This collection of essays results from four sessions convened at the 2010 annual meeting of the RSA held in Venice entitled Landscape as Genre in the Serenissima from XV to XVIIth Century: Iconography, Context and Taste organized by Laura de Fuccia and Christophe Brouard. In their introduction to the volume, de Fuccia and Brouard maintain the established view of Venetian landscape as a distinctive genre, particularly representative of pastoral, Arcadian, and bucolic themes. They assert that iconographical studies still provide new information on the distinctive pictorial language of its painting. Context is defined as the broader economic, social, religious, and cultural factors that derive from Venice’s fraught politics and its relationship to the countryside. In actuality, the studies presented continue to be limited to the sophisticated microcosm of a social elite. Though it is unclear how taste here is distinct from reception, they posit that taste is both reflected in the iconographical systems at work and shaped by the context of the Veneto as well as the dominance of Titian.

Notable iconographic studies include Veronique Dalmasso’s “Paysage des rêves” and “Trees: An Overlooked Topic in Renaissance Art” by Leopoldine Prosperetti. Dalmasso unravels the recurrence of sleeping figures in the landscapes that appear in works by Lotto, Titian, Giorgione, and in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. She narrates a compelling relationship between Neoplatonic theory, the development of the Venetian Arcadian image and their correlation to concepts of an artist’s reflected process and inspiration. She argues that rather than serving as mere background to humanist motifs, the landscapes in these pictures play a pivotal role in the expression of this network of ideas, achieved through the formal manipulations of their elements. Prosperetti offers a rich and accessible introduction to the makers, contexts, and reception of arboreal imagery, completed by extensive footnotes. She places her subject within contemporary debates over disegno and colore to illustrate the recognition of the expressive potential of trees. An analysis of types then allows for investigation of the scriptural basis for the concept of the homo arbor that serves as a source for this expanding vocabulary. Prosperetti concludes with tree imagery’s role in the discernible shift in devotional practices occurring in the last half of the sixteenth century that moved from meditation on traditional Christian symbols to those rooted in the natural world.

Christophe Brouard’s essay “Le Concert champêtre du Louvre. Fortune et interprétation” consists of three interlocking elements. The first provides a summary of recent technical analyses of Titian’s painting, which revealed that the reworking of the female figures in the painting occurred in tandem with that of the landscape features of the scene. Secondly, Brouard looks to Titian’s adoption of the hilly landscape motif and its quotation in other works of the period in order to chronologically pinpoint the completed work. The author uses this evidence to highlight the experimentation with the metaphorical possibilities of the pastoral tradition during the first decades of the sixteenth century, specifically in the representation of male friendship, and assesses this subject within wider cultural traditions of bucolic poetry and sylvan comedies that incorporated Arcadian themes while also offering commentary on male relationships across classes.

“Tra pastorali e paesaggi ‘eroici’: il paesaggio veneto nella Francia del Grand Siècle” by Laura de Fuccia is concerned with the reception of Venetian works in France, particularly those of Giorgione and Titian. The article quickly delves into the myriad ways that Northern artists adapted a resulting preference for color and its effects into printmaking through the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. These printmakers improvised the effects of color through manipulation of tone and sought to create dense compositions that still conveyed aspects of pastoral imagery. In a book where each article exposes a continued concern with the specter of Neoplatonism and the art of small local elites, de Fuccia’s article, which appears last, offers an opening from a relatively hermetic field of inquiry. By breaking down the chronological, iconographic, and regional confines of our understanding of landscape painting in the Veneto, she reaffirms the prominence of this imagery in its own time.