The monster in the garden : the grotesque and the gigantic in Renaissance landscape design

Author(s)

    • Morgan, Luke

Bibliographic Information

The monster in the garden : the grotesque and the gigantic in Renaissance landscape design

Luke Morgan

(Penn studies in landscape architecture)

University of Pennsylvania Press, c2016

  • : [hbk]

Available at  / 2 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-231) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. Their ubiquity indicates that gardens of the period conveyed darker, more disturbing themes than has been acknowledged. In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reframing the Renaissance Garden Chapter 1. The Legibility of Landscape: From Fascism to Foucault Chapter 2. The Grotesque and the Monstrous Chapter 3. A Monstruary: The Excessive, the Deficient, and the Hybrid Chapter 4. "Rare and Enormous Bones of Huge Animals": The Colossal Mode Chapter 5. "Pietra Morta, in Pietra Viva": The Sacro Bosco Conclusion: Toward the Sublime Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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