since religious scenes of shepherds and pasturing, and particularly of Christ as the good shepherd or the Adoration of the Shepherds, had been an established type for centuries and had therefore been an available source for artists.13 Giovanni Bellini’s creative referencing of the early Christian tradition of icons in his half-length depictions of the Virgin and Child shows that he found inspiration from the history of art.14 Certainly the pastoral setting in some of his devotional paintings could deepen the legitimacy or authenticity of the pictures through such iconographic referencing to earlier religious art. The appearance of divine figures in front of a green landscape, as well as the contrast between the world of the picture and the interior, usually urban world in which it is hung, also heightens the experience of these figures as visions appearing before the viewer. With these devo48
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tional pictures, Giovanni Bellini simultaneously expanded the traditions of black backgrounds for half-length devotional paintings and of fictive replication of the actual church architecture within the larger sacra conversazione altarpiece.15 Until the early sixteenth century, the pastoral world remained for Giovanni Bellini, as well as for most other Venetian artists, a place of almost exclusive devotional solitude that was protected from the secular pleasures of music, song, and love enjoyed by communities of poetic shepherds. These green worlds are places, not of sensual indulgence or reverie, but of regular toil, which brings self-knowledge and a deeper commitment to the divine. The solitary life afforded by the natural world, and specifically the pastoral world, occupied the thoughts of Petrarch, among others, who, following the work of Saint Augustine, wrote in his De vita solitaria about the value of solitude in nature as a means for revelations of all types.16 Outside of the city, away from the distractions of urban affairs, he could reflect, contemplate, and study. Such distinctions formed the basis of the Renaissance discussions of the active life and contemplative life, negotium and otium, which in turn inspired and justified actual practices and habits, such as the construction of villas and other humanistic retreats.17 But they also gave rise to an interest in the natural, rural world as a defined space for revelatory thought and meditation—which aligns with the experience of observing the Virgin and Child in rural spaces of pasture. Similarly, the sole shepherd driving his flock in the background of Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert (fig. 11) serves as a foil for the hermetic saint who toils not in physical labor but in his contemplative life and receives the stigmata outside of his isolated makeshift study and cave, which are located outside of the city in the background.18 The rocky foreground that leads into the pasture reinforces the arduous work of thought. Despite this harnessing of the pastoral for religious ends, Bellini’s Saint Francis is often positioned by art historians as one of the earliest Venetian pastoral-type pictures and one of the earliest examples of the burgeoning Italian interest in autonomous landscape painting.19 Unclear, however, are contemporary perspectives on these two categories, or modes, and if and how they existed as relevant concepts for Renaissance artists and viewers. Contemporary descriptions of surviving paintings are relatively rare and were not intended to be comprehensive critical accounts. The inventories of art in Venetian private collections compiled intermittently between 1521 and 1543 by Marcantonio Michiel offer invaluable information on ownership, contents, and, oftentimes, attribution.20 They are less reliable, however, for giving evidence of refined categorizations of image types, especially when it comes to such distinctions as that between Bellini’s Saint Francis and Giorgione’s Tempesta (fig. 9). In 1525 Michiel described the former as “the admirably finished and worked-out landscape [paese] of the wilderness [deserto], which is filling the whole panel up to the foreground [propinquo].”21 He described the The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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Tempesta in 1530 as “the little landscape [paesetto] on canvas with the storm, with the gypsy and soldier.”22 Bracketing, for now, the iconographic tailspin that Michiel set into motion with his description of Giorgione’s picture,23 we can note that the term paese recognizes the outdoor setting of the two pictures and appears to designate similar landscape settings in other pictures described by Michiel, including Giorgione and Titian’s Sleeping Venus (fig. 2).24 Significantly, though, Michiel qualifies the type of landscape in Bellini’s picture by referring to it as deserto, the outdoor space of religious experience described for hermits and other sacred exiles.25 The absence of similar modifiers for the paese in the Tempesta and Sleeping Venus might be compensated by Michiel’s characterization of the subject matter: regardless of how confusing or vague or laconic these identifications might be, the presence of a gypsy or soldier or Venus serves as a default categorization for the type of landscape.26 Similarly, Michiel’s mention of the expansiveness of the landscape in the Saint Francis—“filling the whole panel up to the foreground”—possibly indicates his awareness of the difference between this composition and Bellini’s other works that he had seen, with landscapes divided off from the figures. One could argue, then, that for Giorgione such expansiveness was not unusual and not worth noting—or, just as likely, that Michiel did not share these lexical and epistemological concerns and their implications for defining the shared characteristics of a pictorial genre or mode. By Michiel’s day the term pastorale was already in circulation as a modal identifier for poetry, even though what exactly the term signified remained up for debate. Jacopo Sannazaro, for example, entitled the first version of his pastoral poem Libro pastorale intitolato Archadio.27 Painting would have to wait for any similar and dependable designation.28 But even without a term, writers on the visual arts articulated properties and characteristics that could loosely define a pastoral category. The more regularized categories of architecture allowed Alberti, following the prescriptions made by Vitruvius on decorations of the private house, to point to an analogous category in painting in his De re aedificatoria (written 1443–52, first printed edition 1485): Since painting, like poetry, can deal with various matters—some depict the memorable deeds of great princes, others the manners of private citizens, and still others the life of the simple farmer—those first, which are the most majestic, will be appropriate for public works and for the buildings of the most eminent individuals; the second should adorn the walls of private citizens; and the last will be suitable for horti, being the most lighthearted of them all. We are particularly delighted when we see paintings of pleasant landscapes [amoenitates regionum] or harbors, scenes of fishing, hunting, bathing, country sports [agrestium ludos], and flowery and leafy views.29 50
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Alberti clearly modeled his passage on the broader rhetorical concept of decorum that governed Vitruvius’s advice: location, audience, style, and subject all should accord with one another. The same alignment governed categories of theater, according to Vitruvius, who had advised that the third and lowest type, the satyr play, should be “decorated with trees, caverns, mountains, and other rustic objects delineated in a landscape style.”30 Satyr drama was not in actuality the same as pastoral eclogue, as Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio would assert with philological defensiveness (and accuracy) in the mid-cinquecento, but Serlio’s 1545 rendering of Vitruvius’s recommendations (fig. 22), as well as early examples of pastoral plays (notably Poliziano’s Orfeo), had already blurred those lines so that sheep, shepherds, Pan, satyrs, and nymphs coexisted in a hybrid pastoral-woodland world.31 Similarly, Alberti recast Vitruvius’s advice to depict landscapes with shepherds and sheep into suggestions for representing a diverse set of human activities that occur outside—including the reference to rustic games rather than pasturing. Perhaps Alberti supplemented his chosen subjects with the specific content mentioned by Pliny for a Roman painter, Studius, who executed wall paintings with “country houses and porticoes and landscape gardens, groves, woods, hills, fishponds, canals, rivers, shores, and whatever anybody could desire, together with various sketches of people going for a stroll or sailing in a boat or on land going to country houses riding on asses or in carriages, and also people fishing and fowling or hunting or even gathering the vintage.”32 Renaissance readers either failed to distinguish between the locales of recreation, pasturing, and the generic natural world that were far more established in antiquity or chose to disregard them. Before the vigorous mid-cinquecento debates about genre that developed in conjunction with the translation into Italian of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1536, the shared rustic and woodland world of pastoral eclogues and satyr plays established the foundations for the pastoral mode, and poets and artists were left enormous freedom in their conceptions.33 Alberti, who above acknowledged an undefined rustic mode for painting in architecture, offered no acknowledgment of a similar type or category of painting in his treatise De pictura (1435; Della pittura, 1436). Successive writers on the arts, especially those who contributed theoretical commentaries on the ambitions and affective properties of painting, avoided the subject altogether and focused their attention on the expressive potential of the human figure alone and in coordination with other figures.34 Pastoral subject matter is never mentioned specifically, and depictions of isolated landscape elements are only occasionally mentioned—especially if they complement the behavior of the figures. Paolo Pino famously and indirectly acknowledged this omission in his own theoretical treatise, Dialogo di pittura (1548): “The Northerners show a special gift for painting landscapes because they portray the scenery of their own homeland, which offers most suitable motifs by virtue of its wildness, while we Italians live in The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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Figure 24 (opposite) Giorgione, Enthroned Madonna with Saints (Castelfranco Altarpiece), ca. 1500–1505. Duomo, Castelfranco Veneto.
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the garden of the world, which is more delightful to behold in reality than in a painting.”35 The landscapes to which Pino refers are not identical with pastoral representations, however; but his disingenuous explanation of the absence of landscapes in Italian art rings hollow, since he wrote not only decades after paintings and drawings with pastoral landscapes had flooded the Venetian art world but also simultaneously with contemporary debates on the poetic properties of the pastoral. The “garden of the world” that he describes for Italy itself—which reads almost like a proleptic version of the picturesque—conjures up the sensibility of lush, green spaces existing apart from the world, the locus amoenus, that repeatedly surfaces in the pastoral mode, suggesting that pastoral poetry could possibly shape the description and perception of landscapes by the mid-cinquecento in Italian artistic thought. Without much guidance, artists, like poets, were essentially defining the visual category of pastoral as they were inventing it. And with few visual examples to follow from antiquity (if any, and arguably none for Venetian artists), an equally fragmentary availability of ancient literary examples, and a lack of consistency in medieval and quattrocento forays into pastoral poetry, cinquecento artists produced an extraordinary variety of artworks, which reflects the flexible possibilities in an undefined visual mode. Among the first paintings with pastoral aspects produced in Venice are works of the early decades of the sixteenth century by Giorgione, the young Titian, and the elder Giovanni Bellini. Bellini, continuing his late-quattrocento work, produced half-length depictions of the Virgin and Child in pastoral landscapes inhabited by sheep and shepherds (Madonna and Child, ca. 1510, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan).36 Giorgione followed this Christian vein of the pastoral with his representation of the Virgin and Child with saints in the Castelfranco Altarpiece (fig. 24) and his easy adaptation of the thematically well-suited Adoration of the Shepherds (fig. 25) to his pastoral world of mellow, rolling hills and rustic structures.37 This landscape surfaces as well in secular pastoral pictures attributed to Giorgione, including the Sunset (Il Tramonto) (National Gallery, London) and (with interventions by the young Titian) the Sleeping Venus (fig. 2), and attributed to Titian, such as the Pastoral Concert (fig. 1).38 Giorgione (or possibly Titian or another Venetian painter) also executed a half-length image of a young shepherd (fig. 26).39 Giorgione’s Tempesta (fig. 9), although without the sheep, shepherds, and mellow warmth found in many of these other examples, nonetheless belongs in this pastoral group as a visual partner to the contemporary Venetian theatrical performances of the rustic pastoral (as discussed in chapter 1). The pastoral aspects are easy to identify in these pictures, and yet their generic diversity and novelty are remarkable: some of the pictures fall into easily defined categories such as portrait (A Boy with a Pipe), half-length devotional image (Bellini’s Virgin and Child images), and sacra conversazione altarpiece (Castelfranco Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
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Figure 25 Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds, or Allendale Nativity, ca. 1505–10. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.289. Figure 26 Giorgione, A Boy with a Pipe (“The Shepherd”), ca. 1510–15. King’s Closet, Windsor Castle, Windsor, England.
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Altarpiece); others have (in)famously frustrated attempts by art historians to find generic precedents (Pastoral Concert, Sleeping Venus, and Tempesta only start the list).40 In many ways this generic disobedience follows the contemporary dismantling of stable categories—such as sacred and secular art—that other recent scholars have observed for cinquecento art produced in Venice and elsewhere in Italy. Giorgione himself recognized this fluid spectrum when he changed a representation of the Adoration of the Magi into the Three Philosophers (fig. 12) by painting out the announcing angel and the elaborate headdress of the central magus.41 And other works by Giorgione, such as his La Vecchia (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice)—the allegorical portrait cover that speaks of the commemorative function of portraiture—demonstrate that generic self-reflexivity structured much of the artist’s approach and even, as in La Vecchia, the content of the artworks.42 This tendency, whether Giorgione’s or that of the combined interests that have coalesced into the name of Giorgione, provides an opportunity to attempt a definition of cinquecento pastoral art. Are the pastoral pictures a separate group, a genre that supersedes any of the generic categories that have established image types, such as portraits, devotional images, and so forth? Or does the pastoral function as a mode, that is, almost like a virus, in that it reaches across and into nearly every existing category of painting? Or neither?
The Poetics of Pastoral The challenges of defining pastoral poetry in turn make the questions just raised even more challenging to address, even if the pastoral poetry considered is limited to the period from antiquity to the cinquecento. Pastoral poetry composed after the seventeenth century brings even greater complexity, especially as it extends both its regional scope and its poetic forms.43 However, simply these phenomena— geographic expansion and formal adaptability—regardless of chronological reach, indicate that pastoral poetry lacked one of the common properties sought for a genre: a consistent and specific form, which it lacked from its beginnings.44 Theocritus established no clear distinctions between his pastoral and nonpastoral Idylls and established no conventions that formed a literary inheritance for his successors, such as Virgil.45 Eclogues, elegies, romances, novels, comedies, to name just a few forms, accommodated the pastoral, suggesting to many literary scholars that the pastoral should be considered less as a genre and more as a mode—the designation followed in this book. “Mode,” as Paul Alpers writes in his seminal book, What Is Pastoral?, “refers to feelings and attitudes as such, as distinguished from their realization or manifestation in specific devices, conventions, structures.”46 But mode, as Alpers is quick to point out, still involves an inherent The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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c onnection between manner and matter and, in the example of pastoral, means that the spoken exchanges within the community of shepherds and the activities of their lives make certain landscapes pastoral. Specific poetic meters or rhymes, for example, might not be manifested consistently across all pastoral poetry, but humble speech acts of invitation, sharing, and consolation—among other facets— will, in Alpers’s opinion, always make some kind of showing in the pastoral work. Alpers gives a clearer structure to modern scholarship’s categorization of pastoral poetry, even if he unfairly criticizes many of these approaches for “simply . . . saying what [pastoral] is” rather than accounting for its formal, expressive, and thematic features and their continuity and change over time.47 In distinguishing his own approach, he gives one of the most succinct—albeit reductive—summaries of modern definitions of pastoral, which I cite in full for its usefulness: “We are told that pastoral ‘is a double longing after innocence and happiness’; that it is based on the philosophical antithesis of Art and Nature; that its universal idea is the Golden Age; that its fundamental motive is hostility to urban life; that its ‘central tenet’ is ‘the pathetic fallacy’; that it expresses the ideal of otium; that it is founded on Epicureanism; that in the Renaissance it is ‘poetic expression par excellence of the cult of aesthetic Platonism’ or, alternatively, of the philosophical vita contemplativa.”48 Although written more than three decades ago, Alpers’s summation nevertheless nearly captures the directions of most subsequent scholarship, with the exception of ecocritical perspectives and their interest in the “mutual constructionism” of nature and culture and in the pastoral as an expression of environmental loss.49 The proliferation of definitions of the pastoral is perhaps due to the relative silence on pastoral poetry in ancient and early modern poetic theory. In the absence of any direct statements about pastoral by Aristotle and Horace, cinquecento writers occasionally compiled their own observations gleaned from their readings of Theocritus and Virgil. One of the first to discuss the pastoral directly and critically was Marco Girolamo Vida in his De arte poetica (1527), which comprised the themes raised in cinquecento criticism until they were expanded in the series of debates unleashed by Guarini’s pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido (publ. 1590). The pastoral, according to Vida, is the most humble of all of the poetic modes. Correspondingly, it should be practiced by young poets, and the characters should be rustic shepherds. Later critics, such as Julius Scaliger (Ars Poetica, 1561), who privileged the work of Theocritus—unlike Vida, who extolled Virgil’s Eclogues—emphasized love as the central theme of pastoral.50 In lieu of much writing about pastoral poems, we should consider the pastoral poems themselves. What pastoral poetry was available to read when these Venetian artists were painting these pastoral scenes? Theocritus’s Idylls, although available from antiquity, emerged under the Venetian publishing auspices of Aldus Manutius in 1495–96 and expanded the ancient source material, which had previously 56
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been limited (at least in Latin) to Virgil’s Eclogues.51 Medieval poets forayed into the composition of vernacular and Latin pastoral poems, which quickly diversified the types—ranging from rustic bergerie and pastourelle to Neo-Latin emulations of Virgil’s pastoral models to vernacular romances occurring in part or in whole in a pastoral world.52 Quattrocento contributions included the eclogic poetry of Boiardo and Mantuan and the highly influential Arcadia by the Neapolitan writer Jacopo Sannazaro, which circulated in pirated copies from 1502 until its official publication in 1504.53 Influential pastoral episodes and scenarios also surfaced in many other types of poetry, including some of the works from Petrarch’s Canzoniere and episodes in Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, even if each of these poems in its totality has no pastoral aim.54 Superficially, what all of these examples share is their poetic construction of a green landscape inhabited by some combination of sheep, shepherds, and other woodland deities and creatures. These were potentially among the most straightforward aspects for the visual arts to accommodate in order to accomplish a modal identity with their poetic partners in the same way that visualizations of epic poetry aligned themselves with their textual inspirations by representing heroic battles. But as the many recent and thoughtful considerations of text-image relationships have shown, neither medium set out during the early modern period simply to describe or to illustrate in some replicative operation, to transcribe the mode of one medium into the other.55 Pastoral painting supports these assessments by capturing the mood of the poetry without explicitly representing any specific, identifiable character or episode from related poetic texts. This abstraction results, in part, from the vagueness that characterizes pastoral poetry: personae are attached to specific names, and events possess specific features and locations, but they all also fail to offer much distinctiveness so as to be recognizable out of their unique contexts. Named shepherds hold conversations and perform specific duties, but many of these activities overlap from eclogue to eclogue. How, for example, do we distinguish between multiple depictions of two shepherds who congregate in a landscape environment? Can we ever say with certainty that the Pastoral Concert (fig. 1) represents Tityrus and Meliboeus?56 Or that the depicted event takes place in a specific, identifiable countryside location?57 Any episode or event that is recounted in pastoral poetry with almost pictorial detail, whether an ekphrasis of an imagined artifact or an account of pastoral obsequies, does not surface in any of the surviving visual examples.58 The interdependence of pastoral painting and poetry, even though symptomatic of early modern text-image dynamics, nonetheless places the pastoral closer on the spectrum to other contemporary poetic modes, such as romance, which disrupt the unity of time and action that was so privileged by Renaissance, and especially Albertian, models for pictorial composition.59 As popular in the The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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cinquecento as pastoral poetry was Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, which, although published in an astounding number of editions during the sixteenth century alone, was only rarely the inspiration for visual artists.60 There are a few probable candidates, according to scholars, such as Dosso Dossi’s Melissa (or Circe), ca. 1522–24 (Borghese Gallery, Rome), so called after the Ariostean sorceress, but only some surviving examples of majolica ware attributed to Francesco Xanto Arelli and others betray with certainty their inspiration.61 This somewhat surprising disparity— between the enormous popularity of the poem and its virtually unnoticeable impact on the visual arts in the sixteenth century—perhaps was related to the poetic structure of romance: it notoriously enfolded and interrupted different narrative threads, which in turn enervated contemporary literary critics who prized the unity of time and action. Collections of eclogues, although not recounting multiple contemporaneous story lines over the entirety of the text, typically brought together distinct vignettes, often with a changing cast of characters. The one consistent character tended to be that of the disguised author or the author’s alter ego as shepherd, who gave a unified and consistent point of view but remained one voice among many.62 Additionally, the songs and conversations of the shepherds shifted between past and future events and thereby frustrated temporal continuity across the poems even if they remained topically and structurally connected in other ways. Not surprisingly, though, composers of the pastoral had found and would continue to find possibility precisely where literary theorists found limitations. Poets explicitly acknowledged their employment of the pastoral as a way to express their own literary ambitions for their poetic careers. Once accomplished in the humble song of the pastoral, they aspired to master more-elevated literary forms, such as epic. One of the oft-cited Renaissance examples is Sannazaro’s “Epilogue” to the Arcadia, in which he sings farewell to his sampogna and admonishes it to remain in the pastoral world, where Sannazaro will no longer reside: “I pray you . . . that contenting yourself with your rusticity you remain among these solitudes. It is not for you to go seeking the lofty palaces of princes, nor the proud piazzas of populous cities. . . . Let it suffice you here among these mountains.”63 This self-reflexive authorial voice provides a personal, even autobiographical frame, which simultaneously acknowledges the pastoral world as a fiction, as a poetic construction by that author. For many writers, this self-reflexivity contributed to, perhaps even fostered, the perception of pastoral as a facilitative mode for the construction of multiple levels of meaning—or, more succinctly, the pastoral world as a sympathetic space for allegory. Virgil, of course, had been read allegorically, and Neo-Latin writers of eclogues, such as Petrarch, employed the pastoral to comment on contemporary political events.64 With the following question in his De Geneaologiae Deorum Boccaccio recognizes the easy union of allegory and pastoral in Petrarch’s Bucolicum 58
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Carmen: “Who would be so crazy as to think that . . . [Petrarch’s] Bucolics . . . exist to represent Gallus beseeching Tyrhenus for instruction in playing the pipes, or . . . others quarrelling with each other to be merely ranting shepherds?”65 And yet Boccaccio himself arguably takes this straightforward and transparent approach in his Ameto (1341). In a similar vein, Pietro Bembo in Gli Asolani criticizes poets who conceal ideas under a poetic veil. Intention and reception vary in the pastoral from author to author, poem to poem.66 Painters of the pastoral benefited from the range of poetic approaches, forms, and structures, since visual indications of artistic self-consciousness and the status of a picture as an allegory are challenging to represent in, or signal to the viewer of, a pastoral landscape. Typical figurative attributes of self-reflexivity include a selfportrait or some indication of the artwork as a fiction, such as a written inscription referencing the artist as artist (fig. 11) and/or the artwork as artwork, a gaze directed to the viewer, or a fictive device such as a separating ledge.67 Allegory similarly relies on recognizable features such as figures holding identifying attributes and/ or a schematic landscape that relies for its meaning on the semiotic associations of the picture plane—such as high and low, left and right.68 Consider, for example, Lorenzo Lotto’s Allegory of Virtue and Vice, ca. 1505 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), which locates the virtuous putto on the left, occupied with books and symbols of the liberal arts before an illuminated summit, while the indulgent satyr drowns himself in shadowy excess in the lower right. Pastoral figures shown in conversation with one another, withdrawn from our world outside of the picture and engaged with a green landscape through pastoral tasks (figs. 1 and 3), display none of these normative contemporary cues to read these pictures as self-reflexive or allegorical. Which is not to say that none of the cinquecento pastoral pictures could be read in these ways. Many scholars of pastoral painting have done exactly that.69 However, the allegorical and self-reflexive approaches to the literary pastoral appear not to be as prevalent in and for early sixteenth-century Venetian art.
The Structure of Green Worlds The pastoral mode in cinquecento poetry characterized the relationship between the pastoral and the nonpastoral worlds by envisioning both worlds as connected fictional spaces with the potential for imagination and self-realization.70 These connected, simultaneous worlds differ from the hierarchical registers of interpretation and exegetical experiences associated with allegory and instead parallel the hinging of city and country that potentially underpins almost every pastoral composition but that is not necessarily and consistently the central dynamic. Both cleaving to and holding apart from one another, the country and the city, even in The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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the most allusive way, function as antidotes.71 But following the structure of any antidote, these two worlds depend on one another for their significance, and neither one is less or more “real” than the other. Simply the visual presence and reminders of the city, such as urban architecture in the background of painted pastorals or elegantly dressed visitors to rural poetic and pictorial spaces (fig. 1), affirms the codependence of city and country for their respective articulations— both topographically and conceptually. Not surprisingly, because of the longevity of the pastoral, the precise definitions given to the two spaces and the relationship between the pair have varied over time.72 The interest of cinquecento authors of pastoral poems and art lay precisely in the transition, the passage, between these two worlds of city and country, in the entry into and withdrawal from both as a shaping mechanism for creating pockets of meaning, and in the imaginative process generated by and through this movement.73 The focus on the navigation between the two worlds seems to have arisen when authors explored the pastoral in poetic forms other than the eclogue. Collections of poems such as Theocritus’s Idylls or Virgil’s Eclogues or Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen comprise a group of pastoral vignettes with little interconnection: they are, for the most part, meant to be self-contained short poems.74 They are not meant to offer an extended narration of multiple events. But beginning with the experimentation with pastoral in the vernacular, an interest emerged in longer pastoral accounts with a sustained narrative and characters who interact throughout all of the episodes. Boccaccio’s Ameto (1341) stands among the first Italian examples of these lengthier, more unified poems, in which the poet-narrator selfreflexively observes his passage to and from the pastoral space in which he has participated and which he has created. Toward the end of the poem, after the nymphs have revealed themselves as Muses, the narrator shares his joint status as insider and outsider to this pastoral world by locating himself outside the scene, observing through the bushes, yet inside the fiction: “Among the leafy and new spring, in a spot thick with grass and flowers, and closed off by dense branches, I had sat down, hidden, to listen to the happy and charming loves of the beautiful nymphs, who recounted stories of these and their lovers. And hearing and admiring them . . . so sweetly was Love reawakened in my spirit . . . ; so that truly I remained beside myself for a good time in a happiness never before known.”75 Many cinquecento poets created a more elaborate topography by narrating a detailed itinerary of the poet-narrator. The passage of Sincero, Sannazaro’s pastoral persona, from his green world of Arcadia to the underworld and back home to Naples occupies one of the final prose chapters of Arcadia.76 After waking from an ominous dream in which he finds himself “exiled from the woods and the shepherds, in a solitary place [he] had never seen before,” Sincero walks to find a river and is guided through a cave by a nymph to where all of the rivers of the earth 60
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spring forth, and eventually arrives in Naples.77 “I marveled at our speed in travelling, that in so short a space of time we had been able to arrive at this point from Arcadia; but one could clearly perceive that we were impelled by more than human power.”78 Unrecognized by his compatriot shepherds, Sincero reclines on the grass to hear their native song, despite “his ears replete with the songs of Arcady.”79 Literary historians have noted the creation of connected worlds in other modes of Renaissance literature, whether the fictional islands of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Shakespeare’s Tempest (1610–11) or the interconnected dreamworlds in Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), to name just a few. As discussed in the introduction to this book, Northrop Frye first articulated and designated these fictional spaces staged within Renaissance fiction as “second worlds” and—when appearing as forested, lush fictional spaces—as “green worlds.”80 Frye’s recognition of these worlds encouraged a later scholar, Harry Berger Jr., to observe the complexity of these fictional spaces and to define how these fictional worlds within literary fictions functioned distinctively in Renaissance literature.81 According to Berger, withdrawal into conspicuously artificial worlds followed by a return to the “first world” is not unique to Renaissance fictions; what is unique is the interrelation of the two fields of experience and the higher valuation of the “second world” over the “first world”—or, in other words, of the escape within the fiction over the “real world” in the fiction. In some of Berger’s later work on the subject, he refines his conception of the “first world” by proposing that it is as much of a fiction as the idyllic world into which the fictional characters retreat.82 The concept might not seem as useful for direct application to pastoral painting, since the paintings depict the pastoral world without the same poetic capacity to describe fully the two worlds in an extended narration. Instead, pastoral paintings show the green world itself as their central preoccupation and often include indications of an analogous fictional first world through background architecture (fig. 27), wandering figures who stand generically for movement and passage, contrasts of urban and rustic costume (fig. 1), and seemingly out-of-place staffage— one example of this last feature being the richly urbane drapery in the Sleeping Venus (fig. 2). Many pictures also create ostensibly disjunctive worlds in which congregating figures are nevertheless emotionally detached from one another or not acknowledged (figs. 1 and 9) or, contrastingly, totally absorbed by an activity or someone and/or something that causes them to withdraw within the depicted landscape (figs. 3, 28, and 29). As a result, these pastoral artworks situate viewers in a first world of their own, not because Renaissance observers imagined that they existed in some “real” world essentially disconnected from the depicted one, but because the depicted figures in general actively exclude and/or fail to acknowledge the viewers. To bridge this gap, The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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Figure 27 Domenico Campagnola, Rocky Woodland Landscape, ca. 1520. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. Figure 28 Domenico Campagnola, Two Kneeling Youths in a Landscape, ca. 1517. British Museum, London.
the viewers of these artworks must imaginatively project themselves into these green spaces, in some way imagining that they have happened to come upon these pastoral worlds whether welcomed or not.83 The diminutive scale of the artworks, which unexpectedly contains in miniature such expansive landscapes, both affords the fantasy of the pastoral world as an unexpected, hidden pocket made for the viewer alone and encourages a close viewing that potentially draws the beholder 62
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Figure 29 Titian, Pastoral Scene, ca. 1565. Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
into a secret world. The technical effects found in many of these artworks, such as the shadowy contours and pools of ink, pull the viewer closer to the objects to see what is hidden.84 These qualities, so different from the social, legible worlds in contemporary Venetian narrative painting that were necessarily seen from a greater distance, have created obstacles for many modern scholars, who find these features frustrating. And they are if, as Creighton Gilbert first pointed out, they are forced into iconographic models of interpretation and a specific story is sought to anchor them,85 or if they are considered as early examples of landscape painting that have not yet squeezed out or relegated to a minor role the human figures.86 By contrast, the literary concept of the green world, with its articulation of the corresponding multiple realities and spaces in a fictional world and the significance of passage between them, is defined by and therefore accommodates these seemingly disjunctive elements. This concept of the green world relaxes expectations that these artworks can be explained through a singular interpretation and theorizes that beholders observe the artworks as offering parameters of manifold experiences rather than situations for exegesis. Before the emergence of pastoral painting, quattrocento writers on the arts had actually articulated inclinations toward this “green-world” approach when they discussed the projective invitation to inhabit the green world offered to viewers of paintings with landscapes. Alberti wrote in his De re aedificatoria: “Paintings of springs and streams may be of considerable benefit to the feverish. It is possible to verify this: if some night as you lie awake in bed, unable to sleep, you visualize in The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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your mind the clearest springs and streams you have ever seen, that dryness of insomnia will be quenched immediately, and sleep will steal you away into the sweetest slumber.”87 Only a few decades later, Leonardo da Vinci, attentive to the different aims and effects of painting and poetry, described a pastoral-type painting’s activation of the imaginative translation from personal memory into the depicted world: [In a poem] the soul would not be able to enjoy the benefit of the eyes . . . it would not be able to see the shaded valleys furrowed by the play of serpentine rivers, nor be able to see the . . . flowers which with their colors make a harmony for the eye. . . . But if in the . . . harsh weather of winter the painter sets before you the same landscapes . . . and others where you have received your pleasures beside some spring, you may see yourself as a lover with your beloved, in the flowered meadows, beneath the sweet shade of plants beginning to turn green.88
Relying heavily on the tropes and language of lyric poetry, Leonardo captures for artworks the internal shuttling in poetry between first and green worlds—which are not identical to the first and green worlds as articulated by Frye and Berger, though they certainly align—by acknowledging how memory bridges the separation between the viewer and the artwork. The world outside the frame, according to Leonardo’s passage, is not some empirical reality, some real world, but one already replete with personal memory, which finds projective imaginative transformation in the green world of a painted landscape.89 The act of viewing the green world parallels the described act of passage between first and green worlds, the retreat and return, that occurs in poetry. We are, much like the observing narrator of Boccaccio’s Ameto, drawn into the scene from our hiding place in the bushes or, like Sannazaro’s Sincero, alone in hearing pastoral song even though we are no longer in Arcadia. Although Leonardo did not paint any surviving uninhabited landscapes similar to the one he imagined in the passage above, he did explore both the incorporation of the human figure into the entirety of the landscape and the compositional methods for viewer engagement. Many of his paintings, such as his Virgin of the Rocks (fig. 30), integrate figures in a natural world that—because of its structure and lighting— conveys the mysteries and revelations enacted by the figures and vice versa.90 Painted about two decades later, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (Musée du Louvre, Paris) breaks down the traditional quattrocento separation between portrait sitter and background landscape through nonstructural effects—such as the handling of light and shade to create the impression of a unifying air—despite the loggia setting that locates her apart from the background.91 Similarly, Giorgione’s Castelfranco Altarpiece (fig. 24) accomplishes the same effect in a scene with juxtaposed architecture and pastoral 64
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landscape because of how the architectural space and painting technique generate the coextensive air within the picture.92 The representation of holistic worlds— whether explicitly pastoral or not—appears to have been an objective for many early sixteenth-century painters, many of whom were finding the devotional and poetic possibilities within techniques of verisimilitude.93 In pictures where, to borrow Michiel’s description of Bellini’s Saint Francis, the landscape fills up the entire picture to the foreground, the depicted first world fully shifts out of or to the background edges of the picture, and the second or green world occupies nearly the totality of the picture. Italian painters were not attempting to replicate northern European landscapes and eliminate human activity: the human figure remained a regular feature. And Italian painters were not simply switching out an urban background for a green, leafy one: they were extending the landscape background—and all of its previous visual associations as a distant world detached from human action—to the foreground. They were taking the kinds of subjects and scenes referred to as “parerga” by Paolo Giovio in The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
Figure 30 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, ca. 1483–86. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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his description of some of Dosso Dossi’s paintings and making them join the human figure as the “ergon,” or the work, while still maintaining the significance of the “parerga” as a space of boundaries.94 These pictures embraced the semantic openness of background landscapes and foregrounded it as a locus for the enactment (whether depicted in the artwork or imagined by the viewer) of emotional states and conditions.
Experiences Within the Green Worlds Once the structure of the green world has been established, then the space of the second or green world facilitates any variety of experience. The space of the green world of Venetian Renaissance pastoral painting functions as an internal world in which the emotional states and conditions of pastoral experiences are given a phenomenological and spatial dimension. Friendship, invitation, exchange, isolation, loss, desire, waiting, recollection, and so on—these emotional states all reside in the pastoral world even though they are not necessarily conveyed in either the poetry or the painting through recognizable human expressions, whether in gestures and/or speech. The green world creates a space for the possibility, the potentiality, of these conditions, as well as participates in their manifestation and shapes the kind of subjective, emotional experiences.95 This characterization differs from the interpretation given to the role of landscape in pastoral poetry—especially in ancient compositions—which often drifts out of critical consideration because of the perceived reliance on the pleasant, yet often reductive, topos of the locus amoenus. This topos, developed through repeated rhetorical descriptions of a lovely landscape, Ernst Robert Curtius characterizes as “a beautiful, shaded natural site. Its minimum ingredients comprise a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or a brook. Birdsong and flowers may be added. The most elaborate examples also add a breeze.”96 This recipe-like summary, though, is oftentimes the extent of the landscape description in the literary examples, not necessarily in terms of the length of the list, but in terms of the level of detail offered. Consequently, landscape receded in its importance for understanding pastoral poetry and, for many literary scholars, functioned as merely a setting or backdrop, which in turn became one of the shorthand identifiers of the mode, but not necessarily the sole identifier.97 Alpers, who in his consideration of pastoral poetry privileges the life of the shepherd over the landscape, would disagree: “many think of the landscape as the representative anecdote; but this view comes from Romantic poetry and aesthetics, which give a privileged status to nature and states of innocence and assume that poetry is a matter of individual experience.”98 This arguably is the case more often for later pastoral poetry, that 66
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which was produced after Friedrich Schiller’s writings on naïve and sentimental verse had been fully absorbed. There are certainly scholars who consider preRomantic pastoral through this Romantic lens.99 But Alpers’s perspective overlooks how landscape is often handled only cursorily in literary scholarship on ancient and Renaissance pastoral poetry and has recently reemerged in ecocriticism as the privileged frame.100 Alpers’s contention that landscape in pastoral poetry, when prioritized, always reflects a state of mind reinforces the almost reflexive separation between landscape and figures in most critical approaches and also oversimplifies the complexity of landscape as a concept. The selectively minimal descriptions of literary landscapes facilitate their serving as reflective, even passive, manifestations of the dialogues between characters as well as the descriptions of the characters’ appearance and state of being. The same interpretative impulses given to figures and background landscapes in poetry appear in interpretations of painting, as discussed above: the background, when considered not simply as a convenient, meaningless setting, is often used to reinforce and support interpretation of the figure. But most Venetian cinquecento pastoral paintings shape their depictions of green pastures and shaded groves as sites of agency, where the inhabitants themselves participate in the active shaping of the land into a landscape, where the inhabitants make the space become meaningful. They engage in the human activities—both material and mental, social and individual—that produce landscapes.101 And the landscapes themselves also shape human activities. Representative pastoral activities include wandering, leaving, returning, hiding, contemplating, sleeping, and gathering—all of which occur in space and depend on particular types of space for their recognition. Figures and landscape together create meaningful experiences and conditions only because of the interaction between the two. Hiding is not hiding unless the figure finds coverage—for example, in a cluster of trees (figs. 3 and 27) or behind some heath (figs. 28 and 31). Concealment by a root-ridden clump of ground creates a private sense of retreat (fig. 2) or criminality (fig. 32). Contemplation occurs away from observers, in the far distance, during quiet activities, and tucked away from view (fig. 3). And wandering ceases to be wandering unless the traveler appears in an expansive, open field or plain, oftentimes with a meandering path. The recumbent Venus, for example, in the Sleeping Venus (fig. 2) seems both to emerge from and to generate the knoll against which she leans her head; and as many observers have remarked, the curves of her body and the sequence of raised hills in the distance echo each other.102 The two satyrs in Titian’s Two Satyrs in a Landscape (fig. 33), who contemplate the mysteries of nature with their astrological disc, have hairy lower bodies that both emerge from and generate the shaggy grass. Similarly, for many viewers the standing water pourer in the Pastoral Concert The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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Figure 31 Domenico Campa gnola, Two Youths Kneeling in a Landscape. Albertina, Vienna. Inv. 24364.
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(fig. 1) relates to the tree behind her, not unlike the Magdalene and the tree in Titian’s pastoral Noli me tangere (National Gallery, London).103 These formal evocations between figures and natural details occur so frequently in pastoral paintings that figures and landscapes seem to operate collectively and holistically within their own medium.104 This dissolution of the integrity distinguishing figure from landscape in pastoral painting seems to relate to the diffusion and suffusion of poetry and song in the textual landscapes of pastoral poetry. Poet-narrators often speak of how the pastoral landscape—the caves, trees, and flowers—repeatedly echoes the lovers’ complaints, of how easily its natural features can be moved to tears, and of how the songs and words themselves can be found written upon these parts of the pastoral world. This range can be found in one song of exchange between Logisto and Elpino in Sannazaro’s Arcadia: Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
Log. He who is willing to hear my sighs in rhyme,
Figure 32 Titian, Miracle of the
My dear ladies, and my anguished plaint,
Woman Wounded by Her
And how many steps between night and the day I squander in vain amid so many fields,
Husband, ca. 1510–11. Scuola del Santo, Padua.
May read them among these oaks and among these rocks
Figure 33 Titian, Two Satyrs in a
For I have filled them ere this each valley.
Landscape, ca. 1505–10. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1999.
Shepherds, nor bird nor beast dwells in the valley That does not know the harmony of my rhyme, Nor is there cave or grot among the rocks That does not echo my continual plaint; Nor flower nor bush is growing in these fields That I do not trample a thousand times a day.105 The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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There are countless other examples of the animation and textuality of the pastoral natural world in Sannazaro’s poem alone as well as in other Renaissance poems with pastoral episodes.106 Modern critical readers of these passages frequently refer to this hypostatizing sympathy between man and nature as the “pathetic fallacy,” which Ruskin coined and defined in his Modern Painters (1856) as the “extraordinary or false appearances” taken on by objects in the world “when we are under the influence of emotion or contemplative fancy.”107 Successive scholars have debated the relevance of the pathetic fallacy for ancient pastoral poetry, with advocates finding the nineteenth-century concept at home in the perceived “primitive homeopathy” of the ancients and with detractors considering ancient society already “too close to nature” to employ overt metaphors when they rely on mythological deities to accomplish this figuration of nature.108 But Renaissance poets, when speaking about woods that take pleasure in a song or weep at a shepherd’s loss or repeat a shepherd’s name, turn to nature not as a metaphor, not simply as a poetic means to visualize a concept or situation, but, under the influence of lyric poetry, as a way to figure the interrelatedness between physical and mental landscapes. The weeping trees reflect the shepherd’s lost love, but they also dynamically continue to converse about her and refigure the beloved in the poet-narrator’s mind, which in turn results in more song. Ergasto, almost channeling Petrarch in the final lines of “Eclogue 1” of Sannazaro’s Arcadia, complains: Well do they know, these woods, how much I love her, rivers, mountains, beasts and men they know it, how weeping and sighing every hour I need her. How many times a day I call her name My flock knows, that hears me all the time, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Constantly these trees converse of her And show written on their bark, So that often they spur me to weeping and to singing.109
Petrarch’s lyric poems, rather than his Neo-Latin bucolic eclogues, heavily influenced cinquecento pastoral poetry, particularly with the concept of the landscape as a medium for exploring the phenomenological expression of love and selfhood.110 Petrarch also used topography and natural features to structure his experiences of himself elsewhere in his writings. His well-known letter in which he describes his ascent of Mount Ventoux stages his complex self-discovery and -awareness through the ascent of the mountain, which gives the poet both physical challenges and panoramic perspective.111 The connection between a landscape space and the poet’s self is not simply metaphorical, even though he certainly 70
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involves this type of figuration.112 The lyric landscape draws out a more complicated topography of interaction in which the despairing lover both acts on and is acted upon by the natural world: he finds himself affected by the solitude found and sought after in uninhabited natural locations, and he also longingly projects himself and his feelings into nature. Consider these well-known lines from Petrarch’s “Rima 129”: I have many times (now who will believe me?) seen her alive in the clear water and on the green grass and in the trunk of a beech tree and in a white cloud . . . ; and in whatever wildest place and most deserted shore I find myself, so much the more beautiful does my thought shadow her forth. Then, when the truth dispels that sweet deception, right there in the same place I sit down, cold, a dead stone on the living rock, like a man who thinks and weeps and writes.113
We can easily hear the connections to the passage cited earlier from Sannazaro, as well as understand the later poet’s use of landscape in pastoral poetry. Nature, for Petrarch, manifests the beloved at the same time that the lover also figures nature, such as when he becomes a rock. The landscape functions not as a passive screen or backdrop for the experience of the poet but as an active presence that shapes his longing and turmoil. The mountains, valleys, and shadowed groves facilitate and cultivate emotional conditions and states of being that depend on extensive space and isolated pockets for their expression, and vice versa. Given the influence of Petrarchan lyric poetry on the pastoral mode,114 Venetian painters perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly explored the pastoral mode within the newly popular half-length portrayals of beautiful beloveds that also were inspired by the Petrarchan lyric tradition.115 Seemingly a brief and limited experiment given the few surviving examples, portrait-type depictions of single, isolated androgynous shepherd types appeared in Venetian painting around the same time as the first pastoral landscapes (fig. 26).116 Without any sign of green, and dominated by a black background, the figures wear shepherd garb and are depicted with effeminate features and in a soft style that contributes to the sense of allure. These pictures give none of the indications of impersonation portraits—in which a known individual would be “disguised” as a generic shepherd— and instead seem to visualize without any textual specificity the amorous reflection, the dialogic potential, and the doleful withdrawal that shepherds regularly experience and narrate in pastoral poetry.117 By limiting their compositions to the isolated shepherd type, these pictures anchor their subject’s emotional, self-reflective world to the realm of personhood through a well-established image type—the portrait. The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
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Figure 34 Titian, Gypsy Madonna, ca. 1510. Kunst historisches Museum, Vienna.
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Depictions of pastoral landscapes, by contrast, essentially generated within Venetian art a new category of picture that, although inspired by cinquecento pastoral poetry, introduced viewers to an entirely different way of visualizing the shaping of land to endow a place with meaning. Sometimes a recognizable figure from pastoral poetry—such as a shepherd leaning on a staff, a man reclining at the base of a tree (in the background of fig. 34), or an old man resting (fig. 35)—designated the green world of contemplation and reflection; but more often these clear citations were avoided, and the spatial experiences of wandering, hiding, sleeping, retreating, and gathering, among others, were expressed in spatial terms within a green world that promoted the corresponding sense of ontological openness—for both the depicted and the beholders. Venetians were familiar with the concept of a place that both creates and shapes meaning, since they, in effect, had been thinking of Venice in precisely these terms from its foundation. Venetians, perhaps better than anyone else in cinquecento Italy, understood that landscapes were made, not found, and second worlds—and even green worlds—potentially arose everywhere around them, whether in the painted green worlds of pastoral pictures or beyond the palace walls that these paintings adorned to the Venetian islands and their surrounding sea.
The Green Worlds of Pastoral Painting
Figure 35 Giulio Campagnola, Old Shepherd Lying in a Landscape, ca. 1500–1515. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937.
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Floating Arcadia: Pastoral Vedute of Venice
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 congested totality depend upon shifts in thinking about placement and orientation that foster the imagination of the appearance of a place from an unattainable, distant position. Earlier views of Venice provided a closer view of the city, nearly in elevation and profile (fig. 36); and most maps provided such a distanced view that specific sites appeared as abstracted locations rather than as habitable places with identifiable monuments.2 Perspective, on which Jacopo de’ Barbari relied in part to create this view, usually anchored the viewer in measurable and regular space constructed through urban settings by a spectator somewhere near the ground.3 Consequently, Venetian painters typically situated narrative events in dense and crowded urban locations in the city, which enclosed the scene as a small world apart from its larger lagunar one (fig. 7).4 But sometime around the turn of the century, Jacopo de’ Barbari and others like him thought to look at Venice from a distance, from the outside, and from across a formless ocean—as though the city was its own separate world. The expansive vista that situates the seemingly isolated city within the broad spaces of land and water, the elevated panoramic view that simultaneously enlarges the city to be a singular network of islands in the vast sea and miniaturizes the monumental in order to 75
Figure 36 Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, view of Venice from Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493). Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Gift of Mrs. Francis Welch, 1934.117.44.
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render its entirety in a single artwork: these aspects indicate a spatial turn, which is directly related to emerging cartographic concerns, such as siting, passage and connection between land and sea, and extension into the horizon, and their subjective implications (for both the city and the viewer). Venetian painters working after the execution of the View of Venice, undoubtedly influenced by Jacopo de’ Barbari’s repositioning of the spectator far away and high over the water, soon produced pictures with distant, yet detailed, views of Venice, specifically of the area near the Piazzetta, as the background scenes for mythological and biblical stories—even when these stories were set originally in locations other than Venice. The events were depicted as occurring on a green island, somewhere in the vicinity of the Bacino, sometimes on a nonexistent verdant spit of land, sometimes on an existing landmass that possessed none of its actual, known topographical features, or sometimes out in the middle of the sea. Extant paintings of this sort include Sebastiano del Piombo’s Death of Adonis, ca. 1511 (fig. 6, originally in Villa Farnesina, Rome, and now in Uffizi, Florence); Carpaccio’s Lion of Saint Mark, ca. 1516 (fig. 18, originally in Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, VenGreen Worlds of Renaissance Venice
ice, and now in the Palazzo Ducale); Titian’s Gozzi Altarpiece, 1520 (fig. 37, originally in San Francesco, Ancona, and now in the Pinacoteca civica), and his Saint Christopher, ca. 1523 (fig. 38, Palazzo Ducale, Venice); and Savoldo’s Pala Pesaro, 1524 (fig. 39, originally in San Domenico, Pesaro, and moved in 1811 to Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan), and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt, ca. 1530 (fig. 40, formerly Albani Collection, Milan).5 The range of subjects (biblical, allegorical, mythological), the range of image types (altarpieces, large-scale easel pictures, small-scale devotional pictures), and the range of patrons (the doge, state officials, private individuals residing inside and outside of Venice) indicate the broad appeal and generic adaptability of locating events near, but not quite in, the urban fabric of the city. These islands reinforce the imaginative possibility and interdependence of fiction, space, and place that were found in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view from afar—and that also underpinned Venetian Renaissance culture more generally.6 Giving us views of the city that we could never otherwise have (unless, perhaps, in a boat) and creating green spaces of a kind that could be found in Venice but were experienced infrequently by most Venetians, these pictures visualize insular discourses that Floating Arcadia
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align with those found in the contemporary literary and cartographic imagination.7 These islands, like their poetic or actual, newly discovered counterparts, often exist as relational places positioned in space and time apart from the primary world, as an intermediary between the fictional and the real, as green worlds. Islands as different as those found by Renaissance readers in the Orlando furioso or island atlases (isolarii) or Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice function variously and complexly as sites of marvel, isolation, exile, origin, and refuge.8 Considered within the emerging insular discourses, these pictures also complicate concepts in painting that have been bracketed off in art-historical scholarship in such a way as to function as conceptual islands, such as the interplay between fictional and real in political allegory—especially the iconography of the so-called myths of Venice— and the isolation of foreground from background, figure from landscape, in Renaissance painting more generally. Floating Arcadia
Figure 37 (opposite) Titian, Gozzi Altarpiece, 1520. Pinacoteca civica, Ancona. Figure 38 Titian, Saint Christopher, ca. 1523. Palazzo Ducale, Venice.
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Figure 39 Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, The Virgin in Glory with Christ Child, Angels, and Saints Peter, Dominic, Paul, and Jerome (Pala Pesaro), 1524. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.
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Figure 40 Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, ca. 1530. Formerly Conte A. Albani Collection, Milan. Private collection, Milan.
Vedute Vedute, or represented views, of specific cities—not only Venice—emerged in the quattrocento, when developments in perspective and cartography aligned with the identification of a civic and political entity with its unique urban fabric. Political boundaries increasingly coincided with territorial holdings, and some major cities exercised power over entire territories. City views and maps became a popular way to visualize the political landscape, as many a hall of state commissioned both types of place representation to situate itself politically through symbolic cartography, which, despite obvious manipulations, asserted claims of exactitude.9 The expansive, seemingly accurate vistas of these powerful cities joined the already prevalent, figuratively laconic personifications of places, usually through a female figure, as iconographic expressions of an urban mythology. The single allegorical figure, though, usually functions as a self-enclosed bearer of meaning through her attributes: the figure of Venice, for example, with her scales of Justice and accompanying Lion, references symbolic characteristics while bearing little, if any, mimetic relationship to the city itself (fig. 41).10 The city view, by contrast, because of its resemblance to its subject, often oversupplements the stand-alone representation with interpretative cues—such as the inclusion of Mercury and Neptune in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice or the insertion of the draftsman in Francesco Rosselli’s “Catena Map,” ca. 1470s (fig. 42), another well-known city view. Floating Arcadia
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Figure 41 Jacopo Sansovino and assistants, allegorical figure from Loggetta di San Marco, 1537–49. Piazza San Marco, Venice. Figure 42 Lucantonio degli Uberti, after Francesco Rosselli, “Catena Map,” ca. 1500–1510 (original dates to 1470s). Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
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Inscriptions in cartouches later function as textual equivalents of these visual indicators, similarly reminding the viewer of the polyvalence of space and place.11 Unanchored from expectations of reliable exactitude, vedute of identifiable cities appeared in the backgrounds of depictions of legendary events, such as those Venetian pictures listed earlier. Florence also served as a distant setting for several devotional pictures—primarily of the Virgin Annunciate and the city’s patron saint, John—which were executed simultaneously with the increased production of Tuscan city views in the 1460s and 1470s (e.g., fig. 43), somewhat earlier than the Venetian occurrences, and which for the most part were originally located in exurban monuments with vantages that approximated these distant views, unlike the Venetian pictures.12 Not surprisingly, depicted historical civic events usually took place on the city streets rather than on the hills above. To some extent, the veduta in Venetian art inverts this Florentine sequence by beginning with scuole narrative pictures in which actual and miraculous events occur within the urban fabric (fig. 7) and then following with pictures of legendary events that occur at a distance from the city itself. (Accounting for the distinctiveness of these two traditions is Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
one undertaking of this chapter.) What they share is the investment in locating an event near a specific place, which often leads art historians to forge an allegorical relationship between the event and place, linking the two yet privileging the figurative event in interpreting the city, so that, for example, the death of Adonis in Sebastiano del Piombo’s picture thereof (fig. 6) becomes, in the words of one scholar, “the death of Venice.”13 Reinforcing this approach, Juergen Schulz observes in another context that the depicted topography of a city was often connotative, gathering meaning from the story enacted within it.14 The primacy of the foreground over the background that was inherited from the earliest theorization of pictorial structure understandably bolsters this mode of interpretation, even though Venetian narrative painting does not rigorously adhere to this tradition. Linear perspective first developed out of Brunelleschi’s experimental representations of architecture in an urban network, and then Alberti adapted those synthetic environments to house the human figure. In practice, as well as in theory, depicted architecture preexisted the figure primarily as a means to give a space to human action. The vanishing or centric point, perceived by viewers to reside in the distant background, at the limits of perception, rarely coincided with the primary narrative moment in the foreground, even though some point on the centric line might have. The centric line, in fact, operated in Alberti’s thinking as a dialectical engine by establishing the limit or boundary, which in turn generated comparative relationships within the picture. “No objects in a painting,” according to Alberti, “can appear like real objects, unless they stand to each other in a determined relationship.” The centric line establishes a comparative
Floating Arcadia
Figure 43 Piero del Pollaiuolo, Annunciation, ca. 1470. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
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Figure 44 Jacopo Bellini, Flagellation, ca. 1450. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Inv. no. RF427 recto.
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standard that dictates not only the viewing distance of the spectator but also the interdependence between represented size and perceived distance: “This line is a limit or a boundary, which no quantity exceeds that is not higher than the eye of the spectator. . . . This is why men depicted standing in the parallel furthest away are a great deal smaller than those in the nearer ones—a phenomenon which is clearly demonstrated by nature herself, for in churches we see the heads of men walking about, moving at more or less the same height, while the feet of those further away may correspond to knee-level of those in front.”15 Alberti had found visual evidence for the rhetorical device of emphasizing, or foregrounding, a central argument through comparison, and successive artworks reinforced this dialectical model as a visual reality. Quattrocento Venetian artists often followed Alberti’s prescriptions by depicting figures friezelike in the foreground and detached from background architecture, but they just as often creatively modified Alberti’s recommendations by softening the dialectical prioritization of pictorial space.16 Pages and pages in Jacopo Bellini’s drawing books include renderings of fictional urban perspectival spaces into which stories have been set (fig. 44).17 Orthogonal lines that are naturalized through the patterned pavement and the architecture clearly establish the Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
vanishing point in the background, but in many drawings the figures abandon the foreground and inhabit almost every other part of the composition. The crux of the narrative oftentimes occurs on the periphery along one of the orthogonal lines, such as in his Flagellation, which effectively democratizes the space even though object size is still calibrated relationally. Foreground and background connect through the story that is told along the same line instead of existing as separate planes. Christ occupies the physical center of the page, but the orthogonal grid exerts an almost gravitational pull to create meaning and tension along these lines, through distance and sequence, rather than through comparative detachment. Passage along the diagonal maps as an exegetical structure with extensions to diverse stories—such as the Flagellation, Nativity, and Funeral of the Virgin18— which involve in some way situations of misrecognition, revelation, procession, and transformation or situations that occur over a continuum of time and space. Neither one of these approaches to pictorial space perfectly characterizes those found in the vedute pictures cited above (figs. 6, 18, 37–40), even though both bear some relationship depending on the specific painting. The interposition of the water as a formless mass of blue paint between the enacted story and the view of the Piazzetta disrupts the possible imposition of a legible and continuous perspectival system.19 Furthermore, these depictions of the Piazzetta adjust the angle from the viewpoint so as to disrupt the “naturally occurring” perspectival arrangement created by the Palazzo Ducale and the adjacent buildings on the future site of the Marciana Library. (Sebastiano’s Death of Adonis [fig. 6] comes the closest to orienting the Piazzetta to afford this view.) And the placement of the Piazzetta on the distant horizon, where atmospheric perspective assumes a predominant role in some of the pictures, compromises the legibility and necessity for a structured recession. Later guidebooks with printed views of the Piazzetta seen from a distance exaggerate the conformity of the arrangement of the urban space to the principles of perspective (fig. 45), most likely as a reflection of actual ceremonial spectacles staged in this space and related efforts spearheaded by Jacopo Sansovino to reconfigure the Piazza San Marco and surrounding area with these pictorial principles in mind.20 From the sea, the Piazzetta was the place of origin and destination, the place of (dis)embarkation, for many seafaring visitors and pilgrims, who invested the area with their own experiences of departure and arrival: marvel, curiosity, trepidation, adventure, duty, and so on.21 The orthogonal lines might not be written upon the water, but the ontological freight of passage along the line of a voyage to or from a place is significantly identical. The visual lure of the city on the sometimes-low horizon in the distance endows the pictorial spaces cited here with broad skies and depth of field that align with early-cinquecento interests in representing habitable landscapes. For many cinquecento visitors to Venice, such as the English traveler Stephen Powle, the act Floating Arcadia
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Figure 45 Cesare Vecellio, Perspettiva della prima piazza di San Marco, from Habiti antichi et moderni di tutti il mondo (Venice, 1590), fol. 39r. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
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itself of approaching the city provided similar aesthetic connections: “The seat of Venice when I beheld it in my Gondola as I came from Marghera [near Mestre] me thought resembled some [F]lemish painted table of Landskipt or some mathematical demonstration in prospective: the towers and monasteries in the sea and especially of Muran[o] divided from Venice resembled it so well.”22 Perhaps in the misguided musings of a weary traveler, association of the view with two very different pictorial traditions fits the unusual experience of seeing a city, in isolation, from the vantage point of a boat: the visible landmarks provided a distant elevation of measurability while the expanse of sea and sky evoked the vastness of so-called “world landscapes” executed in northern Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.23 Italian artists, although aware of and influenced by these Northern landscape traditions, also incorporated devices from perspective construction— such as the grid naturalized into landscape features like crop rows—to suggest spatial extension, even though human figures, when they appeared in conjunction with a landscape, stood seemingly apart from the landscape, in the foreground plane, oftentimes separated by a parapet or wall to reinforce distinct, yet coextensive, spatial zones.24 Consider, for example, the distinction between foreground figures and background landscape in two contemporary pictures, Giorgione’s Castelfranco Altarpiece (fig. 24) and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. And yet the atmospheric Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
totality and naturalism of the represented space in both pictures, accomplished by an array of pictorial techniques, minimize the depicted physical, architectural separation and accentuate the full presence and extension of the figures into the world and the response of the world to their presence. Naturalistic landscapes, as cinquecento painters realized and explored, can convey the subtlety and range of ontological dimensions in a way that differs in appearance and structure from the more categorical states of being that are manifested in the allegorical landscape. Later scholars’ unconvincing interpretations of the landscape in the Mona Lisa as allegorical—of the sitter’s psyche, for example—reinforce the distinction between the signifying capacities of the two types of landscape representation.25 Allegorical landscapes, despite the often-obtuse complexity of their meaning, are surprisingly recognizable as allegories and are fairly straightforward to interpret. Lorenzo Lotto’s Allegory of Virtue and Vice clearly conveys the broader message about character with the division of the lush bower of sinfulness from the rocky heights traveled by the virtuous putto.26 The allegorical interpretation is nearly simultaneous with a topographical description of the depicted landscape. Closer in depicted location, for my purposes, is Pompeo Batoni’s Triumph of Venice (fig. 46), which, although executed in 1737, clarifies the shared conception of figure and landscape in my group of pictures and in ca. 1500 pictures such as the Mona Lisa and the Castelfranco Altarpiece.27 With all of the extravagance of Baroque civic allegory, the Triumph of Venice locates mythological figures, featuring Venice on the scallop-shell throne, on a nonexistent spit of land that is adjacent to the Palazzo Ducale, Piazzetta, and Sansovino’s library and mint and that terminates on the right in an abbreviated version of Arcadia. The concealed transition between
Floating Arcadia
Figure 46 Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, The Triumph of Venice, 1737. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, GL.60.17.60.
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the cityscape and the pastoral landscape creates a pastiche rather than a believable place, and the attention given by Neptune and Mars to the sea behind them—their purposeful engagement—transforms the topographical specificity of the veduta into an allegory of naval dominance. The depicted city functions as a particularizing attribute for the personifications rather than as a re-creation of an inhabitable place within a broader naturalistic space, as in my group of pictures. The death of Adonis (fig. 6), the visionary appearance of the Virgin and Child (fig. 37), the carrying of Christ by Saint Christopher (fig. 38): all of these events unfold in some orientation to the world of Venice, in some cases at a very specific temporal moment in the life of the city, and the fictional intervenes in the representation of the real.28
Islands as Second Worlds Not resembling in their superimposition and simultaneity allegorical landscapes, these imaginary islands exist relationally to the city in the distance, functioning as pictorial versions of heterotopias or the related literary concepts of second and green worlds. Heterotopias, which Michel Foucault articulated for social spaces, describe real physical or mental pockets that act as different worlds. Heterotopias exist, unlike utopias, which exist nowhere, and examples include prisons, elderly homes, cemeteries, gardens, mirrors, and boats.29 The concept has found overwhelming traction in recent scholarship, perhaps because Foucault never fully developed and limited the term and perhaps because the concept aligns with contemporary preferences for fragmented, miniature worlds that coexist, for hybridity and difference rather than the idea of an estranged other.30 Furthermore, the overlap between Foucault’s heterotopic social spaces and his earlier discursive version of heterotopia (that is, textual spaces that dismantle expected links between words and things)31 facilitates the extension of the concept to the representation of spaces, such as the depicted islands near Venice, even though Foucault never specifically mentioned in his writings heterotopias in represented spaces.32 Literary scholars, as discussed above, have generated parallel ways of thinking about heterotopia-like spaces in representation in advance of Foucault’s elaborations, referring to these different places as “second worlds” and “green worlds,” the latter being a more specific, verdant instance of the former.33 The second or green world, unlike Foucault’s heterotopia, does not have to be a localized and real place; however, it captures the idea of a creative clearing in a miniature world that bears some relationship to the usual order of space, whether replicating, undoing, countering, or exaggerating. The pictures with views of Venice, as artworks, align more closely with Harry Berger Jr.’s concept of the second world because the “real” place is a representation 88
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rather than a physically occupied place like Foucault’s brothel or cemetery or boat. But as Berger and many other scholars have articulated, the interdependence between the fictional and real prevented any clear distinction in the Renaissance mind. The actual experience of being in Venice (or any city, although especially Venice) was just as interwoven with the imaginary as a depiction of Venice was with the evocation of the actual place. My discussion of Venetian gardens in chapter 1 demonstrates specific manifestations of this interdependence. The extant descriptions by the earliest visitors to the city affirm this experience. Petrarch routinely transformed actual topography into second worlds, whether Mount Ventoux, Avignon, or Rome, so somewhat predictably a stay in Venice prompted him in a letter to Francesco Bruni to identify departing and arriving boats in the Bacino as islands (calling one “una montagna natante sul mare”) and inspired him to discuss the Aristotelian emphasis on the role of experience in art.34 He fantasized about the destinations of the boats moored just below his window and charted an imaginary course that followed Jason’s voyage to obtain the Golden Fleece, as well as other travels to the farthest reaches of the known world. Transporting commercial goods, these boats distributed Venice in pieces to distant places and brought back to Venice the pieces of other places, causing an incredulous Petrarch, following ancient authors, to imply the seeming unnaturalness of such desire among merchant sailors:35 “In British cups they drink our wines, our apples are taken to indulge the taste of the Scythians, and, it is difficult to believe, the woods from our forests are taken to the Egyptians and the Achaeans [difficile a credersi, le legna dei nostri boschi si portano agli Egizi ed agli Achei].”36 Nautical trade, which Petrarch observed in Venice was second only to justice in impressing the visitor, juxtaposed several real and fictional spaces simultaneously. Venice transplanted part of itself to Egypt, for example, and the crew transformed into the Argonauts. The boat was for Foucault the heterotopia par excellence, as a place with no place, and Petrarch here seems to be thinking along the same lines, especially in terms of how the boat creates an alternative space for experience and memory to explicate and generate art. Petrarch self-consciously alerts the reader to the insularity of the (heterotopic) episode when he refers to it as a digression, an “unnecessary little story for this letter” (una storiella non necessaria a questa lettera).37 The early modern conceptions of Venice contribute to obfuscating the categorical distinction of fictional versus real found in these two later critical concepts of second world and heterotopia, especially as that actual second world—the New World—emerged and real places became rich sites for the imaginary and fictional. European explorers often experienced new places through earlier texts that described fictional and legendary places with equally unbelievable inhabitants and natural marvels.38 Columbus’s claim, for example, to have spied mermaids and other monstrous species on his voyage testifies more to his impressive reading list Floating Arcadia
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Figure 47 Benedetto Bordone, view of Venice from Isolario (Venice, 1528). Museo Correr, Venice.
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than to his fortuitous real-life observations.39 Venice, despite its naval superiority, only peripherally participated in exploration, through its publication of maps, navigation books, and firsthand accounts, especially those of Columbus; and Venetian publishers, editors, and writers were among the first to note the sideline participation by the republic.40 Perhaps compensatory, perhaps to counteract political realities, Venetian-made views and maps of Venice manipulated the geographical facts to create parallels, if not mirroring, between the topography of Venice and distant places, such as Tenochtitlan, which were newly visited by European explorers.41 Many of these comparisons occurred in island atlases, or isolarii, in which Venice was not only considered as an island but was also featured prominently as a reference point for the other islands and archipelagoes, whether appearing as the centerfold or outnumbering the reproduced views of other locations.42 Sometimes that meant altering the appearance of Venice and comparative locations to heighten the resemblance, as scholars have observed in the views and descriptions of Venice and Tenochtitlan in Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario (1528, fig. 47).43 The bidirectional manipulations in print affected both the actual urban plans in Venice, such as a proposed initiative to bring fresh water into the city, following Tenochtitlan,44 and the city’s self-conception, such as identification with island paradises described by European explorers. Travelers to Venice frequently remarked on and even lamented its urban density and paucity of green spaces, whereas those residents who knew it best and found support in ancient cosmography affirmed its connection to places of primiGreen Worlds of Renaissance Venice
tive simplicity at the farthest reaches of the known and unknown world. Felix Fabri, visiting Venice during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, summarized the perception that foreigners had of the city: “There, there are no fields, nor forests, nor mountains, nor valleys, nor vineyards, nor pastures, nor handcarts, nor wagons. For ground she has the sea, for a rampart the waves, for a roof the sky, and for paved roads the waters.”45 Native Venetians by contrast embraced the man-made city and celebrated in written accounts and emphasized in topographical views the plentitude of green spaces within Venice and on nearby islands and the agricultural abundance provided by the Lido.46 Diverse natural resources and animal life provided the strongest connection between Venice and legendary, remote islands that had come to be associated with the edge of space and time.47 The Fortunate Islands, or Islands of the Blessed, possessed a wealth and diversity of foodstuffs, flora, and fauna similar to that found in Venice, according to Bordone, who was essentially repeating the ancient identification of Elysium and the Garden of the Hesperides with those distant islands.48 The edges of the Earth could be found at home, according to the illumination opening Marco Polo’s Travels (fig. 5), in which the Giudecca has been transformed into a green space overrun by lions—undoubtedly a “naturalized” version of the bestial symbol of Saint Mark—and other exotic animals.49 The connection forged, even forced, between known and unknown islands derived from a revival of ancient cosmographical theories postulating that habitable islands connected the world in order to make it navigable and benefit mankind.50 Pietro Bembo, drawing on Plato and Seneca, among others, wrote in his Della historia vinitiana (1552) that “that which writers call the Ocean is not empty and idle but full of islands and places inhabited by men” (quello, che gli scrittori Oceano chiamarono, non essere di vana & ignava grandezza: ma pieno d’Isole, & di luoghi habitati da gli huomini).51 The idea of universal origins and harmony allowed Venetians both to downplay the political conquest of discovery by asserting the preexistence of these islands and to establish parallels between Venice and the golden-age, paradisiacal state of these newly found islands.52 Somewhat unexpectedly, the continued presence of Venice in the fully explored eastern seas and the legendary accounts of the primitive origins of the city facilitated the desired perception of Venice as a version of golden-age Arcadia. Throughout all of the diverse foundation myths of Venice runs the consistent thread of sanctuary provided by the lagoons and the simple, harmonious efforts to sustain the settlements through reinforcement of the mudflats and fishing.53 “Instead of driving the plow or wielding the sickle, you roll your cylinders [of salt]. Thence arises your whole crop,” wrote Cassiodorus in a sixth-century diplomatic letter to Venetian officials. Venetians, Cassiodorus continued, lived in harmony: “One kind of food refreshes all; the same sort of dwelling shelters all; no one can envy his neighbor’s home; and living in this moderate style they escape that vice [of Floating Arcadia
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Figure 48 Domenico Tintoretto, Saint Mark Blessing the Origins of Venice, early 1600s. Scuola Grande di San Marco, Venice.
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envy] to which all the rest of the world is liable.”54 Subsequent historians emphasized that the early inhabitants defensively protected the lagoon’s civic harmony and natural bounty.55 Early modern representations, such as Domenico Tintoretto’s Saint Mark Blessing the Origins of Venice (fig. 48), sustained the longevity of these accounts by depicting Venice at the time of Saint Mark as a place of rustic and harmonious simplicity with orderly primitive huts inhabited by productive, happy families. The persistent celebration of continuity and permanence, even in these earliest settlements, reinforced the Venetians’ defiance of the environmental challenges to daily life in Venice. The changing water levels reminded Cassiodorus of another set of islands, both actual and legendary, in the Aegean Sea: “[T]he alternating tide now discovers and now conceals the face of the fields by the ebb and flow of its inundation. Here after the manner of waterfowl have you fixed your home. He who was just now on the mainland finds himself on an island, so that you might fancy yourself in the Cyclades, from the sudden alterations in the appearance of the shore.”56 Cassiodorus most likely refers here to the floating island of Delos, which, according to ancient Greek poets, allowed the nymph Asteria in island form to flee Zeus and then to become anchored once it served as the sheltered birthplace of Artemis and Apollo.57 Its constantly changing boundaries and Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
arid, untillable landscape readily invited comparison with Venice.58 By the time fifteenth- and sixteenth-century visitors arrived on these same Aegean archipelagoes, though, they found their shores stabilized, yet populated: islands full of sheep and goats among ancient ruins that resembled the poetic mountains of Arcadia. Some Venetian expatriates created on some of those islands lush garden spaces for study and contemplation, evoking contemporary depictions of Saint Jerome in simultaneously arid and verdant landscapes.59 Venetians created these island versions of the locus amoenus at home as well, actualizing the contrast in pastoral poetry between the green expanses and shady glades of pastoral landscapes and the alternative space of the salty sea. The sea and its related duties, dangers, and promise of escapism often existed alongside and called out to inhabitants of the pastoral world, but it maintained its topical and physical distance, with Renaissance readers often locating Arcadia far from the sea.60 Whereas the mainland, terraferma possessions held by Venice offered a more proximate version of pastoral, concerned only with green inland landscapes, the shady garden spaces in Venice itself directly involved the surrounding water in their conceptions. Functional semirural areas existed on the property of monasteries, churches, and private homes and produced fruit, vegetables, and dairy products. Many campi remained unpaved and provided homes for livestock at various times in Venice’s history.61 Clusters of green islets known as the Vignole were home to agrarian pursuits and lovers’ promenades, if Matteo Pagan’s 1559 View of Venice is taken at face value (fig. 49); and private gardens, such as Andrea Navagero’s and Trifone Gabriele’s, arose on the Giudecca and Murano, extending to the water and serving as meeting spaces for retreat and literary discussions by Venetian intellectuals.62 These verdant places inspired poetic reveries, whether the “veri paradisi
Floating Arcadia
Figure 49 Matteo Pagan, View of Venice (Venice, 1559). Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, KdZ/SZ/ Inv.-Nr. 870–100.
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terrestri” inhabited by nymphs and half-gods, according to Andrea Calmo, or the Petrarchan fantasies of Pietro Aretino, whose recounting of the breezy green perfection of the printer Marcolini’s garden was itself indebted to the language of earlier poets.63 In reception, use, and location, these gardens existed as exceptional spaces, offering alternative worlds within the city and for the urban dweller. Most early modern depictions of pastoral scenes suppress this fundamental urban aspect of the mode by creating a green world devoid of these intrusions and of the contrasting marine life.64 The obvious division of the single myth of Polyphemus and Galatea into separate, adjacent depictions, Polyphemus by Sebastiano del Piombo and Galatea by Raphael (fig. 20), in the suburban Roman villa of Agostino Chigi is often explained in terms of patronal circumstances or artistic carelessness;65 but the division could also be understood in terms of the perceived irreconcilability of pastoral landscape and epic seascape, which, although it implicitly underpins the tension of pursuit by the Cyclops and resistance by Galatea in the myth, resulted from the categorical generic separations recognized by and emerging in Renaissance poetics.66 Titian acknowledged this irreconcilability in his Bacchus and Ariadne (fig. 50) for Alfonso d’Este’s camerino in Ferrara through the disheveled figure of Ariadne, who, standing amid a few seashells on the shore, simultaneously arrests the bacchanalian revelers emerging from the woods and indicates the ship of her departing seaborne lover, Theseus, who continues on in his heroic and tragic exploits. Most Venetian pastoral pictures, such as the Pastoral Concert (fig. 1), limit the depicted worlds to rural landscape settings with sequential planes extending into the background and occasionally punctuated with seemingly abandoned rustic structures. These paintings offer themselves as fictive worlds of retreat from the urbanity of the actual world in which they were hung. The group of pictures discussed here stages the insularity of the retreat by including depictions of the Venetian cityscape within the pictures themselves and consequently appears to represent a variation of the pastoral visual mode. Sebastiano del Piombo’s Death of Adonis (fig. 6), for example, visualizes both the circumstantial structure and the content of the pastoral mode—that is, the picture as second world and another second world depicted in the picture. Early modern Venetians and visitors to Venice observed in public ceremonies similar second or green worlds on actual and artificial islands in the lagoon. Several mobile floating displays entertained Beatrice d’Este, Duchess of Milan, who recounted the spectacles observed during her visit to Venice in late May 1492, in detailed letters to her husband, the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. Arriving in Venice with her mother, the Duchess of Ferrara, her brother, Alfonso d’Este, and a retinue of twelve hundred people, she witnessed galleys readied for mock battle and other boats decked out like gardens that floated alongside the rafts of the visitors. Some floats staged allegorical tableaux, including one with the figures of Nep94
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tune and Minerva seated on either side of a hill with arms of the pope, the Sforza, and Venice. After some juggling and dancing, Minerva and Neptune each struck the mountain and produced an olive tree and a horse, respectively. Surrounding figures consulted open books to find a name for the city on the mountain. The representation was said to signify that the existence of states was founded on treaties of peace and that those who laid foundations would give their names to future kingdoms, as Minerva did to Athens.67 Floating allegorical and mythological performances occurred in the canals around Venice, often on the occasion of a visit by a foreigner or the commemoration of an event from Venetian history. Marin Floating Arcadia
Figure 50 Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–23. National Gallery, London.
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Sanudo records in his diaries a performance in May 1520 for the Marquis of Mantua that involved a group of floats, platforms, and bridges made of boats and, like many of these spectacles, traveled throughout the city on the Giudecca and Grand Canals, connecting palaces, embankments, and water in an overwhelming display. Sanudo wrote that after dancing and racing on rafts, everyone proceeded to the Giudecca: There they all disembarked at Ca’ Dandolo, near San Zuane di la Zuecha [San Giovanni della Giudecca], where they dined in the garden in a courtly fashion, using silver. . . . Then they mounted the platform raised in front of the house, and another for dancing. . . . There were 200 lit wax torches. . . . They went for the herald, and it was a fine sight to watch him approach along the embankment. . . . The canal was full of boats. I was there, and it was impossible to move with so many notable men and women in their boats. Many rockets and artillery salvos were fired. Then came the grand momaria on a number of floats and they performed the fable of Hercules, who goes to carry Persephone off from Hades, which took a while.68
These spectacular floats functioned as heterotopic spaces for the civic and political celebration and critique that, as they moved through the canals without being in any specific place, changed the space of the city over time and the time of the city over space. The fixed backdrop of the proscenium stage employed in contemporary theater gave way in these floats to the cinematic mobility of the city view, especially when the vantage point came from another boat and the city was viewed from the water. In Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi et moderni di tutti il mondo his view of the Piazza San Marco (fig. 45), with the 1554 floating circular theater in the Bacino, reinforces the tension between the planar immobility of urban perspective and the unmoored orbit of the spectacle.69 Sometimes they were called teatri del mondo, a designation that acknowledged their movement and freedom from boundaries.70 Eventually, in the later sixteenth century, a plan was submitted for a permanent theater to be constructed on a newly formed garden-island near the Bacino as a way to actualize and pastoralize the spectacular mobile fantasies associated with this area. Alvise Cornaro proposed the construction of a public theater on a man-made tree-covered bank between the Piazza San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore.71 He imagined standing in the piazza and seeing the fountain, mountain, and theater, along with the many large ships that entered the port, and he wrote, “this will be a most beautiful spectacle [spettacolo] and view [prospettiva], the most vaga, the most different from every other one.”72 Cornaro celebrated the novelty of a view of and from the theater that would capture the movement and life of the city. Nothing was ever built according to Cornaro’s plans, although Venetians continued to imagine 96
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the area as home to a fantastic pastoral island. Giulio Strozzi, for example, in his epic poem, Venetia edificata (1624), converted the monastic island of San Giorgio Maggiore into the home of a garden and palace for Venus (fig. 51).73 Imaginary and actual garden-islands, although particularly well suited to the topography of Venice, constituted a popular phenomenon in cinquecento literature and garden design, especially in the nearby city of Ferrara.74 Alfonso d’Este commissioned the construction of a garden-island known as the Belvedere, which was built on the larger property of the Boschetto. Home to a villa, the Belvedere included a garden with a wild park in which Alfonso kept an exotic menagerie, which contained elephants, ostriches, leopards, and chameleons. Plays and poems were performed here as well, possibly including Tasso’s Aminta, and further transformed the island into another place in time and space.75 One of Alfonso d’Este’s court poets, Ludovico Ariosto, recognized the poetic dimensions of the garden-island when, foretelling its construction in the Orlando furioso, the knight Rinaldo observes that “no one, after seeing it, would any more sing the praises of Nausicaa’s island. He learnt that for splendid structures it would outdo Capri, the island so beloved by Tiberius; the Hesperides would yield to this lovely spot for the plants of every species, however rare, which would grow here; it would boast as many kinds of animal as exist, more than Circe ever had in sheepfold or stable; and Venus would take up her abode here with the Graces and Cupid, forsaking Cyprus and Cnidus” (43.57–59).76 To Rinaldo’s list of islands could be added some more recent examples, including Ariosto’s own island of the sorceress Alcina in the same poem (6.35–8.16) and the home of Venus, the island of Cytherea, in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499).77 But Rinaldo’s deliberate mixture of examples of literary, historical, and legendary islands, as well as his remarks on the insularity of the Belvedere—identifying the heterotopias of its botanical gardens and zoo—indicate how islands establish, in Nathalie Bouloux’s words, “a new relation between the bookish and the real, between classical space and modern space . . . [that] leads to interrogate the real in a different way, according to more complex processes than the simple opposition between authority and experience, imaginary and real.”78 To some extent, then, the presence of islands in Venetian culture—whether literary, actual, explored, imaginary, man-made, or temporary—compliments the complex relationship between imaginary and real that the city’s ideology of place had already firmly established. Similarly, some of the connotations of islands— Floating Arcadia
Figure 51 Giulio Strozzi, Venetia edificata (Venice, 1624), 156, frontispiece to canto 16. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Typ 625 24.811.
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such as isolation, otherness, refuge, exile, sacredness, and independence—aligned with some of the predominant messages that were broadcast by and about the Venetian state.79 This probably explains why the group of pictures reproduced here is so often interpreted as supporting state ideology, as could certainly be the case. But these pictures, most of which were displayed privately in domestic or religious locations, also possess a quietness that would seem to conflict with the usual noise of propaganda: viewers’ distant position relative to Venice locates them somewhere private, and perhaps uninhabitable, in the lagoon and creates an awe-inspiring event because the compositions suggest that they alone see it happening; they alone can see it happening. These insular views strike me as personal interiorizations of space—like visions—that depend on the cartographic tension between the familiar and the strange, the known and the distant, for their materialization. The distant appearance of the city of Venice orients the imaginary of the insular; it relationally establishes the spiritual and poetic transcendence of topographical isolation, immensity, and breadth; it situates the second world in order to create a world, not comparatively or univocally for the sake of self-aggrandizing political commentary, but to say more poetically, yet still cartographically, that “this can happen here,” that “here happens because of this.”
Visions of and on the Horizon One of the most peculiar aspects of at least two of the pictures, Sebastiano’s Death of Adonis (fig. 6) and Titian’s Gozzi Altarpiece (fig. 37), is that both paintings were commissioned by individuals, Agostino Chigi and Luigi Gozzi respectively, who lived, and subsequently hung the pictures, outside of Venice, in Rome and Ancona respectively.80 Both gentlemen conducted business in Venice and had mercantile and political connections to the city, which not only explains their patronizing Venetian artists but also potentially accounts for the views of Venice in the background. Prevailing interpretations explain the depiction of the city in terms of hostility and rivalry that the two men presumably felt toward it: Agostino because he found satisfaction in and benefited from Venice’s recent and current political hardships, Luigi because he benefited from the papal suspension of mercantile restrictions.81 Neither interpretation convinces on the grounds of the intended placement of these pictures: What exactly would be the relevance of the “myth of Venice” to a Roman who placed the picture in a room in his suburban villa retreat?82 And how appropriate would a scene replete with political protest be for an altarpiece? Just as likely is that these views functioned, as they would for any individual with some attachment to a city, in some way like souvenirs—much as the painted views of Venice developed into a popular tourist industry especially in the eigh98
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teenth century—and humanists collected printed city views from multiple places.83 Painted city views served in some instances as surrogates for the distant places. Isabella d’Este commissioned only one city view, that of her hometown, Ferrara, to be placed in her Mantuan residence. In doing so, she imitated her mother, Eleonora d’Aragona, who had a view of her hometown of Naples painted on the balcony of the apartments in Castelvecchio in Ferrara.84 We can imagine that these views functioned like portraits, as views of home imbued with poignancy by a displaced dweller. Whatever the nature of Agostino’s and Luigi’s relations with Venice—whether nostalgic, hostile, or neutral—both men brought home to a different city a smallerscale view of it that, because of the reduced size, transformed the foreign space into personal, interiorized space. Early modern travelers frequently returned home with site-specific souvenirs of the kind we collect today: most commonly, visitors collected small-scale replicas of well-known artworks and badges and medals from pilgrimages.85 Titian, for example, produced a print of Saint Roch with a view of Venice in the distance (British Museum, London) that pilgrims to the Holy Land were to use as an altar while on board their boats.86 Wealthy visitors commissioned and purchased artworks, although not usually city views, and Agostino went further, bringing home the painter Sebastiano to contribute to the decoration of his Villa Farnesina. Because the world of souvenirs, as Susan Stewart observes, “offers transcendence to the viewer, it may be seen as a miniaturized one, as a reduction in physical dimensions corresponding to an increase in significance, and as an interiorization of an exterior. . . . The . . . world of the souvenir is a world of nature idealized; nature is removed from the domain of struggle into the domestic space of the individual and the interior.”87 Stewart addresses in her discussion those objects that we most often think of as souvenirs, such as the keychain replicas of the Eiffel Tower or the snow globes with views of Rome. But certainly the process of interiorization that she describes for these tchotchkes aligns with the interpretative inclinations of previous scholars to find the personal relationship of the patrons to Venice expressed through the miniaturized view of that city, even if miniaturized to give the naturalistic effect of distance. For those pictures with distanced views of Venice that remain in Venice, such as Titian’s Saint Christopher (fig. 38) and Domenico Tintoretto’s Venice, Queen of the Adriatic, Crowning the Lion of Saint Mark (fig. 52), the miniaturizing of the city from unusual vantage points allows for a process of estrangement and interiorization similar to that operative for the souvenir, even though lacking the souvenir’s quality of displacement.88 Most sixteenth-century city views and written descriptions occur up close to the subject. Thomas Coryat, for example, a traveler to Venice, in 1611 provided detailed observations from within the city and, after climbing to the top of the campanile at Piazza San Marco, noted the unique “synopsis, that is, a Floating Arcadia
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Figure 52 Domenico Tintoretto, Venice, Queen of the Adriatic, Crowning the Lion of Saint Mark, ca. 1590. National Gallery, Dublin.
general view,” of the six parts of the city from above. He could see the major monuments—the Palazzo Ducale and Rialto Bridge among them—and the gardens, the islands bordering the city, and beyond, in the distance, the Alps, the Appenines, and the Euganean Hills.89 His description of his distanced view accordingly loses the dizzying details of his experiences at street level as he naturalizes the city landscape.90 Similarly, painted views of Venice from a distance focus on the profiles of the architecture and substantially omit or limit signs of life in the city. A few sailboats dot the water, and city spaces, if they can be seen, appear to be ghost towns— especially if contrasted to printed views of ceremonies in Venice. Distanced views struck observers as unexpected, even marvelous, particularly when imaginary global—and interplanetary—travelers viewed distant lands from the air. Astolfo, in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, rides around the world on the magical hippogriff (a hybrid horse-eagle) and concludes his journey with a trip to the moon to recover his cousin Orlando’s lost wits. Once there, Astolfo takes a quick look around: Here Astolfo had a double surprise: what a big place the moon was from close up, when to us, who look at it from down here, it seems but a little sphere! And how
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he had to screw up his eyes if from up there he wanted to descry the earth and the sea spread over it; the earth being unilluminated, its features can span but a short distance. / The rivers, lakes, and fields up there were not as they are down here. The plains, valleys, mountains, cities, and castles were different, and there were houses the like of which for sheer size the paladin had never seen before or since. (34.71–72)91
Astolfo can only see the general outlines of Earth, as was the case when he traveled over continents and could note only the names of cities and countries and their boundaries (“He saw Morocco, Fez, Oran, [etc.] . . . all proud cities” [33. 99]). The trip to the moon, and the magnification of the larger natural landscape, allude to similar aerial exploits in ancient texts such as Lucian’s Ikaromenippos, in which Menippus fabricates a pair of wings to visit the gods in heaven.92 The trips destabilize the legitimizing priority of position: Astolfo’s surprise comes from how on the moon the Earth seems as different as the moon seemed when viewed from the Earth. Paintings such as the Saint Christopher (fig. 38) or Venice, Queen of the Adriatic, Crowning the Lion of Saint Mark (fig. 52) locate their scenes in unfamiliar yet not unspecific or unknown waters, compounding the viewers’ sense of witnessing something unexpected, something they would usually not be able to see. These pictures seem simultaneously personal and contingent, with figures that hover somewhere between another world and this locatable, yet far-off place—almost, in these examples, like a state version of a vision. The interdependence between the familiar and strange, the known and distant, that emerges from occupying an unusual topographical position gives cartographic dimensions to the religious visionary experience, as first explored by Titian in his Gozzi Altarpiece (fig. 37). Appearing on golden-hued clouds, the Virgin and Child miraculously emerge in the sky above Luigi Gozzi, whose visionary experience follows the directional guidance of his patron saint, Blaise. Not only is the specific location of this pastoral island in the lagoon unclear, but also that of the vision, which, because of scale, seems to be occurring over the heads of the figures below and, because of the presence of Venice on the low horizon and Saint Blaise’s gesture slightly backward, also farther in the distance, somewhere between the pastoral “here” and the Venetian “there.” Titian’s situation of the vision in a broad landscape shares in what seems to be a contemporary interest in such settings, initiated by Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno (fig. 53), which Titian most likely knew about (although whether through a personal meeting in Ferrara in 1516 or drawings or some other means is not clear), and Fra Bartolommeo’s Vision of Saint Catherine (fig. 54), which was commissioned by, but never delivered to, San Pietro Martire on the Venetian island Murano.93 (After failing to receive payment, Fra Bartolommeo sent the painting to Lucca.)94 The notably low horizon line and the expansive Floating Arcadia
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l andscape in Fra Bartolommeo’s altarpiece facilitate the feeling of the immeasurability of the vision of God and of the positions of all of the figures. They all seem to hover in the sky above the terrestrial world. Raphael observed Fra Bartolommeo’s transformation of the symbolic division between terrestrial and celestial into a hazy, amorphous zone, which, without an exact position or actual existence, conveys the idea of God as present, yet unknowable.95 Many of Raphael’s religious works—the Marriage of the Virgin (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) and the Disputa (Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican)—direct attention to this meeting of sky and earth, especially developing its potentially hieratic connotations, and then, under the influence of Fra Bartolommeo and with Raphael’s own Madonna of Foligno, developing the significance of depth and distance that defines the horizon.96 The Virgin and Child appear in a vision above the foreground figures, but as in the Gozzi Altarpiece, her exact position is difficult to determine even though the higher horizon line creates a continuous recession of the landscape and thereby connects the cloudscape above to the landscape below. Is the Virgin, to repeat John Shearman’s questions of Raphael’s altarpiece, actually enormous above the distant landscape or close to us and in proportion to the figures below, or both?97 The same questions apply even more pertinently to the Gozzi Altarpiece, in which the naturalism of the clouds irradiated by both sunset and divine presence and the low seascape horizon, with the Piazzetta skyline, obscures the Virgin and Child’s exact position while simultaneously exerting a pull toward the background. Savoldo’s Pala Pesaro (fig. 39), on the other hand, although obviously emulating Titian’s work, upholds a distinction between the visionary and the terrestrial and lacks the sense of vastness found in the Gozzi Altarpiece. (The same could be said for Titian’s own later Grimani Altarpiece [Palazzo Ducale, Venice, begun 1555], which stages a theatrical vision of Faith in a detached cloud glory at the entrance to the Palladian church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.)98 Titian aligns the Virgin and Child, the fig tree, and the Piazzetta along the central vertical axis, undoubtedly referencing the importance of the Virgin to Venice, but he also situates the fig tree and the bishop’s cope to frame and isolate the city in the distance, drawing the viewer’s attention from this placeless place outward, to somewhere over the water, and upward, to the divine as manifested through transcendental openness and breadth.99 Staging the occurrence of the visionary in the vicinity of two islands and the sea as the ground plane effectively lowers the space and place of ineffability down to sea level, which also had inevitably occurred in early modern writings and maps as sea navigation had prompted a variety of existential and epistemological meditations on the boundaries of the knowable. The formlessness and irregularity of the sea endow it as a site for the numinous in ancient mythology and biblical texts and for divine illumination in Neoplatonic philosophy.100 In descriptions of sea voyages, the nonexistent Pillars of Hercules symbolically mark the edges of the known world, where 102
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the finite and infinite, man and God, meet.101 Even as navigators imposed systems for measuring and dividing this amorphous mass (converting smooth space into striated space, to invoke Deleuze and Guattari102), their sense of place was determined relationally with parallels to the incommensurability of God.103
Figure 53 Raphael, Madonna of Foligno, 1512. Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City. Figure 54 Fra Bartolommeo, Vision of Saint Catherine, 1509.
How would a passenger know that one’s ship was being moved if one did not know that the water was flowing past and if the shores were not visible from the ship in
Pinacoteca nazionale di Palazzo Mansi, Lucca.
the middle of the water? Since it always appears to every observer, whether on the earth, the sun, or another star, that one is, as if, at an immovable center of things and that all else is being moved, one will always select different poles in relation to oneself. . . . Therefore, the world machine will have, one might say, its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, for its circumference and center is God, who is everywhere and nowhere.104 Floating Arcadia
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Occurring in an appended epistle written by Nicholas of Cusa, who was on a sea voyage from Greece to Venice (1437–38), the passage positions the open seas, devoid of any points of orientation—no coastline—as a place where a body in motion displaces an ever-changing horizon, not unlike the all-encompassing, immeasurable, and omnipresent, yet placeless, presence of the divine experienced in a vision, even though Cusanus does not explicitly draw the connection here.105 Somewhat like the simultaneous omnipresence and no place of the place of Cusanus’s God, the two islands in Titian’s altarpiece (fig. 37) are positioned and experienced relationally in space, but unlike on a map, they are not imagined as necessarily coexisting. Layering of time often arises in visionary pictures, which conflate multiple temporalities of different historical and biblical personages who all observe the same vision. The Gozzi Altarpiece folds in an additional temporality with the pastoral landscape (and perhaps even an aesthetic/allusive temporality by adding a small figure on the far left who, although difficult to see, resembles the seated female figure in Giorgione’s Tempesta [fig. 9]). The depicted ecology of the lagoon indicates the temporariness of the pastoral island: placed beyond the congregated figures, landmasses emerge out of shallow waters that have stranded sailboats, indicating that these pastoral islands can undergo similar ecological processes of surfacing and absorption that were observed daily in the lagoon.106 Savoldo captures the same potential for change, with emerging inlets and strandings in the area of the Bacino, in his Pala Pesaro (fig. 39) and his impossibly insular Rest on the Flight (fig. 40). Depicted as unobserved by anyone identifiable from a specific beyond, the ephemeral islands appear heterochronous, which is perhaps somewhat obvious when inhabited by ancient deities or the infant Christ or when Venice’s building history is recorded with specificity, as done with the reconstructed campanile shown in media res in Sebastiano’s Death of Adonis (fig. 6). But this is, as this chapter has asserted, a heterochrony established through geography and orientation rather than a heterochrony established as a precondition for an allegorical interpretation.
Fictional Coastlines The orientational change that Venetian artists exemplify in their depicted views of the city from the sea as an island among islands aligned with and affected their conception of stories that occurred along noninsular coastlines. Titian, in particular, positions the viewer out in the deep ocean or on an abandoned stretch of beach when representing dramatic stories of abduction, destruction, and salvation at sea. Not scenes of shipwrecks, these are depictions of Ovidian myths (Rape of Europa [fig. 55] and Perseus and Andromeda [fig. 56]), an apocryphal story (Saint Margaret and the Dragon [fig. 57]), and an Old Testament miracle (Submersion of Pharaoh’s 104
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Army in the Red Sea [fig. 58]), which all involve the coastline as their setting but had rarely, if ever, been oriented from the vantage point of the water or even been treated as a marine event in art. Shores, much like islands, are topographical locations with accumulated meanings. Essentially unmappable in their constant motion and perpetual giveand-take between land and ocean, shores emerged as places of tension, desire, and fear.107 The seashore of antiquity, according to Alain Corbin, “remained haunted by the possibility of a monster or a sudden incursion of foreigners, as a natural setting for unexpected violence and a privileged scene for abductions.”108 Shores marked the edge between the known and unknown and were sites for exile and refuge, much like islands, and also for supernatural metamorphoses, homecomings, and Floating Arcadia
Figure 55 Titian, Rape of Europa, ca. 1562. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
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York.
erotic transgressions. Just from the Odyssey alone, Renaissance readers knew about Circe, Polyphemus, Scylla, Sirens—those marginal creatures who live in the sea or along the shore. For sailors and other sea travelers, the practice of costeggiare, or hugging the coastline, offered reassurance of specific navigation points.109 The threatening sea needed to be managed and controlled through harbor construction: as Alberti wrote, “the sea will often defeat all art and workmanship, nor will it be conquered easily by human effort . . . here one must ‘Conquer or be conquered / Such is the wheel of love,’” citing Propertius at the end to make his point.110 The fear of the sea also could transform the shoreline into a lure, as for the English traveler Thomas Coryat, who defined the idea of being carried away as similar to
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Figure 56 Titian, Perseus and Andromeda, ca. 1555. Wallace Collection, London. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London / Art Resource, New
Figure 57 Titian, Saint Margaret and the Dragon, 1565. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
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Figure 58 Titian, Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, 1514–15. British Museum, London.
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being in a boat and seeing the coastline delights and then being pulled away.111 Understood as an edge or borderline, the shore stands as a site for states of friction, for the wavelike double movement of approaching and distancing, rather than the states of isolation generated by the self-enclosed world of the island. The clearest demonstration of the distinction between the two sites comes in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (fig. 50), which supposedly occurs on the island of Naxos but is here staged as though occurring on a shoreline that extends indefinitely to the horizon rather than circumferentially. Approaching Bacchus and departing Theseus connect in the twisting Ariadne. Structural clarity here gestures to the chaotic potential that Titian would find possible in stories staged along the shore: the unsuspecting Europa abducted by the seemingly sweet bull who swims out to sea (fig. 55), the chained Andromeda who is saved by Perseus before being consumed by the sea monster (fig. 56), the emergence of Saint Margaret from the belly of the dragon on the shores of Antioch (fig. 57), and the devastatingly miraculous return of the Red Sea to its original shores after separating to allow passage to Moses and the Israelites (fig. 58). Titian’s emphasis on the aquatic dimensions of these coastal stories, and specifically the seaborne view of the shore, destabilizes another borderline—that between viewer and picture—by foregrounding the formless place of chaos as an uncontrollable liquid mass. The surge of water in the lower right corner of the Rape of Europa appears simultaneously as traversable surface skimmed by the bovine Jupiter and as subaquatic depth inhabited by fish, and the rush of waves in the Submersion moves away from and toward the viewer with almost tireless regularity. These depicted coastal scenes are located not near or in Venice but, with the exception of the Rape of Europa, in some location with a fictionalized urban skyGreen Worlds of Renaissance Venice
line—a clustering of buildings near a tall campanile—that vaguely recalls the favored Piazzetta view of Venice while at the same time differing enough in architectural style and formation to suggest an unspecified “elsewhere.” Renaissance artists, especially Venetian painters, often supplied fictionalized views of a specific place that they had never seen firsthand or had seen only in city views. Carpaccio invented a convincing variation of locales for his painted cycles for the Scuola di Sant’Orsola, whose patron saint traveled to Brittany and Cologne, and for the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, whose trio of patron saints transported viewers to Trebizond and beyond.112 But whereas Carpaccio attempted to endow his scenes with local flavor, whether in architecture, costume, or flora, Titian seemed uninterested in equaling these ethnographic details, offering in the Submersion, for example, a view of Egypt that reads, if not as an evocation of Venice, then as some imagined (European) place. The same could be said for his depiction of Antioch in the Saint Margaret and the Dragon (fig. 57), which reads as Venetian as much for the cluster of distant structures as for the metonymic association of such a thick fire-scape with the Venetian painter’s own later work.113 These pictures obviously are not aiming for the same eyewitness level of verisimilitude sought after and expected by patrons and viewers of scuole pictures (fig. 7), nor are they representing heterotopic or second (or green) worlds in the vicinity of a depicted city that is unquestionably Venice. Although they resemble their second-world counterparts, these pictures, in orienting the distant view of a city from the sea, declare that all cities, even actual ones, become fictionalized at a distance. And it is in that distance, whether occupied by islands or the uninterrupted expanse of sea, that fantasies of the imaginary, miraculous, exotic, and impossible arise and take shape. Jacopo de’ Barbari seemed to realize all of this when he took to the sky to make his ca. 1500 View of Venice (fig. 13).
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Pastoral Sculpture
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 newly found ancient statuary and explored the creative potential of the medium for collectible objects for private household display and use.2 Pastoral protagonists were not the sole subjects figured in small-scale bronze items in the early cinquecento, but they were seemingly among the most popular—if the number of surviving objects is any indication—and they shared with many of their differently subjected bronze cohorts, such as the small-scale tritons, nereids, and putti, similarly marginal and hybrid identities.3 Their Paduan origins and their relatively unknown afterlives have kept these objects somewhat bracketed off from related pastoral paintings, drawings, and prints produced during the same years by artists residing primarily in Venice. Viewers have frequently recognized the shared poetic sources and aesthetic qualities of these pastoral objects—noting the different means for creating sensuous, shadowy, (sometimes tautologically) Giorgionesque figures4—without imagining that one of their likely places of cohabitation was in private palace collections and studioli in Venice.5 Small bronzes, and especially functional objects, were infrequently included in inventories, usually only with vague descriptions. Regardless of these information 111
Figure 59 Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, Satyr (Pan?), ca. 1510–20. 35.9 cm high. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Gifts of Irwin Untermyer, Ogden Mills and George Blumenthal, Bequest of Julia H. Manges and Frederick C. Hewitt Fund, by exchange; and Rogers and Pfeiffer Funds, 1982. Figure 60 Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, Satyr and Satyress, ca. 1515–20. 24 cm high. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
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gaps, we know that the collecting circles in Padua and Venice overlapped significantly, oftentimes seeming to be one and the same group, and they certainly brought these objects into notional, if not actual, contact with one another.6 This chapter reintroduces these pastoral sculptures into the group of artworks—paintings, prints, and drawings—that have defined Venetian pastoral interests in the cinquecento and the literary and urban projects, or the lived pastoral, as described in this book. The obvious distinction between the sculptures and the other artworks and projects considered thus far is the comparative absence of a pastoral or garden landscape environment for the bronze figures: with few exceptions, the shepherd or satyr or other pastoral inhabitant stands alone and apart from any framing landscape, as expected for freestanding sculpture but eccentric for protagonists whose identity is shaped by and contributes to that landscape. There is one known exception, the abbreviated landscape type that probably constituted a base for two satyr figures (fig. 62).7 Figures oftentimes hold an attribute of their pastoral life—such as a syrinx—to assist with their identification, particularly in the case of the nude human figures, but are otherwise solitary and cast without a supportive base (fig. 63).8 A represented green world might not surround Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
Figure 61 Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, Drinking Satyr, ca. 1515–20. 21.7 cm high. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
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Figure 62 Base for a Satyr and Satyress Group, early 1500s? Italy, possibly Padua. Bronze; overall: 33.6 × 14.9 × 18.4 cm (133/16 × 513/16 × 73/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art. John L. Severance Fund 1950.375. Figure 63 (opposite) Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, The Shepherd Daphnis Playing a Pipe, ca. 1520–30. 21.3 cm high. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Acquired by Henry Walters.
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and encompass these figures, but their materiality, their modes of address, their miniaturized size relative to contemporary figurative sculpture, their imaginary identities freed from a specific narrative context, and their likely location in private, intimate spaces combine to create experiences around these sculptures that are similar to those that this book has defined for more fully elaborated pastoral worlds. The small-scale pastoral bronzes, like all private miniature objects, change the space around them into a self-enclosed, private space outside of time—not unlike the ways in which the pastoral mode itself has been described. Consider, for example, how a small-scale equestrian sculpture (fig. 64) or a small-scale statuette of Hercules—commanding in its subject matter—is drained of its public, historical, and heroic valence no matter where it is displayed, but especially when placed within a private space (fig. 66).9 The sylvan subjects of the pastoral bronzes mediate this same transformation of space through subjective experience within their relevant context or lens of the pastoral: the bronzes generate experiences of the mysteries of nature not only by retreating from the explicit representation of a situating Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
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Figure 64 Andrea Briosco, called Riccio, Shouting Horseman, ca. 1510. 15.33 cm high. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
landscape and displacing its imagination onto the observer, but also by enacting the transformation of nature and the elements through their status as bronze objects, which transform molten liquid into shaped metal, and their frequent functions as lamps and inkwells, which transform oil into fire, ink into writing.
Venetian Bronze Statuettes Bronze statuettes were known to have existed in antiquity. Written descriptions by ancient authors and the survival of actual small-scale bronze sculpture confirmed the type for Renaissance artists and collectors.10 Quattrocento sculptors often included miniature, separately cast small-scale bronze figures, such as putti, within larger sculptures (such as in the crozier held by Donatello’s Saint Louis of Toulouse [Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce, Florence]) and after midcentury began to make small-scale bronze reductions of ancient statues.11 Filarete’s miniature copy of the equestrian monument to Marcus Aurelius (which, at the time, was mistakenly identified as Commodus Antoninus) reinitiated the ancient practice of small 116
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bronze reproduction, which other artists, such as the Mantuan sculptor Antico (born Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi), executed for private collectors, such as Ludovico Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este.12 Bronze reductions of antiquities not only allowed individuals to possess monumental sculpture but also allowed those otherwise unmovable, large objects to travel and circulate, affording viewers outside of hotspots of found ancient sculpture some kind of access to those well-known artworks. Venetian artists and collectors, like those in many other northern Italian cities, benefited from such reproductions.13 Although Venice was home to many bronze foundries, which were used mainly for manufacturing defensive materials, the local production of Venetian bronze sculpture occurred primarily in nearby Padua.14 Simultaneously with the reproduction of antiquities in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Paduan goldsmiths such as Bartolomeo Bellano, Severo da Ravenna, and Andrea Riccio began to cast small-scale bronzes, which received inspiration from ancient statuary but were not reproductions of known sculpture, instead manifesting an assimilation of ancient and contemporary statuary into their own stylistic vocabulary— especially those of Riccio.15 Sometime after receiving the commission for the masterful Paschal Candelabrum (Basilica del Santo, Padua) in 1507, Riccio began making reliefs and statuettes, probably around 1513, when he also executed the reduced-scale Moses / Zeus Ammon for a font in front of the refectory of the monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua.16 Although virtuoso examples of Riccio’s unique casting technique, both his Moses / Zeus Ammon and Candelabrum are exceptional religious examples of his surviving freestanding work, which, by contrast, is dominated by secular figures, whether warriors (such as his Shouting Horseman [fig. 64] and Strigil Bearer [Collection of Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill]) or, far more frequently, satyrs and nude shepherds and fauns.17 Riccio’s technique of using both direct and indirect casting might have complicated for art historians the establishment of an authenticated oeuvre, but it has also been credited with endowing Riccio’s pastoral bronzes, especially his satyrs, with the sense of a soul, of some kind of self-consciousness, alongside their animal impulses.18 His seated Satyr and Satyress (fig. 60), following a theme found in contemporary prints, expresses almost conjugal, yet still eroticized, fondness between a couple, and his seated Drinking Satyr (fig. 61) exhibits an animal’s lustfulness, which is paradoxically emphasized through the straining tendons in his human neck and yet is also humanized through his distant gaze, rendering him simultaneously absent and self-aware.19 The extensive modeling of the bronzes conveys the impression that the wax model remained the guide for Riccio’s manipulation of the bronze, whereby he gave his statuettes a sense of tactile pliability that conceptually translates into figures with physical vitality and nuanced emotional lives. Likewise, his seated shepherds (e.g., fig. 63) and seated fauns, with attentive modeling and Pastoral Sculpture
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Figure 65 Venetian, Sleeping Nymph, sixteenth-century Venetian inkstand. Vok Collection.
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shimmering skin, represent figures of sensuality and longing in a distracted state or dreamy reverie.20 That these small-scale statuettes have no specific, identifiable ancient source is intimated by the variation of poses and attitudes given to the core group of authenticated pastoral figures. Replication of statuettes occurred, as attested by the many surviving copies, but this was replication of the cinquecento statuettes rather than of ancient ones.21 Which is not to say that makers of bronze pastoral statuettes did not find inspiration in ancient statuary. Marcantonio Michiel in 1512 recorded in Francesco Zio’s house in Venice such an object: “The god Pan or a faun, in marble, sitting on a tree trunk and playing the panpipes, two feet high, is an antica work.”22 Michiel also notes in Michiel Contarini’s possession a two-foothigh marble figure of a “faun, or a shepherd, nude . . . and playing the flute.”23 These and other entries made by Michiel and others for sixteenth-century inventories suggest that smaller-scale ancient pastoral figures in marble (approximately 1.5–2 Venetian feet, or 0.5–1 meter) were fairly common in Venice—and presumably elsewhere in Italy—and perhaps resembled a surviving first-century c.e. Roman example now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.24 More monumental ancient examples had been found in Rome, such as the Della Valle satyrs and full-scale freestanding representations of Pan and fauns, but none appears to be a direct visual source for the cinquecento pastoral bronzes considered here.25 The one exception is the Vatican Cleopatra and drawings and prints of similar ancient types, which were most likely the models for the sleeping-nymph statuettes (fig. 65).26 The remaining statuettes, especially the satyrs, were probably more directly related Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
to the classical hybrid creatures frequently ornamenting quattrocento public sculptures and also illuminating title pages and bas-de-page landscapes inhabited by satyrs, especially in Padua and Venice from approximately 1470 to 1500.27 Satyrs also began to appear alongside Silenus, shepherds, and Venus in independent paintings during this same time, in part because of the increased circulation of pastoral poetry and the related reinterpretive loosening of their identities that expanded their circle beyond its ancient limits;28 but the isolated appearance of the hybrid creature in sculpture, physically and psychologically alone, developed from the ornamental role that the figure had served in the margins of monuments and of manuscript pages. Pomponius Gauricus wrote in his De Sculptura (1504) that sculptors should rely on the human figure in sculpture, even when using their imagination, and correspondingly advised them not to waste their time with executing hybrid creatures such as “satyrs, hydras, chimeras, and monsters.”29 Gauricus adapts to sculpture the admonishment of ancient writers, such as Horace in his Ars Poetica, against creating such metaphorical hybrids when mixing poetic styles, and uses it to support his perception of the frivolousness of such subjects in sculpture: “as if they have nothing else to do.”30 Riccio and the Paduan circle, although not mentioned specifically, would appear to be implicated by this criticism, which really seems to be a criticism against the elevation (through excision) of a previously peripheral, ornamental figure. When satyrs appear on a doorjamb or in illustrated page margins, they serve as mediators, as sites of pleasure that exist as a transition between the literal and the figurative. “Ornament,” according to Rebecca Zorach, who builds on the work of Oleg Grabar, “seems to become dangerous when it stops mediating a relation to something else and starts asserting the prerogative of the object of the viewer’s attention.”31 The same could be said for the freestanding statuettes that stand alone on the collector’s table: the materiality of the bronze statuettes only reinforces and heightens this structural migration from two-dimensional ornament to autonomous three- dimensional object and the resulting focus of the viewer’s attention.32
Studioli Possessions These small-scale bronzes found homes with individual collectors, who interacted with a range of objects in private spaces in their palaces, whether in studioli in a separate room or in a designated corner of a bedroom.33 Inventories and representations of collectors with their collections could provide some idea of the contents and possible organization of precious objects, even though neither probably was intended as a reconstructive source. An idea of Venetian collecting habits may be gleaned, once again, from Michiel’s entry on Francesco Zio’s studiolo, which Pastoral Sculpture
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Figure 66 Vittore Carpaccio, Saint Augustine in His Study, 1502. Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice.
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included stone vessels, small boxes, porcelain dishes, petrified sea animals, shells, antique coins, and terracotta vases.34 Lorenzo Lotto’s drawing The Cleric in His Study (British Museum, London) and Vittore Carpaccio’s Saint Augustine in His Study (fig. 66) both offer indications of possible display practices and the solitude and intimacy associated with such a space: all types of objects—functional, natural, literary, and artistic—without any apparent guiding organizing structure, are jumbled together within a quiet interior space occupied only by the scholar/collector.35 No small-scale pastoral bronzes appear in either of these views—only a bronze bell, inkstands, and reduced-scale reproductions of a standing Venus and of one of the horses from San Marco—but we know that Venetian collectors such as Michiel himself owned several, including a satyr riding on a sheep, a satyr supporting a candlestick, a satyr supporting an inkwell, and a boy riding on a goat.36 Our limited understanding of how objects were arranged in Renaissance palaces makes it impossible to know exactly how display decisions were made; however, given the inventories, visual representations, and architectural remnants that do survive, it seems that small-scale bronzes—especially functional tabletop objects like inkwells and oil lamps—remained in the most private of spaces, as intimate objects viewed and used in solitary conditions—at least in Venetian palaces.37 Studies of collections have frequently highlighted the ways in which collections of precious objects reflect and project aspects of individual collectors, such as their virtue, knowledge, and wealth—even if the last condition is moderated or minimized in light of contemporary ethical concerns.38 And this characterization certainly applies to many collectors and also to isolated parts of a collection—especially Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
the most public and visible rooms. But as the description and inventory of Andrea Odoni’s collection makes clear, the smallest and most intimate objects were often displayed in their own rooms or parts of rooms. Odoni placed a studiolo in his Camera d’oro, which, as Monika Schmitter has discussed, was a special cabinet, rather than a room, that held inkwells, compasses, scissors, spoons, seals (for letters, etc.), and naturalia such as petrified crabs, fish, snakes crocodiles, and shells.39 Farther into the palace, in his bedroom, Odoni kept small-scale “modern” (moderne) bronzes by different artists (diversi maestri) and paintings, including his well-known portrait by Lorenzo Lotto (fig. 67) and a nuda grande by Savoldo that was placed behind the bed.40 Visitors to Renaissance bedrooms might not always have been limited to the master and mistress of the house, but the space remained the most intimate in the Venetian palace, especially as palaces began to differentiate functions more clearly and to include separate, dedicated spaces for housing collections.41 Even so, the association of artworks with outward, public display, which either gives rise to or reflects a desire to find clear lines between public and private space, in turn has contributed to the relative reluctance in art history to explicate the construction of intimacy through objects.42 But Renaissance writers familiar with Cicero’s writings on friendship—such as Petrarch—understood and
Pastoral Sculpture
Figure 67 Lorenzo Lotto, Andrea Odoni, 1527. Picture Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London.
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perpetuated the connection forged between the bond of intimacy and the sense of belonging that had at their roots a connection to shared property.43 Gabriele Vendramin seems to have shared (or intuited) this when he wrote in his will that the objects in his camerino delle antigaglie, acquired over many years, should “never be sold, nor lent, neither in whole nor in part under any form.” Vendramin requested guardianship for the objects so that they would remain intact and be cared for, as though a member of the family (“I must pray and beseech those who inherit them to treat them with such care that they shall not perish”).44 Perhaps overcontrolling, Vendramin more likely considered his collection part of his family because it belonged to his family. Lotto’s portrait of Odoni (fig. 67) projects a similar connection between intimacy, belonging, and property: the viewer, who, given the painting’s location in Odoni’s bedroom, was principally the portrait’s subject, knows him(self) through these things—some of which he did not actually own.45 The sculptures signify the idea of property rather than specifically document his own. His outstretched hand, oftentimes construed as a flourish of magnificence, offers the Artemis of Ephesus figurine to the viewer in a heartfelt extension of intimacy as a transaction of property.46 The difference between the careful frontal display of a Venus figurine in Titian’s portrait of Jacopo Strada (fig. 68) and Odoni’s comparatively careless reach sideways reinforces the latter’s gesture as one of giving and offering.47 Other depicted fragments—the head of Hadrian and the fragment of a female nymph—support this idea by figuring the revelation and concealment associated with intimacy through their seemingly unstaged emergence from or retreat under the green tablecloth.48 They are shown along the frontal plane of the picture, available yet kept close to both Odoni and the viewer. Added late to the painting, the raised tablecloth creates “peeking” small-scale fragments, which in turn clarify Odoni’s purpose and contribute to the portrait’s enactment of intimacy as a space in which the self can establish a relationship with itself—through things.49 Other things in collections encourage similar situations of intimacy, not only because of their status as personal belongings but also because of how their specific physical properties and functions as objects create the experience of opening up a space that is deeply private. Small-scale containers that open and close, such as lockets, boxes, and envelopes, are perhaps the most obvious examples of objects that create and open up a space accessible and visible to the possessor.50 Gaston Bachelard, who has written of the poetics of intimate spaces and enclosed solitude, also considers, in the same discussion, nests, shells, corners, and cabinets as objects that create spaces that cancel out the exterior world, recesses that allow the observer to be alone with herself.51 Many of these objects or spaces shape and define Renaissance collections, whether actual possessions or containers of the collections themselves. One of the best-known studioli, because purpose built and 122
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relatively intact, Federico da Montefeltro’s room in the Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, thematizes these very concepts of intimacy and spatial recesses with the repeated representation of cabinets in the intarsia work along all sides of the walls (fig. 69).52 The combination of closed and open cabinets messily stuffed—and sometimes overstuffed—with books and other objects not only reflects the collecting and studious activities undertaken in the room itself but also represents contemplation and intimacy through cabinet doors that lead somewhere behind, that barely open to give the slightest suggestion of what resides inside, or that reveal very little through their suggestive lattice work. The intarsia perspectival view with a sweeping landscape observed through a fictive loggia offers a striking comparison between open, unbounded spaces in the world and the open, yet finite, recesses of private cabinets below. The squirrel, perched between the two worlds, nibbles into the interior of a nut as a figurative evocation of the contrast established between these spatial subjectivities. Similarly, Carpaccio’s double-sided painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum, with one side showing letters suspended on a cord within a marble niche and the other side representing a view of hunting on the Venetian Pastoral Sculpture
Figure 68 Titian, Jacopo Strada, 1567. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
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Figure 69 General view of the studiolo, with paintings by Joos van Ghent and Pedro Berruguete, 1472–76. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino.
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lagoon, reinforces the dialectic found in Urbino, even if the specific circumstances of the Carpaccio painting are unknown.53 These experiences of deeply private spaces are personally felt, a situation that these two examples of the intarsia and Carpaccio’s painting only imply but that Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) explicitly enacts. The picture constructs a series of concatenated spaces of far and near through the patterned pavement that creates the perspectival background and the green curtain that effectively cancels out the recession and brings the nude female forward.54 Deep in the corner of the depicted room, two maidservants retrieve from a chest the garments for the nude recumbent female.55 One woman kneels with her back to the viewer, rifling in the darkness of the cassone for some yet-unfound object, while the other stands to the side with a dress slung over her shoulder and her own left hand traveling up into the unseen space between her right arm and its white sleeve. Although counterpoints to one another—standing/kneeling, side view/ back view, possessing/looking—both women figure spaces of intimacy unseen and unexplored by others.56 The contrast with the fully visible recumbent nude figure in the partially detached foreground makes even more striking the privacy of the background space and the activities within that space. These representations, as representations, can only approximate the experience of deeply private spaces of intimacy, in which the self closes out the world and Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice
establishes a relationship with itself. Their autonomy as two-dimensional objects, despite their efforts to fictively transcend those limits through perspective and trompe l’oeil, differentiates these depictions from shells, bronzes, boxes, caskets, and vases—which are all tangible three-dimensional objects. And yet, these depictions helpfully stage the structure of these experiences, as well as historically and geographically locate them. They contribute to our understanding of the ways in which people interacted with things—and especially private, small-scale things— in the Renaissance.
Miniatures The objects that constitute these intimate spaces all are small, even though the object types are diverse. Within this categorical cluster, some objects—especially small figurines, whether statuettes, inkstands, or oil lamps—are executed on a miniature or reduced scale. And to add greater granularity to this discussion, many of these figurines possess identities that deepen the experience of intimacy further still. The pastoral bronze sculptures of satyrs, nymphs, and shepherds—although physically different from boxes or lockets—populated the private collection with protagonists from another world, in terms of both the poetic tradition of a selfenclosed pastoral world outside of time and the artistic traditions in sculpture that identified these miniature figures as existing outside of the space of public history.57 Based on human figures, even the hybrid satyrs, these artifacts have a miniature or reduced scale that changes the space around them,58 allowing viewers to imagine private pastoral landscapes and to experience the mysteries of nature that Renaissance art theorists thought freestanding sculptures incapable of figuring. This imagination of a landscape specific to and inspired by the figure’s identity might not seem unique to small-scale sculpture. Does the viewer of any singlefigure sculpture reflexively situate the figure in its specific respective world? Does the figuration of the biblical hero David, for example, call to mind the broader landscape of the narrative battle with Goliath? Sometimes, but not always; more often the actual location of a life-size or colossal sculpture affects the experience and meaning of the sculpture rather than, as in the case of a miniature, vice versa: the location is transformed by the viewer’s imagination of the sculpture’s world. For example, in his David (Accademia, Florence), Michelangelo’s innovative incorporation of the implied idea of Goliath through David’s furrowed brow, his focused outward stare, and tightened hold on the rock and slingshot recognizes the limitations of single-figure, freestanding figurative sculpture in telling a complete story and simultaneously explores the possibilities for a single figure to manifest more than itself. But regardless of such innovative personification of the narrative, the Pastoral Sculpture
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David and other full-scale and monumental single-figure sculptures alter how viewers perceive the identity of a figure and cause viewers to weave into the figure’s identity some aspect of its immediate context—its installation location—because of how that (usually) public location changes the significance and function of the sculpture. Michelangelo’s David, when placed in the piazza adjacent to the Palazzo Vecchio, came to symbolize the Florentine Republic rather than the triumph of Christianity, which would have been attached to the sculpted youth had it been placed, as originally planned, on the buttress of the duomo.59 Life-size or monumental sculptures with multiple protagonists can amplify some details of a narrative, if only because other “parts” of the story have shown up; but there remains a prioritized focus on how the sculpture relates to its immediate environment in large part because of our tendency to relate a life-sized human figure to ourselves.60 Full-scale and monumental single-figure sculptures are never totally isolated and self-enclosed; their chosen environments inevitably inflect meaning back onto the sculptures themselves. Painting theorists saw the replicative and isolated nature of freestanding sculpture as negatively inhibiting the visualization of an expanded inhabited environment, the limitation of sculpture to the human figure one of its greatest shortcomings compared to painting. “The landscape is not something that the sculptor can show,” wrote Leonardo in his comparison of the two arts. “Painting can give a display of the greatest landscapes with distant horizons.”61 The distinction was repeated into a trope of sorts, with Baldassare Castiglione observing in his Il cortegiano (published 1528) that sculpture cannot show “sky, sea, land, mountains, woods, meadows, gardens, rivers, cities, or houses.”62 Relief sculpture, which stood as a transitional medium between painting and freestanding sculpture, often incorporated these landscape details, as evidenced by the subtle suggestions of trees and mountains in some of the relief work by Donatello, for example.63 And freestanding sculptures—especially colossi—oftentimes became isolated landscape elements, such as Giambologna’s Appennino (Pratolino, Tuscany), which figures the mountain itself.64 By definition isolated figures in the round, miniature statuettes possess these same restrictions of medium as freestanding sculpture, but their reduction in scale causes viewers to locate the miniatures as belonging to another world. This subjective withdrawal by the viewer happens regardless of the subject of the miniature, as Statius writes in his description of a miniature seated Hercules that he saw in the collection of Novius Vindex: “I fell deeply in love; nor, though long I gazed, were my eyes sated with it; such dignity had the work, such majesty, despite its narrow limits. A god was he! . . . Small to the eye, yet a giant to the mind. . . . What preciseness of touch, what daring imagination the cunning master had, at once to model an ornament for the table and to conceive in his mind mighty colossal forms!”65 Statius, 126
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whose Silvae was well known to Renaissance readers, finds himself enamored of the sculpture; he revels in his inability to pull himself away from the artwork; and he marvels that the sculptor can convey the divine magnitude of Hercules on such a small scale in the sculpture itself (“preciseness of touch”) and also through the projective imagination of the beholder (“a giant to the mind”). The varied experiences of the sculpture exceed the small dimensions of the material form.66 Statius relishes the paradox of the colossal presented through the small, but his repeated insistence on this point also suggests the vulnerability of this observation, that a tiny Hercules could be understood as tiny in every way unless the viewer decided to indulge in the suspension of disbelief. Oftentimes, however, the sculptures themselves offered means for situating and contextualizing these statuettes. Group statuettes such as Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus (Bargello, Florence) provide through a narrative frame clearer parameters for anchoring the figures. And the presence of an abbreviated bronze landscape setting, like those in the Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 62) and the Louvre, into which miniature bronze satyrs could be placed suggests that the absence of landscape needed to be addressed for those viewers who were unable to conceive of it in their minds. The risk that suspension of disbelief could fail was always there. Projective imagination arguably arose more easily for the pastoral statuettes, which were not reduced reproductions of ancient or existing statuary: there was no comparison possible to a larger, extant artistic source. As discussed earlier in this chapter, not all Renaissance bronze statuettes served a reproductive function, but collectors and artists in locations with limited access to antiquities acquired with great interest small versions of recently discovered and unearthed ancient sculpture, such as the Laocoön. These portable reproductions not only expanded the viewership but in some way changed the affective impact of the larger originals. In his Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing found that sculpted miniatures consistently minimized the emotional impact and grandeur of the life-sized versions: A human figure of half of a foot or an inch is indeed the image of a man, but it is in some sort a symbolical image. It makes me more conscious of the sign than of the thing signified. My imagination must first elevate to its real size the reduced figure, and this intellectual operation, however rapid and easy, always prevents the intuition of the thing signified from following immediately the intuition of the sign. . . .
. . . [T]he grandeur of dimensions contributes to the sublime. This sublime is
entirely lost by the process of reduction.67
Lessing, taking none of the pleasure in imagination that Statius found in viewing the small seated Hercules, finds standardizing to life size the miniature sculpture Pastoral Sculpture
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an obstacle to full engagement with it and to its signification. It remains for Lessing a detached object, especially given his preference for the sublime that comes from “grandeur.” But there remains the question whether Venetian Renaissance viewers, who were most familiar with these pastoral protagonists from visual sources that were arguably already reduced in scale—small prints, drawings, and paintings, marginal illustrations, peripheral architectural ornament—would have undertaken a similar approach. Renaissance writers on the arts, especially those steeped in rhetorical training, frequently asserted a close connection between measurement and meaning. Size and distance functioned metaphorically for the relative merit of whatever was being measured in those terms.68 Large artworks were perceived as demonstrating a greatness of form and quality; smaller were seen as the work of lesser talents.69 Vasari repeatedly praised artists for working in the gran maniera and for proving that they were not minuta,70 and Lodovico Castelvetro stated that bad painters produce small paintings.71 Alberti was among the earliest Renaissance art theorists to seed this association when he instructed artists to eschew working on picciole tavolelle and embrace the challenge of producing life-size figures, which show all faults. Additionally, Alberti promoted the application of the Aristotelian concept of accidents to depicted objects, so that all meaning derives from comparison: Large, small, long, short, high, low, wide, narrow, light, dark, bright, gloomy, and everything of the kind—which philosophers termed accidents, because they may or may not be present in things—all these are such as to be known only by comparison. . . . Comparison is made with things most immediately known. As man is the best known of all things to man, perhaps Protagoras, in saying that man is the scale and measure of all things, meant that accidents in all things are duly compared to and known by the accidents in man.72
He cites the legendary painting by Timanthes that depicted a sleeping Cyclops with satyrs by his side measuring his thumb with a thrysis, “so that the sleeping figure appeared very large indeed in proportion to the satyrs.”73 Artists adopted Alberti’s advice, especially those who structured their compositions with perspective, by giving priority to the center and scaling the size of figures to convey their relative importance through distance and proximity. But not every Renaissance artwork functioned according to these precepts, and not every Renaissance viewer thought that bigger was always better and more meaningful. Venetian Renaissance artists seem to have constructed the relationship between meaning and measurement differently, especially in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. When artists incorporated pictorial structures of comparison, such as perspective, they often manipulated the Albertian expectation 128
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that the most important figure was the largest and most easily located. Drawings from Jacopo Bellini and his workshop oftentimes position the central protagonist in the distant background of a perspectival structure, small and unnoticeable as one figure among many.74 In the Louvre Flagellation (fig. 44), for example, Christ appears off to the right, in the background, easily overlooked by the viewer in the same way that bystanders appear not to notice his flagellation. Christ’s reduced size reinforces the direct proportion between meaning and measurement established by writers like Alberti, since Christ is not recognized as important in the story; his persecutors want to see him as insignificant and small. Small scale imparts value and meaning and is not always the sign of weaker artistic talent. This appreciation builds slightly as well-known artists begin to break out of established expectations: Vasari concedes that Raphael’s Vision of Ezekiel (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) is “no less rare and beautiful in its smallness than his other things may be in their largeness”;75 and in a letter to Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna praises the artist’s gifted drawing Pietà (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), after her repeated viewings of it with a magnifying glass, which allowed her to look closely at the small signs of his technique.76 The rise of collecting also undoubtedly fed into an appreciation of small things, such that “maniere di figure piccole” started to be recognized as an artistic genre sometime around 1530.77 Regardless of these regional differences, though, the centrality of the human body in establishing scale for figurative sculpture impacted how all Renaissance viewers interacted with miniature objects in collections. The viewer’s body functioned as the standard of size for sculpted figures, as writers on sculpture such as Pomponius Gauricus quantified in his treatise, with categories of small, smaller, and smallest based on proportional reductions from “life size.”78 As the ideal standard, the viewer’s conception of the human body potentially becomes abstracted from her or his own, even though this viewer thinks of these comparisons through her or his body. These abstractions are more likely to occur if the viewer is only looking at the sculpture and thinks of sculpture as an art form that gives her or him power over the thing represented.79 But for Renaissance viewers, the danger and possibility of experiencing sculpture was that it could cross the line into idolatry, that the sculpture could be enlivened (whether through artifice or worship or both) to become the person represented.80 Miniature sculpted objects were experienced (touched, handled, and exchanged) and used (as inkwells, lamps, and other household objects) in the Renaissance collection, and such experience and use constructed a phenomenological relationship between viewer and object that minimized the theoretical abstraction of the viewer’s body when viewing miniature sculpture.81 The pastoral subjects figured (the nude female nymphs and male shepherds, the hybrid creatures displaying their genitalia), their frequent intended function—to contain liquids (ink and oil) or create fire—and their materiality (the polish and shine that makes bronze Pastoral Sculpture
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appear like liquid) all worked against the abstraction of an ideal. These miniature statuettes endowed the medium of sculpture with a vitality that frequently worried Renaissance viewers of other sculpted objects.
Animated Nature in the Pastoral World The pastoral bronzes (with, perhaps, the exception of the seated shepherds) seem to present a vision of the pastoral world different from its predominant construction, at least as discussed so far in this book: the sculpted figures certainly find their poetic relatives in the repeated pastoral episodes involving shepherds, nymphs, sheep, and satyrs who sing about and seek love and community in a verdant landscape. But their appearance in bronze miniature emphasizes different aspects of the pastoral world and in particular the idea of nature as a vital or magic force. Less frequently a part of pastoral, but nonetheless present, is the vision of a magical landscape in which these same protagonists join wizards and astrologers who engage with an animated, living nature that always exists somewhere in the pastoral landscape. Shepherds must venture to territories at some remove from their world of tending flocks to access these manipulators and mediators of the natural world. Theocritus’s second idyll, which relates the nocturnal activities of a sorceress, Simaetha, seems to have influenced Sannazaro’s recounting of similar occult events that occur toward the end of his Arcadia.82 In the prose section of chapter 9, the shepherd Clonico, abandoning his planned visit to an old wisewoman to obtain a remedy for his problems in love, seeks the council of the wizard Enareto, who “has abandoned the flocks and makes his habitation in the temple of Pan our God: to whom is manifest the greater part of things both human and divine; the earth, the heavens, the sea, . . . and, in consequence of this, the times for plowing, for reaping, for planting vines.”83 En route to visit the old man, Clonico hears how Enareto, after having dragons lick his ears and drinking animal blood, understands the language of birds and plants. Once Clonico arrives, he finds Enareto, with his wrinkled brow, long hair and beard, asleep at the base of a tree, not unlike the figure in Giulio Campagnola’s Old Shepherd engraving (fig. 35) or, more obviously, The Astrologer (fig. 70). The wizardry performed partakes little—if at all—in the nefarious aspects of magic or in necromancy but instead reveals the deep connection between nature and man.84 Enareto utters incantations for resisting bad weather, and the altar at the temple of Pan displays scrolls that share forecasts about “stormy weather; and when the sun promises calm, and when rain, and when wind, [. . .] and which [days are] infelicitous for mankind’s tasks.”85 Man and nature are deeply connected, even though man usually fails to intuit and must be instructed of this fundamental truth underpinning the universe. 130
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A handful of surviving Venetian depictions, including Campagnola’s Astrologer print, explore the pastoral landscape as a setting for the interconnection between macrocosm and microcosm.86 Shepherds-turned-wizards and hybrid satyrs connect to natural mysteries in pastoral landscapes located somewhere in our inhabited world, with built settlements usually indicated with architecture in the background. The astrological forecasts shown in the disk held by the old man and the appearance of the imaginary beast, for example, in The Astrologer evoke Sannazaro’s description of Enareto and of how accessing of the vitality of nature exposes humans to natural laws rather than menacing otherworldly spirits. The dragons that licked Enareto’s ears in the middle of the night allowed him to understand the language of birds. Conveying a similar message are the satyrs that hold the astrological disk in Titian’s drawing Two Satyrs in a Landscape (fig. 33): offering a view of their celestial projections, the satyrs, entangled lazily with one another, look off into an unseen distance of the landscape.87 Shown with an intimacy befitting lovers, their poses work together to emphasize their combination of male musculature and furry animality, the latter quality finding technical echoes in the rendering of the land itself—especially in the confused transition between the human buttocks of the rear-facing satyr, its contact with the grass, and extension into his animal leg.88 Seemingly arising out of and connected to nature, these satyrs manifest the dominant aspect of their identity as agents and manifestations of nature, as hybrid creatures that give access to the effects of nature in the world. Renaissance readers and writers were aware of and contributed to a changing conception of the identity of satyrs from manifestations of nature to lascivious Pastoral Sculpture
Figure 70 Giulio Campagnola, The Astrologer, ca. 1509. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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s exual predators—and usually casting a moralizing allegorical layer onto these signs of the robust vitality in nature. The greatest contributing factor in the gradual development of the satyr’s predatory lasciviousness is his association with Venus, who was the goddess both of nature and of love and never connected to satyrs in antiquity.89 The satyr’s sexual vitality was channeled and enacted within the context of human love and usually abstracted from the larger context of generative nature in all of its procreative energy.90 By the mid-sixteenth century, writers used the satyr almost exclusively as emblematic figures of lasciviousness. Consider Lodovico Dolce’s midcinquecento discussion in his Dialogo dei colori (1565), which in dialogue form explains the meaning of a variety of things and beings: Mario: The satyr signifies lasciviousness [lascivia]? Cornelio: This is true. Titian has expressed this admirably in a landscape [un suo paese] in which there is a nymph, who sits surrounded by two satyrs. In the landscape there is another.91
Whether or not Dolce described an actual painting by Titian, Dolce ascribed the possible source of inspiration to a pittura in Sannazaro’s Arcadia—which is most likely Dolce’s poetic reference to Sannazaro’s vivid description of a fictive painting of nymphs pursued by satyrs that appeared at the shrine of the goddess Pales.92 Another of Sannazaro’s ekphrastic descriptions—this one of a maple-wood vase attributed to Mantegna with a satyress nursing her infant—conveys how, in the few decades of the early cinquecento, the complex identity of satyrs had become reductively flattened and simplified. Sannazaro’s description of the fictive scene of the nursing satyress, “totally overcome with love” for her infant, along with other decorative details of natural fertility and vitality, such as centaurs, grape clusters, and the snake handle, reflect the range of associations that were still at work in the early sixteenth century.93 Surviving pastoral bronze statuettes of satyrs—but even of other pastoral protagonists—appear to emphasize their identities as vital natural forces rather than as insatiable predators. This is not to say that the satyrs have been robbed of their libidos: several bronze satyr couples engage in explicit sex acts, and many satyrs display enlarged phalluses. But their sexuality manifests generative and lustful Nature rather than the scopophilia represented in contemporary depictions in which the satyr spies on a nymph with rapacious intentions. A majority of the surviving bronze satyrs appear seated or standing alone, sometimes drinking from a cup or carrying a vase and/or a shell, which presumably held oil, ink, quills, and/or sand and indicate their functional role as oil lamps or inkstands (fig. 59).94 There are also many recumbent nymph bronzes that served similar functions, with one example (fig. 65) including an abridged landscape with a beast-like head that would 132
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have held the ink.95 And we can readily imagine that many other similar objects have not survived. Not only does their materiality—their shining, lustrous, almost liquid surfaces and differentiation of textures—create the impression that these statuettes emerged from nature, but their sculptural origins from molten metal and their frequent role as containers for other fluids and substances deepen the existing connection between these hybrids and the mysteries of nature.96 On multiple levels, then, these statuettes manifest the hermeneutic of natural vitality and transformation that defines alchemy and underpins the related acts of casting bronze, turning ink into writing, and converting oil into a light source. Alchemy, a forerunner of chemistry that was often surrounded with secrecy and mysticism, incorporated Aristotelian doctrines on the nature of substances and was of particular interest in quattrocento and early-cinquecento Padua, the university city that hosted many scholarly discussions and medical investigations with an Aristotelian focus.97 Discussions of bronze casting—the process of converting cool metals into a hot, molten liquid to create a seemingly living, three-dimensional figure or figurative relief—often relied on an alchemical vocabulary, as Michael Cole has elucidated for Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze sculpture and the artist’s own recounting of his artistic process in his Autobiography.98 Other writers on bronze casting, such as Gauricus, who is closer in time and place to the Venetian/Paduan pastoral bronzes, similarly invoked a lexicon that evoked alchemy, even if Cellini was unmatched in his explicit associations between his art and alchemical p rocesses.99 Any bronze statuette would have enshrouded the collector-scholar’s desk with the same structures of transforming nature embedded in the very being of the sculpture, but these pastoral objects would have reinforced this with their identities as beings in nature. Furthermore, these pastoral objects seem to collect and provide substances for conversion, ink and oil, in represented natural objects, such as shells, that have undergone their own material transformations to emerge into being.100 When imagined in the intimate spaces of collections and/or on a desk, these functional pastoral bronzes would have converted the domestic space into a numinous world of natural mysteries and dancing reflected light. A flame, for example, would have emerged from the shell born on the satyr’s shoulder (fig. 59) to illuminate whatever was being written with the ink contained in the vase. The statuette provided an environment for scholarly activity while at the same time transporting that activity into the natural realm of creative generation, a realm that is reflective of and not at odds with inspired, learned work.101 These bronze objects do not seem to bring a moral charge to a private space or to situate the scholar in a dialectical position of asserting his intellectual superiority in the face of the satyr’s moral depravity, of framing his restrained control of the self apart from the excessively lustful being that is driven by impulses alone.102 Instead, they appear to encourage Pastoral Sculpture
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the act of accessing a deeply rooted creativity that furthers the expression of the self, which emerges not in contradistinction to the bronze satyr but from the very vessels that contain the media of his communication of intimacy. The satyr brings the pastoral world into the study and onto the desk in a way that a classicizing replica of an ancient statue of a god or goddess could not.
The Pastoral Laocoön: A Coda Approximately twenty years after the burst of Venetian production of pastoral bronzes had tapered off, a woodcut print appeared, attributed to Niccolò Boldrini and presumably based on a drawing by Titian, that represented a reproduction of the ancient Laocoön sculpture group in a pastoral landscape (fig. 71).103 Titian, like his fellow artists, knew of the Laocoön from the many reproductions in circulation in Italy, from life-sized and reduced-scale marble and bronze replicas, from plaster casts, and from prints and drawings.104 By the 1520s Jacopo Sansovino’s bronze reproduction was in Cardinal Grimani’s collection in Venice, and Titian was reported as having a cast of some portion of the sculpture group.105 Playing on the widespread popularity of the group in Venice and beyond, he replaced the suffering Trojan priest and his two sons with hairy apes, who are encircled by the serpents that eventually will kill them—if this simian version follows the same narrative trajectory as Virgil’s recounting of the tragedy in his Aeneid.106 Figured as a sculpture, as evidenced by the distinctive plinth set at a slight angle to the frontal plane of Boldrini’s composition, the figure group seems at once out of place in a natural setting and somewhat at home, given the bestial nature of these protagonists. The print clearly mocks the repeated copies and citations of the recently unearthed sculpture107—whether replicating or reducing the scale of the human-populated original—but also explicitly and generically frames the woodcut as a satire by situating the ape-Laocoön “sculpture” in a pastoral landscape. Apes are not among the animals usually found within the pastoral landscape, and were not found in Renaissance Italy. Various species of monkeys populated court menageries and frequently appeared in depictions as secondary figures, sometimes chained as a symbol of restrained impulses or accompanying dwarves and court entertainment. Apes and monkeys frequently surfaced in moralizing adages, primarily because of their habit of imitating without understanding. But apes also became familiar to Renaissance readers through ancient writers such as Pliny, whose accounts in his Natural History contributed to the rumored sightings of monstrous species in newly explored parts of the world.108 According to these writers, certain types of apes resembled satyrs, and consequently they were desig134
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nated with the mythological terminology of semihuman creatures—satyrs, centaurs, and sphinxes.109 To the Renaissance mind, apes were just like satyrs and therefore at home in a pastoral landscape such as the one in the woodcut or in bronze pastoral bases (see the simian relative in figure 62)—even though, as I have argued in the preceding sections of this chapter, the bronze miniatures do not engage the satirical tone found in Boldrini’s print. This particular landscape in Boldroni’s woodcut replicates sections of those created by Giulio Campagnola and Titian for other pastoral compositions and consequently emulates preexisting artworks in much the same way as the ape trio relates to the ancient statue group.110 The print is a pastiche of imitation, pasting together sculpted ancient tragedy that exists in and yet remains apart from (by virtue of its plinth) the depicted contemporary pastoral. The satire seems to cut both ways, mocking the thoughtless imitation of the Laocoön in contemporary art at the same time that it mocks the artfulness of nature cultivated by the pastoral mode. The satirical tone that comes from the ridiculousness of apes performing the Laocoön statue group is given generic specificity with the pastoral setting. By the time of this woodcut, the sylvan landscape had been designated the appropriate Pastoral Sculpture
Figure 71 Attributed to Niccolò Boldrini, Caricature of the Laocoön Group, ca. 1540–45. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1972.49.4.
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theatrical setting for the satiric stage. For this stage Sebastiano Serlio provided a visual model that situated the action within a grove of trees with rustic huts (fig. 22), close to but not exactly identical with the pastoral landscapes represented by his fellow Venetian artists.111 Serlio’s description of the satyric stage reflects the common cinquecento conflation of satiric plays and satyr plays, which, although distinctive modes in ancient theater, resulted in performances of biting pastoral dramas. Satiric-stage scenery, according to Serlio, is for performing Satires, a type of drama in which all those who live dissolute and devil-may-care lives are criticized (or rather they are mocked); in ancient Satire the corrupt and the criminal were practically identified. However, it is understandable that this sort of licence was granted to characters who spoke their minds, that is to say, rustic folk. For this reason Vitruvius, when discussing stage scenery, wanted this type to be decorated with wooded groves, rocks, hills, mountains, greenery, flowers, and fountains. He also stipulated some typically rustic huts.112
Serlio goes on to share his experience of a satiric performance with shepherds, satyrs, nymphs, and fishermen, confirming the extent to which these two distinctive traditions of satire and satyr plays had merged, only to be clarified in the later sixteenth century.113 Mocking underpinned both traditions, whether offered from the perspective of a single author (satires) or a chorus of satyrs (satyr plays). Boldrini’s woodcut follows suit, adding multiple layers to the philological confusion: the satyrs—or primates—enact the Laocoön on the satiric stage to mock the weight accumulated from emulating ancient sculpture and contemporary pastoral representations, to the point of the absurd. The shepherd is absent and the remaining pastoral animals (goats? dogs?) meander freely through the landscape, serving as the liberated counterpoints for the captive father/sons trio in the foreground. The print, like all satire, highlights through criticism the deeply held understandings of both ancient sculpture and the pastoral. These are, of course, not stable, monolithic categories, and, as I have shown, their broader generic corollaries of sculpture and landscape were separated frequently in Renaissance art theory; however, sculpture and landscape became linked in the Renaissance imagination due to repeated unearthing of ancient sculpture. Discovered statuary emerged from the ground—the Laocoön was dug out of a deep hole in a Roman vineyard114— and, to quote Horst Bredekamp’s insightful observation, “the sculpture of antiquity oscillated between being considered a product of nature and a creation of man.”115 Renaissance drawings of ancient sculpture reflect this oscillation, either showing unearthed and emerging ancient sculpture populating—almost littering—the Roman landscape or rendering the sculpture as a possession in a courtyard collection. Found ancient sculpture could be understood by Renaissance viewers as man136
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ifesting latent nature and its associated powers and mysteries, as throbbing with Dionysian energy rather than modeling Apollonian restraint and grandeur.116 Bronze pastoral miniatures could effect the same experience, not because of a change of context or the passage of time, but because Renaissance viewers attached the idea of nature to the medium of bronze and the identities of the represented protagonists. Bronze pastoral miniatures did not acquire an overlaid resonance of nature but were made with it. These small sculptures kept in small spaces generated unbounded green worlds.
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·5·
The Exported Pastoral: Painting After the 1520s
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 These chronological demarcations of pastoral interest need to be adjusted or nuanced even further for the visual arts, though, and especially for sixteenth-century Venetian art. After the initial burst of pastoral interest in the first two decades of the cinquecento, a relatively steady production of Venetian paintings, drawings, and prints with pastoral echoes followed during the remainder of the century. Titian, for example, completed the Bacchanals for Alfonso I d’Este of Ferrara (ca. 1518–26, figs. 50 and 72); several pastoral devotional works, including one possibly for Alfonso (The Aldobrandini Madonna, ca. 1532, National Gallery, London) and another for Federico Gonzaga of Mantua (ca. 1525–30, fig. 73); the group of Venus and Musician paintings, probably including at least one picture for Philip II of Spain (ca. 1550, fig. 74); two paintings of the sylvan goddess Diana (Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, ca. 1556–59, National Gallery, London) and also the Pardo Venus (begun ca. 1540, finished in 1553, fig. 75) for Philip II; the Nymph and Shepherd (ca. 1570, fig. 76) and The Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1576, National Museum, Kroměříž), both with unknown patrons; and potentially several drawings.3 But many of these 139
Figure 72 Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1523–26. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
pictures left Venice immediately after their completion to join their non-Venetian patrons in Ferrara, Mantua, and Madrid, with the remainder of paintings beginning their departure from the lagoon soon after 1600.4 Even if these paintings and drawings had not left, though, their diverse literary sources, and especially their reliance on Ovid and mythological source texts, and their pictorial compositions, which tend to include multiple figures that dominate the landscape, indicate how the visualization of the pastoral world in Venetian art expanded in scope sometime in the 1520s.5 The pastoral art of other Venetian artists follows a similar arc of change, even if the particulars differ: Veronese’s midcentury frescoes of ruins in pastoral landscapes for Daniele Barbaro’s Villa at Maser import print views of Rome and its campagna (fig. 77),6 and Jacopo Bassano produced his exegetical depictions of farming livestock in the terraferma.7 Venetian pastoral drawings appear to remain the most continuous in how they visualize green worlds; however, they present challenges to a dependable chronology given their own internal complexities of attribution and dating.8 The discipline of art history usually seeks the identification of definitive events, and therefore of specific historical moments, that cause or mark a stylistic 140
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Figure 73 Titian, Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine and a Shepherd (Madonna of the Rabbit), ca. 1525–30. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Figure 74 Titian, Venus, Cupid, and the Organist, ca. 1550. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
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Figure 75 Titian, Pardo Venus, 1553. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Figure 76 Titian, Nymph and Shepherd, ca. 1570. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
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shift and expansion.9 But such an approach is based upon the idea of a disruption of an established tradition, which seems a bit forced when the interrupted phenomenon existed for less than twenty years and hardly concretized into a normative tradition. Such an approach also can have the effect of reducing the complexity of the “tradition,” in this case the pastoral mode, to its most basic and most often repeated, and therefore identifiable, features—sheep, shepherds, and green landscapes—without acknowledging that artworks that do not resemble one another in composition, style, subject, and/or medium can nonetheless construct similar experiences, as this book has hoped to show. This final chapter offers a set of coordinates by which the path of the pastoral mode can be traced in sixteenth-century Venice, and especially in the artworks. What happens when the depicted green worlds are exported out of Venice? How do the visual arts track or not track with the changing theatrical and literary worlds in Venice? How do artworks produced at the same time and/or by the same artist The Exported Pastoral
Figure 77 Paolo Veronese, landscape, 1560–61, from the interior of the Villa Barbaro, Maser.
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in Venice track with one another? Or do they? By simply trying to reframe some familiar artworks and related discussions, this chapter raises and considers some of the challenges to creating a history of the pastoral mode. The creative adaptability of the mode causes it to behave more like a virus, albeit a pleasant one, which manifests differently depending on what it contacts.10
Stories of Attribution One of the challenges to creating any history of the pastoral mode in the visual arts in Renaissance Venice is the confusion around how it began. Every tradition is predicated on the fantasy of a clear origin story, which the first pastoral pictures obscure and consequently defy—especially if that origin story relies upon naming a person who set everything into motion. Giorgione is the artist usually associated or credited with the introduction of the pastoral mode into painting, but art historians have lacked any clarity on the truth of this claim since the sixteenth century. Giorgio Vasari, who mentioned in his Lives none of the pastoral pictures frequently associated with Giorgione, proclaimed at the beginning of his life of Titian that, in general, Giorgione’s works were often confused with those by the young Titian— which Vasari himself demonstrated by attributing to Giorgione Christ Carrying the Cross (Scuola di San Rocco, Venice) in the 1550 edition and revising his appraisal in his 1568 edition with his assignment of separate authorship variously to Giorgione and Titian.11 Another cinquecento source, Marcantonio Michiel, identified Giorgione as the artist of a few pictures in Venetian collections that this book has discussed in the context of the pastoral; and he mentioned Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo as collaborating with Giorgione on the Sleeping Venus (fig. 2) and The Three Philosophers (fig. 12), respectively. But he also offered laconic descriptions that are difficult to match with extant paintings.12 Left to fill in these archival gaps, modern art-historical scholarship has become equally confused. The ongoing debates around the attribution of the Pastoral Concert (fig. 1) can stand for the entire Giorgione/Titian controversy.13 Without a recorded provenance until the mid-seventeenth century, the painting lacks the key pieces of information that are often useful for narrowing the attribution: the identification of a specific patron or first owner and the indication of subject matter.14 Scholars accepted the attribution to Giorgione, largely because of Vasari’s description of the artist as a lutenist who also enjoyed the pleasures of love, until the early twentieth century, when Louis Hourticq assigned authorship to the young Titian.15 Since then, art historians have engaged in a lively debate and proposed various alternatives, ranging from returning the attribution to Giorgione to suggesting other artists, such as Sebastiano del Piombo and Domenico Mancini.16 Once the Louvre 144
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assigned authorship to Titian in the 1970s, attribution to the artist has generally been accepted, but not without dissent. The history of art is, of course, not without attribution controversies around other artworks; however, what sets this one apart is the incredibly close similarity between the painting styles, figure types, pictorial details, and compositions exemplified by contemporary artworks executed by the proposed candidates.17 Many scholars have interpreted these close resemblances as reflective of artistic competition, as intentional emulations by a younger generation of artists that was vying to establish itself in Venice.18 But the repetition of specific motifs (figures, houses, etc.) and the proximity of artistic styles could also be understood as a collective undertaking to develop a distinctive and definable visual analogue to the pastoral mode in poetry. The complex task of attributing such similar artworks could be seen less as a failure of connoisseurship and more as a reflection of a tight-knit cultural community seeking to create its version of the pastoral mode in a particular place at a particular moment. The confusion, while irresolvable, in effect has constructed the pastoral mode in the cinquecento visual arts as a homogeneous mass. The attributions flatten variations between artworks since they depend on finding a straight line that connects the chain of artworks executed by a single, specific artist. This affects less those attributions given to short-lived artists, such as Giorgione, who had only a few years to work. Attributions to the young Titian, by contrast, who lived nearly another seventy years after the completion the Pastoral Concert, magnify the homogeneity, when, in fact, his pastoral paintings from the early 1510s could be embraced as the beginning explorations of different and distinct types of pastoral visions if the art-historical investment in continuity vanished. Titian, though, serves as an important example for this book precisely because his accepted pastoral paintings demonstrate variations in ways of visualizing the pastoral world while working almost entirely in Venice. Other art historians have observed distinctive aspects of Titian’s pastoral vision, but their comments, because usually voiced in arguments to affirm Giorgione’s authorship of the Pastoral Concert, have failed to contribute to a broader and more nuanced history of the Venetian pastoral.19 But when excerpted from the context of their partisan assertions, these comparisons begin to bring clarity to an often-undifferentiated conglomeration of artworks. For example, David Rosand has observed that, in relation to Giorgione’s pastoral paintings, Titian’s comparable [pastoral] images with amorous iconography are fundamentally different in conception and realization, more classically structured in composition, insistently respectful of the picture plane. Titian’s early palette is chromatically clearer, his forms more crisply drawn, illuminated by a brighter sunlight. Nor are these paintings—the Three Ages of Man, for example—conceived in The Exported Pastoral
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Figure 78 Titian, Three Ages of
a pastoral mode; their compositional structures correspond rather to an allegori-
Man, ca. 1512. National Galleries
cal function, in which clarity of form is essential for the equations of meaning.20
of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Does Rosand’s eloquent formal analysis, with its sensitivity to the rhetorical tendencies in Titian’s art, extend to the artist’s pastoral paintings that are without an iconography of love? And does it also apply to drawings attributed to Titian, however tentative the attribution? Or might Rosand’s description articulate just one strain of the pastoral virus in Titian’s work, even in his early years as an artist? Neither the Three Ages of Man (fig. 78) nor Sacred and Profane Love (fig. 8), to include another of Rosand’s later-cited comparative examples, aligns precisely with the model of green worlds set out by the pastoral artworks discussed in this book. These latter pastoral works offer the engagement and absorption of the figures in the landscape and their related withdrawal from performing for the beholder, which is typically manifested with a lack of acknowledgment or direct address and/or with a disregard for the potential semiotic valence of the pictorial field—Rosand’s “equations of meaning.” And yet, many of these depicted green worlds have gained widespread acceptance as having been executed by Titian. In addition to several drawings associated with Titian, many of his sacred paintings explore the pastoral world as a place of and for revelation, privacy, contemplation, and shelter. His Gypsy Madonna, ca. 1510 (fig. 34), for example, situates a downwardgazing Virgin and Child before a view of a pastoral world in which a partially armorclad man sits at the base of a tree—in evocation of the similarly positioned introspective shepherds repeatedly found in pastoral poetry.21 The internal formal echoes of the green fabric creased into squares and the rectangular window of the 146
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green landscape evoke somewhat the formal clarity found by Rosand in Titian’s secular pastoral pictures, but are employed here to create solitude, refuge, and inwardness within a world separate from and yet connected to our own.22 Titian also employs this strain of the depicted pastoral when telling the miracles of Saint Anthony in the Scuola del Santo fresco cycle (ca. 1511, fig. 32) and representing the biblical parable of Christ and the Adulteress (ca. 1510, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland) by having moments of shameful secrecy and revelation conveyed by the presence of the green landscape.23 Errors and their miraculous corrections occur outside of the city, in the topography of outcroppings, in which, for example, the jealous husband commits a crime against his wife, and of open spaces, in which problems resolve miraculously. Consequently, these two different and yet nearly contemporary pastoral visions that are attributed to the same artist—of which there are more—suggest how the debates around attribution actually have concealed the diversity and complexity of pastoral art produced in early sixteenth-century Venice.
The Courtly Pastoral Another strain of the visual pastoral emerged around 1520, when artworks and artists became increasingly more mobile.24 Venetian artists, particularly Titian, began to produce pastoral paintings for patrons not living in Venice, and itinerant artists—of which Titian was not one—loosened and redefined the geographic boundaries and reach of Venetian art.25 Pastoral art that was directly inspired by examples in Venice was increasingly not displayed or found there, and consequently the specific lagunar contexts laid out to shape our concept of the green worlds in Venice were not attached to these artworks. Instead, these exported artworks reshaped the pastoral world of retreat, solitude, and isolation into a dynamic, social community, which addressed and reflected the cultural milieu in ducal and imperial courts. Venice was not totally isolated from these same cultural interests, but the city channeled them into distinctively republican, noncourtly institutions, and the pastoral art that remained in Venice maintained its strong connection to its early sixteenth-century roots.26 The most immediate gravitational pull came from the nearby ducal court at Ferrara and especially the patronal activities of Alfonso d’Este, who commissioned a series of paintings for his camerino d’alabastro in the Palazzo Ducale.27 The program for the room appears to have been based on having a select group of artists— Titian, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, Fra Bartolommeo, and Dosso Dossi—contribute paintings that were inspired by ancient literary descriptions of lost or fictive artworks and by ancient mythologies.28 The source texts, although not explicitly The Exported Pastoral
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bucolic in meter or mood, all included pastoral elements, such as bacchic festivals and celebrations and green landscapes, as settings for amorous events. The first contribution, Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (fig. 79)—with its congregation of nearly a dozen ancient gods in front of what was originally, before later alterations, a green space framed by a continuous band of trees—in 1514 set the tone for the remaining paintings.29 Engaged in a bacchic festival, the gods eat and drink, but all generally focus their attention on the encounter on the right side of the composition, the lifting of the nymph’s drapery by the young man, who is sometimes identified as Priapus.30 Bellini converts the recently popularized pastoral motif of a secret scopic episode that traditionally occurs unseen in remote groves into the focal point for a public picnic.31 The other main paintings for the room, even those not eventually completed, were based on texts with similarly populated stories of bacchic or amorous celebrations in sylvan settings: Raphael’s aborted commission for the Triumph of Bacchus in India,32 Fra Bartolommeo’s aborted commission for the Worship of Venus (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), which Titian inherited, Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians (fig. 72) and Bacchus and Ariadne (fig. 50), and a now-lost painting by Dosso Dossi, perhaps the Bacchanal of Men.33 Regardless of how the camerino was experienced, whether as a private study or as a place of ducal display or as both, the artworks all present boisterous and social communities under the influence of Bacchus or Venus—or, more usually, both—in pastoral landscapes. The energetic pace, the evidence of noise, the congregation of many figures: although all reflect the mood and details of the source texts, they all also contrast with the mood and details of the pastoral paintings produced just a few years beforehand by the same artists. In many ways these paintings for Alfonso’s camerino brought the court into pastoral painting rather than pastoral painting into the court. These paintings align with the early-cinquecento function and reception of poetic and dramatic pastoral in court cities like Ferrara and Mantua. Court entertainment in the early cinquecento included a variety of pastoral performances, ranging from semidramatic eclogues to hybrid dramas (mixing pastoral, tragic, and comic scenes), interludes, and seasonal festivals and pageants.34 These performances frequently celebrated special court occasions such as marriages and anniversaries but also enhanced annual carnival festivities; they were, as noted earlier in this book, regularly part of life in Venice for similar and different occasions and therefore were not limited to courts. But what distinguished the courtly performances was their allegorical inclusion of court members and their replication of and allusion to court structures—and especially its leisure and sociability—within the performances themselves.35 In a performance staged in Ferrara by Ercole Pio for carnival in 1508, for example, a sad shepherd was advised to dance with the court ladies in the audience as a way to cure his melancholy.36 Shepherds and 148
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Figure 79 Giovanni Bellini, Feast of the Gods, 1514. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Widener Collection, 1942.9.1.
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nymphs often acted as “theatrical doubles” for court members, who, whether as audience members or as actors, vicariously found self-reinforcement in the pastoral community.37 The possible placement of Federico Gonzaga as a shepherd in Titian’s Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine and a Shepherd (fig. 73) could be seen as a pictorial analogue to this tendency.38 Typically, a limited group attended the court performances in some kind of performance space in the court palace or, as was also the case for the specific example of Alfonso, at exurban retreats that were stylized as loci amoeni, where pastoral songs and games enhanced the otium of the court.39 Titian’s paintings could be seen as fulfilling in painting this same function, especially at a time when dramatic performances, or at least those recorded, appear to have been constrained by wars.40 By the mid-cinquecento, which was, somewhat surprisingly, around the time when Titian returned to the pastoral mode in painting after his camerino pictures in the 1520s, the pastoral mode split into even more strains. At the same moment when literary theorists debated the properties of the various theatrical genres, and when the flexible category of the pastoral mode was used by writers to metabolize all of them,41 artists similarly adapted the pastoral mode to depictions of Petrarchan love scenarios and of stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, principally for non- Venetian patrons. Titian, for example, sent to Philip II of Spain his Pardo Venus, Diana and Actaeon, and Diana and Callisto,42 and possibly the Venus with an Organist and Cupid;43 his Nymph and Shepherd and Flaying of Marsyas have more uncertain provenances.44 The first two paintings in this list incorporate aspects of the hunt—of animals either by humans or other animal predators—into the pastoral world, which was central to cinquecento pastoral drama but not present in the pastoral idyll.45 The Venus, Cupid, and the Organist (fig. 74) series envisions the urbane, Petrarchan lover’s longing for the beloved before pastoral landscapes.46 And the remaining paintings figure Ovidian pastoral episodes.47 One could argue that the Nymph and Shepherd (fig. 76) encompasses all three of these categories. But if responses to late-cinquecento pastoral performances are any indication, these categories did not exist with any clear separation for Renaissance viewers. Consider, for example, a letter written by Camillo Albizzi about a pastoral ballet performed in Ferrara in 1585: “It was very delightful to see [the ballet] danced most gracefully by twelve ladies and twelve men, and above all by Madame, the Duchess of Ferrara, accompanied by the sweetest harmony of voices and instruments, to the extent that the nymphs’ costume, the shepherds’ song, and the instrumental music of the god Pan reminded us several times of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.”48 In response to this passage, Giuseppe Gerbino wrote recently: “Notice that Ovid, not Virgil or Theocritus, leaps to Albizzi’s mind when he sees shepherds, nymphs, and the Arcadian god Pan. Today we need to juggle with the adjectives pastoral, mythological, and with all their possible combinations. The problem is ours. For Albizzi and his con150
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temporaries (as well as the audience of Rinuccini’s early opera), pastoral and Ovid’s Metamorphoses belonged to the same mental landscape.”49 The variety of Titian’s pastoral paintings from the later sixteenth century parallels these contemporary trends in theater, poetry, and music, which, although centered in courts outside of Venice, nonetheless carried their reverberations in various ways back to Venice. But Venice assimilated all of the alignments differently throughout the cinquecento, especially after the mid-sixteenth century. Many of Titian’s Venetian contemporaries, such as Veronese and Domenico Campagnola, explored the adaptability of the pastoral mode by turning away from the poetic—these Petrarchan-inspired and mythological—landscapes and toward contemporary prints and drawings of Roman ruins overgrown by the natural world for their new vision of the pastoral landscape as a quiet place that holds in equilibrium time and history, the natural and man-made.50 Jacopo Bassano found creative inspiration in developing the georgic emphasis on pasturage and agrarian labor within a Christian context. And Lambert Sustris and Ludovico Pozzoserrato relocated pastoral activities such as rest and music making to the elegant social worlds of planned formal gardens (fig. 80).51 In the later sixteenth century Venetian publishers, adjusting to The Exported Pastoral
Figure 80 Ludovico Pozzoserrato, Outdoor Concert, ca. 1596. Museo civico, Treviso.
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changing market demands, gradually started to taper the publication of pastoral texts with quiet, reflective green worlds, such as Sannazaro’s Arcadia and various ancient and cinquecento authors’ collections of pastoral eclogues, and directed their energies toward more-popular pastoral tragicomedies and religious texts.52 Patrician families established theaters throughout Venice, and soon thereafter, in the early seventeenth century, public performances of opera absorbed the pastoral into its stage sets and plot lines.53 Carnival, commedia dell’arte (fig. 4), and academies, for example, sustained the pastoral within the life of the city;54 however, as many other cultural institutions dissolved, changed, and emerged, the green worlds that had pervaded all of Venice began to be siloed into their own delimited, stand-alone, yet still public, spaces.
Seicento Departures The lives of sixteenth-century Venetian pastoral artworks had a slightly different story in the seventeenth century: a few remained in Venice, but many more left the city for new homes in collections throughout Europe.55 The departures were hardly specific to pastoral artworks. Entire collections of diverse holdings were sold to or confiscated by newly emerging collectors in Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, Brussels, and Amsterdam.56 But the relocation of the majority of Venetian pastoral artworks certainly affected the construction of green worlds in Venice. Consider, for example, the chronology, in order of departure date from Venice, of Titian’s pastoral paintings that had not been (or were not known to have been) commissioned by patrons living outside of Venice: Three Ages of Man, 1550; Sacred and Profane Love, before 1608; Flaying of Marsyas, 1620; Pastoral Concert, 1623; Nymph and Shepherd, 1638; Venus with Organist and Dog (Prado), 1639; Gypsy Madonna, 1657; Noli me tangere, before 1690; and Sleeping Venus (if we accept Titian’s participation with Giorgione), no later than 1699.57 Giorgione’s paintings have less certain provenance information, which contributes to uncertain attributions, but even the generally accepted works unsurprisingly follow the same pattern as that for Titian’s paintings.58 Drawings are also difficult to track because of the limited provenance information, but we know that artists, such as Rembrandt and, later, Watteau, had direct access to many Venetian pastoral drawings, as well as prints.59 The cities that received the most Venetian pastoral artworks were also those that around the same time began to produce their own painted, drawn, printed, and written variations of the pastoral mode. The geographic center for the pastoral, as has been well charted by art and literary historians, first shifted southward toward Rome and then northward toward France, Holland, and England. Venice, and all that it nurtured and cultivated for the pastoral mode, remained in the fore152
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front of cultural production in these other places, whose inhabitants continued to focus their attention on, if not idealize, the place of Venice as the locus of artistic inspiration and creativity. Many seventeenth-century Venetian artists seemed to take a similarly distanced or external position by visualizing their world as its visitors experienced it, as an urban island set apart from the green landscapes of the countryside. The pastoral was no longer lived in Venice and was never lived again in exactly the same way.
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Notes
Introduction 1. Some publications on the pastoral have focused their attention on the regional manifestations of the mode in reaction to the quickly growing cities in France and England. See, for example, the ecocritical approaches in Ken Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), and Louisa Mackenzie, The Poetry of Place: Lyric, Landscape, and Ideology in Renaissance France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). See also Elisabeth Hodges, Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008). The impact of Venetian pastoral on successive artists is addressed in the collection of essays Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988), with contributions by Robert C. Cafritz, Lawrence Gowing, and David Rosand. This volume remains one of the few book-length surveys of pastoral art. 2. This book is indebted to the richness and diversity of essays on individual Venetian artworks as reflected in the notes to the entire book. Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (1936; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 223–52; Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 295–320; Luba Freedman, The Classical Pastoral in the Visual Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); Patricia Emison, Low and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art (New York: Garland, 1997); Stephen J. Campbell, “Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius,” Renaissance Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2003): 299–332. One of the reasons frequently given for the emergence of the Venetian pastoral landscape is the republic’s early-cinquecento reliance on the terraferma—a reliance many literary scholars have also advanced to explain the eruption of pastoral poetry and plays. Art historians have frequently understood this political relationship as one of the main sources for the depiction of specific pastoral landscapes. This book presents a different approach. 3. For a discussion of the tensions between the terraferma and city that were voiced by early-cinquecento
Venetians, see the seminal study by Alberto Tenenti, “The Sense of Space and Time in the Venetian World of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Renaissance Venice, ed. J. R. Hale (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1973), 17–46. Tenenti relies solely, and a bit too heavily, on the diarii of Girolamo Priuli, but his analysis provides an incisive picture of Venetian conceptions of state identity around 1500. See also Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 46–47. 4. The pastoral in many ways served in Venice as a “carrier of relationships,” to borrow Natalie Zemon Davis’s phrase for the role of printing, as she conceives it in “Printing and the People,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 192. 5. The hinged relationship between city and country characterizes most pastoral poetry. For the Renaissance iteration of these ideas, see Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). The literary history of this division and its impact on society forms the foundation of Raymond Williams’s critique in The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Historians of pastoral poetry frequently identify Ben Jonson and Andrew Marvell as the first poets to locate Arcadia in the present and in actual country estates. See Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), 29–30. 6. The bibliography for pastoral poetry is enormous, much greater than that for pastoral art, and is cited throughout the book, especially in the notes for chapter 2. Some of the most important books for my own consideration of the literary traditions of the pastoral have been Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Giuseppe Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gifford, Pastoral; Walter Wilson Greg, Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama (London: A. H. Bullen, 1906); Kathryn J. Gutzwiller, Theocritus’ Pastoral Analogies: The Formation of a Genre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); David M. Halperin, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 155
1983); Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Marzia Pieri, La scena boschereccia nel Rinascimento italiano (Padua: Liviana, 1983); and Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 7. Renaissance readers were primarily aware of Theocritus’s Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues and Bucolics. For the survival of these poems, see Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977). Although known of before the mid-quattrocento, the first seven of Theocritus’s idylls were translated into Latin between 1454 and 1458 and were published sometime later, probably around 1482, in Rome by Eucario Silber. Aldus Manutius published his Greek edition of thirty of the idylls in 1495. In 1481 Virgil’s Bucolics were translated into Italian by Bernardo Pulci. 8. Freedman, Classical Pastoral, 31–55. 9. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 182. For the essay “The Argument of Comedy,” see Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F. Dean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 79–89. 10. Northrop Frye, “The Reversal of Reality,” in The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 74. 11. Harry Berger Jr., “The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World,” in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 11–12. A parallel dynamic of hinged worlds is described by Gerbino (Music and the Myth of Arcadia, 19) as the central narrative strategy of pastoral texts. Robert N. Watson considers this dynamic through an ecocritical lens in Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), which addresses how various technologies and political and social movements alienated people from nature and reality—concepts that were made to stand in literature and art for epistemological certainty. 12. Frye also notes the historical extension embedded in the concept of green worlds, but he cuts it off at the Romantic moment, which he sees as dismissing the “simple opposition of reality and illusion.” Frye, “Reversal of Reality,” 84. 13. Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres,” Architecture, mouvement, continuite no. 5 (1984): 46–49. Foucault wrote 156
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the text as a lecture, which he gave in March 1967. For the English translation, see “Different Spaces,” trans. Robert Hurley, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault (London: Penguin, 1998), 175–85. Some of the more relevant studies for the current project include Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, eds., Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (London: Routledge, 2008); Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997); and Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and- Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). A further discussion of Foucault’s heterotopia occurs in chapter 3 of this book. 14. Frye’s concept of “green worlds” was developed in relation to drama. Poetic and theatrical genres, however, had not yet been fully articulated during the first half of the sixteenth century, which is the focus of this book. Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, which is a chivalric romance and not a drama, was extremely popular at this time and had not yet been heavily criticized for its genre-breaching vulgarization of literary modes. For a discussion of the mid-cinquecento debates, consult Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 2:954–1073; Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of “Orlando Furioso” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Javitch, “The Emergence of Poetic Genre Theory in the Sixteenth Century,” Modern Language Quarterly 59 (1998): 139–69. 15. Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), canto 23, stanzas 100–101, p. 278. For the Italian text, see Orlando furioso, ed. Marcello Turchi (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), 2:628. 16. Orlando Furioso, canto 23, stanzas 130–31, p. 281. 17. Barbara Lynn-Davis recognizes the role of imagination in the Venetian conception of landscape, but her study, although helpful, rests on an unarticulated conception of the “imaginary” and “landscapes” and an uncritical grouping of multiple types of landscapes. Lynn-Davis, “Landscapes of the Imagination in Renaissance Venice” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1998). 18. “Noi potremmo chiamare questo giardinetto del Marcolino ventaglio de la state, poi che il respirare del suo vento, l’ombra del suo verde, la soavità dei suoi fiori e il canto dei suoi augelli petrarchevoli, rinfresca, ricopre, diletta e adormenta, e tanto più giova il passeggiarci ora, quanto meno il caldo del suo agosto fa bollire la nona d’oggi che
quella di ieri.” Pietro Aretino, Ragionamento delle corti, ed. Fulvio Pevere (Milan: Mursia, 1995), 45. 19. Gaspara Stampa, “Lettera terza” (13 July), in Amore infelice di Gaspara Stampa, ed. Luigi Carrer (Venice: P. Naratovich, 1851), 8–13. 20. “[A] Muran può una stantia con el so zardin se puol dir paradiso terestre per la vaghezza de l’aiere del sito, de l’esser ben governao e molto egregiamente adobao, liogo da ninfe e da semidei.” Andrea Calmo to M. Zuan Francesco Priuli, in Le lettere di messer Andrea Calmo, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1888), 173. For the location of the Palazzo Priuli on Murano, see John Dixon Hunt, The Venetian City Garden: Place, Typology, and Perception (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009), 97—a book that has been invaluable to this project. 21. The recorded performances of pastoral eclogues and plays in Mantua, Urbino, Florence, and Ferrara in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were largely court events. See Francesca Bortoletti, Egloga e spettacolo nel primo Rinascimento: Da Firenze alle corti (Rome: Bulzoni, 2008). Ferrara until 1509 held large-scale court-sponsored performances, with audiences as large as ten thousand people. Performances began again after 1528, and a permanent indoor theater was constructed by 1531 (and destroyed soon thereafter by fire). For Ercole d’Este’s contributions to theater building and performance, see Timothy Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara: Ercole d’Este (1471–1505) and the Invention of a Ducal Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117–20. The evidence, however, could be somewhat misleading, since the court-sponsored events were best documented. 22. Pieri, La scena boschereccia, 34–53. For the diversity of types of pastoral dramas, see also Lisa Sampson, Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy: The Making of a New Genre (London: Legenda, 2006). Since pastoral drama achieves not even nascent definition as a genre until the mid-cinquecento, the pastoral performances mentioned in this book refer to what Sampson calls “irregular” forms of dramatic pastoral: “eclogues, semi-dramatic dialogues, interludes (intermedi or intermezzi), and hybrid dramas (drammi mescidati), mixing mythological pastoral, tragic, and comic scenes” as well as “popular rustic comedies, pageants, and plays linked with religious and seasonal festivals such as carnival or Mayday.” Ibid., 7. Ellen Rosand notes how the “egalitarian” conditions in Venice were important for the development of opera. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 11–15.
23. Popular entertainers performed to mixed audiences in open urban spaces throughout the city, as discussed by Iain Fenlon, The Ceremonial City: History, Memory, and Myth in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 114–15. 24. Pieri, La scena boschereccia, 49–50; Sampson, Pastoral Drama, 7. Venice was not without class tensions, though. See Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). 25. Many historians have noted the ideals of social order promoted by Venice and the importance of the so-called myth of Venice. See David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan explores the limits of the myth in multiple directions, including the ecological. Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 183–229; first published as Venise triomphante: Les horizons d’un mythe (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1999). 26. The pastoral plays authored and performed by the Paduan Il Ruzante (Angelo Beolco) beginning in the 1520s, with their satirical critiques of literary shepherds by rustic peasants, are often turned to as evidence that the pastoral mode manifested deep social tensions in Venetian society, a topic this book considers in chapter 4. Those tensions unquestionably existed throughout the republic; however, it remains unclear to what extent Venetian pastoral plays and artworks experienced in Venice explicitly exemplified those tensions. See Linda L. Carroll, Commerce, Peace, and the Arts in Renaissance Venice: Ruzante and the Empire at Center Stage (New York: Routledge, 2016), and Charles E. Fantazzi, “Ruzzante’s Rustic Challenge to Arcadia,” Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 81–103. For the gradual transition from trade to agricultural investments among sixteenth-century Venetians, see Daniele Beltrami, Saggio di storia dell’agricoltura nella Repubblica di Venezia durante l’età moderna (Venice: Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 1955). 27. The depiction of visions presented challenges to Renaissance painters in particular. See Christian Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). 28. The Travels appears in the same manuscript as The Romance of Alexander. Debra Higgs Strickland identifies three different stages of Marco Polo’s voyage. Sometimes the Notes to Page 7
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Giudecca is identified instead with Marco Polo’s experiences in the East. Strickland, “Text, Image, and Contradiction in the Devisement du monde,” in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 50. 29. For a compilation of pictures with vedute of Venice, see André Corboz, “L’immagine di Venezia nella cultura figurativa del ’500,” in Architettura e utopia nella Venezia del Cinquecento, ed. Lionello Puppi (Milan: Electa, 1990), 63–70. 30. Berger’s argument regarding the separateness of depictions has echoes in deliberations on the status of the frame for the artwork. Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, part 1, considers the frame of the picture as separate from the artwork, which effectively means that he thinks of the artwork as separate or cut from the world. This position is complicated by Jacques Derrida. See his Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 1. For a discussion of these critical positions and their potential relationship and application to landscape painting, which relates to, but is not synonymous with, pastoral art, see Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 58–62. 31. Berger, “Renaissance Imagination,” 17–25. 32. Leon Battista Alberti, “On Painting” and “On Sculpture”: The Latin Texts of “De Pictura” and “De Statua,” trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 55. 33. Alberti, “On Painting,” 61. 34. Recent scholarship has focused on these image types and their smaller-scaled directness with the beholder to develop larger arguments around efficacy and agency of images and the shared histories of cult images and portraits. One study that set into motion these discussions for fifteenth-century Italian painting—even though not the first to make these connections—was Sixten Ringbom’s Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth- Century Devotional Painting, Acta Academiae Aboensis, ser. A, vol. 31, no. 2 (Åbo: Åbo akademi, 1965). 35. Still the most useful sources for the distinctively Venetian traditions of scuole painting and ceiling painting are, respectively, Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), and Juergen Schulz, Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 36. In the preface to the third part of his Lives, Vasari captures the effect of this type of brushwork when describing 158
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Giorgione’s contribution to the “modern manner”: “Giorgione . . . il quale sfumò le sue pitture e dette una terribil movenza alle sue cose per una certa oscurità di ombre” (Giorgione, whose pictures possessed a delicacy of shading and a formidable sense of motion through his use of the depth of shadows). Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, ed. Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 544; Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 280. 37. The most eloquent discussions of technique and the subtle, expressive features of Venetian brushwork remain those by David Rosand. See, in particular, his Meaning of the Mark: Leonardo and Titian (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988). 38. For a fuller discussion of attribution and the pastoral mode, see chapter 5 of this book. One of the most questioned attributions is that of the Pastoral Concert at the Louvre, which has been identified at various times as the work of Giorgione, Titian, and Sebastiano del Piombo, among others. One of the more comprehensive accounts of this attribution history can be found in Alessandro Ballarin, “Le concert champêtre,” in Le siècle de Titien: L’âge d’or de la peinture à Venise (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 340–48. Venetian drawings, regardless of subject, have long created attribution questions, primarily because of the materials and function of the drawings. See, for example, the challenges to attribution voiced in Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat, The Drawings of the Venetian Painters in the 15th and 16th Centuries (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1944). 39. The date of 1514 given to Sacred and Profane Love corresponds to the presumed commissioning of the painting by Niccolò Aurelio on the occasion of his marriage to Laura Bagarotto. The specific dates of the other paintings listed are unknown; however, because of their association with Giorgione, they are given dates near 1510. For a discussion of the context of the Aurelio-Bagarotto marriage for this picture, see Rona Goffen, “Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love: Individuality and Sexuality in a Renaissance Marriage Picture,” in Titian 500, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 45, ed. Joseph Manca (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1993), 121–46. 40. See also the comparison made between these paintings in David Rosand, “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” in Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Places of
Delight, 44–45. Not surprisingly, Sacred and Profane Love accommodated Panofsky’s iconographic approach and his interest in the semiotic legibility of artworks. See Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 110–19. The bibliographies on all of these paintings are too vast to be cited in any meaningful way here. References for these paintings are provided throughout the book. But for those wanting a single introductory reference for the artworks and their various attributions and interpretations, consult the catalogue entries provided in Le siècle de Titien. 41. A similar comparison could be made between Dosso Dossi’s Three Ages of Man (Metropolitan Museum, New York), with the three couples ensconced within pockets of the landscape, and Titian’s Edinburgh painting of presumably the same subject (National Galleries of Scotland), with the three ages legibly punctuating the landscape according to the temporal investment given to the foreground (present), middle ground and background (beginning and ending, and not necessarily respectively). See the chapter 5 of this book for further discussion. 42. Creighton Gilbert, for example, places the Tempesta in his category of artworks without a subject, in “On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,” Art Bulletin 34, no. 3 (1952): 202–16. His recognition of paintings that resist the then-popular iconographic readings, for example, has led to productive considerations of early modern artworks through the rhetorical category of aporia. See the volume of essays edited by Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo, Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2010). See also Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer, 52, for Wood’s objection to the idea of a picture without subject matter and his suggestion that paintings like the Tempesta offer “incomplete and enigmatic presentation of subject-matter.” 43. The parapet remains the fundamental motif to establish the landscape background in these examples. See Rona Goffen, “Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellini’s HalfLength Madonnas,” Art Bulletin 57, no. 4 (1975): 487–518. Other helpful studies include David Sydney Markwick, “The Occurrence of Landscape Backgrounds in Venetian Renaissance Portraits, c. 1475–c. 1515” (M.A. thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute, 1992), and Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer, 9–65. 44. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is probably among the most discussed examples of the relationship between the human
figure and landscape, perhaps because the writings of Leonardo frequently approach the interconnection between microcosm and macrocosm. See, for example, Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 261–70, and, with a further reading, Webster Smith, “Observations on the Mona Lisa Landscape,” Art Bulletin 67, no. 2 (1985): 183–99. A reading of the landscape as a metaphor occurs more frequently in paintings with female sitters, which reveals the biased pairing of female and nature. For the history of this association—for both Renaissance and contemporary viewers—see Claudia Lazzaro, “The Visual Language of Gender in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture,” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 71–113. Much of this thinking remains indebted to Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), despite the frequent criticism of the text for its oversimplifications of historical complexities. 45. A corrective reading of these backgrounds as contributors to the shaping of the experience of interiority is offered by Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 205–6. Grootenboer’s approach finds inspiration in Lacan’s concept of the “extimate” (intimate and exterior at the same time) and Gérard Wajcman, Fenêtre: Chroniques du regard et de l’intime (Paris: Verdier, 2012). 46. Ernst Gombrich situates the rise of landscape, as well as the related origins of “pure” landscape, within the agonistic relationship between northern and southern Europe, as is frequently done by art historians. Gombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” in Norm and Form (London: Phaidon, 1966), 107–21, originally published as “Renaissance Artistic Theory and the Development of Landscape Painting,” Gazette des beaux-arts 41 (1953): 335–60. For a critique of Gombrich’s position, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Gombrich and the Rise of Landscape,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1995), 103–20. A. Richard Turner claims to address the union of figure and landscape, but the former is prioritized at the expense of the idea of union. Turner, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). These studies, which are mentioned Notes to Pages 12–13
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specifically here because of their historical focus on the Renaissance, are joined by many other similar studies in art history that address the migration of landscape into art and the attendant stylistic developments, as well as by more recent scholarship on landscape that, with the help of cultural geography, among other fields, decenters the meaning and applicability of landscape. Many in this latter category are cited throughout this book. For a useful introduction to these multiple perspectives, see Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins, eds., Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008). 47. For Patinir’s paintings, see Walter S. Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth”: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), and, more recently, Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and Alejandro Vergara, ed., Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007). 48. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer, 50–60. 49. The pervasiveness of the human-centered approach is reflected, even though nuanced, by Christopher Wood’s consideration of Altdorfer’s paintings in terms of the self-reflexivity and self-projection of the artist. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer, 63. 50. The possessive aspect of landscape has been addressed specifically for Venetian territorial holdings in the terraferma, and particularly how this ideological concept of landscape underpins the construction and siting of Palladian villas, in Denis E. Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and Its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-Century Italy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). Art historians have adapted approaches pursued within cultural geography to make similar points. See, as one nuanced example, Robin Kelsey, “Landscape as Not Belonging,” in DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory, 203–13. The most familiar, however, is W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 51. Elizabeth Helsinger, “Blindness and Insights,” in DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory, 323–42. 52. Both pictures were in Taddeo Contarini’s collection in Venice in 1525, according to Marcantonio Michiel. See Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano (Marcanton Michiel’s Notizia d’opere del disegno), ed. and trans. Theodor Frimmel (Vienna: Graeser, 1888), 86. 160
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53. This focus on landscape in other disciplines—especially anthropology—in terms of what it does rather than as an object has productive implications for art history. As Helsinger writes, “Other disciplines . . . define landscape by what it does—by which they mean not only what impact landscape (as a cultural and social form) has on social and individual lives but also the reverse: what interventions, what human activities, produce landscapes.” Helsinger, “Blindness and Insights,” 327. The scholarship of social anthropologist Tim Ingold has been especially influential on the current study, even though his particular application of his own ideas to artworks strikes this author as problematic. Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 152–74. 54. For the shift of focus to the agrarian mainland, see Beltrami, Saggio di storia dell’agricoltura, and Fernand Braudel, “La vita economica di Venezia nel secolo xvi,” in La civiltà veneziana del Rinascimento (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), 81–102. 55. Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 56. D. Rosand, Myths of Venice.
Chapter 1 1. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Murano à la fin du Moyen Âge: Spécificité ou intégration dans l’espace vénitien?” Revue historique 268, fasc. 1 (543) (1982): 45–92. Crouzet-Pavan’s groundbreaking work on Murano appears in a more comprehensive consideration of the lagoon as a whole in her “Sopra le acque salse”: Espaces, pouvoir et société à Venise à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1992). For a condensed, translated version of the study, see Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 2. Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Savi ed Esecutori alle acque, R. 342, c11v; Archivio Proprio Trevisan, R. 4. See also Crouzet-Pavan, “Murano,” 70. 3. Crouzet-Pavan, “Sopra le acque salse,” 138. 4. Gardens were created in Venice before 1500, as discussed in this chapter, and persisted there after 1550; however, the span of time defined here designates a period of intense interest and self-consciousness around the role of green places—actual and fictional—in Venice. 5. Recent scholarly interests in ecocriticism have
contributed to a growing consciousness around the ways in which Venice’s unique and fragile ecological situation shaped urban development and water and land management, among other issues. Crouzet-Pavan (“Sopra le acque salse”) was among the first to introduce these concerns to what had previously been a celebratory and nostalgic rhetoric in scholarship on Venice. See also Appuhn, Forest on the Sea. For a thoughtful consideration of the role of the sea in Venice’s civic identity, see D. Rosand, Myths of Venice. Within the broader field of Renaissance studies, there have been several publications on the importance of green—whether the color itself or the concept. Examples include Bruce Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Watson, Back to Nature. 6. For the unique concept of space and time in Venice, see Tenenti, “Sense of Space and Time.” 7. The concept of lived and experienced space derives most obviously from the influential work of Henri Lefebvre (La production de l’espace [Paris: Anthropos, 1974]), who introduced the notion of lived space (l’espace vécu) as a third term between the poles of the conception and the perception of space, a notion, according to Stuart Elden, that recognizes “space as produced and modified over time and through its use, spaces invested with symbolism and meaning, the space of connaissance . . . , space as real-and-imagined.” Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum, 2004), 190. In the wake of Lefebvre’s enormously influential book, the concepts of space and place have been refined by cultural geographers, among others. One of the more helpful discussions of these key texts on place and space occurs in Mackenzie, Poetry of Place, a study on Renaissance poetic landscapes. 8. This assignation of landscape to the poetic genre is approximate rather than absolute. Many lived conflations of landscapes, of course, remain artificially distinct in poetic texts. Pliny the Younger in his Letters discusses the sheep pasturing by his seaside Laurentum villa. Barbara Lynn-Davis considers the idea of landscape in Venice in her dissertation (“Landscapes of the Imagination in Renaissance Venice”) as part of a larger discussion of the “mental geography” of Venice. Her work, appearing before the more recent interest in the theoretical constructions of place, space, and landscape, is one of the first efforts to address the Venetian interest in both describing and visualizing landscapes. She takes the position that “landscapes of cultural imagination”
are rooted in “landscapes of spatial actuality,” without recognizing that the two are never separate. She defines “Venice” as the lagoon and the mainland territories, with a privileging of the latter, except for her first chapter, in which she discusses the gardens on Murano and Giudecca. 9. Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, 224–25. 10. Susan Sontag mentions that “urban pastoral” was coined by William Empson, but she does not cite her specific source, which was undoubtedly his book Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935). Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Delta Book, 1961). See also the more recent elaboration of the concept by Deborah Marie Laycock, “An Eighteenth-Century Sense of Place: The Urban Pastoral” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1987), and Timothy Gray, Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010). 11. One example of this practice is Lynn-Davis, “Landscapes of the Imagination.” Others are cited throughout this book, especially in the introduction and chapter 5. 12. Lionello Puppi has observed that the vector of influence of the Venetian early-cinquecento villa type with gardens went from Venice to the terraferma and continued to structure the relationship between house and garden in Palladio’s villa designs. He discusses this in “Le residenze di Pietro Bembo ‘in padoana,’” L’arte, n.s., 7–8 (1969): 30–65, and “The Villa Garden of the Veneto from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in The Italian Garden, ed. David Coffin (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1972), 83–114. 13. D. Rosand, Myths of Venice. 14. Maria Teresa Muraro, “La festa a Venezia e le sue manifestazioni rappresentative: Le Compagnie della Calza e le momarie,” in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 3, Dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento, vol. 3 (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1983), 315–42. 15. See, for example, the plays by Angelo Beolco as discussed by Ronnie Ferguson, The Theatre of Angelo Beolco (Ruzante): Text, Context, and Performance (Ravenna: Longo, 2000). 16. A variation of W. J. T. Mitchell’s formulation in “Imperial Landscape,” in Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 5–34. 17. Mackenzie, Poetry of Place; Hodges, Urban Poetics; Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral? 18. I am borrowing here from the well-known study of Notes to Pages 22–23
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place by Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: New Press, 1997). Lippard writes, “The lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to prevailing alienation. . . . It is not universal (nothing is) and its character and affect differ greatly over time from person to person and from community to community” (7). 19. Crouzet-Pavan notes in her invaluable study “Murano” the number of rental houses in Murano that include some mention of gardens. More general discussions of gardens in Venice can be found in the following: Vincenzo Zanetti, Guida di Murano e delle celebri sue fornaci vetrarie (Venice: Antonelli, 1866); Pomponeo Molmenti, La storia di Venezia nella vita privata dalla origini alla caduta della repubblica, 2nd ed. (Turin: Roux & Favale, 1880), 163–71; Julia Mary Cartwright Ady, Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, and Other Studies (New York: Scribner’s, 1914); Charlotte Pauly, Der venezianische Lustgarten: Seine Entwicklung und seine Beziehungen zur venezianischen Malerei (Strassburg: Heitz & Mündel, 1916); Gino Damerini, Giardini di Venezia (Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1931); Lionello Puppi, “I giardini veneziani del Rinascimento,” Il veltro 22, nos. 3–4 (1978): 279–97; Richard J. Goy, Chioggia and the Villages of the Venetian Lagoon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Margherita Azzi Visentini, “Analisi storica di alcuni giardini,” in Il giardino veneto: Storia e conservazione, ed. Visentini (Milan: Electa, 1988), 83–192; Hunt, Venetian City Garden. I was unable to consult Priscilla Schutts, “Venetian Island and Terra Firma Gardens of the Renaissance” (M.A. thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1994). 20. Discussed by Richard J. Goy, Venetian Vernacular Architecture: Traditional Housing in the Venetian Lagoon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 203. The original mention occurs in Zanetti, Guida di Murano—which offers a wealth of information about the locations of gardens in Venice. 21. Sansovino includes palace gardens in book 8, the section on public buildings, to which Giustiniano Martinioni made additions in the edition I cite: Venetia, città nobilissima, et singolare: Descritta in xiiii. libri . . . con aggiunta di tutte le cose notabili della stessa città, fatte, & occorse dall’anno 1580 fino al presente 1663 (Venice, 1663), 369. 22. For a discussion of Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View, see Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map 162
Notes to Pages 23–26
Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography Before the Year 1500,” Art Bulletin 60, no. 3 (1978): 425–74. See also Giuseppe Mazzariol and Terisio Pignatti, La pianta prospettica di Venezia del 1500 disegnata da Jacopo de’ Barbari (Venice: Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, 1962). 23. On the typical Renaissance garden features, see Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 24. Goy, Chioggia, 236. 25. Consult the incredibly helpful “Gazetteer” of Venetian gardens that constitutes chapter 4 in Hunt, Venetian City Garden, 67–97. 26. In addition to the “Gazetteer” compiled by Hunt, cited in the note above, see also Zanetti, Guida di Murano, 51–71, 280–86; Molmenti, La storia di Venezia, 163–71; and Ady, Italian Gardens. The lists that follow have been compiled from these sources. 27. The Cornaro family owned multiple residences in Venice. The Palazzo Corner mentioned here (now the site of Campo San Bernardo) was the site of a gathering with Beatrice d’Este in 1494. See Goy, Venetian Vernacular, 206. 28. The Palazzo Corner-Dolfin is frequently identified as the site of the early garden of Trifone Gabriele. See Hunt, Venetian City Garden, 97. 29. Jacopo Sansovino worked on the Palazzo Trevisan, which is mentioned as completed in 1562. Hunt, Venetian City Garden, 96–97. 30. Isolario di Benedetto Bordone nel qual si ragiona di tutte le isole del mondo (Venice, 1528), xxxv: “piu che Vinegia di amenitate se ritrova, percio che, quivi quasi tutte le case accomodate sono di bellissimi giardini tutti di ottimi frutti de diverse maniere ripieni.” A later island atlas, Tommaso Porcacchi’s L’isole più famose del mondo (1572), includes a view of Venice that emphasizes the number of gardens on the Giudecca. Porcacchi includes no gardens in his view of Murano, but he mentions them in his text: “Sono in Murano molte belle chiese, monasteri, palazzi & giardini: percioche essendovi rispetto alle tante fornaci de’ vetri l’aria più purgata; i nobili Vinitiani volentieri vi fabricano per habitarvi la state” (69). He also speaks to the agricultural character of other islands, noting that Maggiorbo, an outer island near Venice, is inhabited “da pescatori & da hortolani.” 31. “Non é cosa che più me habbia conducto in admiratione in questa città edificata sopra l’acqua, quanto a facto el
vedere belli zardini quanti li sono.” Pietro Casola, Viaggio de Pietro Casola Gerusalemme (Milan: Tipografia di Paolo Ripamonti Carpano, 1855), 14. For the translation, see Pietro Casola, Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494, ed. M. Margaret Newitt (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, for the Victoria University of Manchester, 1907), 142, as cited in Ady, Italian Gardens, 104. 32. Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, ed. Remigio Sabbadini, vol. 1 (Venice: A spese della Società, 1915), 295. For a partial translation, see Patricia H. Labalme, Bernardo Giustiniani: A Venetian of the Quattrocento (Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 1969), 25–26. 33. Sansovino, Venetia, 369: “Ci sono etiandio diversi Giardini, oltre à i comuni di semplici, notabili & famosi per piante nobili & rare, cosa incredibile à i forestieri, poi che essi pensano che l’acqua salsa non possa cedere all’artificio humano.” Translation mine. 34. F. Hopkinson Smith, Venice of Today (1902), as cited in Hunt, Venetian City Garden, 10. 35. Mariapia Cunico, Il giardino veneziano: La storia, l’architettura, la botanica (Venice: Albrizzi Editore, 1989), 48. 36. Titian’s house was located in Cannaregio, near the Rio del Gesuiti and the Fondamenta Nove. The description of the gathering at Titian’s garden occurs in a letter included after book 6 in Francesco Priscianese’s Della lingua latina libri sei (Venice, 1550), 398–402. 37. Priscianese, Della lingua latina, 398. 38. Sansovino, Venetia, 370. See also Hunt, Venetian City Garden, 95. 39. Hunt, Venetian City Garden, 95. The sixteenth-century examples include the casino of Palazzo Michiel, rio della Sensa, Cannaregio 3218; and for a surviving example of claire-voie, see the Palazzo Priuli-Bon-Clary, San Trovaso, Dorsoduro 1397—the previous site of the garden and palace belonging to Pier Antonio Michiel. 40. Edward S. Casey, “The Edge(s) of Landscape: A Study in Liminology,” in The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies, ed. Jeff Malpas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 91–110. 41. Well-read observers might also have drawn connections to Pliny’s description of his seaside villa at Laurentum, with its sheep and woods and garden near the sea. In 1508 Venetian readers had access to Pliny’s Letters in an edition published by the Aldine Press. 42. D. Rosand, Myths of Venice. 43. For the rich life found in ecotones, see Casey, “Edge(s) of Landscape.”
44. Danièle Duport, Le jardin et la nature: Ordre et variété dans la littérature de la Renaissance (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002), 119–55; Gianni Venturi, “Picta poësis: Ricerche sulla poesia e il giardino dalle origini al Seicento,” in Storia d’Italia: Annali, vol. 5, Il paesaggio, ed. Cesare De Seta (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1982), 673–77; Rob Aben and Saskia de Wit, The Enclosed Garden: History and Development of the Hortus Conclusus and Its Reintroduction into the Present-Day Urban Landscape (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999). 45. John Dixon Hunt, A World of Gardens (London: Reaktion, 2012), 57–82. 46. Pietro de’ Crescenzi’s treatise, Liber ruralium commodorum, was originally written in Latin sometime between 1304 and 1309 but was soon thereafter translated into Italian as De agricultura vulgare. See Robert G. Calkins, “Pietro de’ Crescenzi and the Medieval Garden,” in Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1986), 155–73. For a helpful list of garden-planning publications in the sixteenth century, see Rita Giudici, Fonti per la storia dell’agricoltura italiana dalla fine del xv alla metà del xviii secolo (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1995), 3–8. 47. Another exception is vases with myrtle, which would have been placed around the garden. See Cunico, Il giardino veneziano, 72. 48. Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View includes tonnelle-type and flat-type pergolas, which were varied according to what was grown. 49. Natsumi Nonaka, “The Illusionistic Pergola in Italian Renaissance Architecture: Painting and Garden Culture in Early Modern Rome, 1500–1620” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2012), 12; Lazzaro, Italian Renaissance Garden, 80, 98n29. 50. Nonaka, “Illusionistic Pergola,” 115–21. 51. The Sala dei Fogliami is attributed variously to Francesco Salviati, Giovanni da Udine, and Camillo Mantovano. See Annalisa Bristot, ed., Palazzo Grimani a Santa Maria Formosa: Storia, arte, restauri (Verona: Scripta, 2008). The ceiling includes botanical specimens recently imported to Europe from the New World. See Cunico, Il giardino veneziano, 16. 52. The strolling figures appear on the far right side of Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View, near the church of San Pietro di Castello, adjacent to the Arsenale. 53. Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale (Venice, 1615), 328. See also Nonaka, “Illusionistic Pergola,” 149. Notes to Pages 26–29
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54. See, in particular, Pietro de’ Crescenzi, De agricultura vulgare (Venice, 1511), bk. 6, p. 154v. 55. Much of the discussion in recent scholarship has focused on the book’s authorship. See, for example, Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili”: Re-cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). However, most scholars accept the attribution to Francesco Colonna. 56. Rosemary Trippe, “The ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,’ Image, Text, and Vernacular Poetics,” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2002): 1222–58; John Dixon Hunt, “Experiencing Gardens in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” Word & Image 14 (1998): 109–18. 57. See, for example, Pisanello’s Figures in a Vaulted Room, from the Codex Vallardi, Musèe du Louvre, Paris. 58. The connection between physical movement in the garden (such as crossing thresholds) and various subjective states is discussed by John Dixon Hunt, “‘Lordship of the Feet’: Toward a Poetics of Movement in the Garden,” in Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2003), 187–213. Movement is beginning to enter into the consideration of garden histories: see Malgorzata Szafrańska, “Place, Time, and Movement: A New Look at Renaissance Gardens,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 26, no. 3 (2006): 194–236. 59. Mario Cermenati, “Un diplomatico naturalista del Rinascimento: Andrea Navagero,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s., 24, no. 1 (1912): 164–205; Cammy Brothers, “The Renaissance Reception of the Alhambra: The Letters of Andrea Navagero and the Palace of Charles V,” Muqarnas 11 (1994): 79–102; Christopher J. Pastore, “Expanding Antiquity: Andrea Navagero and Villa Culture in the Cinquecento Veneto” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003). Pastore’s study collects and translates many important writings by Navagero, although the discussion of Navagero’s Murano villa and garden as predominantly agricultural is not convincing. 60. Andrea Navagero, Opera Omnia (Padua, 1718), 297–98. 61. Lazzaro, Italian Renaissance Garden, 6, 121–23. 62. Dante, The Divine Comedy, vol. 1, Inferno, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (New York: Penguin, 1949), 71: “Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, / I woke to find myself in a dark wood, / Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.” 63. A letter written from Christophe de Longueil to 164
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Pietro Bembo communicates a little about the organization of Navagero’s garden: The garden belonging to this villa was a very pleasant sight, since all the trees in the orchard and plantations are laid out in the form of a quincunx, [with lines of exquisite topiary each side of a path and a walkway covered by vaulted arches. . . .] The apple trees are all planted in regular rows, at discreet intervals, and have grown with amazing rapidity, since they were put in the ground by our Navagero himself, only a few months ago. Nothing could be more beautiful in shape and colour, nothing sweeter in smell and taste, or more excellent in size and variety, than the fruit which this orchard bears. For the Latin text, see Longueil, Epistolarum Libri iiii (Basel, 1558), which is reproduced in Cermenati, “Un diplomatico naturalista.” The letter is translated into English by Ady, Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, 116–17. 64. Amedeo Quondam, “Nel giardino del Marcolini: Un editore veneziano tra Aretino e Doni,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 157 (1980): 75–116. 65. Hunt, Venetian City Garden, 92; Cunico, Il giardino veneziano, 23. 66. “Noi potremmo chiamare questo giardinetto del Marcolino ventaglio de la state, poi che il respirare del suo vento, l’ombra del suo verde, la soavità dei suo fiori e il canto dei suoi augelli petrarchevoli, rinfresca, ricopre, diletta e adormenta, e tanto più giova il passeggiarci ora, quanto meno il caldo del suo agosto fa bollire la nona d’oggi che quella di ieri.” Aretino, Ragionamento delle corti, 45. Nona, translated here as “ninth hour,” refers to the ninth hour after 6:00 a.m., which is 3:00 p.m. For this explanation, see Robert Buranello, “Pietro Aretino: Between the locus mendacii and the locus veritatis,” in Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue, ed. Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallée (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 109n24. 67. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 192–202. 68. Francesco Marcolini, Le sorti . . . intitolato il giardino dei pensieri (Venice, 1540): “ombra cosi densa e fresca, dei fiori cosi profumati? Dove altro puoi ascoltare i canti di innumerevoli uccelli, che con la loro musica petrarchesca ristorano l’anima . . . ?” Pietro Aretino also wrote, in a letter of September 1549, about the same garden: “Se la Giudecca non
meritasse di esser ammirata per la bellezza dei palazzi, delle chiese del sito, solo il giardino che verdeggia intorno alle nobili stanze vostre, la mostrerebbe alle genti meravigliosa.” See Damerini, Giardini di Venezia, 90. 69. Hampton, Literature and Nation, 16 and n. 24. The same connection is often made between silvae (woods) and a literary collection, as in Navagero’s Lusus, trans. Alice E. Wilson (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1973), 46, 54. 70. Priscianese, Della lingua latina, 398. The letter is addressed to Lodovico Becci and Luigi del Riccio. Giorgio Padoan discusses Priscianese’s description of Titian’s garden in Momenti del Rinascimento veneto (Padua: Antenore, 1978), 380–81. 71. Priscianese, Della lingua latina, 398: “la somiglianza, la quale per esso mi si offerte alla mente degli amenissimi horti di Santa Agata del Reverendissimo padron nostro Monsignor Ridolfi (in quanto le picciole cose si possono agguagliare alle grandi) mi fece rinfrescar di forte la Memoria di sua Reverendissima Signoria, & il desiderio di quegli, & di voi amici carissimi, ch’io non saprei ben discerner se la maggior parte del tempo di quella sera, io mi trovai à Roma, ò à Vinegia, quasi come un certo indovinamento di quello, che poco doppo mi avviene.” 72. For the miniature, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 73. Aretino uses the phrase “giardino in aria” in his Ragionamenti (1538), third day, second part, and in the prologue to his La talanta. The phrase—which is similar in meaning to “castles in the sky”—is not unique to him, although he uses it frequently in his writings. 74. Hampton, Literature and Nation, 17. Hampton quotes from Shakespeare’s Henry V to open his introductory chapter: “this best garden of the world, / Our fertile France” (v.2.36). More relevant to Venice are Thomas Coryat’s remarks in his Crudities (1611; repr., London: W. Cater, 1776): “For as Italy is the garden of the world, so is Lombardy the garden of Italy, and Venice the garden of Lombardy” (109). 75. Lettere di Pietro Aretino, ed. Paolo Procaccioli, vol. 4 of Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Aretino (Rome: Salerno editrice, 2002), bk. 1, no. 147, 15 June 1537; The Letters of Pietro Aretino, trans. Thomas Caldecot Chubb (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1967), 65; Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, ed. Ettore Camesasca, vol. 1 (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1957), 53–54. 76. Benedetto Varchi, Storia fiorentina, bk. 6, viii, in Opere di Benedetto Varchi, vol. 1 (Trieste: Lloyd Austriaco,
1858), 107 [1528]: “perchè il giardino dell’Italia non divenisse nido e quasi preda di così barbare nazioni.” For a discussion of regionalism as a phenomenon prior to nationalism in early modern Europe, see Mackenzie, Poetry of Place, introduction, and Hampton, Literature and Nation. 77. Paolo Pino, Dialogo di pittura, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini and Anna Pallucchini (Venice: D. Guarnati, 1946), 145. Translated and cited in Ernst Gombrich, “Renaissance Theory of Art,” 116. 78. Hampton (Literature and Nation, 10) cites Richard Rorty’s comments on the importance of a shared language for communities: “Progress, for the community as for the individual, is a matter of using new words as well as of arguing from premises phrased in old words.” Priscianese talks about language—and specifically the importance of the Tuscan vernacular—in his Della lingua latina and the letter about Titian’s garden that is appended to the books, and Aretino also discusses similar questions around language in his Ragionamento. 79. Terry Comito, The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 53–54. 80. Girolamo Fracastoro, Naugerius: Sive De poetica dialogus, ed. and trans. Ruth Kelso (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1924), 50–52. Comito, Idea of the Garden, 52–53. 81. Fracastoro, Naugerius, 51, translated in Comito, Idea of the Garden, 52–53. 82. Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, Medici Gardens: From Making to Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 99. 83. Comito, Idea of the Garden, 50–68; Fabiani Giannetto, Medici Gardens, 99–131; Sara Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 63–101. 84. One of the most often cited examples is Petrarch’s letter in which he recounts to Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro his ascent of Mount Ventoux. See Petrarch, Familiares 4.1. Pietro Bembo’s later recounting of his visit to Mount Etna imitates Petrarch’s transformation of actual topography into a subjective landscape, regardless of whether he had actually ever made the trip. Bembo’s Etna can be found in translation in Pietro Bembo, Lyric Poetry; Etna, trans. Mary P. Chatfield (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 194–250. 85. Vita di M. Triphone Gabriele nella quale si mostrano apieno le lodi della vita soletaria & contemplativa (Venice, 1543). Giacomo Gabriele, Trifone’s son, provided a prologue, and Notes to Pages 31–34
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Pietro Bembo appended to the end of the text a poem dedicated to Trifone. For Petrarch’s De vita solitaria, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 147–66. 86. Gabriele, Vita, n.p. Translations are mine. 87. For the contrast between city and country as a foundational structure for the pastoral, see the Marxist approach offered in the seminal text by Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Other literary works set in gardens on Murano that emphasize the city/country dialectic are Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Le piacevoli notti (Venice, 1559), which adopts a Decameron-esque conceit of telling stories in a Murano villa garden over multiple nights during carnival, and poems by Celio Magno in Rime di Celio Magno et Orsatto Giustiniano (Venice, 1600). For the city/country dialectic in Italian literature more generally, see Francesco Sberlati, “Villania e cortesia: L’opposizione tra città e campagna dal Medioevo al Rinascimento,” in La letteratura di villa e di villeggiatura: Atti del Convegno di Parma, 29. settembre–1. ottobre 2003 (Rome: Salerno, 2004), 65–114. 88. Bernardino Partenio, Dell’imitazione poetica (1560), in Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, vol. 2, ed. Bernard Weinberg (Bari: Laterza, 1970), 519–58. 89. “E giunti a Murano entrammo in un giardino dove si erano ridotti e agiati i due onorati vecchi sotto un pergolato di viti foltissime, attorniato di spessi gelsomini sì che ’l sole percuotere non li poteva. E spirava un’aura piacevolissima e fresca assai” (ibid., 526). 90. Gaspara Stampa, “Lettera terza” (13 July), in Amore infelice di Gaspara Stampa, 8–13. Gasapara writes: “Il nome proferito del Molino era Collaltino dei conti Collalto” (13). 91. Ibid.: “mi fuggirono dalla mente le cose tutte dette fina a quell’ora dal Gabriello; e mentre l’occhio arrestavasi sbadatamente sul verde delle foglie, e sul bianco dei gelsomini, che ripiegati in vaghissimo pergolato facevano coperchio a buona parte della compagnia, l’immaginazione lasciavasi trasportare dalla nuova lusinga. Sono misteri che non si possono con parole descrivere! Da quell’ora ho perduto l’arbitrio di me stessa.” 92. Ibid., 14–15. 93. Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani, trans. Rudolf B. Gottfried (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1954), 132–33. 94. Henry Marion Hall, Idylls of Fishermen: A History of the Literary Species, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914). 166
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95. Theocritus, Idylls, trans. Anthony Verity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), “Idyll 11,” p. 33, lines 11–14. For the influence of Theocritus on early modern poetry, see Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Dire Straits: The Perils of Writing the English Coastline from Leland to Milton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 56. 96. Theocritus, Idylls, “Idyll 11,” p. 34, lines 60–64. 97. Ibid., “Idyll 6,” pp. 23–24; Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 13. 98. The Idylls of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, trans. Rev. J. Banks (London: George Bell & Sons, 1878), “Idyll 3,” p. 316. The questions around attribution are not of central concern here. 99. Virgil, Georgics, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid i–vi, trans. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916), bk. iv, lines 394–95, pp. 224–25: “immania cuius / armenta et turpis pascit sub gurgite phocas.” 100. See, for example, Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 93. 101. Raphael’s print Quos Ego, in which Neptune is depicted calming the seas, is a good comparative example. See Christian Kleinbub, “Raphael’s Quos Ego: Forgotten Document of the Renaissance Paragone,” Word & Image 28, no. 3 (2012): 287–301. 102. The best introduction to sixteenth-century genre theory is Daniel Javitch, “Emergence of Poetic Genre Theory.” 103. Ariosto, Orlando furioso, canto 46, stanza 17, lines 7–8. 104. William J. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983), 149–80. 105. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclogues, trans. Ralph Nash (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 161. 106. David Rosand and Michelangelo Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut (Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1976), cat. no. 42, pp. 194–95; Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), 222. 107. Figurations of sirens appeared throughout Venetian visual culture, as discussed by Alison Luchs, The Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea Creatures in Venetian Renaissance Art (London: Harvey Miller, 2010), 21–32. Soon after Aretino’s publication, a similar figuration of a siren hovering over a lagoon-like landscape appeared in a majolica plate produced in Venice and dated to 1540 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Reproduced in Luchs, Mermaids of Venice, plate 42. 108. Paolo Procaccioli, “Pietro Aretino sirena di
antipetrarchismo: Flussi e riflussi di una poetica della militanza,” in Autorità, modelli e antimodelli nella cultura artistica e letteraria tra Riforma e Controriforma, ed. Antonio Corsaro, Harald Hendrix, and Paolo Procaccioli (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2007), 103–29. 109. Pietro Aretino, Stanze in lode della Sirena, in Opere di Pietro Aretino, ed. Massimo Fabi (Milan: Francesco Sanvito, 1863), 387–88. 110. Ibid., 401. 111. Ibid., 388. He also uses “salty” to describe more than the water, such as “salsi orgogli.” 112. Soon after the publication of Aretino’s Stanze, the poet Andrea Calmo wrote his own piscatory poems, more as a parody than as a tribute, which were published in Le bizarre faconde, et ingeniose rime pescatorie (1552/53). He situated his rime in the specific topography of Venice. For the parodic tendencies in Calmo’s pastoral eclogues, see Marzia Pieri, “L’egloga manieristica del Calmo,” in La scena boschereccia, 141–49. 113. Maria Teresa Muraro, “Le lieu des spectacles (publics ou privés) a Venise au xve et au xvie siècles,” in Scena e messinscena: Scritti teatrali 1960–1998, ed. Maria Ida Biggi (Venice: Marsilio, 2004), 99–110; Giorgio Padoan, La commedia rinascimentale veneta (1433–1565) (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982), 219–50; Ludovico Zorzi, Il teatro e la città: Saggi sulla scena italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). 114. Maria Teresa Muraro, “Momaria,” in Scena e messinscena, 59–63. On 29 December 1508, a decree issued by the Council of Ten prohibited the performance of “commedie, tragedie, egloghe.” Successive similar decrees in the years that followed indicate the ineffectiveness of the earlier ones. 115. Marin Sanudo, Venice, cità excelentissima, ed. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White, trans. Linda L. Carroll (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 506–7; Maria Teresa Muraro, “Venezia,” in Scena e messinscena, 16–18. 116. One example, the Egloga pastoral de Philebbo e Dinarcho pastori (1507), brings together two shepherds to debate the beautiful features of the beloved, thereby creating a blazon of sorts. For the membership and activities of the Compagnie della Calza, see Matteo Casini, “The ‘Company of the Hose’: Youth and Courtly Culture in Europe, Italy, and Venice,” Studi veneziani 63 (2011): 133–54, and Lionello Venturi, “Le Compagnie della Calza (sec. xv–xvi),” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s., 16 (1908): 161–221, and 17 (1909): 140–233. “Compagnie della Calza” is the collective name for all of the
groups formed by patricians who performed for their own amusement and for more official functions. The compagnia chose their own name and identified themselves through their stockings. See also Elena Povoledo, “Scène et mise en scène à Venise: De la décadence des compagnies de la Calza jusqu’à la représentation de L’Andromeda au Théâtre de San Cassian (1637),” in Renaissance, maniérisme, baroque: Actes du xie Stage international de Tours (Paris: J. Vrin, 1972), 87–99. 117. Stage sets seem to have attracted more attention in the late 1530s to early 1540s, especially with the commissioning of Vasari in 1541–42 to execute stage sets for the performance by the Sempiterni of Aretino’s La talanta. But there is always the possibility of unrecorded performances and disposable ephemera that served as stage sets. See Juergen Schulz, “Vasari at Venice,” Burlington Magazine 103, no. 705 (1961): 500–509. For theatrical performances in gardens, see Lionello Puppi, “Il melodramma nel giardino,” in Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1976), 329–47, and Zorzi, Il teatro e la città, 303. 118. Sebastiano Serlio, On Perspective, in Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, ed. and trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 1:91. Serlio describes a stage set by Girolamo Genga for Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino. 119. Ibid., 91. For the confusion between satyr places and satires in the Renaissance, see chapter 4 of this book. 120. Vitruvius (5.6.9), however, does not mention huts in his passage: “satyric scenes are decorated with trees, caverns, mountains, and other rustic objects delineated in landscape style.” Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914), 150. See also Pieri, La scena boschereccia, 191–94. 121. Daniele Barbaro, trans., I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruvio (Venice, 1567), 256: “le Scene Satiriche sono ornate di alberi, & di spilonche, & di monti, & d’altre cose rusticali, & agrestie in forma di giardini.” 122. Attention was first brought to the role of the villanesca and buffonesca performances in the visual arts by Emison, Low and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art, esp. 98–99. See also Richard Andrews, “The Cinquecento: Theater,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 292–94. 123. Marcantonio Michiel identifies the woman as a “gypsy” (cingana) in his inventory of the picture. See Michiel, Notes to Pages 38–41
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Der Anonimo Morelliano, 106. He identifies the man as a soldier and makes no mention of his striped hose as a possible indication of his membership in a Compagnia della Calza. For this identification, see S. Moschini Marconi, “Giorgione, La tempesta,” in Giorgione a Venezia, ed. Adriana Augusti Ruggeri et al. (Milan: Electa, 1978), 104. 124. See, for example, Campbell, “Giorgione’s Tempest.” 125. Ferguson, Theatre of Angelo Beolco, 17; Linda L. Carroll, Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante) (Boston: Twayne, 1990); and Carroll, Commerce, Peace, and the Arts, 70–73, 100–106. For an approach similar to Beolco’s establishment of contrast, see Le rime di Bartolomeo Cavassico, ed. Vittorio Cian, vol. 1 (Bologna: Presso Romagnoli dall’Acqua, 1893), cx. 126. For the problems with dating the play, as well as the challenges presented by the syntax, see Ferguson, Theatre of Angelo Beolco, 24–25. 127. Ibid., 20. 128. Ibid. 129. For the complex objectives of Cornaro vis-à-vis land reclamation, see Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 141–43. 130. The restrictions had been in place since 1476, when a series of forestry laws were passed. See Appuhn, Forest on the Sea, 112. 131. See, for example, the exchange of pastoral eclogues described in Maria Antonietta Grignani, “Badoer, Filenio, Pizio: Un trio bucolico a Venezia,” in Studi di filologia e di letteratura italiana offerti a Carlo Dionisotti (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1973), 77–115. 132. Cristoforo Sabbadino, cited in Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 275. 133. Appuhn, Forest on the Sea, 275.
Chapter 2 1. The bibliography on early modern pastoral painting, although too lengthy to include in a single footnote, mostly comprises individual articles, anthologies, or chapters within much broader historical surveys of the topic. The foundational studies of pastoral painting in general remain Panofsky, “On the Conception of Transience”; Panofsky, “Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition”; Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Places of Delight, especially the essay by David Rosand (“Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” 21–81); Freedman, Classical Pastoral; and John Dixon Hunt, ed., The Pastoral Landscape, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 36 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992). 168
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2. Luca Signorelli’s now-destroyed Court of Pan, ca. 1490 (originally in Staatliche Museen, Berlin), exemplified the late-quattrocento interest in the visual pastoral as a mode appropriate for autonomous artworks. See the rich discussion of Signorelli in relation to Giorgione and Titian and pastoral poetry in Kristin Phillips-Court, The Perfect Genre: Drama and Painting in Renaissance Italy (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 159–69. 3. On the publication of Theocritus’s Idylls and Virgil’s Bucolics, see note 7 to this book’s introduction. Several of the poets listed in the text above produced work in the 1460s, such as Boiardo’s Pastoralia, but many of the texts were not published until later. Significantly, in 1482 Antonio Miscomini published in Florence a collection, Bucoliche elegantissimamente, with Virgil’s eclogues in the vernacular. Pomponio Gaurico in 1504 assembled a collection of eclogues: Eclogae: Vergilii, Calphurnii, Nemesiani, Francisci, Pe[trarchae], Ioannis Boc[cacii], Ioan bap Mã[tuani], Pomponii Gaurici. 4. Sannazaro wrote the Arcadia in the late fifteenth century, and a pirated edition appeared in print in 1502. See Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro, 96. For the Neapolitan literary world that fostered Sannazaro’s writings, see Matteo Soranzo, Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014). Stephen J. Campbell (in “Giorgione’s Tempest”) also identifies Lucretius as a significant source for pastoral-type paintings such as Giorgione’s Tempesta. 5. The restriction of pastoral sources in art-historical studies contrasts with the more liberal selection of sources for studies of the pastoral in other (even nonliterary) disciplines. See, for examples of the former, Freedman, Classical Pastoral, 1–5, 110–15; D. Rosand, “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” 24–77; and Jonathan Unglaub, “The Concert Champêtre: The Crises of History and the Limits of Pastoral,” Arion 5, no. 1 (1997): 46–96—and, for the latter, Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia. 6. See, for example, the reliance on iconography by Rudolf Wittkower, “L’Arcadia e il Giorgionismo,” in Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo veneziano, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence: Sansoni, 1963), 473–84. 7. These approaches are represented respectively by Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject”; James Elkins, “On Monstrously Ambiguous Paintings,” History and Theory 32, no. 3 (1993): 227–47; and D. Rosand, “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” 30. 8. Cooper, Pastoral, 100–111.
9. E. Kegel-Brinkgreve, The Echoing Woods: Bucolic and Pastoral from Theocritus to Wordsworth (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1990), 239–367. 10. Louise George Clubb, “Pastoral Elasticity on the Italian Stage and Page,” in Hunt, Pastoral Landscape, 111–28; Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia, 101–58; Sampson, Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy, 33–35. 11. For the contrast between urban and pastoral life, see the discussion in chapter 1 of this book. 12. Eugenio Battisti, “Le origini religiose del paesaggio Veneto,” in Esistenza, mito, ermeneutica: Scritti per Enrico Castelli (Padua: CEDAM, 1980), 1:227–46. 13. Una Roman D’Elia, The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15–26. 14. Goffen, “Icon and Vision.” 15. For the full range of Giovanni Bellini’s religious paintings, see Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 16. Hans Belting, “St. Jerome in Venice: Giovanni Bellini and the Dream of Solitary Life,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17, no. 1 (2014): 5–33. 17. See James S. Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 18. Millard Meiss, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Frick Collection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, 106–119; Emanuele Lugli, “Between Form and Representation: The Frick Saint Francis,” Art History 32, no. 1 (2009): 21–51. 19. D. Rosand, “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” 22; Turner, Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy, 57–81; Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: J. Murray, 1949), 23–25. 20. For Marcantonio Michiel’s inventory of Gabriel Vendramin’s collection, see Jaynie Anderson, “A Further Inventory of Gabriel Vendramin’s Collection,” Burlington Magazine 121, no. 919 (1979): 639–48. 21. “La tauola del San Francesco nel deserto a oglio fo opera de Zuan Bellino, cominciata da lui a M. Zuan Michiel et ha un paese propinquo finito e ricercato mirabilimente.” Marcantonio saw the picture in 1525 in the house of Taddeo Contarini. For the inventory entry, see Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano, 88–89. 22. “El paesetto in tela cun la tempesta, cun la cingana et soldato.” Ibid., 106, cited in Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: The Painter of ‘Poetic Brevity’ (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 363.
23. The contours of this iconographic tailspin are laid out by Salvatore Settis in his Giorgione’s “Tempest”: Interpreting the Hidden Subject, trans. Ellen Bianchini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), originally published as La “Tempesta” interpretata: Giorgione, i committenti, il soggetto (Milan: Einaudi, 1978). 24. “La tela della venere nuda, che dorme in un paese con Cupidine fo de mano de Zorzo da Castelfranco; ma lo paese et Cupidine forono finiti da Tiziano.” Cited by J. Anderson, Giorgione, 307. See also Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano, 88. 25. Belting, “St. Jerome in Venice,” 12–15. 26. For the ambiguity and lexical expansiveness of paysage, see Yves Giraud, Le paysage à la Renaissance (Fribourg: Éditions universitaires, 1988), and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Uncanny Landscape,” in The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 51–62. See also Gombrich, “Renaissance Theory of Art,” in Norm and Form, 109. 27. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro, 100–107. Although the dating of the first version of Sannazaro’s text is uncertain, there is consensus that he began work on it between 1486 and 1488, thereby giving a rough date for the conception of the titles. His second version, which became the definitive edition, was published in Naples in 1504—despite its pirated circulation a few years earlier, in 1502. For the two versions, see Soranzo, Poetry and Identity, 75. 28. The Pastoral Concert (Louvre) (fig. 1) is listed as pastorale in a late seventeenth-century inventory of Louis XIV’s collection. See Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. 3, The Mythological and Historical Paintings (London: Phaidon, 1975), cat. no. 29. 29. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Michael Tavernor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 299. 30. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture (New York: Dover, 1960), bk. v, chap. vi, p. 150. 31. Sebastiano Serlio, Libro secondo d’architettura (Venice, 1545), reprinted and translated in Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, ed. and trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 1:83–93. See also Sebastiano Serlio, “Il secondo libro di perspettiva,” in Storia documentaria del teatro italiano: Lo spettacolo dall’umanesimo al manierismo, ed. Ferruccio Marotti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974), 201. For Giraldi’s observations on the blending of the pastoral and the satyr play, see Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia, 168–69. Satyr plays Notes to Pages 47–51
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were also confused with satire in the sixteenth century, as Serlio’s comments about mockery in his description of the satiric/satyric stage set indicate. See J. W. Jolliffe, “Satire: Satura: ∑ATYPO∑: A Study in Confusion,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance 18 (1956): 84–95. 32. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, vol. 9 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), bk. xxxv, chaps. 116–17, p. 347. See also Gombrich, “Renaissance Theory of Art,” 113. 33. Aristotle’s Poetics had been available in print in Latin translation with Valla’s edition from 1498. It was Alessandro Pazzi’s Latin translation, published in 1536, that had an enormous and almost immediate impact. See Marvin T. Herrick, Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 44. 34. A comprehensive anthology of cinquecento treatises on the visual arts is Paola Barocchi’s Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, fra manierismo e Controriforma, 3 vols. (Bari: G. Laterza, 1960–62). 35. Pino, Dialogo di pittura, 145, trans. and cited in Gombrich, “Renaissance Theory of Art,” 116. 36. Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, esp. 106–17. 37. J. Anderson, Giorgione, 81–125; D. Rosand, “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” 59–67. 38. D. Rosand, “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral,” 30–81, discusses each of these pictures through the lens of the pastoral. See also J. Anderson, Giorgione, for a fuller bibliography of each picture, which is also supplied in subsequent notes for the current chapter. 39. Marianne Koos, Bildnisse des Begehrens: Das lyrische Männerporträt in der venezianischen Malerei des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts—Giorgione, Tizian und ihr Umkreis (Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 2006). See also Koos’s “Imagination, Identity, and the Poetics of Desire in Giorgione’s Painting,” American Imago 57, no. 4 (2000): 369–85. The attribution of the Hampton Court picture to Giorgione was questioned by John Shearman, whose suggestion of Titian was affirmed by Alessandro Ballarin and Jaynie Anderson. See Shearman, The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 253–56; Ballarin, Le siècle de Titien, 739; and Anderson, Giorgione, 327–28. 40. Scholars frame the conundrums presented by Giorgione’s work in terms of subject matter, but they are also addressing questions of genre. See Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject.” 170
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41. X-rays of the picture were published by Johannes Wilde, “Röntgenaufnahmen der ‘Drei Philosphen’ Giorgiones under der ‘Zigeunermadonna’ Tizians,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 6 (1932): 141–54. See also J. Anderson, Giorgione, 86–90. Alexander Nagel identifies this destabilization of generic categories as one of the hallmarks of cinquecento art. For his observations on the Three Philosophers specifically, see his Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 57–70. 42. Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15–62. See more recently Lina Bolzoni, Il cuore di cristallo: Ragionamenti d’amore, poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento (Turin: Einaudi, 2010), 264–65. 43. In her Pastoral and Ideology Annabel Patterson recognizes this historical diversity and continuity by shifting the frame of her inquiry from thinking about what pastoral is to what pastoral does. 44. The lack of consistency might account for the omission of the pastoral from the delineation of genres in the writings of Horace (Art of Poetry) and Aristotle (Poetics). Recent literary scholars have shifted their consideration of genre away from formal consistency as the sole or central criterion, especially after the work of M. M. Bakhtin and Tzvetan Todorov, who redirected the study of genre from the definition of categories to a consideration of human speech and behavior. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres” (1952–53), in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–103; Todorov, “The Origin of Genres,” New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 159–70. Not all successive scholars accept Bahktin’s and Todorov’s formulations: Alastair Fowler, for example, in his Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genre and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), emphasizes the historical contingency of genres as “family groupings,” which facilitate comparative interpretations. See also Heather Dubrow, Genre (London: Methuen, 1982). 45. Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, 66. For a slightly different view, one that finds more consistency in Theocritus’s compositions, see Halperin, Before Pastoral, 27–35, 193–216. 46. Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, 47. 47. Ibid., 10–11. 48. Ibid. Alpers’s footnote to this cited passage (11n4) is equally helpful with its succinct annotation of specific scholarly publications on pastoral. 49. Timothy Saunders, Bucolic Ecology: Virgil’s “Eclogues”
and the Environmental Literary Tradition (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral?; Gifford, Pastoral. Mackenzie, Poetry of Place, 22–23, discusses the problematic anachronism of ecocriticism in Renaissance studies. 50. James Edmund Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, 1684–1798 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952), 16–20. 51. Cooper, Pastoral, 9–23. The Aldine version only published twelve of the thirty idylls. The earliest Latin translation published in Italy was by Martino Filetico, sometime in the fifteenth century. Filetico’s Bucolica contained only five of the idylls. 52. Kegel-Brinkgreve, Echoing Woods, 231–37; Cooper, Pastoral, 50–59; William Powell Jones, The Pastourelle: A Study of the Origins and Tradition of a Lyric Type (New York: Octagon Books, 1973). On pastoral romance, see Marsha S. Collins, Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance (New York: Routledge, 2016). 53. Kegel-Brinkgreve, Echoing Woods, 296–314; Cooper, Pastoral, 100–110. On the complicated publication history of Sannazaro’s Arcadia, see Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro, 97–107. 54. Kegel-Brinkgreve, Echoing Woods, 296–314; Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia, 69. 55. The bibliography on this subject is too vast to be cited here. Still the foundational study for Renaissance art is Rensselaer W. Lee, “Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” Art Bulletin 22, no. 4 (1940): 197–269. 56. Unglaub does not make this claim of identification, but he does suggest that the figures are meant to evoke the Virgilian duo. See his “Concert Champêtre” and “The Concert Champêtre and the Poetics of Dispossession,” in Pastoral and the Humanities: Arcadia Re-inscribed, ed. Mathilde Skoie and Sonia Bjørnstad-Velázquez (Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006), 126–46. 57. Many scholars of the Venetian pastoral, in asserting the importance of early-cinquecento political events, such as the Battle of Agnadello, for the appearance of the pastoral, point out or imply the resemblance between the depicted and the actual countryside. See, for example, Cosgrove, Palladian Landscape, 49–50. Cosgrove’s orientation as a cultural geographer affects how he draws the connection between painting and geography, but many art historians also arrive at similar conclusions about the allusion to actual landscapes in pastoral pictures. 58. For example, the description of the ivy cup in Theocritus, Idylls, “Idyll 1.”
59. Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 72–73. 60. Rensselaer W. Lee, “Adventures of Angelica: Early Frescoes Illustrating the Orlando furioso,” Art Bulletin 59, no. 1 (1977): 39–46. 61. Timothy Wilson, “Xanto and Ariosto,” Burlington Magazine 132, no. 1046 (1990): 321–27; Giancarlo Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 107–9; Peter Humfrey, “Melissa, Also Called Circe,” in Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, ed. Andrea Bayer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 114–18. Christopher Wood observes that Dosso could have made the reference to Melissa more clear and concludes that the painting self-reflexively exploits its own wordlessness. Wood, “Countermagical Combinations by Dosso Dossi,” Res 49–50 (2006): 163–64. 62. Most readers of pastoral identify this consistency as a central feature, with many scholars orienting their approaches around it. See, for example, Judith Haber, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Thomas K. Hubbard, The Pipes of Pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). 63. Sannazaro, Arcadia, 151–52. 64. Cooper, Pastoral, 35–37. 65. Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri, ed. Vincenzo Romano (Bari: G. Laterza, 1951), xiv.10, cited and translated by Cooper, Pastoral, 37. 66. Bembo, Gli Asolani, 28: “and since the grandeur of nature could not enter those narrow souls nor reason penetrate their lazy minds to speak to them, the poets yet devised these fables, in which, as under a transparent glass, they veiled the truth.” See also Claudia Berra, “Il Bembo ‘antibucolico,’” in La poesia pastorale nel Rinascimento, ed. Stefano Carrai (Padua: Antenore, 1998), 235–43, and Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia, 68–70. On the ancient use of pastoral as a vehicle for allegorical commentary, see Halperin, Before Pastoral, 38–39. 67. For a survey of these early modern types of formal inventions and their significance, see Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 68. The semiotics of the picture plane, although not limited to visual allegory, nonetheless structures many Notes to Pages 56–59
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allegorical pictures. See Meyer Schapiro, “On Some Problems of the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in ImageSigns,” Semiotica 1, no. 3 (1969): 223–42. 69. Settis, Giorgione’s “Tempest,” gives a summary of these allegorical readings. 70. The consideration of both the nonpastoral and the pastoral worlds as possessing imaginative capacity differs from thinking about only the pastoral world as a dreamworld, as often occurs in scholarship on the subject. See especially Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). Kegel-Brinkgreve (Echoing Woods, 334) considers Sannazaro’s Arcadia specifically as an example of “pastoral dream-country,” an innovation that “should not be related to a general concept already present throughout Virgil’s Eclogues.” 71. Williams, Country and the City, esp. 1–8. 72. Although neither Alpers (What Is Pastoral?) nor Patterson (Pastoral and Ideology) sets out to address precisely or explicitly the relationship between the two worlds (especially Alpers, who focuses on the shepherd to the exclusion of the landscape), they nonetheless intimate the historical shifts in the treatment of the two worlds by treating the pastoral over a broad period of time. 73. Gifford, Pastoral, 2. One of the origins for the retreat into and return from the pastoral setting was Plato’s Phaedrus. See Celeste Marguerite Schenck, Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 23–28. 74. Kegel-Brinkgreve, Echoing Woods, 284–96. 75. Giovanni Boccaccio, L’Ameto, trans. Judith Powers Serafini-Sauli (New York: Garland, 1985), chap. 49, p. 143. 76. The final two eclogues, 11 and 12, and their accompanying prose, as well as the epilogue “To His Sampogna,” were not included in the very first publication, in 1502, which was not authorized by Sannazaro. All editions after the “authorized” version in 1504 include this material. See Nash’s introduction to his translation of Arcadia, 10. 77. Sannazaro, Arcadia, chap. 12, pp. 133–34. 78. Ibid., p. 138. 79. Ibid., p. 141. 80. Frye, “Argument of Comedy,” in Anatomy of Criticism, 182–84. The essay originally appeared in English Institute Essays 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949). 81. Berger, “Renaissance Imagination.” 172
Notes to Pages 59–64
82. Harry Berger Jr., “Second-World Prosthetics: Supplying Deficiencies of Nature in Renaissance Italy,” in Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England, ed. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 98–147. David Quint, although not relying on the terminology of the “green world,” also conceives of the pastoral as self-contained. Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 45–47. 83. For a similar absorptive dynamic for later nonpastoral artworks, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 84. Oftentimes art historians make the argument that smaller artworks in general draw greater attention to the artifice, to the status of the artwork as made, and affirm objects as the self-conscious statement of the artist’s bravura. My claim here is that this affirmation, if it can be ascribed to these pastoral artworks, is secondary to the goal of viewer engagement. I have argued this elsewhere for Titian’s later paintings: “Late Titian and the Haptic Gaze,” in Venetian Painting Matters, 1450–1750, ed. Jodi Cranston (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 77–89. 85. Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject.” 86. The predominance of landscape in pastoral pictures oftentimes leads scholars to insert them within a progression toward “pure” landscape, with the result of misunderstanding the centrality of the interrelationship of figures and landscape. Gombrich initiates this approach in his essay “Renaissance Theory of Art.” Historians of landscape painting approach these pictures similarly. See, for example, Turner, Vision of Landscape, and K. Clark, Landscape into Art. Later historians of landscape painting have relaxed the expectation of teleological progression by according their subject larger interpretative frames such as memory (Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory [New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995]) and artistic self-reflection (Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer). For a helpful discussion of the problematic concept of landscape, see DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory. 87. Alberti, On the Art of Building, bk. 9, chap. 4, pp. 299–300. 88. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270), trans. and ed. A. Philip McMahon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), vol. 2, fols. 11r–12v; translation in 1:28–30. See the translation and discussion of Leon-
ardo’s passage in Mary Pardo, “Artifice as Seduction in Titian,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 66–68. 89. Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani has many examples of a similar kind of imaginative projection onto the pastoral landscape: “I daily see a thousand places which would help me to recall [her charms]: places she visited for one amusement or another, which I no sooner eye than I remind myself, ‘Here my lady was on such a day.’ . . . So as I think and walk, I murmur now with myself and now with Love, now with the very trees, the hillsides, and the river banks which saw her there” (126–27). Another passage relevant to my discussion: “a pleasure tasted can be recalled in only one embodiment, that which it had, but a pleasure not realized can be imagined in a thousand forms, all dear and charming and delightful” (134). 90. For a preliminary and useful survey of Leonardo and his relationship to and figuration of nature, see Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci. 91. Alexander Nagel, “Leonardo and sfumato,” Res 24 (1993): 7–20. See also Geoff Lehman, “Measure and the Unmeasurable: Perspective and the Renaissance Landscape” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2010). 92. Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject,” 214–16. 93. See Nagel, “Leonardo and sfumato.” 94. “The gentle manner of Dosso of Ferrara is esteemed in his proper works, but most of all in those which are called parerga. For devoting himself with relish to the pleasant diversions of painting he used to depict jagged rocks, green groves, the firm banks of traversing rivers, the flourishing work of the countryside, the gay and hard toil of the peasants, and also the far distant prospects of land and sea, fleets, fowling, hunting, and all that genre so pleasing to the eyes in a lavish and festive style.” Paolo Giovio, as cited and translated in Gombrich, “Renaissance Theory of Art,” 115–16. This passage, replete with its Derridean associations, has been discussed by Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer, esp. 58–64, and Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi, esp. 5–7. 95. My thinking about the spatialization of subjectivity has benefited greatly from the consideration of literature from the perspective of cartography, which frames the multivalent concepts of space and place through the phenomenological imagination. See Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Hodges, Urban Poetics; and Mackenzie, Poetry of Place. These specific
studies are themselves based on a much larger literature on imagined spaces and places. For a helpful summary of this scholarship, see Mackenzie, Poetry of Place, 3–31. 96. Curtius, European Literature, 195. 97. One of the few scholars to isolate the landscape as a central feature of ancient pastoral is Eleanor Winsor Leach. See her Vergil’s Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974) and “Parthenian Caverns: Remapping of an Imaginative Topography,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 539–60. 98. Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, 449. 99. See especially Poggioli, Oaten Flute. 100. Saunders, Bucolic Ecology; Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral? 101. My thinking here has been influenced by Elizabeth Helsinger’s discussion of landscape in her essay “Blindness and Insights,” in DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory, 325–28. 102. Among others, see D. Rosand, “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” 48–49. 103. D’Elia, Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings, 20. 104. The association between figures and landscape is often explained by the long-held connection between women and nature. One of the seminal books on this relationship is Merchant, Death of Nature. Many successive scholars have attempted to give a more nuanced history of the relationship. See, for example, Katherine Park, “Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Datson and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 50–73. 105. Sannazaro, Arcadia, “Eclogue 4,” lines 1–12, 53. 106. Ibid., 34, 36, 47, 57, 62, 102, 105. 107. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London: Smith, Elder, 1856), vol. 3, pt. 4, p. 159. 108. Quotes taken from the essay by Bernard F. Dick, “Ancient Pastoral and the Pathetic Fallacy,” Comparative Literature 20 (1968): 27–44. See also Jeffrey M. Hurwit, “Palm Trees and the Pathetic Fallacy in Archaic Greek Poetry and Art,” Classical Journal 77 (1982): 193–99. Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, in The Green Cabinet, his study of pastoral, asks: “Given the Greek tendency to hypostatize nature into woodland creatures and mythological fancies, does it make sense to apply the nineteenth-century yardstick, product of realism and scientism, of the pathetic fallacy?” (248). 109. Sannazaro, Arcadia, “Eclogue 1,” lines 94–98, 103–5. 110. Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia, 49–50, Notes to Pages 64–70
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notes, as do most scholars on the cinquecento pastoral, how Sannazaro made his shepherds speak the language of Petrarch. See also Cooper, Pastoral, 107. For Petrarch’s conception of landscape, see Kenneth E. Cool, “The Petrarchan Landscape as Palimpsest,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 11 (1981): 83–100; Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels, esp. chap. 3; Jennifer Petrie, Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition, and the Canzoniere (Dublin: University College Dublin, 1983), 92–96; Leach, “Parthenian Caverns.” 111. Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Libri i–viii, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), iv.1, p. 172. 112. Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels, chap. 3; Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, 58–79. 113. “I’ l’ò più volte (or chi fia che mi ’l creda?) / ne l’acqua chiara et sopra l’erba verde / veduto viva, et nel troncon d’un faggio / . . . / et quanto in più selvaggio / loco mi trovo e ’n più deserto lido, / tanto più bella il mio pensier l’adombra. / Poi quando il vero sgombra / quel dolce error, pur lì medesmo assido / me freddo, pietra morta in pietra viva, / in guisa d’uom che pensi et pianga et scriva.” Francesco Petrarca, “Rima 129” in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The “Rime Sparse” and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 264–67. 114. Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia, discusses the influence of Petrarch on Renaissance pastoral poetry and music, as well as Pietro Bembo’s impact on the importance of Petrarch for cinquecento literature. 115. Elizabeth Cropper, “The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 175–90. 116. Another related example is Giorgione’s Young Boy with Arrow, ca. 1505–10, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. See J. Anderson, Giorgione, 300, 327–28; Ballarin, in Le siècle de Titien, 700, 739; and Koos, Bildnisse des Begehrens. 117. For the indications of impersonation in portraiture, see Cranston, Poetics of Portraiture, 85–97.
Chapter 3 1. The bibliography on this monumental woodblock print centers on the work of Juergen Schulz, who has discussed the symbolic connotations of the view. See Schulz, 174
Notes to Pages 70–77
“Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View”; Schulz, “The Printed Plans and Panoramic Views of Venice (1486–1797),” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 7 (1970): 7–182; Schulz, “La grande veduta a volo d’uccello di Jacopo de’ Barbari,” in A volo d’uccello: Jacopo de’ Barbari e le rappresentazioni di città nell’Europa del Rinascimento, ed. Giandomenico Romanelli and Susanna Biadene (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1999), 58–66; Deborah Howard, “Venice as a Dolphin: Further Investigations into Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 35 (1997): 101–11; and Bronwen Wilson, “From Myth to Metropole: Sixteenth-Century Printed Maps of Venice,” in World in Venice, 23–69. Wilson also includes related bibliography on subsequent views of the city. 2. Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View”; Schulz, “Printed Plans”; Giocondo Cassini, Piante e vedute prospettiche di Venezia (1479–1855) (Venice: Stamperia di Venezia, 1982). 3. There has been considerable debate around the technical means by which Jacopo de’ Barbari created this view, with most scholars concluding that the woodcut was a studio fabrication resulting from a recent survey. Schulz first believed, as stated in “Printed Plans” (1970), that the view resulted from scientific processes, and then, due to spatial compression in the western cityscape, he changed his opinion. See Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View,” 436–40, and also Lucia Nuti, “The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century: The Invention of a Representational Language,” Art Bulletin 76, no. 1 (1994): 105–28. 4. Gentile Bellini’s Procession in St. Mark’s Square, ca. 1496, is perhaps among the best-known examples of such urban narrative pictures. For the broader tradition of Venetian narrative painting, and the use of perspective to affirm eyewitness views, see P. F. Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting. 5. Relevant bibliography for each painting is provided later in this chapter. Other scholars have noticed the appearance of views of Venice in these pictures, as well as in others not considered here. For a compilation of pictures with vedute of Venice, see Corboz, “L’immagine di Venezia.” In addition to the pictures mentioned above, Corboz includes Giorgione’s Ashmolean Virgin and Child with a View of Venice (Tallard Madonna), ca. 1509, now attributed possibly to one of Giorgione’s pupils, such as Sebastiano del Piombo or Giovanni Cariani; Titian, Saint Roch, woodcut (British Museum, London); Bonifazio Veronese, God the Father over the Piazza San Marco (Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice), ca. 1540; Jacopo Palma il Giovane, Doge Renieri Zen (Oratorio dei
Crociferi, Venice); Titian, Faith Adored by Doge Antonio Grimani (Palazzo Ducale, Venice). Giovanni Cariani’s Allegory of a Venetian Victory (Mario Lanfranchi, Rome) also includes a distant background view of Venice, with allegorical figures foregrounded on a verdant island (reproduced in Jane Martineau and Charles Hope, eds., The Genius of Venice, 1500–1600 [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983], 60). 6. The so-called myth of Venice best encapsulates the interplay between the city of Venice and the imaginary across all facets of Venetian culture. For its iconography, see D. Rosand, Myths of Venice. See also Crouzet-Pavan, Venise triomphante. 7. The early modern interest in the insular and the cartographic receives sensitive articulation in Simone Pinet, Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Pinet’s work, as she recognizes, finds inspiration from Frank Lestringant, Le livre des îles: Atlas et récits insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002), and Conley, Self-Made Map. My thinking about the ontological significance of urban places in Renaissance culture has also been shaped by Hodges, Urban Poetics. 8. Pinet, Archipelagoes, 67–68. Subsequent notes include references for these specific instances of islands and the insular. 9. Nuti, “Perspective Plan,” 108–10; Francesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography, and Politics in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Denis E. Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds: Culture and Cartography in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Imago Mundi 44 (1992): 65–89; Lehman, “Measure and the Unmeasurable.” For Venetian views in particular, see Elizabeth Horodowich, “Editors and Armchair Travelers: The Venetian Discovery of the New World,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 36, no. 4 (2005): 1039–62. Vasari, however, clarified the approximation involved in execution and reception/interpretation when he referred to as ritratti (or “portraits”) his own city views in a series of paintings that commemorated specific historical events in Florence. See Ryan E. Gregg, “Panorama, Power, and History: Vasari and Stradano’s City Views in the Palazzo Vecchio” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008), 132–33. 10. On the figuration of Venice specifically, see D. Rosand, Myths of Venice. Cristelle Baskins addresses personification allegory from the perspective of its effect on social context: “Shaping Civic Personification: Pisa sforzata, Pisa
salvata,” in Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning, ed. Cristelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 91–108. 11. Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, trans. Tom Conley, ed. Edward H. Dahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 114–17; Wilson, World in Venice; Conley, Self-Made Map. For the Berlin drawing, consult Lehman, “Measure and the Unmeasurable.” 12. Divo Savelli, Firenze nella pittura dal xivº al xviº secolo (Florence: A. Gori, 1993), esp. 136–38, 154, 164–66, 188, 208. For the interpretation of the city view in a religious picture as a simile of paradise, see Kornelia Imesch, “The Spiritual and the Civic Meaning of Pollaiuolo’s Berlin Annunciation,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 25 (2000): 41–85. See also Patricia Lee Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), esp. 217–18. 13. Corboz, “L’immagine di Venezia.” 14. Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View,” 458. This tends to be a widely held understanding of the relationship between city views and figurative events staged in the same pictorial space. P. F. Brown (Venetian Narrative Painting, 137) repeats Schulz’s interpretation. 15. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin, 1991), ¶20, p. 58. 16. For the Venetian adoption of perspective, see P. F. Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, esp. 100–153, and David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8–16. 17. One of the most useful studies on the drawing books, their attribution, condition, and manufacture, is Colin Eisler, The Genius of Jacopo Bellini: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989). 18. Reproduced in ibid. 19. The sea is neither entirely formless nor divisible as laid out in the discussion of smooth and striated surfaces by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474–500. 20. Fenlon, Ceremonial City, 85–118. 21. Nicole Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, trans. W. Donald Wilson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 26–46. 22. Addressed to J. Chamberlain, the letter was dated 21 Notes to Pages 77–86
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September 1587. Cited in John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 336n21. 23. Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth.” 24. For the role of perspective in Italian landscape depiction, see Lehman (“Measure and the Unmeasurable,” 33–45), who discusses at length Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the Arno Valley (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence). 25. For a summary of interpretations of the landscape as a reflection of the sitter’s character, see W. Smith, “Observations on the Mona Lisa Landscape.” 26. Indicative of this reading is the catalogue entry for the painting in Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, ed. David Alan Brown and Sylvia FerinoPagden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 248. 27. Edgar Peters Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber, Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 3–5. I am grateful to James Turner for this reference. See also Philip Fehl, “A Literary Keynote for Pompeo Batoni’s The Triumph of Venice,” North Carolina Museum of Art Bulletin 10, no. 3 (1971): 3–15; Anthony M. Clark, Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue of His Works with an Introductory Text (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985), 213; and Fenlon, Ceremonial City, 1–5. 28. The incomplete campanile, without its spire, in Sebastiano’s Death of Adonis and Giorgione’s (?) Tallard Madonna captures the construction process, which was completed in 1514. 29. See note 13 to the introduction. 30. The reliance by recent scholarship in every discipline in the humanities and social science on the concept of heterotopia makes impossible any attempt to summarize the bibliography. For some of the more relevant studies for the current chapter, see the sources listed in note 13 to the introduction, as well as Lorenzo Pericolo, “Heterotopia in the Renaissance: Modern Hybrids as Antiques in Bramante, Cima da Conegliano, and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” Getty Research Journal, no. 1 (2009): 1–16. The most comprehensive bibliography on the subject can be found on a website curated by Peter Johnson: http://www.heterotopia studies.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Bibliography -word-updated-June-2013-pdf.pdf. 31. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), trans. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), xviii: “Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they 176
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secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together.’” 32. Scholars employing the concept of “heterotopia” often make this leap, assuming that there is an unproblematic application to represented spaces. See, for example, Pericolo, “Heterotopia in the Renaissance,” 2. 33. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 182. For the essay “The Argument of Comedy,” see Dean, Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, 79–89. 34. Petrarch, Lettere senili, ed. Giuseppe Fracassetti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1869), vol. 1, bk. 2, letter 3, pp. 104–13, quotation taken from p. 111. 35. Petrarch’s criticism of merchant trade seems to be based on ancient authors’ suspicion of seafaring. Hesiod, Aratus, Catullus, Horace, Tibullus, and Ovid all refer to the Golden Age as a time before seafaring. And Virgil, in his Eclogues 4.31–35, designates the Argo, the ship on which Jason and the Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece, as symbolic of a fall from the Golden Age. 36. Petrarch, Lettere senili, 110. 37. Ibid., 111. 38. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 39. Valerie I. J. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 40. Horodowich, “Editors and Armchair Travelers,” 1039–62; Angela Caracciolo Aricò, “Il nuovo mondo e l’umanesimo: Immagini e miti dell’editoria veneziana,” in L’impatto della scoperta dell’America nella cultura veneziana, ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 25–33; Daria Perocco, “‘Un male non pensato’: Pietro Bembo e la scoperta dell’America,” in ibid., 279–92. 41. Frank Lestringant, “Venise et l’archipel: Quinsay, Mexico, Venezuela,” in Le livre des îles, 89–132; Federica Ambrosini, “Echi della conquista del Messico nella Venezia del Cinquecento,” in Aricò, L’impatto della scoperta, 7–23. In “Virtual Reality and the Isolario,” Annali d’italianistica 14 (1996): 121–30, Tom Conley considers the islands in these island atlases as “virtual realities,” which acknowledges their
fictionalizing potential and networked connectivity. 42. Isolario di Benedetto Bordone, bk 2, xxvi–xxvii. Bordone’s book follows the earlier, fifteenth-century island atlas by Cristoforo Buondelmonti (Liber Insularum Archipelagi [1420]) and the first printed isolario by Bartolomeo delli Sonetti (1485–86). For the genre of the isolario and its relationship to exploration and expansion, see George Tolias, “The Politics of the Isolario: Maritime Cosmography and Overseas Expansion During the Renaissance,” Historical Review 9 (2012): 27–52. 43. David Young Kim, “Uneasy Reflections: Images of Venice and Tenochtitlan in Benedetto Bordone’s ‘Isolario,’” Res 49–50 (2006): 80–91. 44. Ibid., 88. 45. Felix Fabri, The Wanderings of Felix Fabri, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1892), vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 79–80. 46. Jacopo de’ Barbari captures in his View of Venice the plenitude of gardens in Venice and the green spaces on the Giudecca. Other views, especially those which include the Lido and the outer islands, such as Bordone’s (1528) and Matteo Pagan’s (1550), emphasize the uninhabited green spaces of the lagoon. Views until the mid-nineteenth century are compiled and reproduced in Cassini, Piante e Vedute. Francesco Sansovino, in his Venetia, città nobilissima (1581), highlights the number of urban gardens. 47. The early modern perception that islands fulfilled the expectation that paradise existed at the edge of the known world is discussed in John R. Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 48. Isolario di Benedetto Bordone, xxviiv, xvir. 49. See note 28 to the introduction. 50. Venetian readers, such as Ramusio and Bembo, knew about these theories from ancient texts, including Seneca’s Medea and Plato’s Timaeus. See James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 9–25. For Bembo, see Perocco, “‘Un male non pensato.’” 51. Pietro Bembo, Della historia vinitiana (Venice, 1552), bk. 6, pp. 1070–71. 52. Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 58–83. Early-cinquecento Venetian editions of Columbus’s travels emphasized the uncorrupted state of the places and people in the New World. Around 1525, when cities in Central
America were discovered, the tone began to change. See Aricò, “Il nuovo mondo,” 26–29. Arcadia, which is given as a place-name to many New World sites, comes from the perceived similarities between these regions and the pastoral worlds described in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia. See E. H. Wilkins, “Arcadia in America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 101, no. 1 (1957): 4–30. 53. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “An Ecological Understanding of the Myth of Venice,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. John Jeffries Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 39–66. 54. The Letters of Cassiodorus, trans. Thomas Hodgkin (London: Henry Frowde, 1886), bk. xii, letter 24. Cassiodorus, who was a high-ranking Roman functionary, wrote the letter to negotiate with the leaders of Venice to supply Ravenna with foodstuffs. 55. Isolario di Benedetto Bordone, xxvir. 56. Letters of Cassiodorus, bk. xii, letter 24. 57. Pindar, “Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo,” lines 51–61. Ovid mentions Delos (Ortygia) in his Metamorphoses, bk. 15, lines 337–39: “Delos once moved like a ship that drifts among the waves. Now it is fixed.” For the literary examples of floating islands, see Stephanos Stephanides and Susan Bassnett, “Islands, Literature, and Cultural Translatability,” Journal of Global Cultural Studies (2008): 5–21; Julie Nishimura-Jensen, “Unstable Geographies: The Moving Landscape in Apollonius’ Argonautica and Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 130 (2000): 287–317; and Chet Van Duzer, Floating Islands: A Global Bibliography (Los Altos, Calif.: Cantor Press, 2004). 58. Pliny the Elder (Natural History, bk. ii, chaps. 89–94) finds many examples of floating islands and notes their emergence and absorption over time, creating undependable shores. He treats Delos and Rhodes in the same discussion. 59. Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Description des îles de l’Archipel grec, ed. and trans. Émile Legrand (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1974), 171–72, 276–78. Discussed and cited in Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice & Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 78–80. 60. Francesco Sansovino notes the distance of Arcadia from the sea in the preface to his edition of Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia (Venice, 1559): “Ella è d’ogn’intorno lontano da mare per molte miglia.” Ancient authors had affirmed the opposition between the pastoral and the maritime by Notes to Pages 90–93
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connecting the end of the Golden Age to the arrival of seafaring, as noted above. However, in many of the pastoral poems set within view of or nearby the ocean the relationship between land and sea emphasizes or reconciles these tensions. See, for example, Theocritus, Idylls, “Idyll 11.” 61. Deborah Howard, The Architectural History of Venice, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 50. 62. See the discussion of private gardens in chapter 1. For Pagan’s view, see Cassini, Piante e vedute, 40–41. 63. Andrea Calmo: “Veri paradisi terrestri per la vaghezza del aere e del orto, luogo de ninfe e di semi-dei.” Cited in Ady, Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, 102. Pietro Aretino: “ventaglio della state, poi che il respirare del suo vento, l’ombra del suo verde, soavità de i suoi fiori, et il canto de i suoi augelli petrarchevoli, rinfresca, ricuopre, diletta, et addormenta.” Lettere sull’arte, 1:107. 64. On the urban/pastoral tension implicit in the mode, see Williams, Country and the City. 65. See, for example, Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 93. 66. Theocritus, Idylls, “Idyll 11”; Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk, 13, lines 789–869. The association between the sea and epic poetry is discussed by Curtius, European Literature, 128–31, and Stephen Harrison, “The Primal Voyage and the Ocean of Epos: Two Aspects of Metapoetic Imagery in Catullus, Virgil, and Horace,” Dictynna 4 (2007), http:// journals.openedition.org/dictynna/146. 67. Some of the letters are reproduced in Julia Mary Cartwright Ady, Beatrice d’Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475–1497: A Study of the Renaissance, 6th ed. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910), 186–91. 68. Sanudo, Venice, cità excelentissima, 496. On urban theatrical productions, see Lina Padoan Urban, “Gli spettacoli urbani e l’utopia,” in Puppi, Architettura e utopia, 144–66. 69. Folio 39r is reproduced in Cesare Vecellio, The Clothing of the Renaissance World, ed. and trans. Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 41. 70. Aldo Rossi revisited these ideas with his version of a floating teatro del mondo, his submission to the 1979–80 Venice Biennale. 71. Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, 146–58. 72. Cited in ibid., 160. 73. Discussed in Titus Heydenreich, Tadel und Lob der Seefahrt: Das Nachleben eines antiken Themas in den romanischen Literaturen (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1970), 196. 178
Notes to Pages 93–98
74. For Baroque garden-islands, see Margherita Azzi Visentini, “Islands of Delight: Shifting Perceptions of the Borromean Islands,” in Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion, ed. Michael Conan (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2005), 247n4. 75. Mario Zaniboni, Gli Estensi nelle loro delizie: Ferrara medievale e rinascimentale (Ferrara: Vicentini, 1987); Andrea Bayer, “Dosso’s Public: The Este Court at Ferrara,” in Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, ed. Andrea Bayer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 44. 76. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 515. 77. Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 311–25. Islands of love also appear in later poems, including Luís Vaz de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572) and Giovan Battista Marino’s L’Adone (1623). 78. Nathalie Bouloux, “Les îles dans les descriptions géographiques et les cartes du Moyen Âge,” Médiévales 47 (2004): 57. Translation from Pinet, Archipelagoes, 37. 79. Compare, for example, the connotations of islands expressed by Pinet, Archipelagoes, 67–68, and the kinds of messages presented through the myths of Venice as discussed by D. Rosand, Myths of Venice. 80. The circumstances of the commission for Sebastiano’s Death of Adonis are unclear, in large part because of the uncertainty around the specific date of its execution. The background details of the Moors striking the bell on the Torre dell’Orologio suggest that the picture was executed after 1508, and the missing spire on the campanile suggests that it was executed before 1514, when that construction had been completed. Sebastiano arrived in Rome sometime during 1511; his frescoes in the lunettes of the Sala di Galatea were finished in January 1512. Most scholars believe that the painting was begun during the first year or two of his time in Rome and suggest that the view of Venice was captured in a drawing by the artist before he left. The dating is only important for this argument insofar as it reveals the (un)importance of a firsthand recording of the city view. There is no evidence of a commission by Agostino Chigi; however, the timing of the picture’s execution and the artist’s departure to Rome after Chigi’s visit to Venice suggests that the banker was the intended recipient. For a discussion of the picture and its relevant bibliography, see Michael Hirst, Sebastiano del Piombo (Oxford: Clarendon,
1981), 37–39, and Mauro Lucco, L’opera completa di Sebastiano del Piombo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), 101–2. The picture was seriously damaged by the bombing of the Uffizi in 1993 and immediately restored by Antonio Natali. Titian’s Gozzi Altarpiece was placed in San Francesco ad Alto in Ancona. For the history of the picture and the circumstances of its commission, see the essays collected in Tiziano: La pala Gozzi di Ancona, ed. Michele Polverari (Bologna: Grafis, 1988). 81. For Chigi, see Felix Gilbert, The Pope, His Banker, and Venice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). For Gozzi, see Pietro Zampetti, “Tiziano fino al 1520,” in Tiziano: La pala Gozzi, 11–20, and Michele Polverari, “mcxx Titianus Cadorinus pinsit,” in ibid., 23–35. 82. A 1520 inventory taken of the Farnesina is reprinted in Roberto Bartalini, “Due episodi del mecenatismo di Agostino Chigi e le antichità della Farnesina,” Prospettiva 67 (1992): 17–38. James Turner has kindly pointed out to me that the picture was most likely placed on the ground floor, in a room overlooking the giardino segreto. 83. Bernard Aikema, Painters of Venice: The Story of the Venetian ‘Veduta,’ trans. Andrew McCormick, with the assistance of Bev Jackson (The Hague: Rijksmuseum, 1990). 84. Molly Bourne, “Francesco II Gonzaga and Maps as Palace Decorations in Renaissance Mantua,” Imago Mundi 51 (1999): 67. 85. Sarah Benson, “Reproduction, Fragmentation, and Collection: Rome and the Origin of Souvenirs,” in Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance, and Place, ed. D. Medina Lesansky and Brian McClaren (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 15–36. 86. Lisa Pon, “A Document for Titian’s St Roch,” Print Quarterly 19 (2002): 275–77. 87. Stewart, On Longing, 144–45. 88. Titian’s Saint Christopher, commissioned by Doge Andrea Gritti, was one of the artist’s few frescoes and was placed on a wall above a private stairway used by the doge to travel between his private residence and the upper floors, where meetings of the senate and full council were held. Ettore Merkel, “San Cristoforo,” in Tiziano, ed. Francesco Valcanover (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), 184–86. For the association between distance, power, and knowledge, especially in sea voyage, see Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 89. Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611; repr., London: W. Cater, 1776), 232.
90. Stewart, On Longing, 78; John T. Ogden, “The Power of Distance in Wordsworth’s Prelude,” PMLA 88, no. 2 (1973): 246–59. 91. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 419. 92. Other examples of the genre are Lucian’s Verae historiae, which includes travels to the moon and many islands, and Varro’s Endymniones. Stewart, On Longing, 79. 93. The similarity of Titian’s altarpiece and Raphael’s Foligno Altarpiece has been noted previously by Zampetti, “Tiziano fino al 1520,” 19, and Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 308. The influence of Fra Bartolommeo’s altarpieces on Raphael (and Titian) is discussed by Creighton Gilbert, “Some Findings on Early Works of Titian,” Art Bulletin 62, no. 1 (1980): 53; Peter Humfrey, “Fra Bartolommeo, Venice, and St. Catherine of Siena,” Burlington Magazine 132, no. 1048 (1990): 476–83; and Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary, 25–30. Gilbert (“Some Findings,” 61) observes that Fra Bartolommeo and Titian were both in Ferrara in 1516 and that the monk’s Lucca Altarpiece was an important source for Titian’s Assunta (Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice). 94. Humfrey, “Fra Bartolommeo.” 95. Nagel, Controversy of Renaissance Art, 80–86. 96. Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary, 39–45. 97. John Shearman, Only Connect . . . : Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 102. 98. Wethey, Paintings of Titian, vol. 1, The Religious Paintings (1969), cat. no. 40, p. 93. 99. The horizon, in marking the limit of perception, becomes a metaphor for the boundaries of knowledge, belief, and vision and consequently functions as a powerful figure across multiple disciplines. Didier Maleuvre surveys the range and chronological reach of the horizon in his Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). See also Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), and Enrique Lima, “Of Horizons and Epistemology: Problems in the Visuality of Knowledge,” Diacritics 33, nos. 3–4 (2003): 19–35. 100. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Cusanus at Sea: The Topicality of Illuminative Discourse,” Journal of Religion 71, no. 2 (1991): 180–201. 101. Romm, Edges of the Earth, 147–48. 102. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 479. 103. Michael Emerson, “Alberti at Sea,” in Chora 4: Notes to Pages 98–103
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Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, ed. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2004), 55–70. 104. Nicholas of Cusa, Selected Spiritual Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 2.12, pp. 160–61. 105. The circumstances of Cusanus’s sea voyage are described by O’Rourke Boyle, “Cusanus at Sea,” 180–81. Cusanus, who was on a trip from Constantinople to Venice, was a papal delegate who persuaded the emperor, patriarch, and other ecclesiastics to return to Venice with him. The letter was addressed to his patron, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini. 106. Crouzet-Pavan, “Ecological Understanding.” 107. Jacques Derrida explores the littoral topology in Blanchot’s writings in his own Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986). Kas Saghafi discusses Derrida’s essay on Blanchot in “By the Board: Derrida Approaching Blanchot,” in Apparations—of Derrida’s Other (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 101–8. 108. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 14. Corbin’s work reintroduced into scholarship the study of the shore in literature, which had been initiated by Heydenreich, Tadel und Lob der Seefahrt. In the early 2000s scholarship on the coast swelled, most likely in conjunction with the rise of ecocriticism, with some scholars referring to the field as “thalassology” or “blue cultural studies.” Most of these studies are focused on ancient literature or on the novel, with a few publications focused on the early modern coastline. These include Thorsten Feldbusch, Zwischen Land und Meer: Schreiben auf den Grenzen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003); Stephen Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009); Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Köln-Lövenich: Hohenheim, 1981); Sebastian I. Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003); and Sebastian Stelzer, “Writing the Shore: The Shore and the Self—the Floating Meaning of the Coastline in British and American Literature” (M.A. thesis, Universität Konstanz, 2010). 109. The doge of Venice advised this to the Duke of Ferrara in 1526. Cited in Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1:103n3. 110. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, 10.12.351 (On the Art of 180
Notes to Pages 103–111
Building, bk. 10, pt. 12, pp. 350–51). 111. Coryat’s Crudities, 194. 112. P. F. Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 193–218. 113. Paul Hills, “Titian’s Fire: Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 2 (2007): 185–204.
Chapter 4 1. The foundational texts on Italian Renaissance bronze statuettes include Wilhelm von Bode, Die italienischen Bronzestatuetten der Renaissance, 3 vols. (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1907); Leo Planiscig, Die italienische Bronzestatuette der Renaissance, Sammlungen des Kunsthistorischen Museums in Wien, vol. 1 (Vienna: A. Schroll, 1925); John Pope-Hennessy, “Italian Bronze Statuettes—i,” Burlington Magazine 105, no. 718 (1963): 14–23; Pope-Hennessy, “Italian Bronze Statuettes—ii,” Burlington Magazine 105, no. 719 (1963): 58–71; Pope-Hennessy, Renaissance Bronzes from the Samuel H. Kress Collection (London: Phaidon, 1965); Anthony Radcliffe, European Bronze Statuettes (London: Joseph, 1966); Hans R. Wiehrauch, Europäische Bronzestatuetten, 15.–18. Jahrhundert (Braunschweig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1967), esp. 70–249; Joy Kenseth, “The Virtue of Littleness: SmallScale Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance,” in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sarah Blake McHam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 128–48; Debra Pincus, ed., Small Bronzes in the Renaissance, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 62 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001); Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001); Dora Thornton, “The Status and Display of Small Bronzes in the Italian Renaissance Interiors,” Sculpture Journal 5 (2001): 33–41; and Anthony Radcliffe and Nicholas Penny, Art of the Renaissance Bronze, 1500–1650 (London: Philip Wilson, 2004). For a discussion of the variety of household bronze objects, see Jeremy Warren, “Bronzes,” in At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (London: V & A, 2006), 294–305. 2. Renaissance Venetian bronzes and their artistic contexts are discussed in Wiehrauch, Europäische Bronzestatuetten, 138–68; Tanja Beilin and Laura Reghitto, eds., Donatello e il suo tempo: Il bronzetto a Padova nel Quattrocento e nel Cinquecento (Milan: Skira, 2001); and Andrea Bacchi and Luciana Giacomelli, eds., Rinascimento e passione per l’antico: Andrea Riccio e il suo tempo (Trent: Provincia autonoma di Trento, Soprintendenza per i beni storico-artistici, 2008).
3. This assessment, which is based entirely on surviving objects, could obviously be affected by collecting habits and the like and, even if incorrect, does not impact the analysis that follows. 4. Leo Planiscig, Andrea Riccio (Vienna: A. Schroll, 1927), 415; Planiscig, “Andrea Riccio und die neue Kunst des Giorgione,” Almanach des Verlages Anton Schroll & Co.: Kunst, Dichtung, Kunstgewerbe (1926): 20–29. 5. Marcantonio Michiel’s list of art objects in Venetian palaces provides an opportunity to consider the variety of modern and ancient objects with pastoral subject matter. The house of Gabriele Vendramin included Giorgione’s Tempesta and an ancient marble statue of a sleeping nymph. The vagueness of the entries, especially for bronzes (“le molte figurette de bronzo sono opere moderne,” for example, in the collection of Giovanni Ram), makes specific connections somewhat difficult. For these entries, see Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano, 106, for the Ram inventory cited above. For the pastoral mode and studiolo culture, see Campbell, “Giorgione’s Tempest.” 6. Pietro Bembo and Alvise Cornaro are among those collectors who had residences simultaneously in Venice and Padua. 7. There are three known examples of this base type: Cleveland Museum of Art, I.N. 50.375; Louvre, I.N. OA 7408; and Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, Wittmann Collection. It seems as though the Louvre version could have suffered a break of the upper part of the tree. I am grateful to Christine Chabod at the Louvre for providing information on the Paris base. See S. Ebert-Schifferer, ed., Natur und Antike in der Renaissance (Frankfurt: Liebieghaus, 1985), cat. no. 167, p. 465; Bertrand Jestaz, “Un groupe de bronze érotique de Riccio,” Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot 65 (1983): 27–54 ; Martineau and Hope, Genius of Venice, 377; William D. Wixom, Renaissance Bronzes from Ohio Collections (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975), 85; and William M. Milliken, “Two Renaissance Bronzes,” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 1 (1951): 42–44. 8. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Andrea Riccio’s statuettes at the Frick Collection (New York) gives a sample of the different possible types of pastoral statuettes produced in early-cinquecento Padua: Denise Allen, ed., Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze (New York: Frick Collection, 2008), cat. nos. 1, 5, 6, 8, 10–12, 20–24. 9. Ibid., cat. no. 19, pp. 216–21. Another example is Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus (Bargello, Florence).
10. Pliny often referred to small-scale bronze sculptures as “Corinthian” because of their unusual alloy. See, for example, Pliny, Epistle 3.6. It was less commonly used for larger sculptures. Much of the discussion around these small statuettes comes in the form of criticism of collectors who kept them private rather than put them to public use. Seneca is a particularly vocal critic: On Shortness of Life 12.2, Helvia on Consolation 11.3. See also Jennifer Montagu, “The Art of the Small Bronze,” chap. 1 in Bronzes (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963), esp. 7–14, and Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 130. 11. John Pope-Hennessy, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, pt. 2 of An Introduction to Renaissance Sculpture, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985), 82–87. 12. For Filarete’s reduced-scale equestrian monument (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden), which was made in 1440–45 and given to Piero de’ Medici about twenty years later, consult Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 128, and Francis Haskell, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 252. Antico was sent by the Gonzagas to Rome in 1496–97 to make a set, the first known, of small bronze copies of well-known ancient statues. For Antico’s restoration and reproduction practices, see Pope-Hennessy, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, 84, and Stephen J. Campbell, “Antico and Mantegna: Humanist Art and the Fortune of the Art Object,” in Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes, ed. Eleonora Luciano (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2011), 36–39. Antico wrote to Isabella d’Este in 1519 that he was going to make replicas of little bronzes that he had cast for Lodovico. 13. Probably the best-known bronze reproduction was the one based on Jacopo Sansovino’s large-scale wax model of the Laocoön owned by Cardinal Grimani, cast in bronze on the cardinal’s own suggestion. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, vol. 6 (Florence: Sansoni, 1966), 178. Other small-scale Laocoöns were circulating in Venice. See Irene Favaretto, “La tradizione del Laocoonte nell’arte veneta,” Atti dell’Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere, ed arti 141 (1982–83): 75–92, and Michel Hochmann, “Laocoon à Venise,” in Le Laocoon: Histoire et réception, ed. Élisabeth Décultot, Jacques Le Rider, and François Queyrel (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), 91–103. 14. Victoria J. Avery, “State and Private Bronze Foundries in Cinquecento Venice,” in Large Bronzes in the Renaissance, Notes to Pages 111–117
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ed. Peta Motture (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2003), 241–75. Foundrymen in Venice were known to copy works of the masters. See Peta Motture, “Riccio and the Bronze Statuette as an Art Form,” in Allen, Andrea Riccio, 66. 15. It should be noted that distinguishing between the different styles of these artists has been difficult and that attributions have changed significantly over the twentieth century. Anthony Radcliffe notes that about sixty pieces are now attributed to Riccio, whereas more than six hundred were given to the artist by Planiscig in the 1920s. Radcliffe, “The Debasement of Images: The Sculptor Andrea Riccio and the Applied Arts in Padua in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Sculpted Object, 1400–1700, ed. Stuart Currie and Peta Motture (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1997), 87. Radcliffe explains the confusion with the popularity of Riccio’s work among contemporary bronze casters. Riccio’s given name was Andrea Briosco, but Bernardinus Scardeone reported in 1560 that he chose for himself the name Riccio (“curly”) because of his curly hair. See Volker Krahn, “Riccio’s Formation and Early Career,” in Allen, Andrea Riccio, 3. Severo da Ravenna was based in Padua from 1500 to 1509–11, at which time he returned to Ravenna. 16. The Paschal Candelabrum is considered Riccio’s masterwork. See Davide Banzato, “Riccio’s Humanist Circle and the Paschal Candelabrum,” in Allen, Andrea Riccio, 41–63. For the Moses / Zeus Ammon and arguments around idolatry and anachronism, consult Nagel, Controversy of Renaissance Art, 165ff., as well as Nagel’s catalogue entry in Allen, Andrea Riccio, cat. no. 7, pp. 134–43. 17. Allen, Andrea Riccio, cat. nos. 1, 5, 6, 8, 10–12, 19–24, 26. 18. Ibid., 162–63; Douglas Lewis, “On the Nature of Renaissance Bronzes,” in Renaissance Master Bronzes from the Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Washington, D.C.: Scala Books, 1986), 19–24. See also Richard E. Stone, “Riccio: Technology and Connoisseurship,” in Allen, Andrea Riccio, 81–96, and Nagel, Controversy of Renaissance Art, 165. 19. Allen, Andrea Riccio, cat. nos. 1, 10, pp. 98–103, 158–63. 20. Examples are reproduced and discussed in ibid., cat. nos. 21–24, pp. 228–51. 21. See Anthony Radcliffe, “Replicas, Copies, and Counterfeits of Early Italian Bronzes,” Apollo 124 (1986): 183–87. 22. Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano, 94: “El dio Pan ouer Fauno de marmo che siede sopra un troncho, et sona la 182
Notes to Pages 117–119
zampogna, de grandezza de dui piedi è opera antica.” 23. Ibid., 110: “un Fauno ouer un pastore nudo de marmo de do piedi, che senta sopra vna rupe, et appoggiato cun la schena sona vna tibia pastorale, opera antiche, integra et lodevole.” 24. Allen, Andrea Riccio, 243. In addition, an entry in the 1540–42 inventory of Isabella d’Este’s grotta notes the presence of a sculpted Pan blowing on a set of pipes. 25. Haskell, Taste and the Antique, 286–87, 301–2; Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 26. The rich tradition of the sculpted sleeping nymph has been discussed in Millard Meiss, “Sleep in Venice: Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110 (1966): 348–82, repr. in The Painter’s Choice: Problems in the Interpretation of Renaissance Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 212–39; Elisabeth B. MacDougall, “The Sleeping Nymph: Origins of a Humanist Fountain Type,” Art Bulletin 57, no. 3 (1975): 357–65; and Phyllis Pray Bober, “The Coryciana and the Nymph Corycia,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 223–39. 27. Lynn Frier Kaufmann, “The Noble Savage: Satyrs and Satyr Families in Renaissance Art” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1979), 122. 28. Some of the first examples are paintings by Piero di Cosimo. See ibid., 122–30; Patricia Merivale, Pan, the Goat-God, His Myth in Modern Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1–9; and Dieter Blume, Natur und Antike in der Renaissance (Frankfurt: Liebieghaus, 1985), 180–84. 29. “Ita Sculptori rerum omnium species comprehendendae, ut hominem ponat, quo tanquam propositum tota eius et mens et manus dirigenda, quamquam Satyriscis, hydris, chimaeris, monstris denique quae nusquam unquam viderit, fingendis ita praeoccupantur, ut nihil praeterea reliquum esse videatur.” Pomponius Gauricus, De Sculptura, ed. and trans. André Chastel and Robert Klein (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1969), 61. 30. Gauricus, De Sculptura, 60; Horace writes: “If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favored with a private view, refrain from laugh-
ing?” Horace, Satire, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 450–51, lines 1–5. On grotteschi and artistic license, see David Summers, “Michelangelo on Architecture,” Art Bulletin 54, no. 2 (1972): 146–57. 31. Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 152. The starting point for her discussion is the work of Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 32. A parallel capture of attention occurs when the satyr figure migrates to the central position in even twodimensional reliefs and plaquettes, as well as in autonomous paintings; however, the physicality of the freestanding bronze statuette effects this more strongly through the physicality of the medium and its alteration from its original form. 33. Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 130; Thornton, “Status and Display of Small Bronzes”; Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 33–39. 34. Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano, 94–96. For Zio’s collection, see also Monika Schmitter, “The Display of Distinction: Art Collecting and Social Status in Early Sixteenth-Century Venice” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997), 38–134. 35. The two depictions serve as the foundation for most considerations of Venetian collecting and display practices. For a discussion of both within the context of Venetian life, see Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 221–23. 36. Jennifer Fletcher speculates that some of the bronzes were executed by Riccio because of his friendship with Michiel: “Marcantonio Michiel: His Friends and Collection,” Burlington Magazine 123, no. 941 (1981): 453–67; “Marcantonio Michiel’s Collection,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 382–85. 37. P. F. Brown, Private Lives, 218–19. However, Fortini Brown also emphasizes that these areas were “not secluded monastic cells” but were meant to be seen. Adrian Randolph also emphasizes that collected objects were always meant to be displayed and seen, and he therefore questions exactly how private these objects were. Randolph, Touching Objects: Intimate Experiences of Italian Fifteenth-Century Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). The coexistence (and
sometimes tension) between art historians’ emphasis on privacy and display has led to an inconsistent picture of these collecting spaces. The two conditions are not necessarily exclusive and probably depend more on the object types. A small inkwell, because of its function, is less likely to have been displayed prominently and in more-public spaces. For a consideration of these collected objects by type, see Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, and Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, At Home in Renaissance Italy. 38. For the Aristotelian mean as a moderating factor in displays of wealth, see the influential work of Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300– 1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Venetian frugality was extolled as a virtue, as evidenced by the many sumptuary laws to limit material displays of wealth passed during the sixteenth century. See Patricia Fortini Brown, “Behind the Walls: The Material Culture of Venetian Elites,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. John Jeffries Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 295–331. 39. Schmitter, “Display of Distinction,” 210. Michiel calls it a studiolo (Der Anonimo Morelliano, 82). 40. Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano, 84: “El retratto de esso M. Andrea a oglio, meza figura, che contempla li fragmenti marmorei antichi fu de man de Lorenzo Lotto. . . . Le molte figurette de bronzo, sono modern de man de diversi maestri.” Michiel situates these objects “in la camera de sopra,” which Schmitter (“Display of Distinction,” 225–27) identifies as Odoni’s bedroom. See also Monika Schmitter, “‘Virtuous Riches’: The Bricolage of Cittadini Identities in Early-Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2004): 908–69. 41. Patricia Fortini Brown, “The Venetian Casa,” in Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, At Home in Renaissance Italy, 50–65; P. F. Brown, Private Lives, 218–19. 42. The influence of thing theory on the humanities and its reverberations within art history are beginning to change this assumption. See most recently within the field of Italian Renaissance art history, for example, Randolph, Touching Objects. 43. Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 44. Cited and translated in P. F. Brown, Private Lives, 228. See also Gustav Ludwig, Archivalische Beiträge zur Geschichte der venezianischen Kunst aus dem Nachlass Gustav Ludwigs, Notes to Pages 119–122
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Italienische Forschungen 4, ed. Wilhelm Bode, Georg Gronau, and Detlev Freiherr von Hadeln (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1911), 72–74. 45. Schmitter, “Display of Distinction,” 240. See also Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, 144–48. Shearman offers a helpful summary of the critical responses to the portrait until 1983. See Schmitter, “Virtuous Riches,” 950–55, for more-recent interpretations, including those acknowledging the discovery, made during a 1996 restoration, that Odoni is holding a golden crucifix with his left hand. 46. This gesture has been interpreted as a sign of diffidence, withdrawal, and “undisclosedness.” Michiel describes the sitter as contemplating, or contempla. See Harry Berger Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 221–26, and Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze, 28–37. 47. Wencke Deiters and Natalia Gustavson, “Jacopo Strada,” in Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Venice: Marsilio, 2008), 169–72. 48. The head of Hadrian can be identified as an object in Odoni’s collection; the nymph cannot. See Schmitter, “Display of Distinction,” 260. There is some disagreement as to whether this sculpted head is of Hadrian or Trajan. See Berger, Fictions of the Pose, 222. 49. A radiograph of the lower right corner of the painting indicates that the sculpted head and the raised tablecloth were afterthoughts. See Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, 145. 50. Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze, 21–57; Randolph, Touching Objects. 51. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 155–73; first published as La poétique de l’espace (1958). 52. Thornton, The Scholar in His Study, 120–22, postulates a more social context for this room in response to the suggestion by Cecil Clough that the room was the site of secret government negotiations. Clough, “Art as Power in the Decoration of the Study of an Italian Renaissance Prince: The Case of Federico da Montefeltro,” Artibus et Historiae 16, no. 31 (1995): 19–50. For the decorative program of the studiolo, see Luciano Cheles, The Studiolo of Urbino: An Iconographic Investigation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986). 53. George R. Goldner, “A Late Fifteenth Century Venetian Painting of a Bird Hunt,” J. Paul Getty Museum 184
Notes to Pages 122–126
Journal 8 (1980): 23–32; Yvonne Szafran, “Carpaccio’s ‘Hunting on the Lagoon’: A New Perspective,” Burlington Magazine 137, no. 1104 (1995): 148. 54. The bibliography for this painting is too vast to be cited here. Of greatest importance for my point is the essay by Mary Pardo, “Veiling the Venus of Urbino,” in Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” ed. Rona Goffen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 108–28. Randolph (Touching Objects, 156–57, 167) offers a related connection between intimate objects of enclosure and Titian’s painting. 55. On the use of chests in the Renaissance household, see Claudio Paolini, “Chests,” in Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, At Home in Renaissance Italy, 120–22. 56. For the intimate spaces created by fabric in Titian’s paintings, see my essay “The Disordered Bed in the Sleeping Venus,” in Das haptische Bild: Körperhafte Bilderfahrung in der Neuzeit, ed. Markus Rath, Jörg Trempler, and Iris Wenderholm (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 31–49. 57. As Susan Stewart observes for the miniature in her book On Longing: “We find the miniature at the origin of private, individual history, but we find the gigantic at the origin of public and natural history” (71). 58. See Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze, 50–57, for a helpful reading of Stewart and Bachelard on miniatures. 59. For the statue and its relocation, see John T. Paoletti, Michelangelo’s David: Florentine History and Civic Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 60. The human body as the ideal scale for sculpture has its origins in antiquity and has conditioned attitudes toward sculpture through the current day. See Rachel Wells, Scale in Contemporary Sculpture: Enlargement, Miniaturisation, and the Life-Size (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013). 61. Leonardo on Painting, ed. Martin Kemp, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 38, 42. 62. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1976), 98–99. 63. Amanda Lillie, “Sculpting the Air: Donatello’s Narratives of the Environment,” in Depth of Field: Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy, ed. Donal Cooper and Marika Leino (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 97–124. 64. Catherine Walsh, “Renaissance Landscapes and the Figuration of Giambologna’s Appennino: An Eco-Critical Analysis” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2015); Virginia Bush, “The Colossal Sculpture of the Cinquecento” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1967).
65. Statius, Silvae, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 4.6. Novius Vindex is also the subject of Martial’s Epigrams, 9.43–44. 66. Montagu, Bronzes, 8. 67. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon, trans. Robert Phillimore (London: Macmillian, 1874), 337–38. Published first in German as Laokoon, oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. 68. For comparative approaches to meaning and measurement in art, see Elizabeth Alice Honig, Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016); T. J. Clark, “Pollock’s Smallness,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 15–31; and Wells, Scale in Contemporary Sculpture. 69. Webster Smith, “Giulio Clovio and the ‘maniera di figure piccole,’” Art Bulletin 46, no. 3 (1964): 395–401. 70. For a summary of Vasari’s usage of gran maniera, see ibid., 396n14. 71. Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (Basel, 1576), trans. Andrew Bongiorno in “Castelvetro’s Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1935), 100: “bad painters who recognize their own inadequacy will paint only small, indistinct, and crowded canvases, whereas great painters who have confidence in their powers display their true worth by painting figures that larger than life size, as did Michelangelo, though they know how prominently every least defect will stand out.” 72. Alberti, On Painting (1991), bk. 1, ¶18, p. 53. 73. Ibid., 54. 74. See the discussion of drawings from the Bellini workshop and their inversion of perspectival models in chapter 3 of this book. 75. Vasari, Vite, ed. Bettarini and Barocchi, 5:190–91. 76. “I have looked at it carefully in the light, with the lens and with the mirror, and I have never seen anything more finished” (io l’ho ben visto al lume et col vetro et col specchio, et non viddi mai la più finita cosa). Il carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori, vol. 4 (Florence: Sansoni, 1979), p. 104, no. 968. 77. W. Smith, “Giulio Clovio,” 399. 78. Small sculptures were 6/9 of life size, smaller were 6/9 to 3/9 of life size, and smallest were less than 3/9 of life size. The denominator of 9 derives from the nine parts that Gauricus divides the body into to establish its proportions.
See Gauricus, De Sculptura, 106–7. 79. See Claude Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of the power given to the viewer of the miniature: The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 23, first published as La pensée sauvage (Paris, 1962). 80. This discussion of enlivenment and idolatry in sculpture has dominated discussions in art history over the past decade or so; however, it was first introduced to Anglophone readers through David Freedberg’s Power of Images: Studies in the Theory and History of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 81. Geraldine Johnson, “In the Hand of the Beholder: Isabella d’Este and the Sensual Allure of Sculpture,” in Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice, ed. Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandtstad Walker (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 183–97. 82. Theocritus, Idylls, “Idyll 2: The Sorceress,” 7–12. The majority of the encounters with the occult in Sannazaro’s Arcadia occur in books 10–12, which were added to the second version of the poem. For the differences between versions and Sannazaro’s changing cultural context in Naples, see Soranzo, Poetry and Identity, 71–88. 83. Sannazaro, Arcadia, 91–95. 84. Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 13–18. 85. Sannazaro, Arcadia, chap. 10, p. 103. 86. Giancarlo Fiorenza (Dosso Dossi, 118–19) offers a brief discussion of Campagnola’s print within the larger context of magic and the occult in the painted works by Dosso Dossi. Stephen Campbell discusses the print as a manifestation of montage in his essay “Naturalism and the Venetian ‘Poesia’: Grafting, Metaphor, and Embodiment in Giorgione, Titian, and the Campagnolas,” in Nagel and Pericolo, Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, 122. Most scholars interpret the print as related to the disastrous battle of Agnadello because of the date of 1509 that appears in the astrologer’s disk and their interpretation of the monster as ominous. I understand the monster not to be a threatening presence, given not only its depiction but also the positive place of astrological activity in the pastoral world described above. See also Silvio D’Amicone, “Apocalypsis cum mensuris: L’astrologo di Giulio Campagnola,” Venezia Cinquecento 2, no. 3 (1992): 75–87, and Paul Holberton, “Notes on Giulio Campagnola’s Prints,” Print Quarterly 13 (1996), 397–400. 87. On the drawing, see William R. Rearick, “From Arcady to the Barnyard,” in Hunt, Pastoral Landscape, 137–59; Notes to Pages 126–131
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Paul Holberton, “The Pastorale or Fête champêtre in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Manca, Titian 500, 245–62; and Campbell, “Naturalism and the Venetian ‘Poesia,’” 137–38. 88. Campbell (“Naturalism and the Venetian ‘Poesia,’” 137–38) makes a similar observation of the technical effects that create the impression of dissolved boundaries. He understands the merging of body and nature as pushing the limits of an established landscape tradition, which is ultimately exhausted, according to Campbell. He reads Marcantonio Raimondi’s Il sogno almost as a decadent commentary on the pastoral tradition, which now renders nature as a “hellish and threatening illusion.” I do not share this interpretation. Instead, as discussed throughout this book, I understand the pastoral tradition as having a more complex range or spectrum for conveying and structuring the interactions between humans and nature. 89. Blume, Natur und Antike in der Renaissance, 178–80. 90. Kaufmann, “Noble Savage,” 122–34. 91. Dialogo di M. Lodovico Dolce, nel quale si ragiona delle qualità, diversità, e proprietà, de i colori (Venice, 1565), 51r–v. Translation mine. 92. Sannazaro, Arcadia, chap. 3, p. 43. The painting by Titian that is frequently identified as the one described by Dolce is the Jupiter and Antiope (Pardo Venus) (fig. 75). W. R. Rearick also suggests the large drawing Nymphs and Satyrs (Musée Bonnat, Bayonne). Rearick, “From Arcady to the Barnyard,” 151. 93. The description of the vase is given in Sannazaro, Arcadia, chap. 11, p. 124. 94. On inkstands and lamps in studies, see Thornton, The Scholar in His Study, 142–55, and Heike Frosien-Leinz, “Antikisches Gebrauchsgerät: Weisheit und Magie in den Öllampen Riccios,” in Ebert-Schifferer, Natur und Antike, 226–57. 95. Reproduced in Thornton, The Scholar in His Study, 151. 96. For bronze sculptors’ preference for casting lower animals because of the connection between nature and the properties of bronze, see Frits Scholten, “Bronze, the Mythology of a Metal,” in Bronze: The Power of Life and Death (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2005), 20–35. 97. Discussions of alchemy and bronze casting were most useful to my understanding of alchemy in more general terms as a hermeneutic operating in the interpretation and use of Renaissance artworks. Among the many sources on the topic, I benefited most greatly from Michael W. Cole, 186
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Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); P. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, 135–40. On the specific culture in Padua, see Banzato, “Riccio’s Humanist Circle.” 98. Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture. 99. Gauricus, De Sculptura, esp. 217–37. 100. On the poetics of shells as an intimate space, see Gaston Bachelard, “Shells,” in Poetics of Space, 105–35. 101. In a letter dated October 1546, Vincenzo de’ Grandi (Vicentino) wrote to Cristoforo Madruzzo: “because the inkstand is an instrument that serves gentle spirits in the writing of things important and worthy of memory.” Cited in Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 92. Heather O’Leary McStay considers the elemental qualities elicited by shells, inks, and oil as important for the “work of intellectual generation.” McStay, “‘Viva Bacco e viva Amore’: Bacchic Imagery in the Renaissance” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2014), 325–40. 102. Stephen Campbell’s interpretation of the objects in and decorative program of the Renaissance studiolo as demonstrating the restraint of the self dominates most considerations of Renaissance collection spaces. See his important study The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Although Campbell gives a convincing reading of Isabella d’Este’s studiolo, the concept of restraint overshadows the potential for a phenomenological experience of these spaces and the objects contained therein. One exception to this scholarly trend has been the work of Geraldine Johnson (e.g., “In the Hand of the Beholder”). 103. Carlo Ridolfi was the first to associate the woodcut with Titian: “alcuni pastorelli ed animali, ed un gentil pensiero di tre Bertuccie sedenti attorniate da serpi nella guisa del Laocoonte e de’ figliuoli posti in Belvedere di Roma.” Ridolfi, Le meraviglie dell’arte, ed. Giuseppe Vedova (Padua, 1835), 265. For later support of this attribution, see Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, Titian: His Life and Times (London: John Murray, 1877), 2:264; Hans Tietze and Erika Tietze-Conrat, “Titian’s Woodcuts,” Print Collector’s Quarterly 25 (1938): 349; and Rosand and Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut, cat. no. 40, pp. 114–15. 104. On the Renaissance discovery and emulation of the
statue group, see the endlessly rich book by Leonard Barkan Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. 14 for Titian’s woodcut. See also the sensitive consideration of Titian’s use of the statue group in D’Elia, Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings, 27–55. 105. Vasari, Vite, ed. Bettarini and Barocchi, 6:178. 106. Bk. 2, lines 199–250. 107. H. W. Janson, “Titian’s Laocoon Caricature and the Vesalian-Galenist Controversy,” Art Bulletin 28, no. 1 (1946): 49–53. Janson summarizes the interpretations given to the print, most of which involve criticism of the influence of the sculpture on Titian’s contemporaries. Maria H. Loh has developed Janson’s theory that Titian’s woodcut criticizes the followers of Galen. Loh, “Outscreaming the Laocoön: Sensation, Special Affects, and the Moving Image,” Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 3 (2011): 403–4. 108. Still the most useful survey of the iconography of apes in the Renaissance is H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952). Great apes were discovered only gradually between 1650 and 1850. See Raymond Corbey, The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15, and Giulio Barsanti, “Storia naturale delle scimmie, 1600–1800,” Nuncius 5, no. 2 (1990): 99–165. 109. Pliny, Natural History, bk. viii, chap. 216; bk. x, chap. 199; and Aelian, Natura animalium, bk. xvi, 15; bk. xvi, 21. See also Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 330. 110. Rosand and Muraro (Titian and the Venetian Woodcut, 188) note the similar motifs in Titian’s Stigmatization of Saint Francis and an engraving begun by Giulio Campagnola and completed by Domenico. Tietze and Tietze-Conrat (“Titian’s Woodcuts,” 349, 355) assume that Boldrini “incorporated a sketch that dated as far back as Titian’s Giorgionesque period.” Rosand and Muraro (188) suggest that Boldrini more likely used Titian’s Stigmatization engraving as his model. 111. Reproduced in Sebastiano Serlio, On Perspective, 91. 112. Ibid., 90. 113. Jolliffe, “Satire: Satura: ∑ATYPO∑.” See also Sampson, Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy, 22–26. On satyr plays in antiquity, see Kaufmann, “Noble Savage,” 11–13. For the place of satire in cinquecento Venetian culture, see Raymond B. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 114. This is the location given by Francesco da Sangallo in his letter describing the 1506 unearthing of the sculpture. The letter was first published in Carlo Fea, Miscellanea filologica, critica e antiquaria (Rome: Stamperia Pagliarini, 1790), 1:329. 115. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1995), 11. Also cited in Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, 127. 116. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, first published in German in 1872, sets out this dialectic between the Dionysian and Apollonian within Greek tragedy.
Chapter 5 1. Specific references to the seicento Venetian art market appear in later notes. Among the more useful studies of the market and its changes are Isabella Cecchini, Quadri e commercio a Venezia durante il Seicento: Uno studio sul mercato dell’arte (Venice: Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 2000), and Philip Sohm, “Venice,” in Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 205–54. For the changes in book publishing in Venice, see Craig Kallendorf and Lisa Pon, eds., “The Books of Venice,” special issue, Miscellanea marciana 20 (2008). Horatio F. Brown, The Venetian Printing Press (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1891), esp. chaps. 19 and 20 for the seventeenth-century history, remains a foundational text, even as more-recent scholars such as Martin Lowry and Neil Harris have made important contributions to the field. 2. Writers of the broad historical surveys of the pastoral mode have recognized this geographic shift, even implicitly, with their chapter divisions and structure. See, for example, Greg, Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama; Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology; Freedman, Classical Pastoral; and Alpers, What Is Pastoral? These accounts, like all surveys, do not capture the nuances, which, in the case of the pastoral, could include greater acknowledgment of the growing mid-sixteenthcentury interest in the pastoral in Spain. Recent scholarship on the subject includes Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro, Bucolic Metaphors: History, Subjectivity, and Gender in the Early Modern Spanish Pastoral (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 2006), and Javier Irigoyen-García, The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain Notes to Pages 134–139
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(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). 3. Relevant bibliography for all of these paintings is provided later in this chapter. 4. This data, with sources for the provenance, can be found on www.mappingtitian.org, accessed May 2016. 5. Charles Hope, using the Pardo Venus as his example, observes a contrast between Titian’s earlier and later pastoral works. He characterizes the “mood of the figures as [less frivolous than] those in the paintings for Alfonso. To use the kind of analogy often found in sixteenth-century texts, in the earlier works Titian had painted like Ovid whereas here his approach was Virgilian.” Hope, Titian (London: Jupiter, 1980), 125. The reader is left to wonder what Hope means by this contrast between Ovid and Virgil, since he does not specify the texts he associates with the names of these authors. Although this chapter also acknowledges changes in Titian’s approach to the pastoral, it is trying to avoid this close attachment to textual sources and is actually arguing the reverse of Hope’s equation. If anything, Titian’s later pastoral artworks, and the pastoral mode in general, connect more to Ovid than Virgil. 6. Veronese’s frescoes are connected to Hieronymus Cock’s print views of Roman ruins, which Veronese knew through the series published by Battista Pittoni. See Konrad Oberhuber, “Hieronymus Cock, Battista Pittoni, und Paolo Veronese in Villa Maser,” in Munuscula Discipulorum: Kunsthistorische Studien Hans Kauffmann zum 70. Geburtstag 1966, ed. Tilmann Buddensieg und Matthias Winner (Berlin: Bruno Hessling, 1968), 207–24; Christopher P. Heuer, “Hieronymus Cock’s Aesthetic of Collapse,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 3 (2009): 387–408 (with helpful bibliographic references); and Christophe Brouard, “‘Venetia Quanta Fuit’(?): Le paysage de ruines à Venise dans la première moitié du Cinquecento,” in Venise & Paris, 1500–1700: La peinture vénitienne de la Renaissance et sa réception en France, ed. Michel Hochmann (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2011), 25–54. 7. Paolo Berdini, The Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano: Painting as Visual Exegesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Some scholars have understood Jacopo Bassano’s pastoral pictures as reflecting only Virgil’s Georgics and not biblical parables (e.g., Rearick, “From Arcady to the Barnyard”), when the paintings most likely relate to both. 8. Attribution problems have dogged most of the extant Venetian Renaissance drawings, but especially those associated with Titian. The difficulties in making secure attributions were noted in one of the first monographs on 188
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the subject: Tietze and Tietze-Conrat, Drawings of the Venetian Painters. There has been little resolution since, as Charles Hope’s essay on the topic indicates: “Drawings, Attribution, and Evidence: Giulio Campagnola, Giorgione, and Early Titian,” in Rethinking Renaissance Drawings: Essays in Honour of David McTavish, ed. Una Roman D’Elia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 27–51. 9. Of course, not all art histories proceed according to this model; however, the strength of this paradigm for the foundation of the discipline is most efficiently apparent in the collection of writings in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 10. For a virus as a metaphor for communication, and its role in Jacques Derrida’s concept of rhetoric, see Peta Mitchell, Contagious Metaphor (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 11. The painting was given to Giorgione in 1565, when Giorgione’s Vita was printed; in 1567, Vasari gave the painting to Titian. It is assumed that Vasari’s trip to Venice between 1565 and 1567 provided him new information. Vasari changed attributions for other pictures, including The Miracle of Saint Mark, which he attributed to Giorgione in 1550 and to Palma Vecchio in 1568, and the altarpiece in San Giovanni Crisostomo, which he attributed in 1568 to Sebastiano del Piombo. For these reattributions, see J. Anderson, Giorgione, 60–69. 12. Michiel mentions fourteen paintings by Giorgione in Venetian collections, of which four are considered in this book: Tempesta, The Three Philosophers, Youth Holding Arrow (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and Sleeping Woman in a Landscape, which most scholars identify as the Dresden Venus but which Charles Hope identifies as a different picture (whereabouts unknown). Hope, Giorgione or Titian? History of a Controversy (New York: Frick Collection, 2003), 25–27. Hope concludes that only the Laura and the Portrait of a Man (San Diego) are “secure” attributions to Giorgione, because of the “authentic inscriptions” on the reverse (37). I find Hope’s “secure” evidence to be just as circumstantial as the other evidence he dismisses in his study. See Marcantonio Michiel, Notizia d’opere di disegno nella prima metà del secolo xvi: Esistenti in Padova, Cremona, Milano, Pavia, Bergamo, Crema e Venezia (Bassano, 1800), also available in the edition by Theodor von Frimmel, Der Anonimo Morelliano. 13. I am borrowing the notion of a controversy from the title of Charles Hope’s 2003 book. 14. The patron for the picture remains unknown—
assuming that this work was commissioned. Scholars have suggested names, including Isabella d’Este, whose role has been questioned by Patricia Egan, “Poesia and the Fête Champêtre,” Art Bulletin 41, no. 4 (1959): 303–13, and the picture has been identified as a bagno commissioned for Alfonso d’Este even though it does not fit with the bagno. See J. Anderson, Giorgione, 308–9. The picture was first recorded in the Paris collection of Eberhard Jabach. 15. Louis Hourticq was not the first scholar to credit Titian; it was Friedrich Schlegel, who saw the painting conserved in 1803. Louis Hourticq, La jeunesse de Titien (Paris: Hachette, 1919), 1–31. 16. To date, the fullest discussion of the lengthy and complicated attribution history for this picture is Alessandro Ballarin, “Le concert champêtre,” in Le siècle de Titien, 340–48. An extensive bibliography for the various attributions given to this painting since Ballarin’s catalogue entry is included in Jonathan Unglaub, “A Proposal for the Concert Champêtre: Sebastiano?,” in Venetian Painting Matters, 1450–1750, ed. Jodi Cranston (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 35–56. 17. For the interpretive knots tied around these pictures by the discipline of art history, see Elkins, “On Monstrously Ambiguous Paintings.” 18. See, for example, Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 102. 19. An exception is Lawrence Gowing, who, although not occupied with specific attribution questions, differentiates the approaches of Giorgione and Titian to the pastoral in a survey-type study of the visual mode, “The Modern Vision,” in Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Places of Delight: “Giorgione’s intimacy with the environment became in Titian’s hands a robust and compelling formulation of the abundance of nature. Titian . . . hardly painted a single landscape as such and nothing in the mood of sentient seclusion that always marked the harmonies of Giorgione” (192). 20. D. Rosand, “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” in Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Places of Delight, 44. 21. For discussions of the attribution and dating of the picture, see Joannides, Titian to 1518, 141–44, and Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, 66–69. 22. The combination of the Virgin and Child with a contemplative man seems like a variation on depictions of the Rest on the Flight, as well as Giorgione’s Tempesta, Palma Vecchio’s Halberdier Watching Woman Seated in a Meadow
with Two Infants (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Titian’s (attributed) An Idyll: A Mother and a Halberdier in a Wooded Landscape (Harvard Art Museums). 23. For the stories depicted in the frescoes and the circumstances of the commission for the Scuola del Santo pictures, see Joannides, Titian to 1518, 107–27; Pietro Zampetti, “La Scuola del Santo,” in Le pitture del Santo di Padova, ed. Camillo Semenzato (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1984), 75–118; and Charles Hope, “The Attribution of Some Paduan Paintings of the Early Sixteenth Century,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 35 (1997): 81–100. Christ and the Adulteress has generated attribution and dating questions. See Joannides, Titian to 1518, 89–94. For a different identification of the subject matter, as well as a detailed discussion of the attribution debates, see Alessandro Ballarin, “Suzanne et Daniel,” in Le siècle de Titien, 327–39. 24. My discussion here has been influenced especially by David Young Kim’s consideration of the importance of mobility for Renaissance artists and artworks, in The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). As Kim notes, Titian’s contemporaries characterized him as a bit of a homebody, despite his periodic visits to Rome, Bologna, Ferrara, and Ausburg. Titian’s restricted travel was noteworthy for an artist who worked for some of the most important courts abroad. 25. Lorenzo Lotto has been an interesting case study for questioning the validity of a homogeneous Venetian style. See ibid., 11–38. Stephen J. Campbell, also interested in the geography of style, has voiced his approach in a talk, “Against Titian,” delivered at Tufts University, 4 November 2014. His talk focused mostly on the reception of Titian’s paintings in Milan and Naples. 26. A similar distinction between Italian court and Venetian Republican cultures has been made for sixteenthcentury music by Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), chap. 1, and Elizabeth Horodowich, Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 200–201. 27. The bibliography on Alfonso’s camerino and the artworks commissioned for the room is vast, too lengthy to be cited here. Some of the more recent scholarship on the subject, which largely aims to reconstruct the iconographic conception of the camerino but also includes citations of earlier studies, includes Campbell, Cabinet of Eros; Anthony Notes to Pages 144–147
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Colantuono, Titian, Colonna, and the Renaissance Science of Procreation (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010); Tim Shephard, Echoing Helicon: Music, Art, and Identity in the Este Studioli, 1440–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 28. The texts most often cited as sources for these paintings are Philostratus, Imagines; Ovid, Fasti and Ars Amatoria; Catullus, Carmina. Paul Holberton, “The Choice of Texts for the Camerino Pictures,” in Bacchanals by Titian and Rubens: Papers Given at a Symposium in Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, March 18–19, 1987, edited by Görel Cavalli- Björkman (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1987), 57–66; Cecil Gould, The Studio of Alfonso d’Este and Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” (London: National Gallery, 1969). 29. Dosso Dossi and Titian separately modified Bellini’s painting. The continuous screen of trees behind the figures was altered to create the more dramatic landscape. Diana Goodgal, “Titian Repairs Bellini,” in Bacchanals by Titian and Rubens, 17–24; David Bull and Joyce Plesters, “The Feast of the Gods”: Conservation, Examination, and Interpretation (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990); Joyce Plesters, “Examination of Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods: A Summary and Interpretation of Results,” in Manca, Titian 500, 375–91. The technical investigations described in these studies also revealed that Bellini was responsible for adjusting the draperies and the postures of the figures to create a greater eroticism. This invalidated the claims made by John Walker, Bellini and Titian at Ferarra (London: Phaidon, 1956). 30. Edgar Wind first identified the figures in the lower right corner as Priapus and Lotis. Wind, Bellini’s “Feast of the Gods”: A Study in Venetian Humanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 28–29. 31. On the iconographic motif of the sleeping nude female figure whose concealing drapery is lifted by a man or satyr, see Meiss, “Sleep in Venice.” 32. Raphael’s drawing is known from an eighteenth- century engraving of it by Conrad Metz (British Museum, London). 33. The most comprehensive consideration of the camerino to date and the complete documents involving the paintings commissioned for it are collected in Alessandro Ballarin, ed., Il camerino delle pitture di Alfonso I, 6 vols. (Padua: Bertoncello, 2002–7). See also John Shearman, “Alfonso d’Este’s camerino,” in “Il se rendit en Italie”: Études offertes à André Chastel (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 209–29. 34. See Pieri, La scena boschereccia, 1–29, and Sampson, Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy, 7. 190
Notes to Pages 147–150
35. On the privacy of court performances and other methods employed for maintaining elitism, see Richard Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 208–26. 36. Bernardino de’ Prosperi provided the description of the performance in a letter he wrote from Ferrara to Isabella d’Este. For the text of the letter, see Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, Mantova e Urbino: Isabella d’Este ed Elisabetta Gonzaga nelle relazioni famigliari e nelle vicende politiche (Turin: L. Roux, 1893), 317–19. 37. Sampson, Pastoral Drama, 105; Elena Povoledo, “Ferrara,” in Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, vol. 5 (Rome: Le Maschere, 1958), cols. 173–85. There also were frequent (and noteworthy) inclusions of women and children at court in these elite performances, most likely as a way to display their deportment and education to visiting guests—and sometimes as a means to secure marriage offers. 38. Miguel Falomir, ed., Tiziano (Madrid: Museo nacional del Prado, 2003), cat. no. 15, p. 172, with further bibliography. 39. The Este family directed significant attention to the creation of delightful green spaces, which included the villa and gardens on the island of Belvedere, the residence of Belriguardo, and the Montagna di San Giorgio (an artificial hill). See Angelo Solerti, “Ferrara e i luoghi di delizia degli Estensi,” in Ferrara e le corte estense nella seconda metà del secolo decimosesto: I discorsi di Annibale Romei, gentiluomo Ferrarese (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1900), i–xxii. Alfonso’s father, Ercole, also demonstrated an interest in public performances: he staged shows in the cortile of palace with ten thousand people in attendance and began to build a theater. See Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 117–21, 258, and Shephard, Echoing Helicon, 110. There were also performances at the Palazzo Schifanoia. See Sampson, Pastoral Drama, 28, and Charles M. Rosenberg, “Courtly Decorations and the Decorum of Interior Space,” in La corte e lo spazio: Ferrara estense, ed. Giuseppe Papagno and Amedeo Quondam (Rome: Bulzoni, 1982), 2:537–40. 40. Recorded dramatic performances nearly cease between 1508 and 1528, and very few pastoral performances are specifically recorded before 1545. See Sampson, Pastoral Drama, 16; Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 117–21; and Philip Russell Horner, The Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio Giraldi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 6n1. 41. Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 96–178.
42. For the provenance of these paintings, see Jean Habert, “‘Jupiter et Antiope,’ dit ‘Venus du Pardo,’” in Le siècle de Titien, 520–22 (Pardo Venus), and Titian and the Golden Age of Painting: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010). The Pardo Venus was in Madrid before 1564. 43. The Venus with an Organist and Cupid is often identified as the Venus that Titian gave to Charles V in 1545. This could also be the painting listed among the possessions of Diego de Vargas, Philip II’s secretary of state, in 1576. The painting was first recorded in 1626. Falomir, Tiziano, cat. nos. 41 and 42, pp. 248–51. 44. The Nymph and Shepherd was mentioned for the first time in 1636 as a Venus and Adonis in the collection of Bartolomeo della Nave. The inventory is reproduced in Ellis K. Waterhouse, “Paintings from Venice for SeventeenthCentury England: Some Records of a Forgotten Transaction,” Italian Studies 7 (1952): 1–23. The Flaying was probably acquired ca. 1620 by Althea Talbot, wife of Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, but nothing is known about the life of the picture until then. See Falomir, Tiziano, 292–95. 45. Clubb, Italian Drama, 144–47. 46. Most of the scholarship on the five closely related Venus-and-musician pictures has focused on the paintings as Neoplatonic allegories of the perception of beauty through hearing and sight: Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Katherine A. McIver, “Pastoral Pleasures, Sensual Sounds: Paintings of Love, Music, and Morality in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Music, Sensation, and Sensuality, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern (New York: Routledge, 2002), 285–98; Bayer, Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, 327–28. Paul Barolsky thought of the pictures as satires. Barolsky, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 168–70. See also Falomir, Tiziano, 248–51. In “Titian’s Replicas and Variants,” in Titian, ed. David Jaffé (London: National Gallery, 2003), 60–68, Falomir discusses the two Prado pictures within the context of the studio practice of producing replicas. 47. Erwin Panofsky, “Titian and Ovid,” in Problems in Titian, 139–71. 48. Cited and translated in Tim Carter, Music in Late Renaissance and Early Baroque Italy (London: B. T. Batsford), 134. The same could apply to earlier pastoral dramas, such as Giraldi’s satyr play Egle (1545), in which nymphs, pursued by satyrs, rush offstage and find themselves metamorphosed
into trees, rivers, or flowers. See Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, Egle: Lettera sovra il comporre le satire atte alla scena, favola pastorale, ed. Carla Molinari (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1985). Such a mixing of traditions appears even earlier in less academically structured pastoral dramas, such as Poliziano’s late fifteenth-century Orfeo. See Pieri, La scena boschereccia, 1–29. 49. Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia, 231. 50. For Domenico Campagnola, see Albert Châtelet, “Domenico Campagnola et la naissance du paysage ordonné,” in Interpretazioni veneziane: Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Michelangelo Muraro, ed. David Rosand (Venice: Arsenale, 1984), 331–42. 51. Mauro Lucco, “Da ‘paese’ a ‘paesaggio’: Le molte facce della natura veneta,” in Tiziano e la nascita del paesaggio moderno (Florence: Giunti, 2012), 17–35. See also cat. nos. 37 and 45 in the same catalogue. 52. Thirty-three editions of the Pastor fido were published in Venice between 1600 and 1650, far more than the sixteen editions of Sannazaro’s Arcadia. By contrast, forty editions of the Arcadia were published in Venice between 1550 and 1600. This information can be found on EDIT16 (http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it/web_iccu/ihome.htm), a census of Italian sixteenth-century editions of books that is curated by the Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico delle biblioteche italiane. For the circumstances leading to changes in Venetian publishing in the early seventeenth century, see Neil Harris, “Italy,” in The Book: A Global History, ed. Michael F. Suarez, S.J., and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 433–34. 53. In 1565 Palladio was commissioned by the Compagnia degli Accesi to design a temporary venue for a tragedy to be performed at one of the Foscari palaces. After this first commercial theater, nearly twenty followed by the end of the seventeenth century. The first public opera house was the theater at San Cassiano. For the commercial operations of opera productions in Venice, see E. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 9–13. 54. On academies, see D. S. Chambers and F. Quiviger, ed., Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1995); Eric Cochrane, “Le accademie,” in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ’500, ed. Giancarlo Garfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1983), 1:3–17; and Amadeo Quondam, “L’accademia,” in Letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Il letterato e le istituzioni (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 823–98. For commedia dell’arte in Venice, see Peter Jordan, Notes to Pages 150–152
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The Venetian Origins of the Commedia dell’arte (New York: Routledge, 2014). 55. Giorgione’s Tempesta, for example, is included in a few inventories of the Vendramin collection taken in the sixteenth century. The picture is last mentioned in 1601 and then reappears ca. 1800 in the Manfrin collection in Venice. For the full provenance, see J. Anderson, Giorgione, 301–2. 56. For a helpful survey of these transactions, see Jonathan Brown, Kings & Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Christina M. Anderson, The Flemish Merchant of Venice: Daniel Nijs and the Sale of the Gonzaga Art Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), offers an in-depth
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profile of an art dealer who resided in Venice. 57. All data comes from www.mappingtitian.org. Pastoral pictures with unknown provenances include Orpheus and Eurydice (Accademia Carrara). 58. The same contours in provenance can be found by considering the provenance information offered by Anderson (Giorgione, 294–308) for the generally accepted attributions. 59. Robert C. Cafritz, “Reverberations of Venetian Graphics in Rembrandt’s Pastoral Landscapes,” in Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Places of Delight, 131–47, and Robert C. Cafritz, “Rococo Restoration of the Venetian Landscape and Watteau’s Creation of the Fête Galante,” in ibid., 149–81.
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index
Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number. abduction themes, 104, 105 accidents, Aristotelian concept of, 128 Adoration of the Shepherds, or Allendale Nativity (fig. 25) (Giorgione), 52, 54 Aeneid (Virgil), 36, 134 Agnadello, Battle of, 171n57, 185n86 Alberti, Leon Battista green-world references, 9, 63–64 landscape painting recommendations, 14 linear perspective and object relationship, 83–84 measurement and meaning, 128 pastoral painting references, 50–51 sea, human management of, 106 Albizzi, Camillo, 150–51 alchemy, 133 Aldobrandini Madonna, The (Titian), 139 Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara art patronage and commissions, 94, 139, 147–48 art patronage theories, 188–89n14 court entertainment of, 97, 150 floating spectacles witnessed by, 94 garden-island villas of, 97, 190n39 allegory, 58–59, 83, 87, 94–96 Allegory of a Venetian Victory (Cariani), 174–75n5 Allegory of Virtue and Vice (Lotto), 59, 87 Allendale Nativity (fig. 25) (Giorgione), 52, 54 Alpers, Paul, 55–56, 66–67, 172n72 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 13, 160n49 Ambrogini, Angelo (Poliziano), 45, 51, 191n48 Ameto, L’ (Boccaccio), 59, 60, 64 Andrea Odoni (Lotto), 121, 121, 122 Annunciation (Pollaiuolo, P. del), 82, 83 Antico, 117 apes, 134–35 aporia, 159n42 Appennino (Giambologna), 126 Appuhn, Karl, 16 Arcadia (mythological location), 91–93, 177n52 Arcadia (Sannazaro) author’s aspirations in, 58 green-world structures and passage themes, 60–61, 64 landscape roles in, 68–70, 71 New World place-names influenced by, 177n52
occult narrative and animated nature in, 130, 131 as pastoral dream-country example, 172n70 as pastoral painting influence, 46, 57 publishing decline of, 152, 191n52 satyr associations in, 132 seaside themes, 36–37 architecture, in pastoral paintings, 49, 61, 83 Arelli, Francesco Xanto, 58 Aretino, Pietro garden-centered literary experiences, 31, 32 green-world inspirations, 6–7, 94 illustrated poetry books by, 37–38, 39 pastoral poetry with seaside themes, 37–38 Venice metaphoric descriptions, 32–33 “Argument of Comedy, The” (Frye), 4–5 Ariosto, Ludovico. See Orlando furioso (Ariosto) Aristotle accidents concepts, 128 alchemy and nature of substances, 133 genre debate influence, 51 pastoral reference omissions, 56, 170n44 role of art experience, 89 wealth and moderation ethics, 183n38 writing translations and impact of, 170n33 Ars Poetica (Scaliger), 56 Art of Poetry (Ars Poetica) (Horace), 119, 170n44 Arundel, Thomas Howard, Earl of, 191n44 Asolani, Gli (Bembo), 35, 42, 59, 173n89 Assunta (Titian), 179n93 Astrologer, The (fig. 70) (Campagnola, G.), 130, 131, 131 attribution challenges bronze statuettes, 182n15 pastoral paintings, 10, 52, 140, 144–47, 158n39 Augustine, Saint, 49, 120, 120 Aurelio, Niccolò, 158n39 Autobiography (Cellini), 133 Bacchanal of Men (Dosso Dossi), 148 Bacchanal of the Andrians (fig. 72) (Titian), 139, 140, 148 Bacchus and Ariadne (fig. 50) (Titian), 94, 95, 108, 139, 148 Bachelard, Gaston, 122 Bacino, 76, 89, 96, 104 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 170n44 Barbaro, Daniele, 25, 40–41, 140 Bartolommeo, Fra patronage, 101, 147, 148
works of Lucca Altarpiece, 179n93 Vision of Saint Catherine (fig. 54), 101–2, 103 Worship of Venus, 148 Base for a Satyr and Satyress Group (fig. 62), 112, 114, 127, 135 Bassano, Jacopo, 140, 151 Batoni, Pompeo Girolamo: Triumph of Venice, The (fig. 46), 87, 87–88 Beatrice d’Este, Duchess of Milan, 94, 162n27 bedrooms, collection displays in, 121 Bellano, Bartolomeo, 117 Bellini, Gentile: Procession in St. Mark’s Square (fig. 7), 9, 9–10, 75, 82 Bellini, Giovanni pastoral subjects and themes, 48–49 patronage, 147 production period, 45 works of (see also Saint Francis in the Desert) Feast of the Gods (fig. 79), 148, 149 Madonna and Child (fig. 10, New York), 9, 12–13, 13 Madonna and Child (Milan), 52 Madonna of the Meadow (fig. 23), 45, 46, 48 Bellini, Jacopo: Flagellation (fig. 44), 84, 84–85, 129 Belvedere, 97, 190n39 Bembo, Pietro allegorical commentary criticism, 59 green-world references, 35, 91, 173n89 nature of love references, 42 residences of, 181n6 topographical interpretations, 165n84 Beolco, Angelo, 41–42, 157n26 Berger, Harry, Jr., 5, 6, 9, 61, 88–89 Berruguete, Pedro, 124 Bertelli, Francesco: Uomini selvatica (fig. 4), 7, 7 Betía, La (Beolco/Il Ruzante), 42 bizarre faconde, et ingeniose rime pescatorie, Le (Calmo), 167n112 Blaise, Saint, 101 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 47, 58–59, 60, 64 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 45, 57 Boldrini, Niccolò: Caricature of the Laocoön Group, attrib. to (fig. 71), 134–37, 135 Bonacolsi, Pier Jacopo Alari, 117 Bordone, Benedetto, 25–26, 90, 90, 91, 177n46 Bouloux, Nathalie, 97 Boy with a Pipe, A (“The Shepherd”) (fig. 26) (Giorgione), 52, 54, 71
207
Bredekamp, Horst, 136 Briosco, Andrea. See Riccio Britto, Giovanni: Stanze di M. Pietro Aretino frontispiece (fig. 21), attrib. to, 38, 39 bronze casting process, 133 bronze statuettes, pastoral animated nature in, 130–34 composition features, 112 display descriptions, 119–25 function of, 111 goldsmiths and art style descriptions, 117–18 green-world structure descriptions, 112, 114, 116 historical sources for, 116, 118 media descriptions, 111 miniatures, 125–30 nature associations, 137 Renaissance production, 116, 117–18 scholarship on, 111–12 subject matter popularity, 111 Brown, Patricia Fortini, 183n37 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 83 Bucoliche elegantis-simamente (Miscomini), 168n3 Bucolics (Virgil), 156n7 Bucolicum Carmen (Petrarch), 58–59, 60 buffonesca plays, 38, 42, 167n122 Buondelmonti, Cristoforo, 177n42 Calmo, Andrea, 7, 94, 167n112 Campagnola, Domenico art style evolution, 151 production period, 45 works of Rocky Woodland Landscape (fig. 27), 61, 62, 67 Two Kneeling Youths in a Landscape (London) (fig. 28), 61, 62 Two Kneeling Youths in a Landscape (Vienna) (fig. 31), 67, 68 Campagnola, Giulio Boldrini woodcut compared to works by, 187n110 production period, 45 works of Astrologer, The (fig. 70), 130, 131, 131 Landscape with Two Men Sitting near a Coppice (fig. 3), 2, 3, 45, 59, 61, 67 Old Shepherd Lying in a Landscape (fig. 35), 73, 73, 130 Campbell, Stephen, 185n86, 186n102 Canzoniere (Petrarch), 57 Cariani, Giovanni Allegory of a Venetian Victory, 174–75n5 Virgin and Child with a View of Venice (Tallard Madonna), poss. attrib., 175n5 Caricature of the Laocoön Group, attrib. to (fig. 71) (Boldrini), 134–37, 135
208
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carnevale italiano mascherato, Il (Bertelli), 7, 7 Carpaccio, Vittore art style descriptions, 85, 109 works of Hunting on the Lagoon, 123–24 Lion of Saint Mark (fig. 18), 28, 28, 76–77 Saint Augustine in His Study (fig. 66), 114, 120, 120 Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni paintings, 109 Scuola di Sant’Orsola paintings, 109 Casola, Pietro, 26 Cassiodorus, 91–92 Castelfranco Altarpiece (fig. 24) (Giorgione), 52, 53, 55, 64–65, 86–87 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 128 Castiglione, Baldassare, 126 “Catena Map” (Uberti after Rosselli), 81, 82 Cellini, Benvenuto, 133 Charles V, King of Spain, 191n43 Chigi, Agostino, 36, 94, 98. See also Villa Farnesina, Rome Christ and the Adulteress (Titian), 147 Christ Carrying the Cross (Giorgione), 144 Cicero, 131 Cinzio, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, 51, 191n48 Circe (Dosso Dossi), 58 city-country dialect, 34–35, 41–42, 47, 59–60 city personifications, 81, 82 city views (vedute). See also Venice, views of commission purpose, 98–99 compositional traditions for, 82–87 inscriptions on, 82 mythological personifications in, 81 as painting backgrounds, 82–83 popularity of, 81 vedute definition, 81 Cleric in His Study, The (Lotto), 120 cloister gardens, 23, 24 coastlines, 104–9 Cock, Hieronymus, 188n6 Cole, Michael, 133 collections display methods, 114, 119–23 inventory descriptions of, 49, 50, 111–12, 118, 119–20, 144, 181n5 size and scale appreciation, 129 Colonna, Francesco, 29, 30, 30, 61, 97 Colonna, Vittoria, 129 Columbus, Christopher, 89–90, 177n52 Comito, Terry, 33 Compagnie della Calza, 7, 39, 41, 167n116 concealment, 67, 92, 122, 148 Conley, Tom, 176–77n41 Contarini, Giacomo, 25 Contarini, Michiel, 118
Contarini, Taddeo, 160n52, 169n21 Contarini, Tommaso, 25 contemplation, 17, 49, 67, 70, 73, 123, 146 Corbin, Alain, 105 Cornaro, Alvise, 25, 42, 96, 162n27, 181n6 Cornaro, Catherine, 35 cortegiano, Il (Castiglione), 126 Coryat, Thomas, 99–100, 106, 108 country-city dialect, 34–35, 41–42, 47, 59–60 Court of Pan (Signorelli), 168n2 Crescenzi, Pietro de’, 28, 29 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 158n30 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 66 Cusanus, Nicolaus, 104 Dante Alighieri, 30 David (Michelangelo), 125–26 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 155n4 De agricultura vulgare (Liber ruralium commodorum) (Crescenzi), 28 De arte poetica (Vida), 56 Death of Adonis (fig. 6) (Sebastiano del Piombo) allegorical interpretations of, 83 background descriptions, 7, 76, 85, 104 commission details, 98, 178n80 composition descriptions, 8, 76 damage and restoration history, 178–79n80 dating, 178n80 green-world structures of, 94 provenance, 76 Della historia vinitiana (Bembo), 91 Della lingua latina libri sei (Priscianese), 26–27, 32, 163n36, 165n78 Della pittura (Alberti), 51 Dell’imitazione poetica (Partenio), 34 Delos (mythological island), 92–93 De pictura (Alberti), 51 De re aedificatoria (Alberti), 50–51, 63–64 Derrida, Jacques, 158n30, 180n107 De sculptura (Guaricus), 119, 129 deserto, 50 De vita solitaria (Petrarch), 34, 49 Dialogo dei colori (Dolce), 132 Dialogo di pittura (Pino), 51–52 Diana and Actaeon (Titian), 139, 150 Diana and Callisto (Titian), 139, 150 Disputa (Raphael), 102 distance, perspective of, 27, 67, 75, 84, 99–101, 104–9, 128 Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri), 30 Doge Renieri Zen (Palma Giovane), 175n5 Dolce, Lodovico, 31, 132 Dolfin, Bianca, 23 Donà family, 23 Donatello relief sculptures with landscape details, 126
Saint Louis of Toulouse, 116 Dosso Dossi (Dosso of Ferrara) Bellini works modified by, 190n29 composition descriptions, 66 patronage, 147 works of Bacchanal of Men, 148 Melissa (or Circe), 58 Three Ages of Man, 159n41 Dresden Venus (Giorgione), 188n12 Drinking Satyr (fig. 61) (Riccio/Briosco), 111, 113, 117 Eclogae (Gaurico), 168n3 Eclogues (Virgil), 45, 56, 57, 60, 156n7, 176n35 Egle (Giraldi), 191n48 egloga pastorale. See theatrical performances, pastoral Egloga pastoral de Philebbo e Dinarcho pastori (play), 167n116 Elden, Stuart, 161n7 Eleonora d’Aragona, Duchess of Ferrara, 99 Elysium, 91 Empson, William, 161n10 enclosed gardens, 28, 32 Enthroned Madonna with Saints (Castelfranco Altarpiece) (fig. 24) (Giorgione), 52, 53, 55, 64–65, 86–87 environmentalism, 16–17, 21, 22, 42–43 Epicureanism, 56 Epitaph of Bion (Moschus, attrib.), 36 Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, 190n39 Ermolao academy, 25 espace vécu, l’, 161n7 Etna (Bembo), 165n84 extimacy, 159n45 Fabri, Felix, 91 Faith Adored by Doge Antonio Grimani (Titian), 174–75n5 Feast of the Gods (fig. 79) (Bellini, Giovanni), 148, 149 Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, 123, 124 Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, 139, 150 Ferguson, Ronnie, 42 Ferrara city views of, 99 court entertainment in, 148, 150 garden-islands constructed in, 97 Venetian pastoral art in, 94, 139, 140, 147–48 figures. See also portraits early dominance of, 13–14, 64–65 green-world structure and characteristics of, 61–62 in pastoral paintings, 45–46, 65–68, 70–71, 83–84
theatrical character comparisons, 41, 42, 52 Filarete: Marcus Aurelius sculpture reproduction, 116 Filetico, Martino, 171n51 Flagellation (fig. 44) (Bellini, Jacopo), 84, 84–85, 129 Flaying of Marsyas, The (Titian), 139, 150, 152, 191n44 floating theatrical spectacles, 94–96 Florence, Italy, 22, 45, 82, 125–26, 157n21 Foliage Room (Palazzo Grimani at Santa Maria Formosa), 29 Foucault, Michel, 5, 6, 88–89 Fracastoro, Girolamo, 33 Frye, Northrop, 4–5, 6, 61 Gabriele, Trifone, 7, 25, 34, 93–94 Galatea (fig. 20) (Raphael), 36, 37, 94 garden-islands, 97 Garden of the Hesperides, 91 gardens categories of, 22 descriptions and design features, 23–30, 30 early popularity and development, 1, 21–23 enclosed (hortus conclusus), 28, 32 human activity associations, 29, 164n58 islands as, 97 metaphorical symbolism, 32–33 ownership of, 23 purpose and uses of, 21, 23, 29, 31–34, 39–40 treatises on planning, 28 vedute documentation of, 23–26, 24, 25, 93, 93 Gauricus, Pomponius, 119, 129, 133, 168n3 Geneaologia Deorum Gentilium Libri (Boccaccio), 58–59 Georgics (Virgil), 188n7 Gerbino, Giuseppe, 150 Ghent, Joos van, 124 Giambologna: Appennino, 126 Gilbert, Creighton, 63, 159n42 Giorgione attribution issues, 52, 144, 152, 174n5, 188n11 pastoral painting origins, credit for, 144 production period, 45 provenance issues, 152 works of (see also Sleeping Venus; Tempesta) Adoration of the Shepherds, or Allendale Nativity (fig. 25), 52, 54 Boy with a Pipe, A (“The Shepherd”) (fig. 26), 52, 54, 71 Castelfranco Altarpiece (Enthroned Madonna with Saints) (fig. 24), 52, 53, 55, 64–65, 86–87 Christ Carrying the Cross, 144 Laura, 188n12 Portrait of a Man, 188n12
Sleeping Woman in a Landscape (Dresden Venus), 188n12 Sunset (Il Tramonto), 52 Three Philosophers, The (fig. 12), 14, 16, 20 (detail), 55, 144, 188n12 Vecchia, La, 55 Virgin and Child with a View of Venice (Tallard Madonna), attrib., 174n5 Youth Holding Arrow, 188n12 Giovio, Paolo, 65–66 Giudecca creative interpretations of, 91 early documentation of gardens on, 23, 24, 24, 25, 162n30 floating display spectacles, 96 Marco Polo illustrations with views of, 7, 8 villa retreats on, 21, 25 Giustiniani, Leonardo, 26 God, 101–4 God the Father over the Piazza San Marco (Veronese, B.), 175n5 Gowing, Lawrence, 189n19 Gozzi, Luigi, 98–99, 101 Gozzi Altarpiece (fig. 37) (Titian), 77, 78, 88, 98, 101, 102, 104 Green Cabinet, The (Rosenmeyer), 173n108 green worlds, overview. See also gardens; green worlds in pastoral paintings in bronze statuettes, 112, 114, 116, 125–28 characteristics of, 5–7, 9, 34, 48, 60–61 heterotopias compared to, 5, 6, 88–89 islands as, 88–98 passage/transition themes, 4–6, 9, 34, 59–61, 64, 76, 172n73 projective imagination requirements, 63–64 in Renaissance literature, 5–7, 59–61, 173n89 term origins, 4, 61 green worlds in pastoral paintings characteristics of, 9, 10, 12, 47–48, 60–62, 73 composition descriptions, 12–14, 73 early references to, 64–65 figures in, 13–14, 61–62, 65–66, 70–71 function of, 7, 9, 61, 66, 93, 94 pastoral landscape roles compared to, 66 religious themes and visionary imagery, 7, 9, 98–104 viewing experiences, 9–10, 12, 61–63 Grimani, Cardinal Domenico, 25, 181n13 Grimani Altarpiece (Titian), 102 Grise, Jehan de, and workshop: View of Venice, from Marco Polo, The Romance of Alexander (fig. 5), 7, 8, 91 Gritti, Andrea, 25, 179n88 Guarini da Verona, Guarino, 26, 56 Gypsy Madonna (fig. 34) (Titian), 44 (detail), 72, 73, 146–47, 152
index
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Habiti antichi et moderni di tutti il mondo (Vecellio), 85, 86, 96 Halberdier Watching Woman Seated in a Meadow with Two Infants (Palma Vecchio), 189n22 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 160n53, 173n101 Hercules and Antaeus (Pollaiuolo, A. del), 127 hermits, as popular pastoral figures, 46, 49 heterotopias, 5, 6, 88–89, 97 Heydenreich, Titus, 180n108 Homer, 36, 106 Hope, Charles, 188n5, 188n12 Horace, 56, 119, 170n44 horizons, 85, 99–104 hortus conclusus, 28, 32 Hourticq, Louis, 144 Hunting on the Lagoon (Carpaccio), 123–24 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Colonna, attrib.), 29, 30, 30, 61, 97 Idyll: A Mother and a Halberdier in a Wooded Landscape, An (Titian), 189n22 Idylls (Theocritus), 35–36, 44, 55, 56–57, 60, 130, 156n7 Ikaromenippos (Lucian), 101 Ingold, Tim, 160n53 intimacy of art ownership and collection displays, 114, 120–25 and exterior, 157n45 of green-world viewing experiences, 9–10, 12, 61–63 Isabella d’Este, 99, 117, 182n24, 188–89n14 islands, as second/green worlds atlases for, popularity of, 90 floating display spectacles, 94–96 garden-, 97 heterotopic reality vs. creative imaginings, 88–94 mythological floating, 92–93 personal spatial interiorizations of, 98 symbolism of, 98 isolarii, 90, 162n30 Isolario (Bordone), 25–26, 90, 90, 91, 177n46 isolation, 26–27, 66, 79, 98, 108, 146 isole più famose del mondo, L’ (Porcacchi), 162n30 Jacopo de’ Barbari. See View of Venice (Jacopo de’ Barbari) Jacopo Strada (fig. 68) (Titian), 110 (detail), 122, 123 Janson, H. W., 187n107 Jason and the Argonauts, 89 Jerome, Saint, 80, 93 John, Saint, 82 John the Baptist, Saint, 46 Jupiter and Antiope (Pardo Venus) (fig. 75) (Titian), 132, 138 (detail), 139, 142, 150, 186n92
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Kant, Immanuel, 158n30 Kim, David Young, 189n24 landscapes bronze pastoral sculptures and, 112, 125–26 female figures with nature, 12–13, 14, 159n44, 173n104 figure dominance and subordination of, 13–14 in other disciplines, 160n53 for portrait backgrounds, 12–13, 64, 87 pure, 13–14 role of, in pastoral mode, 45–46, 66–71, 73 small-scale, 50 Venetian interest in, 14, 16 Landscape with Two Men Sitting near a Coppice (fig. 3) (Campagnola, G.), 2, 3, 45, 59, 61, 67 Laocoön, 127, 134–37, 135, 181n13 Laocoön (Sansovino, J. and assistants), 134, 181n13 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Lessing), 127–28 lasciviousness, 131–32 Laura (Giorgione), 188n12 Leach, Eleanor Winsor, 173n97 Lefebvre, Henri, 161n7 Leonardo da Vinci green-world references in treatises of, 64 nature depictions, 14 painting vs. sculpture comparisons, 126 pictorial composition recommendations, 14 works of Mona Lisa, 12–13, 64, 86–87 Virgin of the Rocks, 64, 65 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 127–28 Lettera terza (Stampa), 34 Letters (Pliny the Younger), 161n8, 163n41 Liber Chronicarum (Pleydenwurff and Wolgemut), 75, 76–77 Liber Insularum Archipelagi (Buondelmonti), 177n42 Liber ruralium commodorum (Crescenzi), 28 Libro pastorale intitolato Archadio (Sannazaro), 50 Libro secondo della prospettiva (fig. 22) (Serlio), 40, 41, 51, 136 Lion of Saint Mark (fig. 18) (Carpaccio), 28, 28, 76–77 literature, 29, 30, 61, 97. See also poetry, pastoral Lives of the Artists, The (Vasari), 144, 158n36 locus amoenus court retreats as, 150 garden green worlds as, 6–7, 31, 32, 33 as pastoral description, 52, 66 Venetian islands described as, 93 Loggetta di San Marco allegorical figures (Sansovino, J., and assistants), 81, 82 Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena (Raphael), 29
Loggia di Psiche frescoes (Raphael), 29 Loh, Maria H., 187n107 Lotto, Lorenzo production period, 45 works of Allegory of Virtue and Vice, 59, 87 Andrea Odoni, 121, 121, 122 Cleric in His Study, The, 120 love garden associations, 21, 33, 35 islands of, 178n77 landscapes as expression of, 66–67, 70 as pastoral painting theme, 150 as pastoral poetry theme, 42, 47, 56 pergola associations, 29 Lucca Altarpiece (Fra Bartolommeo), 179n93 Lucian, 101, 179n92 Lucretius, 168n4 Ludovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, 117 Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, 94 Lynn-Davis, Barbara, 156n17, 161n8 Madonna and Child (fig. 10, New York) (Bellini, Giovanni), 9, 12–13, 13 Madonna and Child (Milan) (Bellini, Giovanni), 52 Madonna of Foligno (fig. 53) (Raphael), 7, 101, 102, 103 Madonna of the Meadow (fig. 23) (Bellini, Giovanni), 45, 46, 48 Maggiorbo, 162n30 maniere di figure piccole, 129 Mantuan, Baptista, 45, 57 Manutius, Aldus, 56–57, 156n7 Marcolini, Francesco, 6–7, 31, 37, 94 Marco Polo, Li Livres du Graunt Caam, from The Romance of Alexander, 7, 8, 91 Marcus Aurelius reproduction (Filarete), 116 Mark, Saint allegorical imagery of, 28, 28, 81, 82, 91, 100 in Venetian mythology, 23, 28, 92, 92 Marriage of the Virgin (Raphael), 102 McStay, Heather O’Leary, 186n101 measurement, and meaning, 128–29 Medici, Lorenzo de’, il Magnifico, 45 Melissa (Dosso Dossi), 58 Mercury (god), 75, 81 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 36, 150–51 Michelangelo David, 125–26 Pietà drawing, 129 Michiel, Marcantonio, 49–50, 118, 119–20, 144, 181n5 Michiel, Pier Antonio, 25, 163n39 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 5 Miracle of the Woman Wounded by Her Husband (fig. 32) (Titian), 67, 69, 147
Miscomini, Antonio, 168n3 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 70 momarie, 23, 38 Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci), 12–13, 64, 86–87 moon, travels to, 100–101 More, Thomas, 61 Moschus, 36 Moses / Zeus Ammon (Riccio/Briosco), 117 Murano, 7, 21, 23, 24, 24, 25, 162n30 Nagel, Alexander, 170n41 Natali, Antonio, 178–79n80 nationalism, 23, 32–33, 52 Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 134, 177n58 nature. See also gardens; landscapes; sea bronze casting and statuettes associated with, 137 bronze sculpture with animated, 130–34 environmentalism and, 16–17, 21, 22, 42–43 female associations with, 159n44, 173n104 solitude in, 34, 49 Naugerius (Fracastoro), 33 Navagero, Andrea, 25, 30, 33, 34, 93–94, 164n63 Nave, Bartolomeo della, 191n44 negotium, 33, 49 Neptune (Roman god), 75, 81, 88, 94–95, 166n101 Nicholas of Cusa, 103–4 Noli me tangere (Titian), 67–68, 152 Nymph and Shepherd (fig. 76) (Titian), 129, 142, 150, 152, 191n44 Nymphs and Satyrs (Titian), 132, 186n92 occult, 130–31, 133 Odoni, Andrea, 121, 121 Odyssey (Homer), 36, 106 Old Shepherd Lying in a Landscape (fig. 35) (Campagnola, G.), 73, 73, 130 orchards, 23, 264n63 Orfeo (Poliziano), 51, 191n48 Orlando furioso (Ariosto) distanced views and global perspectives, 100–101 garden-island descriptions, 97 genre descriptions, 156n14 green-world scenarios, 5–6 as pastoral painting inspiration, 58 seaside themes, 36–37 vedute green-world structure comparisons, 79 Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 57 Orpheus and Eurydice (Titian), 192n57 Ortolani, 39 otium (leisure time), 16, 33, 49, 56, 150 Outdoor Concert (Pozzoserrato), 151, 151 Ovid, 36, 150–51
Pagan, Matteo: View of Venice (fig. 93), 93, 93, 177n46 paintings, pastoral, overview. See also green worlds in pastoral paintings art style descriptions, early, 45–46, 52, 55 art style descriptions, later shifts in, 140, 143, 150, 151–52 attribution challenges, 10, 52, 140, 144–47 early references on, 50–52 environmentalist purpose of, 43 exportation/relocation of, 139–40, 147–48, 150, 152–53 green-world comparisons, 10, 12 landscape roles in, 66, 67–68, 73 literary influences on, 57–58 pastoral poetry relationship to, 46–48, 56–59 popularity of, 2, 45, 48–55, 139 scholarship on, 2 survival of, 4 theater as influence on, 41, 42, 47, 52, 150–51 themes and subjects of, 2–3, 4 viewing experiences, 9–10 Pala Pesaro (fig. 39) (Savoldo), 77, 80, 102, 104 Palazzo Apostolico, Rome, 29 Palazzo Cornaro, Giudecca, 25, 31 Palazzo Corner, Murano, 25, 162n27 Palazzo Ducale, Ferrara, 94, 147–48 Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, 123, 124 Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 10, 38 Palazzo Grimani at Santa Maria Formosa, 25, 29, 102, 134, 163n51 Palazzo Michiel, Venice, 25, 163n39 Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice, 25 Palazzo Priuli, Murano, 7, 25 Palazzo Trevisan, Murano, 25, 25, 162n29 Palma, Jacopo, il Giovane: Doge Renieri Zen, 175n5 Palma, Jacopo, il Vecchio attribution issues, 188n11 production period, 45 Halberdier Watching Woman Seated in a Meadow with Two Infants, 189n22 Pan (Roman god), 45, 51, 118, 130, 150, 168n2 paradise, 28 Pardo Venus (Jupiter and Antiope) (fig. 75) (Titian), 132, 138 (detail), 139, 142, 150, 186n92 parerga, 65–66 Partenio, Bernardino, 34 Paschal Candelabrum (Riccio/Briosco), 117 passage themes, 4–6, 9, 34, 60–61, 64, 76, 172n73 pastoral, La (Beolco), 42 pastoral (pastorale), overview. See also related topics definition of, 56 early term usage, 50 mode descriptions, 4
seventeenth-century exportation of, 139 urban, 22 Pastoral and Ideology (Patterson), 170n43, 172n72 Pastoral Concert (fig. 1) (Titian) attribution issues, 52, 144–45 composition view, 2 genre categorization, 2, 52 green-world structures in, 10, 12, 59, 60, 61 landscape roles in, 45, 67–68, 94 patronage theories, 188–89n14 provenance, 188–89n14 relocation date, 152 Pastoralia (Boiardo), 167n3 Pastoral Scene (fig. 29) (Titian), 61, 63 pastor fido, Il (Guarini), 56, 191n52 pathetic fallacy, 56, 70 Patinir, Joachim, 13 Patterson, Annabel, 170n43, 172n72 pergolas, 23, 24–25, 28–29, 30 Perseus and Andromeda (fig. 56) (Titian), 104–5, 106, 108 perspective atmospheric, 14, 85, 86–87 distance and, 27, 67, 75, 84, 99–101, 104–9, 128 foreground vs. background relationships, 82–85 horizons and, 85, 99–104 passage/transition symbolism, 85 pergola imagery and emotion, 29 size and scale for meaning, 128–29 for views of Venice, 75–76, 81, 85–86 Perspettiva della prima piazza di San Marco (fig. 45) (Vecellio), 85, 86, 96 Petrarch friendship and shared-property intimacy, 121–22 gardens for writing inspiration, 34 green-world structures of, 60, 89 love themes, 21, 47, 70 pastoral mode for political commentary, 58–59 as pastoral painting influence, 57, 150 as pastoral poetry influence, 6–7, 21, 28, 31, 35, 47, 70, 71 solitude in nature, 34, 49 writing style descriptions, 60 Phaedrus (Plato), 32, 172n73 Philip II of Spain, 139, 150 Piazza San Marco, 1, 33, 38, 85–86, 86, 96 Pietà drawing (Michelangelo), 129 Pino, Paolo, 33, 51–52 Pio, Ercole, 148 Piscatorial Eclogues (Sannazaro), 36–37 Plato, 32, 172n73
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Pleydenwurff, Wilhelm: View of Venice, from Liber Chronicarum (fig. 36), with Wolgemut, 75, 76–77 Pliny the Elder, 51, 134, 177n58 Pliny the Younger, 161n8, 163n41, 181n10 Poetics (Aristotle), 51, 170n44 poetry, pastoral central themes in, 21, 42, 47, 56, 70 characteristics of, 57 functions of, 58–59 garden-islands in, 97 global perspectives due to distanced views, 100–101 green-world inspiration for, 6–7 green-world structures in, 5–6, 34, 59–61, 64, 173n89 ideals of, 7 influences on, 47 landscape roles in, 66–67, 68–71 literary categorization challenges, 4, 55–56 pastoral painting relationship to, 46–48, 56–59 popularity of, 45, 152, 191n52 seascape themes in, 35–38 theatrical performances of, 7, 23 Poliziano, 45, 51, 191n48 Pollaiuolo, Antonio del: Hercules and Antaeus, 127 Pollaiuolo, Piero del: Annunciation, 82, 83 Polyphemus (fig. 20) (Sebastiano del Piombo), 36, 37, 94 Polyphemus (mythological character), 36, 37, 38, 94, 106 Porcacchi, Tommaso, 162n30 Portrait of a Man (Giorgione), 188n12 portraits character impersonations in, 58, 71 of cities (see city views; Venice, views of) emotional quality without landscape, 71 with landscape backgrounds, 12–13, 14, 64, 65 property displays in, 121, 122 self-portraits in pastoral paintings, 59 Powle, Stephen, 85–86 Pozzoserrato, Ludovico: Outdoor Concert, 151, 151 Priscianese, Francesco, 26–27, 32, 163n36, 165n78 Procession in St. Mark’s Square (fig. 7) (Bellini, Gentile), 9, 9–10, 75, 82 projective imagination, 35, 63–64, 127, 173n89 Protagoras, 128 Pulci, Bernardo, 45, 156n7 Pulci, Luca, 45 Puppi, Lionello, 161n12 Quos Ego (Raphael), 166n101 Radcliffe, Anthony, 182n15
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Ragionamenti delle corti (Aretino), 31, 165n78 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 186n88 Randolph, Adrian, 183n37 Rape of Europa (fig. 55) (Titian), 74 (detail), 104–5, 105, 108 Raphael patronage, 147 works of Disputa, 102 Galatea (fig. 20), 36, 37, 94 Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, 29 Loggia di Psiche, 29 Madonna of Foligno (fig. 53), 7, 101, 102, 103 Marriage of the Virgin, 102 Quos Ego, 166n101 Triumph of Baccus in India, 148 Vision of Ezekiel, 129 regionalism, 32–33 relief sculpture, 126 religious devotional art. See also Virgin Mary city views as backgrounds in, 82–83 horizon placement symbolism, 98–102 landscape backgrounds in, 18, 48 pastoral symbolism in, 146 popular subjects, 48, 52, 139 seascape symbolism, 103–4 visionary scenes, 7, 9, 48, 101–4 Rembrandt, 152 Rest on the Flight to Egypt (fig. 40) (Savoldo), 77, 81, 104 restraint, 133, 134 revelation, 49, 64, 85, 122, 146, 147 Riccio (Andrea Briosco) art style descriptions, 117 attribution challenges, 181n15 biographical information, 117 casting techniques of, 117 patrons of, 183n37 works of Drinking Satyr (fig. 61), 111, 113, 117 Moses / Zeus Ammon, 117 Paschal Candelabrum, 117 Satyr (Pan?) (fig. 59), 111, 112, 132, 133 Satyr and Satyress (fig. 60), 111, 112, 117 Shepherd Daphnis Playing a Pipe, The (fig. 63), 112, 115, 117–18 Shouting Horseman (fig. 64), 114, 116, 117 Strigil Bearer, 117 Ridolfi, Carlo, 186n103 Ridolfi, Niccolò, 32 “Rima 129” (Petrarch), 71 Rocky Woodland Landscape (fig. 27) (Campagnola, D.), 61, 62, 67 romance literature, 57–58 Romance of Alexander, The, 7, 8, 91 Rosand, David, 145–46
Rosand, Ellen, 157n22 Rosenmeyer, Thomas G., 173n108 Rosselli, Francesco: “Catena Map,” Uberti after, 81, 82 Ruskin, John, 70 Ruzante, Il, 41–42, 157n26 Sacred and Profane Love (fig. 8) (Titian), 10, 10, 12, 146, 152 Saint Augustine in His Study (fig. 66) (Carpaccio), 114, 120, 120 Saint Christopher (fig. 38) (Titian), 77, 79, 88, 99, 101, 179n88 Saint Francis in the Desert (fig. 11) (Bellini, Giovanni) artist inscriptions on, 59 composition descriptions, 15, 49, 50 genre categorization, 49 green-world structure in, 65 subjects and themes, 15, 46, 48, 49 Saint Louis of Toulouse (Donatello), 116 Saint Margaret and the Dragon (fig. 57) (Titian), 104–5, 107, 108, 109 Saint Mark Blessing the Origins of Venice (fig. 48) (Tintoretto), 92, 92 Saint Roch (Titian), 99, 174n5 Sala dei Fogliami (Foliage Room), 29 Sampson, Lisa, 157n22 San Donato, Murano, 23 San Francesco della Vigna, 24 San Giorgio Maggiore, 24, 96, 97 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 30, 50. See also Arcadia (Sannazaro) San Pietro di Castello, 24, 163n52 Sansovino, Francesco, 23, 26, 27, 32, 177–78n60 Sansovino, Jacopo, and assistants ceremonial spectacles staged by, 85 Laocoön reproduction, 134, 181n13 Loggetta di San Marco allegorical figures, 81, 82 Palazzo Trevisan construction, 162n29 Santa Agata, 32 Santa Maria dei Frari, 24, 179n93 Sante Cattaneo, 27 Sanudo, Mario, 38–39, 95–96 Satyr (Pan?) (fig. 59) (Riccio/Briosco), 111, 112, 132, 133 Satyr and Satyress (fig. 60) (Riccio/Briosco), 111, 112, 117 satyrs apes resemblance to, 134–35 as bronze statuette subjects, 112, 117–19, 120 identity conceptions of, 131–32 as pastoral painting subject, 4, 51 symbolic inclusion of, 119 theatrical performances and set recommendations for, 40, 51, 136
Savoldo, Giovanni Girolamo studiolo collections and displays of works by, 121 works of Pala Pesaro (Virgin in the Glory with Christ Child, Angels, and Saints Peter, Dominic, Paul, and Jerome, The) (fig. 39), 77, 80, 102, 104 Rest on the Flight to Egypt (fig. 40), 77, 81, 104 Scaliger, Julius, 56 Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 29 Schiller, Friedrich, 67 Schlegel, Friedrich, 189n15 Schmitter, Monika, 121 Schulz, Juergen, 83, 174n1, 174n3 sculpture, 121, 121, 122, 123, 125–27. See also bronze statuettes, pastoral Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni paintings (Carpaccio), 109 Scuola di Sant’Orsola paintings (Carpaccio), 109 sea Arcadia mythological location and, 93 coastlines, 104–9 islands in, as second worlds, 88–98 land relationship to, 2, 47, 94, 177–78n60 land vs., dialect of, 47, 94 nautical trade as green worlds, 89 as pastoral theme, 35–40 Roman god of, 75, 81, 88, 94–95, 166n101 symbolism of, 93, 102–4 Venice mythological associations to, 27–28 Venice views and land relationship with, 76 waterside gardens, 25, 26–28 Sebastiano del Piombo attribution challenges, 144 works of (see also Death of Adonis) Polyphemus (fig. 20), 36, 37, 94 Virgin and Child with a View of Venice (Tallard Madonna), poss. attrib., 175n5 Secondo libro di prospettiva (Serlio), 40 self-reflexivity, 58–60 Serenissima, La, 16, 22 Serlio, Sebastiano pastoral theater stagecraft recommendations, 40–41, 51, 126 satyric scene (fig. 22), from Libro secondo della prospettiva, 40, 41, 51, 136 Shakespeare, William, 4–5, 61 Shearman, John, 102, 170n39 “Shepherd, The” (Boy with a Pipe, A) (fig. 26) (Giorgione), 52, 54, 71 Shepherd Daphnis Playing a Pipe, The (fig. 63) (Riccio/Briosco), 112, 115, 117–18
Shouting Horseman (fig. 64) (Riccio/Briosco), 114, 116, 117 Signorelli, Luca: Court of Pan, 168n2 Silvae (Statius), 127 size and scale, 9, 62–63, 127–29 Sleeping Nymph (fig. 65), 118, 118, 132 Sleeping Venus (fig. 2) (Giorgione) attribution challenges, 144 composition descriptions, xii (detail), 2, 3, 10, 12 exportation departure date, 152 genre categorization, 52 green-world structure of, 61 landscape roles, 67 Michiel inventory inclusion, 50 Sleeping Woman in a Landscape (Giorgione), 188n12 sogno, Il (Raimondi), 186n88 Sonetti, Bartolomeo delli, 177n42 Song of Songs (biblical book), 28 Sontag, Susan, 161n10 sorti...intitolato il giardino dei pensieri, Le (Marcolini), 31 souvenirs, city views as, 98–99 space. See also perspective intimacy of, 121–25 lived (l’espace vécu), 22, 161n7 miniature statues transforming, 114, 116, 125–30 personal belongings as accessibility to, 122–23 Stampa, Gaspara, 7, 34 Stanze in lode della Sirena (Aretino), 37–38 frontispiece illustration (fig. 21, Britto after Titian), 38, 39 Statius, 126–27, 127–28 Stewart, Susan, 99, 184n57 Stigmatization of Saint Francis (Titian), 187n110 Strigil Bearer (Riccio/Briosco), 117 strolling, 29 Strozzi, Giulio: Venetia edificata frontispiece (fig. 51), 97, 97 studioli, 114, 119–25, 120, 133–34 Studius, 51 Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea (fig. 58) (Titian), 104–5, 108, 108, 109 Sunset (Giorgione), 52 Sustris, Lambert, 151 Tadel und Lob der Seefahrt (Heydenreich), 180n108 Talbot, Althea, 191n44 Tallard Madonna (multiple attrib.), 175n5 teatri del mondo, 96 Tempest (Shakespeare), 4–5, 61 Tempesta (fig. 9) (Giorgione) composition descriptions, vi (detail), 11 genre categorization, 52
green-world structures in, 10, 12, 61 literary influences on, 168n4 Michiel inventory inclusion, 50, 181n5, 188n12 provenance, 192n55 subject matter debates, 159n42 theatrical characters and figure comparisons, 41, 42, 52 Titian’s Gozzi Altarpiece figure comparisons, 104 Titian’s Gypsy Madonna composition comparisons, 189n22 temporality, 104 Tenenti, Alberto, 155n3 Tenochtitlan, Mexico, 90 terraferma cultural importance of, 2, 16, 93 land-sea relationship, 2, 47, 94, 177–78n60 urban vs. country dialect, 16, 41 terraferma (land), 2, 16, 93, 160n50 thalassology, 180n108 theaters, 7, 39–40, 94–97, 157n21, 191n53. See also theatrical performances, pastoral theatrical performances, pastoral (egloga pastorale) costumes for, 40 decline of, 150, 152, 190n40 descriptions, 7, 23, 38–40 exportation of, as court entertainment, 148, 150 locations for, 7, 39–40, 94–97, 157n21, 191n53 pastoral paintings influence by, 41, 42, 47, 52, 150, 151 performer groups for, 39 prohibitions on, 38–39 settings/backdrops for, 40–41 sources for, 7, 23, 39, 150–51 themes of, 41–42 Theocritus animated nature and occult narratives, 130 as pastoral painting influence, 46 as pastoral poetry influence, 45, 56–57, 156n7 seaside themes, 35–36 writing descriptions and genre categorization, 55, 60 Three Ages of Man (Dosso Dossi), 159n41 Three Ages of Man (fig. 78) (Titian), 145–46, 146, 152, 159n41 Three Philosophers, The (fig. 12) (Giorgione), 14, 16, 20 (detail), 55, 144, 188n12 Timanthes, 128 Tintoretto, Domenico Saint Mark Blessing the Origins of Venice (fig. 48), 92, 92 Venice, Queen of the Adriatic, Crowning the Lion of Saint Mark (fig. 52), 99, 100, 101
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Titian art style descriptions, 104, 145–46 attribution issues, 52, 144, 188n8 Bellini works modified by, 190n29 function of paintings, 150 influences on, 151 Laocoön woodcut caricatures after drawing by, 134 patronage, 139, 147, 148 production period, 45 residences and gardens of, 26, 32 travel and mobility of, 147, 189n24 works of (see also Pastoral Concert) Aldobrandini Madonna, The, 139 Assunta, 179n93 Bacchanal of the Andrians (fig. 72), 139, 140, 148 Bacchus and Ariadne (fig. 50), 94, 95, 108, 139, 148 Christ and the Adulteress, 147 Diana and Actaeon, 139, 150 Diana and Callisto, 139, 150 Faith Adored by Doge Antonio Grimani, 174–75n5 Flaying of Marsyas, The, 139, 150, 152, 191n44 Gozzi Altarpiece (fig. 37), 77, 78, 88, 98, 101, 102, 104 Grimani Altarpiece, 102 Gypsy Madonna (fig. 34), 44 (detail), 72, 73, 146–47, 152 Idyll: A Mother and a Halberdier in a Wooded Landscape, An, 189n22 Jacopo Strada (fig. 68), 110 (detail), 122, 123 Miracle of the Woman Wounded by Her Husband (fig. 32), 67, 69, 147 Noli me tangere, 67–68, 152 Nymph and Shepherd (fig. 76), 129, 142, 150, 152, 191n44 Nymphs and Satyrs, 132, 186n92 Orpheus and Eurydice, 192n57 Pardo Venus (Jupiter and Antiope) (fig. 75), 132, 138 (detail), 139, 142, 150, 186n92 Pastoral Scene (fig. 29), 61, 63 Perseus and Andromeda (fig. 56), 104–5, 106, 108 Rape of Europa (fig. 55), 74 (detail), 104–5, 105, 108 Sacred and Profane Love (fig. 8), 10, 10, 12, 146, 152 Saint Christopher (fig. 38), 77, 79, 88, 99, 101, 179n88 Saint Margaret and the Dragon (fig. 57), 104–5, 107, 108, 109 Saint Roch, 99, 174n5 Stanze in lode della Sirena frontispiece (fig. 21), Britto after drawing attrib. to, 38, 39
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Stigmatization of Saint Francis, 187n110 Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea (fig. 58), 104–5, 108, 108, 109 Three Ages of Man (fig. 78), 145–46, 146, 152, 159n41 Two Satyrs in a Landscape (fig. 33), 67, 69, 131 Venus, Cupid, and the Organist (fig. 74), 139, 141, 150 Venus of Urbino, 124 Venus with an Organist and Cupid, 139, 150 Venus with Organist and Dog, 139, 152 Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine and a Shepherd (Madonna of the Rabbit) (fig. 73), 139, 141, 150 Todorov, Tzvetan, 170n44 Torre, Giovanni Battista della, 33 Tramonto, Il (Giorgione), 52 Travels of Marco Polo, 7, 8, 91 Trissino, Gian Giorgio, 34 Triumph of Baccus in India (Raphael), 148 Triumph of Venice, The (fig. 46) (Batoni), 87, 87–88 Two Kneeling Youths in a Landscape (London) (fig. 28) (Campagnola, D.), 61, 62 Two Kneeling Youths in a Landscape (Vienna) (fig. 31) (Campagnola, D.), 67, 68 Two Satyrs in a Landscape (fig. 33) (Titian), 67, 69, 131 Uberti, Lucantonio degli: “Catena Map” after Rosselli, 81, 82 Uomini selvatica, from Il carnevale italiano mascherato (fig. 4) (Bertelli), 7, 7 urban pastoral, 22 urban-pastoral dialect, 22–23, 34–35, 41–42, 47, 59–60 utopias, 88 Varchi, Benedetto, 33 Vasari, Giorgio, 128, 129, 144, 158n36, 175n9 Vecchia, La (Giorgione), 55 Vecellio, Cesare: Perspettiva della prima piazza di San Marco, from Habiti antichi et moderni di tutti il mondo (fig. 45), 85, 86, 96 vedute. See city views; Venice, views of Vendramin, Gabriele, 25, 122, 181n5, 192n55 Venetia, città nobilissima et singolare (Sansovino, F.), 23, 26, 27 Venetia edificata (Strozzi), 97, 97 Venice. See also gardens; Venice, views of environmentalism and terrafirma principles, 16–17, 21, 22, 42–43 landscaping of, 1, 21–23 mythology of, 22–23, 27–28, 81, 91–93 propagandistic perceptions of, 16, 22, 32–33, 52 visiting experiences, 85–86, 88–90, 99–100
Venice, Queen of the Adriatic, Crowning the Lion of Saint Mark (fig. 52) (Tintoretto), 99, 100, 101 Venice, views of. See also View of Venice (Jacopo de’ Barbari) allegorical interpretations, 87–88 coastline from water, 104–9 commission purpose, 98–99 composition descriptions, 75, 77, 79, 82–86, 88–91, 99–104 early traditions, 9–10, 75, 82 insular themes, 88–98 as painting background scenes, 76–77 Venus (Roman goddess), 97, 119, 132, 139 Venus, Cupid, and the Organist (fig. 74) (Titian), 139, 141, 150 Venus and Adonis (now Nymph and Shepherd) (fig. 76) (Titian), 129, 142, 150, 152, 191n44 Venus of Urbino (Titian), 124 Venus with an Organist and Cupid (Titian), 139, 150 Venus with Organist and Dog (Titian), 139, 152 Verae historiae (Lucian), 179n92 Veronese, Bonifazio: God the Father over the Piazza San Marco, 175n5 Veronese, Paolo art style evolution, 151 Villa Barbaro landscape (fig. 77), 140, 143 Vida, Marco Girolamo, 56 viewers bronze statuettes impact on, 119 coastline settings and destabilization of, 108 green-world compositions and viewing experiences, 10, 12, 61–63 miniature sculpture and viewing experiences, 119, 125–30 pastoral paintings and viewing experiences, 9–10 property depictions and intimacy enactments, 122 View of Venice (fig. 93) (Pagan), 93, 93, 177n46 View of Venice (Jacopo de’ Barbari) composition descriptions, 17, 17, 75–76 garden design features on, 23, 24, 28, 29 gardens featured on, 23–25, 24, 25, 177n46 green-world function of, 79 human activity on, 29 mythological personifications featured in, 81 production process theories, 174n3 themes and symbolism, 17, 76, 79 View of Venice, from Liber Chronicarum (fig. 36) (Pleydenwurff and Wolgemut), 75, 76–77 View of Venice, from Marco Polo, The Romance of Alexander (fig. 5) (Grise and workshop), 7, 8, 91 Villa Barbaro, Maser, 25, 140, 143
Villa Farnesina, Rome, 29, 36, 37, 76, 94, 98–99 villanesca plays, 16, 41, 42, 167n122 Virgil allegorical readings of, 58 genre categorization and descriptions, 55, 60 pastoral literature influenced by writings of, 46, 47, 56, 188n7 popularity and availability of writings by, 45, 57, 156n7 seafaring criticism, 176n35 seaside themes and pasturing metaphors, 36 woodcut caricatures on Laocoön narratives of, 134 Virgin and Child with a View of Venice (multiple attrib.), 174n5 Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine and a Shepherd (Madonna of the Rabbit) (fig. 73) (Titian), 139, 141, 150
Virgin in the Glory with Christ Child, Angels, and Saints Peter, Dominic, Paul, and Jerome, The (Pala Pesaro) (fig. 39) (Savoldo), 77, 80, 102, 104 Virgin Mary cityscape backgrounds with, 82, 174n5 enclosed garden symbolism, 28 landscape backgrounds with, 45, 46, 48, 146–47 as popular pastoral figure, 46, 48, 139 religious visionary themes with, 101–2 as Venetian personification, 22–23 Virgin of the Rocks (Leonardo da Vinci), 64, 65 visionary religious experiences, 7, 9, 48, 98–104 Vision of Ezekiel (Raphael), 129 Vision of Saint Catherine (fig. 54) (Fra Bartolommeo), 101–2, 103 Vita di Triphone Gabriele nella quale si mostrano apieno le lodi della vita soletaria & contemplativa, 34
Vitruvius, 40, 50–51, 51, 167n120 walking, 29, 165n58 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 152 wealth, perceptions of, 120, 183n38 What Is Pastoral? (Alpers), 55–56, 172n72 Wolgemut, Michael: View of Venice, from Liber Chronicarum (fig. 36), with Pleydenwurff, 75, 76–77 Wood, Christopher, 160n49, 171n61 Worship of Venus (Fra Bartolommeo), 148 Youth Holding Arrow (Giorgione), 188n12 Zardinieri, 39 Zeus (Greek god), 92 Zio, Francesco, 118, 119–20 Zorach, Rebecca, 119
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Typeset by bessas & ackerman Printed and bound by Asia Pacific Offset Composed in calluna Printed on Neo FSC Matte Bound in jht