Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy

The green mantle of the earth! This metaphor borrows from the vocabulary of weaving and epitomizes the Renaissance interest in "fashioning green worlds" in art and poetry. Here it serves as a motto for a cultural poetics that made representing living nature increasingly popular across Italy in the Early Modern Period. The explosion of landscape art in the Renaissance is often associated with the rise of interest in the literary pastoral, narrowly defined, but Green Worlds expands this understanding, investigating green's broad appeal with audiences ranging from the ecclesiastic, to the medical and scientific, to the humanistic and courtly. The essays gathered here explore the expanding technologies and varied cultural dimensions of verzure and verdancy in the Italian Renaissance, demonstrating the role of visual art in shaping the poetics and expression of greenery in the arts of the 16th-century and beyond.