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Speaker: Genevieve Warwick (I Tatti / University of Edinburgh)
This seminar aims to redress analyses of the Renaissance rise of landscape painting through the prism of environmental history. Connecting art-historical literatures on landscape imagery with environmental studies of the land itself, it seeks to rewrite our understanding of this new genre of art’s emergence within a history of the Anthropocene. Early modern histories of land therefore form a critical context. Here the purpose of the research is to assemble a range of early modern ‘voices’ on the changing use and nature of the surrounding landscape. Treatises such as John Evelyn’s Sylva or a Discourse on Forest Trees of 1664 and subsequently Hans Carl von Carlowitz’ Sylvicultura oeconomica of 1713 on forestry and timber management speak to those concerns within a good husbandry of land, yet through the cultural prism of pastoral poetics that the ‘sylvan’ title acknowledges. In painting, print, and poetry, the early modern poetics of ‘Arkady’ were often poignant. In light of current concern with global futures, the proposed research calls on our capacities of historical analysis to advance understanding that can inform both the past and the future of the ‘landscape view’.
Genevieve Warwick is Professor of the History of Art from the University of Edinburgh. Over 2012-17 she was Editor and Chair of Art History, the leading British journal for the subject. From 2017-21 she was a Major Research Fellow of the Leverhulme Trust to write The Mirror of Art: Painting and Reflection in Early Modern Visual Culture, 2024, as well as a short book for Cambridge University Press’ Elements series, Cinderella’s Glass Slipper: Towards a Cultural History of Renaissance Materialities. She has just completed a book on Bernini’s Ephemeral and Preparatory Sculpture for the Routledge Research in Art History series, forthcoming in Summer 2025, to complement her earlier study of Bernini: Art as Theatre, Yale University Press, 2022, which won honourable mention for the Renaissance Society of America’s Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize in 2014 and led to a BBC World Service documentary on Bernini in 2016. Her professorship at I Tatti to work on landscape painting is preceded by a guest fellowship at the Rachel Carson Centre at the University of Munich to study environmental history in preparation for her current research.
Image: Nicolas Poussin, The Four Seasons: Summer | Ruth and Boaz, Musée du Louvre
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