Francesco di Mauro:Il significato simbolico delle piante nella pittura veneziana

During the Venetian fifteenth century, the progressive opening of the sacred image to nature does not cease in a greater descriptive attention to the visible world.

Flowers, trees, herbs, fruits, and shrubs become instruments through which painting constructs further layers of meaning, transforming the vegetable data into a presence capable of dialoguing with the figures, guiding the observer's meditation, and expanding the symbolic density of the scene.

This slow maturation of the botanical gaze in fifteenth-century Venetian painting will be examined, observing how the natural element is progressively removed from the function of simple ornament or marginal filler.

In the paintings of the great masters of the fifteenth century, the plant placed at the feet of a Virgin, the tree that accompanies the solitude of a saint, the flowering meadow, the enclosed garden, or the seemingly secondary vegetation do not consist of neutral details, but fragments of a broader visual system, in which nature, theology, devotion, and humanistic culture contribute to defining the sense of the work.

Through a path among sacred images, devotional narratives, and landscapes still in formation, Di Mauro will show how the botanical component represents one of the privileged grounds through which Venetian painting begins to question the relationship between figure, space, and nature.

This reflection will also constitute a premise for understanding the developments of the following century, when, with Titian, the landscape will assume a new centrality, no longer merely symbolic or narrative, but fully poetic, expressive, and conceptual.

FRANCESCO DI MAURO earned his bachelor's degree in "Economics and Management of Cultural Assets and Activities" in 2021 from Ca' Foscari University of Venice, with a thesis on the relationship between Titian Vecellio and the Dutch engraver Cornelis Cort. Subsequently, he obtained his master's degree in "History of Arts and Conservation of Artistic Heritage" in 2024, also from Ca' Foscari, with a thesis on the landscape in Titian's graphics. He is currently specializing at the School of Specialization in Cultural Heritage in Udine.