The Potted Tree

The essays in this book, each dealing primarily with a single work of art, form a history of Venetian painting and its criticism from the international Gothic style in the early fifteenth century to that of the Venetian baroque in the eighteenth. They are united by their concern with one of two topics, and sometimes with both: colerito, the naturalistic imitation of nature, customarily identified as a salient feature of Venetian art, and fantasia, not perceived as a consistently significant aspect of Venetian painting, except by Giorgio Vasari in the second edition of his famous Lives of the Artists (1568). Subjects addressed include Giorgione's Tempest; the early fifteenth-century painter and mosaicist Michele Giambono; iconographical interpretation; Nicolas Poussin (discussed in this context because of his debt to Venetian colouring); ekphrastic description -- art criticism evoking certain qualities of a work of art as it was understood in the Renaissance and seventeenth century; Paolo Veronese; and Lorenzo Lotto. NORMAN LANDis Professor of Italian Renaissance Art and Baroque Art at the University of Missouri, Columbia.