Summary
Abstract
This chapter focuses on Josiah Gilbert's Cadore, or Titian's Country, the book which firmly associated the Dolomite Mountains to the name of Titian and transformed them into a site where a ‘cult geography’ could be played out. It explains how this link emerged as a symbolic gaze cast from Venice. It then shows how that gaze was negotiated between distinct models of artistic landscape. Finally, it illustrates the ways in which Gilbert embedded the cult of Titian into a Dolomite ‘Petit Tour’ that branded the region as Titian's Country. The practice of scenery hunting is here introduced as mobilizing a web of hybridized geographical discourses inspired by the artistic cult of Venetian landscape painting.
Keywords: landscape painting, cult geography, Venetian art, Titian, John Ruskin, Josiah Gilbert
Titian's custom of going in the summer-time from heated Venice to the cool Dolomite Mountains – The Scotland of Italy – that stand so invitingly within sight of the city, is one that Venetians practised long before the painter's day, and which they have kept up ever since.
− Alexander RobertsonIn 1866, Henry Ecroyd wrote a long article in George Augustus Sala's Temple Bar entitled ‘The Highlands of Venetia’ (1866, 1867) with the intention of sponsoring a charming ‘Petit Tour’ in the hills surrounding Verona, Padua, and Vicenza, identified as a scenery whose horizon was still silhouetted by the hazily-labelled ‘Venetian Alps’. The Dolomites are absent from his account, and to include them in that horizon we need to recall the ‘romantic’ description of Matlock quoted in the conclusion of Chapter One. Adam's description presupposes a familiarity with the wild British landscape that Britons started exploring from the eighteenth century as a local complement to the amiable sceneries associated to the Grand Tour (Darby, 2000, pp. 79-82; Korte, 2000, pp. 66-81; Buzard, 2002, pp. 41-43). New fascination with the Celtic fringes of Britain, with the legends of Ossian and his father Fingal, with the Scottish Highlands and their barren landscapes held sway.
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- Topographic Memory and Victorian Travellers in the Dolomite MountainsPeaks of Venice, pp. 135 - 162Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020