There are few more glorious moments in the history of art than Quattrocento Italy. It was a time when painters were becoming as inspired by nature—human, sexual and environmental—as they were by God. Thanks to the Neo-Platonist ethos which said that worldly love was a route to its divine sister, artists succeeded in fusing both strands into spectacular packages. The apotheosis must be La Primavera (late 1470s or early 1480s): Botticelli’s painting of the Roman goddess Flora floating through a forest of fruits and flowers wearing a dress adorned with exquisite blooms.

Although Botticelli disliked landscape painting, the fact that he, or more likely his assistants, bothered to depict no fewer that 500 plant species in La Primavera reveals he was part of a culture enchanted by the natural world. Ditto Giorgione, whose painting La Tempesta (around 1502), which unfolds in a tree-dotted, riverside glade under a storm-ripped sky, is one of the earliest paintings to make landscape a protagonist.

Για περισσότερα δες εδώ.