Blue Worlds and Italian Art

In today’s world, we live in an era of rising sea levels, coastal erosion, and the decline of marine biodiversity. Ecological anxieties have led to emerging scholarship examining humans’ cultural and social relationships with blue worlds. In Italy’s long history, seas and oceans have served as spaces for navigation, trade, and warfare. Smaller natural and manmade bodies were used as sites of ceremony, leisure, and human pleasure. Artistic engagements of water range, from ancient grottos to contemporary site-specific installations such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Floating Piers on Lago d’Iseo. How has water served as subject matter, material, or artistic inspiration within Italian art? How do artworks embody aquatic beliefs, concerns, and attitudes? This panel invites presentations that explore the presence and significance of enclosed and flowing bodies of water in Italian art from antiquity to the present day.