1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910795394203321

Autore

Morgan Luke

Titolo

The Monster in the Garden : The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design / / Luke Morgan

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2015]

©2016

ISBN

0-8122-9187-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (256 p.) : 48 illus

Collana

Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture

Disciplina

712.0945

Soggetti

Garden ornaments and furniture - Italy - Psychological aspects - History - 16th century

Gardens - Symbolic aspects - Italy - History - 16th century

Gardens, Renaissance - Italy - Design - History - 16th century

Grotesque - Italy - Psychological aspects - History - 16th century

Landscape design - Italy - History - 16th century

Monsters - Italy - Psychological aspects - History - 16th century

ARCHITECTURE / Landscape

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Reframing the Renaissance Garden -- Chapter 1. The Legibility of Landscape: From Fascism to Foucault -- Chapter 2. The Grotesque and the Monstrous -- Chapter 3. A Monstruary: The Excessive, the Deficient, and the Hybrid -- Chapter 4. “Rare and Enormous Bones of Huge Animals”: The Colossal Mode -- Chapter 5. “Pietra Morta, in Pietra Viva”: The Sacro Bosco -- Conclusion: Toward the Sublime -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. Their ubiquity indicates that gardens of the period conveyed darker, more disturbing themes than has been acknowledged.In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century



medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.