The nature of authority : villa culture, landscape, and representation in eighteenth-century Lombardy / Dianne Harris.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Harris, Dianne Suzette.

Contributor:

Wunsch, Aaron V., Former owner.

Series:

Buildings, landscapes, and societies ; 1.

Buildings, landscapes, and societies ; 1

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Architecture, Domestic--Italy--Lombardy.

Architecture, Domestic.

Architecture--Italy--Lombardy--18th century.

Architecture.

Lombardy (Italy)--Civilization--18th century.

Lombardy (Italy).

Italy--Lombardy.

Genre:

Endpapers

Physical Description:

xxi, 239 pages, 16 pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps (some color) ; 27 cm.

Place of Publication:

University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, [2003]

Summary:

Italian villas are generally regarded as beautiful havens where a privileged elite, fleeing the harsh realities of the city, found peace and harmony amid buildings and gardens framed upon classical ideals of proportion, balance, and the natural. In her interdisciplinary book, Dianne Harris presents a radically different view of villa life as it developed during the eighteenth century on the vast estates dominating the fertile Lombard plain. Governed from Vienna by a Habsburg regime bent upon increased tax revenues, the great landowning families lived lives fraught with tensions and contradictions. Although they retained many privileges and indulged in shows of wealth and social distinction, they faced mounting demands for reform and progress from an absolutist state.

The Nature of Authority employs what Harris calls "panoramic history" to trace the mingling of enlightened reform and a culture of display in the design and functioning of villas and villa life in eighteenth-century Lombardy. Cadastral maps are juxtaposed with Marc' Antonio Dal Re's famous prints of the "delights" of villa life; both are woven into an exceptionally wide-ranging investigation of the villas, their gardens, and crop-bearing fields as well as their representation in visual and written sources from agricultural treatises to books of etiquette. Combining this diverse material with a sharp focus upon the organization of space and class privilege, Harris shows how the villas served as centers of complex cultural and sociopolitical transactions, fashioning a landscape that was at once a beguiling vista and a tool in the enforcement of a strict hierarchy of use and value. Harris's innovative book reveals the complicity of landscape in the formation of culture and the structures of everyday life. It also elucidates the significance of Lombardy as a testing ground for Habsburg policies of enlightened reform in the social and natural orders.

Contents:

Introduction: Landscape and Enlightened Absolutism 1

Chapter 1 Landscape and Representation: The PrintedView and Marc' Antonio Dal Re's Ville di delizie 19

Chapter 2 Mapping the Landscape of Reform 40

Chapter 3 Displaying the Social Landscape 62

Chapter 4 Villas of Delight? The Architecture of Production and Display 90

Chapter 5 Environmental Absolutism: The Villas Clerici 112

Chapter 6 Gardens in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy 135

Chapter 7 Gardens and Social Distinction 155.

Notes:

Series statement from jacket.

Athenaeum circulating copy: Endpapers decorated with green and white diamond-shaped patterns.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-235) and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum circulating copy: From the Library of Aaron V. Wunsch.

ISBN:

0271022167

OCLC:

49844685