ABSTRACT
Antonio Somaini questions the veils, mists, and fogs that appear in the late works of J.M.W Turner, suggesting that here the canvas gains the status of an ‘atmospheric screen’. Drawing on the etymology of the term ‘medium’, Somaini probes the re-emergence in the nineteenth century of an environmental media concept in relation to the rediscovery of the environmental nature of the screen. Their parallel genealogies, he suggests, intersect in Romantic landscape painting as well as in German Naturphilosophie and Romantic Literature, each of which might be situated within a line of descent running from Aristotle’s notions of metaxy to mediaeval theories of media diaphana. The controversies over Turner’s canvases, exemplified by the debate between Ruskin and Hazlitt, are a potent reminder of the unsettled status of the atmosphere at a moment when the optical conception of the screen was not yet dominant.
