ENST 333 - Gardens and Landscape in Early Modern Italy

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as ART 333) Changing attitudes toward the relationship between art and nature played out in the gardens and landscape of Italian villas, c. 1450-1650. These large-scale estates created by renowned architects and patrons established models for the Western landscape tradition. Their designs for buildings, hardscaping, plantings, waterworks, and decorations blurred distinctions among art, architecture, landscape, and urban form, as well as between indoors and outdoors; city and country; and nature and artifice. We examine sites from Tuscany and Rome to the Veneto, considering the inheritance of ancient Roman, medieval, and Islamic landscape traditions, and the later reception of Italian landscape in France and England. We also explore the impact of new flora and fauna taken to Europe via global trade and new contact with the Americas, as well as changing patterns of collecting and display. Readings explore notions of villa ideology, city/country life, the garden as utopia, nature as monstrous, and paradigms of human cooperation with, or dominion over, nature. Through excursions to local landscapes, we experience the agency of the ambulatory spectator in constructing place and narrative, and consider the reception of the Italian garden in America. Yvonne Elet.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS