DOI Artikel:
Kilian, Joanna: Locus amoenus, Delightful Place: the courtly return to nature in sixteenth century Northern Italian painting
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18947#0041
excessive frugality. The aforementioned Ruzzante described the qualities of
the ideał Venetian in these words: “no sono avari, ne larghi fuori di ordine
e che si dilettano di honesti sollazzi, come sonno le cazze, cantare, sonare,
e cose tali, e che sopra il tutto, siano huomini allegri, e non malenconici,
e a ąuesti, il paradiso e apparechiato.”21
In Bonifazio’s painting the ideał image of the villa was used as a morał
admonition. The pauper Lazarus was not admitted to the feast in the elegant
villa, which is only a temporal setting. The real locus amoenus awaits not the
rich man, but Lazarus, because it is he who will take his place in heaven.
Hellfire awaits the rich man, foretold by the fire in the right background of
the painting. Bonifazio combines sacrum and profanum in his work, that which
is earthly with that which is heavenly. The morał meaning of the parable is
explained through a scene representing the daily life of the artist’s contemporary
world.
The gardens and villas of the Veneto fascinated the painters from Northern
Europę who were active in Venice. Many paintings by Lodewijk Toeput
from the Netherlands, known as Pozzoserrato, active in the second half of
the 16thcentury, bear witness to this fascination with Venetian uilleggiatura.
Pozzoserrato conveyed with almost encyclopaedic precision the topography
of the villa as a place of recreation. His paintings are a mosaic of individual
genre observations. One of his drawings in the collections of the National
Museum in Warsaw, ca. 1590, is a bird’s eye view of a country house in
the Veneto (ill. 7). The drawing is a testimony to his fascination with the
microcosm of the Italian villa, mathematical in the clarity and grace of its
depiction of the gardens intended for elegant company.
The poem by Sannazaro as well as Carianhs Country Concert and Anguissola’s
Chess Gamę are expressions of the same longing for Arcadia. In these works
Arcadia acąuires symbolic meaning, becoming a dreamland of happiness, one
of the many utopias created by human imagination, analogous and sometimes
identical with Eden, the paradise lost.
Translated by Robert Kirkland
23 II Ruzzante, op. cit., p. 23.
the ideał Venetian in these words: “no sono avari, ne larghi fuori di ordine
e che si dilettano di honesti sollazzi, come sonno le cazze, cantare, sonare,
e cose tali, e che sopra il tutto, siano huomini allegri, e non malenconici,
e a ąuesti, il paradiso e apparechiato.”21
In Bonifazio’s painting the ideał image of the villa was used as a morał
admonition. The pauper Lazarus was not admitted to the feast in the elegant
villa, which is only a temporal setting. The real locus amoenus awaits not the
rich man, but Lazarus, because it is he who will take his place in heaven.
Hellfire awaits the rich man, foretold by the fire in the right background of
the painting. Bonifazio combines sacrum and profanum in his work, that which
is earthly with that which is heavenly. The morał meaning of the parable is
explained through a scene representing the daily life of the artist’s contemporary
world.
The gardens and villas of the Veneto fascinated the painters from Northern
Europę who were active in Venice. Many paintings by Lodewijk Toeput
from the Netherlands, known as Pozzoserrato, active in the second half of
the 16thcentury, bear witness to this fascination with Venetian uilleggiatura.
Pozzoserrato conveyed with almost encyclopaedic precision the topography
of the villa as a place of recreation. His paintings are a mosaic of individual
genre observations. One of his drawings in the collections of the National
Museum in Warsaw, ca. 1590, is a bird’s eye view of a country house in
the Veneto (ill. 7). The drawing is a testimony to his fascination with the
microcosm of the Italian villa, mathematical in the clarity and grace of its
depiction of the gardens intended for elegant company.
The poem by Sannazaro as well as Carianhs Country Concert and Anguissola’s
Chess Gamę are expressions of the same longing for Arcadia. In these works
Arcadia acąuires symbolic meaning, becoming a dreamland of happiness, one
of the many utopias created by human imagination, analogous and sometimes
identical with Eden, the paradise lost.
Translated by Robert Kirkland
23 II Ruzzante, op. cit., p. 23.