Landscapes of the imagination in Renaissance Venice

This dissertation is an inquiry into the emergence of the pastoral landscape in the visual arts of Venice in relation to the culture's framework of spatial experience--both actual and fictive--during the Renaissance period. For although the development of the pastoral as an independent pictorial type in the first decade of the sixteenth century is among the greatest achievements in a rich painterly tradition of rendering landscape, art historians have been surprisingly unable to account for its appearance on the watery stage of Venice in particular. Typically, attention to the larger cultural framework has been deflected in favor of focus on those individual artists who gave definition to the new pictorial form: Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Titian.;Departing from a traditional art historical approach, the dissertation traces a "mental geography" that distinguished Venetian society during the Renaissance period, inflecting its modes of experiencing and representing the natural world. For if, as Simon Schama has observed, "it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape," what was the specific shaping perception of this historical culture? And ultimately, how is it revealed in the fictional landscapes of its visual arts?;Each chapter of the dissertation is grounded in a landscape of spatial actuality, but from there, ventures out towards landscapes of Venetian cultural imagination: from the immediate surroundings of a lagoon of marsh, mud, seaweed and reeds; to paradisiacal gardens of the East and cannibal islands of the New World reported in the tradition of Marco Polo; to the domains of Caterina Cornaro, Venetian Queen of Cyprus, in the Veneto on the North Italian mainland; to the "wilderness" of Late Antique holy men such as St. Jerome; and finally, to the meadows, green banks, and whispering ilexes of Arcadia. In a journey from the lagoon to the realm of Pan, the dissertation ultimately defines the pastoral landscape in the pictorial arts not as an isolated terrain of cultural experience, but as the quintessential destination of Venetian urban imagination.