Biography

Genevieve Warwick, Professor of Art History from the University of Edinburgh, is author of 11 books and some 50 articles on aspects of Renaissance and Early Modern visual culture: drawings and artistic practice; sculpture and materials; painting and mimesis; ephemeral and decorative arts; art collecting and histories of display; cultural memory and arts of reproduction; theories and technologies of the early modern image. From 2012-17 she was Editor of Art History, UK journal for the discipline. From 2017-21 she was Major Research Fellow of the Leverhulme Trust for research on The Mirror of Art: Painting and Reflection in Early Modern Visual Culture, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press June 2024. In Spring 2022 she was guest fellow at the Rachel Carson Center Munich for research on early modern landscape imagery and environmental history, which she will continue to pursue at I Tatti.

Project Summary

This research redresses analyses of the Renaissance rise of landscape painting through the prism of environmental studies. Connecting art-historical literatures on landscape imagery with environmental histories of the land itself, it rewrites our understanding of this new genre of art’s emergence within a history of the anthropocene. The geographical scope of the research is global, centred on landscape histories and their perception in art set within larger narratives of early modernity. Through visual representations, the research charts vast shifts in early modern agricultural land uses with resulting observations of climate change, alongside sixteenth-century encounters with entirely new landscapes of global exploration circa 1492. These comprise cartographic and topographical depictions of land; changing pictorial modes of botanical and horticultural illustration; and their pictorial representation in print, painting, manuscript illumination, drawing, and water-colour, as well as tapestries and decorative arts. Alongside an emerging scientific depiction of nature, the research also considers artistic and literary manifestations of nostalgia for lost arcadian landscapes that suffused painting, pastoral music, and poetry of the period. It is thus concerned with longue durée pastoral and agrarian histories from the late Middle Ages into Early Modernity; the rise of new visual methods of scientific observation; as well as the impact of circumnavigation and ‘new world’ exploration on land imaginaries in word and image.