“Cultural Traces” in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Good and Bad Government frescoes.
During one of his most aesthetic moments, Berenson enthused about the similarities between Japanese art and Lorenzetti’s paintings. Berenson developed an interest in Asian art, and more significantly made comparisons between it and western painting when he was part of the Bostonian group of scholars, art historians and aesthetes. In his early career this kind of intercultural comparison took the form of commenting on the “similarity” of the Venetian Carlo Crivelli and the Sienese Ambrogio Lorenzetti to Asian art; though later Berenson in his famous surveys of renaissance painting would liken the whole of the Sienese school to Chinese and Japanese art, largely inspired by eattending exhibitions and reading books about the subject. Long after Berenson’s death in 1959 such paintings as Lorenzetti’s Palazzo Pubblico murals of Good and Bad Government have intrigued art historians and cultural historians prompting them to pursue similar associations with the art of the Far East such as Prazniak wondering- for example- whether a piece of porcelain in this painting might actually be of the type imported from Iran or China.[1] Scholars have gone further than this remaking on the “Chinese” look of Lorenzetti’s landscapes (above) and wondering whether the renaissance artist had knowledge of landscape painting from Asia. This speculative trend has even been extended to Leonardo, and one has to say comparing Da Vinci’s wonderfully rich drawing of the Vale of Arno with Chinese monochrome landscapes, it is tempting to argue some kind of diffusionism, but with the lack of concrete evidence we should err on the side of caution: this could simply be another instance of parallel development in landscape in different countries at separate times.
[1] Prazniak, 200.
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