The Tuscan Landscape
“The view thence of Florence is most beautiful--far better than the hackneyed view of Fiesole. It is the view that Alessio Baldovinetti is fond of introducing into his pictures. That man had a decided feeling for landscape. Decidedly. But who looks at it to-day? Ah, the world is too much for us."
E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
Perhaps we could identify with a figure looking out across the Tuscany landscape in one of Baldovinetti’s paintings, the Nativity. We can follow this figure’s gaze out over the valley patterned by snaking paths and rivers that wind with a mazy motion under bridges, until our eyes reach further to the distant mountains. Baldovinetti’s painting opens up to the spectator with the result that the pleasure of looking is transmuted into potential. The promise of a better world becomes visible, made manifest through Baldovinetti’s naturalistic skill and his poetic evocation of the Tuscan countryside: Tuscany. The word itself when applied to the problem of defining the terrain geographically raises certain problems. More of a region than a specific province, state or principality, Tuscany can mean many things to many people depending on their interests, outlook and experience. The mention of Tuscany to an educated person with knowledge of the classics might suggest myths of origin in Virgil’s Aeneid; whilist to the modern mind, more immersed in current affairs and popular culture, Tuscany may evoke thoughts of holiday villas for famous and wealthy politicians and musicians like Tony Blair and Sting. Geographically Tuscany could be described, in the words of one commentator, as follows: “that roughly triangular portion of Italian territory located between the upper Tyrrhenian, the central Apennines and the conventional border with the old papal State.”[1] Containing both mountainous regions, rolling fecund countryside and coastal plains, the terrain is of paramount importance in visualising Tuscany as a place in real life, and as a backdrop to many paintings in its centres such as Baldovinetti, Botticini’s Assumption (above) the Lorenzetti’s frescoes in Siena and Benozzo Gozzoli’s histories of St Francis at Montefalco, to mention just a few out of hundreds. And in the sphere of literature, perhaps it is this evocation of a “landscape” through such novels as Forster’s Room with a View (1908), more recently, John Mortimer’s Summer’s Lease (1988), that noticeably makes use of the “Piero della Francesca trail” in the region: it is therefore no surprise to learn that attempts have been made to preserve parts of the Tuscan countryside for present and future generations, both native and foreign to enjoy.
[1] Moro, quoted in Silvia Ross, Tuscany: Literary Constructions of Place, (University of Toronto, 2010), 4.
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