The strength of Nature. The representation of southern landscapes between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Abstract

The present contribution wants to focus the attention on the activity of those Italian and foreign artists, who, driven by curiosity or at the service of the sovereigns, travel far and wide, not without difficulties and dangers, the south of Italy up to Sicily. The paintings of views, the gouaches, the printed engravings of foreign painters help to spread a southern iconography, which will be at the base of the construction of the myth of the South.
However, while building the imaginary of the Grand Tour, other voices resounded in the enchantment of the landscape of the South. Giuseppe Maria Galanti – extraordinary figure of the last Neapolitan Enlightenment – of that South had told, for example, the harshness of the cultivated lands, the harshness of the conditions of daily work, the misery of the villages far from the capital. Added to this were the natural calamities that confirmed, inexorably, how these enchanting and uncontaminated lands hid an intrinsic fragility.
The earthquake of 1783, which devastated Calabria and part of Messina, as well as the one that destroyed on 13 August 1851 Melfi and with it much of Basilicata, were proof of the adversity of a nature hostile to man, "malignant" dispenser not only of evocative views, but of landscapes battered by landslides and crags.