Rarefaction. Nature, Philosophy, and Ethics: Images of Metaphysical Peace in Venetian Renaissance Painting (1500–1510)

Art history has long identified what is most striking in the masterpieces of the Golden Age of Italian painting as harmony, exactness of proportions, the perfect calibration of gestures. Yet the mystery lying at their core remains, and the task to define it rests perhaps on philosophy, rather than art history. Philosophy, after all, in the extremely refined fashion of the over-synchretistic Platonism of the time, exerted an enormous influence both on Quattrocento and Renaissance painting. This paper will try to describe, rather than determine, such mystery in terms of a “metaphysical peace”, focusing in particular on the element that lies in the background of these artworks: the landscape, whose realization Venetian painting took to unprecedented heights. Such background acts in fact as the actual foundation of the metaphysical visions manifested by these artworks – which should rather be considered as philosophical treaties in themselves rather than pure “works of art”. It is only by the presence and the role of the landscape that these paintings achieve a dimension of pure, metaphysical peace that reunites poetry and wisdom, and restitutes a notion of the Human as a Whole.