Landscape through a Sociopolitical Lens: Representing the Environment in the Early Modern Netherlandish World
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Netherlandish ArtScarcely a news cycle passes without discussion of national borders, climate change, natural disasters, and globalization. This discourse has prompted new questions about the visual representation of the physical environment, making this an apt moment to reassess the extraordinary production and consumption of landscape imagery in Northern Europe in the early modern period. This session seeks to complicate existing understandings of this material by focusing on its intrinsic but diverse sociopolitical content. Papers will address, through discussions of paintings, prints, and decorative objects, how pictorial tactics and conventions function as inscriptions of power, control, identity, and otherness. This panel will examine how the vision of the land provided by Northern, particularly Dutch, practitioners, informed or shifted understandings of “space,” “nature,” and “environment” and contributed to contemporary conversations about social ecologies, climate, land ownership, and labor. Importantly, this session also attends to the concept of “world,” integrating considerations of “the Northern landscape” with those of depictions of overseas territories, particularly New Spain, Africa, and Curaçao.
Field of Study:
Europe
Northern Europe
Sixteenth Century
Seventeenth Century
Fifteenth Century
Chairs:
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein,Harvard Art Museums - joanna@seidenstein.com
and
Sarah Walsh Mallory,Harvard University - sarahmallory@g.harvard.edu
