天美传媒APP

Art and Landscape in Renaissance and Baroque Italy

I attended the Valley and Ridge workshop with the intention to improve an existing Art History course taught in Italian. My original purpose was to develop a new module on landscape painting in Italy and to understand how to integrate the modern term sustainability into lessons on the history of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. At the end of the three-day workshop, thanks to Neil, Lindsey and all the other participants, I developed an entire new course on landscape painting I will be teaching in Spring 2026. The course, which I would like to title “The country where it is possible to live” from the literal translation of the ancient word landscap, will have nature and sustainability as starting and recurrent themes on which students will have to elaborate their personal reflections.

The protagonists of the 18th century Grand Tour in Italy described the Italian landscape as a mythical place, with marvelous monuments reminiscent of what was considered the glorious classical era. If you were to make the same journey today, your feelings would be different because the two fundamental conditions of perception, the traveler’s gaze and the landscape itself, have changed, since then. It will be from those changes that this course will take shape, focusing on the pictorial representation of the Italian landscape as it developed over the centuries, from the Middle Ages until 1800. The etymological analysis of the term landscape and its connection to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the comparison of some 14th century frescoes showing the effects of good and bad government in town and country with photographs documenting the profound signs of human action on the land in the so-called Anthropocene era, will be the starting points of this course that is going to be divided into sections, each corresponding to a historical period. Students will study the birth of landscape feeling and its transposition into painting in the Middle Ages, when nature was represented in a conventional and stereotypical manner, in the Renaissance, when the bucolic and pastoral views were often used as backgrounds for artworks, and so on until landscape painting became an autonomous genre of art, that encouraged the development of the first landscape preservation actions in the 19th century. The course will be enriched by reading travel diaries and listening to musical compositions that have landscape and nature as main subjects. Its purpose is for students, the contemporary observers and travelers, to gain a comprehensive view of what the idea of Italy was over the centuries and to form their own one to write in their personal travel journals.

The process of creating this kind of new course was only possible thanks to Valley and Ridge.

From the article on sustainability and liberal education that we read in preparation for the workshop, to the various activities promoted and panelists invited to speak, a whole new world opened up to me. I learnt about the many facets to the concept of sustainability, and how to decline them in an Italian Art History class. The exchange and sharing of ideas, perspectives and expertise with the other participants was crucial and very stimulating. I found the variety of the workshop program particularly interesting. The presence of learning activities and the presentation of teaching pedagogies not only and specifically focused on sustainability, were very instructive.

This experience was not only important for my understanding of the concept of sustainability and for the development of a new course. I know that what I learnt will become a substantial part of my teaching and can be integrated into the many activities of the Bologna program to create a stronger awareness and connection between our students and the city where they live for a semester or a year.