Full Description
Natural hazards punctuate the history of European towns, moulding their shape and identity: this book is devoted to the artistic representation of those calamities, from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century. It contains nine case studies which discuss, among others, the relationship between biblical imagery and the realistic depiction of urban disasters; the religious, political and ritual meanings of "destruction subjects" in early modern painting; the image of fire in Renaissance treatises on architecture; the first photographic campaigns documenting earthquakes' damages; the role of contemporary art in the elaboration of a cultural memory of urban destructions. Thus, this book intends to address one of the main issues of Western civilization: the relationship of European towns with their own past and its discontinuities.
Contributors are Alessandro Del Puppo, Isabella di Lenardo, Marco Folin, Sophie Goetzmann, Emanuela Guidoboni, Philippe Malgouyres, Olga Medvedkova, Fabrizio Nevola, Monica Preti and Tiziana Serena.
Contents
Contents
Preface vii
List of Table and Figures xv
List of Contributors xix xxi
Part 1
The Representation of Urban Disasters in a Long-Term
Perspective
1 Transient Cities: Representations of Urban Destructions in European
Iconography in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries 3
Marco Folin
2 When Towns Collapse: Images of Earthquakes, Floods, and Eruptions in
Italy in the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries 33
Emanuela Guidoboni
PART 2
Images of Ruination and Hopes for Redemption
3 Urban Responses to Disaster in Renaissance Italy: Images and
Rituals 59
Fabrizio Nevola
4 In the Beginning, There was Fire: Vitruvius and the Origin of the
City 75
Olga Medvedkova
5 "Cities of Fire": Iconographic Fortune, Taste and Circulation of Fire
Paintings between Flanders and Italy in the early Sixteenth
Century 100
Isabella di Lenardo
6 The Destruction of the City: A Pledge of Salvation? Some Reflections
about Monsù Desiderio and the Genre of "Destruction Painting" 116
Philippe Malgouyres
PART 3
Urban Disasters on Display: Art, Documentation, Remembrance
7 Catastrophe and Photography as a "Double Reversal": The 1908 Messina
and Reggio Earthquake and the Album of the Italian Photographic
Society 137
Tiziana Serena
8 Meidner's Urban Iconography: Optical Destruction and Visual
Apocalypse 164
Sophie Goetzmann
9 Destruction and Construction in Contemporary Art. Three Cases in
Twentieth-Century Italy (Gibellina 1968, Friuli 1976, Napoli 1980) 179
Alessandro Del Puppo
Index of Names 193
Index of Places 203
