| Summary: | <p>The current dissertation seeks to provide a novel approach to Italian Renaissance painting by focusing on the pictorial background behind and around the figure. Considering the problem of the ground or background (referred to in Renaissance sources as the ‘campo’) raises some new questions regarding the production and reception of Renaissance paintings, which could be treated as both material objects and immaterial works of art that represent both real and fictional worlds. As a counterpoint to the ongoing emphasis in scholarship on the figure in Italian Renaissance painting, I discuss how the employment of different kinds of backgrounds also contributed to the varied socio-cultural meanings and changing functions of Renaissance paintings. I make a case study approach to exploring both the symbolic meanings of backgrounds as pictorial forms and the social-historical functions of such backgrounds in different contexts between c. 1450 and c. 1550, with a particular focus on the fifteenth century.</p>
<p>Given the formal and semiotic complexities of different types of backgrounds in Renaissance paintings, I have adopted a typological approach that addresses all the major types, ranging from gold grounds to backgrounds consisting of landscapes, architectural forms or textiles such as curtains and so-called cloths of honour. Chapter 1 addresses how the concepts of ‘ground’ and ‘background’ are dynamically changing in the contemporary term campo in Renaissance writings on art. Chapter 2 considers how the long-standing tradition of gold backgrounds was reimagined in some late fifteenth-century Italian paintings and frescoes. Chapter 3 looks at how landscape backgrounds in paintings were produced both as an independent impulse within Italy and as an apparent response to Northern examples. Chapter 4 explores the development of architectural backdrops in both the theory and practice of Renaissance art and how backgrounds take centre stage in the three ‘Ideal City’ panels.</p>
<p>By foregrounding the background, I provide a new approach to theorising the art of pre-modern Italy that quite literally de-centres the figure which has traditionally been the focus of most scholarship on this period.</p>
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