Casa Guidi Windows

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​Liane Lang created this series of large format analogue photographs at Casa Guidi in Florence, the home of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Creating a sculpture of the poet, she explores poetry, illness, displacement and the magical memory of space.

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Photographed in 2010 in the apartment of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning in Florence, the place they eloped to from England. The titles are taken from poems Elizabeth wrote during this period. Lang uses her sculpted dolls, a likeness to Elizabeth, to occupy the rooms like spectral presences. The images reflect the quiet emptiness of spaces preserved for posterity, where visitors seek to encounter the spirit of the past, the absent body of the inhabitants, the traces of their thoughts and feelings. Elizabeth Barrett was an invalid and had to spend much of her days lying down. The enforced rest was also a space for contemplation, reading and writing and an avid life of the mind. Many of her poems make reference to the windows at Casa Guidi through which she witnessed the Italian Revolution.

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