Val d’Aosta

1858

John Brett

Collection of Lord Lloyd-Webber

Brett’s understanding of the way in which they had formed the existing landscape, heightened a sense of their dormant power. In Val d'Aosta, we are shown an inhabited landscape, with a sleeping figure and a waking goat, and myriad human activities stretched out over the entire valley. All of this appears to be concerned with the present, and seems to imply that we are safe to be indifferent to or unaware of larger geological forces. Nonetheless, to the person who understood how the landscape had been formed (Brett himself of course, plus a Europe-wide intelligentsia), it was certainly amazing and perhaps also alarming. The placing of the girl, who rests her head upon one of the very boulders that were evidence to the informed eye of stupendous past events, and whose figure seems to meld with and to echo the patterns of the stone's grain and shape, is surely intended as a foil to a representation of the landscape on the basis of scientific understanding. In her slumber she is insensible to her surroundings, as in her daily existence she may similarly have taken for granted, rather than attempted to comprehend, the geographical mechanisms of her habitual environment. The silver cross at her breast may signify that she is intended to represent the devout – but to Brett's Protestant perception, simple-minded adherence of the Catholic peasantry of the Italian to an unquestioning and uncritical biblical explanation of the landscape's formation. 

Quoted from Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature, ed. Allen Staley and Christopher Newall (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), p. 141-42; for a fuller discussion of Pre-Raphaelite painting and its concern with precise renditions of the earth’s geological complexity—and, hence, its collision with religious teaching of both the Anglican Church and (especially) Dissenting denominations—click here for Newall’s chapter on “Understanding the Landscape.”

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