| When the Habsburg Dynasty assumed control of Lombardy in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the province became a testing ground for social, economic and political reforms that stemmed from pragmatic concerns and later became part of an enlightened-absolutist governmental strategy. This dissertation examines the role of the built environment of noble villa compounds in relation to the social and economic reforms imposed under Charles VI and Maria Theresa of Austria. A set of prints of the villas, titled Ville di delizie o siano palaggi camperecci nello stato di Milano, published in 1726 and 1743 by the Milanese printmaker Marc' Antonio Dal Re, serve as the centerpiece for this study which crosses the disciplinary boundaries of art, architectural, landscape and environmental history. Far from serving as "Villas of Delight" as the title of the printed series suggests, these agricultural Lombard estates were centers from which the nobility exercised absolute control over natural and human resources resulting in an environmental absolutism that matched the Habsburg's enlightened-absolutist government.; Although historians have previously assumed Dal Re's prints to be factual documentation that recorded the state of 18th-century Lombard villas, this dissertation reveals the ideological nature of his willfully distorted representations. By questioning the prints' authenticity, the complex social and economic dynamics of control and display emerges. In fact, the prints are most important for their contradiction to physical reality. They were primarily used to display wealth, status and title during a time of great social and economic destabilization. Although they cannot be relied on as accurate architectural depictions, they are authentic in their illustration of the nobility's need to construe a world where the traditional hierarchy of power reigned supreme, unhindered by the changing political and social forces imposed by the Habsburg monarchy.; Dal Re portrayed each of the seventeen villas included in his series in panoramic perspective, displaying villa and garden within a detailed rural landscape populated by numerous figures representing a broad spectrum of Lombard social life. The dissertation employs a new methodological approach demonstrating the complex web of connections that existed between built form and class relationships, environmental change and economic power, villa and landscape, city and countryside--a panoramic approach to historical inquiry that matches the scope of the material portrayed in Dal Re's panoramic views. The result is a contextualized reconstruction of the past in which buildings and gardens are the fundamental setting for the workings of culture, just as Dal Re's panoramic views placed the architectural complex of the villa at the center of the landscape and at the center of the viewer's attention. |
