From Gold to Green: Visualizing the Environment in the Italian Renaissance

During the Italian Renaissance, the representation of landscape developed in significant and revealing ways. Where portraits had traditionally depicted profiled sitters against stark, placeless backgrounds, around the middle of the fifteenth century, they began to incorporate suggestions of place, often filling the entire background with sprawling landscapes. A similar "greening" took place in the backgrounds of devotional paintings as landscape imagery began to overtake the gilded grounds associated with medieval and Byzantine art. Motivating this shift, in part, was the popularity of Northern European oil paintings which were avidly circulated, collected, and copied throughout Italy. Synthesizing these cosmopolitan influences with first-hand observations of nature, Italian Renaissance landscapes offer privileged glimpses into the vibrant physical and social environments from which they emerged.Placing these long-overlooked landscapes at the center of analysis, this dissertation excavates the experiences of historical communities that inhabited and shaped the landscape yet remain underrepresented in the historical and scholarly record. To do this, it draws upon methods from ecocriticism and historiography; and orients analysis around ethnic minorities, women, and laborers, thus de-centering the elite male Christian perspective that dominates interpretations of Renaissance art. Ultimately, this dissertation constructs a wider vision of Renaissance Italy by analyzing the historical landscape – real and represented – as a window onto the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual experiences that shaped how various individuals and communities engaged with their surroundings.