Animating Nature

In the age of Lorenzo Lotto, nature was understood as legible, expressive, and replete with divine significance. Animating Nature explores how the painting of nature embodied human faith, experience, and identity in Renaissance Venice. In this book, April Oettinger proposes a fresh understanding of what it meant to paint and describe landscape in the first half of the sixteenth century. She examines Lotto’s experiments with the expressive and metaphorical character of the “Book of Nature” and the ways Venetian painters invoked the mercurial moods and metaphorical dimensions of arboreal, geological, aqueous, and atmospheric imagery to enrich devotional, portrait, and mythological subjects. Through close analysis of selected paintings by Lotto and his peers, alongside the work of contemporaneous poets and Renaissance theorists of painting, Oettinger shows how a lyrical vocabulary of temporal landscape imagery emerged and how the practice of painting nature shaped early modern theories of art. Drawing on the art of Lotto and his peers, as well as literary and theoretical texts, Animating Nature expands our understanding of the multifaceted character of landscape and the languages of ornament in the early modern era. Situated at the crossroads of Venetian Renaissance painting, the history of ornament, and the environmental humanities, it will appeal to scholars and students of art history and literature, as well as general readers interested in landscape, memory, and the art of Lorenzo Lotto.