‘Non vedete. È un rivoluzione.’ [You don’t see. It’s a revolution] Edward Lear Landscape Painter and Italy

Abstract

Edward Lear‟s 1852 text Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples details the author‟s painting tours in the South of Italy during one of its periods of major political and social upheaval. The text was based on his journeys in Southern Calabria in the summer of 1847 and Basilicata in the autumn of the same year. In his travel writing, Lear attempts, through a rhetoric of the „picturesque‟, to construct an Italian refuge for himself; one which is static and silently „picture-like.‟ This article considers the tensions and negotiations in this text between Lear‟s picture-refuge and his reporting of the dramatic events of the Italian Risorgimento, which demanded his, largely unwilling, involvement.