Aesthetica Preprint

Introduction

Paolo Furia — 2024-12-18

The Imagination of Resemblance. Landscape and Mimesis in Contemporary Painting

Giulia Giambrone — 2024-12-18

The representation of the landscape in contemporary painting calls into question a renewed figurative image. Bound to an imagery largely belonging to a reality different than the natural one, the mimetic rendering is nevertheless predominant. The landscape is characterised by the restriction of space in the framework and the relationship with the human figure inside, hiding the dissolution of the subject. Both, the natural restriction of the space and the flatness of the image as well as the mimetic elision of the subject are elements already identified by Michel Foucault in Manet’s paintings and in the post-Renaissance episteme exemplified in a representation by the concept of imagination of resemblance. Manet’s spatial conception traces a common thread all the way to the greatest landscape painter of the contemporary age, David Hockney.

Encountering the Elements Horizon, Materiality and Temporal Perspectives in Contemporary Landscape Representations

Zoltán Somhegyi — 2024-12-18

In this paper I am curious of the aesthetic investigation of some of the most elemental and essential constituents of landscape representations, that are, at the same time, also among the basic coordinates in our existence in the world. More precisely, I would like to survey some aspects of the artistic explorations of the horizon, material(ity) and time, through four contemporary artists’ pieces, those by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Taiji Matsue, Levente Baranyai and Torben Eskerod. As it will be clear, their series of artworks can be considered as aesthetically captivating investigations – not only artistic but philosophical investigations – into space, matter and time. The pieces are thus meditations on the perception of some of the fundamental elements of human condition, and the creative survey of these by the contemporary artists provide the observer with particular insights that can be gained only through works, and that would have otherwise been, most likely, undiscovered.

Landscape, Images and Photography. From the Picturesque to the Performative Approach

Elena Romagnoli — 2024-12-18

A Parabola on the Tuscan Landscape: New Gazes of the Amateur Photography in the 1920s

Fabrizio Gitto — 2024-12-18

The contribution investigates the cultural dynamics and spaces of expression that, during the 1920s, made amateur photography the most effective medium for creating and disseminating a new image of the Tuscan landscape. In this decade, landscape photography played a leading role in various publishing and exhibition projects in Tuscany, such as the magazine “Illustrazione Toscana” (1923-1945), the two editions of the Florentine Esposizione Fotografica del paesaggio toscano (1925, 1927), and the book Toscana (1927). If, at the beginning of the 1920s, the official visual panoramas of the region were constructed and transmitted by professional photographic studios, in the following years, renewed visions of Tuscany were promoted through its non-monumental aspects, mainly due to amateur photographers, such as Vittorio Alinari, Lodovico Pachò, Gino Danti, and Ermanno Biagini.

Revisualizing Italian Silentscapes 1896-1922 (RevIS): i paesaggi italiani del primo cinema nelle scuole secondarie di II grado

Manlio Celso Piva — 2024-12-18

The essay describes the preliminary findings of the 2022-2025 research project Revisualizing Italian Silentscapes 1896-1922. Landscapes and Locations of the Early Italian Cinema One Hundred Years Later. This project has two aims: first, it studies how the films produced from 1896 to 1922 made use of Italy’s landscapes to represent the nation and its various territories; second, it promotes the knowledge, the reappropriation and the reuse of the largely neglected silent cinema heritage in all areas of present-day society, starting from public schools. The essay discusses the planning, the testing and the results of the learning activities conducted at four high schools in Lombardia and Veneto throughout 2023 and 2024. As part of these learning activities, the students explore the streets of their hometowns and revisualize by means of photos and videos the very same Italian locations featured in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century cinema; then, the students return to class and create open-access online maps highlighting the similarities and differences between past and present. By rediscovering cinematic landscapes from the silent era, the students gain a new understanding of their everyday environment and make their discoveries publicly accessible to strengthen their own – and their local community’s – ties to the territory and sense of belonging to it.

Miniature landscapes

Madalina Diaconu — 2024-12-18

The concept of miniature landscapes is used in this paper for human-made, three-dimensional landscape at reduced scale. Their diversity ranges from Japanese gardens to indoor habitats and from scientific and artistic dioramas to mini-railroad-systems and snow globes. Many of them employ mixed media and combine natural with artificial items. Depending on their genre, context and addressee, micro-landscapes critically reflect on the naturalization of vision in science, replicate cosmogenesis at small scale, satisfy biophilia, fascinate for their skillful reproduction of details and nostalgically recall childhood pleasures. The enjoyment of making and watching them can be explained in terms of functional beauty and interplay of scales; moreover, miniature landscapes “trap” the outer world in capsules, creating a domestic sublime, and activate attention and imagination.

La scoperta del paesaggio terrestre. Note sulla rivoluzione spaziale astronautica del paesaggio

Tommaso Morawski — 2024-12-18

The most important event in cosmonautical exploration was not the reaching of distant lunar territory, but the fact that the Earth for the first time had the opportunity to see itself, to meet itself. Two photographs in particular have imposed themselves as a true visiotype of our planetary imagination, establishing the birth of a new landscape consciousness of the cosmos: Earthrise (1968) and The Blue Marble (1972). This article analyses the landscaping operation from which the new astronautical worldview originated: that “altered image of the Earth” that represents the most important and lasting legacy of the ‘astronautical spatial revolution’, the last great global spatial revolution in the air age.

Faustian Polarity and Colourful Mediations: Goethe’s Experimental Landscapes

Alberto L. Siani — 2024-12-18

La simbiosi di arte e natura in una concezione est-etica del paesaggio: l’opera di Manrique a Lanzarote

Valeria Costanza D’Agata — 2024-12-18

This paper aims to highlight the way in which César Manrique managed to create a correspondence between anthropic and natural elements, between nature and culture and to apply art to life through the mediation of ecological and sustainable architectures, capable of enhancing the morphological and geological uniqueness of the Canarian landscape. Through the analysis of his most important works, made on the island of Lanzarote between 1968 and 1990, we will focus on the importance of the ethical imperative that led to his aesthetic ideal in a process in which man and nature cooperate symbiotically, in order to perceive – even in the magmatic flow of the destructive force of lava streams – alternative ways of living in the world and of establishing an affective resonance with the environment.

Il gesto del pittore tra esperienza e figurazione del paesaggio. Henri Maldiney e l’arte di tal-coat

Rita Messori — 2024-12-18

Thomas et le Voyageur: Gilles Clément, the landscape, and the planetary garden

Valeria Maggiore — 2024-12-18

The philosophical novel Thomas et le Voyageur: Esquisse du jardin planétaire, written in 1996 by the French landscape architect and agronomist Gilles Clément, is an essential medium for understanding the aesthetic reflections of its author centred on the delicate relationship between environment and landscape, but also (and above all) between landscape “perceived” and “co-created” by human beings. Here, Clément proposes the idea of a garden in motion, qualified as a “laboratory of human-nature relationship”, where the gardener participates in the vital flux of the territory and defends biodiversity without forcing nature but letting it evolve according to the biological cycles. In the garden in motion, the landscape, rather than being “managed” or exploited, is thus observed and accompanied by a kind dialogue. Starting from these premises, Clément promotes, without any internal theoretical contradiction, the idea of the Planetary Garden that, operating an “enlargement of scale”, proposes a responsible approach to the Earth.

Il Cervino. Mediazioni di una Gestalt montana

Katia Botta — 2024-12-18

The mountain presents itself as a particular case study through which to investigate the aesthetic category of the landscape and the related mediation processes.
From the travel observations included by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in his Voyages dans les Alpes up to 1865, the year the group led by the English alpinist Edward Whymper reached the summit, the pyramidal morphology of the Cervino (Matterhorn) has aroused the interest of travellers, naturalists but also reflections of an aesthetic, artistic and literary nature which find ample explanation in the multifaceted figure of the Englishman John Ruskin. Towards the middle of the XIX century, the form of the Matterhorn became a preferential object for contemporary pictorial representations, protagonists of a process of mediation partly still close to a contemplative approach (from an aesthetic-sensitive point of view) and mimetic (from an aesthetic-artistic point of view) but which, at the same time, anticipates that dimension of abstraction of the mountain corpus. Moreover, the Matterhorn, in the wake of Thomas George Bonney’s geological considerations and Guido Rey’s literary text, is not only the privileged object of mediating formulas of experience, but qualifies even earlier as a work of art of nature.