Dr. April Oettinger: Animating Nature, Lorenzo Lotto and the Art of Landscape in Venice, 1500-1550

During the first half of the 16th century, Venetian painters began to explore the lyrical aspect of nature’s always-changing phenomena: the effects of lighting across stormy skies, fires on mountainsides and tempest-tossed seas. Temporal landscape imagery intermingled with the idea that nature’s phenomena were replete with divine significance. The natural world not only evidenced the work of God but also came to embody the complexity of man. In this presentation, Goucher College Professor of Art History and Visual Culture April Oettinger discusses what it meant to paint and describe nature in 16th-century Venetian painting. Through the art of Lorenzo Lotto and his peers, Dr. Oettinger explores the ways in which Venetian painters experimented with the lyrical, metaphorical and human character, and also offers a fresh perspective on landscape painting in the Renaissance.