Art, science and nature. The landscapes on the lintels in the rotunda of the Museum of La Plata

The landscapes on the lintels in the rotunda of the Museum of La Plata

Abstract

The roundabouts of the Museo de La Plata, the entrance hall and the upper floor, are decorated with a set of small format landscape paintings and larger mural paintings, made by different artists of the Argentine School in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The artists Luis de Servi and José Speroni were the authors of the friezes or paintings of small size and of some of the large murals. In this presentation we will examine data on the authorship of some works and describe some characteristics of the paintings, which address issues linked both to the tradition of the scientific naturalist document and to the development of the genre of the pictorial landscape, in the context of the painters of plenairism and compositional naturalism of the last third of the nineteenth century. The ideas that raise the representations of the landscape as a geographical document or as an indicator of a national imaginary will be reviewed, as well as its correlation at the service of science through the commission of a museum like that of La Plata, oriented to natural history and extended to art collections, thematically relevant in the context of the museum and cultural of the time.