Feb 6th – Guest Lecture

Prof. Jodi Cranston, Boston University
Wednesday February 6th, 6pm, CAS 132

Beginning around 1500, Venetians began to imagine, perceive, and experience their marine city as dotted with green worlds, with actual and imaginary green places. Gardens became a celebrated feature of newly built private villas on outer islands; specific garden sites were settings for fictional literary exchanges and poetic inspiration; pastoral paintings, drawings, and sculptures adorned palace interiors; performances of pastoral eclogues and plays occurred throughout the city and on celebratory floats that traversed the canals; and Venice itself was represented frequently as a lagoon city comprised of verdant islands. This talk will address aspects of this diverse “greening” of Venice with particular focus on paintings that visualize insular discourses, which also captured the contemporary literary and cartographic imagination during the time of exploration of the Atlantic and the Americas.

This lecture is free and open to the public.