Elisabetta Cunsolo, Dickinson in Italy, Art and Art History
Art and Landscape in Renaissance and Baroque Italy
The protagonists of the 18th century Grand Tour in Italy described the Italian landscape as a mythical place, with marvelous monuments reminiscent of what was considered the glorious classical era. If you were to make the same journey today, your feelings would be different because the two fundamental conditions of perception, the traveler’s gaze and the landscape itself, have changed, since then. It will be from those changes that this course will take shape, focusing on the pictorial representation of the Italian landscape as it developed over the centuries, from the Middle Ages until 1800. The etymological analysis of the term landscape and its connection to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the comparison of some 14th century frescoes showing the effects of good and bad government in town and country with photographs documenting the profound signs of human action on the land in the so-called Anthropocene era, will be the starting points of this course that is going to be divided into sections, each corresponding to a historical period.
Students will study the birth of landscape feeling and its transposition into painting in the Middle Ages, when nature was represented in a conventional and stereotypical manner, in the Renaissance, when the bucolic and pastoral views were often used as backgrounds for artworks, and so on until landscape painting became an autonomous genre of art, that encouraged the development of the first landscape preservation actions in the 19th century. The course will be enriched by reading travel diaries and listening to musical compositions that have landscape and nature as main subjects. Its purpose is for students, the contemporary observers and travelers, to gain a comprehensive view of what the idea of Italy was over the centuries and to form their own one to write in their personal travel journals.