Lorenzo Lotto and the Sublime Turn in Venetian Landscape Art

FAIN: FT-248690-16

April Oettinger
Goucher College (Baltimore, MD 21204-2753)

A book-length study on the landscape paintings by the Venetian Renaissance master Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480-1557).

My project addresses the genesis and cultural dimensions of the sublime landscape in early 16th-century northern Italian landscape painting and the role of landscape expression in shaping not only landscape practice and theory, but also literary descriptions of the land. Through a close consideration of the landscape ornaments of Lorenzo Lotto, my project elucidates the ways in which Lotto and his peers invoked and assimilated a range of landscape imagery to heighten the rhetorical affect of their devotional paintings, portraiture, and mythological subjects, effecting a “sublime turn” in landscape practice that not only shaped discussions of landscape in 16th-century theories of painting, but also informed the more dramatic landscapes described in 16th-century poetry and accounts of the land in the writings of early modern natural philosophers.