Jodi Cranston's Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice, winner of the 2021 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Prize, defines Venice from the late fifteenth century to ca. 1550 as an interconnected series of “green worlds”: painted, textual, and real. Cranston, professor of Renaissance art at Boston University, is author of The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (2000) and The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian's Later Paintings (2010), editor and contributor to Venetian Painting Matters, 1450–1750 (2015), and the driving force behind two digital projects: “Mapping Titian” and “Mapping Painting.” Green Worlds continues a number of Cranston's interests: intersections of literature and art, relationships between objects and viewers, and the accretion of meanings that apply as objects move between temporally specific spaces. In Green Worlds, Cranston resituates Venice's most famous pastoral moment away from the terraferma, convincing the reader of multiple verdancies embedded in the culture, watery environs, and city fabric of Venice itself.
The first of the book's five chapters, which defines “greening” as Venetians’ “concerted efforts to create actual and imaginary green places in a city that was becoming increasingly aware of its own unique ecology” (21), explores the way these places shaped theatric and literary endeavors. The second chapter uses twentieth-century literary theory to address space and time, foreground and background, and narrative versus landscape emphasis in ancient and Renaissance texts and early century paintings and drawings, particularly those of Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and Domenico Campagnola. Chapter 3 finds green meaning in works that show the sea as a zone between unspecified second worlds and a Venice-like mainland by unpacking cultural associations with islands, ships, navigation, and other aspects of a marine environment. The fourth chapter breaks new ground in considering how small pastoral bronzes, often used as inkwells or lamps, might spur pastoral contemplations through their facture, scale, and association with wildness, witchcraft, and alchemy. Chapter 5 briefly examines how the pastoral changed in moving away from Venice.
The “Green Worlds” of the title is borrowed from Northrop Frye to promote the pastoral as a desired, disjunctive, verdant place, one Cranston links to Harry Berger Jr.'s broader, related concept of “second worlds.” Second worlds are “poetic, fictional, and metaphorical” (5), but interdependent with reality. Importantly, Berger's second worlds generally are characterized by historical and regional concerns, and Cranston uses this to engage in what might be called cultural geography, knitting together disparate historical evidence to build a picture of how Venetians might have understood themselves and their worlds.
Chapter 1, “The Greening of Venice,” for instance, gathers multiple green spaces and asserts that these were not mere backgrounds to creativity but a medium for them, an idea that resonates with Cranston's valuable research into private, garden-staged, pastoral dramas. This chapter also opens Cranston's investigation into the sea as a pastoral realm. She traces “littoral pastorals” from Theocritus's Polyphemus through Sannazaro's piscatorial eclogues and Pietro Aretino's 1537 Stanze in lode della Sirena, which mixes Petrarch with the pastoral and renders the unique surroundings of Venice, as when its sea forms “liquid furrows” (38).
In chapter 2 and elsewhere, Cranston skillfully unpacks the shared style of early Venetian landscapes: small in scale, lacking viewer engagement, hinting at the hidden, distant, isolated, shadowy, and blurred. These elements create visual equivalents to sensual experiences but resist exact meaning (significantly, for Cranston, the works share a mode but not necessarily a genre). The resulting painted worlds are evocations of complex, subjective experiences that correspond to extensive textual equivalents, especially similar to earlier vernacular Italian texts, which often describe the setting of dream worlds or amorous wanderings. For example, Petrarch's lyrics, in which the poet is shaped by nature, can be paralleled with Titian's Two Satyrs in a Landscape, in which a satyr's fur is indistinguishable from the grass on which he sits. Nature/poet, meadow/satyr—each pair is balanced and equal, including the creator and created, the resulting works denying the pathetic fallacy. In this focused period of artmaking, nature is set forth not only to reflect humanity's concerns but also to shape them.
Perusing Cranston's bibliography, one is reminded of how many scholars have attempted to understand this green moment. She finds purchase on slippery works by reviving manifold facets of sixteenth-century Venetian life: maps, atlases, and shifting shorelines; plays and poems; technologies and theologies. Tackling all this in a relatively short text means certain assertions need fleshing out, and, occasionally, ideas are so densely packed that it takes a patient reader to follow an argument from its many inspirations to its conclusion. With that said, readers come away from this beautifully produced text seeing Venetian art anew. Cranston has returned the most significant period of pastoral painting to Venice itself, given the sea its due, and allowed green worlds to act alongside—and on—their shepherds, satyrs, and cultured viewers.
