Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature 9789048552153

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Landscape, Mutability, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduction
Part 1. Latent Landscapes
1. Waterland and the Disquiet of the Dutch Landscape
2. Landscape and Autography
3. Painted Landscape before Landscape Painting in Early Modern England
Part 2. Elemental Resources
4. Unruly Indigo? Plants, Plantations, and Partitions
5. A Natural History in Stone: Medusa’s Unruly Gaze on bardiglio grigio
6. The Cosmologies of Early Modern Mining Landscapes
Part 3. Staged Topographies
7. Aurea Aetas Antverpiensis : Land(scapes) in the Blijde Inkomst for Ernest of Austria into Antwerp, 1594
8. An Overlooked Landscape Installation : The Winter Room at Copenhagen’s Rosenborg Castle
9. Insidious Images: Veiled Sight and Insight in Pieter Bruegel’s Landscapes
Part 4. Fragile Ecologies
10. “In einem Augenblick”: Leveling Landscapes in Seventeenth-Century Disaster Flap Prints
11. Performative Landscapes: A Paradigm for Mediating the Ecological Imperative?
Index

Citation preview

Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor at Brown University. She has authored or edited five books on early modern Italian visual and material culture.

Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity Picturing Unruly Nature

Edited by Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by an RSA–Samuel H. Kress Publication Subvention Grant from the Renaissance Society of America.

Cover illustration: Hendrick Goltzius, Demogorgon in the Cave of Eternity (first print of the seven-part series of Demogorgon and the Deities), ca. 1586–1590. Chiaroscuro woodcut from one line block and two tone blocks in tan and dark grey, 35 × 26.3 cm, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. no. VII.31.183. Image: © Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 943 7 978 90 4855 215 3 e-isbn doi 10.5117/9789463729437 nur 654 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

7

Acknowledgments

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Landscape, Mutability, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduction

27

Christine Göttler

Part 1  Latent Landscapes 1. Waterland and the Disquiet of the Dutch Landscape Mia M. Mochizuki

2. Landscape and Autography Victoria Sancho Lobis

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3. Painted Landscape before Landscape Painting in Early Modern England 153 Karin Leonhard

Part 2  Elemental Resources 4. Unruly Indigo? Plants, Plantations, and Partitions

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5. A Natural History in Stone: Medusa’s Unruly Gaze on bardiglio grigio

209

Romita Ray

Steffen Zierholz

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6. The Cosmologies of Early Modern Mining Landscapes Tina Asmussen

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Part 3  Staged Topographies 7. Aurea Aetas Antverpiensis: Land(scapes) in the Blijde Inkomst for Ernest of Austria into Antwerp, 1594

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8. An Overlooked Landscape Installation: The Winter Room at Copenhagen’s Rosenborg Castle

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Ivo Raband

Michèle Seehafer

9. Insidious Images: Veiled Sight and Insight in Pieter Bruegel’s Landscapes 323 Michel Weemans

Part 4  Fragile Ecologies 10. “In einem Augenblick”: Leveling Landscapes in Seventeenth-Century Disaster Flap Prints

353

11. Performative Landscapes: A Paradigm for Mediating the Ecological Imperative?

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Index

415

Suzanne Karr Schmidt

Peter J. Schneemann



List of Illustrations

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Song Dong, Doing Nothing Garden, 2010–2012. Daily-life rubbish and building rubbish with plants and neon signs, 7 × 32.5 × 23.5 m, Kassel, dOCUMENTA (13) (shown shortly before the opening of the exhibition). Image: © Song Dong, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Theodorus Graminaeus, Cathena aurea Platonis, before 1593 (title page of the series The Seven Planets). Engraving, 24.3 × 18.6 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1981–186. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Maarten de Vos, Landscape with the Chariot of Venus, ca. 1600 (from the series The Seven Planets and the Catena aurea). Engraving, 24.5 × 18.7 cm (sheet), London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1862,0712.331. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Maarten de Vos, Landscape with the Chariot of Mars, before 1593 (from the series The Seven Planets and the Catena aurea). Engraving, 24.6 × 18.3 cm (sheet), Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1981–188. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Maarten de Vos, Landscape with the Chariot of Jupiter, before 1593 (from the series The Seven Planets and the Catena aurea). Engraving, 23.7 × 18.1 cm (sheet), Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1981–190. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Maarten de Vos, Landscape with the Chariot of Saturn, before 1593 (from the series The Seven Planets and the Catena aurea). Engraving, 23.5 × 18 cm (sheet), Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1981–187. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Johannes Sadeler I after Maarten de Vos, The Sun and the Moon and Their Influences on the Provinces, Regions, and Cities, 1585 (from the series Planetarum effectus et eorum in signis zodiaci). Engravings, each ca. 23.5 × 24 cm, both cut within borders; hand-colored and glued onto a sheet of parchment (53.9 × 3.5 cm), Album Jean de Poligny,

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Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–2005–214. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Adriaen Huybrechts after Andrea Bacci, Ordo universi et humanarum scientiarum prima monumenta, 1585. Engraving, 60.3 × 42.7 cm, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, RES QB–201 (170, 1)–FT 4. Image: © BnF. Nature in Her Workshop, in Cy comme[n]ce le roma[n]t de la rose. Ou tout lart damours est enclose (Geneva: Jean Croquet, ca. 1481), fol. 133r. Colored woodcut, 6.7 × 5.9 cm, with commentary by François Rasse des Neux, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. M: Lm 4° 3d. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Matthäus Merian the Elder, “His Nurse Is the Earth,” in Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim: Hieronymus Galler and Johann Theodor de Bry, 1618), 17. Engraving, 9.3 × 10.1 cm, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. A:196 Quod. (1). Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Hendrick Goltzius, Demogorgon in the Cave of Eternity (first print of the series of Demogorgon and the Deities), ca. 1586–1590. Chiaroscuro woodcut from one line block and two tone blocks in tan and dark grey, 35 × 26.3 cm, Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. no. VII.31.183. Image: © Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg. Nature Nurturing the Growth of Metals, in Antonio Neri, Il tesoro del mondo (The Treasure of the World), fol. 2r. Pen and watercolor, 17 × 11 cm, Glasgow, University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections, MS Ferguson 67. Image: © University of Glasgow. Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, Man Born to Toil, 1572. Part of an album with prints by Maarten van Heemskerck and other artists, fol. 202r. Engraving, 20.9 × 24.8 cm (plate); 26.3 × 34.3 cm (sheet). Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1988–297–202. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Peter Candid, Vision of St. William of Malavalle, ca. 1600 (from the Chapel of St. William at Schleissheim). Oil on canvas, 306.5 × 174.5 cm, Munich, Bayerische Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen, Nymphenburg,

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Marstalldepot, inv. no. SAS–G–0001. Image: © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung. Figure 0.15 Johannes Sadeler I after Dirck Barendsz., Mankind Awaiting the Last Judgement (“Ita erit et adventus filii hominis”), 1581–1583. Engraving, 35 × 44.2 cm (cut within border), handcolored in blue, green, red, and brown, glued onto a sheet of parchment (53.9 × 38 cm) in an album from the library of Jean de Poligny, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–2005–214–3. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 0.16 Herri met de Bles (circle of), Landscape with Lot and His Daughters in Front of the Burning Sodom, sixteenth century. Oil on panel, 33.2 × 45.2 cm, Warsaw, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, inv. no. M.Ob.600 MNW. Image: © Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie / Piotr Ligier. Figure 0.17 Herri met de Bles (or workshop of), Landscape with Lot and His Daughters, second third of the sixteenth century. Oil on panel, 26 × 40 cm, Namur, TreM.a, Musée des arts anciens, inv. no. 245C. Image: © Coll. Province de Namur / G. Focant. Figure 1.1 Jan van Goyen, Landscape with Two Oaks, 1641. Oil on canvas, 88.5 × 110.5 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. SK–A–123. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 1.2 Hendrick Goltzius, Dune Landscape, 1603. Pen and brown ink on paper, 9.1 × 15.4 cm, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, inv. no. H253 (PK), on loan from Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen 1940 (formerly Collection Koenigs). Image: © Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Photo: Studio Buitenhof. Figure 1.3 Hendrick Goltzius, Cliff on a Seashore, ca. 1592–1595. Chiaroscuro woodcut in sepia-ochre, green, and black ink on paper, 11.4 × 14.4 cm, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, inv. no. 1943.3.4628. Image: © National Gallery of Art. Figure 1.4 Leonardo da Vinci, Study of Rock Formations, ca. 1510–1515. Black chalk on paper, 16.4 × 20.1 cm, Windsor, Windsor Castle, Royal Library, inv. no. RCIN 912397. Image: © Royal Collection Trust / Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021. Figure 1.5 Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom, Battle between Dutch and Spanish Ships on the Haarlemmermeer (26 May 1573), ca. 1629. Oil on canvas, 190 × 268 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. SK–A–602. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Cornelis Anthonisz., View of Amsterdam, 1538. Oil on panel, 116 × 159 cm, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum, inv. no. SA 3009. Image: © Amsterdam Museum. Figure 1.7 Geography and Chorography, in Petrus Apianus, Cosmographicus liber (Landshut: Johann Weissenburger, 1524), part 1, 3–4. Woodcut on paper, 21 × 15 cm, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Libraries, Burndy Library, Special Collections, Gift of Bern Dibner, call no. GA6.A4X. Image: © Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. Figure 1.8 Anonymous, Cantino Planisphere Portolan Chart, 1502. Ink on six sheets of glued parchment, 220 × 105 cm, Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Gallerie Estensi, Fondo Cartografico / Fondo Estense, inv. no. CGA2. Image: © Su concessione del Ministero della Cultura–Gallerie Estensi, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria. Figure 1.9 Cornelis Anthonisz., Caerte van Oostlant, ca. 1560. Woodcut on nine sheets of mounted paper, 73 × 96.5 cm, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. K1.1. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Figure 1.10 Coastal Profiles of North Holland, in Cornelis Anthonisz., Caerte van die Oosterse See (Amsterdam: Jan Ewoutsz., 1558), bound with Onderwijsinge vander zee, om stuermanschap te leeren, 3rd ed. (Amsterdam: Jan Ewoutsz., 1558), fol. 2v. Woodcut on paper, 16 × 21 cm, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, call no. NC5. An866.544oc. Image: © Harvard University, Houghton Library. Figure 1.11 Sea Chart of Portugal, in Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer, Spieghel der zeevaerdt (Leiden: Christophe Plantin, 1584), chart 17. Engraving, 32.5 × 51 cm, Utrecht, University Library, call no. P fol 111 Lk (Rariora). Image: © Utrecht University Library. Figure 1.12 Jan Christiaensz. Micker, View of Amsterdam, ca. 1652–1660. Oil on canvas, 100 × 137 cm, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum, inv. no. SA 1531. Image: © Amsterdam Museum. Figure 1.13 Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, ca. 1670–1675. Oil on canvas, 55.5 × 62 cm, The Hague, Mauritshuis, inv. no. 155. Image: © Mauritshuis. Figure 1.14 Jan Collaert II, Astrolabe, in Johannes Stradanus, Nova Reperta (Antwerp: Philips Galle, [ca. 1580–1605]), plate 18. Engraving on paper, 27 × 33 cm, Chicago, Newberry Library,

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call no. VAULT Case Wing oversize Z412.85. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago. Photo: Catherine Gass. Figure 1.15 Title Page, in Reinerus Gemma Frisius, De principiis astronomiae et cosmographiae ([Antwerp]: Joannes Grapheus for Servatio Zasseno, 1530). Woodcut on paper, 20.2 × 13.8 cm, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Rare Books, call no. LP3.012A. Image: © Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique. Figure 1.16 Gualterus Arsenius, Armillary Sphere, 1568. Brass, 36 × 26 cm, 4.2 kg, Greenwich, National Maritime Museum, Caird Collection, inv. no. AST 0618. Image: © National Maritime Museum. Figure 1.17 François van Knibbergen, Panoramic Dune Landscape around Kleve, ca. 1655–1665. Oil on canvas, 97.3 × 139.5 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. SK–A–2361. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 1.18 Jan Porcellis, Shipwreck off the Coast, 1631. Oil on panel, 36.5 × 66.5 cm, The Hague, Mauritshuis, inv. no. 969. Image: © Mauritshuis. Figure 2.1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wooded Landscape with Mills, 1552. Pen and brown ink on paper, 21.3 × 28.1 cm, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, inv. no. F245 inf n9p. Image: © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Mondadori Portfolio. Figure 2.2 Nicolò Boldrini (attributed), Two Goats at the Foot of a Tree, ca. 1550–1570. Woodcut in light brown ink, 50 × 21.7 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1881,0709.80. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 2.3 Jan Brueghel the Elder, Wooded Landscape with a Family of Bears, Deer, and Other Wild Animals, ca. 1595. Pen and brown ink on paper, 33.9 × 24.3 cm, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, inv. no. 8025. Image: © Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. Figure 2.4 Pieter Bruegel the Elder (after), Forest Landscape with Wild Animals, ca. 1545–1599. Pen and brown ink on buff laid paper, laid down on card, 36 × 24.4 cm, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, inv. no. 1922.1932. Image: © The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. Figure 2.5 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Woodland Scene with Bears, ca. 1540–1569. Pen and brown ink over black chalk, 33.7 × 23.2 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1872,1012.3344. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Roelandt Savery, Mountainous Landscape with a Draftsman, ca. 1606. Pen and brown ink, 51.3 × 48.2 cm, Paris, Département des arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 20721–recto. Image: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Thierry Ollivier. Figure 2.7 Roelandt Savery, Houses behind the Lobkowitz Palace in Prague, ca. 1604–1605. Pen and brown ink on laid paper, 24.8 × 22.4 cm, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, inv. no. 5524. Image: © National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada. Figure 2.8 Anthony van Dyck, Straits of Messina, Sicily, or Liguria, with Cumulus Clouds Above; leaf from the Italian Sketchbook, ca. 1621–1627. Pen and brown ink on paper, 19.4 × 15.5 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1957,1214.207.1. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 2.9 Jan van de Velde I, Design for a Writing Exemplum with an Admiral Ship, 1605. Pen and brown ink, 21 × 30.9 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP–P–1896–A–1924–8(V). Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 2.10 Jacques de Gheyn II, Mountain Landscape, ca. 1600. Pen and brown ink, over black chalk, on paper, 29.2 × 38.9 cm, New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, inv. no. 1967.12. Image: © The Morgan Library and Museum. Figure 2.11 Peter Paul Rubens, Trees Reflected in Water at Sunset, ca. 1635–1638. Black, red, and orange chalks, heightened with white, on buff paper, 27.6 × 45.4 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. Gg.2.229. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 3.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape with St. George and the Dragon, 1630–1635. Oil on canvas, 152.5 × 226.9 cm, Windsor, Royal Collection, inv. no. RCIN 405356. Image: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022. Figure 3.2 Nathaniel Bacon, Landscape, 1656. Oil on unprimed copper, backed with oak panel, 7 × 11 cm, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, inv. no. WA1908.224. Image: © Ashmolean Museum. Figure 3.3 Wolf Huber, Large Landscape with Golgotha, 1525–1530. Pen and brown ink, watercolor, and gouache, 32.7 × 44.5 cm, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Graphische Sammlung der Universitätsbibliothek, inv.

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no. B822. Image: © Graphische Sammlung der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, B822. Figure 3.4 Albrecht Altdorfer, St. George in the Woods, ca. 1510. Oil on parchment on linden wood, 28.2 × 22.5 cm, Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. WAF 29. Image: © bpk|Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung. Figure 3.5 Anglo-Dutch School, London from Southwark, ca. 1630. Oil on oak panel, 57.7 × 85.7 cm, London, Museum of London, inv. no. 001697. Image: © Museum of London. Figure 3.6 Claude de Jongh, View of Old London Bridge, ca. 1630. Oil on panel, 48.9 × 109.2 cm, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. 7129–1860. Image: © Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Figure 3.7 Jan Siberechts, Wollaton Hall, 1690s. Oil on canvas, 191.8 × 138.4 cm, New Haven, CT, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, inv. no. B1973.1.52. Image: © Yale Center for British Art. Figure 3.8 Robert Streeter, Boscobel House and White Ladies, ca. 1670. Oil on canvas, 136.7 × 211.5 cm, Windsor, Royal Collection, inv. no. RCIN 404761. Image: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022. Figure 3.9 Sir Peter Lely, Diana Kirke, later Countess of Oxford, ca. 1665. Oil on canvas, 132.1 × 104.1 cm, New Haven, CT, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, inv. no. B1981.25.756. Image: © Yale Center for British Art. Figure 3.10 Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Aged 31, 1785–1787. Oil on canvas, 219.7 × 153.7 cm, Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, inv. no. 1937.1.92. Image: © National Gallery of Art. Figure 4.1 Johann Zoffany, The Auriol and Dashwood Families, about 1783–1787. Oil on canvas, 142 × 198 cm (unframed), Bath, The Holburne Museum. Image: © The Holburne Museum. Figure 4.2 Captain R. B. Hill, Botanical Gardens, Calcutta, 1850s. Albumen silver print, 19.6 × 24.3 cm (image), New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, inv. no. 2005.100.948.2 (25). Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 4.3 Company School, Nerium tinctorium, in William Roxburgh, Icones Roxburghianae, or Drawings of Indian Plants, 1785–1791, no. 18 (K). Watercolor, graphite, and ink on paper, 51.5 × 35.7 cm (sheet), 47.2 × 30.5 cm (image), Kew, Royal

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Botanic Gardens. Image: © Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Indigofera caerulea Roxb., specimen no. K001121003, collected Patna, April 9, 1812. Indigo plant on paper, 26.7 × 42.6 cm (sheet), Kew, Royal Botanic Gardens, cat. no. 5460, http:// specimens.kew.org/herbarium/K001121003. Image: © Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Krishnanagar Artist, Model of an Indigo Factory, detail, 1883–1884. Clay, paint, glass, bamboo, and other materials, 203.2 × 101.6 × 30.48 cm, Kolkata, Botanical Survey of India, Industrial Section Indian Museum (BSI ISIM). Image: © Botanical Survey of India, Kolkata. “Indigo Cultivation in Tirhoot, Bengal,” The Graphic (February 12, 1881), 165. Engraving, 29.3 × 40 cm, Syracuse, NY, Author’s Collection. Image: © Author. Oscar Mallitte, “Beating a Vat by Hand,” in The Planting & Manufacture of Indigo in India: 29 Photographic Views, Allahabad, India, 1877. Album with albumen silver print, 18.3 × 23.7 cm (image), Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. no. 84.XO.876.8.9. Image: © Getty Open Content Program. Piece of Indigo Dye from India, 6.35 × 6.35 cm. Image: © Wikimedia Creative Commons. Photo: Evan Izer. Anonymous, Perseus Transforming Atlas, first half of the seventeenth century. Oil on bardiglio grigio, 27 × 23 cm, Isola Bella, Lago Maggiore, Palazzo Borromeo, inv. no. PIT–01048. Image: © Archivio Fotografico Borromeo Isola Bella. Johann Wilhelm Bauer, Perseus Transforming Atlas, in Johann Wilhelm Bauer, Imagines sive illustrationes ad Publii Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseon libros XV (Vienna: [s. n.], 1641), fol. 42r. Etching, 13 × 20.5 cm, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, call no. Res/4 A.lat.a.451y. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Carlo Simonetta (attributed), Teatro Massimo, 1667–1677. Isola Bella, Lago Maggiore. Image: © Roberto Crepaldi, Italy. Jacques Callot, “Effigia impressa de la natura a un bianco marmo dicono che sia S. Girolamo,” in Bernardino d’Amico, Trattato delle piante, & immagini de sacri edifizi di Terra Santa (Florence: Pietro Cecconcelli, 1620), fig. 8. Engraving, 26.7 × 19.2 cm, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, call no. 84–B29370. Image: © Public Domain.

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Figure 5.5

Bernard Palissy (attributed), Oval Plate, mid-sixteenth century. Lead-glazed earthenware, 6.2 × 33 × 25.3 cm, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alain Moatti in honor of Peter Fusco, inv. no. 97.DE.46. Image: © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Figure 5.6 Antonio Tempesta (attributed), Conquest of Jerusalem, 1615–1630. Oil on pietra paesina, 24 × 37 cm, Rome, Galleria Borghese, inv. no. 520. Image: © Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e per il Turismo–Galleria Borghese. Figure 5.7 Dionisio Maniggio, Title Page of the Feather Book, 1618. Feathers on paper, 47.6 × 30.5 cm, Montreal, McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, Blacker Wood Natural History Collection, call no. folio ORHQ M66. Image: © Public Domain. Figure 5.8 Anonymous, Perseus with Medusa’s head, detail of Fig. 5.1. Figure 5.9 Giovanni Battista Coriolano, I. “Tabella in qua visuntur homines, et iumenta petrificata,” in Ulisse Aldrovandi, Musaeum metallicum in libros IV distributum Bartholomaeus Ambrosinus (Bologna: Giovanni Battista Ferroni, 1648), 823. Engraving, 35 × 22.7 cm, Zurich, ETH-Bibliothek, call no. Rar 1027. Image: © ETH-Bibliothek. Figure 5.10 Anonymous, Veins of Petrified Wood, in Francesco Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile minerale nuovamente scoperto (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1637), plate 5. Engraving, 33 × 23 cm, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, call no. 1364–392. Image: © Public Domain. Figure 5.11 Anonymous, Ammonites and Fragments of Ammonites, in Francesco Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile minerale nuovamente scoperto (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1637), plate 13. Engraving, 33 × 23 cm, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, call no. 1364–392. Image: © Public Domain. Figure 6.1 Anonymous, Mining Landscape, in Georg Agricola, De re metallica libri XII (Basel: Froben, 1556), 74. Woodcut, 21 × 33 cm, Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, call no. hv I.22. Image: © Public Domain. Figure 6.2 St. Daniel Receiving an Ore Specimen, in Schwazer Bergbuch (1556), fol. 1r. Colored drawing, 21 × 33 cm, Leoben, Bibliothek der Montanuniversität Leoben, codex 1556, call no. 2737 Direktion. Image: © Bibliothek der Montanuniversität Leoben.

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Figure 6.3

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Artist “L.A.,” Metercia (St. Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the Baby Jesus in a Mining Scene), 1513. Oil on canvas, 170 × 125 cm, Rožňava (Slovakia), Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Image: © Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, University of Salzburg. Photo: Peter Böttcher. Divine Agency in the Formation of Minerals, in Martin Stürz, Speculum metallorum (1575), fols. 20r, 70v. Drawing, 31.7 × 19.5 cm, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, codex 11.134. Image: © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Caspar Ulich, Handstein with Mine and Crucifixion, third quarter of the sixteenth century. Gold-plated silver, argentite, minerals, enamel, and glass, 30 × 14 × 11 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. Kunstkammer 4157. Image: © Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Arch of the Mint from the Entry of Charles V and Prince Philip into Antwerp in 1549, in Cornelius Grapheus, Le triumphe d’Anuers, faict en la suspection du Prince Philips, Prince d’Espaigne (Antwerp: P. De Lens, 1550). Woodcut, 29 × 22 cm, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. A:289.4 Hist. 2°. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Lazarus Ercker, Frontispiece, in Aula subterranea domina dominantium subdita subditorum (Frankfurt: P. Humm, 1673). Engraving, Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Digitale Sammlungen, call no. Metall.12. Image: © Public Domain. Anonymous, Mining Landscape in Markirch (Vosges), late sixteenth century. Copper engraving on laid paper, 24.8 × 36.2 cm, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Graphische Sammlung, inv. no. An 1848. Image: © Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565. Oil on panel, 119 × 162 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 19.164. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Stage of Agriculture, in Descriptio publicae gratulationis spectaculorum et ludorum in adventu Serenissimi Principis Ernesti (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1595), 54–55. Engraving, 32.6 × 20.2 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. BI–1953–0546B–09. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Figure 7.3

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Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Arrival of Archduke Ernest outside of Antwerp, in Descriptio publicae gratulationis spectaculorum et ludorum in adventu Serenissimi Principis Ernesti (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1595), 71. Engraving, 33.1 × 43.2 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. BI–1953–0546B–03. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Abraham de Bruyn (attributed to), Arrival of the Duke of Anjou and William the Silent outside of Antwerp, in La ioyeuse et magnifique entrée de Françoys […] Duc de Brabant, d’Anjou (Antwerp: Christoffel Plantijn, 1582), after 14. Etching, 29.7 × 39.4 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. BI–B–FM–001–2. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Central tableau vivant of the Stage of Agriculture, detail of Fig. 7.2. Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Painted frieze with agricultural tools, products, and a bucranium on the front of the Stage of Agriculture, detail of Fig. 7.2. Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Coat of arms on top of the Stage of Agriculture, detail of Fig. 7.2. The Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © The Royal Danish Collection, Rosenborg Castle. The south wall of the Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © The Royal Danish Collection, Rosenborg Castle. Fluted column with ionic capitals in the Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © The Royal Danish Collection, Rosenborg Castle. Carved column base with ornamental mask in the Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © Photo: Author. Joos de Momper II and Jan Brueghel I, Mountainous Landscape with Travelers on a Hilly Road, 1610–1615. Oil on oak panel, 43 × 66 cm, Copenhagen, Rosenborg Castle, Winter Room. Image: © Photo Collection RKD–Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, inv. no. 0001326397.

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Figure 8.6

Baldassare Peruzzi, Sala delle Prospettive, 1517–1519, Rome, Villa Farnesina. Image: © Wikimedia Creative Commons. Photo: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta. Figure 8.7 Frames used in the Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © Photo: Author. Figure 8.8 Otto Heiden, Castle of Rosenborg, seventeenth century. Drawing, 21.8 × 29.8 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1868,0612.1603. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 8.9 Anonymous, Personification of Hope (Spes), ca. 1614–1615. Oil on oak panel, Copenhagen, Rosenborg Castle, Winter Room. Image: © Photo Collection RKD–Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, inv. no. 0001326398. Figure 8.10 Floor opening in the Winter Room leading to the musicians’ cellar, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © The Royal Danish Collection, Rosenborg Castle. Photo: Peter Nørby. Figure 8.11 Section of the eastern wall of the Winter Room with Sebastiaan Vrancx (circle of), A Picnic in a Park, ca. 1617–1620, oil on oak panel, 49 × 64 cm; and Osias Beert I (circle of), Still Life with Drinking Vessels, Fruit and Pastries, ca. 1617–1620, oil on oak panel, 51.5 × 66 cm, Copenhagen, Rosenborg Castle. Image: © Photo Collection RKD–Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, inv. nos. 0000381787 and 0000381788. Figure 9.1 Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel, View of the Tiber at Tivoli (Prospectus Tiburtinus), 1555–1556. Etching and engraving, 39.8 × 42 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprent­ enkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–OB–7351. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 9.2 Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel, Anthropomorphic rocks, detail of Fig. 9.1. Figure 9.3 Jacques de Gheyn, Anthropomorphic Rocks, early seventeenth century. Drawing, brown ink on paper, 26.6 × 17.5 cm, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, inv. no. 5094. Image: © The Fondation Custodia. Figure 9.4 Jan Brueghel, Ponte San Rocco, early seventeenth century. Drawing, brown ink on paper, 38.1 × 27.2 cm, Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, inv. no. 1954–56. Image: © The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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Figure 9.5

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Figure 9.9 Figure 9.10 Figure 9.11 Figure 9.12 Figure 9.13

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Figure 10.2 Figure 10.3

Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel, Invidia (Envy), 1557. Engraving, 22.5 × 29.6 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprenten­ kabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1887–A–12303. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Superbia (Pride), 1557. Drawing, brown ink on paper, 22.9 × 30 cm, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, inv. no. 465. Image: © The Fondation Custodia. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, Insidiosus Auceps (The Crafty Bird Catcher), 1555–1556. Etching and engraving, 42.5 × 32.1 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–H–T–31. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Hans Sebald Beham, The Devil as Bird Trapper, in Johann von Schwarzberg, Die Beschwerung der alten Teufelischen Schlangen mit dem Göttlichen Wort (Nuremberg: Steiner, 1525), fol. 106r. Woodcut, 9.8 × 9.7 cm, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, inv. no. Res/4 Polem. 382. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, Anthropomorphic rock, detail of Fig. 9.7. Matthäus Merian, Anthropomorphic Landscape, early seventeenth century. Engraving, 17.2 × 12.9 cm, Private Collection. Image: © Private Collection. Pieter Bruegel, The Rabbit Hunt, 1560. Etching, 21.3 × 19.2 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–OB–2141. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Pieter Bruegel, The hunter and the solider, detail of Fig. 9.11. Pieter Bruegel, The Rabbit Hunt, 1560. Drawing, pen, brown ink, and black chalk, 21.3 × 19.6 cm, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, inv. no. 6959. Image: © The Fondation Custodia. Anonymous, Warhaffte abbildung deß fläckens PLURS, in den Grawen Pündten gelagen (Zurich: Johann Hardmeyer, 1618). Flap broadside with etching and letterpress, 54 × 42 cm (sheet), Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. IP 18. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Anonymous, Flap down, detail of Fig. 10.1. Anonymous, Flap lifted, detail of Fig. 10.1.

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Figure 10.4 Jacopo Ligozzi (after), Before and After Views of Mountain, in Lino Moroni, Descrizione del sacro monte della Vernia (Florence: [s. n.], 1612). Engraving, etching, and letterpress, with flaps, 44 x 31 cm (sheet), plate I, Chicago, Newberry Library, call no. Wing ZP 6351.12. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago. Figure 10.5 Daniel Mannasser (engraver), Warhafftige und erschröckliche Newe Zeittung, Von dem plötzlichen undergang, deß wol bekandten Flecken Plurs in Bergel, und gemeinen dreyen Bünten gelegen, Wie ein blötzlich Ruina anderseytes deß Berges sich herab gelassen, und den gantzen Flecken in einem Augenblick uberfallen, von grund auffgehebt, verdeckt, verworffen und hingerichtet hat, geschehen in disem 1618. Jahr (Augsburg: Lucas Schultes, 1618). Engraving with letterpress, 37 × 31 cm (sheet), Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. 38–25–Aug–2F–809. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Figure 10.6 Wilhelm Peter Zimmerman (engraver), Title Page, in Il Compassionevole Infortunio, Occurso alli 4 di Settembre del presente anno 1618 all infelice Terra di Piure; quale è restata somersa sotto parte d’una Montagna, con perdita di tutte le gente, e robbe. Descritto dall’ Orviet. Ad instanza del Verona. Beschreibung des Flecken Plurs Undergang, den vierdten Septembris 1618 (Augsburg: Sara Mang, 1618). Etched and letterpress, 9.8 × 12.2 cm (plate), Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, call no. 4 Helv. 300. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. Figure 10.7 Wilhelm Peter Zimmerman, Before the Plurs Disaster, in Il Compassionevole Infortunio. Fold-out etching, 24.1 × 33.5 cm (plate), Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, call no. 4 Helv. 300. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. Figure 10.8 Johann Philipp Walch, Warhaffte Abbildung deß Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen (Nuremberg: Hans Philip Walch, 1619). Etching and letterpress with rockslide on flap, 41.2 × 33.5 cm (sheet), Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, call no. Einblatt V, 8. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. Figure 10.9 Jacob van der Heyden, Warhaffte abbildung deß fläckens PLURS, in den Grawen Pündten gelägen (Strasbourg: [Jacob] van der Heyden, 1619). Etching with letterpress,

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Figure 10.10

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48.5 × 40.1 cm (sheet), Halle an der Saale, Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt, Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, call no. F789. Image: © Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt, Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle an der Saale. Johann Philipp Walch, Warhafftige Abbildung deß Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen, wie solcher noch in Flor gewesen, und auch, wie solcher nach seinem schröcklichen Untergang anzusehen (Nuremberg: Hans Philip Walch, 1619). Etching and letterpress with rockslide flap, approx. 40 × 30 cm (sheet), Kunstsammlungen Waldburg-Wolfegg, call no. Album 128, 67. Image: © Kunstsammlungen Waldburg–Wolfegg. Photo: Author. Johann Philipp Walch, Warhafftige Abbildung deß Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen: wie solcher noch in Flor gewesen, und auch, wie solcher nach seinem schröcklichen Untergang anzusehen (Nuremberg: Hans Philip Walch, 1619). Etching and letterpress with no flap, 39.9 × 30 cm (sheet), Chicago, Newberry Library, call no. map2F G6714.P715A3 1619.W35. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago. Photo: Catherine Gass. Johann Philipp Walch, Etched flap remnant and red wax (in place of missing flap), detail of Fig. 11. Michael Wolgemut and workshop, Destruction of Burgundian Mountain, in Das Buch der Chroniken und Geschichten (Nuremberg: Hartmann Schedel, 1493), fol. 212v. Woodcut and letterpress, 10 × 8 cm (block), Chicago, Newberry Library, call no. Inc.2086a. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago. Photo: Author. Balthasar Schwan, Warhafftige abbildung des fleckens Plürs, in Grauenbünden gelegen, wie solcher Flecken noch in Esse und Flor gewesen Anno 1618, Warhaffte abbildung des orhts da der flecken Plurs gestanden, wie solcher nach seinem schröcklichen undergang anzusehen, in Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio (Frankfurt am Main: [Sigismundus Latomus], 1619). Etching, 40.8 × 31.6 cm (sheet), Chicago, Newberry Library, call no. map2F G6714.P715A3 1619.W37. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago. Photo: Catherine Gass. Anonymous, Eigentlicher Abriß, Auch Waarhafftiger Bericht, wie es mit Eroberung der uhralten, Weitberühmbten Stadt Magdeburg hergangen… Der 10 oder 30 Mai, 1631 ([Strasbourg:

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Figure 10.16

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Jacob van der Heyden?], 1631). Etching with letterpress on two attached sheets: upper part 29 × 37 cm, lower part approx. 29 × 36 cm, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. 219–1–Quod-25. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Jacob van der Heyden, Eigentlicher Bericht, So wol auch Abcontrafeytung, welcher gestalt die weitberühmbte unnd mächtige Hense Statt Magdeburg von dem Käyserlichen General Herrn Serclas Grafen von Tilly, a. den 20 Tag Maji dieses jetzkauffenden 1631. Jahres mit gewehrter und stürmender Hand erobert worden ([Strasbourg: Jacob van der Heyden?], 1631). Etching with letterpress on two attached sheets: 58 × 40 cm (two sheets together), Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. IH 546.1. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Jacob van der Heyden, Flap lifted, detail of Fig. 10.16. Anonymous, Warhaffte abbildung deß fläckens Plurs, in den Grawen Pündten gelagen (Zurich: Johann Hardmeyer, 1618). Flap broadside with etching and letterpress, hand-colored, 52 × 39.5 cm (sheet), Zurich, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, call no. LM 62228. Image: © Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, Zurich. Anna Halprin, Dancers at Halprin’s Driftwood Beach Summer Event Joint Workshop, 1966. Still image. Image: © Anna Halprin, courtesy of the Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco. Photo: Constance Beeson. Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Scores and Documentation, Installation view, documenta 14, Athens, 2017. Image: © Anna and Lawrence Halprin. Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Scores and Documentation, Installation view, documenta 14, Athens, 2017. Image: © Anna and Lawrence Halprin. Lawrence Halprin, Sea Ranch Ecoscore, ca. 1968, in Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 122–23. Image: © The Halprin Estate. Pierre Huyghe, After ALife Ahead, temporary installation for the duration of the exhibition Skulptur Projekte, Münster, 2017. Concrete floor of ice rink, logic game, ammoniac, sand, clay, phreatic water, bacteria, algae, bees, aquarium, black switchable glass, Conus textile, GloFish, incubator, human

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cancer cells, genetic algorithm, augmented reality, automated ceiling structure, and rain. Location: former ice rink, Münster, Steinfurterstraße 113–115. Image: © ProLitteris, Zurich, 2021. Edward Burtynsky, Phosphor Tailings Pond #4, near Lakeland, Florida, 2012. Archival pigment print. Image: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto. Richard Serra, Sawing Device: Base Plate Measure, 1970, in Richard Serra, ed., Richard Serra (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1970), [14]. Image: © ProLitteris, Zurich, 2021. Richard Serra, Sawing Device: Base Plate Measure, 1970, in Richard Serra, ed., Richard Serra (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1970), [18]. Image: © ProLitteris, Zurich, 2021. Regina José Galindo, Tierra, 2013, Moulins, France. Video, color, and sound, 33 min 56 sec. Image: © Regina José Galindo, courtesy of Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani Milan-Lucca. Credits: Regina José Galindo, Lucy + Jorge Orta (producers), Bertrand Huet (photographer and cameraman), Didier Martial (cameraman), Pascal Pauger (driver), Studio Orta assistants: Tiziana Abretti, Sofia Cavicchini, Andrea Rinaudo, Alberto Orta. Realized during the Les Moulins Residency Program 2013, with the support of the University of the Arts London and La Maréchalerie centre d’art Versailles. Hamish Fulton, Limmat Art Walk, Zurich, 2012. Performance art. Image: Courtesy of Häusler Contemporary. Photo: Barbora Gerny. Mai-Thu Perret, And Every Woman Will Be a Walking Synthesis of the Universe, 2006. Installation view. Image: © Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Photo: Tom Van Eynde. Andrea Zittel, A–Z Wagon Stations: Second Generation, California, 2012–present. Powder coated steel, aluminum, plexiglass, wood, canvas, futon, pillow, hand brush, and straw hat, 91.4 × 228.6 × 228.6 cm. Image: © Andrea Zittel, courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery. Photo: Lance Brewer.

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Acknowledgments Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature, like many books, stemmed from multiple beginnings. This volume emerged from the editors’ shared interest in the early modern landscape and its potential to spur the imagination of alternative worlds. While shaped by our own explorations of the earth’s changeable nature, the project was also driven by the topical question of how to engage with the early modern landscape in art history today, at a moment when human activity has irreversibly transformed our planet. Over the course of many conversations, we came to choose the category of the “unruly” to open up and distill new ways to approach a protean subject that has tended to resist uniform interpretation. Our thinking on this topic is indebted to the many colleagues and friends who contributed their knowledge and expertise over the course of this book’s gestation: Hannah Baader, Yvonne Elet, Beate Fricke, Dario Gamboni, Armin Kunz, Niklaus Largier, Raphaèle Preisinger, Jennifer Rabe, Claudia Swan, Tristan Weddigen, and Gerhard Wolf. The chapters by Christine Göttler, Ivo Raband, Michèle Seehafer, and Steffen Zierholz benefited considerably from Julia Slater’s infallible editorial eye. We feel very fortunate to have found in Amsterdam University Press an ideal venue for the book’s publication. Our very special thanks go to Erika Gaffney, Senior Commissioning Editor, Early Modern History and Art History, for her enthusiasm and encouragement, and to Allison Levy for accepting our book for publication in the series Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700. This manuscript also profited greatly from the insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers. We were honored to receive a RSA–Samuel H. Kress Publication Subvention Grant from the Renaissance Society of America that allowed the book to appear in its best form. It has been a pleasure to work with Jonathan Hoare, who copy-edited, proofread, and indexed our volume with exemplary care. And we are particularly grateful to Chantal Nicolaes, Head of Desk Editing and Production at Amsterdam University Press, for her commitment to the aesthetic appeal of the book. Our greatest thanks, however, go to our authors, whose creative interpretations made working on this project so rewarding. Rather than offer a definitive conclusion, this book is intended to foster the continued sifting of the layers of history and geological time deposited in the ever dynamic early modern landscape, and thus it closes by looking to the generative serendipity of future horizons. Bern and New York Spring 2022



Landscape, Mutability, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduction Christine Göttler 1

Abstract Taking unruliness as a central category, this introduction explores a fresh approach to early modern art centering on landscape, which is here defined in terms of modes of engagement with ever-changing nature and the mutable body of the earth. During the early modern period, unruliness was viewed as the defining condition of the natural elemental world. Proceeding from three interrelated case studies focusing on processes of extraction and material transformation, the reshaping of land through labor, religion, and art, and the overthrow of nature through God’s intervention, the early modern landscape will be presented as a mediating concept between shifting notions of nature and earth. Keywords: earth; landscape; nature; unruliness; overthrow; reform

“Art Show as Unruly Organism”: this was the tagline used by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith for her review of the Kassel documenta (13), 2012. It was accompanied by a picture of the Doing Nothing Garden created by Beijing artist Song Dong, set up in front of the baroque Orangery along the central axis of Karlsaue Park, but separated from its well-kept lawn by a ring of orange rubber tubing.2 Artists participating in the 2012 documenta were asked to engage with the sites on which their works would 1 The ideas presented in this introduction form part of the author’s ongoing work on the early modern imaginaries of landscape and nature. Special thanks go to my co-editor Mia Mochizuki for her help in bringing together the chapters of this book and to Armin Kunz for sharing ideas on the early modern landscape. A generous fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel made it possible to finalize this essay in the best possible surroundings. It is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Rosa. 2 Smith, “Art Show as Unruly Organism.” Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the documenta’s artistic director in 2012, stressed in her dedicatory statement the inclusive vision of the show and its attention to “the shapes and practices of knowing of all the animate and inanimate makers of the world”: Christov-Bakargiev, “Preface.” The title’s inverted capitalization as “dOCUMENTA (13)” was meant to underscore the show’s aim of reversing traditional hierarchies in the making of art.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_intro

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Fig. 0.1: Song Dong, Doing Nothing Garden, 2010–2012. Daily-life rubbish and building rubbish with plants and neon signs, 7 × 32.5 × 23.5 m, Kassel, dOCUMENTA (13) (shown shortly before the opening of the exhibition). Image: © Song Dong, courtesy of Pace Gallery.

be displayed. The Orangery, built for Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel (1654–1730) as a summer residence and a house for overwintering plants, was originally designed as the focal point of the newly laid-out French formal garden. Celebrated at the time for its technological innovations, it was later transformed into a landscape garden, in other words, a type of garden that attempted to conceal human labor and intervention.3 Song Dong’s Doing Nothing Garden functioned as a heterotopic space, a garden within another garden, but one that was left to grow unruly and of its own accord (Fig. 0.1). 4 The artist began the project in 2010 by sowing seeds of roughly eighty 3 Becker, “Die Geschichte der Karlsaue,” esp. 23–33; Von Buttlar, “Vom Karlsberg zur Wilhelmshöhe.” 4 dOCUMENTA (13), vol. 2, The Logbook, 194; vol. 3, The Guidebook, 306–7, no. 165. Badagliaccia, “Doing and Nothing”; Frohne, “‘Doing Nothing,’” 55–57; Jansen, “The Art of Doing Nothing in Contemporary China”; Pickartz, “‘Der Tanz war sehr frenetisch…,’” 195, 285–86; Wang, Song Dong, 228–29. Both Badagliaccia and Jansen emphasize the indebtedness of Song Dong’s art to philosophical Daoism or Chan Buddhism. See also: Guest, “The Getting of Wisdom.” On the impact of Daoism on contemporary art in China: Liu Weijian, “The Dao in Modern Chinese Art.” On Song Dong’s Doing Nothing Garden as an example of art works using plant growth: Corder, “Plant Growth as Transient or Durational Material,” 215–16; Wagner, “‘In solchen Zeiten wie diesen,’” 120.

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

different local plant species on piles of municipal waste, shaped into an undulating row of mounds. By the time the documenta opened, the garden had grown to a height of roughly 6 meters. Neon signs of Chinese characters, placed along the curve of the mound, made it into an emblematic structure with a maxim playing on the seemingly opposite notions of “doing” (zuo 做) and “not doing” (bu zuo不做): 不做白不做 (bu zuo bai bu zuo), 做了当没做 (zuo le dang mei zuo), 白做也得做 (bai zuo ye dei zuo)

Visitors unable to read Chinese had to consult the catalog to choose from a range of English translations produced by machine translation services and Song Dong’s friends. For example, Philip Tinari, the then newly appointed director of Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, translated the aphorism as follows: That which goes undone goes undone in vain, that which is done is done still in vain, that done in vain must still be done.5

Daoist paradoxical thought was expressed here in a medium that stood for urban modernity, and interpretative openness was given material form as continuous growth. In the catalog, Song Dong noted that “this ‘do’ could change to any verb,” thus emphasizing the verb’s ability to continually generate new meanings; at the end of the documenta the artist celebrated his garden’s convertibility by recycling various parts for other art works.6 Song Dong’s Doing Nothing Garden was one of three works created with plants in the immediate vicinity of the Orangery building.7 Positioned next to it were Massimo Bartolini’s Untitled (Wave), a pool of water with a wave-making machine behind a frame of barley plants,8 and Maria Loboda’s The Work Is Dedicated to an Emperor, consisting of twenty cypress trees in pots placed across Karlsaue Park in various strategic formations as if preparing for military action.9 Also nearby, but in the hidden compost area of the park, was Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled, an environment of decay and transformation, ironically subverting God’s command when he sent 5 Song Dong, “Doing Nothing.” It is a pleasure to thank Lihong Liu for her help in translating the Chinese characters and for discussing the use of Daoist traditions in contemporary Chinese art. 6 Scazzosi, “Gardens and Landscapes as ‘Open-Ended Works.’” 7 Corder, “Plant Growth as Transient or Durational Material,” 214–15. 8 Massimo Bartolini, Untitled (Wave), 1997–2012. Pool, water, electrical motor, barley, 500 × 950 × 130 cm. Kassel, dOCUMENTA (13). Pickartz, “‘Der Tanz war sehr frenetisch…,’” 195, 285. 9 Maria Loboda, The Work Is Dedicated to an Emperor, 2012. Twenty cypress trees in pots, lined up according to various battlef ield strategies. Kassel, dOCUMENTA (13). Pickartz, “‘Der Tanz war sehr frenetisch…,’” 84, 195, 285–86.

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Adam “out of the paradise of pleasure to till the earth from which he was taken” (Gen. 3:23).10 The artificial ecosystems presented in Karlsaue Park at documenta (13), with their visions of utopian and dystopian futures, serve here as a reference point to introduce a collection of essays that engage with the ways in which the unruly nature of the premodern world was imagined, interpreted, pictured, and performed.

Unruly Organisms As Kenneth Olwig and others have observed, “land” in its premodern sense primarily refers to a place as a social entity, a community, country, and territory, and the suffix “-scape” with its variants in Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Frisian, and Danish) is related to processes of shaping and creating.11 In Dutch usage, “landtschap” made its entry into the vocabulary of art around 1600; it is used by Karel van Mander who, in his Schilder-Boeck of 1604, frequently mentions “landtschappen” as a possible specialization for (Netherlandish) artists.12 Like “paesaggio” in Italian, and “paysage” in French, the Germanic variants “landscape,” “Landschaft,” and “landtschap” could refer to land shaped by human activity or a representation of that shaped land.13 This dual meaning also informs the chapters assembled in this book; landscape is explored as a site of artistic engagement with the earth and its ecologies at specific moments in history. Rather than a stable entity, landscape is considered as an intermediary or mediating space in the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the real and the imaginary, inside and outside. From the late nineteenth century onward, the suffix “-scape” has been used to form an ever-increasing number of new words, including, within the broad realm of “landscape,” “cityscape,” “cloudscape,” “dreamscape,” “dunescape,” “hellscape,” 10 Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2011–2012. Alive entities and inanimate things, made and not made. Kassel, dOCUMENTA (13). Cheetham, Landscape into Eco Art, 46–47; Fehrenbach and Krüger, “Einleitung”; Von Hantelmann, “Thinking the Arrival”; Pickartz, “‘Der Tanz war sehr frenetisch…,’” 84, 195, 285–86. See also Peter Schneemann’s contribution in this volume. Throughout the text I follow the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible, based on the Latin Vulgate: The Vulgate Bible, 16–17: “Et emisit eum Dominus Deus de paradiso voluptatis ut operaretur terra de qua sumptus est.” 11 Olwig, “The ‘Actual Landscape,’ or Actual Landscapes?”; Olwig, Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic, 16–20; Olwig, “Performing on the Landscape”; Olwig, “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape,” 630–53; Cosgrove, “Landscape and Landschaft.” See also: Liu Lihong, “Path, Place, and Pace,” 208–10. 12 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck. The first documented use of “landschaft” in an artistic context is, however, by Dürer who, in the diary of his journey to the Netherlands (1520/21), referred to Joachim Patinir (ca. 1480–1524) as “den gut Landschaftsmaler” (“the good landscape painter”): Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, 45. 13 Roger, Court traité du paysage, 22–26.

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“lunarscape,” “mountainscape,” all of them listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as relating to a specific area or scene, or a pictorial representation of it. Art historian Jonathan Hay developed the concepts of “surfacescapes,” “imagescapes,” and “bodyscapes” to emphasize that aspects of materiality, figuration, and plasticity in art works are capable of mediating across different visual cultures.14 Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai identifies “scapes” or landscapes as the chaotic flows (of people and processes, but also of images, imaginaries, and ideas) that characterize the modern world.15 Tim Ingold, for his part, foregrounds the work of the imagination in human engagement with a changing environment and its strata of past and present, real and imagined history.16 Ingold’s emphasis on the material aspects of imagining comes close to premodern views of the image-making capacity of the mind as intimately linked to memory and sensual perception.17 Over the last twenty or thirty years there has been a growing literature on the emergence of the “landscape” in sixteenth-century northern European art and the multiple links of this new visual imagery to “new” forms of knowledge such as geography, geology, cosmography, surveying, and mapping.18 In the first and second editions of his Landscape and Power (1994 and 2002), W. J. T. Mitchell opened up new ways for rethinking representations of landscapes as relational and reflective artistic practices, rather than as pictorial genres.19 Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature builds upon and further develops these approaches. But what sets this volume apart from the wealth of existing publications on the early modern landscape is its focus on “unruliness.”20 In early modern thought, change and contingency were the defining conditions of the elemental world that underwent a perpetual cycle of growth and decay.21 The “unruly” is used here as a central category 14 Hay, “The Mediating Work of Art,” 449–50; Hay, “The Worldly Eye,” 121–32. 15 Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Appadurai uses the terms “ethnoscapes,” “technoscapes,” “financescapes,” and “mediascapes.” See also: Salazar, “Scapes.” 16 Ingold, “Introduction.” 17 The classic study is: Carruthers, The Book of Memory. 18 Relevant publications with a focus on the early modern period include: Busch, Landschaftsmalerei; Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape; DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory; Enenkel and Melion, Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place; Fehrenbach, “Sfondare: Landschaft als Kraftraum”; Fleckner, Hua, and Tzeng, Memorial Landscapes; Heuer and Zorach, Ecologies, Agents, Terrains; Kasper et al., Entdeckungen der Landschaft; Kirchhoff and Trepl, Vieldeutige Natur; Mitchell, Landscape and Power; Schama, Landscape and Memory; Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape; Warnke, Politische Landschaft. 19 Mitchell, Landscape and Power. 20 For “unruliness” with regard to the materiality of scientific objects: Dacome, et al., “Unruly Objects: Material Entanglements in the Arts and Sciences.” For unruliness and the world of things: Appadurai, “The Thing Itself.” 21 The key reference from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries remained Aristotle’s Meteorology: Martin, Renaissance Meteorology, esp. 5–9 and 23–26; Dal Prete, “Climate and Meteorology”; Dal Prete, “The Ruins of the Earth.”

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to historicize and reframe the early modern landscape in terms of its engagement with the earth’s cavernous body, reinterpreted and restaged across different visual media, including paintings, prints, and performances. This introduction aims to open up a window into the dynamic semantics of the “unruly” and how this category shaped evolving views on landscape, earth, and nature up to current times. “Early modernity” is not primarily meant to designate a narrowly defined period in the history of western European art. Rather, it is offered as a heuristic phrase to express a sense of living in a transitional age, at the brink of something not quite graspable, a shared awareness associated with multiple moments in time.22 The long history and current topicality of artists’ engagement with nature is evidenced by Peter Schneemann’s contribution to this volume. In its early modern usages, the word “unruly” lent itself to multiple meanings, including severe weather conditions, the uncontrollable forces of water and fire, the wild growth of vegetation, the turbulence of war and revolution, the restlessness of animals, demons, and spirits, the uncontrolled imagination (viewed as both dangerous and ingenious), and the spirit of animated draftsmanship.23 In this volume, Victoria Sancho Lobis connects the fleeting elements of nature (such as leaves, roots, patterns of clouds, and light) with the early modern artist’s impulse to draw, while Steffen Zierholz explores randomly generated stone structures as a vehicle for the artist’s imagination. Unruliness was, moreover, frequently associated with the materials used by artists and craftsmen, including the resistance and sturdiness of certain woods, the unpredictable chemical reactions of pigments and other compounds, and the risks involved in all metallurgical operations. Premodern biographies of artists are full of accounts of how they engaged with the unpredictability of the material world. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the irregular weather patterns caused by the Little Ice Age led to fears that the heavens themselves were out of joint.24 The perils of the elemental world were not, however, exclusively manifest in weather extremes such as floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, but also in slower and more subtle changes of the earth’s composition, such as the shifting borders between water and land, indiscernible within the short span of a human life.25 As shown by Mia Mochizuki, the sense of foreboding conveyed by some of 22 See, however, for an equally broad use of the term “Renaissance”: Baker, “A Twenty-First-Century Renaissance”; Howard, “Approaching Renaissance Religions,” 17–18; Starn, “A Postmodern Renaissance.” 23 OED Online, s.v. “Unruly, adj. and n.,” accessed October 8, 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/21 7421?redirectedFrom=unruly. 24 Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age, 253–99; Goedde, “Bethlehem in the Snow and Holland on the Ice”; Pfister, “Weeping in the Snow.” 25 See the contributions by Tina Asmussen (on metals), Mia Mochizuki (on the dynamics between land, water, and air), and Steffen Zierholz (on stones) in this volume. On disasters: Passannante, Catastrophizing.

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

the Dutch landscape paintings arose from this shared awareness of the mutability of all worldly things, the flows and commotions of the elements never at rest. When Horst Bredekamp published his pioneering article “Die Erde als Lebewesen” (The Earth as Living Organism) in Kritische Berichte of 1981, scholarly interest in the early modern imaginary of the earth as an animated, living body was just beginning.26 The turn in the humanities towards the global and the material increased scholarly sensitivity to questions of cultural difference in the ways humans have interacted with their local natural environments across time and space. Recent publications on early modern attempts to harmonize the Genesis account of creation with observations of the natural world have revealed the degree to which theories about the history of the earth were shaped by religious debates. Finally, the surge in interest in the history of alchemy has led to more nuanced views regarding the early modern understanding of natural and artificial environments, as well as the arts associated with the perfecting of nature, such as agriculture and mining, that frequently feature in paintings and prints.27 Foregrounding the contingencies of natural and artificial processes, the following sections look at three case studies to probe an alternative framework for landscape, where reality and its potential for imaginings and representation intersect.

Materials of the Earth In the Judaeo-Christian framework, decay, death, and mutability entered the world with the original sin and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Edmund Spenser (1522–1599), in his “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie” added posthumously to the 1609 edition of The Faerie Queene, introduces Mutability as the rebellious daughter of Mother Earth and one of the Titans.28 Although in Spenser’s poem Mutability fails in her ambition to claim sovereignty over the heavens, her rule on earth, inherited from her mother, remains unchallenged. In contrast to the equally mutable goddess of Fortune, Mutability was rarely personified in medieval and early modern culture. Rather, mutability was understood as the invisible force affecting all matter and living beings below the moon, as evident in the cycle of 26 Bredekamp, “Die Erde als Lebewesen.” 27 On the interrelationship between religion and natural philosophy: Blair and von Greyerz, Physicotheology; Roling, Physica sacra. On the boundaries between the natural and the artificial: Bensaude-Vincent and Newman, “Introduction: The Artificial and the Natural.” On alchemy and the quest for the perfectibility of nature: Newman, Promethean Ambitions. See also: Keller, “Mining Tacitus.” 28 On Spenser’s “Mutabilitie”: Anderson, Light and Death, 32–51; Machosky, “The Personification of the Human Subject”; Miller, “Nature in the Faerie Queene.” On mutability in literature and the visual arts: Hallett, “Change, Fortune, and Time”; Lehtonen, Fortuna, Money, and the Sublunar World.

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seasons, the alternation of day and night, the ebb and flow of the waters, and the generation and corruption of metals and stones. The high demand for printed and painted series of the months and seasons speaks to an increasing interest in landscapes affected by weather and climate and shaped by agriculture over long periods of time.29 Series of the seven planetary gods occasionally also include landscapes fashioned from within by the mineral treasures that Nature had hidden away from covetous human eyes. At the turn of the seventeenth century, mountainous landscapes with stone quarries and mines became a favorite subject in the visual arts, allowing painters and printmakers to display their own compositional skills in emulation of the creative powers of the earth.30 A particularly noteworthy example is a series of the Seven Planets, drawn by Maarten de Vos (1532–1603) and engraved by Crispijn de Passe the Elder (1564–1637), which shows the planetary gods steering their airborne chariots over the regions under their influence, distinguished from each other by their resources and industries (Figs. 0.2–6).31 The frontispiece, composed by the printer and publisher Theodorus Graminaeus (1530?–1594?), who also contributed the Latin inscriptions to the prints, contextualizes the series within the well-known concept of the “golden chain,” emphasizing the mutual interdependence of all parts of the world (Fig. 0.2).32 The series’ title, “Plato’s golden chain, through which the first genera of things are bound together in mutual concord and harmonize with each other and the Archetype,” appears in the central oval space, bounded by the chain.33 As further explained at the bottom of the page, the prints revolve around “the seven planets,” introduced as part of “Plato’s golden chain,” and the impact of “their actions upon (human) bodies, animals, plants, and metals.”34 Alternately 29 Recent literature includes: Kaschek, Weltzeit und Endzeit; Melion, “Introduction: Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place.” 30 For landscapes with mining scenes: Asmussen, The Cultural and Material Worlds of Mining; Baumgartner, “Molte belle et varie fantasie”; Prosperetti, Landscape and Philosophy, 68–74; Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, 38–39; Tapié and Weemans, Fables du paysage flamand, 304–7, cat. nos. 90–92 (Michel Weemans). See also Tina Asmussen’s contribution in this volume. 31 Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, 14:273–75, cat. nos. 1373a–1379; Brakensiek, “Als Platons goldene Kette riss,” 93–96; Kaulbach and Schleier, “Der Welt Lauf,” 83–88, cat. no. 17.1–8 (Stephan Brakensiek); Veldman, “De macht van de planeten,” 21–32, 48–50. 32 Like De Passe, Graminaeus was at the time living in Cologne. For Graminaeus, see Fuchs, “Das Wüten des bösen Feindes.” 33 “Cathena aurea Platonis qua prima rerum genera in amplitudinem diffusa multuis [= mutuis] concentibus constringuntur et conveniunt adminicem [= ad invicem] et cum Arthetypo [= Archetypo].” Corrected spelling cited from Veldman, “De macht van de planeten.” Veldman offers the most detailed interpretation of Graminaeus’s title page; Crispijn de Passe was obviously not familiar with Latin and misspelled several words. 34 “Septem planetae inventi ex aurea catena Platonis, eorundemque actiones in corpora, animalia, herbas et metalla, excusi a Crispino Passaeno Zelando.” The title concludes with the widely cited saying that “the wise man will dominate the stars” (“Sapiens dominabitur astris”).

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

Fig. 0.2: Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Theodorus Graminaeus, Cathena aurea Platonis, before 1593 (title page of the series The Seven Planets). Engraving, 24.3 × 18.6 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1981–186. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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ascribed to Homer or Plato, the “golden chain” was a recurring motif in philosophy, literature, and the visual arts throughout the medieval and early modern periods.35 Cesare Ripa (ca. 1555–1622), in the first, unillustrated edition of his Iconologia of 1593, referred to it as “the junction and bond between human and divine things and the tie of humankind to its creator.”36 The writer mainly responsible for passing on the motif, and Graminaeus’s possible source, was Macrobius (ca. 385/390–after 430) who, in his commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, describes the “golden chain” as a “connection of parts,” reaching “from the supreme God down to the last dregs of things.”37 In De Passe’s print, two connecting chains linked to medallions inscribed “Luna” and “Homo,” respectively, mark the boundaries between the superlunary and sublunary spheres, and the higher and lower elementary worlds, corresponding to the old Aristotelian tradition.38 The large oval pendant linked to the “Homo” medallion and bearing the image of a mountainous landscape with people working in quarries and mines relates to the subject of the prints: like the worlds of animals and plants, the realm of “stones and metals” (“lapides et metalla”) is shaped by, but also shapes, human actions. With their planetary associations and correspondences, metals, located at the very bottom of the “golden chain” of creation, affect cultures, climates, arts, industries, bodies, and minds. The title page situates De Vos’s landscapes within the broader interest in the natural and religious history of the earth and the exploitation of its mineral resources. In the series, Venus, the goddess of love, steers her chariot over a landscape that features the mining, smelting, and further processing of copper, the metal linked with her (Fig. 0.3). The festive scene in the foreground stresses the malleable metal’s peaceful uses such as for the manufacturing of trumpets and—not shown in the print but certainly recognized by De Passe—engraving.39 Mars, the god of war associated with hard iron, is shown traveling over rocky land, where an army camp has been erected (Fig. 0.4). In the smithy in the foreground, weapons are being produced. 35 The allusion to Homer comes from Iliad 8.18–27, where Zeus boasts that while the other gods would not be able to pull him down from heaven to earth by means of a golden rope, he could easily drag all of them up to heaven. Plato refers to the passage in Theaetetus (153 C). See Auffarth, “Justice, the King, and the Gods,” 436–37. For later usages: Carroll, “Rembrandt’s Aristotle,” 48–50; Gampp, “Magia Naturalis.” 36 Ripa, Iconologia, 76: “la congiuntione, & il legamento delle cose humane con le divine, & un vincolo dell’humana generatione co’l sommo Fattore suo.” Carroll, “Rembrandt’s Aristotle,” 50. 37 Macrobius, In somnium Scipionis 1.14: “invenietur pressius intuenti a summo deo usque ad ultimam rerum faecem una mutuis se vinculis religans et nusquam interrupta connexio.” Cited from Carroll, “Rembrandt’s Aristotle,” 49. See also: Lyons, “Some Notes on the Roman de la rose”; Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 59. 38 At the time the Aristotelian division of the cosmos into a changeable sublunary and an unchanging supralunary or celestial realm had already come under attack. See Randles, The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos. 39 According to the inscription “what is made of copper confers joy” (“quod ab aere factu gaudia confert”).

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Fig. 0.3: Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Maarten de Vos, Landscape with the Chariot of Venus, ca. 1600 (from the series The Seven Planets and the Catena aurea). Engraving, 24.5 × 18.7 cm (sheet), London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1862,0712.331. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 0.4: Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Maarten de Vos, Landscape with the Chariot of Mars, before 1593 (from the series The Seven Planets and the Catena aurea). Engraving, 24.6 × 18.3 cm (sheet), Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1981–188. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

Fig. 0.5: Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Maarten de Vos, Landscape with the Chariot of Jupiter, before 1593 (from the series The Seven Planets and the Catena aurea). Engraving, 23.7 × 18.1 cm (sheet), Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1981–190. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Fig. 0.6: Crispijn de Passe the Elder after Maarten de Vos, Landscape with the Chariot of Saturn, before 1593 (from the series The Seven Planets and the Catena aurea). Engraving, 23.5 × 18 cm (sheet), Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1981–187. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

Mighty Jupiter, connected with “shiny” (“speciosa”) tin, flies over a coastal region with some spectacular ancient architecture (Fig. 0.5). In the foreground, several learned men are preoccupied with atlases, globes, and measuring instruments; in the background, a smoking furnace highlights tin’s utility for the production of everyday things. Unfriendly Saturn, finally, associated with toxic lead, moves over an inhospitable landscape permeated by fumes and swept by fire and floods (Fig. 0.6).40 Some castaways from a shipwreck are trying to reach land. A scene of witchcraft is shown next to an idolatrous ceremony surrounding a feather-crowned king. In the foreground the mining of lead ore is paralleled with a cannibalistic meal, indicating that the location depicted must be identified with the New World. De Vos’s landscapes should be understood as portraits recording the changing faces of the earth in their different shapes, expressions, and moods. Hewn from mining rather than agriculture, they affect the lives of the communities residing within the confines of their influence.41 Finally, the prints may also be viewed as ruminations about the ambiguity of metals and the metallurgical arts, associated with the Ovidian Iron Age. An early seventeenth-century album from the library of an otherwise unknown collector by the name of Jean de Poligny sheds light on the extraordinary fascination exercised by these kinds of landscapes on their period viewers (Fig. 0.7). The album includes a world chronicle written in French, starting with the Creation and going up to 1521, and several hand-colored prints by the Netherlandish engravers Johannes Sadeler I (1550–1600), Raphael Sadeler I (1560–1632), Adriaen Collaert (ca. 1560–1618), and Philips Galle (1537–1612), that showcase the whole history of mankind, from Adam’s creation to mankind’s final hours and the destruction of the earth at the Last Judgment. 42 Many of these prints depict landscapes. In addition to several 40 Already Pliny the Elder, while writing on the medical uses of lead, commented on the toxicity of the metal’s fumes: Natural History, 9:246–49 (34.49.167). 41 For the concept: Reckwitz, “Affective Spaces.” 42 Bound in parchment, the album from the library of Jean de Poligny, now in the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam, includes a Cronica cronicarum from the creation of the world up until 1521, a map by Abraham Ortelius, and about fifty hand-colored prints from various series by Johannes Sadeler I, Raphael Sadeler I, Adriaen Collaert, and Philips Galle, such as The Story of the First Men, 1583 (Johannes Sadeler I after Maarten de Vos, Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, 14:14–15, cat. nos. 25–36); Mankind before the Flood and Mankind Awaiting the Last Judgment, 1581–1585 (Johannes Sadeler I after Dirck Barendsz., De Hoop Scheffer, Aegidius Sadeler to Raphael Sadeler II, 21:124, cat. nos. 264–65); The Apostles’ Creed, 1578–1579 (Johannes Sadeler I after Maarten de Vos, Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, 14:189–90, cat. nos. 871–82); The Four Elements, ca. 1582 (Adriaen Collaert after Maarten de Vos, Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, 14:270–71, cat. nos. 1349–52), The Eight Planets, 1585 (Johannes Sadeler I after Maarten de Vos, Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, 14:275–76, nos. 1380–87); The Four Temperaments, 1583 (Raphael Sadeler I after Maarten de Vos, Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, 14:293–94, cat. nos. 1482–85); The Eight Wonders of the World, 1572 (Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck, part 2, 192–197, cat. nos. 513–20). For a detailed description of the album, see Rijksstudio (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), http://hdl.handle. net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.433820.

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Fig. 0.7: Johannes Sadeler I after Maarten de Vos, The Sun and the Moon and Their Influences on the Provinces, Regions, and Cities, 1585 (from the series Planetarum effectus et eorum in signis zodiaci). Engravings, each ca. 23.5 × 24 cm, both cut within borders; hand-colored and glued onto a sheet of parchment (53.9 × 3.5 cm), Album Jean de Poligny, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–2005–214. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

series of the four elements and the four temperaments, there is also a series of the seven planets.43 This, however, focuses not so much on the seven planets’ influence on the metals, but rather on the ways in which they shaped “provinces, regions, and communities,” a topic that, with the broad dissemination of Hippocrates’s Airs, Waters, Places, was receiving growing attention.44 In the series, Holland and Zeeland are listed among the water-dominated places under the influence of the moon. The album originally contained at least a dozen more maps and also a handcolored copy of the large-scale broadsheet Ordo universi et humanarum scientiarum prima momumenta, conceived by the physician and natural philosopher Andrea Bacci (1524–1600), who held the chair of botany at the university of Rome.45 Bacci was the author of a seminal work on the thermal baths and curative waters in Rome and several other treatises on health including on the medicinal value of unicorn horn, the panacea theriac, and the natural history of Italian vines.46 He must have used the Ordo universi as a pedagogical tool to explain to his courtly audience the various correspondences between the macrocosm, visualized as a set of concentric spheres with the earth at its center, and the microcosm, presented as a head resembling the spherical shape of the cosmos. While the original print by Natale Bonifacio (1537–1592) is extant in only one copy on vellum at the British Library, a number of later versions of this highly successful work still survive. The copy included in the Poligny album was engraved by Adriaen Huybrechts (died after 1614) and published by Gerard de Jode (1509–1591) in Antwerp in 1585 (Fig. 0.8). 47 If the engraving was indeed pasted on the first sheet of the album, as is most likely, it would have provided its owner with a guide to situate the natural world within a larger cosmological and religious framework and to help him understand the dynamics of his own life and its relationship to the history of God’s creation of the entire universe. Diagrams such as Bacci’s allowed early modern men and women to contemplate mutability 43 Johannes Sadeler I after Maarten de Vos, The Seven Planets, 1585. Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, 14:275–76, nos. 1380–87; Veldman, “De macht van de planeten,” 32–37. 44 On the growing interest in the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places from the late sixteenth-century onwards: Siraisi, “Historiae, Natural History, Roman Antiquity,” 330 (with further literature). 45 Natale Bonifacio after Andrea Bacci, Ordo universi et humanarum scientiarum prima monumenta, 1581, engraving on vellum, London, British Library, inv. no. BL, 1856.g.16.(4.). Saffrey, “L’homme-microcosme”; Berger, The Art of Philosophy, 20–21; Siegel, “Kosmos und Kopf,” 117–22; Siegel, Tabula, 23–27. 46 Siraisi, “Historiae, Natural History, Roman Antiquity.” Bacci’s publications include: De thermis […] in quo agitur de universa aquarum natura […] libri VII (1571 and subsequent editions); Discorso dell’alicorno (1582); Tabula de theriaca (1582); and De naturali vinorum historia libri VII (1596 and subsequent editions). See also: Crespi, “Bacci, Andrea.” 47 Leesberg, The De Jode Dynasty, part 3, 38–39, cat. no. 680; Saffrey, “L’homme-microcosme,” 96–97. According to Leesberg, the engraving that once belonged to the Poligny album was auctioned at Libert, Paris, in 2004 (28 V 2004). Its present whereabouts are unknown. It is a pleasure to thank Huigen Leeflang, Curator of Prints, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, as well as Marjolein Leesberg, for providing further information on this fascinating album.

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Fig. 0.8: Adriaen Huybrechts after Andrea Bacci, Ordo universi et humanarum scientiarum prima monumenta, 1585. Engraving, 60.3 × 42.7 cm, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, RES QB–201 (170, 1)–FT 4. Image: © BnF.

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

in nature as part of an all-encompassing cosmological machine linking micro- and macro-worlds with their different temporal and spatial dimensions.

“Reforming” the Landscape But where was the place of nature in these Netherlandish landscapes transformed through mining and agriculture? And how was nature imagined and portrayed at a time when the landscape, with its economic, but also spiritual potential, became a frequent theme in the visual arts? In the widely disseminated allegorical poem of the Roman de la rose, “Dame Nature” is introduced as a blacksmith hammering new creatures in her forge to replace those who had died. 48 The poem was begun by Guillaume de Lorris in the 1230s, but completed in a much expanded form by Jean de Meung in the 1270s, and it was in this version that the Roman de la rose became so widely known. Illustrations of the poem, circulated in both manuscript and print form, frequently picture the goddess as she lifts her hammer to forge new life, as exemplified by this humble woodcut in a printed edition published by Jean Croquet in Geneva around 1481 (Fig. 0.9). Interestingly, this copy of the Geneva edition, held at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, was owned by the Parisian surgeon and book collecting enthusiast François Rasse des Neux (ca. 1525–1587) who left several handwritten comments in the margins of the text. 49 Rasse was known not only for his extensive collections of manuscripts and books, but also for his natural history cabinet, particularly his collection of petrifications, visited by the ceramicist and writer Bernard Palissy (1510–1589).50 On the page with the picture of Nature as a craftswoman in her workshop, Rasse comments on her solicitousness to secure the conservation of life.51 He also marked the verses praising alchemy as the only “true art” able to approximate the workings of nature, expressing, however, his doubts about the success of alchemical transmutation.52 48 De Lorris and de Meung, Cy comme[n]ce le roma[n]t de la rose (HAB, M: Lm 4° 3d), fol. 133r: “Comment nature la subtille| Forge tousiours ou filz ou fille| Affin que lumaine lygnye| Par son deffault ne faille mie.” McWebb, “Lady Nature in Word and Image,” 67–69; Modersohn, Natura als Göttin im Mittelalter, 73–160; Morton, The “Roman de la rose” in Its Philosophical Context, 51–61; Newman, God and the Goddesses, 90–137; Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 77–82. 49 De Lorris and de Meung, Cy comme[n]ce le roma[n]t de la rose: “De la libraire de Francois Rasse des Neux Chirurgien à Paris et Ordinaire du Roy. 1546.” On François Rasse des Neux: Davis, “Beyond the Market,” 83; Greengrass, “Desserrant les nœds”; Veyrin-Forrer, “Un collectionneur engagé.” 50 Greengrass, “Desserrant les nœds,” 65. 51 De Lorris and de Meung, Cy comme[n]ce le roma[n]t de la rose, fol. 133r, handwritten note by François Rasse: “Ici il commence à entrer en matiere discours comme la nature est soigneuse de la conservation de ce tout.” 52 De Lorris and de Meung, Cy comme[n]ce le roma[n]t de la rose, fol. 134v. The best translation and analysis of the verses related to alchemy is by Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 79–81. Rasse comments

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Fig. 0.9: Nature in Her Workshop, in Cy comme[n]ce le roma[n]t de la rose. Ou tout lart damours est enclose (Geneva: Jean Croquet, ca. 1481), fol. 133r. Colored woodcut, 6.7 × 5.9 cm, with commentary by François Rasse des Neux, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. M: Lm 4° 3d. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

Rasse’s comments in his copy of the Roman de la rose reveal a familiarity with alchemical thought and an interest in the workings of the natural world, shared with many contemporaries, including his acquaintance Palissy.53 At the turn of the seventeenth century, the relationship of art to nature became a central topic in both alchemical writing and the literature on art. Michael Maier (1568–1622), in the commentary on emblem two “Nutrix eius terra est” (“His Nurse Is the Earth”) of his Atalanta fugiens, insists that artificial creation in the glass vessel of the alchemist is no different from natural creation in the womb of a woman or the womb of the earth.54 Art cooperates with nature, rather than overthrowing it: “Art and Nature take each other by the hand, so that each may stand in for the other; nonetheless Nature remains the mistress, and Art the maidservant.”55 The “pictura” of emblem two shows Earth with her body in the form of a globe, suckling the philosopher’s child “with the wonderful juice” contained within her; the motifs of the she-goat nursing Jupiter and the she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus highlight the powerful effects of this juice provided by Earth herself (Fig. 0.10).56 Hendrick Goltzius’s (1558–1617) figure of generative Nature in his chiaroscuro woodcut Demogorgon in the Cave of Eternity reverberates with alchemical imagery reminiscent of the Roman de la rose (Fig. 0.11).57 Nature is shown enclosed in a transparent bubble and holding a giant syringe by which she propels plants and animals into the world. Like the hammer, the syringe stands for sexual potency; the multiple breasts associate her with the Ephesian Diana, stressing Nature’s fertility and procreative power.58 Nature’s unruly productivity is contrasted to the measured activity of the bearded man in the foreground who, with his gaze turned to the starry sky, notes down the harmonious movements of the superlunary bodies on a stone on the margin of the page: “Il tient l’operation de l’alchimie pour veritable.” 53 Shell, “Casting Life, Recasting Experience.” See also: Dupré, “Artists and the Philosophers’ Stone”; Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 145–63. 54 Maier, Atalanta fugiens, 19: “Vas quidem artificiale est sed in hoc differentia non committitur, sive nidus ab ipsa gallina f iat, sive a rustica incerto quodam loco (ut solet) ordinetur, eadem erit ovorum generatio et ex illis pullorum exclusio. Calor est res naturalis, sive ab igne temperato veniat furnorum et simi putredinis, vel sole et aere, vel matris visceribus, aut aliunde.” Jong, Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, 65: “The retort is artificial, it is true, but it makes no difference whether a nest is made by the hen or by the farmer, for the coming into being of the egg will be the same. Warmth is a natural force, regardless of whether it emanates from the moderate fire of furnaces, from putrid manure, from sunlight, from the mother’s body or from another source.” 55 Maier, Atalanta fugiens, 19: “Ars itaque et natura mutuas sibi manus conferunt, ita ut haec illius vicaria fiat et illa huius: Nihilominus natura manet domina et ars ancilla.” Jong, Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, 64–65. 56 Maier, Atalanta fugiens, 19: “[…] in hoc admirando succo terrestri contingit.” Jong, Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, 65; Bredekamp, “Die Erde als Lebewesen,” 12–13; Laube, “Die Alchemie,” 180–81. 57 Pollack and Vitali, Crossing Parallels, 165–67, cat. no. 58 (Christine Göttler). 58 Goesch, Diana Ephesia. See also: Wenderholm, “Personifikationen der Natur.”

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Fig. 0.10: Matthäus Merian the Elder, “His Nurse Is the Earth,” in Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim: Hieronymus Galler and Johann Theodor de Bry, 1618), 17. Engraving, 9.3 × 10.1 cm, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. A:196 Quod. (1). Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

Fig. 0.11: Hendrick Goltzius, Demogorgon in the Cave of Eternity (first print of the series of Demogorgon and the Deities), ca. 1586–1590. Chiaroscuro woodcut from one line block and two tone blocks in tan and dark grey, 35 × 26.3 cm, Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. no. VII.31.183. Image: © Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg.

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slab.59 But Goltzius’s woodcut also indicates a shift in the imagery of Nature. From the sixteenth century onwards, Nature was no longer represented as an artisan or craftswoman, but rather as a wet-nurse feeding the whole of the material world. The Florentine alchemist and glassmaker Antonio Neri’s 1599 manuscript Il tesoro del mondo includes a particularly striking image of the regenerative dynamics of Nature, showing her as a heavenly goddess surrounded by clouds, pouring streams of milk from her swollen breasts over metals, thus nourishing their subterranean growth (Fig. 0.12).60 A 1572 series engraved by Philips Galle (1537–1612) after Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) further complicates the dynamics between art, labor, and nature, and between creative and procreative work (Fig. 0.13). Of particular interest in the context of this book is the f irst print, which depicts a curious encounter between the large figure of multi-breasted Nature and a giant celestial sphere with tools, instruments, and objects attached to its surface, as if held by magnetic force, symbolic of the universe of labor.61 A landscape of cattle grazing by a large body of water, with a town visible in the distance, serves as the stage for the scene. The role of Nature, identified as the Ovidian “renewer of all things” and shown nursing a human child, is further detailed in the Latin hexameters below the picture. Expanding on Job 5:7, “Man is born to toil, and the bird to fly,” the caption states that “like the bird that with its song drives its fledged brood out of the nest […] so Nature […] gently leads mankind from the soft cradle of the mother’s womb to labor and hard toil.”62 The relationship between nature and art is therefore recast by emphasizing mankind’s power to shape the earth and make it more useful for human needs.63 Labor, the punishment God placed on mankind as a result of Adam’s sin, is here framed as a means of redemption and the expiation of sins. 59 The f igure of the bearded man combines the features of Boccaccio’s Demogorgon with those of Claudian’s “venerable old man” in his fiction of the “Cave of Eternity” in De consulate Stilichonis: Pollack and Vitali, Crossing Parallels, 165–67, cat. no. 58 (Christine Göttler). 60 Engle, “Depicting Alchemy.” On Antonio Neri: Boer and Engle, “Antonio Neri”; Dupré, “Making Materials.” For a related imagery of the growth of metals and minerals, see also Tina Asmussen’s contribution in this volume. 61 The sphere is spanned by the band of the zodiac with the earth at its center. Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck, part 2, 181–85, nos. 501–6; Sellink and Leesberg, Philips Galle, part 2, 257–65, nos. 303–8; Bartsch, “Bildbesprechung: Maarten van Heemskerck”; Kaulbach and Schleier, “Der Welt Lauf,” 59–62, cat. no. 11.1–5 (Hans-Martin Kaulbach); Veldman, “Images of Labor and Diligence”; Veldman, “Representations of Labor and Diligence.” Still foundational: Kemp, “Natura,” 148–49. 62 “Ales ut a primis producit in aera nidis| Iam iam plumantes certo modulamine foetus,| Hortaturque sequi, brevibusque insurgere pennis;| Sic genus humanum rerum Natura novatrix| Mollibus e cunis, gravidaq[ue] parentis ab aluo,| Ducit ad aerumnas, et duros cauta labores.” Ovid calls “natura” “rerum novatrix” in Metamorphoses 15.252. 63 See also: Bredekamp, “Observations on the Natural History of the Web.”

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

Fig. 0.12: Nature Nurturing the Growth of Metals, in Antonio Neri, Il tesoro del mondo (The Treasure of the World), fol. 2r. Pen and watercolor, 17 × 11 cm, Glasgow, University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections, MS Ferguson 67. Image: © University of Glasgow.

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Fig. 0.13: Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, Man Born to Toil, 1572. Part of an album with prints by Maarten van Heemskerck and other artists, fol. 202r. Engraving, 20.9 × 24.8 cm (plate); 26.3 × 34.3 cm (sheet). Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1988–297–202. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The early modern landscape was an area where the natural and the artificial converged, and man-made structures mingled with natural surroundings. Land­ scapes were understood as multifaceted articulations of God’s creation; corrupted through Adam’s sin, they could be restored to their original condition through human labor and art. The destruction caused by wars and natural calamities called for a reshaping or “reformation of the landscape,” to use Alexandra Walsham’s happy expression in her book on the history of the British Isles.64 But restoring the countryside was also a principal concern of Catholic reform.65 Ivo Raband has shown that the 1594 Antwerp spectacle in honor of Archduke Ernest of Austria, 64 Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape. 65 Johnson, “Gardening for God”; Walsham, “Holywell.”

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

the new Spanish governor-general, deployed a Virgilian Golden Age imagery of natural abundance to link the renewal of (Catholic) religion to the renewal of the landscape. The inclusion of a tableau vivant with Agriculture seated in the middle and flanked by Nature (with bare arms and breasts) and Annus (representing the seasonal cycle), was meant to remind the new governor-general of the city’s hope that he would return peace to the country so that the soil could be cultivated again. The fact that the city council also presented the archduke with Pieter Bruegel’s Seasons underscores the urgency of rural renewal. But the gift of landscape paintings by an artist who was himself identified with Nature also points to the relationship between the art of agriculture and that of painting, a connection described by Don Felipe de Guevara (ca. 1500–ca. 1563) in the dedication of his 1563 Comentario de la pintura y pintores antiguos (Commentary on Painting and Painters) to the archduke’s uncle, King Philip II of Spain (1527–1598).66 According to De Guevara, the arts of both agriculture and painting restore the body and the mind; both relate to the variety of nature, while at the same time bringing order into it. There has as yet been little research conducted into the interrelationship between painterly and agricultural practices as processes meant to restore order into either the pictorial or the natural worlds.67 A case in point is the retirement seat built by Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria (1548–1626) at Schleissheim (near Munich) after his forced abdication in 1597.68 The project transformed what had been a traditional hunting ground into a “sacred landscape” with a manor house, a large agricultural estate, several chapels and hermitages, a glasshouse, and an alchemical laboratory, where experiments in the transmutation of metals were apparently conducted. At the center of the complex was the chapel dedicated to the duke’s patron saint, St. William of Malavalle (died 1157), who after his conversion had settled in a wasteland (“mala valle”) near Grosseto to establish a hermit community. The chapel’s altarpiece, created by the duke’s favorite painter Peter Candid (ca. 1548–1628) around 1600, is an atmospheric depiction of the stony, barren landscape that St. William set out to reform and make fruitful, with a sunlit sky in the background and a great cloud in the foreground, where the Virgin is seated with her Son descending from the heavenly realm in dazzling light (Fig. 0.14). The reshaping of landscape gestured toward the concurrent societal trends of conversion, renewal, and reform. 66 De Guevara, Comentarios de la pintura, 5–6; Giménez-Berger, “Ethics and Economies of Art in Renaissance Spain,” 10. For Abraham Ortelius’s praise of Pieter Bruegel as “nature among painters” (“naturam pictorum”): Meganck, Erudite Eyes, 223. 67 A notable exception is: Leonhard, The Fertile Ground of Painting, esp. 13–22. 68 Göttler, “‘Sacred Woods’: Performing Solitude at the Court of Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria.”

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Fig. 0.14: Peter Candid, Vision of St. William of Malavalle, ca. 1600 (from the Chapel of St. William at Schleissheim). Oil on canvas, 306.5 × 174.5 cm, Munich, Bayerische Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen, Nymphenburg, Marstalldepot, inv. no. SAS–G–0001. Image: © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung.

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

Fig. 0.15: Johannes Sadeler I after Dirck Barendsz., Mankind Awaiting the Last Judgement (“Ita erit et adventus filii hominis”), 1581–1583. Engraving, 35 × 44.2 cm (cut within border), hand-colored in blue, green, red, and brown, glued onto a sheet of parchment (53.9 × 38 cm) in an album from the library of Jean de Poligny, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–2005–214–3. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Overthrowing Nature But what about the floods, fires, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions that disrupted the cycle of the seasons, provoking fears that a cosmic catastrophe would soon bring the world to an end? Debates about the age of the earth prompted speculations about its transformation during the Flood and its future fiery destruction.69 The universal deluge at the time of Noah and the final conflagration at the end of times were often discussed in relation to each other, and depictions of these two supernatural events were frequently paired.70 The very first prints pasted by Jean de Poligny into his album, after the maps and the Ordo universi, were two engravings by Johannes Sadeler I after Dirck Barendsz.: each of these compositions include 69 Barnett, After the Flood, 20–23; Dal Prete, “‘Being the World Eternal.’” 70 Barnett, After the Flood, 129–59, esp. 152–59; Barnett rightly observes that in the eighteenth century the Flood was discussed independently from the Apocalypse.

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a banquet scene, while in the background, unnoticed by the people enjoying the festivities, the disaster of the Great Flood and the apocalyptic event of the Last Judgment are already unfurling (Fig. 0.15).71 As was the case with the 1618 landslide that buried the flourishing mining town of Plurs (near Chiavenna, Italy) and all its inhabitants under thick layers of rubble, natural disasters were often interpreted as divine punishments for mankind’s sins.72 The wasteland left after this catastrophic event was compared to the ashen wilderness into which the once fertile valley of Sodom had turned after the city had been consumed by fire (Gen. 19:24–25). Sodom’s annihilation through a rain of “brimstone and fire” was undoubtedly the most frequently depicted catastrophe in early modern Netherlandish art (Figs. 0.16 and 0.17).73 Only Lot and his family were spared. Lot’s wife, however, because she disobeyed God’s instructions not to look behind her, was “turned into a statue of salt” (Gen. 19:26).74 The Latin Vulgate uses the verb “subvertere” to describe the divine act of destruction, rendered in vernacular versions of the Bible as either “destroy” (Douay-Rheims Bible), or as “overthrow” (King James Bible).75 “Overthrow,” in particular, captures the meaning of the event as a miraculous inversion of the natural order; commentators describe how the 71 Johannes Sadeler I after Dirck Barendsz., Mankind before the Flood and Mankind Awaiting the Last Judgment, 1581–1585. De Hoop Scheffer, Aegidius Sadeler to Raphael Sadeler II, 21:124, cat. nos. 264–65. See note 42, above. 72 See Suzanne Karr Schmidt’s contribution in this volume. 73 To punish the sins of the inhabitants, God, in the dead of the night, when everybody was asleep, “rained […] brimstone and fire” in order to destroy “these cities and all the country about, all the inhabitants of the cities, and all things that spring from the earth.” The Vulgate Bible, 86–87 (Gen. 19:24–25): “Igitur Dominus pluit super Sodomam et Gomorram sulphur et ignem a Domino de caelo. Et subvertit civitates has, et omnem circa regionem, universos habitatores urbium, et cuncta terrae virentia.” 74 The Vulgate Bible, 86–87 (Gen. 19:26): “Respiciensque uxor eius post se versa est in statuam salis.” 75 The Vulgate Bible, 86–87 (Gen. 19:25): “Et subvertit civitates has.” “And he destroyed these cities.” The Vulgate Bible, 88–89 (Gen. 19:29): “Cum enim subverteret Deus civitates regionis illius, recordatus Abrahae et liberavit Loth de subversione urbium in quibus habitaverat.” “Now when God destroyed the cities of that country, remembering Abraham he delivered Lot out of the destruction of the cities wherein he had dwelt.” The King James Study Bible, 41 (Gen. 19:25): “And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” The King James Study Bible, 41 (Gen. 19:29): “And it came to pass, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, that God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in the which Lot dwelt.” Luther, Biblia Deudsch (“Das Erste Buch Mose,” 19) translates “subvertere” as “umkehren”: “Da lies der Herr schwebel und fewr regenen von dem Herrn von himel erab/ auff Sodom und Gomorra/ und keret die stedte umb/ die gantze gegend/ und alle einwoner der stedte/ und was auff dem land gewachsen war/ Und sein weib sahe hindersich/ und ward zur saltz seule.” The Septuagint uses the ancient Greek word καταστροφή (katastrophē), made up of the preposition κατά (kata), “down, downward,” and the verb στρέφειν (strephein), a “turning,” thus meaning an “overthrow,” “ruin,” or “downward turn,” which was, however, not taken up in the Latin Vulgate, the King James version, or Luther’s German translation of the Bible. See Briese and Günther, “Katastrophe,” 167–68; Meier, “Zur Terminologie der (Natur-)Katastrophe.”

L andscape, Mutabilit y, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduc tion 

Fig. 0.16: Herri met de Bles (circle of), Landscape with Lot and His Daughters in Front of the Burning Sodom, sixteenth century. Oil on panel, 33.2 × 45.2 cm, Warsaw, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, inv. no. M.Ob.600 MNW. Image: © Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie / Piotr Ligier.

miraculous rain resulted in an overturning of the earth’s crust that transformed “the paradise of the Lord” (Gen. 13:10) into a smoldering wasteland. In the visual arts, the material alterations accompanying the disaster—the liquification of fire, the turning of Lot’s wife’s body into salt, and the distortion of the earth’s surface—tell their own stories. Netherlandish landscape painters represented the burning cities as a hell on earth and dystopian counter-image to the Garden of Eden. With their intense, luminous colors the frequently small paintings were intended to spark the desires of potential buyers in the exceedingly competitive art market. Dante, in the Divine Comedy, identif ied the color of the f ire of hell and of Satan as vermilion, a pigment that was prepared from mercury and sulfur, in other words the same components found in the biblical descriptions of the fire of hell and the rain that fell on Sodom.76 The Netherlandish painter-alchemist, by using vermilion, realgar, and orpiment—mercuric and 76 Klettke, “Feuer und Flamme,” 9–10.

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Fig. 0.17: Herri met de Bles (or workshop of), Landscape with Lot and His Daughters, second third of the sixteenth century. Oil on panel, 26 × 40 cm, Namur, TreM.a, Musée des arts anciens, inv. no. 245C. Image: © Coll. Province de Namur / G. Focant.

arsenic sulfides—to produce the effects of light and shade in the fiery material that rained down on the sinful cities, was in a certain way repeating the work of God as the “master alchemist” of the universe who poured punishment down on the once fertile land. A small painting created in the circle of Herri met de Bles (active ca. 1533–ca. 1566) showing Lot’s daughters seducing their father is an example of such alchemy of painting (Fig. 0.16).77 It situates the scene in a kind of pleasure garden with rare animals, among them a unicorn; in the background a vivid red rain of fire, most probably created with vermilion, is falling on the cities. The story inspired Herri met de Bles to produce a range of new pictorial inventions. One of his paintings, now in Namur, centers on the “dead sea” into which the area was gradually transformed after the fire had died (Fig. 0.17).78 In the background, the fire is still burning and has spread to one of the ships at anchor there. The dark cave at the front left serves 77 On the painting’s possible attribution to Herri met de Bles: Friedländer, Pieter Bruegel und Nachtrag zu früheren Bänden, 131. 78 Tapié and Weemans, Fables du paysage flamand, 198–99, cat. no. 37 (Jacques Toussaint); Weemans, Herri met de Bles, 288–91.

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as a dwelling place for Lot and his two daughters. A similar cave can be seen on the island on the right, right next to a church, and appears to be crowned by an idol on a high pedestal. Michel Weemans has drawn attention to the skull-like shapes of the caves, which emphasize the barrenness of the area. At the same time, stone, water, and air appear curiously full of life, as if these elements are competing with the fourth one, fire, which Van Mander associated with the artist’s mind. Also in the picture is the little owl with which Herri used to sign his works.79 The owl is sitting on the smaller cliff rising out of the water just below the burning ship. Looking out of the picture toward the viewer, it functions as a counter figure to the immovable pillar of Lot’s wife shown in the middle of the road not far from the city gate. The devastation, or “overthrow,” of the biblical “cities of the plain” haunted the minds and imaginations of early modern men and women and challenged theologians, natural philosophers, and artists to think more deeply about the destructive forces of art and nature. For Netherlandish painters experimenting in the still new genre of landscape, the fiery disaster provided an opportunity to stage their skills in the alchemy of paints, to reconsider their own identities in relation to other experts in material processes, and to create a successful and attractive work for the still new space of the gallery, or constkamer, a space that, incidentally, was itself starting to feature as the subject of paintings.80 This brings us back to some of the central objectives of the volume: to explore the ways in which early modern artists imagined landscape in its shifting relationship to nature, the material world, and the dynamics of their craftsmanship and art. Landscape as a new kind of specialization for artists emerged at a time of growing interest in subtle natural phenomena such as light, clouds, rain, and reflections, and at a moment when the seemingly “lowest” elements in the chain of being—metal and stone—were receiving increased attention, not least for the knowledge they conveyed about geological time and the antediluvian history of the earth. This volume does not aim to give a comprehensive account of the history of a new genre, which in western European art has been traditionally associated with the Netherlands. Rather, its individual chapters shed light on the broad range of early modern artists’ approaches to landscape, when knowledge about the earth was itself in a process of transformation and there was not one, but a multiplicity of landscapes, natures, and cosmologies. It is my hope that this book might initiate further thoughts about the early modern landscape, including its implications for 79 Weemans, Herri met de Bles, 288–91. On the motif of the owl persecuted by other birds: Vandenbroeck, “Bubo significans.” 80 Foundational contributions to the rich literature on depicted collection spaces (constkamers) include: Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp, 177–89; Marr, “The Flemish ‘Pictures of Collections’ Genre”; Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, 123–27.

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a global art history and its reverberations in contemporary art. The utopian and dystopian ecospheres laid over Karlsaue Park at documenta (13) suggest an art form that is realized by laying layer over layer, privileging composition over invention. Song Dong’s Doing Nothing Garden, begun by the artist, but then grown by nature (aided by fertilizer from local waste), finds its early modern precedents in notions of art as operating in tandem with nature and in the range of constkamer objects wrought by both nature and art.81

Picturing the Unruly Landscape The authors of this book explore “unruliness” in landscape from various perspectives, through various media, and within different time frames and cultural contexts. Its four parts are reflected in the sections of this introduction, which are intended as further deliberations on the theme. Part One, “Latent Landscapes,” addresses how the experience of “unruliness” in ecologies and landscapes served as a foundation for renegotiating representation. Risk in the interplay of aesthetic practice and visual judgment is at the core of Mia Mochizuki’s chapter that ascribes the “terraqueous” quality of the Dutch landscape, with its conspicuously low horizon, to a new awareness of the interactions between water and land. She shows how the use of maps, astrolabes, globes, and other navigational aids challenged established visual and representational conventions and brought together the “scapes” of land, sea, and clouds to create a visual ecosystem that combined earth, water, and air. Victoria Sancho Lobis demonstrates that many of the landscape drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and contemporaneous artists were crafted from prints rather than drawn from nature. Their unruly elements revealed the artists’ ambition to capture the inner workings of nature through a virtuoso performance in pen and ink. Karin Leonhard elaborates on the beginnings of an English theory of landscape based on the Aristotelian distinction between “particulars,” objects perceivable by the senses, and “universals,” objects accessible only through the intellect. Early theorists recognized the ability of the imagination to complete the landscape by bringing distant objects into focus; in a tradition reaching back to Lomazzo and Leonardo, draperies molded to the body of their wearers by the wind were believed to evoke the folds of a landscape, thereby reinforcing the notion of an animated, unruly earth. Part Two, “Elemental Resources,” tracks how engagement with the earth’s materials obscured distinctions between the natural and the artificial. Romita Ray, in her chapter on indigo plantations in colonial South Asia, points to the seminal impact 81 See most recently: Göttler, “Tales of Transformation”; Göttler, “Vulcan’s Forge.”

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exerted by globalization on local landscapes. She asks how natural environments were recreated as controlled plantation spaces, which were then advertised in engravings, photographs, and dioramas. While the laborious extraction of natural indigo was later replaced by synthetic production, the most beautiful and costly indigo continued to be sourced from wild plants. Metamorphosis as petrification is examined by Steffen Zierholz, who uses the example of a painting on stone depicting the transformation of Atlas into a mountain to trace how mythological representations conveyed knowledge about the world of stones to which they themselves belonged. The early modern artist was construed as a natural philosopher endowed with insight into the secrets of nature, itself mediated in the space where these works were displayed. Tina Asmussen investigates sites of extraction as emotionally and ecologically charged “resource landscapes,” carrying both the promise of prosperity and the threat of failure and loss. Drawing on a selection of textual and visual sources, she reveals how cosmological and religious beliefs framed metals as alternative fruits of the earth that could potentially satisfy both material desires and spiritual needs. Part Three, “Staged Topographies,” looks at the mutual interdependence between nature and cultivation to explore how the interest in a generative natural world shaped artists’ experimentation with media and materials. Ivo Raband, in his analysis of the Stage of Agriculture for the triumphal entry of Archduke Ernest of Austria in 1594, shows how in response to the ongoing war, a Virgilian Golden Age imagery was deployed to remind the new Spanish governor of the urgency of agricultural renewal. The fact that Agricultura was flanked on the stage by Natura and Annus further emphasized the city’s desire to return to a timeless golden era with nature restored. That landscape paintings often produce their effects in larger configurations, rather than as individual pieces, is amply documented by Michèle Seehafer in her chapter on Christian IV’s Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen. The ninety-five landscapes inserted into the oak paneled walls of the Winter Room of the Danish king’s beloved residence recall the experience of nature through their sensuous and material associations as sovereign territory, a resource for sustenance, and a pleasurable heterotopic site. For Michel Weemans, the graphic works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder exemplify the fluid boundaries between natural images and images generated in an artist’s fruitful mind. The widespread fascination with images in the process of becoming, such as those created by the erosive effects of wind and water on rock, underscored the drama of nature in its cycle of change. Part Four, “Fragile Ecologies,” explores how easily the delicate balancing act between art and nature, or technology and the environment, could be upended. Suzanne Karr Schmidt presents broadsheets with liftable flaps that spread the news of the 1618 landslide at the mining town of Plurs. She argues that the medium created

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a new disaster imaginary that allowed readers to reenact and experience emotionally the catastrophe staged in the language of divine vengeance in the accompanying texts. Nor was the destruction of nature limited to the early modern world. In a timely epilogue, Peter Schneemann reveals the degree to which contemporary artists use the landscape as a surface on which to project their own ecocritical modes of engagement with nature and the earth, one where earlier art forms were imagined, enacted, and performed. Like its precedent in the early modern period, the contemporary landscape has emerged as a testing ground and as a site where paradisiacal, antediluvian, and apocalyptic scenarios continue to play out. Landscape’s unruly predicament, pioneered during the turbulent times of early modernity, may provide a lens for understanding its frail nature today.

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Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Lyons, Faith. “Some Notes on the Roman de la rose: The Golden Chain and Other Topics in Jean de Meun.” In Studies in Medieval Literature and Languages in Memory of Frederick Whitehead, edited by William Rothwell, William Raymond Johnston Barron, David Blamires, and Lewis Thorpe, 201–8. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973. Machosky, Brenda. “The Personification of the Human Subject in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.” In Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion, edited by Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers, 121–39. Intersections 41. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Maier, Michael. Atalanta fugiens, hoc est, emblemata nova de secretis naturae chymica. Oppenheim: Hieronymus Galler, Johann Theodor de Bry, 1618. Mander, Karel van. Het Schilder-Boeck. Haarlem: Paschier van Wesbusch, 1604. Marr, Alexander. “The Flemish ‘Pictures of Collections’ Genre: An Overview.” Intellectual History Review 20 (2010): 5–25. Martin, Craig. Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. McWebb, Christine. “Lady Nature in World and Image in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose.” Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures 6, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 67–89. Meganck, Tine Luk. Erudite Eyes: Friendship, Art and Erudition in the Network of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598). Leiden: Brill, 2017. Meier, Mischa. “Zur Terminologie der (Natur-)Katastrophe in der griechischen Historiographie: Einige einleitende Anmerkungen.” Historical Social Research 32, no. 2 (2007): 44–56. Melion, Walter S. “Introduction: Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500–1700.” In Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500–1700, edited by Karl A. E. Enenkel and Walter S. Melion, 3–22. Intersections 75. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Miller, Milton. “Nature in the Faerie Queene.” English Literary History (ELH) 18, no. 3 (1951): 191–200. Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. Landscape and Power. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Modersohn, Mechthild. Natura als Göttin im Mittelalter: Ikonographische Studien zu Darstellungen der personifizierten Natur. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997. Morton, Jonathan. The “Roman de la rose” in Its Philosophical Context: Art, Nature, and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Newman, Barbara. God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Newman, William R. Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. OED Online. September 2021. Oxford University Press. https:/www.oed.com. Olwig, Kenneth Robert. “The ‘Actual Landscape,’ or Actual Landscapes?” In Landscape Theory, edited by Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins, 158–77. New York: Routledge, 2008.

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Olwig, Kenneth Robert. Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Olwig, Kenneth Robert. “Performing on the Landscape versus Doing Landscape: Perambulatory Practice, Sight and the Sense of Belonging.” In Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, edited by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, 81–92. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Olwig, Kenneth Robert. “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86, no. 4 (1996): 630–53. Passannante, Gerard Paul. Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pfister, Christian. “Weeping in the Snow: The Second Period of Little Ice Age-Type Impacts, 1570–1630.” In Cultural Consequences of the “Little Ice Age,” edited by Wolfgang Behringer, Hartmut Lehmann, and Christian Pfister, 31–86. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. Pickartz, Tim. “‘Der Tanz war sehr frenetisch…’: Kuratorische Praxis, Kunstvermittlung und Vermittlungskunst auf der dOCUMENTA (13).” Bielefeld: transcript, 2019. Pliny. Natural History in Ten Volumes. Vol. 9: Books 33–35. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Pollack, Susanne, and Samuel Vitali, eds. Crossing Parallels: Agostino Carracci, Hendrick Goltzius. Exhibition catalog, Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2021. Prosperetti, Leopoldine. Landscape and Philosophy in the Art of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625). Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Randles, W. G. L. The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos, 1500–1760: From Solid Heavens to Boundless Æther. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Reckwitz, Andreas. “Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook.” Rethinking History 16, no. 2 (June 2012): 241–58. Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia overo descrittione dell’imagini universali cavate dall’antichità et da altri luoghi. Rome: Heirs of Gio[vanni] Gigliotti, 1593. Roger, Alain. Court traité du paysage. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Roling, Bernd. Physica sacra: Wunder, Naturwissenschaft und historischer Schriftsinn zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Saffrey, Henri-Dominique. “L’homme-microcosme dans une estampe médico-philosophique du seizième siècle.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 89–122. Salazar, Noel B. “Scapes.” In Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, edited by R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms, 753–54. Los Angeles: Sage, 2013. Scazzosi, Lionella. “Gardens and Landscapes as ‘Open-Ended Works’ between Continuity and Transformation: Notes on the Role of Historical Studies.” In Clio in the Italian Garden: Twenty-First-Century Studies in Historical Methods and Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Mirka Beneš and Michael G. Lee, 169–83. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2011.

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Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Schuckman, Christiaan. Maarten de Vos. Edited by Dieuwke de Hoop Scheffer. 3 vols. Hollstein’s Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450–1700, 14–16. Rotterdam: Sound & Vision, 1996. Sellink, Manfred, and Marjolein Leesberg. Philips Galle. Edited by Manfred Sellink. 4 parts. The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450–1700. Rotterdam: Sound & Vision, 2001. Shell, Hanna Rose. “Casting Life, Recasting Experience: Bernard Palissy’s Occupation between Maker and Nature.” Configurations 12 (2004): 1–40. Siegel, Steffen. “Kosmos und Kopf: Die Sichtbarkeit des Weltbildes.” In Die Welt als Bild: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur Visualität von Weltbildern, edited by Christoph Johannes Markschies and Johannes Zachhuber, 113–42. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Siegel, Steffen. Tabula: Figuren der Ordnung um 1600. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009. Silver, Larry. Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Siraisi, Nancy G. “Historiae, Natural History, Roman Antiquity, and Some Roman Physicians.” In Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, edited by Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi, 325–54. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. Smith, Roberta. “Art Show as Unruly Organism.” Art Review, The New York Times, June 14, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/arts/design/documenta-13-in-kassel-germany. html. Song Dong. “Doing Nothing.” In dOCUMENTA (13). Vol. 1, The Book of Books, 534–39, no. 084 (“The Experiment / Rehearsal: 100 Notes—100 Thoughts”). Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Starn, Randolph. “A Postmodern Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 1–24. Stoichita, Victor I. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early-Modern Meta-Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Tapié, Alain, and Michel Weemans. Fables du paysage flamand: Bosch, Bles, Brueghel, Bril. Exhibition catalog. Paris: Somogy, 2012. Vandenbroeck, Paul. “Bubo significans: Die Eule als Sinnbild von Schlechtigkeit und Torheit, vor allem in der niederländischen und deutschen Bilddarstellung und bei Jheronimus Bosch.” Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1985: 19–135. Veldman, Ilja M. “Images of Labor and Diligence in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Prints: The Work Ethic Rooted in Civic Morality or Protestantism?” Simiolus 21, no. 4 (1992): 227–64. Veldman, Ilja M. Maarten van Heemskerck. Edited by Ger Luijten, 2 parts. The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450–1700. Roosendaal: Koninklijke Van Poll, 1994. Veldman, Ilja M. “De macht van de planeten over het mensdom in prenten naar Maarten de Vos.” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 31, no. 1 (1983): 21–53.

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Veldman, Ilja M. “Representations of Labor and Diligence in Late-Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Art: The Secularization of the Work Ethic.” In The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Adele Seeff, 123–40. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Veyrin-Forrer, Jeanne. “Un collectionneur engagé: François Rasse des Neux, chirurgien parisien.” In Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, La lettre et le texte: Trente années de recherches sur l’histoire du livre, 423–77. Paris: École normale supérieure de Jeunes Filles, 1987. The Vulgate Bible: Douay-Rheims Translation. Edited by Swift Edgar. Vol. 1, The Pentateuch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Wagner, Monika. “‘In solchen Zeiten wie diesen, sind die Gärtner die einzigen, die echten Künstler.’” In Der achte Tag. Naturbilder in der Kunst des 21. Jahrhunderts, edited by Frank Fehrenbach and Matthias Krüger, 109–25. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Walsham, Alexandra. “Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Post-Reformation Wales.” In Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, edited by Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, 211–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Walsham, Alexandra. The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Wang, Sabine, ed. Song Dong. Exhibition catalog. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2015. Warnke, Martin. Politische Landschaft: Zur Kunstgeschichte der Natur. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1992. Weemans, Michel. Herri met de Bles: Les ruses du paysage au temps de Bruegel et d’Érasme. Paris: Hazan, 2013. Wenderholm, Iris. “Personifikation der Natur.” In Mutter Erde: Vorstellungen von Natur und Weiblichkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Maurice Saß and Iris Wenderholm, 49–103. Exhibition catalog. Petersberg: Michael Imhhof Verlag, 2017. Wood, Christopher S. Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. London: Reaktion Books, 1993.

About the Author Christine Göttler, Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Bern, specializes in the art of early modern Europe. She has published widely on collecting practices, the interactions between various arts and crafts, the alchemy of color, and the changing relations between art and nature and between natural philosophical and religious traditions. Her current project explores Peter Paul Rubens’s engagement with the global world of seventeenth-century Antwerp.

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Part 1 Latent Landscapes

1.

Waterland and the Disquiet of the Dutch Landscape Mia M. Mochizuki1

Abstract Although the shift in how land was portrayed circa 1600 has mainly been understood through the dynamics of earth in land-centric terms, water also positioned the coastline as a zone of artistic invention through the etymology of the independent landscape picture, the physical sites of the polders of the Netherlands, and the tradition of approaching land from the sea. By taking a water-oriented view of land, the famously low horizon line of the Dutch landscape can be explained by the chorographic and cosmographic visual conventions of nautical navigation tools—portolan chart and rutter, astrolabe and globe—that made land recognizable to contemporaries as an image, and by prefacing risk over realism, ushered in the disquiet of the Dutch landscape. Keywords: chorography; cosmography; Dutch landscape; maritime cartography; nautical instruments; water

The Unquiet Landscape Some pictures are trouble; they should carry signs that warn, “Beware: Hazardous Viewing.” For certain pictures, like scenes of Hell or the Last Judgment, the viewer is aware of the dangers of looking from the outset. Other subjects, however, promise a visual restorative, a brief respite from the human condition, only to coalesce in a growing unease, and this was true of the Dutch landscape. A painting like the Landscape with Two Oaks, 1641, by Jan van Goyen (1596–1656) exemplifies the classic Dutch landscape with its unlimited horizontal expanse and low horizon line, where 1 This essay is dedicated to my co-editor, Christine Göttler, in appreciation for our friendship over the years.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch01

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Fig. 1.1: Jan van Goyen, Landscape with Two Oaks, 1641. Oil on canvas, 88.5 × 110.5 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. SK–A–123. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

dune, craggy tree, and a brace of clouds play the protagonists (Fig. 1.1). Van Goyen’s striations of sand, hillock, and sky present like a cross-section of stone; in fact, the seventeenth-century chronicler of artists Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678) compared his loose, variegated strokes to the veins that naturally appear in agate, granite, or marble, but now writ large, so the whole painting saturated the viewer before its parts could be discerned.2 Van Hoogstraten intended his remarks as an object lesson in painterly style, but he inadvertently put his finger on an aspect of Dutch landscape painting that has garnered little attention: the subtle pulse of agitation that percolates beneath the smooth surface of these seemingly tranquil images. Long before the high-stakes drama of late landscape pictures in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, pictures like Landscape with Two Oaks were steeped in an atmosphere of 2 Gombrich, “The Image in the Clouds,” Art and Illusion, 187–88; Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, 237–38; Leeflang, “Segers’s Painterly Prints,” 47–49, 71, notes 73–76.

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foreboding. Van Goyen cast the foreground into deep shadows to spotlight the tree mound, an occurrence not easily replicated in natural circumstances. Gnarled tree stumps dominate the middle ground, half-dead, half-alive, with razor-edged branches even as frothy florets sprout on the other side. And the heavy cumulus of a storm gathers, about to break, in the background, the delicate white wings of its central bird only making the clouds appear darker by comparison, as if in warning of the onslaught to follow momentarily. When providing tips for painting a landscape, the art critic Karel van Mander (1548–1606) even compared the tight interlocking of such pictorial zones to the surreptitious slithering of intertwined serpents: As we weave together our [fore-, middle-, and back-] grounds, Letting the one issue from the other, In the manner that twisting serpents creep.3

The Dutch landscape may have seemed to afford the delight of unexpected prospects, but looking closer, the viewer then and now could sense the disturbance to come, the “snake in the grass” (addertje onder het gras) of impending threat, like a ripple across a still pond. The unsettling awareness of pieces not quite adding up was already palpable in one of the earliest Dutch landscapes, a small drawing from a series on the outskirts of Haarlem, Dune Landscape, 1603, by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) (Fig. 1.2). This modest image gives the impression of an almost infinite flatness through its relentless horizontality, where its unbracketed expanses and continuous horizon line were made only more emphatic by being juxtaposed against a vast sky with not a single line to distract from the barely washed ground of the paper. The effect was a vista that seems to extend beyond its left and right frames ad infinitum, where the cropping of a scene to imply a larger whole supplied the foundation for the modern claim to the inseparability of picture and reality. Only the most desultory of marks, the kind usually reserved for a lone bird, denote a scattering of figures difficult to differentiate from bush or tree, so the “narrative” of the picture is firmly entrenched in nature; this is not the story of human actions. Yet what can initially be read as the delicate filigree-work of foliage and thatched-roof cottage dissolves into a confusion between earth and sea that pinpoints a source for the disquiet. Are these extensive fields or placid waters? What is the proportion of land to liquid in these broad swaths? Where does solid ground yield to the advances of the river’s inlets? The composure of this picture recedes like the ebb of the tide in a marsh-like substructure. 3 “Als wy onse gronden dus vast beknopen / En soo van d’een in d’ander laten strijcken / Ghelijck ofter swierende aders cropen.” Van Mander, “Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const,” Het Schilder-Boeck, fol. 36r, chap. 8, stanza 21; Melion, “Introduction,” 7–8.

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Fig. 1.2: Hendrick Goltzius, Dune Landscape, 1603. Pen and brown ink on paper, 9.1 × 15.4 cm, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, inv. no. H253 (PK), on loan from Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen 1940 (formerly Collection Koenigs). Image: © Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Photo: Studio Buitenhof.

Water, specifically where land met sea, furnished the Dutch landscape with its signature aptitude for turbulence and it points to the need to look beyond land-based reasons for the shift in how land was portrayed circa 1600.4 After all, the high horizons of the religious Weltlandschaft panoramas of Joachim Patinir (ca. 1480–1524) and the vertiginous mountainscapes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525/1530–1569), that arose in tandem with the global cartography of sixteenthcentury Antwerp, did little to prepare the viewer for the Dutch landscape, where the horizon line’s crash to the bottom half or third of the composition instilled a profoundly destabilizing effect in the genre’s pictorial DNA.5 This essay will therefore 4 For the Dutch landscape in the trajectory of Western art, see: Adams, “Competing Communities in the ‘Great Bog of Europe,’” 35–76; Andrews, Landscape and Western Art; Von Baldass, “Die niederländische Landschaftsmalerei von Patinir bis Bruegel,” 111–57; Bengtsson, Studies on the Rise of the Realistic Landscape in Holland; Büttner, Landscape Painting; Clark, Landscape into Art; Fechner, Natur als Landschaft; Friedländer, Essays über die Landschaftsmalerei und andere Bildgattungen, 7–188; Friedländer, Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life, 11–153; Pochat, Figur und Landschaft; Slive, Dutch Painting, 1600–1800, 177–212; Wamberg, Landscape as World Picture; Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. 5 For example: Joachim Patinir, Landscape with St. Jerome, 1516–1517, oil on wood, 74 × 91 cm, Madrid, Museo del Prado, inv. no. P001614; Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Return of the Herd (Autumn), 1565, oil on panel, 117 × 159.7 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. 1018. The term Weltlandschaft was first coined by Eberhard von Bodenhausen in a monograph on Gerard David (ca. 1460–1523) in 1905 and then

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turn to the culture of water, by which I mean the pervasive influence of the sea on manifold aspects of seventeenth-century Northern Netherlandish life, and two views of Amsterdam from before and after the advent of the Dutch landscape to consider how water conditioned a decisive response in the representation of land and suggests a reorientation of the “mapping impulse” in Dutch art.6

The Culture of Water “Landscape smells of the sea,” wrote John Stilgoe, because the independent “landscape” picture that came into English as landskip from early modern Dutch (Nieuwnederlands), introduced by seamen circa 1600, referred to a view across the sea.7 Goltzius’s earlier chiaroscuro woodcut, Cliff on a Seashore, ca. 1592–1595, reveals how the first Dutch landscapes drew upon the possibilities of line to render both the rocky outcroppings and the translucent waves that appear to borrow their weight through discursive loan (Fig. 1.3). E. J. Reznicek described this effect as a “Bodenwelle” (“ground wave”) in Goltzius’s landscapes, reminiscent of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE), “And now the sea and the land have no distinction,” where little difference can be traced between wave and rock, the one inescapably merging with the other in shared syncopation.8 The revolution in the representation of land was defined by the interchangeability of land and water, and that it played out in primarily graphic terms only made it more difficult to locate precisely where applied to Patinir’s work by Ludwig von Baldass in 1918. For an introduction to the “world landscape,” see: Von Baldass, “Niederländische Landschaftsmalerei,” 120–22; Von Bodenhausen, Gerard David; Büttner, Erfindung der Landschaft; Falkenburg, “Patinir,” 91–92; Falkenburg, Patinir, 66; Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth,” xx–xxi; Huvenne, Uitvinding van het landschap; Huys Janssen, Panorama; Kofuku, Bruegel; Müller Hofstede, “Bruegels Landschaft,” 84–93, esp. 85; Muller, Rosasco, and Marrow, Met de Bles; Zinke, Patinirs “Weltlandschaft,” 21–29. 6 Alpers, The Art of Describing, 119–68. For the impact of world maps on the Netherlandish landscape tradition, see: Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth,” 54–56; Michalsky, Projektion und Imagination. 7 Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, xxv, 213–14, 221–22; Stilgoe, What Is Landscape?, 1, 4–5. For associations with landscape, see: Bakker, Landscape and Religion; Büttner, Die Erfindung der Landschaft, 9–19; Büttner, Landscape Painting, 32–71; Büttner, “Images and Imaginations,” 355; Cosgrove, “The Idea of Landscape,” Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, 13–38; Delue and Elkins, Landscape Theory; Falkenburg et al., Natuur en landschap in der Nederlandse kunst 1500–1850; Hochstrasser, “Inroads to Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting,” 192–221; Michalsky, Projektion und Imagination, 21–38; Mitchell, Landscape and Power; Schama, Landscape and Memory; Nancy, “Uncanny Landscape,” The Ground of the Image, 51–62; Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, 3–61, 213–27; Olwig, The Meanings of Landscape; Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting in the 17th Century; Stilgoe, What Is Landscape?; Warnke, Political Landscape. 8 Geddes, Watermarks, 117, 216, note 53; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 22–23, book 1, line 291; Russell, “Seascape into Landscape,” 66–67.

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Fig. 1.3: Hendrick Goltzius, Cliff on a Seashore, ca. 1592–1595. Chiaroscuro woodcut in sepia-ochre, green, and black ink on paper, 11.4 × 14.4 cm, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, inv. no. 1943.3.4628. Image: © National Gallery of Art.

the dunes become waves, as if sand and sea were composed of the same matter outside the picture plane as within it, a pictorial testimony to Pliny the Elder’s characterization of Friesland as “the region disputed as belonging whether to the land or to the sea” in his Natural History (77–79 CE).9 The Dutch landscape came of age at a moment when land itself was being reshaped: 27 percent of the “Nether-lands” was situated below sea level, a true waterland, with drainage and the institution of waterschappen—relatively independent bodies responsible for the maintenance of water levels, dikes, and land and water routes—already beginning in the twelfth century.10 The construction of dikes and dams was 9 “Twice in each period of a day and a night, the ocean with its vast tide sweeps in a flood over a measureless expanse, covering up Nature’s age-long controversy.” Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 386–87, book 16, sec. I.2; Siegert, “The Chorein of the Pirate,” 10. 10 Koeman and Van Egmond, “Surveying and Official Mapping in the Low Countries,” 1263–68.

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Fig. 1.4: Leonardo da Vinci, Study of Rock Formations, ca. 1510–1515. Black chalk on paper, 16.4 × 20.1 cm, Windsor, Windsor Castle, Royal Library, inv. no. RCIN 912397. Image: © Royal Collection Trust / Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

essential, since drainage reduced Amsterdam’s soil by one to two centimeters per year; the lock of the Amstel Dam (ca. 1270) allowed the Damrak, known as “Op ’t Water” until the nineteenth century, to maintain the stable level required for a harbor.11 By the seventeenth century, the Beemster polder project to reclaim 7,200 hectares of the province of Holland from the sea, supervised by Lucas Jansz. Sinck (1607–1612), would be responsible for the construction of the modern coastline of the Netherlands.12 11 Knevel, “Bird’s-Eye View of Amsterdam,” 11. 12 For water as a foundation for Dutch culture, see: Ciriacono, Building on Water, 157–93; Metz and Van den Heuvel, Sweet and Salt; Gehring and Weibel, “10. The Invention of Landscape: Land Reclamation and Polder Technology in the Visual Arts,” including a map of reclaimed land in the Netherlands, Mapping Spaces, 402–23, esp. 404–5; Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 12–50; Schotte, Sailing School, 26–61; Vignau-Wilberg, Das Land am Meer.

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In fact, the Frisian landschop can be translated literally as “shoveled up land,” or “land thrown up by sea,” where the shape of land was dictated by layers of “shelf,” submerged or sand-banked earth, honed in equal part by “embanking,” the building up of mass, and “wasping,” the draining of land, when it was not being flooded to improve the arability of the soil.13 Shifting shores undergirded the Dutch landscape in reality and representation, and the etymology of “-scape” (-schap, -schaft, -ship, -skip) bears within it the resonances of shape, scope, and it is sometimes forgotten, wholesale creation, in the formation of land salvaged from water, where the suffix -skep defined landscape as that which is “cut out.”14 The landskip operated in wetlands (land/water), such as mud flats (wadden), along the northern coastline (water/land), and when land slid into image (land/image). And this axis of slippage between land and sea can be a productive starting point for an investigation of the Dutch landscape, one that can shed fresh light on a historiography concentrated on stylistic evolution, iconological interpretation (religious and political, local and national), and more recently, contemporary eco-politics.15 When the craggy rocks of Cliff on a Seashore were moved to the foreground and isolated just off center in a sea of waves, it was a visual shorthand for a new regime, one that apprehended land in terms of the sea. And it was this promising tension between land and sea, the potent push and pull of the tides, that provided the premise and infrastructure for another mode of depicting land. Water has a history of problematizing the limits of representation with its amorphous, mutable, and borderline imperceptible forms: Ernst Gombrich first tied the critical role of water in the creative artistic process of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) to the negotiation between reality and the picture plane.16 In Leonardo’s Study of Rock Formations, ca. 1510–1515, a comparable image to Goltzius’s later Cliff on a Seashore, jagged outcroppings vie against the mass of swirling eddies that engulf them, the powerful test of wills between anchored stone and cascading torrent extended, by implication, to nature and artist in the competition to be the determinative agent in the perception of land (Fig. 1.4).17 Frank Fehrenbach 13 Stilgoe, What Is Landscape?, 2–5. 14 Casey, Representing Place, 168, 272–73; Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, 232, note 6. 15 For recent anthologies on landscape studies, see: Bakker, “Points of View,” 104–28; Delue and Elkins, Landscape Theory; Enenkel and Melion, Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500–1700; Goodchild, Oettinger, and Prosperetti, Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy; Heuer and Zorach, Ecologies, Agents, Terrains; Howard et al., The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies. 16 For Leonardo’s fascination with hydrology, see: Fehrenbach, “Leonardo and Water,” 368–75; Fehrenbach, Licht und Wasser, 193–256, 291–331; Geddes, “‘Infinite Slowness and Infinite Velocity,’” 269–83, 392–98; Geddes, Watermarks, 96–117; Gombrich, “The Form of Movement in Water and Air,” The Heritage of Apelles, 39–56, esp. 42; Macagno, Leonardian Fluid Mechanics; Pfister, Savenije, and Fenicia, Leonardo da Vinci’s Water Theory. 17 Geddes, “‘Infinite Slowness and Infinite Velocity,’” 271–72, 392; Geddes, Watermarks, 113–17, 142.

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Fig. 1.5: Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom, Battle between Dutch and Spanish Ships on the Haarlemmermeer (26 May 1573), ca. 1629. Oil on canvas, 190 × 268 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. SK–A–602. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

has portrayed water in Leonardo’s oeuvre as pure dynamic force, ambivalent in its creativity and destruction, where, from his earliest drawings, “Leonardo represents landscape as a realm perpetually modified by water.”18 In Northern art, the role of water in representation has centered on the radical spatial experimentation of marine painting, whose piecemeal projection outside a coherent perspectival system, as in the Battle between Dutch and Spanish Ships on the Haarlemmermeer (26 May 1573), ca. 1629, by Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom (ca. 1562–1640), mimicked the traversal of territory, or chorein, appropriated by pirate ships (Fig. 1.5).19 But it was Margarita Russell, writing already in 1986, who proposed that the Dutch landscape, 18 For example: the apocalyptic overtones of Leonardo da Vinci’s ten Deluge drawings, ca. 1513–1518, black chalk, pen and ink, and wash on paper, all 15–16 × 20–21 cm, Windsor, Windsor Castle, Royal Library, inv. nos. RCIN 912377–RCIN 912386. Fehrenbach, “Leonardo and Water,” 368–75, esp. 371–72; Fehrenbach, Licht und Wasser, 193–256, 291–331. 19 Gehring, “Verfahren der werelt beschryvinge in Seehandbüchern, Portolanen und Gemälden um 1600,” 46–49, 52–66; Siegert, “The Chorein of the Pirate,” 6–23, esp. 7–8, 18–20; Siegert, “Kastell, Linie, Schwarm,” 413–34.

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like Goltzius’s early Dune Landscape drawing, began when artists looked to other genres for fresh approaches to the depiction of land.20 Landscape was indebted to the marinescape for its overarching compositional structure, the concerted attention to the study of atmospheric conditions, and above all, the undulating lines of coast and water, if Vroom’s first dated marine painting in 1594, Ships in the Harbor of Dordrecht, is an indication.21 Whether a case of cause and effect or common nautical antecedents, the instability of land can be taken as a cue, where the disorientation of being “at sea” offers fresh “ground” for art historical investigation.22

The Seafarer’s Gaze When Cornelis Anthonisz. (Thonisz. or Teunissen, ca. 1507–1553) painted his View of Amsterdam for the Amsterdam city authorities in 1538, it may have still included a high horizon line, a band of blue across the top eighth of the picture, albeit no longer punctuated by peaks (Fig. 1.6).23 But it was a city enclosed, bisected, and irrigated by inlets of the North Sea (the IJ, the Emster, the Amstel, and the unlabeled Oude Schans), triple-masted ships populating the foreground en route to the shipyards 20 Russell, “Seascape into Landscape,” 63–66, 71; Russell, Visions of the Sea. 21 Hendrick Vroom, Ships in the Harbor of Dordrecht, 1594, oil on canvas, 106 × 169 cm, previously in Schwerin, Staatliches Museum, destroyed in 1945. 22 For the cultural implications of the sea, including the sixteenth-century interest in ascertaining the correct physical and conceptual relationship between water and earth from sea voyages, see: Baader and Wolf, Das Meer, der Tausch und die Grenzen der Repräsentation; Gordo Peláez, “Water and Infrastructure in Late Colonial Guanajuato,” 283–93; Gunn, Imagined Geographies; Miller, The Sea; Starkey, Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond, esp. 217–43. Oceans cover more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface; today, the ocean economy, or “blue economy,” as opposed to the “green economy,” has been estimated at US $2.5 trillion annually, equivalent to 5 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), making it the seventh largest economy in the world. 23 Cornelis Anthonisz. was paid six pounds for his View of Amsterdam, which was intended as a gift for Jean de Hénin-Liétard (or Hennin, 1499–1562), a confidant of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558, r. 1516–1556), although it ended up on display in the city’s Town Hall. Nevertheless, Charles V would have seen the View of Amsterdam on his visit to the city in 1540, so the political significance of water-based land views should not be underestimated. In 1544, Anthonisz. made a wall-size woodcut after the painting that was frequently reprinted and copied through the seventeenth century. Cornelis Anthonisz., View of Amsterdam, 1544, twelve-block woodcut on paper, 107.4 × 109.1 cm, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum, inv. no. A 36814. For an introduction to Anthonisz.’s View of Amsterdam and its afterlife, see: Breen, “De oudste door Cornelis Anthonisz. geteekende plattegrond van Amsterdam,” 117–37; Dubiez, Cornelis Anthoniszoon van Amsterdam, 14, 27–36, 96–98, 107–8, cat. nos. 11, 41; Hameleers, Gedetailleerde kaarten van Amsterdam, 27–41; Hameleers, Kaarten van Amsterdam, 1:24–32; Knevel, “Bird’s-Eye View of Amsterdam,” 8–15; Meuwissen, “Attributing the Berlin Sketchbook to Cornelis Anthonisz.,” 18–19, 34–40, figs. 1, 27; Niël, “De perspectivische ruimteweergave van het Gezicht in vogelvlucht op Amsterdam van Cornelis Anthonisz.,” 107–13; Wiessner, “Over de perspectief van de kaart van Amsterdam van 1544 door Cornelis Anthonisz.,” 274–76.

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Fig. 1.6: Cornelis Anthonisz., View of Amsterdam, 1538. Oil on panel, 116 × 159 cm, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum, inv. no. SA 3009. Image: © Amsterdam Museum.

of the Lastage district that Anthonisz. knew well, to present the city from the implicit socio-political perspective of its economic arteries.24 The View of Amsterdam has often been credited as the first painted street plan of the city, even called a “sixteenth-century Google Map,” with scholars determining its accuracy by linking it to land-based cartography, but its significance as a view across water, as a landskip, for the history of landscape painting has not yet been fully grasped.25 24 The city government paid Anthonisz. four times (in 1544, 1547, 1548, and 1551) for maps of the Lastage district, in connection with the district’s attempt to obtain voting rights on the Amsterdam town council. The View of Amsterdam was believed to have been ordered as an aid in the defense of the city that was no longer needed when the threat was resolved. Most recently, Yvette Colijn has proposed that the city council presented the painting to Charles V to assure him of its loyalty and support in keeping Reformed Protestant movements in check, while reminding him of his personal interest in the Baltic grain trade, which had helped finance his on-going wars. Armstrong, The Moralizing Prints of Cornelis Anthonisz., 12; Colijn, “Amsterdamse graanhandel, ‘sincere’ katholieken en keizer Karel V,” 179–209, esp. 179–84, 194–204; Dubiez, Cornelis Anthoniszoon van Amsterdam, 14–15; Knevel and Knevel, “Grain, Beer and Green Soap,” 42–49. 25 Hameleers, Kaarten van Amsterdam, 1:24; Knevel, “Bird’s-Eye View of Amsterdam,” 15.

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Water affected not only subject matter in landscape, it also predicated a way of looking shaped by chorography, the charting of regions that did not fit neatly into a geometric scheme, designated by a walled city also surrounded by waterways in the Cosmographicus liber (1524) of Petrus Apianus (Peter Apian or Peter Bennewitz, 1495–1552), like the rocks engulfed by surf in Goltzius’s Cliff on a Seashore (Figs. 1.3, 1.6–1.7).26 Apianus juxtaposed the Ptolemaic structural distinction between world Geography and regional Chorography as between a descriptive whole, like a person’s head, and specific nodes of activity, such as the eye or ear, for land known through the unpredictable sights and sounds of water. Chorography provided the familiar pictorial conventions that allowed the Dutch landscape picture to be understandable to contemporaries, the prerequisite of the “Gentleman” in the Miniatura, or the Art of Limning (1627–1628) of Edward Norgate (1581–1650), in the same way Gombrich observed the concept of the “picturesque” relies upon having seen a picture before.27 In Anthonisz.’s View of Amsterdam, the contours of land bound by water emphasized the major line in the foreground, or bottom third of the painting, the coastline, whose purview extends an unlikely, and potentially unreliable, pictorial anchor to the representation of land dredged from the sea (Fig. 1.6). A genre of originally chorographic maps—portolan charts—were the first geographically accurate maps to appear in the West after medieval theocentric mappaemundi, and they reached their apogee in the first half of the sixteenth century when the Dutch landscape was gaining ground.28 The Cantino Planisphere Portolan Chart from 1502 provides an eloquent example of the hydrographic charts that took their name from the portolano, or manual for a day’s sailing along the coast (like the periploi of the ancient world), so sea captains could collect knowledge of the coastal locales, shorelines, and preferred routes through 26 Kenneth Olwig has attributed the double character of the aesthetic/affective and scientific/scenic space of landscape to the ancient Greek chora/choros distinction, where chora derived from Plato’s notion of cosmology and choros related to a political landscape. Alpers, The Art of Describing, 133–34, 167; Olwig, “Choros, Place, and the Spatialization of Landscape,” The Meanings of Landscape, 76–87, esp. 78–80, 83–86. 27 Gombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” Norm and Form, 116–17; Norgate, Miniatura, rev. ed. 1648, 10–11, 82–89, esp. 83–84. 28 The oldest surviving portolan chart dates to ca. 1270, with at least 180 charts and atlases surviving from the fourteenth (30) and f ifteenth (150) centuries, only a fraction of what was likely produced. Although over 650 portolan charts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Mediterranean alone have been recorded in major public collections, Corradino Astengo has described the later portolan chart tradition as a “long twilight with flashes of brilliance.” Astengo, “The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean,” 177, 235, 238–61 (“Appendix 7.1 Charts of the Mediterranean in Public Collections, 1500–1700”); Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 373, 380, 390, 428–29, 439. For an introduction to portolan charts, see: Astengo, “The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean,” 174–262; Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 371–463; Casey, Representing Place, 171–93.

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the Mediterranean and Black Seas (Fig. 1.8).29 Above all, portolan charts prefaced coastlines, in accordance with the so-called “Italian” mode of sailing within sight of the shoreline (costeggiare), as opposed to the “French” method of venturing out into open waters (camin francese).30 As sailing charts, portolans provided no stable vantage points; they were meant to be turned and rotated, with no fixed top or bottom, only the coastline to get one’s bearings, just as a pilot would find himself on the water.31 Labels of place names were never written in a single direction, as is customary today, but instead twist and turn with the coastline, always labeled at a right angle to it, 29 The Cantino Planisphere Portolan Chart was named after Alberto Cantino (fl. 1502), an agent of Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1431–1505), who commissioned a secret copy of an official chart in Portugal for twelve gold ducats, despite a royal prohibition, and was able to smuggle it into Italy. The inscription on the back of the Chart reads: “Navigational chart of the islands recently [discovered] […] in part of the Indies: from Alberto Cantino to Duke Hercole” (Carta da nauigar per Le Isole nouam.te tr[ovato] […] in le parte de l’India: dono Alberto Cantino Al S. Duca Hercole). Its date (1502) has been established by documentary evidence—information on the map contains details that could not have been known in Lisbon until the return of the third Portuguese India fleet under João da Nova (ca. 1460–1509) (September 11 or 13, 1502) and a still extant letter from Cantino to Duke Ercole, written in Rome on November 19, 1502, reports the Chart as already in Genoa in the possession of Francesco Catanio (fl. 1502)—that places the completion of the Cantino Chart in the autumn of 1502. For an introduction to the Cantino Chart bibliography, see: Berchet, Fonti italiane per la storia della scoperta del Nuovo mondo, 47, 153; Cortesão and da Mota, Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica, 1:9; Gaspar, “Blunders, Errors, and Entanglements,” 181–84, 195; Harisse, Les Corte-Real et leurs voyages au Nouveau-monde, 70–71; Harisse, The Discovery of North America, 423; Leite, “O mais antigo mapa do Brasil,” 227–32; Pereira, “A ilha brasileira do planisfério da Casa da Este,” 680–718; Roukema, “Brazil in the Cantino Map,” 7. The outlines of the Mediterranean in the work of the f irst named portolan chartmaker, Pietro Vesconte (fl. 1311–ca. 1325), would not be improved until the eighteenth century, and the Black Sea shorelines of early portolan charts would not be modified until the mid-nineteenth century. Beševliev, “Basic Trends in Representing Bulgarian Lands in Old Cartographic Documents up to 1878,” 100; Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 371; De la Roncière, “Les cartes marines de l’époque des grandes découvertes,” 18. 30 Portolan charts were created using colored inks on parchment, and existed in two major types: the functional “Italian-style” and the more decorated “Catalan-style,” like the Cantino Chart. The earliest charts were made by Catalan, Genoese, and Venetian chartmakers, most former shipmen and captains, with Palma de Mallorca and Venice as the two major “schools.” During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, portolan charts were produced in at least twenty port cities, with eight of them housing permanent workshops: Palma de Mallorca, Genoa, Venice, and Ancona were joined by Naples, Messina, Leghorn, and Marseilles. Astengo, “The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean,” 206; Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” including “Appendix 19.2 Biographical Index to the Atlases and Charts Produced up to 1500,” 373, 376–80, 392–402, 432–33, 435–36, 438, 441, 449–56; Casey, Representing Place, 181, 192; Da Mota, “L’art de naviguer en Méditerranée du XIIIe au XVIIe siècle et la création de la navigation astronomique dans les océans,” 137–38; Winter, “Catalan Portolan Maps and Their Place in the Total View of Cartographic Development,” 1–12; Winter, “A Late Portolan Chart at Madrid and Portolan Charts in General,” 40–46. 31 Contemporary terms used for portolan charts emphasized their use for sailing, such as carta de Navegar, carta pro Navigando, mappae maris, as well as the potentially confusing compasso. The term “portolan chart” first appeared in the 1890s. Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 372, 375; Casey, Representing Place, 181; Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art, 115–17.

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Fig. 1.7: Geography and Chorography, in Petrus Apianus, Cosmographicus liber (Landshut: Johann Weissenburger, 1524), part 1, 3–4. Woodcut on paper, 21 × 15 cm, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Libraries, Burndy Library, Special Collections, Gift of Bern Dibner, call no. GA6.A4X. Image: © Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

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Fig. 1.8: Anonymous, Cantino Planisphere Portolan Chart, 1502. Ink on six sheets of glued parchment, 220 × 105 cm, Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Gallerie Estensi, Fondo Cartografico / Fondo Estense, inv. no. CGA2. Image: © Su concessione del Ministero della Cultura–Gallerie Estensi, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria.

so the caption could be read as the ship approached land from the sea.32 These were relative, variable views, born of experience, where land meets water was the only constant, and this disconcerting perspective is what Anthonisz. capitalized on for his representation of land. What Max Friedländer characterized as the “idiosyncrasy” (“Sonderart”) of the Northern landscape, or Jean-Luc Nancy portrayed as a border 32 Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 377.

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zone of estrangement between civilization and the wild unknown, can be traced to mariners’ predilection for coastlines in portolan charts.33 33 Edwin Buijsen, “De zoektocht naar de betekenis van het geschilderde landschap,” in Huys Janssen, Panorama op de wereld, 42–63; Friedländer, “Die Sonderart des Landschaftlichen,” Essays über die Landschaftsmalerei und andere Bildgattungen, 9–23; Friedländer, “I. The Idiosyncrasy of Landscape,” Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life, 11–22; Nancy, “Uncanny Landscape,” The Ground of the Image, 51–62.

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The compass rose Anthonisz. placed on the bottom left of the View of Amsterdam, flanked by a signature and date picked out in light paint against the ocean’s murky depths, and the bowing of the port and surrounding lands, find their explanation in the navigational lines captains used to take the curve of the earth into account when plotting a ship’s course (Fig. 1.6).34 At the very center of the Cantino Chart, in Africa, lies a jewel-like brooch, the compass rose, which determined direction for the map, the fleur-de-lis registering north (Fig. 1.8).35 Cardinal orientations were assigned the conventional formula used here—eight brown or black winds, eight green half-winds, and sixteen red quarter-winds, for a total of thirty-two lines, extended and repeated across the chart, replete with supplementary compass roses when at the furthest reaches from landmarks—so the pilot need not count, but could quickly determine which wind to follow by chromatic guide.36 These were rhumb lines, a constant bearing across intersecting meridians on a sphere, and they were laid down even before coastlines, because this mesh grid set the routes; the compass rose was an extension of the rhumb line structure.37 What makes the Cantino Portolan Chart particularly instructive for a discussion of landscape representation was its status as the first preserved portolan chart to include latitude-chart readings—the lines for the equator, the tropics, and the Arctic Circle—culled from the advances in astronomical navigation during the second half of the fifteenth century: it used the “latitude-chart” type for Africa and Brazil and the portolan-chart model for the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Northern Europe, and the Caribbean.38 Systems for measuring latitude were still being standardized at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and this heady atmosphere encouraged 34 Anthonisz. painted “1538” and the initials “CT” to the left and right sides of the compass rose respectively; his initials were, in turn, positioned on either side of a stylized St. Anthony’s bell-and-staff motif. Maikel Niël has reconstructed Anthonisz.’s method as a perspectival ground plan with compass-based orientation lines for the alignment of landmarks, resulting in the compass rose as the key to the painting’s spatial composition. Niël, “De perspectivische ruimteweergave van het Gezicht in vogelvlucht op Amsterdam van Cornelis Anthonisz.,” 110–12. 35 The compass rose has been considered the key to dating portolan charts. Winter, “A Late Portolan Chart at Madrid and Portolan Charts in General,” 37–40. 36 Petrus Roselli (or Pere Rossell, fl. 1447–1469) increased the precision of the compass rose by doubling the sixteen lines to thirty-two in 1447. Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 377, 396. 37 Rhumb lines were a great step forward from the “dead reckoning” technique, where the distance and direction of a run were estimated largely by eye from the last position taken with little recourse to instruments—at most a rudimentary precursor of the log for gauging speed, a sandglass to calculate time, a lodestone, and a lead line—and this emphasis on navigational information was what separated portolan charts from world maps before Gerardus Mercator (or Gerard de Cremer, 1512–1594). Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 379, 386, 390–91. 38 The information for the eastern part of the Cantino Chart, including most of India, was likely obtained from Arabian sources encountered by Vasco da Gama (1469–1524) and Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467/1468–ca.

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experimentation with the depiction of land’s horizontal expanse, where it became an attribute of the “surface of the earth shaped by people for their own purposes” that has been credited with the advent of the independent landscape.39 Moreover, Cornelis Anthonisz., a born and bred Amsterdammer, was an unusually versatile man; he was active in both aesthetic and nautical circles, as a painter, draftsman, and printmaker (woodcut and copper engraving), and also possibly as a sailor in his youth and later as a maritime cartographer of some renown to receive such a prestigious commission. 40 He produced the Caerte van Oostlant in 1543, just five years after painting his View of Amsterdam, as a portolan-indebted chart of Northern Europe, rhumb lines crisscrossing the North and East Seas from compass roses, with the stated purpose, according to its inscription, of clarifying “certain coasts in the manner in which they are seen by seafarers” (Fig. 1.9). 41 1520) en route to India. Gaspar, “Blunders, Errors, and Entanglements,” 181–200, esp. 182–84, 194–95; Gaspar, “From the Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean to the Latitude Chart of the Atlantic.” 39 Early portolan charts have neither graticule nor meridians. Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 377; Stilgoe, What Is Landscape?, ix. 40 For the background and range of Anthonisz., including whether he had any personal seafaring experience himself, see: Armstrong, The Moralizing Prints of Cornelis Anthonisz., 10–18, esp. 12–13; Dubiez, Cornelis Anthoniszoon van Amsterdam, 9–15; Van Eeghen, “Cornelis Anthonisz. en zijn omgeving,” 12–34, esp. 14, 18; Van Eeghen, “Jacob Cornelisz., Cornelis Anthonisz. en hun familierelaties,” 95–132., esp. 108–18. Margaret Schotte has observed that nautical materials were part of the explosion in seventeenth-century Dutch print culture: at least ten shops or ship chandlers (including printers, engravers, book- and chartsellers, and instrument- and chartmakers) on the Amsterdam waterfront alone kept them in stock. Authors, publishers, and booksellers spread maritime culture through the popular genre of travel narratives, accounts of naval victories, the addition of stock comic figures like the “ignorant” sailor, nautical-themed political pamphlets, technical guides, and above all, navigation manuals, whose audience could consist of dreamy youths, practicing sailors, and armchair travelers, like gentlemen amateurs, shipowners, and merchants. “Table 45.1 Professions of Sellers of Maritime Printed Matter, Mainly from the Seventeenth Century,” in Schilder and Van Egmond, “Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries during the Renaissance,” 1400; Schotte, Sailing School, 45–46, 59–61. 41 At least three editions of the Caerte van Oostlant existed: (1) the original version of 1543, which can be reconstructed from the one produced by the Venetian publisher Michele Tramezzino in 1558; (2) an edition revised by Anthonisz. ca. 1553; and (3) a version further revised by the Antwerp publishing house of Arnold Nicolai ca. 1560, which is how it is known today. City records show that Anthonisz. received two gulden and sixteen stuivers for two portions of this work in November 1543. Based upon city accounts, Anthonisz. is also known to have made other no longer extant sea charts, including two of the North Sea and Zuiderzee and two of the Baltic Sea. Most portolan charts focused on the Mediterranean, leaving the northern waters largely uncharted until approximately 1550, although the North Sea’s unforgiving shallow coast and strong tides meant a miscalculation of even an hour could result in a fleet being trapped in port or stranded on a sandbar. Armstrong, The Moralizing Prints of Cornelis Anthonisz., 12; Dubiez, Cornelis Anthoniszoon van Amsterdam, 14, 16–21, 96, cat. no. 10; Van Eeghen, “Jacob Cornelisz., Cornelis Anthonisz. en hun familierelaties,” 128; Keuning, “Cornelis Anthonisz.,” 52–54; Keuning, “Cornelis. Anthonisz.: Zijn Caerte van Oostlant,” 687–714, esp. 689–91; Lang, Die “Caerte van Oostlant” des Cornelis Anthonisz., 1543, 22–23, 25–57, esp. 44–54; Schilder, Early Dutch Maritime Cartography, 16–22; Schilder and Van Egmond, “Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries during the Renaissance,” 1385, 1388, 1405, note 20.

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Fig. 1.9: Cornelis Anthonisz., Caerte van Oostlant, ca. 1560. Woodcut on nine sheets of mounted paper, 73 × 96.5 cm, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. K1.1. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

Anthonisz.’s View of Amsterdam has been described as a “bird’s eye” view, but a “portolan” perspective would be more apt for its distinctive profile views of landscape vignettes, as if the viewer floated in the air above and to the side of each scene (Fig. 1.6). Tony Campbell has noted that the appearance of realistic town views, as opposed to generic urban symbols, emerged at the same time as the compass rose convention (ca. 1327), both propelled by nautical observation.42 In the Cantino Chart, the “Montes Claros” mountain range in North Africa (today’s Atlas Mountains) presents three layers of unmodulated color (brown, green, and blue) as overlapping theatrical backdrops, whose effect flickered between a flat surface and a lateral view in the same oblique aerial vista adopted in Anthonisz.’s View of Amsterdam (Fig. 1.8). 43 These proto-landscapes, all angled for approach 42 Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 397. 43 Notable landmarks in the Cantino Chart include: Venice; Jerusalem; the Portuguese Castelo de São Jorge da Mina (or Elmina Castle, erected in 1482) in present-day Ghana; a lion-shaped mountain range

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from the Atlantic Ocean, also provided some of the earliest pictorial resources that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) and Vasco da Gama would use for their exploration of the West African coast. 44 Anecdotal landscapes appeared, like that on the eastern coast of Brazil, where verdant greens, unusual flora, and striking fauna, such as three giant parrots, referenced the reports of the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500, the landscape “prequel” an unforeseen by-product of regional discovery overseas. Coastlines became the zone of artistic invention, because anything that did not contribute to the voyage was left open for creative commentary. 45 So shorelines could be landscaped in green, interspersed with a clump of small red dots and blue bunches, as off the northern coast of South America, to avoid the shallows and rocks vital for a smooth landing, and the emphasis on a safe harbor, a “porto seguro,” after the capricious seas, would likewise be maintained in Anthonisz.’s View of Amsterdam. 46 The addition of topographically specif ic elevation views, however, was an innovation of Northern maritime cartographers initiated by Anthonisz., who introduced horizontal woodcut profiles of shores well suited to an oblong quarto, like the Coastal Profiles of North Holland, into the first Dutch navigation manual, his seventy-six page Onderwijsinge vander zee, om stuermanschap te leeren (1558 [1544]), f irst published a mere six years after his painted View of Amsterdam (Fig. 1.10). 47 Anthonisz. positioned his View of Amsterdam between paskaart across Sierre Leone; and the Table Mountain and Drakensberg Mountain Range that anchor the tip of South Africa. Da Mota, A África no planisfério português anónimo “Cantino” (1502), 1–8. 44 Thirty-nine inscriptions of the Cantino Chart, transcribed and translated into English by Cortesão and Da Mota, also disseminated knowledge garnered from explorations at the end of the fifteenth century. Large crosses along the South African shoreline mark the stone standards (padrões), with the Portuguese coat of arms, that explorers like Diogo Cão (fl. 1480–1486) and Bartolomeu Dias (ca. 1450–1500) erected on behalf of King Jõao II of Portugal (1455–1495, r. 1481–1495) in the 1480s. The oldest surviving stone standard is the Padrão of St. George, erected by Diogo Cão at the mouth of the Congo River in May 1483, and a Padrão of St. Augustine was also raised by Cão on Cabo de Santa Maria, Angola on August 28, 1483. Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 372; Cortesão and Da Mota, Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica, 1:11–13; Gaspar, “Blunders, Errors, and Entanglements,” 182; Henriques, Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries, 68; Leite, “O mais antigo mapa do Brasil,” 223–81; Da Mota, A África no planisfério português anónimo “Cantino” (1502), 6–12; Pereira, “A ilha brasileira do planisfério da Casa da Este,” 680–718; De la Roncière, “Les cartes marines de l’époque des grandes découvertes,” 21–25; Roukema, “Brazil in the Cantino Map,” 7–26, esp. 10–14. 45 In portolan charts, islands and capes were enlarged for their greater navigational signif icance, like Anthonisz.’s Amsterdam docks, but the stretches between headlands owed more to geometry and aesthetics, often in stylized round, pointed, and wedge shapes, than hydrographic reality. Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 377. 46 Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 378, 393. 47 There were three editions of Anthonisz.’s Onderwijsinge vander zee: the oldest probably in 1544, followed by another in 1551, and a third, the only known copy, in 1558; the first editions were likely produced as octavo books. The Onderwijsinge, a textbook on the art of navigation, was bound with Anthonisz.’s

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Fig. 1.10: Coastal Profiles of North Holland, in Cornelis Anthonisz., Caerte van die Oosterse See (Amsterdam: Jan Ewoutsz., 1558), bound with Onderwijsinge vander zee, om stuermanschap te leeren, 3rd ed. (Amsterdam: Jan Ewoutsz., 1558), fol. 2v. Woodcut on paper, 16 × 21 cm, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, call no. NC5.An866.544oc. Image: © Harvard University, Houghton Library.

forty-two-page rutter, Caerte van die Oosterse See, complete with its own title page and imprint, to complement his chart, the “Caerte van Oostlant” (1543). Together, they described basic nautical tools and the most popular routes taken by the Dutch fleets for the grain and salt trade on the North and Baltic Seas. Special attention was paid to the river approaches to the sea, such as the Ems, the Weser, and the Elbe, and to the accurate representation of secure landfalls with profiles supposedly based on reports of experienced seafarers, including a man who had worked on the seas for over fifty years. The only copy of the oldest known printed rutter, De kaert va[n]der zee (1532) by Jan Seversz. (fl. 1501–1530), is incomplete, but the extant pages have no illustrations of land interspersed throughout the text. Burger, Jr., “Oude Hollandsche zeevaart-uitgaven,” 245–61, esp. 251–55; Dubiez, Cornelis Anthoniszoon van Amsterdam, 14, 22–26, 98–99, cat. no. 13; Keuning, “Cornelis Anthonisz.,” 54–57; Keuning, “Cornelis. Anthonisz.: Zijn Caerte van Oostlant,” 692–98; Lang, Die “Caerte van Oostlant” des Cornelis Anthonisz., 1543, 58–87, esp. 82–85; Meskens, Practical Mathematics in a Commercial Metropolis, 141–42; Meuwissen, “Attributing the Berlin Sketchbook to Cornelis Anthonisz.,” 21; Schilder and Van Egmond, “Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries during the Renaissance,” 1386–88, note 19; Seversz., De kaert vander zee van Jan Seuerszoon (1532); Steppes, Cornelis Anthonisz., 7–42, esp. 33. For navigation pedagogy in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, see: Schotte, Sailing School, 31–41.

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and leeskaart, sea chart and rutter (pilot guide), visual and verbal navigation guides, Caerte van Oostlant (1543) and Onderwijsinge vander zee (1544). 48 By 1580, just before the early Dutch landscape had begun to be formulated, the mathematician Michiel Coignet (1549–1623) would present the side view as the core of navigational praxis: The whole science of common navigation lies in nothing more than simply and certainly knowing all headlands, harbors, and rivers; how these appear and are seen in the sea; how far and in which direction these [places] lie from one another; […] and the appearance of these depths and shadows. 49

The Enkhuizenaar Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer (ca. 1533–1606) would even insert the electrocardiogram-like elevations of Sintra, as seen from both the southeastern and northern approaches at five miles out and coastal profiles (dunes, rocks, and hills), complete with groves of trees and settlements, into the Sea Chart of Portugal for his Spieghel der zeevaerdt (Leiden: Christophe Plantin, 1584) (Fig. 1.11).50 And it was Waghenaer who would become the best known representative of the North Holland school of maritime caert-schrijvers, ca. 1580–1620, whose widespread

48 Schilder and Van Egmond, “Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries during the Renaissance,” including “Appendix 45.1 Dutch Printed Rutters, 1532–1594,” and “Appendix 45.2 Pilot Guides Published in the Netherlands, 1584–1681,” 1384, 1404, 1429–32. 49 Coignet, “De nieuwe onderwijsinghe op de principaelste puncten der zeevaert,” fol. 3r, in De Medina and Coignet, De zee-vaert oft Conste van ter zee te varen; Schotte, Sailing School, 30. 50 The Spieghel der zeevaerdt appeared in December 1583, although its title page is dated 1584. Each regional chart consisted of a visual and verbal description, with sailing instructions, of the coast. It was the f irst publication of nautical maps in book form and drew upon portolan charts for compass roses and rhumb lines, marcations for sandbanks and shallow channels, and an emphasis on coastal profiles. Waghenaer standardized the distinctive combination of coastal profile and coastline, where side and front views were presented together in one image, that the Portuguese chartmaker João de Castro (1500–1548) had used in his roteiro, or “sailing journal,” from Lisbon to Goa (1538), given to the Jesuit College of the Holy Spirit in Évora by King Henrique of Portugal (1512–1580, r. 1578–1580) and only known today through copies. The Spieghel der zeevaerdt’s maps were elaborated upon in Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer’s Thresoor der zeevaert (Leiden: Frans van Ravelingen, 1592), as in the comparable Description of Portugal, chart 6, engraving, 19 × 55 cm, Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library, call. no. OL 77 (atlas); these maps was smaller, more affordable, and presented in an oblong format, making them more handy for a sailor than a large folio-size book. Gernez, “L’influence portugaise sur la cartographie nautique néerlandais du XVIe siècle,” 1–9, esp. 1–3; Koeman, The History of Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer and His “Spieghel der zeevaerdt,” 22–71, esp. 32–39; Koeman, Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer van Enckhuysen; Schilder, Early Dutch Maritime Cartography, 56–85, 108–21, 546–671, esp. 73–74, 549–50, 588–89, 645, 654; Schilder and Van Egmond, “Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries during the Renaissance,” 1392–96, 1428; Schotte, Sailing School, 42, 50–51, pl. 1–2; Waghenaer, Thresoor der zeevaert, 1596 ed., 50–54.

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Fig. 1.11: Sea Chart of Portugal, in Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer, Spieghel der zeevaerdt (Leiden: Christophe Plantin, 1584), chart 17. Engraving, 32.5 × 51 cm, Utrecht, University Library, call no. P fol 111 Lk (Rariora). Image: © Utrecht University Library.

circulation of nautical maps, sea atlases, and pilot guides prompted the disruption of the early Dutch landscape.51 51 The North Holland school of maritime cartography was in close contact with Amsterdam publishers, such as Cornelis Claesz. (ca. 1551–1609), who issued an inexpensive German edition of Waghenaer’s Spieghel der zeevaerdt as Spiegel der Seefahrt in 1589 and his Thresoor der zeevaert in 1596. Claesz. was also responsible for three reprints within one decade (1589, 1592, and 1598) of Merten Everaert’s translation from the French edition of Pedro de Medina’s eight-volume f irst treatise on navigation in Spain, Arte de navegar (1545, French 1554), as De zee-vaert oft Conste van ter zee to varen, which included Coignet’s twenty-f ive-page appendix (“De nieuwe onderwijsinghe op de principaelste puncten der zeevaert”) that had appeared in Antwerp eight years before. The North Holland school combined Spanish and Portuguese sources with new information culled from sailing the North and Baltic Seas. When Claesz. collaborated with Petrus Plancius (1552–1622) on the oldest geographic and hydrographic Wall Map of the World, 1592, engraved by Joannes (1530–1605) and Baptista (fl. 1583–1611) van Doetecum on nineteen sheets of mounted paper (146 × 233 cm, Valencia, Real Colegio Seminario de Corpus Christi, Museo del Patriarca), Plancius took great care to emphasize the direct study of Iberian sources in his note to “Geographical Readers” (Geographiae Studioso): “We have used the greatest care and precision in comparing the hydrographic maps of the Spaniards and Portuguese, which they use in sailing to America and India, with one another and with other maps. We have obtained, among other things, a very accurate nautical map of Portuguese origin, as well as fourteen hydrographic detail maps […] Following a responsible, mutual comparison, we offer here the precise measurement and position of

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The Cosmographer’s Position By the time of the interpretation of Anthonisz.’s View of Amsterdam, ca. 1652–1660, by Jan Christiaensz. Micker (1598–1664) just over a century later, the “portolan” view of land had been normalized (Fig. 1.12).52 The horizon line had vanished; the bowing of land was straightened; the abstractions along the shoreline individuated; and without these distractions, the coastline was able to come into its own as the orienting axis of the composition. The most significant change from Anthonisz.’s version was the most subtle, its presence never articulated outright, merely hinted off-stage: the suggestion of clouds by shadows projected on to the land below, an effect best known from later Haerlempjes, such as the Mauritshuis’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, ca. 1670–1675, by Jacob van Ruisdael (ca. 1629–1682) (Fig. 1.13). Ulrike Kern has described how Dutch artists arrayed clouds in the strategic deployment of light and shadow (reddering) to achieve spatial effects in a landscape, particularly as a signifier of distance.53 Contemporary art treatises document this usage as a popular convention, both before this painting, when Karel van Mander praised the variety of clouds in counterpoint with sunbeams in 1604, and afterward, in 1707, when Gerard de Lairesse (1641–1711) admired the very same device of casting shadows on land adopted by Micker.54 Gombrich would later opine that clouds act as an invitation the lands, the oceans, and the seas according to the observations of geographers and experienced sea captains.” The acquisition of twenty-f ive detailed maps by the Portuguese chartmaker Bartolomeu Lasso (fl. ca. 1564–1591) was also explicitly mentioned in the privilege granted to Claesz. Keuning, “XVIth Century Cartography in the Netherlands,” 35–63; Koeman et al., “Commercial Cartography and Map Production in the Low Countries,” 1347–49; Koeman, The History of Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer and His “Spieghel der zeevaerdt,” 62–70; Koeman, Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer van Enckhuysen; Schilder, Cornelis Claesz (c. 1551–1609), chap. 2; Schilder, Early Dutch Maritime Cartography, 149–68, 255–545, esp. 155–57, 169, fig. 4.8; Schilder and Van Egmond, “Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries during the Renaissance,” 1384, 1408–10, 1413–14, 1428; Schotte, Sailing School, 49–53; Wieder, Monumenta cartographica: Wereldkaart van Petrus Plancius, 1592, 2:27–50, plates 26–38. For an introduction to sixteenth-century Portuguese cartography, see: Alegria et al., “Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance,” 975–1068. 52 Micker’s View of Amsterdam is usually presented as a “free copy” of Anthonisz.’s 1538 painting, although it is actually closer to Anthonisz.’s 1544 woodcut. Hameleers, Kaarten van Amsterdam, 1:81–82. 53 Kern, Light and Shade in Dutch and Flemish Art, 62–87; Kern, “Light and Shadow, Clouds and Sunrays,” 209, 216, 221. 54 Van Mander noted: “Occasionally one can make [a landscape] as if sunbeams filter here and there through the clouds and shine on towns and mountains. Alongside one should also [put] dark partches and make towns, sometimes entirely, but sometimes only partly covered with shadows of clouds” (Spaerlijck salmen somtijts hier oft daer tooghen / Als of de Sonne de wolcken doorstraelde / En voort soo op Steden, en Berghen daelde. / Daer neffens salmen oock bedimsternissen / Somtijts gheheel, somtijts haalf maer de Steden / Beschaduwt van wolken, […]). De Lairesse wrote: “They [ingenius sunpainters] apply their shadows where they consider them to be advantageous and can always support this with reasons: because in sunshine one sees often that a little drifting cloud casts a shadow over a whole area of land, while another

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Fig. 1.12: Jan Christiaensz. Micker, View of Amsterdam, ca. 1652–1660. Oil on canvas, 100 × 137 cm, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum, inv. no. SA 1531. Image: © Amsterdam Museum.

to the viewer to assemble the clues in the picture, the “beholder’s share,” when the viewer responds to the prompt with recognition, and this interactive art-making experience represented a decisive step toward modernity.55 All three authors refer to area is illuminated, and so on, several times behind each other. They can thus divide a field into light and shadow, as they like, in order to represent things most pleasantly” (Zy [schrandere Zonschilders] voegen hunne schaduwen waar zy de zelve dienstig oordeelen, konnende altoos dit met de reden goed maaken; vermits men in zonneschyn meenigmaal zieet, dan een kleene dryvende wolk een geheel stuk landts overschaduwt, en weder een ander verlicht, en zulks toto verscheidene achter een: konnende aldus een veld met licht en donker verdeelen naar hun believen, om alzo de dingen op het aangenaamste te vertoonen). And later de Lairesse added: “As if driving clouds did not cause large shadows, as daily experience shows” ([…] even als of de zweevende wolken geen groote slagschaduwen veroorzakten; gelyk de ondervinding ons dagelyks leert). Kern, Light and Shade in Dutch and Flemish Art, 76–77, 80; Kern, “Light and Shadow, Clouds and Sunrays,” 216–17, 220; De Lairesse, Het Groot Schilderboek, 1:271, 364; Van Mander, “Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const,” Het Schilder-Boeck, fol. 35r, chap. 8, stanzas 10–11. For early theories of landscape painting, see: Gombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” Norm and Form, 107–21; Kern, Light and Shade in Dutch and Flemish Art, 13–25; Melion, “Introduction,” 3–22; Michalsky, Projektion und Imagination, 161–98, esp. 167–75, 190–96; Norgate, Miniatura, 82–89. 55 Gombrich, “The Image in the Clouds,” Art and Illusion, 181–202, esp. 189–91.

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Fig. 1.13: Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, ca. 1670–1675. Oil on canvas, 55.5 × 62 cm, The Hague, Mauritshuis, inv. no. 155. Image: © Mauritshuis.

intermittent shadows among billowing banks of clouds, but none where the cumulus proper remain out of sight, as in Micker’s clever design. The clouds in Micker’s View of Amsterdam pick up where the latitude markings of the Cantino Chart left off: they signal a portolan-chart view augmented by the full-blown astronomical navigation of water. With the addition of clouds, the landscape became unsettlingly immersive, as if a human being had been placed within the picture, spurring many a viewer to an empathetic glance up at his or her own sky. The inclusion of atmospheric conditions allowed Micker to establish an implicit vertical scaffolding from earth to clouds that could supplement Anthonisz.’s lateral expanses with a worthy rival to the dizzying heights of Patinir’s and Bruegel’s mountainscapes. Micker’s View of Amsterdam was a picture that relied upon stargazing, a person’s relationship to the landmarks of the sky, to allow navigation

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by water, leavening chorography with cosmography, the branch of science tasked with positioning the earth in the universe.56 In nautical navigation, stars were first accessed through the mariner’s astrolabe that liberated sailors from maintaining visual contact with the shoreline.57 When astrolabes are pictured in books today, it is difficult to see how this was done, unless looking at the Astrolabe, engraved by Jan Collaert II (ca. 1561–ca. 1620), for the Nova Reperta (ca. 1580–1605), or “New Discoveries,” series by Johannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet, 1523–1605) (Fig. 1.14).58 In this scene, the great explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) is shown with his left hand dangling an astrolabe, if only approximately depicted, by its top ring, a gesture known as “weighing the sun,” in order to ascertain the degree of inclination of the earth, as his right hand holds the calipers necessary to ensure a precise reading.59 Astrolabes allowed latitude to be measured by the viewer’s altitude to a pole star (i.e., Polaris), a bright constellation (i.e., the Southern Cross), or the 56 For the transmission of knowledge, Ulrike Gehring has identified the Haarlem St. Lucas Guild circa 1600 as the ground zero for the circulation of geographic, nautical, and mathematical expertise among artists necessary for early marine painting. Schotte has noted that many of the livelihoods of seventeenth-century Dutch society were directly invested in fortunes related to water, from the shareholders and directors of merchant companies, such as the rival trading consortia (voorcompagnieën) that would become the Dutch East and West India Companies; to the astronomers, cartographers, and artists, who would chart and record routes; the instrument makers, navigation teachers, and examiners of the local admiralty, who were responsible for the dissemination of naval skills; the provisioners, shipwrights, and dockworkers, who would prepare the vessels; and the captain (schipper) and navigator (stuurman, and sometimes chief and assistant navigators, or opper- and onderstuurlieden), who would sail the ships. Waghenaer would consciously address his Spieghel der zeevaerdt to “Mariners, Masters, and Marchants.” Gehring, “Verfahren der werelt beschryvinge in Seehandbüchern, Portolanen und Gemälden um 1600,” 49–51; Schilder and Van Egmond, “Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries during the Renaissance,” 1403–4; Schotte, Sailing School, 27–30, 46, esp. 28. 57 Astrolabes also made reliable night sailing possible with the cross-staff, a tool to measure the angle between the horizon line and celestial bodies. Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” 441; Van Cleempoel, “Scientific Instruments in the Ximenez Household”; Van Damme and Van Cleempoel, Instrumentos cientificos del siglo XVI, 85–155, 164–202; Meskens, Practical Mathematics in a Commercial Metropolis, 183–86; Da Mota, “L’art de naviguer en Méditerranée du XIIIe au XVIIe siècle et la création de la navigation astronomique dans les océans,” 130. For the impact of scientific technology on artistic representations of land, see: Gehring and Weibel, Mapping Spaces; Larsen, “Descartes and the Rise of Naturalistic Landscape Painting in 17th-Century Holland,” 12–17; Larsen, “The Proof of the Use of the Inverted Telescope in Dutch 17th-Century Landscape Art,” 172–74; Karr Schmidt, “Making Time and Space,” 114–35; Michalsky, “Das Wissen der Kunst,” 17–39; Powell, “Squaring the Circle,” 282–301. 58 Coignet’s appendix, “De nieuwe onderwijsinghe op de principaelste puncten der zeevaert,” organized each chapter around a different tool, such as an astrolabe, often including instructions for construction if one was not readily available. Coignet, “De nieuwe onderwijsinghe op de principaelste puncten der zeevaert”; Schotte, Sailing School, 53. For an introduction to the Nova Reperta series, with attention to the astrolabe, see: Baroni Vannucci, Jan Van der Straet detto Giovanni Stradano, 282–88, 397–400; Bernsmeier, “Die Nova Reperta des Jan van der Straet”; Clifton, “Mathematical Instruments in the Nova Reperta,” 84–86; Leesberg and Leeflang, The New Hollstein, 3:5–25, cat. nos. 322–41; Markey, Renaissance Invention; McGinty, “Stradanus (Jan Van der Straet).” 59 Henriques, Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries, 64–65; Dos Reis, Astrolábios náuticos em Portugal, 32; Dos Reis, “A saga dos astrolábios portugueses,” 38.

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Fig. 1.14: Jan Collaert II, Astrolabe, in Johannes Stradanus, Nova Reperta (Antwerp: Philips Galle, [ca. 1580–1605]), plate 18. Engraving on paper, 27 × 33 cm, Chicago, Newberry Library, call no. VAULT Case Wing oversize Z412.85. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago. Photo: Catherine Gass.

sun: if Vespucci used a planispheric astrolabe, he would have looked through two perforated pinnules to determine the angle of his view from the scale engraved on the circle’s edge. The rotating alidade inserted the rhumb lines of the compass rose into a person’s own three-dimensional space by situating his or her location within the planetary system. In other words, the navigation of the seas staged man-made ground in the unnervingly liminal space between earth and sky. The Dutch landscape was as much about freedom from high horizon lines through the pilot’s sightlines and the cosmographer’s bearing as Friedländer’s “emancipation” of the genre from the shackles of religious subject matter.60 60 Casey, Representing Place, 192; Friedländer, “Die Emanzipation der Landschaft im 16. Jahrhundert,” Essays über die Landschaftsmalerei und andere Bildgattungen, 54–106; Friedländer, “III. The Emancipation of Landscape in the 16th Century,” Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life, 46–87. For the implications of the changing horizon line, including from literary and phenomenological perspectives, see: Flécheux, L’Horizon; Flécheux, L’Horizon au land art; Gehring, “Verfahren der werelt beschryvinge in Seehandbüchern, Portolanen und Gemälden um 1600,” 65–66, f ig. 14; Koschorke, Geschichte des Horizonts; Siegert, “The Chorein of the Pirate,” 20; Virilio, L’Horizon négatif.

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Perhaps the most telling source for Micker’s cloud shadows can be found in the terrestrial globe pioneered by (Reinerus) Gemma Frisius (Jemme Reinerszoon, 1508–1555) (Fig. 1.15).61 The Title Page of Frisius’s De principiis astronomiae et cosmographiae (1530), an explanatory text for a no longer extant terrestrial globe, presents oceans dotted with stars, manifesting the same commitment to projections on earth seen in Micker’s View of Amsterdam.62 The affixing of stars to lands and seas was no mere decoration or flight of fancy. By the time of Spieghel der zeevaerdt (1584), where Waghenaer supplied a detailed two-page table of stars, claiming to have memorized each, they had become the key positional aid for safe sailing.63 Frisius’s great innovation rested on his appropriation of elements from the celestial globe, such as the hour circle or the stars, for his terrestrial ball, placing the planet in what amounted to an astronomical mounting.64 The result was a cosmographic globe that destabilized the Ptolemaic universe by collapsing the innermost terraqueous core and the outermost realms of the stars and the first mover, or primum mobile, into one compact orb. Further still, the clouds in Micker’s View of Amsterdam seem to float across the sky, and it is worth recalling that reddering was also employed to simulate movement in a landscape.65 Nineteenth-century researchers especially valued the globe for its ability to address the complications of sphericity in the navigation of water, like the charting of an accurate course or the shortest 61 For an introduction to the early modern globe, see: Dekker et al., Globes at Greenwich; Dekker, “Globes in Renaissance Europe,” including “Appendix 6.1 List of Globes and Globe Gores Made in Europe from 1300 until 1600,” 135–73, esp. 160–71; Koeman et al., “Commercial Cartography and Map Production in the Low Countries,” 1356–74; Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici; Van der Krogt, Old Globes in the Netherlands. 62 The production of globes wound down ca. 1650. Dekker et al., Globes at Greenwich, 6–9, 33–43, 91–95, 412–15; Koeman et al., “Commercial Cartography and Map Production in the Low Countries,” 1359. Dekker, “The Doctrine of the Sphere,” 37; Dekker, “Globes in Renaissance Europe,” 153. 63 By the seventeenth century, stars had even outpaced the compass in its importance for navigation; every manual illustrated the stars and classroom lessons included zodiac “songs” (liedjes) as a mnemonic technique for retaining large quantities of cosmographical knowledge. Schotte, Sailing School, 50, 58–59. 64 Globes were later produced in terrestrial and celestial pairs to ensure the earth was placed within the context of the solar system. Dekker, “The Doctrine of the Sphere,” 38, 40–42; Dekker, “Globes in Renaissance Europe,” 136; Harley and Woodward, “Preface,” xv–xvii. Early sixteenth-century land surveying relied upon some of the same tools and methods, such as the triangulation technique, used in astronomy. Frisius would publish his method for land surveying as an appendix (“Libellus de locorum describendorum ratione”) to an adaption of Apianus’s Cosmographicus liber in 1533, and it is worth noting that he matriculated as a philosophy and medicine student at the University of Leuven in 1526, just eight years after Cornelis Anthonisz. registered as a theology student there in 1518. Van Eeghen, “Cornelis Anthonisz. en zijn omgeving,” 12–34, esp. 16–18; Meskens, Practical Mathematics in a Commercial Metropolis, 139–66, esp. 140–44, 155–56, 161–66; Meuwissen, “Attributing the Berlin Sketchbook to Cornelis Anthonisz.,” 17; Niël, “De perspectivische ruimteweergave van het Gezicht in vogelvlucht op Amsterdam van Cornelis Anthonisz.,” 109–10. 65 Kern, Light and Shade in Dutch and Flemish Art, 85; Kern, “Light and Shadow, Clouds and Sunrays,” 223.

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Fig. 1.15: Title Page, in Reinerus Gemma Frisius, De principiis astronomiae et cosmographiae ([Antwerp]: Joannes Grapheus for Servatio Zasseno, 1530). Woodcut on paper, 20.2 × 13.8 cm, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Rare Books, call no. LP3.012A. Image: © Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

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distance between two points on a round surface, the issues surrounding planar curvature that play out in the Dutch landscape.66 But it is sometimes forgotten today that Frisius framed what he called the “doctrine of the sphere” within broad humanist parameters, so globes acted as “mechanical representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world,” where a critical function they could fulfill, that flat maps could not, was the display of mobility on a stand, newly mobile meridian to permanent horizon ring.67 The Ptolemaic preference for the mathematical calculation of place required the ability to determine latitude by the sun, to find a meridian line by solar observations, and to fix longitude by the occurrence of eclipses.68 What the cosmographic globe preserves is motion on terrestrial surfaces, that stars and clouds appear to trail across the sea and land below, so a stationary site could become disarmingly mobile. The drama of Micker’s View of Amsterdam hinged on the tension between the stasis and the dynamism of land familiar from the instruments of astronomical navigation. Stargazing relied upon a stable platform on earth to chart motion in two ways: the earth’s individual rotation and the paths of the planets. The ability of the cosmographic globe to preserve the unusual juxtaposition of a steadfast earth and a moving sphere was a holdover from the Armillary Sphere, such as that fashioned by Gualterus Arsenius (ca. 1530–ca. 1580) in 1568, which captured the friction between the invariable horizon ring and the double axes of the spinning earth (Fig. 1.16).69 By combining the framing bands of the armillary sphere with the outlines of land and sea in the terrestrial globe, Frisius fashioned a navigational tool that could pinpoint a spot on earth at the same time as it could ascertain the daily and annual orbit of the sun.70 Both the armillary sphere and the cosmographic globe delivered the illusion of a fixed post, but one that nevertheless was factually 66 Mercator’s inclusion of rhumb lines in his cosmographic globe of 1541 was an essential step in the addition of signs of sphericity to his renowned flat world map in 1569. Dekker, “The Doctrine of the Sphere,” 25–44, esp. 27, 39–42; Dekker, “Globes in Renaissance Europe,” 142, 148, 151; Harley and Woodward, “Preface,” xv–xvii. 67 Dekker, “Globes in Renaissance Europe,” 136. 68 When Frisius published his triangulation method for determining longitude and latitude, he sought to improve on the ways coordinates were calculated from land; it was only incidentally suited to navigators due to its reliance upon astronomical observation. Dekker, “The Doctrine of the Sphere,” 38; Dekker, “Globes in Renaissance Europe,” 147, 151, 153. 69 Dekker, “The Doctrine of the Sphere,” 36; Meskens, Practical Mathematics in a Commercial Metropolis, 185–87; Van Damme and Van Cleempoel, Instrumentos cientificos del siglo XVI, 158–63. 70 The accessories of the globe—meridian ring, hour circle with pointer, horizon ring, altitude quadrant, position semi-circle, and spherical gnomon—could ascertain the times of the rising and setting of the sun throughout the year and locate the limits of the twelve houses of the heavens. Several accessories were applied to a celestial globe by Johann Schöner (1477–1547), first in his Appendices (1518) and then again in his Globi stelliferi (1533), and elaborated upon by Frisius for his cosmographic globe (1530). Dekker,

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Fig. 1.16: Gualterus Arsenius, Armillary Sphere, 1568. Brass, 36 × 26 cm, 4.2 kg, Greenwich, National Maritime Museum, Caird Collection, inv. no. AST 0618. Image: © National Maritime Museum.

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in motion, like standing on a ship or the waterland of the Netherlands. Astrolabes, globes, and armillary spheres were also three-dimensional models intended for consultation on land, unlike the more flexible portolan charts; they were used by scholars in their studies, not sailors on the high seas, and the uncertainty of which vantage point best served the “view across water” only exacerbated the limbo of the Dutch landscape. The navigation of water, its stubborn refusal to be pinned down when mapped and diagrammed, destabilized the pictorial representation of land by endowing it with not only the conventions, but also the stress fractures, the subterranean turmoil, dictated by the earth’s terraqueous structure.

The Representation of Risk In closing, Samuel van Hoogstraten’s comments on the agate-like result of Van Goyen’s technique at the start of this essay were expressed in the context of a hypothetical competition for the consummate landscape (Fig. 1.1). Yet Van Goyen did not win; his painting merely served as a superior example to the work of François van Knibbergen (1596–1674), who although demonstrating a masterly control over the precise imitation of every rock, leaf, and cloud, lost the total effect in the profusion of detail, as could be claimed for his Panoramic Dune Landscape around Kleve, ca. 1655–1665 (Fig. 1.17). The winner of Van Hoogstraten’s parable, in an affront to the tyranny of timelines, was Jan Porcellis (1583–1632), in pictures like his Shipwreck off the Coast, 1631, since he waited until he had the entire composition in his mind, a “denkbeeld,” literally a “thought-image,” before seamlessly executing a painting (Fig. 1.18).71 When Van Hoogstraten praised Porcellis for finishing the landscape in “The Copernican Globe,” 541–66; Dekker, “The Doctrine of the Sphere,” 28, 33–36, 43; Dekker, “Globes in Renaissance Europe,” 144–45. 71 Leonardo da Vinci also emphasized the mental invention of a composition, notably for clouds: “I have even seen shapes in clouds and on patchy walls which have roused me to beautiful inventions of various things, and even though such shapes totally lack f inish in any single part, they were yet not devoid of perfection in their gestures or other movements” (Io ho gia veduto nelli nuvoli e’ muri machie, che m’ anno deste a belle inventioni di varie cose le quali machie anchora che integralmente fussino in se private di perfectione di qualondue membro non manchavano di perfectione nelli loro movimenti o altre actioni). Gombrich, “Leonardo’s Method for Working Out Compositions,” Norm and Form, 58–63, esp. 59–61, 147, note 13; Da Vinci, Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270), fol. 62r. For Leonardo’s emphasis on the imagination in art-making, with attention to accidental forms found in nature, see: Bambach, “Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Notions of the Unfinished in Art,” 35–37; Bambach, “‘Porre le figure disgrossatamente,’” 51–61, esp. 59–60. Van Hoogstraten’s writings were a critical link in the spread of Leonardo’s ideas in the Netherlands; for the different appropriations of Leonardo’s ideas in the North, especially for landscapes, see: Barone, “Rubens and Leonardo on Motion,” 441–72; Heck, “The Reception of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della Pittura, or Traité de la Peinture, in Seventeenth-Century Northern Europe,” 377–414, esp. 396–97, 413–14; Weststeijn, “‘This Art Embraces All Visible Things in Its Domain,’”

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Fig. 1.17: François van Knibbergen, Panoramic Dune Landscape around Kleve, ca. 1655–1665. Oil on canvas, 97.3 × 139.5 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. SK–A–2361. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

his mind before brush ever touched canvas, taking the wholistic enterprise one step further than Van Goyen, he conveyed an appreciation for a view of land and water that obscured the difference between the coast’s whipped dunes, foam-capped waves, and cottony clouds by subsuming them into a single atmospheric ecosystem. An ideal Dutch landscape must be able to communicate the consubstantial physics of land, water, and clouds in the continuum from ground to image. In place of precision, the terraqueous picture prefaced the ambiguity of what the viewer sees (beach/sea/sky), where he or she is (lateral view to aerial vista), and how he or she moors him- or herself in drifting dunes through the fluid, fluctuating medium of water (image/reality). The Dutch landscape exploited the subtle unease of a moment, transmitted from artist’s mind to support (paper, panel, or canvas) to audience’s mind, to align the liability of looking with risk over realism. Svetlana Alpers’s application of a mapping mode to the depiction of land was an early attempt to redirect the field away from viewing consciously composed 415–39. For Van Hoogstraten’s debt to Federico Zuccari’s notion of the mental image (disegno interno) that precedes the physical drawing (disegno esterno) and endows this medium with a universal status, see: Weststeijn, The Visible World, 97–101.

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Fig. 1.18: Jan Porcellis, Shipwreck off the Coast, 1631. Oil on panel, 36.5 × 66.5 cm, The Hague, Mauritshuis, inv. no. 969. Image: © Mauritshuis.

views, like Goltzius’s Dune Landscape, as a triumph of immediacy (Fig. 1.2). Since then, the relationship of maps to the pictorial conventions of land has been recalibrated by Valérie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner, and Bruno Latour with a proposal that urges scholars to distinguish between the mimetic and the navigational functions of maps.72 Digital navigation has highlighted a map’s ability to act as a dashboard for heterogenous data sets (legal, tidal, and topographic) and a platform for probability calculations, like those of sixteenth-century shipowners whose maritime investments paved the way for risk to enter insurance. Maps were always the result of much-filtered information gathered from institutions, skills, practices, and instruments, a whole chain of production that begs the question why analytic interpretation has focused on vague, at times spurious, resemblances to physical territories over the relational relevance of successive landmarks, with hydrographic charts particularly accenting the indexical over the identical.73 As in Van Hoogstraten’s chorographic entreaty to the senses, it was the experience of a contingent physical environment that was decisive for the construction of the Dutch landscape. When the ground beneath a person’s feet was uncertain, the navigational mapping of risk sustained the peculiar restlessness and anxiety that could undergird even the most innocuous, and seemingly land-locked, of views. 72 November, Camacho-Hübner, and Latour, “Entering a Risky Territory,” 581–99, esp. 583–86, 588–90, 593. 73 Mochizuki, “A Global Eye,” 80–86.

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Water was a critical factor in the representation of land, as can still be traced in the etymology of the independent landscape picture, the physical sites of the polders of the Netherlands, and the practice of approaching land from the sea. The Dutch landscape was not simply a negation of what came before, like religious subject matter in the foreground or a mountain range in the background; it pro-actively built on soil only recently harvested from the ocean. By taking a water-oriented view of land, the seemingly counter-intuitive sea chart tradition over the legacy of the land map, the preference for the coastline in the Dutch landscape, which ushered in a lowered horizon line, can be explained by the chorographic and cosmographic visual conventions of nautical navigation tools—portolan chart, sea chart, rutter, astrolabe, globe, and armillary sphere—that made land recognizable to contemporaries as an image. The “view across the sea” of the early landskip drew upon coastline and compass rose, rhumb lines and elevation views, clouds and stars, and the signs of motion familiar from maritime visual culture. Considering terrain from the perspective of the inherent riskiness of water provides a counter-balance to the history of landscape imagery as a march toward increasing realism and geographic precision, and it recovers the burgeoning ferment of the Dutch landscape that would be smoothed over in the eighteenth-century arcadian pastorale. Michael Taussig has argued that the miasma of marsh, bog, and I would add, polder, posited a kind of de-petrification, since the primordial swamp alluded to an awakening of congealed life, and perhaps this final observation clarifies how a painting like Porcellis’s Shipwreck off the Coast would come to surpass Van Goyen’s Landscape with Two Oaks in Van Hoogstraten’s estimation.74 The waterland of the early Dutch landscape positioned land and image as both historical and timeless, defying and defining, in the borderland between the living and the dead. Letting water into the frame changed the tenets of what qualified as a “view”; it is where land was transformed into painting and how the genre constructed the claims of the modern image. For it was in the undertow of deep-seated disquiet in the terraqueous picture, which no retrospective varnish of calm could quell, where the indelible appeal of the Dutch landscape resides.

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Warnke, Martin. Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature. Translated by David McLintock. London: Reaktion Books, 1994. Weststeijn, Thijs. “‘This Art Embraces All Visible Things in Its Domain’: Samuel van Hoogstraten and the Trattato della Pittura.” In Re-reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550–1900, edited by Claire Farago, 415–39. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2016. Weststeijn, Thijs. The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. Wieder, Frederick C. Monumenta cartographica: Reproductions of Unique and Rare Maps, Plans, and Views in the Actual Size of the Originals, Accompanied by Cartographical Monographs. 5 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1925–1933. Wiessner, Leendert J. B. “Over de perspectief van de kaart van Amsterdam van 1544 door Cornelis Anthonisz.” Bouwkundig Weekblad 64, no. 31 (26 November 1946): 274–76. Winter, Heinrich. “Catalan Portolan Maps and Their Place in the Total View of Cartographic Development.” Imago Mundi 11 (1954): 1–12. Winter, Heinrich. “A Late Portolan Chart at Madrid and Portolan Charts in General.” Imago Mundi 7 (1950): 37–46. Wood, Christopher S. Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. Rev. ed. London: Reaktion Books, 2014. Zinke, Detlef. Patinirs “Weltlandschaft”: Studien und Materialen zur Landschaftsmalerei im 16. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main and Bern: Peter Lang, 1977.

About the Author Mia M. Mochizuki, Ph.D. (Yale University, 2001), is a historian of Northern Renaissance and Baroque art. She retired from teaching after holding professorships at New York University Institute of Fine Arts and NYU Abu Dhabi, the Graduate Theological Union and Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Her seven books include: the prize-winning Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm (2008), Dawn of a Global Age (2017), The Nomadic Object (ed., 2018), and Jesuit Art (2022).

2.

Landscape and Autography Victoria Sancho Lobis1 Abstract Departing from the famed “Lugt Group” of early landscape drawings created by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, his son Jan Brueghel the Elder, and other Bruegel followers, this essay considers the special relationship between the increasingly independent landscape genre and the acceptance of drawings as objects worthy of preservation. This essay provides an exploration of how landscape subjects lent themselves to the development of drawn autography in the early modern era, and it will argue that the site of landscape drawing often served to register the artist’s individual style rather than simply to document his or her powers of observation. Keywords: drawing; pictorial style; invention; self-expression; pen and ink drawing; use of artistic sources

The Unnatural Landscape Despite a critical prejudice against landscape subjects during his lifetime, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30–1569) demonstrated his inventive faculties and technical brilliance rendering elements of nature through painting, drawing, and printmaking. Given his innovative contributions to iconography for both allegorical and peasant subjects, it is consistent with Bruegel’s established role in art history to acknowledge his impact on the rise of landscape as critically accepted subject matter for the visual arts in Western Europe. This essay explores Bruegel’s contribution in this field through the lens of his work as a draftsman, and it asks what role landscape drawing played for the artists working in the generation immediately following his own. As this text will argue, the practice of landscape drawing served artists not 1 The author wishes to express her thanks to Armin Kunz and Maureen Warren, who read previous versions of this essay. Furio Rinaldi provided bibliographic advice, and Claudia Swan offered commentary on the essay’s argument. Mel Becker Solomon provided essential support in securing image rights and commissioning new photography.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch02

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only as a habit to develop skills of observation, but also as a vehicle for self-conscious demonstration of invention and facility with pen and ink. In his biography of Bruegel, Karel van Mander (1548–1606) offered the following, now frequently cited comment: “On his travels he drew many views from life, so that it is said that when he was in the Alps he swallowed all those mountains and rocks which, upon returning home, he spat out again on canvases and panels, so faithfully was he able, in this respect and others, to follow Nature.”2 As other scholars have noted, Van Mander emphasized how the act of drawing directly from nature enhanced Bruegel’s mimetic capacity to render landscape elements in the context of painting.3 For Van Mander, Bruegel’s practice of drawing natural motifs served not as an end unto itself, but rather as a means to distinguish his work as a painter. This emphasis on painting within the specific context of increasingly independent landscape subjects can be observed in Van Mander’s chapter on landscape in Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const. The primacy of painting in this context has been reinscribed through decades of scholarly literature, which generally treats the art of painting as the principal setting for this narrative. Yet contrary to Van Mander’s celebration of his accurate landscape paintings, Bruegel’s influence in the development of the landscape genre was arguably exerted most strongly in the reproducible language of printmaking. 4 His drawings of landscape subjects also circulated among artists of the following generation, several of whom emulated or directly copied his compositions and stylized manipulations of pen and ink. Wooded Landscape with Mills, a sheet held today in the Ambrosiana Library, provides an example of such a work (Fig. 2.1).5 On first view, the drawing depicts a waterside avenue of trees that yields to a group of buildings. At the left corner of the sheet, two male figures lead a dog out of the space of the composition. The drawing includes many more details: grazing cows at the lower right and lightly drawn buildings glimpsed through the tree trunks at left, as well as a more distant view in the right background of a neighboring town. In other words, Bruegel chose to fill his drawing support with these landscape elements, creating a finished composition and an elaborate demonstration of his range of pen-drawn marks. 2 “In zijn reysen heeft hy veel ghesichten nae t’leven gheconterfeyt / soo datter gheseyt wort / dat hy in d’Alpes wesende / al die berghen en rotsen had in gheswolghen / en t’huys ghecomen op doecken en penneelen uytghespogen hadde / soo eyghentlijck con hy te desen en ander deelen de Natuere nae volghen.” Van Mander, Lives, 1:190–91 (fol. 233r, lines 25–30). 3 Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 266, cat. nos. 120–25. 4 Gifford, “Pieter Bruegel’s Afterlife,” and Gerszi, The New Ideal of Beauty, “Pieter Bruegel and the Influence of His Landscape Art,” 63–97; Hand et al., The Age of Bruegel. For a recent review of the literature, see: Oberthaler et al., Bruegel the Master; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder; Winner, Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. als Zeichner. 5 Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 88–89, cat. no. 2; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 33–34, cat. no. 3.

L andscape and Autogr aphy 

Fig. 2.1: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wooded Landscape with Mills, 1552. Pen and brown ink on paper, 21.3 × 28.1 cm, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, inv. no. F245 inf n9p. Image: © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Mondadori Portfolio.

Despite these many compositional elements, the towering tree in the foreground dominates the sheet, extending from its roots at the lower margin to the upper register. The viewer is positioned below the tree’s massive canopy, allowing the structure of its branches to emerge more clearly than the feathery and somewhat indistinct leaves that rest on top of them. The trunk appears especially energetic as it rotates upward in a mass of coils. However commanding and finished this landscape drawing is, it cannot be considered as a study of nature, per se.6 As has been discussed, most extensively by Frits Lugt, the principal element of the twisting and towering tree came to Bruegel’s pen by way of his familiarity with Venetian prints.7 Several prints designed by Titian 6 Mielke considered this a “composite landscape” (Komponierte Landschaft); his entry on this drawing identifies several different sources, including a drawing in the Errera sketchbook and drawings by Titian and Cornelis Massys. Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 33–34, cat. no. 3. 7 Lugt, “Pieter Bruegel und Italien.”

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(ca. 1485/90–1576), Domenico Campagnola (ca. 1500–1564), and Nicolò Boldrini (1510–1570) feature dramatically towering trees with knotted or coiled trunks. As David Rosand and Michelangelo Muraro have noted, one particularly comparable chiaroscuro woodcut attributed variously to all three artists survives in at least two impressions of the key or line block that were printed in brown ink (Fig. 2.2). This choice allows the print to approximate the appearance of a pen and ink drawing.8 Such a source would have been especially useful to Bruegel in the development of his pen-drawn landscapes. The Ambrosiana drawing is not exceptional in its iconographic origins within Bruegel’s drawn oeuvre; there are at least six drawings that reflect direct or indirect inspiration from prints designed by Titian, Campagnola, and Boldrini.9 Bruegel’s representations of nature in these examples and elsewhere therefore spark questions about the artist’s description of the natural world and the role of landscape subjects for his development as an artist. Contrary to Van Mander’s vivid characterization of Bruegel ingesting and expelling natural features like so many delicious treats, it was the graphic production of other artists that inspired Bruegel’s landscape inventions with some regularity. As the constellation of drawings presented in the following pages will demonstrate, artists working around 1600 regularly followed Bruegel’s model in their production of landscape drawings as an intellectual and inventive act rather than as a register of their habits of observation.

Independent Landscape, Independent Drawing Bruegel’s artistic contributions undeniably propelled the idea that independent landscape subjects—in other words, landscape compositions that do not include narrative subjects—could be worthy of representation. As has been discussed fairly extensively, landscape subjects were considered “by-works” through the latter part of the sixteenth century—that is, subjects insufficiently demanding of an artist’s intellect.10 Even as European artists increasingly embraced the practice, and as 8 Rosand and Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut, 156, cat. no. 25. The other impression is in the Harvard Art Museums (Two Goats at the Foot of a Tree, late sixteenth century, woodcut, 48.4 × 21.4 cm, Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Gray Collections of Engravings Fund, inv. no. G7526). See also Jonathan Bober’s entry in Takahatake, The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy, 210–11, cat. no. 88. I am especially grateful to Naoko Takahatake for discussing with me the distinctive inking of the British Museum impression, a choice that further situates the print in explicit dialog with pen and ink drawing of the period. 9 Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 104, cat. no. 13. Karel van Mander cites only three artists by name as models to emulate in his chapter on landscape from Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const: Tintoretto, Titian, and Bruegel. Van Mander, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, 1:210 (fol. 36r, stanzas 24–25). 10 Brown, Dutch Landscape; Gibson, Mirror of the Earth; Clark, Landscape into Art; Gibson, Pleasant Places; Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer.

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Fig. 2.2: Nicolò Boldrini (attributed), Two Goats at the Foot of a Tree, ca. 1550–1570. Woodcut in light brown ink, 50 × 21.7 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1881,0709.80. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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independent landscapes began to surface, critical writing on the subject remained scarce. As aptly synthesized in the classic essay on the subject by E. H. Gombrich, critical discussions of landscape in the early modern period emphasized accuracy in representation, tacitly affirming the artist’s direct encounter with nature as the source of inspiration for landscape subjects; and, as is observed in the work of a critic like Van Mander, the variation and strategic deployment of color often featured as a central concern for artists engaging in the landscape genre.11 Elsewhere I have explored the parallel histories of the gradual acceptance of drawing as a form of artistic expression worthy of preservation and the emergence of landscape as an independent genre for representational art.12 These histories intersect meaningfully in the Low Countries of the seventeenth century. Although the origins and evolution of landscape subjects have been considered broadly and in the context of the careers of specific artists including Bruegel, but also Joachim Patinir (ca. 1480–1524), Cornelis Massys (ca. 1510–1556/57), Albrecht Altdorfer (ca. 1480–1538), Hercules Segers (1589/90–1633/38), and others, these discussions have often focused on the art of painting, with significant complementary studies treating the art of printmaking.13 An important exception is Martin Royalton-Kisch’s 1999 introductory essay to the exhibition catalog, The Light of Nature: Landscape Drawings and Watercolours by Van Dyck and His Contemporaries.14 Royalton-Kisch established Van Dyck’s identity as a landscape draftsman by charting a chronological narrative for landscape drawing more broadly, and in doing so, he adhered to objects apparently made on site, that is, sketches made directly from nature. This emphasis on drawing as an act parallel to observation prompts the viewer to consider further drawing practices that are adjacent to, but different from, the drawing of a natural scene in which one is immersed. What does an artist achieve if she or he creates a landscape drawing from memory or on the basis of other visual sources? In the case of Bruegel’s Ambrosiana drawing, the act of inventing, rather than observing, a landscape subject differs from those examples adduced to chart the narrative in Royalton-Kisch’s important essay. Furthermore, Bruegel depended on motifs invented by other artists. In his case and the examples that follow, I will suggest how the independent landscape as an evolving concept in early modern Europe may map onto an idea of independent drawing—that is, drawing as an end in itself—rather than as preparation for a work to be rendered in another medium like painting or printmaking.

11 Gombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art,” 108–10. 12 Lobis, “The Independent Landscape,” Rubens, Rembrandt, and Drawing in the Golden Age, 222–71. 13 For example, see: Dunbar, “The Landscape Paintings of Cornelis Massys”; Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century; Leeflang and Roelofs, Hercules Segers; Onuf, “Local Terrains”; Vergara, Patinir; Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer. 14 Van Hasselt, Dessins de paysagistes hollandais du XVII siècle; Legrand, Méjanès, and Starcky, Le paysage en Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle; Royalton-Kisch, “Introduction,” The Light of Nature, 10–62, esp. 31–54.

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In the context of independent landscape drawings, it is not coincidental that the focus is largely on works executed in pen and ink, a technical choice that distanced the artist from theoretical and critical discussions of the significance of color in rendering landscape subjects. It will be posited here that the landscape genre offered artists the space to develop their individual pictorial styles through the performance of their drawn gestures. Further, the very absence of historia subjects can be appreciated as a liberation of the artist’s thoughts. In fact, the growing appreciation of independent landscape subjects encouraged artists to engage the practice of drawing natural motifs as increasingly independent registrations of the work of both their hands and their minds.

Studio to Studio Bruegel’s landscape drawings first circulated among a group of his followers that likely included his son Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) and Paul Bril (ca. 1554–1626), who worked together in Rome around 1600. Evidence provided by the extant group of some twenty related drawings indicates that these artists collectively studied Bruegel’s landscape drawings and copied their motifs, at times rather precisely and in other cases more freely. This body of material evidence, known familiarly as the “Lugt Group” owing to Frits Lugt’s first identification of the relationships among the different examples, further prompts a reconsideration of the relationship between the practice of drawing and the representation of natural subjects for artists in Bruegel’s orbit who were working around 1600 and in the decades that followed.15 Without rehearsing the intricacies of scholarly debate related to the attribution of individual sheets from this group, a single comparison will demonstrate how closely related these drawings are in compositional terms. One of the two drawings in the “Lugt Group” currently attributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder, Wooded Landscape with a Family of Bears, Deer and Other Wild Animals, presents an uncannily close comparison with an unattributed drawing in the Art Institute of Chicago, Forest Landscape with Wild Animals (Figs. 2.3 and 2.4).16 Both drawings, like many in the 15 Robinson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt, 73–75, cat. no. 16; Arndt, “Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. als Vorlaufer Coninxloos”; Arndt, “Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. und die Geschichte der ‘Waldlandschaft”; Lugt, “Pieter Bruegel und Italien”; Mielke, Review of L’epoque de Lucas de Leyde et Pierre Bruegel, 81–84, cat. no. 44; Winner, Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. als Zeichner, 43–49, cat. nos. 41–51; Wood Ruby, “Bruegel/Brueghel/Bril.” 16 The drawing in the Fondation Custodia collection has been published as a copy after Pieter Bruegel the Elder and, more recently, as the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder. Gerszi, Wood Ruby, and Tóth, Jan Brueghel, 48–50, cat. no. 13. The Chicago sheet has remained unattributed to an individual maker, bearing the association to Pieter Bruegel and described as “after Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” as is the case for several other drawings f irst treated collectively by Frits Lugt. Lobis, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Drawing in the Golden Age, 226–30, 292, cat. no. 79.

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Fig. 2.3: Jan Brueghel the Elder, Wooded Landscape with a Family of Bears, Deer, and Other Wild Animals, ca. 1595. Pen and brown ink on paper, 33.9 × 24.3 cm, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, inv. no. 8025. Image: © Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris.

Fig. 2.4: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (after), Forest Landscape with Wild Animals, ca. 1545–1599. Pen and brown ink on buff laid paper, laid down on card, 36 × 24.4 cm, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, inv. no. 1922.1932. Image: © The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

“Lugt Group” adopt a vertical orientation, emphasized by the dense grouping of trees in the right foreground and left middle ground. The viewer looks down as if from a slightly higher point, elevated enough to see the tops of the animals’ heads at lower left. The sheets are nearly full with longer contour lines of the tree trunks, alternating with patches of short-stroked patterns to create shade and textures. These more linear elements of representation contrast with localized passages of reserve to indicate masses of leaves. Only a very small space in the lower center of both drawings opens through the absence of media to a more distant view. In the Paris sheet, the opening frames a schematically drawn church, its tower punctuating the space between the trees in the right foreground. The church is absent in the Chicago drawing, the distant background of which offers lightly drawn treetops instead.

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Fig. 2.5: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Woodland Scene with Bears, ca. 1540–1569. Pen and brown ink over black chalk, 33.7 × 23.2 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1872,1012.3344. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

These nearly passage-for-passage compositional similarities can be observed in three additional drawn versions (two in the Louvre and one in the British Museum).17 However, the manner of execution seen in each of these sheets differs sufficiently to suggest that they were produced by different artists engaging with the same source. The inscription on the first example, today in the Fondation Custodia in Paris—as well as on another extant drawing now at the Harvard Art Museums—indicates the source of both the Fondation Custodia and Chicago drawings to be an example by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, executed, according to the inscriptions, in the early 1550s.18 Woodland Scene with Bears, a drawing in the British Museum now attributed to 17 Pieter Bruegel the Elder (after), Forest Scene with Wild Animals, ca. 1600, pen and brown ink, 35.8 × 25.6 cm, Musée du Louvre, Département des arts graphiques, inv. no. 20724; Pieter Bruegel the Elder (after), Forest Scene with Wild Animals, pen and brown ink, ca. 1600, 35.1 × 25.2 cm, Musée du Louvre, Département des arts graphiques, inv. no. 20725. The British Museum drawing has been variously ascribed to Jan Brueghel the Elder, Paul Bril, and an anonymous follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (after), A Woodland Scene with Stags and Bears, ca. 1600, pen and brown ink, 34.3 × 25.7 cm, The British Museum, London, inv. no. 1910, 1013.7. Brown, Dutch Landscape, 101, cat. no. 11. 18 The inscription on the Fondation Custodia drawing reads: “Bruegel inuen [?] 1554. Roma.” Another drawing from this series with a firm attribution to Jan Brueghel the Elder also includes a similar inscription: “[…]uegel invent 1554.” Robinson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt, 73–75, cat. no. 16. Although not currently attributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder, the Chicago drawing also includes

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder, includes many, but not all, of the compositional elements present in the five free copies or variations of it (Fig. 2.5). It is also possible that another, now-lost drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder served as an even more direct model for the five extant studies. As none of the five drawings after Pieter Bruegel in this sub-group bear signs of incising, one can only speculate whether some form of tracing was employed to facilitate the careful repetition of specific compositional elements. What purpose did the execution of these drawings serve? Clearly, they are not records of careful observation of nature. They are, quite strikingly, the opposite in that they are responses to another artistic creation—entirely artificial representations of natural motifs. In turn, Pieter Bruegel the Elder derived his landscape compositions, at least in part, from his own study of Venetian prints.19 In removing the burden of representing a known literary source or accurately describing a person, costume, or natural feature, the artist may be liberated to concentrate instead on the development of his technical mastery and the intellectual assimilation of specific motifs. Much as Bruegel himself repeated the motif of the towering tree with dramatically exposed roots, twisting trunk, and expansive canopy—features which recur in his drawn and printed oeuvre as an analog for the artist’s signature—so could his followers develop their own visual library of landscape elements for repetition elsewhere in their work. Beyond their compositional study, these artists were also practicing the specific line patterns that could constitute their autograph style as draftsmen. Royalton-Kisch articulated the unintended benefit afforded both drawings and landscape representations because of their non-dominant status: “[We recognize landscape drawings] as sensitive indicators of artistic intent within a European context: because they stand at the periphery of a form of art, landscape, that was itself consistently viewed, until well into the seventeenth century, as a peripheral occupation.”20 In other words, the independent landscape drawing served especially well as an opportunity for individual expression.

Beyond the Studio A remarkable feature of Bruegel’s landscape drawings is their degree of finish, despite any documented relationship to similarly finished painted versions of the same inscriptions referring to Bruegel: “Bruegel [sic] from Titian,” among others. For full transcriptions, see: Lobis, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Drawing in the Golden Age, 292, cat. no. 79. 19 Christopher Wood considers a parallel group of drawings related to Venetian prints and argues that this phenomenon conditioned the interests of both drawing and print collectors. Wood, “Landscapes by Wolf Huber and Domenico Campagnola,” 302–3. 20 Royalton-Kisch, “Introduction,” The Light of Nature, 29.

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compositions. The “Lugt Group” variations likewise embrace Bruegel’s impulse to fill the space of the drawing supports, leaving only tiny openings of uncovered reserve to render sun-struck leaves at the roof of their forests or to offer views to more distant space. Landscape drawings by Bruegel successor Roelandt Savery (ca. 1576–1639) often demonstrate the same inclination. Savery, like Bruegel before him, created a robust body of landscape drawings believed to have been motivated by the desire of his patron Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) to travel into the Tyrol to observe and record “wonders” to be added to Rudolf’s expanding Wunderkammer.21 Joachim von Sandrart, whose brief biography of Savery includes a reference to Rudolf’s desire to send the artist into the Tyrol to create marvelous images, refers specifically to Savery’s practice of drawing mountains and valleys in ink, while rendering other natural elements, like trees, with chalk.22 The peripatetic Savery lived and worked at the Rudolfine court in Prague from 1603/04 until 1613, a year after Rudolf II’s death. He visited the Tyrol, where he is believed to have recorded natural scenery. His extant drawings also reflect his careful observation of costumes, daily life, and specific architectural structures in Prague and more rural areas in Bohemia. One captivating example of the landscape drawings Savery created during his employment at the Rudolfine court, Mountainous Landscape with a Draftsman, depicts vertiginous cliffs, possibly of limestone, drawn as if the artist was perched at nearly the highest point of one of the two towering formations represented (Fig. 2.6).23 These cliff faces anchor both sides of the composition, and their features extend nearly the full vertical dimension of the sheet at both sides. A ledge shown in the lower left corner of the sheet suggests a platform for viewing the expansive river valley extending almost infinitely into the distance. It has been observed that Savery’s representation of these cliff faces accurately describes the shard-like texture of limestone created through the process of erosion.24 The specific description of their texture and geological character has prompted discussions about the precise location in which they were observed. Indeed, the artist’s assertion through his 21 For still the most comprehensive study of Roelandt Savery as a draftsman and his landscape drawings, which account for over a hundred of the drawings attributed to Savery, see: Spicer-Durham, “The Drawings of Roelandt Savery,” 43–125. 22 “Eben so große Erfahrung ließ er auch merken in Steinfelsen, Klippen, Rotzen, Bergen und Wasserfällen, dahero Kayser Rudolphus bewogen ihn in Tyrol verschickt, um darinnern der Natur seltsame Wunder mehr zu erkundigen. Also zeichnete er alle schönste und verwunderlichste Gebürge und Thäler dieses Landes aufs fleißigste mit der Feder, die große Bäume mit Kohle, die weitaussehende Werke aber mit Wasserfarben in zweyen Jahren in ein grosses Buch, dass ihm hernach in seinen Landschaften sehr wol zu Nutzen kame.” Von Sandrart, L’academia todesca, 2:305. 23 Ducos and Sjöholm, Un Allemand à la cour de Louis XIV, 150–51, cat. no. 41; Legrand, Méjanès, and Starcky, Le paysage en Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, 93–94, cat. no. 105; Spicer-Durham, “The Drawings of Roelandt Savery,” 413, cat. nos. C17, F17. 24 Spicer-Durham, “The Drawings of Roelandt Savery,” 54–55.

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Fig. 2.6: Roelandt Savery, Mountainous Landscape with a Draftsman, ca. 1606. Pen and brown ink, 51.3 × 48.2 cm, Paris, Département des arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 20721–recto. Image: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Thierry Ollivier.

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inscriptions on studies of Bohemian peasants and local landmarks reinforces the idea that he adopted the practice of drawing from nature (naer het leven).25 Many of his landscape drawings could even be termed topographical in their precise rendering of architectural and natural features within and around Prague. However, the Paris cliff drawing does not operate in such a faithful register. Although the character of limestone cliffs may be accurately evoked, the careful, indeed premeditated manipulation of pen and ink imbues the drawing with such artful contrivance that the role of the artist’s imagination should not be underestimated here and elsewhere in his drawn oeuvre.26 Savery created the illusion of fluid slabs of limestone gradually sliding down the mountain on the left-hand side of the composition. This effect was achieved, somewhat ironically, through a trailing series of short, vertical lines in alternation with precise dots and dashes. The transition between different shading patterns can be observed most clearly in the right foreground, where Savery has also used a darker value of the brown ink to reinforce the viewer’s proximity to the space. The use of atmospheric perspective is carried throughout the sheet. In the upper register, the broadening horizontal line patterns suggest the movement of air and clouds over the valley below. As in other examples discussed here, the sheet has been filled with the artist’s mark making; only lozenge-shaped patches of reserve indicate sunlight breaking through the sky or the reflection of light on the river’s surface. As if to emphasize the self-conscious manner of expression brought to the realization of this work, Savery includes a representation of a sketching artist in the lower left foreground. It is tempting to imagine that he is depicting a fellow traveler that he could have observed drawing a similar view from the ledge below. Given the degree of f inish observed in this sheet and its technical precision, it seems more likely to be a reference to Savery himself. Recalling his travels through this spectacular natural setting, he likely marshaled a patchwork of memories to conceive an object wondrous both for its subject and, just as importantly, for its manner of making. That the artist chose to create landscape drawings that were striking in their f idelity to observed nature only emphasizes the signif icance of his choice on other occasions, like the one discussed here, to allow his imagination and stylish manipulation of technique to take precedence. 25 Spicer, “The ‘Naer Het Leven’ Drawings.” For more on the term “naer het leven,” see: Swan, “Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the Life.” 26 In commenting on Savery’s landscape drawings and comparing them to depictions of similarly dramatic natural scenery drawn by Jan Brueghel the Elder, Teréz Gerszi recognized the emphasis on style: “Savery’s work is much more stylized and greater importance is attached to the ornamental aspect of the composition. Between observation and ornament on the one hand, and stylization in the cause of imagination on the other, it is the latter which dominates in these works.” Gerszi, “Landscapes and City Views of Prague,” 137.

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Fig. 2.7: Roelandt Savery, Houses behind the Lobkowitz Palace in Prague, ca. 1604–1605. Pen and brown ink on laid paper, 24.8 × 22.4 cm, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, inv. no. 5524. Image: © National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada.

In a drawing of houses behind Lobkowitz Palace in Prague, now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Savery evokes both the architectural character and state of preservation of his subject (Fig. 2.7).27 Using the same media as in the Paris cliffs drawing—pen and brown ink on paper—Savery achieves rather a different effect. Executed perhaps just a year earlier, Savery described the group of houses in the Ottawa sheet through minimal use of the pen. Relying on a repertoire of short lines, 27 Spicer, Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada, 86–87, cat. no. 32.

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Savery set off passages of the reserve to describe light striking the running fence that occupies much of the lower third of the composition. This motif leads to the primary subject, situated in the center of the support. The longest lines employed in the drawing describe the exterior posts of the houses, as well as the terminal plank at the fence’s bend. As noted by Joaneath Spicer-Durham, the contours are hesitantly drawn, and textures are left generally undescribed.28 Still, Savery convinces his viewer of the specificity of the location. A simple compositional choice to place the houses in the center of his drawing support anchors the process of thinking about the subject itself as primary. Mountainous Landscape with a Draftsman, by contrast, leaves the central space of the sheet open. In technical terms, the Ottawa drawing is one of restraint, in which Savery wielded his pen only to the extent of his observational capacity. Savery worked in this vein on several occasions, not only with pen and ink, but increasingly with black chalk to which he would add washes, sometimes returning to the primary chalk drawing significantly later than its first moment of creation. In these two pen and ink drawings from Savery’s years in Prague, distinct impulses generate the aesthetic difference so readily observed in these materially similar works. The Ottawa sheet conveys the artist’s interest in capturing the physical details of specific examples of vernacular architecture. The Paris sheet, on the other hand, asserts the brilliance of the artist’s inventive faculties, registered through the highly stylized and individual patterns of his pen-drawn lines.

Free Association, Gestural Exercise, and Individual Autography A drawing by Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) provides an example that is comparable in terms of its attention to the quality of line, despite its less finished character (Fig. 2.8). This is one of three coastal views depicted in his so-called “Italian Sketchbook,” which otherwise features studies of Italian paintings and prints as well as costume studies.29 On this occasion and a few others, Van Dyck created landscape drawings in a context similar to that observed for the “Lugt Group” sheets: the act of studying other artistic sources. Admittedly an outlier in his extant corpus of landscape drawings, the first folio of his Italian Sketchbook includes a drawing

28 Spicer-Durham, “The Drawings of Roelandt Savery,” 465, cat. nos. C66, F66. The anchoring location is identified as Schwarzenberg Palace, the name ascribed to the site after a change in ownership in the eighteenth century. Karel Boon referred to this scene as “a study of the Belvedere.” Boon, “Roelandt Savery te Praag,” 146. 29 Adriani, Anton van Dyck Italienisches Skizzenbuch; Cust, A Description of the Sketch-book by Sir Anthony Van Dyck; Jaffé, “New Thoughts on Van Dyck’s Italian Sketchbook.”

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Fig. 2.8: Anthony van Dyck, Straits of Messina, Sicily, or Liguria, with Cumulus Clouds Above; leaf from the Italian Sketchbook, ca. 1621–1627. Pen and brown ink on paper, 19.4 × 15.5 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1957,1214.207.1. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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of a northern Italian shoreline likely made outdoors.30 In this image, the contours of a rocky promontory emerge from an expanse of reserved paper indicating the water separating the foreground vegetation from the more distant coast. However, the most commanding element of the drawing is the mass of unbroken, swirling circular marks overlaid by sharper and more linear passages of rough hatching. Due to the more legible elements at the lower edge of the sheet, the viewer understands that this energic mass of loops, ovals, and vertical strokes are intended to describe clouds. It is not hard to imagine Van Dyck beginning the drawing in the lower register, intrigued by the dramatic inlet of water at the cliff’s edge. But then the clouds above the water command his interest, and the impulse to describe them leads to a much more abstract exercise in penmanship. As Elizabeth McGrath has observed, the dimensions of the Italian Sketchbook suggest that it was indeed a type of “pocket book” that could be brought out of the studio and carried as part of the artist’s personal effects. This portability leads to what McGrath characterized as “snatches of observed reality encroaching on copied art-works in intriguing ways.”31 Van Dyck’s freely drawn cloud formation and the drawings made by Bruegel and his immediate followers manifest the use of landscape drawing as exercises for the draftsman’s hand. In these acts, they could refine the gestures they articulate with their pens, and thereby develop an individual style of mark making or autography. It is not insignificant that Van Dyck’s landscape with cloud abstraction appears on the first folio of his sketchbook, a choice that suggests the opening of his mind to explore the ideas registered in the subsequent pages. The impetus behind Van Dyck’s drawing and those of the “Lugt Group” also parallels the effort these artists would have undertaken to learn to write, or more precisely, to fashion letterforms, an activity that was restricted in the early modern period to the domain of the learned. The mutually reinforcing relationship between writing and drawing was celebrated by Renaissance theorists, including Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), Giovanni Battista Armenini (ca. 1525–1609), and Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1466–1536).32 Especially relevant for artists with Antwerp origins or ties to the city, the book publisher Christophe Plantin (ca. 1520–1589) authored a brief dialog in 1567 on writing and printing in which he asserts that children should follow an incremental course of instruction. For illustration, he used models provided by the calligrapher Pierre Hamon (ca. 1530–1569), writing instructor to Plantin’s daughter. “[The student] should proceed from the small to the great. He shows what is simple before showing the complex. It begins with the letters of the alphabet, demonstrating how to fashion 30 Royalton-Kisch, “Introduction,” The Light of Nature, 24; Vey, Die Zeichnungen Anton van Dycks, 344–62, cat. nos. 282–308. 31 McGrath, “‘Una striga in Palermo,’” 43. 32 Rosand, Drawing Acts, 139–44.

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Fig. 2.9: Jan van de Velde I, Design for a Writing Exemplum with an Admiral Ship, 1605. Pen and brown ink, 21 × 30.9 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP–P–1896–A–1924–8(V). Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

well the form of each one of them.”33 This advice aligns closely with instructions provided to young artists. First emerging in printed form around 1600, drawing treatises and the related, more graphic counterpart of printed drawing books encouraged young artists to begin with schematic elements of the face and then the human body, finally drawing the human figure directly from life.34 The intersection between drawing and writing finds its epitome in the art of calligraphy. As was discussed by Ben Broos in his interpretation of specific Rembrandt portraits, writing demonstrations provided a basis for competition in the early decades of the seventeenth century.35 These writing matches possibly emerged from a practice upheld by late sixteenth-century writing masters to inspire diligence by pitting pupils’ writing samples against one another. Despite warnings from writing masters for their pupils to avoid excessive ornamentation, the early decades of the seventeenth century in the northern Netherlands already saw printed samples of elaborate calligraphic models, executed sometimes in single, unbroken lines. Of 33 As transcribed and translated in Nash, Calligraphy and Printing, 9. 34 Bell Gallery, Children of Mercury; Bolten, Method and Practice; Dempsey, “Some Observations on the Education of Artists”; Feigenbaum, “Practice in the Carracci Academy”; Lobis, “Printed Drawing Books”; Pevsner, Academies of Art. 35 Broos, “The ‘O’ of Rembrandt,” 152–54.

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these pennetrekken, one of the most famous is Jan van de Velde I’s (ca. 1568–1623) drawing of an East-Indiaman ship (Fig. 2.9). The central motif in Van de Velde’s drawing defies its viewer to guess where the pen has alighted on the sheet and where it was lifted off. Parallel, swirling ovals define the sail of the East-Indiaman, with variations of the line width introducing the illusion of depth. Tight loops suspended over long, downward curving lines provide the lower contour of the ship’s hull. The text passages on either side of the central motif assert Van de Velde’s artistry; together with the central motif, they clarify that the calligrapher’s penwork can be equally well employed to conjure both text and image. As Mia Mochizuki argued in the context of Dutch text paintings (tekstschilderijen), the pen-like strokes likewise complicated the role of spectator by overlaying the role of reader.36 Although the refinement and astonishing precision of Van de Velde’s writing model operates in a different sphere of artistic endeavor from Van Dyck’s apparently spontaneous flourish above his rendering of a coastline, the two drawings share an indexical registration of the movement of the hands that brought these linear demonstrations into being. Van Dyck’s fluid mass of graceful loops and more frenetic hatching erupt as a material expression of the artist’s will to render thought in lines, so the two drawings can be appreciated for how they provide evidence of these artists’ self-regard, and, by extension, their existential need to assert individual identity through the act of mark making. Of course, the calligrapher’s charge required legibility, in a fashion, and Van de Velde’s pennetrekken convey an intention to disseminate his drawing publicly through the medium of printmaking. This forces an important distinction with the entirely private space of Van Dyck’s Italian Sketchbook. Yet, in both examples, the energy of the artists’ hands and the gestural impulse fueled by their individual expressive needs come to the foreground.

The High Stakes of Drawing in Pen and Ink What both Van Dyck’s Sketchbook caprice and Van de Velde’s pennetrekken have in common is the performance of virtuosity in the medium of pen and ink. The desire to wield the pen with artful command similarly motivates the production of the landscape drawings discussed earlier in this essay. Jacques de Gheyn II’s (1565–1629) highly finished Mountain Landscape provides a prime example of the strategic choice of pen and ink. In this inventive landscape drawing, the artist demonstrates utter mastery of the pen (Fig. 2.10).37 Situating his viewer high above a rolling succession 36 Mochizuki, “The Dutch Text Painting,” 83; Mochizuki, The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm. 37 Van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn, 2:158–59, cat. no. 1049; Stampfle, Netherlandish Drawings, 35–36, cat. no. 62.

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Fig. 2.10: Jacques de Gheyn II, Mountain Landscape, ca. 1600. Pen and brown ink, over black chalk, on paper, 29.2 × 38.9 cm, New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, inv. no. 1967.12. Image: © The Morgan Library and Museum.

of hills to the right side of the composition and a series of mountain tops to the left, Antwerp-born De Gheyn employed strongly articulated atmospheric perspective by using a much darker value of brown ink in the immediate foreground. Looping patterns define the plant forms, while mountain peaks emerge in curving, vertical swelling line patterns. Short and sharp hatching creates the shading on the sides of the minute buildings, punctuating the crest of the lower mountain in the left middle ground. Deft use of the reserve, adjacent throughout the sheet in small areas alternating with dense and regular passages of diagonal cross-hatching or finely rendered vegetal forms, articulates how sunlight strikes the many different natural and built elements of this expansive landscape scene. In short, De Gheyn has created nothing less than a symphonic performance of pen-drawn lines, shown in all their expressive potential. Given the source material that inspired several of Bruegel’s landscapes, as well as those of his immediate followers and successors, it should perhaps be no surprise that De Gheyn’s monumental Mountain Landscape also refers to another work of art. The Morgan sheet compares closely in compositional terms to a drawing once attributed

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to Hendrick Goltzius in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.38 Both drawings are further related to two sheets by Mechelen-based sixteenth-century artist Jan van Stinemolen, who, like his contemporary Bruegel, traveled south across the Alps to Italy.39 Although closely related to each other, neither the Nationalmuseum nor the Morgan Library drawing seems to derive directly from the extant drawings in Edinburgh and Vienna by Van Stinemolen; it is possible that a more immediate source by the same artist has been lost. In any case, it is clear that De Gheyn chose to execute an ambitious landscape drawing, fully realized and monumental in its relative scale, in dialog with an artistic source rather than in response to a direct experience of nature. De Gheyn’s choice to create the artistic statement in pen and ink, seen as well in previous examples considered here, prompts further comment. The use of pen and ink is significant in the inherent challenge these unforgiving drawing materials present to the draftsman. In learning to draw, an artist undertaking his or her training circa 1600 would have been advised to save pen and ink drawing for last.40 Recognized also in modern criticism as the most demanding method for mark making, pen-drawn lines cannot be erased or blended, as can be done with chalk or graphite. As Joseph Meder wrote in the early twentieth century, “pen drawing presupposes long, diligent training and great confidence in execution.”41 Indeed the artful manipulation of pen and ink found expression not only in drawings, but also in the hybrid pen paintings so effusively celebrated by Van Mander in the life of Hendrick Goltzius.42 In the combination of independent landscape subject matter and the choice of pen and ink, artists found an ideal vehicle for the demonstration of intellect and skill, manifestations of which appealed to virtuosi similarly impressed with pen-works such as those by Goltzius. Although representing natural motifs, the examples presented thus far do not record acts of observation as much as they demonstrate the desire of their makers to develop an individual repertoire of pen-drawn marks. These drawings also register their makers’ collective impulse to develop their ideas about compositional structure and the repetition of specific natural motifs. 38 Jan van Stinemolen (after?), Mountain Scenery: Bagnoregio, Close to Lago di Bolsena, ca. 1580, pen and brown ink, with touches of gray wash, 26.6 × 39.2 cm, Nationalmuseum, Sweden, inv. no. Anck 200. Bjurström, Drawings from Stockholm, 29–30, cat. no. 47. 39 Jan van Stinemolen, Bird’s-Eye View of the Island of Ponza, ca. 1580, pen and brown ink, 29.4 × 42.6 cm, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (inv. no. D 1205); Jan van Stinemolen, Panorama of Naples, ca. 1580, pen and brown and gray ink, 46.2 × 121.9 cm, Albertina, Vienna (inv. no. 15444). Dodgson, “An Unknown Landscape Artist”; Van Regteren Altena, “Vergeten Namen.” 40 Van Mander advises artists to begin studying drawing first with charcoal and then with chalk or pen: “Eerst men Colen dan met Crijen oft Pennen.” Van Mander, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, 1:102–3. 41 “Die Primafederzeichnung setzte stets eine grosse Schulung und Sicherheit voraus.” Meder, Die Handzeichnung, 34, as translated in Ames, The Mastery of Drawing, 1:30. 42 Van Mander, Lives, 1:398–400 (fols. 285r–v).

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This collective impulse contrasts starkly with the observational benefits Van Mander comments on throughout his chapter on landscape. With each distinct natural element—the sun, the sky, water features—Van Mander refers to the colors that can be used. Writing several decades later, Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678) admired loose strokes of the pen as useful for drawing landscapes from life; his discussion of landscape representation generally is rather scant, and his most focused commentary appears in the book of his treatise on color, referring to the “thousand broken colors” of a spring landscape. 43 The intentional restriction in the pen and ink drawings considered here points away from the importance of credible imitation so emphasized in Van Mander’s text, as well as in the account of the invention of landscape painting by Edward Norgate (1581–1650). His narrative culminates in the production of a painting by a Flemish artist that so closely matched his patron’s verbal description “as if hee had seene with his owne eyes, or bene his Companion in the Journey.”44 Surviving objects, especially pen and ink drawings, convey a different emphasis, one in which landscape drawings offered highly personalized opportunities for individual stylistic development and expression.

Conclusions All of the artists discussed here are of Flemish origin, just like Norgate’s originating landscape painter. Flemish cultural tradition is especially relevant as the taste for Northern art in Italy specifically celebrated southern Netherlandish representations of landscape (however marginal in some cases); this appreciation is well documented as early as the fifteenth century and certainly through the early seventeenth century. Jan Brueghel the Elder’s patron Federico Borromeo (1564–1631) even championed the idea that landscape and still life subjects could inspire or reinforce Catholic faith, focusing his early art collecting almost exclusively on landscape subjects. 45 The artists discussed here furthermore all chose to travel outside of their native regions, in many cases making trans-Alpine journeys, thereby gaining access to broader experiences of both the natural world and the artistic production of multiple regions in Europe. Although these examples certainly have their precedents, the works of Germanic artists like Wolfgang Huber (ca. 1485–1553) and Albrecht Altdorfer (ca. 1480–1538), Flemish countrymen like Hans Bol (1534–ca. 1593) and Matthijs Cock (ca. 1505–1548), and also Italian artists such as Fra Bartolomeo (1472–1517), 43 Van Hoogstraten, Introduction to the Academy of Painting, 84, 266. 44 Norgate, Miniatura or the Art of Limning, 84. 45 Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana, 65; Jones, “Federico Borromeo as a Patron of Landscapes and Still Lifes.”

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Fig. 2.11: Peter Paul Rubens, Trees Reflected in Water at Sunset, ca. 1635–1638. Black, red, and orange chalks, heightened with white, on buff paper, 27.6 × 45.4 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. Gg.2.229. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Gherardo Cibo (1512–1600), and Titian, among others, suggest a new momentum for landscape drawing in general—and for self-conscious and highly stylized pen-drawn landscapes more specifically—in the decades following Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s career. Most of the drawings considered thus far do not relate to work created in another, more public arena of artistic work, like painting or printmaking. Owing to the still tenuous status of drawings at the time of their production, their very survival testifies to their collective good fortune and to the value they likely held as reference material for their makers. A final example reflects the somewhat precarious status of drawings produced in the early seventeenth century. Although prolific in nearly all areas of his artistic practice, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) is represented as a landscape draftsman by only a handful of extant sheets. 46 The haphazard means of survival for drawings produced around 1600 provide at least partial explanation for this fact. 47 One of Rubens’s rare independent landscape drawings bears a character similar in its abstraction to Van Dyck’s coastal clouds (Fig. 2.11). In this drawing, Trees Reflected 46 Logan and Plomp, Peter Paul Rubens, 286. 47 Baker, Elam, and Warwick, Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe; Lobis, “The Afterlife of Drawings,” Rubens, Rembrandt, and Drawing in the Golden Age, 272–84.

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in Water at Sunset, held today in the British Museum, Rubens depicts a line of trees on the bank of a body of water, presumably close to Elewijt, where he spent an increasing amount of time in his later years in the land around his house Het Steen. Once again using the trois crayon technique he had so skillfully deployed in his earlier portrait drawings, in this drawing Rubens sparingly, though rather densely, applied red chalk at the far left of the sheet to indicate the color of the setting sun. Likewise, white chalk appears above and below the red to indicate the diffuse light he observed at sunset. Rubens’s pen and ink inscription cites a theory proposed by Franciscus Aguilonius (1567–1617), for whose treatise on optics Rubens provided illustrations as well as a title-page design decades earlier. 48 The inscription reads, “the trees appear browner and more perfect in the water than they do themselves.”49 Julius Held first made the connection between this inscription and the passage from Aguilonius that proposed how shadows can impact perception.50 There is a clear contrast to the drawings that feature as primary evidence in this essay; Rubens’s inscription testifies to his direct study of nature, specifically, the effect of shadow as observed in reflections at sunset. The artist’s observation is rendered through the cursory application of black chalk, applied with greater pressure in the passages describing shadow. Loose and notational, Rubens’s chalkdrawn lines do not explicitly manifest his individual stylistic expression. Rather, he used drawing in this case as a method for scientific experimentation. Without his inscription, it might be difficult to discern the precise subject of Rubens’s drawing. Its abstraction obviates its ability to perform the descriptive work so celebrated by the landscape artists of successive decades in Flanders and elsewhere. In other words, even in its explicit motivation to record what has been seen, Rubens’s drawing of trees still reminds its viewer that the space of landscape drawing importantly served as a site for the artist to exercise his mind and test his hand.

Works Cited Adriani, Gert, ed. Anton van Dyck Italienisches Skizzenbuch. 1940. Reprint, Vienna: Schroll, 1965. Arndt, Karl. “Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. als Vorläufer Coninxloos: Bemerkungen zur Geschichte der Waldlandschaft.” Kunstgeschichtliche Gesellschaft zu Berlin, Sitzungsberichte, n.s. 14 (1965/1966): 9–11.

48 Judson and Van de Velde, Book Illustrations and Title-Pages, 100–116, cat. nos. 10–16. 49 “de boomen wederschyn[en] In het Waeter bruynder/ ender veel perfecter In het Waeter als de boomen selvde.” Logan and Plomp, Peter Paul Rubens, 284, cat. 104. 50 Held, “Rubens and Aguilonius,” 261–62.

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Arndt, Karl. “Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. und die Geschichte der ‘Waldlandschaft.’” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 14 (1972): 69–121. Baker, Christopher, Caroline Elam, and Genevieve Warwick, eds. Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500–1750. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Bell Gallery. Children of Mercury: The Education of Artists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Exhibition catalog. Providence, RI: Department of Art, Brown University, 1984. Bjurström, Per. Drawings from Stockholm: A Loan Exhibition from the Nationalmuseum. Exhibition catalog. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1969. Bolten, Jaap. Method and Practice: Dutch and Flemish Drawing Books, 1600–1750. Stuttgart: Edition PVA, 1985. Boon, Karel. “Roelandt Savery te Praag.” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 9, no. 4 (1961): 145–48. Broos, Ben. “The ‘O’ of Rembrandt.” Simiolus 4, no. 3 (1971): 150–84. Brown, Christopher. Dutch Landscape: The Early Years, Haarlem and Amsterdam, 1590–1650. Exhibition catalog. London: The National Gallery, 1986. Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Cust, Lionel. A Description of the Sketch-book by Sir Anthony van Dyck, Used by him in Italy, 1621–1627. London: George Bell and Sons, 1902. Dempsey, Charles. “Some Observations on the Education of Artists in Florence and Bologna during the Later Sixteenth Century.” Art Bulletin 62, no. 4 (December 1980): 552–69. Dodgson, Campbell. “Staynemer: An Unknown Landscape Artist.” Burlington Magazine 21, no. 109 (April 2012): 30–31, 34–35. Ducos, Blaise, and Oliva Savatier Sjöholm, eds. Un Allemand à la cour de Louis XIV: De Dürer à Van Dyck, la collection nordique d’Everhard Jabach. Exhibition catalog. Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2013. Dunbar, Burton L. “The Landscape Paintings of Cornelis Massys.” Bulletin des Musées Royaux des Beaux-arts de Belgique 23/29, nos. 1–3 (1974/1980): 97–126. Feigenbaum, Gail. “Practice in the Carracci Academy.” Studies in the History of Art 38 (1993): 58–76. Freedberg, David. Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century. London: British Museum Publications, 1980. Gerszi, Teréz. “Landscapes and City Views of Prague.” In Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City, edited by Eliša Fučikova, 130–45. Exhibition catalog. London: Prague Castle Administration and Thames and Hudson, 1997. Gerszi, Teréz, with the assistance of Bernadett Tóth. The New Ideal of Beauty in the Age of Pieter Bruegel: Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Drawings in the Museum of Fine Arts. Exhibition catalog. Budapest: Szépmúvészeti Múzeum, 2012. Gerszi, Teréz, and Louisa Wood Ruby, with contributions by Bernadett Tóth. Jan Brueghel: A Magnificent Draughtsman. Exhibition catalog. Kontich, Belgium: BAI, 2019. Gibson, Walter S. Mirror of the Earth: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

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Gibson, Walter S. Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Gifford, E. Melanie. “Pieter Bruegel’s Afterlife: A Visual Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century Landscape.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 69 (2019): 43–72. Gombrich, Ernst H. “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape.” Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 107–21. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Hand, John Oliver, J. Richard Judson, William W. Robinson, and Martha Wolff. The Age of Bruegel: Netherlandish Drawings in the Sixteenth Century. Exhibition catalog. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Hasselt, Carlos van. Dessins des paysagistes hollandais du XVII siècle: De la collection particulière conservée à l’Institut Néerlandais de Paris. Exhibition catalog. Paris: Institut Néerlandais, 1968. Held, Julius S. “Rubens and Aguilonius: New Points of Contact.” Art Bulletin 61, no. 2 (June 1979): 257–64. Hoogstraten, Samuel van. Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or The Visible World (1678). Edited by Celeste Brusati. Translated by Jaap Jacobs. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2021. Jaffé, David. “New Thoughts on Van Dyck’s Italian Sketchbook.” Burlington Magazine 143, no. 1183 (October 2001): 614–24. Jones, Pamela M. Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and the Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Jones, Pamela M. “Federico Borromeo as a Patron of Landscapes and Still Lifes: Christian Optimism in Italy ca. 1600.” Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 261–72. Judson, J. Richard, and Carl Van de Velde. Peter Paul Rubens: Book Illustrations and TitlePages. Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard 2. 2 vols. London and Philadelphia: Harvey Miller and Heydon & Son, 1978. Leeflang, Huigen, and Pieter Roelofs, eds. Hercules Segers: Painter-Etcher. 2 vols. Exhibition catalog. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2017. Legrand, Catherine, Jean-François Méjanès, and Emmanuel Starcky. Le paysage en Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Exhibition catalog. Paris: Edition de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990. Lobis, Victoria Sancho. “Printed Drawing Books and the Dissemination of Ideal Male Anatomy.” In The Nude and the Norm in the Early Modern Low Countries, edited by Karolien De Glippel, Katharina Van Cauteren, and Katlijne Van der Stighelen, 51–64. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Lobis, Victoria Sancho, ed. Rubens, Rembrandt, and Drawing in the Golden Age. Exhibition catalog. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2019. Logan, Anne-Marie, and Michiel Plomp. Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings. Exhibition catalog. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004.

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Lugt, Frits. “Pieter Bruegel und Italien.” In Festschrift fur Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburstage, edited by Paul Oskar Kristeller and Elfried Bock, 111–29. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1927. Mander, Karel van. Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const. Edited by Hessel Miedema. Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1973. Mander, Karel van. The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603–04). Edited by Hessel Miedema. 6 vols. Doornspijk: Davaco, 1994–1999. McGrath, Elizabeth. “‘Una striga in Palermo’: A Sicilian Document from the Italian Sketchbook.” In Van Dyck 1599–1641: Conjectures and Refutations, edited by Hans Vlieghe, 43–51. Turnhout: Brepols, 2001. Meder, Joseph. The Mastery of Drawing. 2 vols. Translated and revised by Winslow Ames. New York: Abaris Books, 1978. Mielke, Hans. Pieter Bruegel: Die Zeichnungen. Pictura Nova: Studies in 16th and 17th Century Flemish Painting and Drawing. Turnhout: Brepols, 1996. Mielke, Hans. Review of L’epoque de Lucas de Leyde et Pierre Bruegel. Master Drawings 23/24, no. 1 (1985/1986): 75–90. Mochizuki, Mia M. “The Dutch Text Painting.” Word and Image 23, no. 1 (2007): 72–88. Mochizuki, Mia M. The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Nash, Ray. Calligraphy and Printing. Boston, MA: The Merrymount Press, 1940. Norgate, Edward. Miniatura or the Art of Limning (1648). Edited by Jeffrey M. Muller and Jim Murrel. New Haven, CT and London: Paul Mellon Centre for British Art for Yale University Press, 1997. Oberthaler, Elke, Sabine Pénot, Manfred Sellink, and Ron Spronk, with Alice HoppeHarnoncourt. Bruegel the Master. Exhibition catalog. London: Thames and Hudson, 2018. Onuf, Alexandra Kirkman. “Local Terrains: The Small Landscapes Prints and the Depiction of the Countryside in Early Modern Antwerp.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006. Orenstein, Nadine, ed. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. Exhibition catalog. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Pevsner, Nikolaus. Academies of Art: Past and Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. Regteren Altena, I. Q. van. Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations. 3 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983. Regteren Altena, I. Q. van. “Vergeten Namen: III. Staynemer of Stinemolen?” Oud Holland 49 (1932): 91–96. Robinson, William W., ed. Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2016.

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Rosand, David. Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Rosand, David, and Michelangelo Muraro. Titian and the Venetian Woodcut. Exhibition catalog. Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1976. Royalton-Kisch, Martin. The Light of Nature: Landscape Drawings and Watercolours by Van Dyck and His Contemporaries. Exhibition catalog. London: British Museum Press, 1999. Sandrart, Joachim von. L’academia todesca della architectura, scultura & pittura; oder Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild-, und Mahlerey-Künste. 2 vols. Nuremberg: Jacob von Sandrart, 1675–1679. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Spicer, Joaneath Ann. “The ‘Naer Het Leven’ Drawings: By Pieter Bruegel or Roelandt Savery?” Master Drawings 8, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 3–30, 63–82. Spicer, Joaneath, with Odilia Bonebakker and David Franklin. Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada. Exhibition catalog. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2004. Spicer-Durham, Joaneath. “The Drawings of Roelandt Savery.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1979. Stampfle, Felice, ed. Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Swan, Claudia. “Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the Life: Defining a Mode of Representation.” Word and Image 11, no. 4 (1995): 353–72. Takahatake, Naoko, with contributions by Jonathan Bober, Jamie Gabbarelli, Antony Griffiths, Peter Parshall, and Linda Stiber Morenus. The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy. Exhibition catalog. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2018. Vergara, Alejandro, ed. Patinir: Estudios y catálogo crítico. Exhibition catalog. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007. Vey, Horst. Die Zeichnungen Anton van Dycks. 2 vols. Brussels: Verlag Arcade, 1962–1967. Winner, Matthias, ed. Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. als Zeichner: Herkunft und Nachfolge. Exhibition catalog. Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, 1975. Wood, Christopher S. Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. Rev. ed. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. Wood, Christopher S. “Landscapes by Wolf Huber and Domenico Campagnola.” In Jenseits des disegno: Die Entstehung selbstständiger Zeichnungen in Deutschland und Italien im 15. and 16. Jahrhundert, edited by Daniela Bohde and Alessandro Nova, 291–315. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2018. Wood Ruby, Louisa. “Bruegel/Brueghel/Bril: The ‘Lugt Group’ Revisited.” Master Drawings 50, no. 3 (Autumn 2012): 357–64.

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About the Author Victoria Sancho Lobis joined Pomona College as the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in January 2020. Lobis also serves as Associate Professor in Pomona’s Art History Department. She authored Rubens, Rembrandt, and Drawing in the Golden Age (2019).

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Painted Landscape before Landscape Painting in Early Modern England Karin Leonhard

Abstract This paper investigates the period before landscape painting was regarded as an autonomous genre and became a key concept of British national identity—that is, in paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Painting landscapes then regularly appears as the task of developing a spatial-plastic continuum; beginning from the foreground, the painter works, layer by layer, toward the most distant point in the depth of the pictorial space, revealing different layers or steps of visibility. Keywords: landscape painting; early modern England; parergon; argument; foreground; background

In England, landscapes were initially only painted as backgrounds for portraits and typically represented the parks or estates of a landowner. It has often been said that British landscape painting began with Thomas Gainsborough and Richard Wilson, yet little has been done to show what was happening in landscape painting in England before them or what their primary inspiration may have been. Therefore, in this chapter, I would like to investigate the period before landscape painting was regarded as an autonomous genre and became a key aspect of British national identity by looking at paintings from the early seventeenth century. Great preEnglish Civil War collections, such as those of Charles I, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Countess of Arundel, included landscapes by Annibale Carracci, Adam Elsheimer, Paul Bril, and Cornelis van Poelenburgh, as well as a few by Flemish masters, such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Joos de Momper, and Roelant Savery.1 Peter Paul Rubens painted the magnificent St. George and the Dragon for Charles I when 1 More than half of the paintings lining the great chamber and withdrawing room at the Countess of Arundel’s Tart Hall were landscapes; and in the wainscoting of the Single Cube Room at Wilton, the Earl of Pembroke’s guests saw paintings of scenes from Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral Arcadia. Skelton, The Paradox of Body, 133.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch03

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Fig. 3.1: Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape with St. George and the Dragon, 1630–1635. Oil on canvas, 152.5 × 226.9 cm, Windsor, Royal Collection, inv. no. RCIN 405356. Image: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022.

he visited England in 1629/30 (Fig. 3.1). The presence of such pictures in England was a sign of a changing attitude toward landscape painting that had begun to make itself felt early that century.

“A small Landskip drawn by Sir Nath: Bacon” Created just a short time before Rubens’s St. George, presumably in the early 1620s, this Landscape, painted by Nathaniel Bacon (1585–1627) in oil on copper, is considered a prime example of early modern English landscape painting, and this in spite of the fact that it measures only 7.1 × 10.7 cm (Fig. 3.2). “Freely painted in a range of impasto greens, browns and greys, this little picture shows a tree-topped rock at the center, up which ascend a tiny horseman and a figure on foot. Buildings are seen to the right, cottages to the left and a church behind, with another on the horizon.”2 It has been assumed that the composition may have been intended 2 Hearn, Nathaniel Bacon, 10.

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Fig. 3.2: Nathaniel Bacon, Landscape, 1656. Oil on unprimed copper, backed with oak panel, 7 × 11 cm, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, inv. no. WA1908.224. Image: © Ashmolean Museum.

to represent the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt, though it could conceivably be a depiction of St. George, as the varnish has yellowed considerably, and the figures are too minute to be definitely identified. As the ebony frame appears to be original to this work that bears the conjoined monogram “NB” rather prominently in the branches of the tree at the center of the composition, the painting may have been considered an autonomous object and not a decorative element on, for example, a cabinet. The provenance confirms this assumption, as it has been part of the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford since its founding in the late seventeenth century. It is thought to be the “small Landskip drawn by Sir Nath: Bacon”3 that in 1656 was listed in an inventory of the collection amassed largely by the celebrated gardener John Tradescant the Elder (ca. 1570–1638). If so, it is the first-known pure landscape painting by an English-born artist. Nathaniel Bacon was closely related to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, the son of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who had been the patron of John Tradescant. He was also the nephew of the politician, natural philosopher, and writer Sir Francis Bacon. Himself a horticultural enthusiast, he cultivated exotic fruits and vegetables. He 3 Tradescant, Musæum Tradescantianum, 40.

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was also included in a list of “Principall Benefactors to the Precedent Collection” of Tradescant’s rarities, the rarities cataloged by Elias Ashmole, an antiquarian with a strong Baconian leaning toward the study of nature, in the early 1650s. After Tradescant’s death in 1662, Ashmole took possession of the collection and turned it into the first museum in Britain open to the public. Bacon’s “small landskip” is listed next to “Severall draughts and pieces of painting of sundry excellent Masters” in a chapter of the catalog dedicated, as its title indicates, to “Mechanick artificiall Works in Carvings, Turnings, Sewings, and Paintings.”4 It is singled out in this list as the only painting attributed to an artist, which suggests that the little piece was held in high esteem because of its illustrious provenance. In Britain, landscape painting had previously been practiced exclusively by Netherlandish artists. Indeed, in his early seventeenth-century manuscript treatise, Miniatura (1627–1628; revised 1649; and therefore written at the same time as Bacon painted his “small landskip”), the painter and herald Edward Norgate (1581–1650) described it as “an Art soe new in England, and soe lately come a shore, as all the Language within our fower Seas cannot find it a Name, but a borrowed one, and that from […] the Dutch,” namely “landschap.”5 Norgate also commended the work of Adam Elsheimer and Paul Bril, examples of whose small paintings on copper were owned by the most active English art collectors of the early seventeenth century, including Charles I and Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel. Nathaniel Bacon himself owned “Eighten lantsheps little and great,” which hung in the “inward parlour” of Culford Hall, as was noted in the inventory of his household at the time his widow, Jane, died in 1659.6

Landskip It is interesting to note that the word landscape entered the modern English language as landskip, an Anglicization of the Dutch landschap, around the start of the seventeenth century. It initially served purely as a term for works of art and was first used by Richard Haydocke (1569/70–ca. 1642) to describe a painting in his Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge (1598).7 More precisely, the modern form of the word, with its connotations of scenery, was borrowed from Dutch artists and denoted a painting whose primary subject matter was either inland natural 4 Tradescant, Musæum Tradescantianum, 36. 5 Norgate, Miniatura (1997), 82. 6 1659, Hertford Record Office, Gorhambury, IX.D.54; cf. Hearn, Nathaniel Bacon, 32. 7 Haydocke, A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, 94: “Barnazano an excellent Landskipworker counterfeited Strawberies so liuelie uppon a wall in a Landskip, that the Peacockes […] pecked at them.”

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or rural scenery.8 Within a few decades, it was also used to describe vistas in poetry—according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest instance is found in John Milton’s L’Allegro (1632)—and eventually as a term for real views.9 However, the cognate term landscaef or landskipe, meaning a cleared patch of land, already existed in Old English: scaef derived from the Old English verb sceppan, meaning “to shape.”10 Since the suffix “-schaft” is related to the verb schaffen, ship and shape are also etymologically linked, emphasizing the process of cultivating nature. It is worthwhile to look at the exact wording used in early modern English dictionaries. One example is Thomas Blount’s Glossographia; or, a Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue (1656), of which several editions were published and which defined around 11,000 words deemed unusual or difficult to understand. It was not only the largest English dictionary at the time of its publication, but was also the first to include etymological information and to cite sources of definitions. According to Blount, the word landscape signifies “an end of land that stretcheth further into the Sea then other parts of the Continent thereabouts,” whereas the term Landskip is derived from “Belgian” and means a “Parergon, Paisage or By-Work, which is an expressing of the Land, by Hills, Woods, Castles, Valleys, Rivers, Cities, &c. as far as may be shewn in our Horizon.”11 Interestingly, Blount’s definition is elucidated by an additional comment: All that which in a Picture is not of the body or argument thereof is Landskip, Parergon, or By-work. As in the Table of our Saviours Passion, the picture of Christ upon the Rood (which is the proper English word for Cross) the two Theeves, the blessed Virgin Mary, and St. John, are the Argument: But the City Jerusalem, the Country about, the clouds, and the like, are Landskip.

Thomas Blount (1618–1679) was an English antiquarian, lexicographer, and a zealous Roman Catholic. He was called to the bar at the Inner Temple, but, because his religion interfered considerably with the practice of the law, he retired and dedicated his life to private studies. His devotion to the Roman Catholic Church, however, may be also reflected in the subject he chose as his example: a landskip with the Crucifixion, St. Mary, and St. John. It is reminiscent of Early Netherlandish paintings in which the Crucifixion is set in a vast panoramic landscape containing 8 Olwig, “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape,” 630–53. 9 Milton, Poems, 33: “Streit mine eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the Lantskip round it measures, / Russet Lawns, and Fallows Gray, / Where the nibbling flocks do stray, / Mountains on whose barren brest / The labouring clouds do often rest; […].” 10 See e.g. “Shāpen,” the Middle English Compendium, accessed December 27, 2020, https://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED39781/track?counter=2&search_id=4946730. 11 Blount, Glossographia, s.v. “Landskip.”

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multifarious details, some of which are related to the main subject, while a great many others are purely incidental. That Blount’s definition of landscape is not necessarily rooted in a particular school or confession is evidenced in the adaptation of the passage in The New World of English Words, published by Edward Phillips (1630–ca. 1696) just two years later, in 1658: Lantskip, Landskip, or Paisage, a description of the land as far as may be seen above the Horison, by hills, valleys, cities, woods, rivers, &c. in a mixt picture, which contains both persons and the description of a Country, or any part of a Country; the Persons are called the Argument, the Landskip, the Parergon, or By-Work.12

Phillips, the nephew and student of the Puritan poet John Milton (1608–1674), became the tutor of John Evelyn’s son as well as of the family of Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington, in the 1660s.13 Prior to this, he worked as a bookseller’s clerk in London, and it was during that time that he applied himself to the compilation of a dictionary that was to surpass Blount’s Glossographia both in dimension and popularity. It soon became obvious, however, that Phillips had copied many definitions from Blount and, as a consequence, the two were engaged in a publishing war for many years undertaking constant revisions of their works accompanied by denunciations of the other. Not least because of this “feud,” it can be assumed that no item entered their dictionaries without due consideration. Blount had been educated 12 Phillips, The New World of English Words, s.v. “Landskip.” 13 Note John Evelyn’s comparison of vistas, perspectives, and landscape elements in contemporary garden architecture to painting, during his visit in Paris in 1644: “1st March, 1644. I went to see the Count de Liancourt’s Palace in the Rue de Seine, which is well built. Toward his study and bedchamber joins a little garden, which, though very narrow, by the addition of a well-painted perspective, is to appearance greatly enlarged; to this there is another part, supported by arches in which runs a stream of water, rising in the aviary, out of a statue, and seeming to flow for some miles, by being artificially continued in the painting, when it sinks down at the wall. It is a very agreeable deceit. At the end of this garden is a little theater, made to change with divers pretty scenes, and the stage so ordered, with figures of men and women painted on light boards, and cut out, and, by a person who stands underneath, made to act as if they were speaking, by guiding them, and reciting words in different tones, as the parts require. We were led into a round cabinet, where was a neat invention for reflecting lights, by lining divers sconces with thin shining plates of gilded copper.” Or his entry, in the same year: “The passage from this town to Naples (which is about ten or twelve English post miles) is as straight as a line, of great breadth, fuller of travelers than I remember any of our greatest and most frequented roads near London; but, what is extremely pleasing, is the great fertility of the fields, planted with fruit trees, whose boles are serpented with excellent vines, and they so exuberant, that it is commonly reported one vine will load five mules with its grapes. What adds much to the pleasure of the sight is, that the vines, climbing to the summit of the trees, reach in festoons and fruitages from one tree to another, planted at exact distances, forming a more delightful picture than painting can describe.” In 1664, Evelyn praises a perspectival view by the English-born “landskip” painter Robert Streeter: “1st July, 1664. Went to see Mr. Povey’s elegant house in Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, where the perspective in his court, painted by Streeter, is indeed excellent.” The Diary of John Evelyn, 54, 147–48, 374.

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as a lawyer, and the comparison of a landscape to a “by-work,” or “parergon,” that surrounds the central figures and main narrative, or “argument,” mirrors a manner of speech or discourse common among students of rhetoric and law.

“Argument” and “Parergon” It is thus no coincidence that Malcolm Andrews, in his recent book Landscape and Western Art, uses Blount’s rhetorical terminology and thought pattern in his discussion of Wolf Huber’s Landscape with Golgotha (ca. 1525–1530). Though painted a century earlier, in his eyes it “seems almost to be testing out the relationship between landscape and Argument” (Fig. 3.3).14 He continues: The watercolour view seems peculiarly inconsequential, as if waiting for the introduction of the Argument. In fact, the Argument, or the scaffolding for it, is vestigially present: the crosses on Golgotha recede almost to invisibility [!] on the horizon on the right; the city in the background is presumably Jerusalem. Neither of these narrative features, however, commands the picture. Instead we are left with the strange arena stretching right across the foreground, like an empty stage waiting for the human action to begin. Is the subject an unfinished religious painting? Is it a topographical view? A landscape capriccio?

In his study on Albrecht Altdorfer (ca. 1480–1538), Christopher Wood, too, employs Blount’s definition to underscore the asymmetry between work and accessory; in his opinion, it is the unbalanced interdependence that shaped the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in general. According to Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer’s art clearly sets itself apart from precisely this opposition between frame and center: [It abolishes] the boundary between subject and setting, as well as the hierarchy, by banishing subject and funnelling setting toward the literal centre of the image. Once subject is gone, it is no longer possible to characterize landscape as either overdetermined or underdetermined. It no longer even makes sense to call it a setting. For the primary boundary is now the frontier between work and world. The symbol of this new boundary is the frame.15

Consider Altdorfer’s splendid masterpiece of a landscape in St. George in the Woods (1510), in which two tiny figures are almost submerged in the lush, dense forest that 14 Andrews, Landscape and Western Art, 6. 15 Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer, 58.

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Fig. 3.3: Wolf Huber, Large Landscape with Golgotha, 1525–1530. Pen and brown ink, watercolor, and gouache, 32.7 × 44.5 cm, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Graphische Sammlung der Universitätsbibliothek, inv. no. B822. Image: © Graphische Sammlung der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, B822.

towers over them (Fig. 3.4). At first glance, we might agree with the idea that, in this case, landscape is no more a parergon or setting for the main narrative than, say, a pool of water is for an ice cube. The figures blend in with their surrounding environment; they are completely absorbed by the density of the forest. But can this impression, in fact, be connected with the contemporaneous discussion about the relation of figure and landscape? To consider this question, let us turn to a few late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century references to painted landscapes and try to differentiate them in a more comprehensive and systematic way. Returning now to the discussion of primary source research, the earliest use of the word landscape in print in English can be found in Richard Haydocke’s translation of Giovan Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte de la pittura, published in London in 1598. It contains a chapter on the “Motions of Trees, and all Other Thinges that are Mooved” in which Haydocke deals with the treatment of natural phenomena, such as waves, clouds, plants, and fire, but does not consider landscape as a whole. The first English writer to deal directly with landscape was Henry Peacham (ca. 1576–ca. 1643) who devoted a whole chapter to it in his treatise The Art of Drawing with the Pen and Limning in Water Colours, published in London in 1606. While, in the first edition, he clearly defines it as a branch of painting that, as a rule, was not

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Fig. 3.4: Albrecht Altdorfer, St. George in the Woods, ca. 1510. Oil on parchment on linden wood, 28.2 × 22.5 cm, Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. WAF 29. Image: © bpk|Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung.

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practiced for its own sake, by the second edition, published in 1612, he altered the wording to show that he was familiar with the concept of pure landscape. 1606: Of Landt-skip. CHAP. 10. LAndtskip is a Dutch word, & it is as much as wee shoulde say in English landship, or expressing of the land by hills, woodes, Castles, seas, valleys, ruines, hanging rocks, Citties, Townes, &c. as farre as may bee shewed within our Horizon. Seldome it is drawne by it selfe, but in respect & for the sake of some thing els: wherfore it falleth out among those thing which we call Parerga, which are additions or adiuncts rather of ornament, thē otherwise necessary: as for exāple I should Draw the citty of London, I would beside the citty it selse, shew in vacant places (as far as my table or Horizon would giue me leaue) the Country round about, as Shooters hill, and the high way winding vp there between the woods, the Thames to grow lesse and lesse, & appearing as it were a dozen mile of, heer and there scattered with shippes and boats: Greenwitch with the tower there and such like, all which are beside my purpose, because I was tied to nothing but the citty itselfe: this kind of all other is most pleasing, because it feedeth the eie with varietie. Before you make your Landskip, you must haue perfected all your other work, & let that be the last […].

1612: CHAP. XI. Of Lant-skip. LAndtskip is a Dutch word, and it is as much as we should say in English landship, or expressing of the land by hilles, woods, Castles, Seas, vallies, ruines, hanging rockes, Cities, Townes, &c. as farre as may be shewed within our Horizon. If it be not drawne by it selfe or for the owne sake, but in respect, and for the sake of some thing else: it falleth out among those things which we call Parerga, which are additions or adiuncts rather of ornament, then otherwise necessarie. 

In the version from 1606, Peacham lays the cornerstone for the later standard definition: “Landtskip is a Dutch word,” he writes, “& it is as much as wee shoulde say in English landship, or expressing of the land by hills, woodes, Castles, seas, valleys, ruines, hanging rocks, Citties, Townes, &c. as farre as may bee shewed within our Horizon,” and his statement is famously echoed in the early seventeenth-century manuscript treatise Miniatura by Edward Norgate.16 Peacham, in turn, continues by saying that “seldome it is drawne by it selfe, but in respect & for the sake of some thing els: wherfore it falleth out among those thing which we call Parerga, which are additions or adiuncts rather of ornament, theotherwise necessary.”17 As example, he selects a depiction of the city of London and its surroundings, like a View of London from Southwark by an artist from the Anglo-Dutch School circa 1630, or Claude de Jongh’s View of Old London Bridge, from the same period, that are, as he writes, “all […] beside my purpose” (Figs. 3.5 and 3.6).18 First the city must 16 Norgate, Miniatura (1919), 82; Norgate, Miniatura (1997); Peacham, The Art of Drawing, 28. 17 Peacham, The Art of Drawing, 28–29. 18 Peacham, The Art of Drawing, 28–29.

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Fig. 3.5: Anglo-Dutch School, London from Southwark, ca. 1630. Oil on oak panel, 57.7 × 85.7 cm, London, Museum of London, inv. no. 001697. Image: © Museum of London.

Fig. 3.6: Claude de Jongh, View of Old London Bridge, ca. 1630. Oil on panel, 48.9 × 109.2 cm, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. 7129–1860. Image: © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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be completed; only then does one devote oneself to the surroundings: “Before you make your Landskip, you must haue perfected all your other work, & let that be the last.”19 Landscape was thus considered the secondary or additional element in a painting; it is not seen as generating a stage on which the action or the ergon unfolds, but rather is placed around the core of the depiction like a frame, a mantle, or—the word is missing here—an ornament. At the same time, these parerga, “this kind of all other,” are “most pleasing, because [they] feedeth the eie with varietie.”20 In the 1612 edition of Peacham’s book, however, the entire last part has been left out, while the wording of the first sentence has been slightly altered. It no longer states that the landscape is “seldome drawne by it selfe,” but, in a relative way, that it only functions as a “parergon,” “addition,” “adiunct,” or “ornament” in those instances in which it is not painted “for the owne sake” (see Appendix).21

Singularia and Universalia In both editions, this section is followed by some “Generall rules for Landtskip.” Even in the earliest version, published in 1606, reference is made to the Aristotelian differentiation or relation between the sensorially perceptible and the intelligible, the universalia and singularia, specifically through the discussion of the perceptibility of small things from a great distance. One must ensure, for example, that things in the distance are smaller and more difficult to make out: “you must be very dainty in lessening your bodies by their distance & haue a regard, the farther your Landsskip goeth to those vniuersalia which as Aristotle saith (*in respect of theyre particulars concealed from our sences) are notiora.”22 This passage is most interesting, as it tackles the question of the relation between sensory and intellectual cognition which was discussed in Aristotle’s De anima and introduced to the medieval world by Boethius (ca. 480/85–ca. 524/26). It was even more fervently discussed by William of Ockham (ca. 1288–1347), who argued that only individuals exist and that universals are mental ways of referring to sets of individuals. For this reason, differences in how clearly things can be perceived in a painted landscape reflect the steps of the cognitive process that lead from what can be perceived to what is intelligible. Viewed from up close, the “particulars” appear clear and precise to the eye while the universals do not truly and perceivably exist but are only thought-objects in the mind (“objectivum in anima”). This is also true of the horizon which symbolizes the metaphysical problem the universals were brought in to address. 19 Peacham, The Art of Drawing, 28–29. 20 Peacham, The Art of Drawing, 28–29. 21 Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise, 40. 22 Peacham, The Art of Drawing, 30.

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1606: Generall rules for Landtskip. YOu shall alwaies in your Landtskip shewe a fair Horizon, and expresse the heauen more or lesse either ouercast by clouds, or with a cleare sky, shewing the sunne rising or setting ouer some hill or other: you shall seldome, except vpon necessity, shew the moone or stars, because we imagin al things to be seene by day. 2. Yf you shew the Sunne, let all the light of your trees, hils, Rocks, building &c be giuen thitherward: shadow also your clouds from the sunne: and you must be very dainty in lessening your bodies by their distance & haue a regard, the farther your Landsskip goeth to those vniuersalia which as Aristotle saith (* in respect of theyre particulars concealed from our sences) are notiora: as in discerning a building 10 or 12 miles off, I cannot tell whether it bee Church, Castle, gentlemans house, or the like: So that in drawing of it I must expresse no particular signe as bell, portculleis &c, but shew it as weakly and as faintly as mine eie iudgeth of it “because all those particulars are taken away by the greatnes of the distance. I haue seen a man painted comming downe a hill some mile and a halfe from mee, as I iudged by the Landtskip, yet might you haue told all the buttons of his dublet: whether the painter had a suttle inuention, or the fellows buttons were as big as those in fashion whēn Mounseir came into England, I wil leaue it (friendly reader) to thy iudgement. If you laie your Landtskip in coloures, the farther you goe, the more you must lighten it with a thinne and aiery blew, to make it seeme farre off, beginning it first with a darke greene, so driuing it by degrees into a blew, which the densitie of the air betweene our sighte and that place doth (onely imaginarily) effect: your eie may easily bee deceiued in remote thinges, that is when the bodies appeare to your sighte farre bigger then indeede they are, by the corruption (as wee saie) of the Medium: as for example, the Sunne and Moone at their rising or Setting, you see, seeme farre bigger then when they are mounted ouer our heades in the Zenith: the reason is the thicknesse or corruption, as I sayd, of the ayre or Medium; which (beeing morning and Euening subiect to vapours) dooth participate and multiply the quality of the obiect […].”

1612: Generall rules for Landtskip. YOV shall alwaies in your• Landtskip shew a faire Horizon, and expresse the heauen more or lesse eyther ouercast by clouds, or with a cleere skie, shewing the Sunne rising or setting ouer some hill or other: you shall seldome, except vpon necessitie, shew the Moone or Starres, because we imagine all things to be seene by day. 2 If you shew the Sunne, let all the light of your trees, hilles, rockes, buildings, &c. be giuen thitherward: shadow also your clouds from the sunne: and you must be verie daintie in lessening your bo|dies by their distance, and haue a regard, the far|ther your Landtskip goeth to those vniuersalia, which as Aristotle saith (in respect of their particulars concealed from our sences) are notiora: as in discerning a building tenne or twelue miles off, I I cannot tell whether it be Church, Castle, House, or the like: So that in drawing of it, I must expresse no particular signe as Bell, Portculleis, &c. but shew it as weakly and as faintly as mine eye iudgeth of it, because all those particulars are taken away by the greatnesse of the distance. I haue seene a man painted comming downe a hill some mile and a halfe from mee, as I iudged by the Landskip, yet might you haue told all the buttons of his dublet: whether the painter had a quicke inuention, or the Gentlemans buttons were as big as those in fashion, when Mounseur came into England, I will leaue it to my readers iudgement. If you lay you Lantskip in colours, the farther you goe, the more you must lighten it with a thinne and ayerie blew, to make it seeme farre off, beginning it first with a darke greene, so driuing it by degrees in|to a blew, which the densitie of the ayre betweene our sight, and that place doth (onely imaginarily) effect.

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In the early edition of 1606, Peacham added this passage to a paragraph that, furthermore, links the way things in the landscape take on a bluish tint with the intervening role of the medium of air. Air becomes thicker as the distance increases, which results in the emergence of optical illusions that affect, above all, the size and coloration of things. This part was also completely left out of the version of 1612. Instead, Peacham introduces a new subchapter, “Of the Graces of Landtskip,” in which he operates between universalia and singularia with a similar differentiation. On the one hand, he states that the depiction of accidentia helps the painter achieve infinite “inuention and imitation”; on the other hand, absurdities repeatedly arise here, as if “your Landtship be good and true in generall, yet some particular error ouerslips your iudgement.”23 The “Parergas or needlesse graces,” as Peacham, in conclusion, once again refers to the landscape motifs, always pleased him, because they give the image variety: “you shall finde your conceipt seconded with a thousand inuentions.”24 However, according to English art theory of the first half of the seventeenth century, the contrast between proximity and distance, center and periphery, detail and whole, is inevitably a part of the concept of the genre as can be seen in Jan Siberechts’s Wollaton Hall (ca. 1690) (Fig. 3.7). Landscape painting bridges the gap between sensory and intellectual cognition, between singularia and universalia or at least makes the beholder aware of the intellectual challenge of visual perception and a possible touchpoint between the physical and the metaphysical. For this reason an anonymous author, in a treatise on The Geometry of Landskips and Paintings (1690), can state that “Landskip is […] rather a neat contraction or Epitome of things visible than a real view of them.”25 Even in William Sanderson’s influential Graphice, the Use of the Pen and Pencil, or the Most Excellent Art of Painting from 1658, landscape painting is placed in such an epistemological context. For Sanderson (ca. 1586–1676), the viewer becomes a traveler traversing the landscape, even if this only occurs visually or in his or her imagination. On this journey, things appear either near or far, either clear or “beyond the comprehension of Sight; and untill from several degrees of dimensions, each Creature seems contracted into Shapes, almost of Atomes.”26 The details that fade in the distance are difficult to discern and must be cognitively interpreted: The Judgement assists the Sight, to distinguish them into Buildings. […] And thus the Traveller, having long time looked over these objects; he turnes his back from all, with religious Contemplation: That in such varieties of Prospect; contarieties 23 Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise, 44. 24 Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise, 45. 25 Anon., The Geometry of Landskips and Paintings, 2. 26 Sanderson, Graphice, 7–8.

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Fig. 3.7: Jan Siberechts, Wollaton Hall, 1690s. Oil on canvas, 191.8 × 138.4 cm, New Haven, CT, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, inv. no. B1973.1.52. Image: © Yale Center for British Art.

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in Nature and affection; Fire and water, Hills and Vales, barren and fruitfull; Trees, and Medows; Heaven, and Earth; all should concurre in beautifull Objects, and Ornaments of delight, to Gods glory, and content to the Creature.27

Foreground and Background Only a short time before Sanderson, Franciscus Junius (1591–1677) had provided a first comprehensive overview of ancient writings on the subject of the fine arts, and in it, he also discussed the relationship between “argument” and “parergon.” In paragraph 6, he asserts that every painting ought to have a “principall place” that is populated with “principall figures,” for these advance the action: Every picture consisting of many figures must needs have some historicall part in it […]: it is ever requisite that the very figures which are represented in the worke, should teach us by a speechlesse discourse what connexion there is in them: but because in every historicall relation the things that are a doing are ever most remarkable, so is it that an understanding and warie Artificer doth ever assigne the principall place unto the principall figures which have the chiefest hand in the represented action.28

According to Junius, this “principall place” is distinguished by its clarity, while there can be secondary settings that are obscured in the depth of the picture, as in a haze. Thus painters are instructed to proceed in a manner that takes its cue from rhetoric: Wee are eever to beginne with what is chiefe, sayth Quintilian, neither doth any man, that is to make a picture or statue, take his beginning at the feet. As for the other circumstances, he fitteth them afterwards unto severall places, representing them a farre off in smaller figures, and sometimes also involving them and shutting them up as it were in a certaine kinde of mist: The Painter 27 Sanderson, Graphice, 8–9. Elsum calls it the “diminution of sensation, or the discerning of the Figures,” and the introductory words of The Geometry of Landskips and Paintings read: “The Geometry of Landskip is rather Optick or Perspective, than real; for if a Man were to be seen at that distance, as to appear as little as in a common Landskip, ’twere impossible with common sight to discern any part of him distinctly, much less any feature about him: So likewise of the Leaves of Trees, and Ornaments of Buildings; for at such a diminishing distance they would all appear obscure and confus’d, and not distinct and compleat, indeed, just as if they were going to leave the verge of sight, unless reduc’d back again by Perspective.” Elsum, The art of painting, 52; The Geometry of Landskips and Paintings, 1–2. 28 Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, 311.

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hath shed a mist about the other things, sayth Philostratus, that they might rather resemble things alreadie done, than things that are a doing.29

In this manner, different time levels are indicated, for the dimension of depth in space can be turned into a temporal one. But, at the same time, a specific ideal of picture composition is formulated, namely that the relationship between the individual figures, groups, and picture planes ought to be fluid, and create gradual transitions: It is likewise evident, that the worke requireth a round, and not interrupted continuance: all the parts of it must be connected, easily rolling on, and gently flowing or rather following one another, after the manner of them that goe hand in hand to strengthen their pace; they hold and are held.30

The demand for fluid transitions is especially important in landscape painting. Here, wave-like rhythms can be developed that extend across the picture space and tie foreground and background together.

Landscape and Drapery If we now return to Peacham, we can see that he follows his remarks on landskip with a chapter on the depiction of drapery. This is noteworthy, as landscape and drapery have similar functions: both are parerga—that is they surround a central necessity or ergon, and consequently, are subordinate or secondary to it. However, both are also a means of depicting a continuous space and are mediating between proximity and distance. In view of the depiction of garment folds, for example, Peacham writes: “You must not vse much folding where the garments ought to sit close, or any eminency appeare, as commonly there doth in the breasts of a woman, the armes, belly, thighes, legs, &c.,”31 almost as if the way the garment lies followed the hilly landscape of the human body. One must also differentiate between large, sweeping fold lines and smaller ones; the former “must be continued throughout the whole garment; the latter are shorter and frequently broken.”32 In general, the aim is to achieve the depiction of “loose apparrell,” and this in such a way that “your draperie haue a care of the winde and motion of the ayre, for driuing your loose 29 Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, 311–12: “Note: Orat. instit. lib. III, cap. 9” and “Note: Iconum lib. II, in Insulis.” 30 Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, 315. 31 Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise, 47–48. 32 Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise, 47–48.

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apparrell all one way, as Ouid describes the garments of Europa, when she by Iupiter [was] carried ouer the Sea.”33 The garment fabric should thus be directed by a single motion, as if it had been seized by a gust of wind and the folds were the expression of this continuous movement. “There is but small grace in an upright bodie,” states Franciscus Junius, thereby referencing Quintilian.34 He also agrees that there is not “any thing which can adde a more lively and forcible grace to the worke, than the likenesse of an outward motion, proceeding from the inward commotions of the minde.”35 The link made between landscape and drapery in English art literature as early as around 1600 was already a close one, and it fundamentally shaped further discussions on the relationship between figure, landscape, and drapery. I have collected numerous text samples; to the best of my knowledge, they all trace back to Haydocke (and with him, to Lomazzo and Leonardo) whose chapter “Of the Motions of Trees, and all Other Thinges that are Mooved” is preceded by a chapter “Of the Motions of All Sortes of Cloth.” In this chapter, a comparison is made between the motion of trees and that of the human body: Last of all the motions of every thing which is mooved, ought to be expressed with iudgment, accordingly as they agree with the thing wherunto they are giuen, sometimes quicke, sometimes slow, sometimes mooueable, sometimes not. And first of all in trees, when they are shaken of the wind, their smaler (& therfore more plyable) boughes, must be resembled with such an action, that they may more strike one against another, by yeelding and declyning from the part whence the wind bloweth, then the stiffer (& therefore slower) the body notwithstanding remaining stronge & stedfast.36

Similar guidelines apply to the depiction of flowing water and clouds, as is later stated in this famous passage from Lomazzo’s treatise, because here too it is a matter of taking the motivation of the movement into account which unites all parts in one continuous and directed motion. According to Haydocke, the folds in a garment behave like the branches of a tree, as if they were supported by an invisible frame that moved them: The motion of cloth, that is the foldes or plaites, ought to runne out every way like boughes from the stemme & body of the tree: and must be so made that one plait rise from another, as one bough or one streame of water issueth out from 33 Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise, 47–48. 34 Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, 291. 35 Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, 291. 36 Haydocke, A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, 90.

Painted L andscape before L andscape Painting in Early Modern Engl and 

another; in such wise, that there be no part of the cloth wherein there appeare not some of these motions.37

In his Book of Drawing (1652), Thomas Jenner (1631–1656), for example, speaks of “Drawing Garments” in such a manner that the “folds must imitate the branches of a tree,” in other words, that they should “bend with the body.”38 When, in the following chapter, he moves on to describe contemporary landscape painting, he does so with the same terminology he just used to discuss the depiction of garment folds: as though the landscape itself were a piece of fabric that, fold by fold, could be crammed together or stretched out. Jenner criticized painters, for example, who “have run into [an] error, by making the Landskip mount up higher and higher, till it reach up a great height, that it appears to touch the clouds,” suggesting instead that “the best way of making Landskips is to make them shoot away one part lower then another, which hath been practised by our best workmen of late.”39 In this way, the topographies of landscapes are formed like the bunching up or smoothing out of a garment’s fabric in evidence in Robert Streeter’s View of Boscobel House and 37 Haydocke, A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, 88; cf. Lomazzo, “Trattato dell’arte della pittura,” 160–63. 38 Jenner, A book of drawing, 14: “When you are able to draw naked drafts well, you will finde a matter of no great difficulty to doe bodies with garments upon them […]. First, you must draw the outmost lines of your garments lightly, and in this you must be very carefull, for the whole grace of a picture lies in the outmost draft, and not in the curious work within. Now […] you must suite your garments to the body, and make them bend with the body […] and you must observe which part of the body bends in or out, that the garment may answer to the body […]. Excellent workmen doe make the body appeare plainly thorow the garments, especially where the garment lyes close and flat upon the body […]. [M]any workmen draw the naked first, and afterwards put on their garments […]. You must draw the greatest folds first, and so stroake your greater folds into lesse, and be sure you let one fold crosse another.” Elsum, The art of painting, 14. 39 Jenner, A book of drawing, 16: “Landskip is expressing of land by hills, woods, castels, seas, valleys, ruines, rocks, cities, towns, &c. and there is not so much difficulty in it, as in drawing figures there take only these rules for it. “1. The best way of making Landskips is to make them shoot away one part lower then another, which hath been practised by our best workmen of late, but others have run into a contrary error, by making the Landskip mount up higher and higher, till it reach up a great height, that it appears to touch the clouds, as if they had stood at the bottome of a steeple, when they took the Landskip which is altogether improper, for we can discerne no prospect at the bottom of an hill, but the most proper way of making a Landskip, is to make the neerest hill highest, ad so to make the rest that are further off, to shoot away under that, that the Landskip may appear to be taken from the top of an hill. “2. You must be very carefull to lessen every thing proportionable to their distance […]. “3. You must make all your lights fal one way […]. “4. You must make ever thing to have its proper motion, as trees when they are shaken with the winde, their smaller and more pliable boughs must be resembled with such an action, as they may strike one against another, by yeelding and declining from that part whence the winde blows; the stiffer boughes must have lesse bending and motion; you must likewise observe the bending of a twigg when a bird sits upon it, so likewise it be forced or pressed with any other thing.”

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Fig. 3.8: Robert Streeter, Boscobel House and White Ladies, ca. 1670. Oil on canvas, 136.7 × 211.5 cm, Windsor, Royal Collection, inv. no. RCIN 404761. Image: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022.

White Ladies (ca. 1660) (Fig. 3.8). Furthermore, Jenner mentions a condensing of the medium of air which can also be compressed, thickened, or thinned.

Conclusion To summarize the main points: in treatises and drawing books of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, it is unanimously claimed that, in painting “landskips,” the “collateral must not outshine the principal,” that “argument” and “parergon” constitute a hierarchical logic that must not be undermined.40 Painting landscapes also regularly appears as the task of developing a spatial-plastic continuum; beginning from the foreground, the painter works, layer by layer, toward the most distant point in the depth of the pictorial space, revealing different layers or steps of visibility. In doing so, a “concept of folds” comes into play that allows the landscape to become a kind of bunched-up fabric, and its fabric-like surface, a relief-like structure. In addition, the garment folds of portrait painting are compared to the leaves on the branches of a wind-blown tree in the way they follow the movement of the body, 40 Elsum, The art of painting, 60; see also his critique of such a composition: Elsum, The art of painting, 67.

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revealing a similarity between drapery and landskip in their pictorial function. Both are centrally motivated; in other words, they both frame a centrally positioned subject and thus succeed it as a secondary element. The tension between subject and setting seems to be a frequent feature in early modern English portrait painting. The fact that a close connection was made between landscape and drapery in English art treatises of the seventeenth century—and this under the common premise of a continuous movement or motivation of the limbs of a body or the branches of a tree—would prove influential in the development of English landscape and portrait painting, as can be seen in Sir Peter Lely’s Portrait of Diana Kirke, later Countess of Oxford (ca. 1665) (Fig. 3.9). And over a century later, Thomas Gainsborough’s (1727–1788) windswept landscapes and portraits, like the Portrait of Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Aged 31 (1785–1787), still seem to evoke a concern with “the winde and motion of the ayre,” a thought Haydocke introduced into the English artistic debate in his translation of Lomazzo’s work that would lay the foundation of the English approach to landscape, which, in turn, would pave the way for the more widely known landscape painters of the eighteenth century (Fig. 3.10). 41

Appendix Terms used in seventeenth-century English treatises to describe the relationship between “argument” and “parergon” in “landskip” painting. “Argument”

“Parergon”

by itself

not for the owne sake

naked; nudity

garment, apparel ornament needlesse graces sweet seasonings of picture

necessitie

addition adiunct

principall

second collateral circumstantial

first

afterwards

body

by-work

conceipt invention

variety

generall

particular

41 Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise, 47–48.

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Fig. 3.9: Sir Peter Lely, Diana Kirke, later Countess of Oxford, ca. 1665. Oil on canvas, 132.1 × 104.1 cm, New Haven, CT, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, inv. no. B1981.25.756. Image: © Yale Center for British Art.

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Fig. 3.10: Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Aged 31, 1785–1787. Oil on canvas, 219.7 × 153.7 cm, Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, inv. no. 1937.1.92. Image: © National Gallery of Art.

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Works Cited Andrews, Malcolm. Landscape and Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Blount, Thomas. Glossographia; or, a dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue. London: Printed by Thomas Newcomb for Humphrey Moseley, 1656. Elsum, John. The art of painting after the Italian manner. With practical observations on the principal colours. And directions how to know a good picture. London: Printed for D. Brown, 1703. Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 1. Edited by William Bray. Washington: M. Walter Dunne, 1901. The Geometry of Landskips and Paintings. Made Familiar and Easie: Useful to Linners in Drawing, and Gentlemen in Choosing PICTURES; CAP. I. London: Printed for Richard Baldwin, 1690. Haydocke, Richard. A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge. London: Printed by Ioseph Barnes, 1598. Hearn, Karen. Nathaniel Bacon: Artist, Gentleman, and Gardener. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Jenner, Thomas. A book of drawing, limning, vvashing or colouring of maps and prints: and the art of painting, with the names and mixtures of colours used by the … Or, The young-mans time well spent. London: Printed by James and Joseph Moxon, 1652. Junius, Franciscus. The Painting of the Ancients. London: Printed by Richard Hodgkinsonne, 1638. Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo. “Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura [Milan: Marchi & Bertolli, 1584].” In Scritti sulle arti. Edited by Roberto Paolo Ciardi, vol. 2. Florence: Marchi & Bertolli, 1974. Milton, John. Poems of Mr. John Milton both English and Latin, compos’d at several times; published this year. London: Printed by Ruth Raworth for Humphrey Moseley, 1645. Norgate, Edward. Miniatura or the Art of Limning. Edited by Martin Hardie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919. Norgate, Edward. Miniatura or the Art of Limning. Edited by Jim Murrell and Jeffrey M. Muller. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Olwig, Kenneth R. “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86, no. 4 (December 1996): 630–53. Peacham, Henry. The Art of Drawing with the Pen and Limning in Water Colours. London: Printed by Richard Braddock for William Iones, 1606. Peacham, Henry. The Gentlemans Exercise. London: Printed for Iohn Browne, 1612. Phillips, Edward. The New World of English Words. London: Printed by E. Tyler for Nathanael Brooke, 1658. Sanderson, William. Graphice, the Use of the Pen and Pencil, or the most excellent Art of Painting. London: Printed for Robert Crofts, 1658.

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Skelton, Kimberly. The Paradox of Body, Building and Motion in Seventeenth-Century England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Tradescant the Younger, John. Musæum Tradescantianum: Or, A Collection of Rarities Preserved at South-Lambeth neer London by John Tradescant. London: Printed by John Grismond for Nathanael Brooke, 1656. Wood, Christopher. Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

About the Author Karin Leonhard is Professor of Art History at Konstanz University. Her research has focused on Dutch and Flemish art, particularly theories of space, light, and color; the concept of creativity; and the interrelationship between art theory and natural philosophy. Her habilitation treated the “Bildfeld” in seventeenth-century still life painting.

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Part 2 Elemental Resources

4. Unruly Indigo? Plants, Plantations, and Partitions Romita Ray

Abstract Can landscapes be unruly? Taking my cue from this question, my essay looks at indigo plantations in colonial Bengal as dynamic sites of negotiations between plants, land, and human bodies. Specifically, it analyzes how material, spatial, and corporeal engagements with the indigo plant rendered plantations unruly landscapes. Finally, it follows the unruliness of plantations to the colonial city of Calcutta where the violence of plantation life made its way into the social spaces of the city’s elite. Interwoven with plantations and the plantocracy, the urban trajectories through which indigo dye was ushered through the cityscape became sites of resistance and revolt, turning Calcutta itself into an unruly metropolitan landscape. Keywords: indigo; plantation; labor; planter; Calcutta; Bengal

Can landscapes be unruly? Colonial records are filled with accounts of disobedient natives, “lazy” coolies, and reluctant officials.1 But landscapes were seen as no less recalcitrant sites ripe for surveying, improving, cultivating, and profit-making. And no other landscape exemplified the orderly taming of plants and bodies as the colonial plantation whose very purpose, in S. Max Edelson’s words, was to change “a place of wild generation” into “a space of refined cultivation.”2 Plantations often hark back to the dense forests that once cascaded across their cultivated expanse: quintessentially unruly spaces filled with plants and animals that challenged the limits of human intervention.3 By transforming this wilderness into monoculture landscapes, planters cordoned themselves off from what they perceived as the 1 See, for instance: Sharma, “‘Lazy’ Natives,” 1287–324. 2 Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 23–24. 3 Philip, Civilizing Natures, 54–79, 82.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch04

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savage, positioning themselves instead as civilized entrepreneurs who were “remade and refined” by “harness[ing] nature’s abundance for profit.”4 But were plantations truly tamed landscapes? Or did their plant and human occupants continue to resist, challenge, and dismantle their cultural ecologies and political economies? Plantations disclose the human desire to commoditize nature on an ambitious scale. Here, plants and people submit to technologies and cultivation practices to create productive landscapes and generate commercial profit. To disrupt the orderliness upon which plantations and their economies rely is to render their landscapes unmanageable, not in the sense of the wild and unpredictable jungle, but rather, as contested sites of unrest and revolt. Unruliness, the focal point of this volume of essays, therefore needs to be read through the material, spatial, and corporeal engagements that make up those geographies. In other words, we need to approach plantations as dynamic intersections between plants and humans where points of resistance between and within plant and human worlds often transform their controlled environments into fractious spaces. Plantations are fundamentally living composites of land, plants, and labor. Their landscapes are not inherently contentious. Instead, unruliness speaks to the human desire to assess, break down, and affix complex plant and human ecologies within the confines of human behavior. Like a defiant child, a disorderly landscape misbehaves, the very word “unruly” turning landscape into something that does instead of something that simply is. What then does such a landscape do? And how might its recalcitrance be tamed? Can landscapes be tame and turbulent at the same time? A place where notions of territoriality, property, and ownership undergird the orderliness of plant commodities and the human bodies that tend to them, the plantation is a tightly managed system of capitalism and wealth production.5 When rendered disorderly and disruptive, it resists and defies, ushering in changes that destabilize and dismantle existing belief systems, rules, laws, structures, frameworks, and ecologies. In effect, the intractable plantation exposes the fragility of what Raymond Williams once described as “the whole complex of social and natural relationships which is at once our product and our activity.”6 Yet change itself, while unsettling, can also be immensely productive and innovative. It challenges the status quo, produces ground-breaking science, and nurtures new forms of beauty. It creates equity and new wealth. On plantation landscapes, plants can just as easily be categorized as disruptive as the human actors responsible for converting their plant matter into commodities. From this perspective, the unruly can be regarded as irrefutably corporeal and material. It is also conceptual, 4 Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 24. 5 Besky and Padwe, “Placing Plants,” 9–28. 6 Williams, Culture and Materialism, 83.

Unruly Indigo? Pl ants, Pl antations, and Partitions 

ideological, and always relational, marking the limits of human and plant agency, while exposing the physical and social thresholds of those limits. Entangled with one another, plants, landscapes, and human bodies cast long shadows in the history of the British Empire in India, their ontologies mediated by the creation of wealth; their material intersections shaped by science, commoditization, and taste; and their cultural overlaps imbued with the politics of race, class, and gender. I am particularly interested in how their entanglements open up new ways of reading colonial plantations through the lens of ownership, for plantations are fundamentally rooted in the idea of territoriality, their visual thresholds defined by a proprietary gaze and their physical expanse delineated by property lines and physical boundaries. This essay focuses on indigo, a plant cultivated on colonial plantations in Bengal to produce a dye whose blueness spilled into the port city of Calcutta, where indigo became embedded in the global circuits of commerce and exchange.7 By the end of the nineteenth century, indigo blue had built immense fortunes; triggered the Nil Bidroho (Blue Revolt or Indigo Revolt) of 1859; resulted in a play critiquing the tyranny of British indigo planters (Nil Darpan); and unleashed a wave of fierce debate in Calcutta.8 Quite simply, indigo exposed the plantation as a deeply flawed landscape whose disorderliness was rendered starkly visible by the violence inflicted on the ryot (peasant worker). It also revealed the extent to which plantation landscapes were entwined with metropolitan sites of science, commerce, law, and sociability. Keeping these entanglements and fissures in mind, I follow the unruliness of the colonial plantation back to the indigo plant whose capacity to produce color, a lucrative one at that, preoccupied colonial scientists, government officials, and indigo planters throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet such a useful plant managed to unravel the tightly woven lines of race and class that separated the ryot from the planter on a plantation. How then did indigo transform plantations into contested sites of labor and territoriality? And what do its own transformations from a botanical curiosity to a blue dye tell us about the paradigm of unruliness on plantations? This last question pulls us into the geographies of rebellion and unrest that expanded far beyond the plantation to the city, bringing us to the last and final section of my essay, which analyzes how and why the violence of 7 Indigo blue was used to paint clay figurines from Krishnanagar and Bardhaman, and to dye cotton Neelambari saris from Shantipur and patterned silk fabrics from Cossimbazar (Kasim Bazar). It was also found in pigments used by Bengali artists in Calcutta’s Kumortuli and Kalighat neighborhoods. The Bengali term “nil” or “neel” refers to both the color blue and the indigo plant. Palchoudhuri, “Neel,” 164–68; Majumdar, “Clay-Image Making,” 213; Bean, “Image Makers,” 32; Wheeler, Burgio, and Shulman, “Kalighat Paintings,” 176–84. Calcutta’s name was changed to Kolkata in 2001. 8 Bhattacharya, “Indigo Revolt,” 13–23; Nandi, “One Mirror,” 48–55; Guha, “Neel-darpan.” Nil Darpan (Indigo Mirror) was first published in Bengali in 1860.

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plantation life made its way into the social spaces of Calcutta’s elite. Plantations were not just isolated pockets of cultivation in rural land; they were inextricably linked with the urban trajectories through which indigo traveled as a plant commodity destined for “distant markets.”9 Disciplined in tandem with one another, plants, land, and peasant bodies were bound up with the profit-making goals of monoculture farming. But while both ryot and planter were involved in the shared business of manufacturing indigo, their physical labor, social status, and monetary gains were scaled along radically different lines, splintering them apart during the Indigo Revolt that saw their stark inequalities play out in the courtrooms and courtyards of Calcutta. If the plantation produced the rebellious ryot, then the latter exposed the troubling f igure of the autocratic planter. By disrupting the harmonious visions of industrious labor promoted in contemporary newspapers, drawings, photographs, and dioramas, this indigenous agent of landscaping and cultivating created powerful counter memories that dismantled the “civilized” f igure of the planter, further revealing the seams of violence that long held together plantation landscapes. In short, the ryot unmasked both the plantation and the city as unruly landscapes.

A Useful Plant In his portrait of the Auriol and Dashwood families (1783–1787), Johann Zoffany (1733–1810) depicts the pioneering indigo planter John Prinsep (1748–1830) as a fashionable gentleman smoking tobacco in a hookah (Fig. 4.1). A prosperous resident of eighteenth-century Calcutta, Prinsep’s vast wealth was forged by the indigo plant in Bengal where the English East India Company had expanded its political and commercial foothold for over a century.10 Portrayed alongside high-ranking Company officials and their spouses, military officers, and servants, he appears with his wife Sophia Auriol (in pink) who is seated nearby at a tea table laden with porcelain teacups, while Chinese tea is served by Indian servants. Although invisible to the eye, tea, tobacco, and indigo hover in the picture as imperial products associated with the colonial body. Prinsep, in particular, invokes Indigofera or Bengal indigo that ensured his status as a member of the Calcutta elite into whose ranks the acclaimed artist Zoffany had inserted himself to seek out a colonial fortune.11 Plant 9 Philip, Civilizing Natures, 58. 10 Prinsep’s friend Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the first governor-general of Bengal, helped him win a Company contract to cultivate indigo. Llewellyn-Jones, Man of the Enlightenment, 268; Ray, “Indigo Dye Industry,” 203; Gupta, “Indigo in Bengal,” 179; Balaram, “Indian Indigo,” 139. 11 Jasanoff, “Passage through India,” 125.

Unruly Indigo? Pl ants, Pl antations, and Partitions 

Fig. 4.1: Johann Zoffany, The Auriol and Dashwood Families, about 1783–1787. Oil on canvas, 142 × 198 cm (unframed), Bath, The Holburne Museum. Image: © The Holburne Museum.

commodities therefore urge us to look more closely at the sitters portrayed here, not just as subjects connected through social bonds, but as colonial citizens with deep links to landed wealth—mirrored no less by the sprawling garden in which they appear to socialize. As it so happens, indigo’s endorsement as a Company commodity also took place in a garden: a botanical one laid out on the outskirts of Calcutta in 1787, whose primary goal was to cultivate useful plants that would benefit Britain’s empire in India (Fig. 4.2). The cultivation of the cinnamon and pepper seems practicable, and we are sanguine in our expectations of greatly improving the indigo plant, as well as of introducing the date and sago trees. These may prove an infinite service to this country should it ever experience a failure in the crops.12

12 Macpherson, “Extract,” viii. Emphasis added.

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Fig. 4.2: Captain R. B. Hill, Botanical Gardens, Calcutta, 1850s. Albumen silver print, 19.6 × 24.3 cm (image), New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, inv. no. 2005.100.948.2 (25). Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The plan to improve and deploy plants as economic resources stemmed from the horrors of the 1769 Bengal famine that jolted Company administrators into realizing that they had to take a more strategic approach to agricultural practices in India.13 There was also the devastating failure of Britain’s indigo plantations in North America, which had slipped away from Britain’s grasp in 1786. Further south in the Caribbean, a waning industry of indigo planting in the British colonies of the West Indies added to Britain’s financial woes (sugar plantations dominated instead). To make matters worse, stiff competition from Spain and France who monopolized the global trade in high quality indigo, had edged out their English rivals.14 Not surprisingly, attention shifted to India where the Company’s robust foothold in Bengal ensured that plenty of fertile land was available for cultivating and manufacturing indigo.15 Moreover, the port city of Calcutta, the capital of the 13 McCracken, Gardens of Empire, 6. 14 Ray, “Indigo Dye Industry,” 202–3. 15 The French were responsible for introducing European indigo growing techniques in Bengal, but were outrivaled by the British. Gupta, “Indigo in Bengal,” 178–85.

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Company Raj, was ideally positioned near the Bay of Bengal from where indigo could be ushered to domestic and international markets.16 European planters, many of whom had left behind impoverished indigo plantations in the West Indies to try their luck at planting indigo in India, were not disappointed.17 By the end of the 1700s, the best quality indigo was flourishing in the districts of Lower Bengal.18 By this time, British botanists were also exploring the economic potential of plants like indigo, tea, cotton, and tobacco. When Sir John Macpherson (1745–1821), the governor-general, proposed cultivating indigo in Bengal, the Calcutta-based army engineer Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Kyd (1746–1793) suggested that a botanical garden be used as a testing ground for growing plants as “articles of commerce.”19 Kyd’s proposal laid the foundation for the Calcutta Botanic Garden where the relationship between useful plants and colonial commerce was first formalized on an expansive scale in British India. So successful was the garden that the most prized varieties of indigo could be found growing there within just two years of its founding; samples of these varieties were distributed for free to European planters.20 Botanical practice shaped the very foundation of indigo experiments in India, preoccupying Kyd throughout the closing decades of the eighteenth century when he corresponded with the Scottish botanist William Roxburgh (1751–1815), who was busy collecting plant specimens on the Coromandel Coast.21 Interested in both the botanical properties and the chromatic potential of indigo, Roxburgh observed that “the plant [was] well worth cultivating” and yielded a “deep green” color tinged with “violet coloured scum.”22 Such mediations of color and material transformations reveal an intimate understanding of plant matter, while also gesturing at how a plant might behave if it were grown commercially. For its part, an indigo plant “well worth” planting needed what Jill Casid calls the “scaping of land” into a landscape, or more specifically, into an organized realm of cultivars and transplants in which it could flourish.23 16 The Company Raj refers to British rule in India under the aegis of the English East India Company. 17 Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, 56. 18 Balfour-Paul, “Bengal to Blue Jeans,” 42. 19 Macpherson, “Extract,” viii. 20 Thomas, “Calcutta Botanic Garden,” 174. The Calcutta Botanic Garden remained actively involved in indigo cultivation well into the 1800s, with one of the most fruitful collaborations taking place between its curators, directors, and scientists associated with the Indigo Improvements Syndicate (IIS) established by Calcutta’s indigo traders to improve the quality of indigo seeds, plants, and color. See Kumar, Indigo Plantations, 180–96. 21 Roxburgh would become a leading advocate of the Indian system of indigo manufacturing that he had observed in the Madras province. 22 Kyd, Letters, 368–69. 23 Casid, “Epilogue,” 101.

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Healthy plants require good soil. As such, they direct us to read landscapes both horizontally (across the land) as well as vertically (beneath the surface of the land). As Roxburgh would discover, the quality of soil could impact the quality of color extracted from the indigo plant. “The leaves of the plants raised from seed in my garden, did not yield colour till several years old, and then but in a trifling degree, and of a quality inferior to what the old wild plants do in their natural soil,” he wrote, further remarking that “[it] is the same with the young plantations in Bengal. If the leaves are culled, and only the best chosen, the Indigo is considerably more beautiful than when taken promiscuously.”24 Keenly aware of the importance of cultivating indigo for its botanical and commercial value, Roxburgh identifies indigo as both a plant and a color, while assigning superior tonal values to the dye extracted from the “wild” variety. Consequently, the unruly is recognized as the primary source for beauty nourished by the earth or “natural soil.” Such an understanding of the wild or the “natural” had to be reconciled with the need to manufacture the best quality indigo in (human) controlled landscape environments. Enter a cosmopolitan body of knowledge built by generations of planters and indigenous indigo-makers in the Caribbean, India, and elsewhere that filtered into the plains of Bengal through published texts, planters’ diaries, lived experiences, and oral histories. After all, indigo had been grown in India since antiquity and was exported to Europe from the twelfth century onwards.25 Diverse technologies and methods of knowledge transmission could only benefit indigo cultivation in a place like Bengal with no prior history of commercial indigo planting, while scientific discoveries like Roxburgh’s added to an already rich corpus of place-based knowledge and praxis.26 In 1790, Roxburgh would send the results of his research to both the Company’s directorate in London and the governor-general in Calcutta. His findings would be published later along with instructions to produce indigo from the “common indigo plant, (indigo fera tinctorea), as practiced at Singatollah, near Malda.”27 By 1795, “Nili, Indigofera” had been added to a list of Indian plants compiled by Sir William Jones (1746–1794), the late 24 Roxburgh, “New Species of Nerium,” 263. Emphasis added. These observations were part of Roxburgh’s research on the chromatic potential of the indigo plant. They were published during his tenure as the Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden, in Transactions of the London-based Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. The aesthetics and materiality of color extracted from indigo preoccupied Roxburgh for two decades after he took over the supervision of the garden upon Kyd’s demise. See Turner, “Roxburgh,” 21–25. 25 Varadarajan, “Indigo,” 83–85; Ray, Bengal Industries, 207–8; Balaram, “Indian Indigo,” 140–44. For more about the European demand for Indian indigo in the seventeenth century, see Nadri, “Indigo Trade,” 61–76. 26 Kumar, “Planters and Naturalists,” 740–44. Kumar notes that in comparison to Bengal, the “Coromandel region” in South India had a well-established history of indigo production. 27 Roxburgh, “New Species of Nerium, 252.

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founder-president of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta.28 As these nodes and networks of exchange crystallized between Bengal and Britain, indigo became embedded in conversations about color, plants, and commerce, joining other plants like cotton and tea to shape the Company’s “wide-ranging” portfolio of business investments in Asian plant commodities.29 At the heart of these conversations were botanical fragments and drawings of the indigo plant that traveled from Calcutta to London. Material evidence of the taxonomic diversity of Indian landscapes that now entered—and indeed built—some of the most prominent botanical collections in Britain, included a watercolor drawing of Nerium tinctorium made by a Company artist in Calcutta for Icones Roxburghianae No. 18, a copy of which was received in London in 1791 and deposited in the botanical gardens at Kew, and a specimen of Indigofera caerulea Roxb. collected in Patna in 1812, also deposited at Kew via the Calcutta Botanic Garden (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4).30 Vivid examples of the “exotic, inexhaustible array of Indian plants” and images that contributed to British science, art, and profit, these representations transpose the leafy components of the indigo plant, its minutiae intact, onto blank sheets of paper.31 Reconstituted as a botanical curiosity through European pictorial and scientific conventions, indigo is altered into a familiar artifact far removed from its natural surroundings in India. Flattened out, its form invites close looking, engendering an intimacy of vision. In an era of heightened empirical scrutiny and documentation facilitated by repositories like herbaria and by the new and exciting optical technologies of the microscope, such close-up views of plants reveal the rapid pace at which botanical knowledge was being gathered, codif ied, and disseminated.32 They also attest to the growing culture of the material or visual fragment, a direct endorsement of the Baconian approach to studying nature with “a fresh examination of particulars” that evinced the desire to reduce nature to its constitutive parts from which new bodies of knowledge could be created based on examining, comparing, and contrasting those parts.33 28 Jones, “Catalogue,” 234. Founded in 1784, the Asiatic Society was a prestigious institution devoted to science, art, and literature. Jones’s list was published posthumously in the Society’s journal, Asiatick Researches. 29 Kelley, Clandestine Marriage, 162. 30 Turner, “Roxburgh,” 22–23. Company artists were Indian artists employed by (mainly) high-ranking East India Company officials. 31 Kelley, Clandestine Marriage, 163. 32 By 1918, a dissected view of Indigofera Tinctoria, Linn. would be included in K. R. Kirtikar and B. D. Basu’s Indian Medicinal Plants. Influenced by Roxburgh, and also by John Forbes Royle’s work on materia medica, Kirtikar and Basu attempted to weave together Ayurveda and Western botanical knowledge. Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, 175. 33 Francis Bacon, as quoted in Porter, Science, 4.

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Fig. 4.3: Company School, Nerium tinctorium, in William Roxburgh, Icones Roxburghianae, or Drawings of Indian Plants, 1785–1791, no. 18 (K). Watercolor, graphite, and ink on paper, 51.5 × 35.7 cm (sheet), 47.2 × 30.5 cm (image), Kew, Royal Botanic Gardens. Image: © Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Fig. 4.4: Indigofera caerulea Roxb., specimen no. K001121003, collected Patna, April 9, 1812. Indigo plant on paper, 26.7 × 42.6 cm (sheet), Kew, Royal Botanic Gardens, cat. no. 5460, http://specimens. kew.org/herbarium/K001121003. Image: © Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

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But reduction, reconstitution, and knowledge-building necessitated removing and dislocating plants and their parts. Might fragmentation then be read as a visual paradigm of dislocation and displacement so essential to the practices of plant collecting and botanizing? Can it be analyzed within the broader practice of plantation culture where plants, laboring bodies, and planters were uprooted from their original habitats only to be transplanted in plantation landscapes? Such displacements hint at unruliness, their very capacity to disorient and reorient plants and people signaling at the profound shifts that destabilized the very worlds from which plants and people were removed, and those in which they were relocated. Seen this way, the fragment can be understood as a metonymic reminder of the diasporas of plants and people bound up with the geographies of agriculture and botany, and indeed, more broadly with the mobilities and movements of people, objects, ideas, commodities, and wealth across and within the British Empire. A word whose very etymology draws upon the Greek dia (“division” and “dispersal”) and spiro (“to sow the seeds”), the term “diaspora” oscillates between “the idea of dispersion” on the one hand, and the notion of “stasis and stability” on the other, its origins rooted in the ontologies of dislocation, renewal, and regeneration borne out by the movement and dispersal of seeds and plants, the very foundation of a plantation.34 Might diaspora then open up new ways of analyzing the unruly? Isolated from their natural settings, plants are palpable reminders of the ecosystems they once inhabited and the landscapes from which they were extracted. Quite simply, they remind us in Anna Tsing’s words, of the “unruly edges and seams of imperial space, where we cannot ignore the interspecies interdependencies that give us life on earth.”35 Pressed between herbarium sheets or sheets of drawings, those “edges and seams” were transferred into the heart of scientific inquiry. With its place of origin blanked out literally and figuratively, the indigo plant was recalibrated as a botanical acquisition within a classification system that sought to “erase the environmental and cultural contexts of plants.”36 Yet cultural knowledge and more specifically, indigenous knowledge, was essential to growing the indigo plant and shaping a successful plantation economy. As Prakash Kumar notes, indigo cultivation in eighteenth-century Bengal relied on Indian practices that existed well before the English, French, and Dutch arrived in India, and on English, French, and Spanish knowledge of indigo planting appropriated from indigenous cultures across the Caribbean and Central America.37 The “peasant-produced indigo” in the Spanish indigo empire, he points out, “cornered major profits” for “European traders.”38 34 35 36 37 38

Sideri, “Diaspora,” 33–34. Tsing, “Unruly Edges,” 141. Tobin, “Imperial Designs,” 269. Kumar, “Planters and Naturalists,” 720–34. Kumar, “Planters and Naturalists,” 725–26.

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The same can be said of plantations in Bengal that created vast fortunes for private merchants like Prinsep who returned to England a rich and influential member of London society. But Prinsep’s success was far from smooth sailing. His early attempts to apply the West Indian method of indigo planting had proven challenging in a foreign landscape. Several failures had ensued before the “unruly seams and edges” of the colonial plantation in Bengal were tamed through trial and error, patience and perseverance; only then could the indigo plant flourish.39 By 1828, Bengal indigo reportedly fulfilled “four-fifths of the consumption of Europe, Asia, and America.”40 Indigo blue’s commercial success would continue to be forged through the close alliance between botany and commerce—one that would go on full display at a series of exhibitions in London and Calcutta, starting with the pioneering Great Exhibition of 1851 for which indigo plantations, or factories, supplied the indigo plant exhibits. 41

The Labor of Indigo By 1886, the Calcutta-based agency houses that brokered the commercial value of indigo had replaced plantations as the chief custodians or “exhibitors” of the indigo specimens shown at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held in London: Exhibitors—An interesting collection of green leaf indigo is exhibited by the Bengal Exhibition Commercial Committee, by Messrs. William Moran & Co., Messrs. Jardine Skinner & Co., Messrs. Shoene Kilburn & Co., Messrs. Begg Dunlop & Co., and Messrs. J. Thomas & Co., of Calcutta, Messrs. H. W. Jewsbury & Co., London, and The Indigo Co., London, Agents, Gillanders, Arbuthnot, & Co., Calcutta. The model of an indigo factory will make intelligible the brief account given of the process of indigo manufacture. Messrs. Parry & Co., of Madras, exhibit dry leaf indigo, and the Assam Government has contributed a sample of Strobilanthes indigo. 42 39 Kumar, “Planters and Naturalists,” 731–35, 745–46. Prinsep became an alderman to the City of London and a Member of Parliament for Queensborough. Kumar observes that Prinsep probably consulted the indigo planter Elias Monnereau’s The Complete Indigo Maker (1769), based on growing indigo in Saint Domingue, the French colony in the Caribbean (the account was first published in French in 1736). He also notes that little is known about Prinsep’s experience of cultivating indigo in Bengal. 40 “Free Trade and Colonisation in India,” 405. 41 Watt, Economic Products, 33; Great Exhibition, 2:880. 42 Wardle, Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 147. Emphasis added. Calcutta’s agency houses oversaw the Company’s advances made to indigo planters. Thomas, Marten and Company, the most prominent of agency houses, was established in 1851. Known today as J. Thomas, it is headquartered in Nilhat House (Indigo Market House), whose very name pays tribute to the indigo industry in which it played such a prominent role in its formative years. J. Thomas Story, 14.

Unruly Indigo? Pl ants, Pl antations, and Partitions 

Fig. 4.5: Krishnanagar Artist, Model of an Indigo Factory, detail, 1883–1884. Clay, paint, glass, bamboo, and other materials, 203.2 × 101.6 × 30.48 cm, Kolkata, Botanical Survey of India, Industrial Section Indian Museum (BSI ISIM). Image: © Botanical Survey of India, Kolkata.

As the chief intermediary between the indigo factory and the merchant, the agency house was essentially a trading firm whose services had expanded to include insurance, shipping, and banking. 43 By the 1880s, it was also the primary supplier of the indigo plant. In sharp contrast to herbaria where plant specimens were stored in secluded cabinets, exhibitions drew the leafy fragments of the indigo plant into public sites of display. They also enabled the Indian government to openly promote “natural indigo” to offset the growing popularity of synthetic indigo whose market value now threatened the production of natural dye. 44 Key to this strategy was exhibiting plant specimens near miniature dioramas or clay models of indigo factories that visualized the very processes through which indigo blue was coaxed from a plant (Fig. 4.5). 45 Made by artisans from Krishnanagar, an indigo-growing 43 Connell, Business in Risk, 22; Shukla, Indigo and the Raj, 15. 44 Cornish, “Curating Global Knowledge,” 130. 45 A clay model of an indigo factory, now in the Indian Museum in Kolkata, was displayed at the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883–1884. See Official Report, 535. Another clay diorama of an indigo factory made by Rakhal Chandra Pal and modeled after the Calcutta diorama was displayed in 1886 at the Colonial

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area of Bengal, dioramas, along with plant specimens, presented convincing images of the plant’s origins (indigo) and its places of cultivation (plantations) that together evoked an “ideal industrial world” for exhibition visitors. 46 Even the detail of the reclining ryot glimpsed in the diorama displayed at the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883–1884, while evocative of the prevailing stereotype of the idle “native,” can be linked more generally to Victorian aesthetics of leisure as seen, for instance, in Debendranath Tagore’s contemplative f igure in his autobiography Svarachita Jiban-charit (My Life in My Own Words, 1894), or James Tissot’s rendering of a picnicker stretched out on the ground, teacup in hand, in Holyday (1876). 47 Such visualizations were augmented by the valorization of labor at the Great Exhibition, which set the tone for all subsequent exhibitions in Britain and colonial India to celebrate “workers, of all types” who “stand forth as the really great men.”48 Reduced to miniature scale in the diorama, the labor of indigo is turned into a delightful curiosity, yet the dollhouse-like charm of the clay model belies the harsh working conditions and (often) violent negotiations that in reality marked plantation landscapes. As Michel Foucault observes, “the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.”49 Indeed, the visual imaging of indigo cultivation frequently drew attention to surveillance as an integral part of plantation life (Fig. 4.6). Be it in dioramas, newspapers, or photographs like Oscar Mallitte’s image of European supervisors watching over ryots immersed up to their waists in vats filled with fermenting indigo, agrarian labor—and especially male labor—was shown as inseparable from the politics of discipline and control (Fig. 4.7).50 Put another way, such picturizations asserted the role of plantations as both disciplined as well as disciplining environments where the unruly was kept at bay through routine inspections and punishment. Like the diorama and the newspaper illustration, Mallitte’s photograph emphasizes discipline and industry, with plants, bodies, and chemical residue entwined with one another in the production of indigo blue. Entrapped in the vat, laboring ryots are pressed into service like “human machines” (borrowing from Michael Taussig), and Indian Exhibition in London. Cornish, “Curating Global Knowledge,” 140; Cundall, Reminiscences, 21. Pal’s diorama is now in the economic botany collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 46 Purbrick, “Introduction,” 2. Sixty clay figures of Indian artisans at work made by Krishnanagar sculptors were displayed at the Great Exhibition. Kriegel, Grand Designs, 117. On the subject of clay modeling in Krishnanagar, see: Smith and Stevenson, “Modeling Cultures,” 39–41. 47 Fludernik, “Performativity of Idleness,” 129–53; Debendranath Tagore quoted in Chaudhuri, “Phantasmagorias,” 187; Marshall and Warner, James Tissot, 110–11. 48 Barringer, Men at Work, 2. 49 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26. 50 Mallitte’s photograph was one of twenty-nine views of indigo planting from his album titled, The Planting & Manufacture of Indigo in India (1877).

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Fig. 4.6: “Indigo Cultivation in Tirhoot, Bengal,” The Graphic (February 12, 1881), 165. Engraving, 29.3 × 40 cm, Syracuse, NY, Author’s Collection. Image: © Author.

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Fig. 4.7: Oscar Mallitte, “Beating a Vat by Hand,” in The Planting & Manufacture of Indigo in India: 29 Photographic Views, Allahabad, India, 1877. Album with albumen silver print, 18.3 × 23.7 cm (image), Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. no. 84.XO.876.8.9. Image: © Getty Open Content Program.

beating the soaked and fermented indigo plants with bamboo paddles to separate the dyestuff from plant matter.51 Liquid oxidizes, precipitating the indigo dye, foam, froth, and the stench of chemical processes engulf ing their half-naked bodies. Finally, the water is drained out and the remaining sludge is dried, “cut into square cakes,” and “sent down to Calcutta” where it is sold as “the indigo dye of commerce” (Fig. 4.8).52 But beating was not simply confined to dye manufacture; it was also a means of keeping plantation laborers in line.53 “Before, we felt sorrow in beating one man; now, we can beat ten persons with the Ramkant (leather strap), making them senseless,” declares Planter Rose in Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan, prompting Torap the rebellious ryot to give him a dose of his own medicine. “Torap, what is the use of beating him?” cries Nobin Madhab, “valiant champion of the ryots.” “We 51 For an analysis of indigo manufacture in colonial Bengal, see: Taussig, “Redeeming Indigo,” 5–8. 52 “Indigo Culture,” 396; “Indigo Natural Fermentation Vat.” 53 Das Gupta, “Plantation Labour,” 173–98.

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Fig. 4.8: Piece of Indigo Dye from India, 6.35 × 6.35 cm. Image: © Wikimedia Creative Commons. Photo: Evan Izer.

ought not to be cruel, because they are so.”54 If the inescapable realities of violence underscored what Caroline Cornish describes as “economic botany in action,” then the manually intensive processes of indigo production revealed the strict hierarchies of labor and violence upon which the smooth running of plantations relied.55 Dioramas, newspapers, and photographs offered a more public realm of viewership in which these realities and hierarchies were laid bare. As such, they engendered a sort of voyeurism centered on bodies, liquids, and plant worlds that constituted the secluded world of indigo plantations. Filtered through—and framed by—Victorian high imperialist attitudes towards race, laboring bodies and plant commodities crystallized into Victorian subjects of rescue whose very ontologies were understood as “subordinate, inferior, or less advanced,” thus “requir[ing] and beseech[ing] domination.”56 As if to demonstrate this, the hatted, suited, and booted European planter in the photograph and the diorama looks down, literally and figuratively, upon the laboring ryot, his vantage point and uniformed figure instantly signaling his position of authority. Yet such positionings and modalities of viewing betray an underlying anxiety about losing control over the “native” body in a space dominated by ryots. The threat of the unruly, rebellious subaltern could not be underestimated, especially in the wake of the Indigo Revolt triggered by the violence of plantation culture. Color emerged as a means of taming the ryot. In 1846, Thomas Machell, an assistant to the influential Bengal-based indigo planter James Forlong, observed that indigo blue began its journey in the skilled hands of the “dark skinned” laborer: Women and children flung sheafs of green indigo plants into the vats which were carefully and quickly stowed by the noisy coolies […] but long before the 54 Mitra, Nil Darpan, 53. George, Modern Indian Literature, 49–50. 55 Cornish, “Curating Global Knowledge,” 136; Cornish, “Collecting Photographs,” 129. 56 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 9–10. Emphasis in original.

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last vat was filled the sun had disappeared in a red twilight glow as the first streaks of dawn appeared there was a sound of wooden mallets hammering at huge wooden plugs and then a rush of orange coloured water pouring in to the lower vats. It is from this fermented Indigo juice that the dye is made by the dark skinned sons of India—the dye which may colour the purple robes of royalty or the blue coat of the charity boy, the fair forms of our northern beauties or the dark uniforms of the British soldier. This is the dye for the sailors blue jacket and labourers Sunday coat—a tide golden to those who far from here know not and care not for the toil and groanings of the thousands whose lives are spent in one long struggle of want and toil for the benef it of those who know not even of their existence.57

Color mediates a complex network of bodies and plants, the dark complexion of the laborer invoking India’s vast human resources that were mobilized, managed, and exploited to meet the demands of British consumers. As working men, women, and children were forced to contend with heat, sweat, fermentation, rotting smells, and green and blue stains, skin emerged as the principal threshold where color was registered and recalibrated within a highly racialized domain of indigo production. And it is this dualism between tactility and visuality, between the touch and stain of indigo blue, that the diorama made startlingly visible in its display of ryots and their supervisors staged in the midst of their collective performance of capitalist commodity production. From the planter’s perspective, an industrious ryot defined a well-run indigo factory where the very dynamics of discipline, orderliness, and labor were aligned with Victorian notions of work as a civilizing process and a morally edifying category. As Kavita Philip points out in her analysis of coffee and tea plantations in South India, the “representation of work” was positioned as “the route to civilization.”58 In reality, however, the indigo factory was a site of strenuous, debilitating, and even dangerous corporeal engagements. Here, like the “indigo plant of commerce,” the ryot had to submit, yield, and comply.59 In other words, the plant and the laborer, the two potentially disruptive elements of the landscape, had to be tamed, controlled, and managed in order to meet the plantation’s (and planter’s) goals for improvement and progress. And it is through such mechanisms of control that plants and people were positioned as property, and the plantation was claimed as an intractable landscape to be disciplined by the planter.

57 Machell, as quoted in Balfour-Paul, “Bengal to Blue Jeans,” 42–44. Emphasis added. 58 Philip, Civilizing Natures, 84. 59 Watt, Pamphlet, 5–56.

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A Partitioned City By 1831, there were nearly 400 indigo factories in Bengal with both Europeans and Bengalis at their helm.60 As Bengal indigo dominated in global markets, members of Calcutta’s Bengali elite, like Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) and his colleague Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846), who owned several indigo plantations, discussed the welfare of ryots who they believed were far better off there than “natives” residing elsewhere in the vicinity of those areas.61 The Governor-General Lord William Bentinck (1774–1839), an ardent follower of Utilitarianism, chimed in as well, observing that “every [indigo] factory” was a “circle of improvement.”62 The production of blue, all agreed, was beneficial to the poor peasant farmer. But by the 1850s, Calcutta’s powerful citizens could no longer ignore the plight of the ryot whose oppressive working conditions triggered heated disputes between planters, magistrates, indigo traders, British civil servants, missionaries, and Bengali landowners and intellectuals.63 As Calcutta evolved into a hotbed of indigo controversy, the polemics of color created deep rifts in the city’s social circles. In September 1855, at a Bengal missionary conference held in Calcutta, the Reverend F. Schurr, a pastor from Krishnanagar, read a paper criticizing corrupt planters and policemen. When indigo planters caught wind of Schurr’s presentation, they attacked the missionaries in the Dacca News and in the Calcutta-based newspapers Bengal Hurkaru and the Englishman.64 In sharp contrast, staunch support for the missionaries permeated sections of the Indian press with newspapers like the Hindoo Patriot and the Indian Field standing behind them and the ryots.65 Even minor Bengali press owners like Harinath Majumdar started the vernacular journal Grambartaprakashika (1863–1884) “to expose the exploitation of peasants” by a nexus of colonial officials, indigo planters, and zamindars (landowners), including the eminent Calcutta-based Tagore family.66 Elsewhere in Calcutta, Rajendralal Mitter (1822–1891), the well-known antiquarian and photographer, was expelled from the Photographic Society of Bengal in 1856, on account of his speech against the planter class and the irreparable damage that they had caused to Indian monuments.67 The murky dynamics of indigo manufacturing 60 Bansal and Bansal, “Industries in India,” 219. 61 Ray, Bengal Industries, 232. See also: Kling, Partner in Empire, 87; Bhattacharya, “Indigo Planters,” 56–65. 62 Ray, Bengal Industries, 232. 63 Balfour-Paul, Indigo, 73. 64 Indigo planters Alexander Forbes and James Furlong led the protest. Oddie, Missionaries, 106–7. 65 Oddie, Missionaries, 115–17. 66 Bhattacharya, Sentinels of Culture, 100–101. 67 The famed Scottish architectural historian James Fergusson, who built a small fortune by investing in an indigo plantation in India, may have used his book, Archaeology in India with Especial Reference

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had deposited the violence of plantation culture in the heart of Calcutta’s social consciousness from which it could not be easily expunged. In 1859, poor weather conditions combined with extreme physical hardship culminated in the Indigo Revolt. Coming on the heels of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the indigo riots and demonstrations were no less devastating, prompting Lord Canning, the Viceroy of India, to confess that they had “caused [him] more anxiety” than the events in Delhi.68 Faced with a crisis, the government initiated a Commission of Inquiry in 1860 to determine what permanent changes could be put into place to protect the rights of both indigo planters and cultivators. That same year, hundreds of indigo farmers poured into Calcutta to present their petitions to the city’s Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Peter Grant, prompting the protestant missionary James Long (1814–1887) to launch an acerbic attack on the credibility of the Indigo Commission in a letter to the editor of the Bengal Hurkaru. In May 1860, Long went on to address the indigo question at the all-Bengali Family Literary Club in Calcutta.69 Just over a year later, he was jailed. Long’s imprisonment was spurred on by the English translation of Mitra’s play Nil Darpan, whose critique of the brutal oppression of ryots unleashed a fresh wave of controversy about the indigo industry.70 Although the brilliant Bengali poet and dramatist Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873) had translated the play with Long’s support, the prosecution representing the Landowners’ and Commercial Association (to which the indigo planters belonged) targeted Long as the play’s translator.71 The trial began on July 19, 1861 in the Supreme Court of Calcutta, where Sir Mordaunt Wells presided as the judge, and the fifteen-member jury, save for two individuals, was composed mainly of Britons.72 Accused of libeling the indigo planters of Lower Bengal and the editor of the Englishman, Long was imprisoned in the Common Jail of Calcutta and fined the princely sum of 1,000 rupees, the latter paid promptly by the Bengali playwright Kaliprasanna Sinha (1840?–1870).73 Close economic and social ties with the British made it difficult for Calcutta’s prominent Bengali citizens to agitate for “radical reforms” or demand the “overthrow” of “British rule.”74 But Long’s indictment now eroded their steadfast loyalty to the British government and inspired them to find a renewed sense of pride in their to the Works of Babu Rajendralal Mitra (1884) to hit back at Mitter because of the “Babu’s” critique of the misdeeds of the plantocracy. Eaton, Colour, 38–42. 68 Balfour-Paul, Indigo, 73. 69 Oddie, Missionaries, 111–12, 116. 70 Ghosh, Dinabandhu Mitra, 21. 71 Ray, Bengal Industries, 67; Rao and Rao, Blue Devil, 9. 72 Rao and Rao, Blue Devil, 123. 73 Oddie, Missionaries, 122–25. 74 Bhattacharya, “Indigo Revolt of Bengal,” 20.

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Bengali identity.75 Just over a decade later, a staged production of Mitra’s Nil Darpan took place at the Calcutta National Theatrical Society in December 1872, pulling indigo back into the limelight.76 Praised as “an event of national importance” in Bengali newspapers, Nil Darpan was denounced as “libel on the Europeans” in the Englishman, the chief mouthpiece for indigo planters who expressed surprise that the government had “[allowed] its representation in Calcutta.”77 Indigo cultivation had exposed the cracks and fissures in colonial society, while simultaneously giving the ryot a new visibility in the partitioned city. Taking full advantage of a messy trail of government blunders and a sympathetic judge, irate planters went out of their way to punish their long-standing enemy, a Christian missionary who had dared to support the ryot. By collapsing the boundaries between plantation life and urban society, and between a plantation economy and urban commerce, they ensured that the politics of refusal and rebellion, once confined to unruly plantation landscapes, were now embedded in the city.

Conclusion Colonial plantations can be understood as microcosms of empire where transplanted people (laborers and planters) became entangled with transplanted plants (indigo). Haunted by the loss of identity and place, each determined the fate of the other. Nature ceased to be natural and landscapes turned into contested zones of imperial encounter. Plantation landscapes therefore urge us to consider how the indigo plant, once embedded in the flux and flow of human life, was reconstituted as an artifact that was meant to cater to, and indeed, to produce human “desire and demand.”78 Botanical specimens, fermented liquids, and blue dyes track indigo’s metamorphosis into a commodity that traveled from plantations to factories, settled into herbaria, and seeped into cloth. Dioramas and exhibitions extended these displacements into the public sphere where indigo was valorized as a product of Victorian industry, its plant form conceding to its blue dye in clay models depicting its laborious production. Prints, photographs, paintings, and drawings, on the other hand, folded the plantation back into more intimate orbits of viewing, thus repositioning the complex dynamics of indigo production within the familiar contours of landscape painting and photography. But such picturizations glossed over the harsh realities 75 Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, 153. 76 Rao and Rao, Blue Devil, 135. The performance took place at the Jorasanko residence of Madhusudan Sanyal. It was the first public Bengali theatrical event of its kind. See also: Chatterjee, “Performing (Domi-) nation,” 3; Pamment, “Police of Pig and Sheep,” 234–36. 77 Rao and Rao, Blue Devil, 136–37. 78 Appadurai, “Introduction,” 29–41.

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of plantation life, sharpening instead British pride in a colonial industry that saw indigo laborers beaten and killed across rural Bengal. Might we then reframe indigo as a useful yet unruly plant whose material changes, chemical infusions, and economic exigencies paved the way for violence and disorder on plantations, and thenceforth, in the city of Calcutta? The systematic remaking of nature into specimens and dioramas underscores the web of plant-human interdependencies upon which nineteenth-century modernity came to rely. As science and agriculture converged in plantations, the modern was lodged in the spectatorial. It was also rooted in the transformative potential of nature and in the productivity of landscapes that fueled capitalist systems of wealth production. Modernity now insisted on merging “the cheapness of the human sweat and the human blood, which were converted into commodities,” in the words of Karl Marx (1818–1883), with the sensory pleasures of commodity culture and the optics of visual display.79 Visitors to colonial exhibitions in Calcutta, London, and Melbourne could marvel at miniature recreations of indigo factories or samples of indigo, while reading newspaper accounts about the brutalities of exploitation. Modernity was rife with such slippages in time and space. And emphasizing its precarity were plants like indigo that crystallized into sites of resistance, their leafy matter shoring up plantations as powerful nodes of culture and identity, and the trajectories of science as innovative yet fragile streams of knowledge. By 1901, the British industrial chemist and dye-maker Herbert Levinstein (1878–1956) reminded every “Yorkshire dyer and printer” to favor natural indigo, “the product of our greatest dependency, India,” over synthetic indigo invented by their German rivals. That same year, fellow chemist Raphael Meldola (1849–1915) observed that Germany’s display of coal tar products at the 1900 Paris Exposition was a troubling sign of Britain’s decline as an industrial power. Indigo planters, he surmised, had failed to take seriously Germany’s advances on synthetic indigo production.80 If these scientists sensed that natural dye was on its way out, they were not wrong. By World War I, “factory-produced synthetic indigo” had replaced the agricultural dye, rendering a plantation industry obsolete.81 Even so, the traces and shadows of indigo continued to linger on in Calcutta where, to this day, vestiges of Bengal’s indigo culture can still be found at the palatial Tagore Villa, once an indigo planter’s estate (now quarters for officers of the Border Security Force), Nilhat House, headquarters of the erstwhile indigo brokers Thomas, Marten and Company (J. Thomas), and the Tollygunge Club built on a former indigo plantation. 79 Marx, Capital, 516. 80 Kumar, Indigo Plantations, 154–55; Watt, Pamphlet, cover page. Levinstein would later take over the family firm of Levinstein Limited, one of the earliest and most important British dye-makers. 81 Kumar, Indigo Plantations, 294.

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Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Arnold, David. Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Balaram, Padmini Tolat. “Indian Indigo.” In The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, 139–54. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. Balfour-Paul, Jenny. Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans. London: Firefly Books, 2011. Balfour-Paul, Jenny. “Indigo: From Bengal to Blue Jeans.” Marg 65, no. 2 (2013): 38–49. Bansal, U. R., and B. B. Bansal. “Industries in India during 18th and 19th Century.” Indian Journal of History of Science 19, no. 3 (1984): 215–23. Barringer, Tim. Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain. London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, 2005. Bean, Susan. “Image Makers of Bengal.” Ceramics Monthly 38, no. 5 (May 1990): 30–32. Besky, Sarah, and Jonathan Padwe. “Placing Plants in Territory.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 7 (2016): 9–28. Bhattacharya, Subhas. “Indigo Planters, Ram Mohan Roy and the 1833 Charter Act.” Social Scientist 4, no. 3 (October 1975): 56–65. Bhattacharya, Subhas. “The Indigo Revolt of Bengal.” Social Scientist 5, no. 12 (July 1977): 13–23. Bhattacharya, Tithi. The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (1848–1885). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Brockway, Lucille H. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New York: Academic Press, 1979. Casid, Jill. “Epilogue: Landscape in, around, and under the Performative.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 21, no. 1 (March 2011): 97–116. Chatterjee, Sudipto. “Performing (Domi-)nation: Aspects of Nationalism in NineteenthCentury Bengali Theatre.” Unpublished paper, Thirtieth Anniversary Bengal Studies Conference, University of Chicago, April 28, 1995. 3–6. Accessed March 13, 2021. http:// www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/TESTold/Sudipto.html. Chattopadhyay, Swati. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny. London: Routledge, 2006. Chaudhuri, Supriya. “Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture, Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction.” Journal of Victorian Culture 15, no. 2 (August 2010): 173–93. Connell, Carol Matheson. A Business in Risk: Jardine Matheson and the Hong Kong Trading Industry. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004. Cornish, Caroline. “Collecting Photographs, Constructing Disciplines: The Rationality and Rhetoric of Photography at the Museum of Economic Botany.” In Photographs, Museums,

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Collections: Between Art and Information, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton, 119–38. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Cornish, Caroline. “Curating Global Knowledge: The Museum of Economic Botany at Kew Gardens.” In Spaces of Global Knowledge: Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire, edited by Diarmid A. Finnegan and Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, 119–42. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015. Cundall, Frank, ed. Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. London: William Clowes & Sons, 1886. Das Gupta, Ranajit. “Plantation Labour in Colonial India.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 19, nos. 3–4 (1992): 173–98. Eaton, Natasha. Colour, Art and Empire: Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013. Edelson, S. Max. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Fludernik, Monika. “The Performativity of Idleness: Representations and Stagings of Idleness in the Context of Colonialism.” In Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature, edited by Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi, 129–53. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. “Free Trade and Colonisation in India.” The Oriental Herald 17, no. 54 (June 1828): 399–429. George, K. M., ed. Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology, vol. 3. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1994. Ghosh, A. K. Dinabandhu Mitra. Calcutta: Sahitya Akademi, 1998. Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue. London: Spicer Brothers, Wholesale Stationers; W. Clowes and Sons, Printers, 1851. Guha, Ranajit. “Neel-darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 2, no. 1 (1974): 1–46. Gupta, Jayati. “The Travels and Travails of Indigo in Bengal: Anglo-French Rivalry in the Early Nineteenth Century.” In Desiring India: Representations through British and French Eyes 1584–1857, edited by Niranjan Goswami, 175–88. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2020. “Indigo Culture in Bengal.” Illustrated London News, Saturday, October 16, 1869. “Indigo Natural Fermentation Vat.” Aurora Silk & Natural Dyes, September 20, 2019. Accessed March 13, 2021. https://aurorasilk.com/wp/2019/01/01/indigo-natural-fermentation-vat/. The J. Thomas Story: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Excellence in Tea. Kolkata: J. Thomas and Company Private Limited, 2012. Jasanoff, Maya. “A Passage through India: Zoffany in Calcutta & Lucknow.” In Johan Zoffany RA Society Observed, edited by Martin Postle, 124–39. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for

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British Art; London: Royal Academy of Art; New Haven, CT: in association with Yale University Press, 2011. Jones, Sir William. “A Catalogue of Indian Plants, Comprehending Their Sanscrit, and as Many of Their Linnæan Generic Names as Could with Any Degree of Precision be Ascertained.” Asiatick Researches: Or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal, For Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, The Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia 4 (1795): 229–36. Kelley, Theresa M. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Kling, Blair B. Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Kriegel, Lara. Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Kumar, Prakash. Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kumar, Prakash. “Planters and Naturalists: Transnational Knowledge on Colonial Indigo Plantations in South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 3 (May 2014): 720–53. Kyd, Robert. Letters to Government from Colonel Robert Kyd reporting on various botanical subjects. Bengal Public Proceedings, Fort William 2nd July 1790, 350–72. British Library, IOR/P/3/53. Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie, ed. A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century India: The Letters of Claude Martin 1766–1800. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Macpherson, Governor-General John. “Extract from a Public General Letter from the Governor-General and Council, Calcutta, to the Hon’ble the Court of Directors—dated the 21st of August 1786, paragraphs 50 to 53.” In Annals of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta. Vol. 4, The Anonaceæ of British India, edited by George King, viii. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1893. Majumdar, Souvik. “Methods and Techniques of Clay-Image Making Art of Radha Region.” Journal of Bengal Art 7 (2002): 209–15. Marshall, Nancy Rose, and Malcolm Warner. James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Edited by Frederick Engels. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1921. McCracken, Donal P. Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire. London and Washington: Leicester University Press, 1997. Mitra, Dinabandhu. Nil Darpan; or The Indigo Planting Mirror, A Drama. Translated from the Bengali by a Native. Translated by Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Calcutta: C. H. Manuel, Calcutta Printing and Publishing Press, 1861. Nadri, Ghulam A. “The Indigo Trade of the English East India Company in the Seventeenth Century: Challenges and Opportunities.” In Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading

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Eurasia, edited by Maxine Berg with Felicia Gottmann, Hanna Hodacs, and Chris Nierstrasz, 61–76. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Nandi, Partha Sarathi. “One Mirror, Myriad Reflections: The Politics of Indigo Cultivation and Its ‘Representation’ in Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan, or The Indigo Planting Mirror.” Colloquium: A Journal of the Arts Department 3 (2016): 48–55. Oddie, Geoffrey A. Missionaries, Rebellion, and Proto-nationalism. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999. Official Report of the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–1884: Compiled Under the Orders of the Executive Committee, vol. 2. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885. Palchoudhuri, Ruby. “Neel in Bengali Culture.” In Culture of Indigo in Asia: Plant, Product, Power, edited by Kapila Vatsyayan, 163–70. New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2014. Pamment, Claire. “Police of Pig and Sheep: Representations of the White Sahib and the Construction of Theatre Censorship in Colonial India.” South Asian Popular Culture 7, no. 3 (2009): 233–45. Philip, Kavita. Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Porter, Dahlia. Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Purbrick, Louise. “Introduction.” In The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Louise Purbrick, 2–25. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Rao, Amiya, and B. G. Rao. The Blue Devil: Indigo and Colonial Bengal with an English Translation of Neel Darpan by Dinabandhu Mitra. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Ray, Indrajit. Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution (1757–1857). New York: Routledge, 2011. Ray, Indrajit. “The Indigo Dye Industry in Colonial Bengal: A Re-examination.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 41, no. 2 (2004): 199–224. Roxburgh, William. “Account of a New Species of Nerium, the Leaves of which Yield Indigo, with an Engraving of the Plant, and Descriptions and Engravings of the Necessary Apparatus for Manufacturing the Indigo. To Which is Added, a Brief Account of the Result of Various Experiments Made with a View to Throw Some Additional Light on the Theory of that Artificial Production. Also Descriptions of Two Other Plants Which Yield Indigo, and One from Pegu, Said to Yield a Green Dye.” Transactions of the Society, Instituted at London, for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce; With the Premiums Offered in the Year 1810 28 (1811): 251–307. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Sharma, Jayeeta. “‘Lazy’ Natives, Coolie Labour, and the Assam Tea Industry.” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 6 (2009): 1287–324. Shukla, Prabhat Kumar. Indigo and the Raj: Peasant Protests in Bihar 1780–1917. Delhi: Pragati Publications, 1993.

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Sideri, Eleni. “The Diaspora of the Term Diaspora: A Working-Paper of a Def inition.” Transtext(e)s Transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies 4 (December 2008): 32–47. Smith, Charlotte H. F., and Michelle Stevenson. “Modeling Cultures: 19th Century Indian Clay Figures.” Museum Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2010): 37–48. Taussig, Michael. “Redeeming Indigo.” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 3 (2008): 1–15. Thomas, Adrian P. “The Establishment of Calcutta Botanic Garden: Plant Transfer, Science, and the East India Company, 1786–1806.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 16, no. 2 (2006): 165–77. Tobin, Beth. “Imperial Designs: Botanical Illustration and the British Botanic Empire.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 25 (1996): 265–92. Tsing, Anna. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 141–54. Turner, I. M. “William Roxburgh and the Names of Some Indian Indigos.” Willdenowia 44, no. 1 (March 2014): 21–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3372/wi.44.44103. Varadarajan, Lotika. “Indigo: The Indian Tradition.” In Culture of Indigo in Asia: Plant, Product, Power, edited by Kapila Vatsyayan, 78–88. New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2014. Wardle, Sir Thomas. Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886: Empire of India: Special Catalogue of Exhibits by the Government of India and Private Exhibitors. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1886. Watt, George. Economic Products of India Exhibited at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–1884. Part II, Dyes, Tans, and Mordants. Calcutta: Printed by the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1883. Watt, George. Pamphlet on Indigo. Calcutta, 1890. Wheeler, Michael, Lucia Burgio, and Michelle Shulman. “Materials and Techniques of Kalighat Paintings: Pigment Analysis of Nine Paintings from the Collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum.” Journal of the Institute of Conservation 34, no. 2 (September 2011): 173–85. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Materialism: Select Essays. London: Verso, 2005. First published in 1980 by Verso, London.

About the Author Romita Ray is Associate Professor of Art History at Syracuse University. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in art history from Yale University, and her B.A. degree in art history from Smith College. Ray is the author of Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (2013) and is currently writing a book about tea in colonial India.

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A Natural History in Stone: Medusa’s Unruly Gaze on bardiglio grigio Steffen Zierholz1

Abstract This essay deals with a little-known seventeenth-century painting on stone in the Palazzo Borromeo on the Isola Bella in Lake Maggiore. The painting, executed by an unknown artist, shows the Ovidian myth of Perseus transforming Atlas into a mountain by means of Medusa’s gaze. The artist employed the mineral support not primarily to visualize a poetics of transformation. Rather, he was exploiting highly specialized geological and mineralogical knowledge, in order to craft a historia naturalis. The essay will focus on how the artist explored the aesthetic qualities of the stone support, providing the viewer with insights about nature’s petrifying agency, the formation of fossils, and the phenomenon of “middle nature.” Keywords: painting on stone; fossils; petrification; Isola Bella; geomythology

An anonymous seventeenth-century artist, possibly from Lombardy, made the unusual choice to depict Perseus Transforming Atlas on a small piece of bardiglio grigio, a fine- to medium-grained gray marble with white veins from Carrara or the Apuan Alps (Fig. 5.1). Displayed in the Palazzo Borromeo on the Isola Bella in Lake Maggiore, the painting illustrates an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that tells how Perseus, after killing Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, and taking her head as a trophy, sought rest in Atlas’s kingdom.2 Fearing an old prophecy that a son of Jupiter 1 The research and writing for this article would not have been possible without the generous support of a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art. I want to particularly thank the editors, Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki, for their insightful comments on various versions of this essay; their thoughtful suggestions have improved the argument. Last, but not least, I would like to sincerely thank Julia Slater for proof-reading and revising my English. 2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 148–50.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch05

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Fig. 5.1: Anonymous, Perseus Transforming Atlas, first half of the seventeenth century. Oil on bardiglio grigio, 27 × 23 cm, Isola Bella, Lago Maggiore, Palazzo Borromeo, inv. no. PIT–01048. Image: © Archivio Fotografico Borromeo Isola Bella.

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would steal the golden fruits in the garden of his daughters, the Hesperides, Atlas denied him entrance, threatened him, and tried to drive him away. The unknown artist depicted the moment after Perseus had unveiled Medusa’s head and raised it up to the crowned titan, whereupon he “became a mountain just as large as the man had been. His hair and beard became a forest, and his arms and shoulders turned into adjacent ridges; his head was now the mountain summit and his bones were rock. Each part grew to extraordinary size […] until the weight of heaven rested on his shoulders.”3 Atlas stands out, as he is placed at the very front of the picture plane taking up more than three-quarters of the image, fitting Ovid’s description of him as “huge, greater in bulk than all men put together.”4 He is dressed as a Roman centurion with gray hair and beard, but with a youthful and well defined muscular body. Significantly, his left boot is covered with paint of the same color as the support, indicating that he is actually in the process of turning into stone. It is only Atlas’s gaze directed downwards toward Perseus that makes the subject clear: the hero, with Medusa’s head at the end of his outstretched right arm and a sword in his left hand, is set back into the middle ground where the view opens up onto a mountainous landscape bathed in the warm light of the setting sun. The composition closely follows a work by the German etcher, engraver, and miniature painter Johann Wilhelm Bauer (1607–1642) with the same subject (Fig. 5.2). Bauer’s etching was part of 150 illustrations for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, realized in 1639/40 and first published without an accompanying text in 1641, a terminus post quem for the execution of this painting on stone.5 However, the painting is more than just a copy. The use of stone as pictorial support implies the significant differences that will be the subject of this chapter. Since the second half of the sixteenth century, painters had been increasingly using different sorts of marble as pictorial supports. But unlike the “first” tradition of painting on stone allegedly invented by Sebastiano del Piombo (ca. 1485–1547), where the slate support was painted all over, in the seventeenth century artists exploited the natural patterning and striations of the stone as a re-presentation of nature as part of the pictorial narration.6 Hence it is reasonable to assume a connection between stone as pictorial support and Medusa’s gaze which transforms the beholder into stone. However, this chapter argues, the artist employed the mineral support not primarily to visualize a poetics of transformation. Rather, he or she 3 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 150. 4 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 149. 5 Bauer, Imagines sive illustrationes; Bonnefoit, Johann Wilhelm Bauer, 111–13, 158–65. On the early modern reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, see: Thimann, Lügenhafte Bilder. 6 In recent years, painting on stone has received much scholarly attention. The most recent monographs and edited volumes include: Baker-Bates and Calvillo, Almost Eternal; Casaburo, Pittura su pietra; Collomb, Splendeurs d’Italie; Lohff, Malerei auf Stein; Mann, Paintings on Stone.

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Fig. 5.2: Johann Wilhelm Bauer, Perseus Transforming Atlas, in Johann Wilhelm Bauer, Imagines sive illustrationes ad Publii Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseon libros XV (Vienna: [s. n.], 1641), fol. 42r. Etching, 13 × 20.5 cm, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, call no. Res/4 A.lat.a.451y. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

was exploiting highly specialized geological and mineralogical knowledge, in order to craft a historia, or to be more precise, a historia naturalis. In the classical and early modern tradition mythological language and imagery was believed to conceal knowledge of the natural world, which means that Perseus Transforming Atlas can be considered as painted “geomythology.” This term was coined by the geologist Dorothy Vitaliano in 1968 to refer to the notion of “euhemerism,” named after the Greek mythographer Euhemerus, according to which the origins of myths are construed as traditional accounts of historical persons and events. Geomythology, then, is the application of euhemerism to geology.7 Even if the identity of the artist is unknown and the exact provenance of the Perseus Transforming Atlas remains open, the place where the painting is on display, the Palazzo Borromeo on the Isola Bella, points to Vitaliano VI Borromeo 7 Vitaliano, “Geomythology,” 5–30. This approach is further explored in Piccardi and Masse, Myth and Geology. This euhemeristic approach was also commonplace in the early modern literature on alchemy which considered Greek and Roman mythology to be alchemical processes in disguise. For example, Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece was construed as an allegory for transmutation. Matton, “L’interprétation alchimique,” 73–87. On identifying various mythological figures as embodiments of generative and transmutational principles in art and alchemy, see: Göttler, “Tales of Transformation.” For an overview of the different strands of interpretation of myth, see: Seznec, Survival of Pagan Gods, 11–147.

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(1620–1690) as the probable original owner of the work. Vitaliano had a great passion for literature and the arts and was deeply committed to natural philosophy. In 1660, he was elected head of the Accademia dei Faticosi in Milan, an institution with strong Aristotelian inclinations. He wrote two unpublished treatises on the nature of light, the Discorso particolare del lume and Del lume e delle ombre.8 The Isola Bella, described by the painter Luigi Pellegrino Scaramuccia as “a marvelous artifice added to nature” (alla natura aggiuntovi un meraviglioso Artificio) and as a “wonder of both art and nature” (miracolo, e d’Arte, e di Natura), was first and foremost a site of withdrawal and contemplation, surrounded by the beautiful landscape of Lake Maggiore at the foot of the Alps.9 The garden-island hosted the Accademia dell’Isola, a loose circle of distinguished writers, mathematicians, and Jesuit intellectuals particularly interested in moral and natural philosophy.10 It can be considered a site in which knowledge of the natural world was presented and where the visual arts played a major role in the production of such knowledge. The sculptural program of the Teatro Massimo, a monumental fountain at the center of the island, stages Vitaliano’s commitment to art and nature (Fig. 5.3). Among the statues mentioned in a letter to his brother Cardinal Giberto Borromeo (1615–1672), he describes the personifications of art and nature flanking the unicorn, a heraldic symbol from the Borromeo coat of arms, on top of the exedra, as being in a sense “allusions to the island.”11 These allusions surely included his collection of paintings with the Perseus Transforming Atlas, landscape paintings and numerous flower still lifes on mineral supports, which testified to his fondness for both nature and painting on stone.12 8 The manuscripts are kept in the Borromeo family archive on the Isola Bella, Cipollini, Vitaliano Borromeo; Azzi Visentini, L’arte dei giardini, 582–83. 9 Scaramuccia, Le finezze de pennelli italiani, 147; Galli and Monferrini, “Un cavaliere e la sua ‘dama,’” 26–43. 10 Here I refer to Sergio Monferrini’s paper “The ‘Academy’ of the Isola Bella of Vitaliano VI Borromeo” delivered at the Renaissance Society of America Virtual Conference, April 2021. 11 “quelle del frontespizio abbiano a rappresentare le quattro stagioni, […] e […] le quattro statue da mettersi nella parte riguardante la detta isola di sopra avessero a significare i quattro elementi, e che nel mezzo vi siano due statue esprimenti la Natura e l’Arte abbracciate insieme ma con certe allusioni all’isola.” Cited after Morandotti and Natale, Vitaliano VI Borromeo, 132. 12 More than a hundred flower still life paintings on different sorts of marble by Giovanni Saglier were documented as being in Vitaliano’s possession at the time of his death in 1690. His collection owed much to his famous great-uncle Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who established the taste for still life paintings and landscapes in northern Italy. As Pamela Jones has pointed out, the Cardinal considered the contemplation of nature to be a major way to get closer to God. His view of nature as a manifestation of God’s goodness was reflected in his collection of Flemish landscape paintings and still lifes, including many by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Paul Bril. Morandotti, “La formazione della Galleria,” 30–32; Jones, “Federico Borromeo as a Patron,” 261–72. On Vitaliano VI as a patron of artists, see Monferrini, “‘Raccomandazioni’ di Vitaliano VI Borromeo,” 180–89.

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Fig. 5.3: Carlo Simonetta (attributed), Teatro Massimo, 1667–1677. Isola Bella, Lago Maggiore. Image: © Roberto Crepaldi, Italy.

The Artist as Perseus In early modernity, the imitation of nature (imitatio naturae) was at the very core of artistic training. The literature of art discusses the imitation of nature in a twofold sense: the imitation of created nature (natura naturata) and the imitation of the creative principles of nature (natura naturans).13 In order to discover and understand the secrets of nature and the arts, the artist required a searching mind and scrutinizing eye, described in art theory as the ability of discernment. This has recently been defined as a “key concept at the intersection of various spheres in both learned and artisanal cultures,” connected both to highly specialized practical experience and to theoretical book knowledge.14 The concept derives from the 13 Białostocki, “The Renaissance Concept of Nature,” 19–30; Eusterschulte, “Imitatio naturae,” 701–807. On the power of Leonardo’s paintings on the viewer in relation to processes of the transmission of forces in the natural world, see: Fehrenbach, Leonardo da Vinci. 14 Dupré and Göttler, “Introduction: Hidden Artifices,” 2. Recent approaches in the history of knowledge have stressed both the experiential and physical practices that produce a specific artisanal knowledge and how a well-read and intellectual artist acquired scholarly book knowledge. Damm, Thimann, and Zittel, The Artist as Reader; Smith, Body of the Artisan.

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discernment of spirits (discretio spirituum), a technique of mental introspection popularized by Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, which enables the practitioner to distinguish whether his own thoughts, emotions, and visions derive from the good or the evil spirit.15 In Venetian writings on art, it was first used synonymously with judgment (giudizio); however, it remains a rather nebulous term referring to different notions, as ingenuity (ingenium), invention (invenzione), taste (gusto), art (arte), and was variously described as an innate gift or a skill initially learned and subsequently honed through practice.16 In Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Idea del tempio della pittura, published in 1590 and supposed to be originally titled Libro della discrezione, discernment played a major role. Lomazzo defines it as “the first and principle part of painting.”17 It enables artists “to understand clearly, deep down, what we are doing. And from this understanding results the purity of our intelligence, stability of judgment, and, ultimately, the true and rational way to work.”18 In the Perseus Transforming Atlas, the artist not only presented an intricate historia naturalis, but also presented himself as Perseus possessing the virtues of judgment and discernment.19 In his seminal study on Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus, Michael Cole argued convincingly that Cellini (1500–1571) considered his casting of bronze as a generative and life-giving act. Cole does not elaborate on the figure of Perseus, but asserts that the gesture of the hero’s outstretched hand holding Medusa’s head dripping with blood resembles the pouring of molten metallic “blood,” which suggests an identification of the artist with Perseus.20 Mythographical texts support this reading. In his influential Mythologiae, Natale Conti (1520–1582) contrasts the Gorgons with the Graeae, three gray-haired sisters who shared one eye and one tooth. Perseus visited them and stole the eye to extort information on the magical items necessary to kill Medusa. According to Conti, the Graeae represent “the knowledge (cognitionem) and prudence (prudentiam) that is acquired through experience (experientiam).”21 While the Graeae stand for prudence, the Gorgons represent the pleasures and dangers of 15 Important literature on the early modern notion of discernment of spirits includes: Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit; Copeland and Machielsen, Angels of Light? 16 On the increasing relevance of the notion of discernment and judgment in the literature of arts, see: Summers, The Judgment of Sense, 21–28; Cole, “Discernment and Animation,” 146–50; Dupré and Göttler, “Introduction: Hidden Artifices,” 2. 17 Lomazzo, Idea of the Temple of Painting, 94; Göttler, “The Temptation of the Senses,” 424. 18 Lomazzo, Idea of the Temple of Painting, 54. 19 Mythological deities were often used for the fashioning of an artistic identity. Depictions of Vulcan in his forge, for example, were popular in Flemish and Netherlandish art, as Vulcan produces useful and beautiful things combining knowledge, judgment, and manual skill. Göttler, “Vulcan’s Forge,” 52–87; Pfisterer, “Zeugung der Idee,” 57–58. 20 Cole, “Cellini’s Blood,” 227. 21 I have been using the English translation by John Mulryan and Steven Brown, based on the 1581 edition: Conti, Mythologiae, 640.

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life, which can only be overcome with the help of the Graeae’s “good judgment.”22 Beside the Graeae’s eye, Conti also alludes to Minerva’s advice, Pluto’s helmet, and Mercury’s sword and winged sandals that were required to complete the mission. He construes the divine help granted to Perseus as an allegory of discernment: “For the first thing we need if we want to complete any kind of laborious and difficult task is wisdom. We also need insight (animi perspicientia), a subtle awareness (subtilitate), and a sharp native intelligence (acumine ingenii), for nothing of stirring importance can be achieved without these qualities.”23 Minerva’s association with wisdom and knowledge, evoked by Conti, had a long tradition reaching back to classical antiquity, but in sixteenth-century art the goddess was also increasingly used as a symbol for ingenuity and artistic invention, as for example in Giorgio Vasari’s Forge of Vulcan, painted in 1565, while in his Imagini de i dei degli antichi of 1571 Vincenzo Cartari explained that all the arts were created by Minerva, and that Vulcan personified the manual execution of what ingenuity had designed.24 The sophisticated historia naturalis presented in the Perseus Transforming Atlas is, then, the result not of mere instruction and acquired knowledge, but of an innate or divine gift which Benedetto Varchi (1502/1503–1565) called “natural judgment.”25 Echoing Perseus, who cut off Medusa’s head “with Pallas guiding his hand,” the unknown painter presented himself as a divinely inspired artist-philosopher whose manual skill was guided by wisdom, judgment, discernment, and intelligence.26 Following Conti, the artist can be understood as “a second Perseus” and “a servant of the divine mind,” able to understand and reveal the most hidden secrets of art and nature.27

Images on Stone When the artist considered the painting’s materiality, in particular the natural patterning into which he incorporated the pictorial subject, the contemporary discussions about the generation of images in stone must have been a first point of 22 Conti, Mythologiae, 640. 23 Conti, Mythologiae, 640. 24 On Vasari’s Forge of Vulcan within the Florentine discussion of ingenium, see: Zagoury, “Minerva in the Forge of Vulcan,” 61–93; Cartari, Le imagini de i dei degli antichi, 387. 25 Varchi, Lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi, 678: “E divero, come uno, che naturalmente sia giudizioso, può ancora senza studio nessuno, e senza lettere avanzare, in molte cose gli studiiosi, e i letterati; così quantunche dotti, e esercitati, se mancano di quel giudizio naturale, senza il quale non può stare, o non è mai perfetto il giudizio accidentale, e acquistato mediante gli studii, non provano mai troppo, anzi bene spesso sono ridicoli, e uccellabili cavare a gli huomini idioti.” See also: Dupré and Göttler, “Introduction: Hidden Artifices,” 3. 26 Conti, Mythologiae, 635. 27 Conti, Mythologiae, 641.

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reference. In his depiction of the crowned Atlas, the artist was certainly harking back to stone images of kings known since the thirteenth century. Albertus Magnus, for example, writes of a stone he saw in Venice showing “a most beautiful picture of a king’s head with a crown and a long beard.”28 In De pictura, published in 1435, Leon Battista Alberti brings up the famous ring of King Pyrrhus mentioned by Pliny the Elder—an agate, which shows Apollo with his lyre together with the nine muses, each of them with her attribute—and then states that “nature herself delights in painting, for we observe she often fashions hippocentaurs and bearded faces of kings out of marble.”29 Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, appearances of images in stone tended to be construed as religious figures: instead of profane depictions of kings, sixteenth-century treatises on natural history by both Julius Caesar Scaliger and Conrad Gessner include representations of bearded hermits in stone.30 And printed illustrations of images featuring saints, the Virgin and Child, or even Christ on the cross were interpreted as examples of divine image-making conveyed by the hand of God through nature (Fig. 5.4).31 Although done on bardiglio, the representation of Perseus on a mineral support might have invoked the apotropaic functions of images in semi-precious stones. Such images were usually incorporated into amulets or rings, items that were carried close to the body. From a modern point of view, this belief is often disdained as superstition; but in the Middle Ages and still in early modernity, natural magic and natural philosophy were closely intertwined. Both Albertus Magnus’s mid-thirteenth-century De mineralibus and Ludovico Dolce’s Trattato delle gemme, published in 1565, are treatises on the generation of stones, which include astrological lapidaries that credit figured stones with magical properties and medicinal virtues. Regarding the image of Perseus, the Dominican philosopher writes: “Perseus, holding in his right hand a sword and in his left the Gorgon’s head, is said to protect from thunderbolts and storms, and from attack from the envious.”32 In Dolce’s account, which depends heavily on Albertus Magnus, Perseus holds the “sword in his left hand and the head of Medusa in his right one. If engraved on stone, it protects the wearer from misadventure, lightning, and storm and guards places against witchcraft.”33 The deliberate use of the natural patterning of the stone 28 Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, 128; on figured stones with reference to Albertus Magnus, see: Daston, “Nature by Design.” 29 Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, II, 28; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXVII, 3. 30 Scaliger, Exotericarum, 180; Gessner, De omni rerum fossilium, 141. 31 D’Amico, Trattato delle piante, 14. 32 Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, 145. 33 Dolce, Trattato delle gemme, 148: “Perseo è una immagine, che ha nella manca mano una spada, e nella destra il capo di Medusa. […] Se sia scolpita in pietra guarda chi la porta da disaventure, e lo conserva da folgori e dalle tempeste: et anco i luoghi, ove si contiene, lo difendono da strigherie.”

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Fig. 5.4: Jacques Callot, “Effigia impressa de la natura a un bianco marmo dicono che sia S. Girolamo,” in Bernardino d’Amico, Trattato delle piante, & immagini de sacri edifizi di Terra Santa (Florence: Pietro Cecconcelli, 1620), fig. 8. Engraving, 26.7 × 19.2 cm, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, call no. 84–B29370. Image: © Public Domain.

suggests that the artist was very familiar with astrological lapidaries. The abstract and indeterminate white stains acted as a “potential image,” a term coined by Dario Gamboni, that stimulated the artist’s imagination to construe these figuratively as clouds.34 In contrast to Bauer’s etching, in which the dark clouds only indicate an approaching thunderstorm, the painter has now included the thin delicately branching veins above Perseus to create the impression of an actual lightning storm from which he seems to be shielding himself with Medusa’s head.

Medusa’s Gaze and the Petrifying Powers of Nature Like other artists before him, the painter of Perseus Transforming Atlas invoked nature’s transformative powers, in particular petrification, in order to compete with

34 Gamboni, Potential Images, 18–20.

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Fig. 5.5: Bernard Palissy (attributed), Oval Plate, mid-sixteenth century. Lead-glazed earthenware, 6.2 × 33 × 25.3 cm, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alain Moatti in honor of Peter Fusco, inv. no. 97.DE.46. Image: © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

the artifice of nature.35 A well-known example is the French natural philosopher and potter Bernard Palissy (ca. 1510–ca. 1589), who had a strong interest in geology, especially in the formation of minerals and fossils.36 As William Newman has suggested, it is highly likely that Palissy considered his rusticware with life casts of reptiles, insects, and plants to be formed in the same way as fossils (Fig. 5.5).37 It was through practical skills, manual experience, and physical practices, what Pamela Smith has described as “artisanal epistemology,” that Palissy produced a

35 On the art versus nature debate in alchemy, see: Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 34–114. 36 Wright, “Geological Studies of Bernard Palissy.” 37 Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 158. Originally, the term “fossil” had no evolutionary or paleontological connotations. It derives from the Latin fossilis (“dug up”) and fodere (“to dig”) and referred to any object or body removed from the earth, including gems, marbles, minerals, and stones, as well as fossils in the modern sense, in other words, objects that were commonly characterized by their “stoniness.” It was used in this sense from Aristotle’s time up to early modernity, when a semantic reduction of fossils as evidence of primeval life gradually started to develop. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils, 24.

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knowledge of the natural world.38 By turning dead flesh into stone and by using fire and heat in the kiln to make the water evaporate out of the clay, he replicated the process of nature creating stones and fossils in the earth. Like Palissy, but based on theoretical rather than on practical knowledge, the Perseus artist visually illustrated the petrifying agency of nature by incorporating the pictorial narration into the bardiglio. As recent research has pointed out, stone in its different variations has a number of metaphoric connotations. Regarding Sebastiano del Piombo’s Pietà in Madrid, painted between 1533 and 1539, which entirely covers the piece of slate it is painted on, Elena Calvillo has called attention to the referential qualities of the support, evoking entities made of stone, such as the tomb of Christ and the familiar metaphor of the Church and Rock of St. Peter.39 Similarly, Christopher Nygren has stressed the “theology of stone,” relating Titian’s use of slate as the support for the Prado Ecce Homo of 1547 to the idea of the touchstone, the pietra di paragone. 40 In the same way that the touchstone was used to assay alloys of precious metal, slate points to Christ as a spiritual touchstone to test the purity of one’s soul. The depiction of Perseus and Atlas had similar symbolic connotations. In the Aeneid, Virgil described Atlas as hard (“Atlantis duri”); the relevant verses were cited in Conti’s Mythologiae, in what the artist might have recognized as an argumentum ad nomine referring to the materiality of the support. 41 But thanks to the visible presence of the pictorial support, what happens here is something very different. Whereas in the case of Titian’s Ecce Homo, the stone refers to an idea other than itself but related to it through metaphor or figurative language, there is now a stone-qua-stone relationship: the rock formation into which Atlas is changed is not represented exclusively by painterly means, but re-presents itself through the visible materiality of the stone support. The artist made use of the natural patterning of the support to create a stony mountainscape. He defined its contours by using dark brown colors and adding sparse vegetation on its slope. The connection between stone supports and landscape is not unusual and is particularly evident in the case of pietra paesina in which contemporaries construed the abstract figurations naturally occurring in the stone as landscapes, paesine. The German merchant and art agent Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) described them as “Florentine stones” with “naturally created landscapes and buildings.”42 Pietra paesina was used mainly for subjects situated in stony desertscapes, such as the 38 Smith, The Body of the Artisan, 59–93. 39 Calvillo, “Authoritative Copies,” 485–86. 40 Nygren, “Titian’s Ecce Homo,” 55–59. 41 Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 246–49; Conti, Mythologiae, 273. 42 Hainhofer, as cited in Baltrušaitis, Aberrations, 63.

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Fig. 5.6: Antonio Tempesta (attributed), Conquest of Jerusalem, 1615–1630. Oil on pietra paesina, 24 × 37 cm, Rome, Galleria Borghese, inv. no. 520. Image: © Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e per il Turismo– Galleria Borghese.

Conquest of Jerusalem, shown here, Perseus rescuing Andromeda, and hermits in the wilderness (Fig. 5.6). 43 Stone, in particular colored or patterned stone, was used for the representation of landscapes and nature which formed an integral part of figural composition. But whereas lapis lazuli was used to represent water and alabaster to represent the divine heavens and celestial glories, pietra paesina and bardiglio grigio fully exploit their enargetic qualities in re-presenting what they actually are: stone. 44 Thus there is an element of “found object” or “objecthood” in the painting of Perseus and Atlas, similar to the Dionisio Minaggio’s “Feather Book” of 1618, a sort of bestiary in which real feathers, bird skin, beaks, and feet were used

43 Lohff, Malerei auf Stein, 226–31. 44 Fabio Barry has made a similar observation regarding the oscillation between presence and representation in the Stoning of St. Stephen, painted on yellow breccia and attributed to Antonio Tempesta (1555–1630): “It re-presents itself as earth, rock, ashlar, and a monumental marble column,” but also “mimics a piebald horse, a leather cuirass, brocade cloaks, the luminous plasma of heaven […] and the act of lapidation itself.” Barry, “‘Painting in Stone,’” 34.

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Fig. 5.7: Dionisio Maniggio, Title Page of the Feather Book, 1618. Feathers on paper, 47.6 × 30.5 cm, Montreal, McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, Blacker Wood Natural History Collection, call no. folio ORHQ M66. Image: © Public Domain.

to re-present different sorts of birds (Fig. 5.7). 45 In terms of rhetoric, in which early modern art theory was grounded, the shift from the re-praesent-atio of nature to its praesentia can be explained by the notion of enargeia which Heinrich Plett def ines as possibly a “universal principle of representation” based on inner images of the imagination. 46 Enargeia is a technique used by orators and poets in order to describe a past event or an absent subject in the most vivid and visual manner as if it were present here and now. 47 As Valeska 45 On Minaggio’s book in the global context of feather works, see: Russo, “Contemporary Art in New Spain,” esp. 50–58. 46 Plett, Enargeia, 2. 47 The locus classicus is a well-known passage in Quintilian’s De institutione oratoria: “There are certain experiences which the Greeks call φαντασίαι, and the Romans visiones, whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes. It is the man who is really sensitive to such impressions who will have the greatest power over the emotions. […] From such impressions arises that εναργεια which Cicero calls illumination and actuality, which makes

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von Rosen and Caroline van Eck have shown, painting can generate a feeling of presence, a fictive lifelikeness, similar to a linguistic representation. 48 However, painting is considered to be far superior, as, being visual, it is eminently suited to placing a subject immediately before the beholder’s eyes. The enargetic quality of painting on stone comes into its own in a twofold sense: in contrast to a mere verbal description, it places the subject visually before the eyes of the viewer; and unlike a visual depiction on canvas, it materially evokes the presence of stony wilderness. Perseus Transforming Atlas is such a striking case because the self-referential reading is reinforced by the pictorial subject and its idiosyncratic composition. Unlike the “close-up” depictions of Medusa’s severed head, for example in the collaborative work by Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, in which the appalling facial expression and naturalistic rendering of the mass of snakes f iguratively petrify the viewer, the power of Medusa’s gaze is now tied to its material support (Fig. 5.8). 49 This becomes evident when comparing the painting on stone with Johann Wilhelm Bauer’s etching. Bauer placed Perseus and Medusa’s head in an immediate narrative and visual context with Atlas. Perseus stands on the same pictorial level and is looking up, meeting the gaze of the titan. In contrast, the painting on stone shows Perseus set back into the middle ground, while the head of Medusa is turned away from Atlas, pointing into the pictorial space. The artist dissolved and reconf igured the narrative nexus, so that Medusa is now visibly interacting with the pictorial support. It is at her eye level that the evening ambience gives way to the materiality of the bardiglio grigio, suggesting that not only Atlas, but the whole painting, where large parts of the unworked support have been left visible, is being turned into stone as a result of her gaze. In the seventeenth century, different theories about the generation of fossils coexisted. Building upon the classical and medieval work of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Albertus Magnus, early modern scholars attributed the generation of images in stone to a force that is inherent in the earth, variously referred to as “vis formativa,” “vis plastica,” or “spiritus plasticus.”50 At the same time, fossils were often considered “jokes of nature,” playful figurations that seemed to have been painted by nature us seem not so much to narrate as to exhibit the actual scene, while our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence.” Quintilian, De institutione oratoria, vol. 2, VI, 2, 29–33. 48 Important literature includes: von Rosen, “Die Enargeia des Gemäldes”; Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts. 49 On the petrifying power of art in relation to the myth of Medusa, see: Van Eck, “The Petrifying Gaze.” 50 Aristotle, Meteorology, IV, 1; Avicenna, De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum, 22; Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, 22.

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Fig. 5.8: Anonymous, Perseus with Medusa’s head, detail of Fig. 5.1.

herself.51 This notion was already expressed in Pliny, but early modern authors, like Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, and the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, used the trope in order to avoid any problematic implications of the organic origins of fossils and the age of the Earth.52 Nature, then, was seen as an artist capable of imitating herself, of representing living animals and plants in stone, and of producing things that had never been seen elsewhere. Even though early modern natural history did not distinguish conceptually between fossils and random patterns in stone, there were signif icant visual 51 The foundational study is Findlen, “Jokes of Nature,” 292–331; see also the contributions in Adamowsky, Böhme, and Felfe, Ludi naturae; Felfe, “Figurationen im Gestein,” 153–75. 52 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, IX, 52; Gessner, Historiae animalium, 208; Aldrovandi, Musaeum metallicum, 448; Kircher, Arithmologia, 282.

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Fig. 5.9: Giovanni Battista Coriolano, I. “Tabella in qua visuntur homines, et iumenta petrificata,” in Ulisse Aldrovandi, Musaeum metallicum in libros IV distributum Bartholomaeus Ambrosinus (Bologna: Giovanni Battista Ferroni, 1648), 823. Engraving, 35 × 22.7 cm, Zurich, ETH-Bibliothek, call no. Rar 1027. Image: © ETH-Bibliothek.

differences. In contrast to the ambiguous forms that stimulate the viewer’s imagination, imprints of fossils are characterized by clearly shaped outlines. As mimetic representations of known and unknown specimens, fossils had a peculiar status between art and nature. A major advance in the discussion of the petrification of fossils was Georg Agricola’s De ortu et causis subterraneorum, published in 1546, in which he introduced the notion of the “petrifying juice” (succus lapidescens). In addition to heat and cold as basic principles of the generation of stone, Agricola assumed the existence of a juice which turns materials into stone.53 In denying the traditional influence of the stars on the formation of subterranean bodies, he rationalized the process of fossilization and argued for an organic origin. His theory was already well received in the sixteenth century. In his Musaeum metallicum, published posthumously in 1648, Aldrovandi included an engraving depicting several men keeping watch over their grazing animals (Fig. 5.9). He claimed it showed an event, which allegedly occurred in “Tartary,” in which the group came into contact with the petrifying juice, so that we see 53 Morello, “Birth of the Mineralogical Sciences,” 22–30.

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them turned into stone (“in saxa mutarentur”) just where they were standing, albeit on a smaller scale.54 An erudite viewer familiar with the discussion of fossil formation would certainly understand Medusa’s powers as a replication of natural processes. Treatises on natural history often related nature’s petrifying agency to Medusa’s gaze. In his Book of Minerals, after describing how images on stones are formed, Albertus Magnus concluded with the myth of Medusa: “A story that confirms this is that of the Gorgon, who is said to have converted into stone those who looked upon her. A strong mineralizing power was called the ‘Gorgon,’ and exposing the bodily humours to the petrifying power was described as ‘looking upon the Gorgon.’”55 In his Discourse of Earthquakes, posthumously published by Richard Waller in 1705, Robert Hooke sought to illustrate how earthquakes and volcanic activities have transformed the surface of the earth by using Ovid’s Metamorphoses, among other stories, as empirical evidence.56 Hooke stresses that “all these poetical expressions, which the author [Ovid] seemeth to speak, as of men, and their actions, and enjoyments, I take to be significative of all acting powers of the earth whether vegetative or animal.”57 In his natural exegesis of the myth of Perseus, Hooke describes the Garden of the Hesperides as a locus amoenus which had never been troubled with lightning, thunder, and earthquakes. He explains how, when Perseus turned Medusa’s gaze upon it, “the subterraneous eruption, and therewith the petrifactive quality exerted itself, upon that country” turning Atlas’s realm into a stony wasteland.58 Giacinto Gimma’s account in Della storia naturale delle gemme, delle pietre, e di tutti minerali, published in 1730, still links the petrifying force that transforms living material into dead stone with Medusa’s gaze: “This, then, is the Gorgon that robs animals and plants of both nature and movement [that is life], and transforms them into stone.”59 In addition, Medusa’s petrifying powers were also used as an explanatory model in the field of medicine. In his treatise entitled Spiritus gorgonicus of 1650, the English natural philosopher Walter Charleton referred to the spiritus lapidificus to explain the generation of kidney stones in the human body, comparing its effect to Medusa’s gaze.60 54 Aldrovandi, Musaeum metallicum, 823. 55 Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, 53. 56 Birkett and Oldroyd, “Robert Hooke, Physico-Mythology,” 145–70. 57 Waller, Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, 378. 58 Waller, Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, 399–400. 59 Van Gastel, “Controversial Continuities,” 59; Gimma, Della storia naturale, 1:78: “Questo è dunque la Gorgone, che toglie agli animali e la vegetazione, e la natura, e’l moto, ed in pietra gli converte.” 60 Charleton, Spiritus gorgonicus, 13: “In summa, ut brevitati studeamus, amplectendus est Spiritus lapidificus, seu semen petrificum; quo ut primum afflantur corpora […] tanquam Medusae Gorgonis

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Painting on Stone, Fossilized Wood, and “Middle Nature” Perseus Transforming Atlas surely prompted further discussions related to nature’s petrifying agency. The starting point is a central feature of the painting, namely the fact that it combines art and nature. This is the reason why paintings on stone were often displayed in cabinets of curiosity, interacting with other objects whose materialities similarly oscillated between artificialia and naturalia.61 The artist reinforced this ambiguity by creating visual uncertainty when it came to distinguishing between the painted reality and the material reality of the stone. It is almost impossible for the viewer to identify the exact transition between the stone and the painter’s brushstroke, for example at the feet of Atlas. In this case, the blurring of boundaries between art and nature was not primarily intended as a delightful aesthetic play.62 Rather, the artist was mirroring problems of classification that were being discussed at the time regarding the phenomenon of fossilized wood discovered by Federico Cesi (1585–1630), founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, around his hometown of Acquasparta in Umbria.63 Much more than coral, petrified wood eluded exact classification. It is at the same time both plant and stone, vegetable and mineral, and existed in different combinations: some examples were made of wood and earth, others of wood and stone, and yet others of wood with both stony and metallic qualities. Cesi was most fascinated with the ambiguity, or “middle nature” (mezzana natura) as he referred to the phenomenon, of items that shared more than one quality. Johann Faber, botanist and member of the Lincei, credited Cesi with being the first to have revealed the middle nature between plants and minerals, and numerous letters by Cesi and other scholars, such as Cassiano dal Pozzo and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, testify to the lively interest of the Republic of Letters in his discoveries.64 In a letter to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII, Cesi writes of a “new type of middle nature between plants and metals, the veined and varied mineralized woods.” He further describes petrified objects, some of which “have become totally petrified […] and others which are mixed, where some parts remain of wood, the others of stone, or of similar condition, with both the interior and exterior mixed in many different ways.”65 Their middle nature is reflected capite conspecto, mutant vultum, rigent, induuntque solidam substantiam.” 61 On early modern cabinets of curiosities, see: Bredekamp, Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben. 62 Nygren, “A Stone through the Window,” 92. 63 My account on fossilized wood is based on Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx, 305–45. On visual discernment as a heuristic device that prompted the viewer to engage in spiritual discernment, see: Zierholz, “The Subiconographic Surface.” 64 Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx, 329. 65 Cesi, as cited in Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx, 326.

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in Cesi’s hybrid designations, often neologisms, that highlight the combination between two different specimens, such as “stone-wood” (petrilignum), “metal-plant” (metallophyta), and “clay-wood” (cretilignum).66 A draft of Cesi’s planned treatise on middle natures, “De mediis naturis in universo,” treated “things of doubtful nature, or doubtful species, or ambiguous things. On [the nature] of ambiguous Nature. Two different natures joined in a single species […] species participating in two natures.”67 Cesi intended to write a treatise on petrified wood for which he commissioned rich visual documentation, mostly drawings, but also watercolors. However, his untimely death prevented the conclusion of many of his projects. Thanks to Francesco Stelluti (1577–1652), Cesi’s thoughts and ideas were made available to the public in the short Trattato del legno fossile minerale, published in 1637. Stelluti’s views on the generation of fossilized wood, not its middle nature, were contested soon after the publication and were still being discussed at the end of the seventeenth century.68 Stelluti introduced the subject as “wholly new and ambiguous.”69 Petrified or subterranean wood is what he calls a “metallophyte” (metallophyta), in other words, composed of both metal and plant. He mentions other cases in which it is impossible to distinguish if the objects are wood or stone. As the wood in them has not yet entirely changed into stone, they can be simply characterized as “wood stone” (legno pietra).70 Some of these wood stones had the appearance of wood, but the substance of stone, while the interior of others were made of wood and the exterior of stone. The accompanying engravings were no substitute for the visual and haptic experience of the original object’s middle nature (Fig. 5.10). Nor were they anywhere near comparable to the rich and detailed illustrations commissioned by Cesi himself, which is why Stelluti briefly described their appearance, color, size, texture, and degree of petrif ication. The last figure in the treatise represents a peculiar case (Fig. 5.11). The engraving illustrates various ammonites and other mollusk fossils that at first glance seem to be unconnected with the matter at hand. According to Freedberg, Stelluti included this plate to point to Cesi’s wider interests that were supposed to frame his studies 66 Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx, 308. 67 “De Ancipiti natura, seu de ancipiti specie, seu ambiguis. De ambigua Natura. Quae duae coniunctae unica in specie naturae […] Species duarum naturarum particeps.” Gabrieli, “L‘orizzonte intelletuale,” 40, as quoted in Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx, 323. 68 Lohff, Malerei auf Stein, 162–65. In his Discourse of Earthquakes, Robert Hooke refers to Stelluti’s account in his mention of the fossilized wood found in Italy. Waller, Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, 315. On Stelluti, see: Alessandrini and Armezzani, Francesco Stelluti. 69 Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile, dedication: “una materia in vero totalmento nuova, & ambigua.” 70 Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile, 7.

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Fig. 5.10: Anonymous, Veins of Petrified Wood, in Francesco Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile minerale nuovamente scoperto (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1637), plate 5. Engraving, 33 × 23 cm, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, call no. 1364–392. Image: © Public Domain.

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Fig. 5.11: Anonymous, Ammonites and Fragments of Ammonites, in Francesco Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile minerale nuovamente scoperto (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1637), plate 13. Engraving, 33 × 23 cm, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, call no. 1364–392. Image: © Public Domain.

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on petrified wood, including corals, petrified fungi, and the “mixed marbles” to which Stelluti actually referred.71 However, more than simply adding context, its primary function was to link the phenomenon of mezzana natura to a more familiar discussion of the ambiguous relationship between art and nature. This is made explicit in Stelluti’s description of the ammonites as being shaped like snail shells, or coiled serpents resembling rams’ horns. Even if both are formed in this way by nature, he adds that “the spirals are so well-proportioned that I have always considered them artificial, rather than natural.”72 Stelluti goes on to address Cesi’s general interest in images in stone, mentioning, among others, dendrites featuring arboreal patterns, “small trees with branches and twigs, that resemble very much their models in nature, so that they seem to be exquisitely painted.”73 The visual evidence in Perseus Transforming Atlas testifies to a learned artist with a highly specialized knowledge of both natural magic and natural philosophy. Since 1641 can be established as terminus post quem for the execution of the painting, it seems most likely that the artist was familiar with the ongoing discussion concerning petrified wood and had himself read Stelluti. He must have been aware, then, that Stelluti alluded to the trope of natura pictrix and implicitly to painting on stone, as dendrite was commonly used to depict woodscapes, for example in Antonio Tempesta’s Boar Hunt, painted around 1609, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.74 While Cesi’s definition of mezzana natura as “two different natures joined in a single species” or “species participating in two natures” can easily be applied to painting on stone, challenging the viewer’s process of (visual) discernment, Stelluti’s considerations provide textual evidence as a missing link that prompted the artist’s imagination to transpose the notion of middle nature to the painting of Perseus Transforming Atlas on stone.

Conclusion To sum up, the unknown artist must have had a good knowledge of natural philosophy and natural magic that informed his imagination and determined his engagement with its mineral support. Fashioning himself as a second Perseus armed with the virtue of discernment, he painted an intricate and “site-specific” 71 Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx, 307–14. 72 Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile, 11: “e son fatte con tanta proporzione quelle circolationi spirali, ch’io l’haverei sempre stimati artificiose, e non altrimenti naturali.” 73 Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile, 12: “come si formino nelle pietre Arboree, che l’Imperato [Ferrante] chiama imboscate, quegli alberetti con rami, e frondi, tanto alli naturali somiglianti, che sembrano esservi artificiosamente dipinti.” 74 Lohff, Malerei auf Stein, 194–97.

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historia naturalis. Exhibited in the Palazzo Borromeo on the Isola Bella, a place where artificialia and naturalia intermingle, it would have certainly served as a conversation piece for an erudite gathering, offering various starting points for lively debate and discussion. In referring to created nature in the re-presentation of stone, to the creative principles of nature in the transformation into stone, and to the phenomenon of middle nature, Perseus Transforming Atlas on bardiglio grigio can be regarded as an example of painted geomythology revealing a natural history to the discerning eye of the viewer. The way in which the artist employed Medusa’s petrifying gaze to present knowledge of the natural world must have left the viewer awestruck, or in the words of Natale Conti: “Men who looked at Medusa were supposed to have turned into stone, for God’s wisdom is awesome. And if anyone ever really did figure out […] what magnificent forces are found in Nature, he would be practically struck dumb by the shock of what he learned.”75

Works Cited Adamowsky, Natascha, Hartmut Böhme, and Robert Felfe, eds. Ludi naturae: Spiele der Natur in Kunst und Wissenschaft. Munich: Fink, 2011. Agricola, Georgius. De ortu et causis subterraneorum. Basel: Hieronymus Frobenius and Nicolaus Episcopius, 1546. Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua. Translated by Cecil Grayson. London: Phaidon, 1972. Albertus Magnus. Book of Minerals. Translated by Dorothy Wyckoff. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Aldrovandi, Ulisse. Musaeum metallicum in libros IV distributum Bartholomaeus Ambrosinus. Bologna: Marcius Antonius Bernia, 1648. Alessandrini, Ada, and Renzo Armezzani, eds. Francesco Stelluti: Linceo da Fabriano. Studi e ricerche. Fabriano: Città e Comune di Fabriano, 1986. Aristotle. Meteorology. Translated by E. W. Webster. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923. Avicenna. De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum. Translated by Eric J. Holmyard and Desmond C. Mandeville. Paris: Geuthner, 1927. Azzi Visentini, Margherita, ed. L’arte dei giardini: Scritti teorici e pratici dal XIV al XIX secolo. 2 vols. Milan: Il Polifilo, 1999. Baker-Bates, Piers, and Elena Calvillo, eds. Almost Eternal: Painting on Stone and Material Innovation in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Baltrušaitis, Jurgis. Aberrations: An Essay on the Legend of Forms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. 75 Conti, Mythologiae, 641.

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Barry, Fabio. “‘Painting in Stone’: Early Modern Experiments in a Metamedium.” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 3 (2017): 30–61. Bauer, Johann Wilhelm. Imagines sive illustrationes ad Publii Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseon libros XV. Vienna, 1641. Białostocki, Jan. “The Renaissance Concept of Nature and Antiquity.” In Renaissance and Mannerism: Studies in Western Art, 4 vols., Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art, 2:19–30. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963. Birkett, Kirsten, and David Oldroyd. “Robert Hooke, Physico-Mythology, Knowledge of the World of the Ancients and Knowledge of the Ancient World.” In The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition, edited by Stephen Gaukroger, 145–70. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012. Bonnefoit, Régine. Johann Wilhelm Bauer (1607–1642): Ein Wegbereiter der barocken Kunst in Deutschland. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1997. Bredekamp, Horst. Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben: Die Geschichte der Kunstkammer und die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte. Berlin: Wagenbach, 2000. Calvillo, Elena. “Authoritative Copies and Divine Originals: Lucretian Metaphor, Painting on Stone, and the Problem of Originality in Michelangelo’s Rome.” Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2013): 453–508. Cartari, Vincenzo. Le imagini de i dei degli antichi. Venice: Giordano Ziletti, 1571. Casaburo, Mario. Pittura su pietra: Diffusione, studio dei materiali, tecniche artistiche. Florence: Nardini, 2017. Charleton, Walter. Spiritus gorgonicus, vi sua saxipara exutus, sive de causis, signis & sanatione lithiaseos diatriba. Leiden: Officina Elseviriorum, 1650. Cipollini, Antonio. Il conte Vitaliano Borromeo (1620–1690): Memoria originale su documenti inediti. Rome: Tipografia dell’Unione editrice, 1913. Cole, Michael. “Cellini’s Blood.” The Art Bulletin 81, no. 2 (1999): 215–35. Cole, Michael. “Discernment and Animation, Leonardo to Lomazzo.” In Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Reindert Falkenburg and Walter S. Melion, 133–61. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Collomb, Anne-Laure. Splendeurs d’Italie: La peinture sur pierre à la Renaissance. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012. Conti, Natale. Mythologiae. 2 vols. Translated by John Mulryan and Steven Brown. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006. Copeland, Clare, and Johannes Machielsen, eds. Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period. Leiden: Brill, 2013. D’Amico, Bernardino. Trattato delle piante, & immagini de sacri edifizi di Terra Santa. Florence: Pietro Cecconcelli, 1620. Damm, Heiko, Michael Thimann, and Claus Zittel, eds. The Artist as Reader: On Education and Non-Education of Early Modern Artists. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

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Daston, Lorraine. “Nature by Design.” In Picturing Science, Producing Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, 232–53. New York: Routledge, 1998. Dolce, Lodovico. Trattato delle gemme che produce la natura; nel quale si discorre della qualità, grandezza, bellezza e virtù loro. Venice: Giovanni Battista & Giovanni Bernardo Sessa, 1617. Dupré, Sven, and Christine Göttler, “Introduction: Hidden Artifices.” In Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, edited by Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler, 1–16. London: Routledge, 2017. Eck, Caroline van. Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Eck, Caroline van. “The Petrifying Gaze of Medusa: Ambivalence, Ekplexis, and the Sublime.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 8, no. 2 (2016). https://jhna.org/articles/ petrifying-gaze-medusa-ambivalence-explexis-sublime/. Eusterschulte, Anne. “Imitatio naturae: Naturverständnis und Nachahmungslehre in Malereitraktaten der frühen Neuzeit.” In Künste und Natur in Diskursen der Frühen Neuzeit, 2 vols, edited by Harmut Laufhütte, 2:701–807. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000. Fehrenbach, Frank. Leonardo da Vinci: Der Impetus der Bilder. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2019. Felfe, Robert. “Figurationen im Gestein: Ko-Produktionen zwischen Kunst und Natur.” In Paragone als Mitstreit, edited by Joris van Gastel, Yannis Hadjinicolaou, and Markus Rath, 153–75. Berlin: Akademie, 2014. Findlen, Paula. “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourses in Early Modern Europe.” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1990): 292–331. Freedberg, David. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002. Gabrieli, Giuseppe. “L’orizzonte intellettuale e morale di Federico Cesi, illustrato da un suo Zibaldone inedito.” In Contributi alla storia della Accademia dei Lincei, edited by Giuseppe Gabrieli, 27–77. Rome: Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1989. Galli, Anna Elena, and Sergio Monferrini. “Un cavaliere e la sua ‘dama’: Vitaliano VI Borromeo tra politica, filosofia e amore per l’Isola Bella.” In Vitaliano VI Borromeo: L’invenzione dell’Isola Bella, edited by Alessandro Morandotti and Mauro Natale, 26–43. Milan: Rizzoli, 2020. Gamboni, Dario. Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Gastel, Joris van. “Controversial Continuities: Giacinto Gimma and the Art of Marble Intarsia.” In Radical Marble: Architectural Innovation from Antiquity to the Present, edited by John Nicholas Napoli and William Tronzo, 43–71. London: Routledge, 2018. Gessner, Conrad. De omni rerum fossilium, lapidum, et gemmarum maxime. Zurich: Jakob Gessner, 1565. Gessner, Conrad. Historiae animalium. 4 vols. Frankfurt: Andreas Cambierius, 1602–1604.

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Gimma, Giacinto. Della storia naturale, delle gemme, delle pietre, e di tutti i minerali. Naples: Gennaro Muzio, 1730. Göttler, Christine. “Tales of Transformation: Hendrick Goltzius’s Allegory of the (Alchemical) Arts in the Kunstmuseum Basel.” 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual – Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur 1, no. 2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.11588/xxi.2020.2.76233. Göttler, Christine. “The Temptation of the Senses at the Sacro Monte di Varallo.” In Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, edited by Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler, 393–451. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Göttler, Christine. “Vulcan’s Forge: The Sphere of Art in Early Modern Antwerp.” In Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, edited by Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler, 52–87. London: Routledge, 2017. Jones, Pamela M. “Federico Borromeo as a Patron of Landscapes and Still Lifes: Christian Optimism in Italy, ca. 1600.” The Art Bulletin 70, no. 2 (1988): 261–72. Kircher, Athanasius. Arithmologia sive de abditis numerorum mysteriis. Rome: Typographia Varesij, 1665. Lohff, Johanna Beate. Malerei auf Stein: Antonio Tempestas Bilder auf Stein im Kontext der Kunst- und Naturtheorie seiner Zeit. Munich: Hirmer, 2015. Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo. Idea of the Temple of Painting. Edited and translated by Jean Julia Chai. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Mann, Judith W., ed. Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530–1800. Munich: Hirmer, 2020. Matton, Sylvain. “L’interprétation alchimique de la mythologie.” Dix-huitième siècle 27 (1995): 73–87. Monferrini, Sergio. “‘Raccomandazioni’ di Vitaliano VI Borromeo per alcuni artisti: Note d’archivio su Cignaroli, De Groot, Garzia, Lanzani, Saglier, Tempesta, Vismara, Volò.” Arte lombarda, nuova serie 186/187, no. 2/3 (2019): 180–89. Morandotti, Alessandro. “La formazione della Galleria e la sua storia tra la seconda metà del Seicento e la fine del Settecento.” In Collezione Borromeo: La galleria dei quadri dell’Isola Bella, edited by Alessandro Morandotti and Mauro Natale, 9–45. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2011. Morandotti, Alessandro, and Mauro Natale, eds. Vitaliano VI Borromeo: L’invenzione dell’Isola Bella. Milan: Rizzoli, 2020. Morello, Nicoletta. “Agricola and the Birth of the Mineralogical Sciences in Italy in the Sixteenth Century.” In The Origins of Geology in Italy. Special Paper 411, edited by Gian Battista Vai and W. Glen E. Caldwell, 22–30. Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America, 2006. Newman, William R. Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Nygren, Christopher J. “A Stone through the Window of Art History: Paintings on Stone and the Legacy of Pictorial Illusionism.” In Steinformen: Materialität, Qualität, Imitation,

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edited by Isabella Augart, Maurice Saß, and Iris Wenderholm, 75–96. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. Nygren, Christopher J. “Titian’s Ecce Homo on Slate: Stone, Oil, and the Transubstantiation of Painting.” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 1 (2017): 36–66. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Edited and translated by Charles Martin. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005. Pfisterer, Ulrich. “Zeugung der Idee – Schwangerschaft des Geistes: Sexualisierte Metaphern und Theorien zur Werkgenese in der Renaissance.” In Animationen, Transgressionen: Das Kunstwerk als Lebewesen, edited by Ulrich Pfisterer and Anja Zimmermann, 41–72. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2005. Piccardi, Luigi, and W. Bruce Masse, eds. Myth and Geology. London: The Geological Society, 2007. Plett, Heinrich F. Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pliny the Elder. The Natural History. Edited and translated by D. E. Eichholz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Quintilian. The institutio oratoria of Quintilian. 4 vols. Edited and translated by Harold E. Butler. London: Harvard University Press, 1959–1963. Rosen, Valeska von. “Die Enargeia des Gemäldes: Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des Utpictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept.” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000): 171–208. Rudwick, Martin J. S. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Russo, Alessandra. “A Contemporary Art from New Spain.” In Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, edited by Alessandro Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane, 23–63. Munich: Hirmer, 2015. Scaliger, Julius Caesar. Exotericarum exercitationum liber XV, de subtilitate ad Hieronymum Cardanum. Lubeck: Morellus, 1557. Scaramuccia, Luigi Pellegrino. Le finezze de pennelli italiani. Pavia: Giovanni Andrea Magri, 1674. Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Translated by Barbara F. Sessions. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953. Sluhovsky, Moshe. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Stelluti, Francesco. Trattato del legno fossile minerale nuovamente scoperto. Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1637. Summers, David. The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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Thimann, Michael. Lügenhafte Bilder: Ovids favole und das Historienbild in der italienischen Renaissance. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Varchi, Benedetto. Lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi. Florence: Filippo Giunti, 1590. Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Frederick Ahl. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Vitaliano, Dorothy B. “Geomythology: The Impact of Geological Events on History and Legend with Special Reference to Atlantis.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 5, no. 1 (June 1968): 5–30. Waller, Richard, ed. The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke. London: Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1705. Wright, Brooks. “The Geological Studies of Bernard Palissy.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1943. Zagoury, David. “Minerva in the Forge of Vulcan: ‘ingegno’, ‘fatica’, and Imagination in Early Florentine Art Theory.” In Image, Imagination, and Cognition: Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice, edited by Christoph Lüthy, Claudia Swan, Paul Bakker, and Claus Zittel, 61–93. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Zierholz, Steffen, “The Subiconographic Surface: Two Temptations of Saint Anthony Painted on Stone.” The Art Bulletin 103, no. 4 (2021): 36–60.

About the Author Steffen Zierholz is currently an assistant professor (wissenschaftlicher Assistent) at the Institute of Art History at the University of Tübingen. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of Bern and received postdoctoral fellowships from the Getty Foundation/ACLS, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. His publications include Räume der Reform: Kunst und Lebenskunst der Jesuiten in Rom, 1580–1700 (2019).

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6. The Cosmologies of Early Modern Mining Landscapes Tina Asmussen1

Abstract Sixteenth-century rural mining landscapes redef ined conceptualizations of “nature” from the perspective of resource exploitation. These mining activities present an early form of large-scale landscape transformation with wide-ranging consequences. Early modern extractive industries differed from modern practices, yet they are often seen as the origins of a mentality that values nature as little more than a passive container of resources that had irreversible consequences for the environment. This chapter questions this linear narrative of increasing exploitation of nature while historicizing the meaning of mineral resources. The textual and visual sources of European ore mining illuminate the necessity of situating mining practices within a sacred cosmology. Keywords: metals; mineral resources; mining; resource landscape; cosmology

The remote northern European mountain landscapes of the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains), the Harz Mountains, the Vosges, and the Tyrolean Alps share a long history of mineral resource extraction. The large-scale mining activities that began during the second half of the fifteenth century had a profound impact on the natural environment. Subterranean shafts and tunnels hollowed out and perforated miles of soil. Above ground, forests were cleared to provide timber and fuel. Rivers and streams were redirected to power machines, dams were built, and reservoirs were created to increase water pressure. Mining infrastructure necessitated the construction of roads and waterways, machines, hammer works, foundries, and mints, maintained by countless workers who themselves lived in newly constructed 1 I wish to warmly thank the editors Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizucki as well as Pietro D. Omodeo for their most valuable comments, suggestions, and support.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch06

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settlements and mining boomtowns.2 Even today, a hiking tour through the Harz and Ore Mountains shows the transformative impact that early modern mining exerted on the landscape in a very tangible way. I refer to these historical mining sites as “resource landscapes,” defined as the past extractive actions and infrastructures created by an interplay of nature, manual labor, and technology. Traditionally, mining history analyzed the early modern extractive industries mainly through the lens of economic actions and technological innovation.3 Mining was perceived as an essential driving force towards a mechanical and rational understanding of nature that paved the way for capitalism. 4 This narrative was additionally supported by the belief in a paradigm shift in the wake of the “Scientific Revolution,” that led to a detached and rationalized view of nature.5 In Carolyn Merchant’s seminal study The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980), the Scientif ic Revolution offers an apt explanation for the emergence of a mechanized worldview with a rationalized understanding of nature that replaced the former cosmological understanding of the earth. Within the grand narrative of the emergence of modern capitalist societies, the extractive industries (from ore mining to the extraction of fossil fuels) act as an emblem of human conquest and the exploitation of nature.6 However, the focus on innovation and the emergence of modern capitalist structures obscures how sixteenth-century thinking and making in the context of mining was still very much embedded in medieval theories of matter and religion. In this chapter, I argue for a nuanced, non-teleological history of the production and perception of natural resources in the early modern period. I follow the path taken by historians of early modern science and knowledge in order to contextualize the practices and “epistemologies” of miners and metalworkers in a broader cosmological understanding of nature.7 The latter provide the foundation for a more holistic view of mineral resources and landscape transformations in the early modern period. Applying this perspective requires careful attention to how materials and practices were connected to belief systems and the symbolic meaning of materials. I thus understand resource landscapes as spaces determined 2 On the impact of mining on rural landscapes, see: Asmussen, “Spirited Metals.” 3 Bartels and Slotta, Geschichte des deutschen Bergbaus; Suhling, Aufschließen, Gewinnen und Fördern. 4 Mumford, Technics and Civilization. For the historiography of mining research with further literature, see: Asmussen and Long, “Introduction.” 5 Historians of science dethroned the Scientific Revolution long ago, see: Schaffer, “Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers”; Shapin, Scientific Revolution; Garber, “Descartes.” Nevertheless, the narrative of the importance of the “New Science” that led to a mechanized, modern worldview is still very influential in bestselling books. Mokyr, Culture of Growth; Pinker, Enlightenment Now. 6 Merchant, Death of Nature, esp. 1–42. For the German context especially, see Bayerl, “Natur als Warenhaus”; Bayerl, “Prolegomenon”; Uekötter, Im Strudel, 28–31. 7 Smith, Body of the Artisan, 59–93; Long, Artisan/Practitioners.

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by the performative relation between nature and human making, experiencing, and believing.8

Historicizing the Resource Landscape De re metallica (1556), the treatise on mining and refining by the German physician and mineral expert Georg Agricola (1494–1555), is often used as a prime witness for the transformative impact of early modern mining. Lavishly illustrated, the 292 woodcuts featured in this book depict a fundamentally transformed environment of cleared land, perforated throughout with pits and shafts, with miners hard at work operating machines or laboring in the shafts and tunnels.9 Through the portal of Agricola’s images, the reader observes the miners constructing a complex resource landscape that expanded above and below the surface, powered by humans and machines (Fig. 6.1). The illustration shows a vertical cross-section through the landscape with horizontal hauling shafts and vertical tunnels. The surface is cleared almost completely, numerous tree stumps mark the bare area. Miners are seen prospecting (with the aid of dowsing rods), entering the mine, cutting ore with a pickaxe, as well as leaving the mine with a cart. However, it becomes evident that underground work was likewise a site of conflict and deviance: in the lower part of the picture, two miners are arguing, with the miner on the right attacking the miner on the left with a stick. For Agricola and his contemporaries, mining was not only a technical and landscape-changing activity, it was also closely linked to social and moral dimensions. These aspects were especially emphasized in the first two books of De re metallica and they reveal a more holistic perspective on natural resources, one that moves beyond utilitarian, mechanistic, and rational conceptualizations.10 The first two books of Agricola’s treatise depict an idealized savant-miner who possesses universal knowledge in diverse fields of learning (mineralogy, medicine, astronomy, arithmetic, architecture, and law). Further, he must also have solid practical skills in surveying, drawing, and smelting, all essential for conducting 8 This analytical perspective is inspired by Denis Cosgrove’s and Erik Swyngedouw’s concepts of landscape and “waterscape” respectively. Both authors show how the physical and geographical shape of the terrain is related to social practice and cultural meanings: landscapes are thus socio-natural processes, shaped by material, symbolic, discursive meanings alike. Cosgrove, “Landschaft and Landscape,” 61; Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity.” 9 For an analysis of the woodcuts, see: Hannaway, “Reading the Pictures”; Kessler-Slotta, “Die Illustrationen in Agricolas De Re Metallica”; Lefèvre, Picturing the World of Mining; Pieper, “Die Kunstgeschichtliche Stellung.” 10 Asmussen, “Spirited Metals.”

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Fig. 6.1: Anonymous, Mining Landscape, in Georg Agricola, De re metallica libri XII (Basel: Froben, 1556), 74. Woodcut, 21 × 33 cm, Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, call no. hv I.22. Image: © Public Domain.

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mining in a profitable and prosperous way.11 Agricola’s way of fashioning artisanal practices and technologies in humanistic style connects production and technical skill with an ethical and moral treatment of matter.12 Agricola comments on the moral integrity of the miners, which outlines mining as a divine service: It is indispensable that they [the miners] should worship God with reverence, and that they understand the matters of which I am going to speak, and that they take good care that each individual performs his duties efficiently and diligently. It is decreed by Divine Providence that those who know what they ought to do and then take care to do it properly, for the most part meet with good fortune in all they undertake; on the other hand, misfortune overtakes the indolent and those who are careless in their work.13

For sixteenth-century Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike, God not only created the physical world, he also cared for and sustained it. God was perceived to act through and in the world, and divine providence was believed to extend to motions and matters, with minerals and natural resources understood as his divine gift.14 The Schwazer Bergbuch, a mining manuscript from Tyrol that originated in the same year as De re metallica, visualizes the idea of mineral ore as stemming from God. An illustration in the manuscript located in the library of the Montanuniversität of Leoben shows St. Daniel, the patron saint of miners, receiving an ore specimen from God via an angel. The ore specimen symbolizes a pars pro toto for the natural riches hidden below the ground and emphasizes the mineral blessings of the Tyrolean underground (Fig. 6.2). This image underscores the religious conceptualization of both the specimen and the mineral kingdom. It also accentuates the necessity of considering the religious dimensions of mineral resources and landscape transformation in pre-industrial societies. Today, the word “resource” is predominantly understood through an economic lens. We use the term “resource” to describe natural products, means of production, or signs of wealth. Research into mineral resources is mostly concerned with 11 Agricola, De Re Metallica: Translated, 3–4. 12 Hannaway, “Georgius Agricola as Humanist”; Barton, “Georgius Agricola’s De Re Metallica.” 13 “Qui inprimis necesse habent sanctè Deum colere, ac ea, quæ dicam, scire, & operā dare ut quoque opus efficantur rite atque diligenter. Etenium divina providentia factū est, ut his qui & norunt ea quaæ oportet facere, & curant ut perfici possint, plerumque omnia secunda accidant: inertibus contra & qui curam in rebus absolvendis non possunt, adversa.” Agricola, De re metallica libri XII, 19; Agricola, De Re Metallica: Translated, 25. 14 On the aspect of the role of divine providence in economy, see: Hengstmengel, Divine Providence. For the role of divine providence in Protestant natural philosophy in the case of Philipp Melanchthon, see: Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy, esp. 124–73.

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Fig. 6.2: St. Daniel Receiving an Ore Specimen, in Schwazer Bergbuch (1556), fol. 1r. Colored drawing, 21 × 33 cm, Leoben, Bibliothek der Montanuniversität Leoben, codex 1556, call no. 2737 Direktion. Image: © Bibliothek der Montanuniversität Leoben.

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describing and locating resource deposits to determine questions of profitability and technical options for exploitation.15 In the early modern period, “resource” had a much broader semantic meaning, ranging from a source for aid or re-establishment to a reserve of money or means by which to help a person in adverse circumstances.16 Only during the eighteenth century did the modern understanding of resources as a stock of natural materials appear. The concept of resource must thus be carefully historicized when applied to earlier centuries. The etymological roots of “resource” are connected to an activity, referring to the Latin verb resurgere, meaning to arise from, to resurrect, to get up, or to recover. Resurgere is composed of the Latin prefix re- (again) and the verb surgere (to rise/arise), which also echoes the verb regere (to lead, to govern).17 For mineral resources, the term is therefore conceptually intertwined with hauled materials (surgere) and politics (regere). The historians Daniel Hausmann and Nicolas Perreaux provide further insights into the analysis of the concept of resource, establishing that the term had different implications before 1600. Based on their analysis of the Patrologia Latina (a substantial collection of medieval texts, which is also available in digital form), the historical semantics of the entry “resurgere” reveals that the term was mostly used in a biblical context, pointing to the resurrection of Christ, to flesh and its corruptible or incorruptible nature, and to the possibility of rising from the dead.18 The first vernacular occurrences of resurgere appear in French texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: ressours, ressourdre, ressourte, résurrexi, resordre, resordement, resorce, and resors. Conceptually, they evoke the ideas of emerging, rising, and even flying.19 These etymological and semantical insights point to a bodily and spiritual renewal or transformation; they present important connections between the earthly/material and the transcendent/spiritual meaning of matter. In sixteenth-century theories of mineral generation, the biblical meaning of resurgere, pointing to a process of transformation or change of matter is particularly important, since metals were not perceived as static or dead entities, but rather as matter in flux. They were understood as “growing” underground, like subterranean plants. Agricola’s dialogue on mining, Bermannus sive de re metallica (1530), presents this idea for silver ore through the eyes of the protagonist Bermann, a learned miner: Bermann: Now as far as the native [i.e. pure] silver is concerned, it often grows in bushes, often in the form of hairs. Sometimes one finds whole tufts, of which 15 Haas, Geographie des Bergbaus. For newer approaches towards a broader understanding of resources, see: Bakker and Bridge, “Material Worlds?”; Bridge, “Material Worlds”; Bridge, “Resource Triumphalism.” 16 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Resource.” 17 Kluge, “Ressourcen.” 18 Hausmann and Perreaux, “Resources,” 184. 19 Hausmann and Perreaux, “Resources,” 185.

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the individual threads are interwoven like a fabric. Partly they are completely white, but partly also pink. Finally, one finds this native silver as if some tool or even the image of a tree was depicted by an admirable work of the art of nature. We can contemplate this with great pleasure.20

Agricola’s theory of the origin of minerals, formulated in detail in De ortu et causis subterraneorum libri V (1544) and De natura fossilium (1546), is based on the concept of mineral juices that he sees as analogous to the humors of Galenic physiology. Various types of water and juices in the earth are generated by their innate warmth, just as humors are generated in the bodies of living beings.21 For Agricola and his contemporaries, the mineral kingdom was not a separate realm; rather, it was connected to animal and plant bodies through the principle of humors. The theory of generation of minerals and ore is a very broad f ield in which Agricola’s theory counts as one among many.22 Ulrich Rülein von Calw’s tract, Ein nützlich Bergbüchleyn (A Useful Booklet on Mining, ca. 1500), also includes an elaboration on metallogenesis, the generation of metals. His ideas differ from Agricola’s in so far as he stresses the cosmological connection of mineral generation that correlates the “birth” and “growing” of metals with the influence of the seven planets. Each planet is assigned to one of the seven metals: Sun–gold, Moon–silver, Jupiter–tin, Venus–copper, Mars–iron, Saturn–lead, Mercury–quicksilver.23 The generation of each of the seven metals is described as caused by the planets and a specific mixture of sulfur and mercury, which are not identical to the elements today known as mercury (Hg) and sulfur (S), but instead are intended here as compositional principles.24 This perception of mineral generation draws heavily on Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280) and Avicenna (d. 1037), and was widely spread among early modern alchemists and Neoplatonic thinkers.25 While Agricola did not share the theory of planetary influence on the generation of metals, he acknowledged 20 “Atque item argentum purum iam in modum virgularum, iam in capillorum excrescit. Sic nonnunquam globum quendam, et minimis huius quasi filis nonnexum, candidissimum invenies, interdum surubum. Demum hoc genus argenti admirando naturæ artif icio alicuius interdum instrumenti, aut arboris f iguram referre videtur, id quod nos non sine summa animi delectatione vidimus.” Agricola, Bermannus, 81–82. 21 Hirai, Le concept de semence; Norris, “Early Theories”; Norris, “The Mineral Exhalation Theory.” 22 Luzzini, “Sounding the Depths.” 23 Rülein von Calw, Ein Nutzlich Bergbuchleyn, [5–7]. On Rülein’s booklet, see: Connolly, “Ulrich Rülein von Kalbe’s Bergbüchlein.” 24 On the role of sulfur and mercury in the metallogenesis and mineral exhalation theory, see: Norris, “Mineral Exhalation Theory”; Norris, “Early Theories.” 25 On the connection between alchemy and mining, see: Dym, “Alchemy and Mining.” On the influence of Neoplatonic ideas in Renaissance theories on the earth and minerals, see: Oldroyd, “Some Neo-Platonic and Stoic Influences.”

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so-called “mineral juices” (succus) as a principle of fertility or life.26 These sixteenthcentury conceptualizations of mineral matter demonstrate that they were thought of as vital and fertile, completely embedded in a cosmological understanding of life, and the result of material transformations. The intellectual framework, and the language in which these cosmologies of resources were expressed, was tightly embedded within a religious and natural philosophical theory of matter.

Matter in Flux The Protestant minister Johannes Mathesius (1504–1565) was a leading figure in the dissemination of miners’ knowledge. Mathesius came from the mining boomtown Sankt Joachimsthal (Jáchymov), located in the Bohemian parts of the Erzgebirge.27 He published several mining sermons in the 1550s and 1560s, and in 1562, an augmented collection of these sermons appeared under the title, Sarepta oder Bergpostille. This collection represents the interaction of Christian belief and mineral knowledge with practical experience, and it is an invaluable source for vernacular mining knowledge. The sermons deal with subjects such as the location of biblical mining sites, the transmission of natural philosophical knowledge on minerals and metals, and the discussion of practical skills connected to mining such as minting, glassmaking, and engineering. Mathesius portrays God as a great metallurgist performing the generation of metals in “his laboratory underground.”28 Mathesius’s connection between theology and mining went beyond the moral fortification of the miners; he perceived metals as animated and changeable, even renewable. In his third sermon, “Vom Ursprung und Abnehmen der Metallen” (On the Origins and Decline of Metals), he explains: “We school miners prefer to derive the word metal from the Greek, which means to change or transform. […] For, as we shall hear in a moment, since a lesser kind of mountain or lesser ore or metal becomes a better one in time, and one is transformed into the other, the metals are said to have received their name.”29 He further referred to the appropriation of this belief in the miners’ daily 26 On Agricola’s theory of mineral juices, see: Hirai, Le concept de semence, 116–23. 27 Dym, “Mineral Fumes”; Haug, “In the Garden.” For a broader localization of Mathesius within Protestant culture, see: Kohnle and Dingel, Johannes Mathesius. 28 “Denn Gott hat mancherley schmelzwerck in seinem laboratorio / und schmeltzet je die metal / so schön und vilerley farben / als die blümlein auff dem felde / oder ein Steinschneider sein wappenstein.” Mathesius, Sarepta, fol. 41r. 29 “Wir Schulbergkleut / wolten das wort / Metal / lieber vom Kriechischen wort herfüren / das verandern oder verwandeln heisset […] Denn wie wir hernach hören werden /weyl auß einer geringen Bergkart / oder geringen ertz oder metall ein bessers wirdt mit der zeyt / und eins verwandelt sich in das ander / sollen die metal den namen daher bekommen haben.” Mathesius, Sarepta, fol. 41v.

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work: “So arises the common occurrence among our miners that when they strike a nice bismuth, they say they came too early; by which they mean that if the ore had only sat longer in the mountain fire, it would have become silver.”30 This theory of the transformative power of metals was tied to the medieval perceptions of matter. For example, Isidore of Seville understood “materia” (matter) as etymologically connected to “mater” (mother), and therefore fertile in the sense of both generation and decay.31 Caroline Walker Bynum asserts that the medieval perception of all change as analogous to organic generation was especially enhanced in the High Middle Ages by the enormous influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption.32 Mathesius’s third sermon, particularly his account of miners’ fears of accessing a metal vein “too early” (and in other accounts too late), shows the influence of Aristotle’s matter theory and its adaptation to the belief systems of sixteenth-century mining practices . This line of thought is discernable in textual and visual mining sources and connected to the Christian doctrine of incarnation and salvation. This dynamic and religious conception of matter was represented in a variety of texts and images, and it was especially evident in the “boom years” of European mining from the late f ifteenth- to mid-sixteenth century. A painting entitled Metercia presents a fascinating example of this: located in the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Katedrála Nanebovzatia Panny Márie) in Rožňava (Slovakia), it was created by the unknown artist “L.A.” in 1513 (Fig. 6.3). The painting depicts St. Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the baby Jesus (Anna Selbdritt) in a mining landscape, dignifying the miners’ work and marking it as divine will.33 St. Anne was a popular patron saint of mining and venerated as a provider of rich ore. She was associated with tin, whereas Mary was often related to silver, and Jesus with gold.34 The painter explicitly draws an analogy between Anna Selbdritt and the mining landscape.35 Just as Mary’s head is adorned with a crown, the mountain in the background is crowned with an impressive horse capstan. It is striking that the depiction of Anna Selbdritt on the horizontal axis is combined with that of the Trinity on the vertical axis, with Christ at the center of both iconographies. The 30 “Hierher gehört nun das gemeine zeugnuß unser Bergkleut / wenn sie in einen schönen Wismat erschlagen / pflegen sie zu reden / wir sind zu früe kommen / damit sie bekennen / wenn dise bergart lenger im bergfewer gewstanden / so were gut silber draus worden.” Mathesius, Sarepta, fol. 50r. 31 “Materia [matter] is named from mater [mother]” (Materia quasi mater dicit). Isidore of Seville, Isidori Etymologiarvum, 2:321, book 19, sec. 19.5, as quoted in Bynum, Christian Materiality, 231. 32 Bynum, Christian Materiality, esp. 233–39. 33 I wish to thank Nicolai Kölmel, Christine Göttler, and Mia M. Mochizuki for discussing this painting with me and sharing their expertise. 34 Neubert, “Bergbau, Kunst und Religion,” 313. 35 On the veneration of St. Anne during the medieval and the early modern periods, see: Nixon, Mary’s Mother; Buchholz, Anna Selbdritt Bilder; Welsh, The Cult of St. Anne.

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Fig. 6.3: Artist “L.A.,” Metercia (St. Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the Baby Jesus in a Mining Scene), 1513. Oil on canvas, 170 × 125 cm, Rožňava (Slovakia), Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Image: © Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, University of Salzburg. Photo: Peter Böttcher.

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interlacing of the two “triplicate” iconographies, one male, one largely female, underscores the central message of this painting: the representation of the process of incarnation and purification is visualized by the vertical sequence of the Trinity above. Fertility is underlined in the horizontal Anna Selbdritt scene, where the fruits generated from the bowels of Mother Earth are understood as the “fruits” born from the maternal womb. St. Anne is thereby linked to the Virgin’s immaculate conception, and the Virgin is linked to the miraculous incarnation of her son.36 These female saints’ fertile bodies, which generate “fruits” of increasing purity, act as an analogy to the divinely ordained processes at work in nature: the birth of metals by means of a fecund succus in the underground, and the subsequent extraction and refining of these earthly fruits.37 Metaphorically, the combination of the two iconographies can be understood as articulating the process of removing human waste and purifying this worldly filth or, speaking in the symbolism of metals, as a purification process from tin to silver to gold. This interpretation is further supported by the sequence of metal processing, as well as by the posture of Christ, whose head is turned in the direction of Mary and the diligently worked mine where ore is extracted. Both of Christ’s arms, indeed his entire body, turn in the direction of St. Anne and the metal foundry before a wealthy city on a river. A horse carriage, located directly above Christ’s head, and an oxen cart, behind Mary’s back, transport the ore from the mine to the foundry. The analogy of the fertile wombs of St. Anne, the Virgin Mary, and nature bringing forth the fruits of divine providence underlines the beauty, nobility, and related economic aspects of the mining industry and the utility and value of God’s creation. Aside from these images that stress the generation of metal, the visual and textual representations of mining and mineral generation equally stress death, resurrection, and salvation, especially in the Protestant mining regions of the Erzgebirge. Paracelsus, for example, regularly drew analogies from his medical or metallurgical practice to the Christian doctrine of salvation; he viewed the removal of waste during the refining of metals as a metaphor for the resurrection of Christ. In the Liber de resurrectione et corporum glorificatione, Paracelsus explains that just as gold must be purified from the slag of the ore, the resurrected body must also rise above the excretions of the ordinary body.38 A remarkable visualization of this idea is found in the unpublished manuscripts of the Speculum 36 On Anne’s immaculate conception, see: Nixon, Mary’s Mother, 13–16; 72–79. On Mary’s virginity and birth, see: Rubin, Mother of God, 16–33. 37 On the birth of metals in the Earth’s womb and the practices of extraction, see: Merchant, “Mining the Earth’s Womb.” 38 Paracelsus, “Liber de resurrectione,” 310. On the theological writings of Paracelus, see: Gantenbein, “Paracelsus als Theologe.”

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Fig. 6.4: Divine Agency in the Formation of Minerals, in Martin Stürz, Speculum metallorum (1575), fols. 20r, 70v. Drawing, 31.7 × 19.5 cm, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, codex 11.134. Image: © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

metallorum (Mirror of the Metals) from the second half of the sixteenth century.39 Two illustrations in the Vienna Codex depict a crucif ied Christ in connection with the generation of the seven metals (Fig. 6.4). Seven bands that represent the metals with their corresponding planetary signs and colors are depicted behind and below a bleeding and crucified Christ. From left to right, the image depicts: lead–Saturn–black; tin–Jupiter–blue; iron–Mars–red/brown; gold–Sun–gold; copper–Venus–green; mercury–Mercury–red; and silver–Moon–gray/silver. This illustration parallels the death and resurrection of Christ with the generation and purif ication of mineral matter. 40 The so-called Handstein also presents a three-dimensional materialization of the aspect of material change and purif ication. Handsteine are a genre of artistically crafted ore specimens; those by Caspar Ulich, a local goldsmith from the mining town of Sankt Joachimsthal 39 On the different manuscripts of the Speculum metallorum, see: Kirnbauer, Speculum metallorum; Dobras, “Das Speculum Metallorum des Abraham Schnitzer von 1590”; Fussek, “Das Speculum Metallorum des Martin Sturtz”; Egg, “Zum dritten Exemplar des Speculum Metallorum.” 40 This illustration is also discussed in Smith, “Making as Knowing,” 25.

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Fig. 6.5: Caspar Ulich, Handstein with Mine and Crucifixion, third quarter of the sixteenth century. Goldplated silver, argentite, minerals, enamel, and glass, 30 × 14 × 11 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. Kunstkammer 4157. Image: © Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.

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(Jáchymov), are particularly famous examples of this genre that posit the artistic representation of the flux and flow of local mineral wealth within a Christian worldview (Fig. 6.5). 41

The Ambivalence of Metals By striving towards greater purity, a fertile, malleable sacred cosmology presented tangible manifestations of divine blessings, but the transformative nature of metal could be construed as both promising and threatening, infused with earthly vices. In particular, the fraught financial situation of the sixteenth century was marked by abundant silver finds in the New World, a constant lack of bullion in the Old World, and the gradual inflation of the currency. 42 Precious metals in the form of coins were seen as the source of infinite wealth. Yet, as Elvira Vilches has outlined in detail, the combination of abundant silver finds, monetary inflation, and financial loss ensured changes in the composition of metal alloys were also discussed in religious and moral terms. 43 In 1549, the president of the Audiencia of Peru, Pedro de la Gasca, was deeply concerned about the high inflation in his region caused by the large influx of newly extracted silver. He wrote to the Council of the Indies in Seville: “Such an abundance is expected in these lands, that silver may be worth almost nothing, that it may be considered as unbelievable, because even now it is so for those who see it.”44 In the Habsburg Empire, the ambivalence of silver mediating between abundance and financial threat was expressed visually and verbally, as seen in the 1549 tableau vivant performed by the Antwerp minters in the Triumphal Entry of Charles V and Prince Philip, recorded in a woodcut illustration in Cornelis Grapheus’s festival book of 1550, De seer wonderlijcke, schoone, triumphelijcke incompst (Fig. 6.6). 45 In the festival book, both text and image work together to articulate a performance that shows God handing over gold and silver pieces to humankind, depicted in the upper part of the arch, where they are illuminated by sunlight. 46 Situated below the divine sphere, Saturn is shown hammering these

41 Haug, “Wunderbarliche Gewechse”; Hylla, “Himmlisches Erz”; Quellmalz, “Zur Materialfrage”; Schiedlausky, “Handsteine.” 42 Rössner, “Bad Money, Evil Coins?”; Munro, “The Monetary Origins”; Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, 190–202. 43 Vilches, New World Gold, esp. 95–144. 44 Quoted in Vilches, New World Gold, 138–39. 45 Grapheus, De seer wonderlijcke, fol. 104v. I wish to thank Christine Göttler for this reference and for sharing a chapter of her book manuscript in progress with me: Göttler, “Mount Potosí in Antwerp.” 46 Grapheus, De seer wonderlijcke, fol. 104r.

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Fig. 6.6: Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Arch of the Mint from the Entry of Charles V and Prince Philip into Antwerp in 1549, in Cornelius Grapheus, Le triumphe d’Anuers, faict en la suspection du Prince Philips, Prince d’Espaigne (Antwerp: P. De Lens, 1550). Woodcut, 29 × 22 cm, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. A:289.4 Hist. 2°. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

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divine gifts into coins. 47 He is represented as an old man, half naked with long hair and a beard, accompanied by the goddess of Money (“MONETA”) and her four beautiful daughters: Opulence (“OPULENTIA”), Abundance (“COPIA”), Business (“NEGOCIATIO”), and Civility (“CIVILITAS”). Christine Göttler has convincingly argued that the minters, with their tableau vivant, performed a discourse of wealth and abundance that went along with the hopes placed in the newly accessed rich silver mines of the Cerro Rico Potosí. A year later, in 1550, Charles V made the Antwerp mint the headquarters of a consortium of mints in the Low Countries; as a consequence, the “world city” of Antwerp became a hub for the world’s metal trade. 48 The Arch of the Antwerp Minters constitutes an important example of how contemporaries allegorized the significance of gold and silver coins within both a globalizing economy and a cosmological framework. 49 However, early modern society was also well aware of the unpredictability of the god Saturn and the ambivalent aspects of silver blessing. Metallogenesis was regularly understood within astronomical contexts, and the influences of metals on the human body found common ground in medical practice and theory. Saturn, in particular, connected micro- and macrocosm, transcendent and this-worldly, and provoked emotions of promise and threat. Being the son of Father Sky (Uranus) and Mother Earth (Gaia), he acted as patron over the earth, woods, and mines.50 Miners and peasants, along with deviant figures and ingenious artists and poets, were regularly depicted as the children of Saturn. Saturn figured as the last of the seven planets and in greatest distance to the sun, and it qualified as dry and cold and was assigned the color black. Children of Saturn were regarded as predisposed to Melancholia (black bile), and they were characterized as lean, clumsy, wicked, limp, sloppy, cowardly, and lazy, passionate in hatred and love, very easily seized by anger or strong sexual desire, and unable to control themselves. Neoplatonist thinkers, most prominently Marsilio Ficino, associated Saturn with ingenuity and intellect. Saturn was thus a highly ambivalent figure, mediating bestiality and ingenuity.51 The cosmological framework of the resource landscapes in which metals were embedded connected mineral and human bodies, and expanded the underground world to the planetary sphere. 47 “In de nederstellagie / Saturnus in gelyckenisse van een ouden half naecten man / met lang wit haer / met eenen langen witten baert / als eē smit aen eenen aenbilt sittende / syn seysene by hem liggende / noech (?) gouden ende silveren ghelt.” Grapheus, De seer wonderlijcke, fol. 104r. 48 On Antwerp’s role in the trade of metals, see also: Van der Wee, “World Production and Trade”; Westermann, “Silberproduktion und -Handel”; Westermann, “Silbererzeugung, Silberhandel und Wechselgeschäft.” 49 Göttler, “Mount Potosí in Antwerp.” 50 Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 133–216. 51 On the ambivalence of Saturn, see: Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 134.

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Cosmological thinking enabled a Christian spirituality to provide a structural framework that shaped mining practices and material meaning. Mining and the dark underground were a battleground between sins and the metals’ slow process towards purification. Ulrich Rülein’s A Useful Booklet on Mining was among the earliest vernacular mining books that stressed the connection between God, planet, and mineral. The German smelting expert Lazarus Ercker also draws this cosmological connection in the letter of dedication to Emperor Maximilian II of his metallurgical treatise of 1573.52 Notably, Ercker discussed the relationship between planets and metals, explaining that only the seven most “important and principal” metals are assigned to the planets, although sulfur, bismuth, antimony, and many other minerals are mined. He concludes his cosmological elaboration with a long encomium on the excellence of gold as the most durable and enduring metal, notable for its effective remedy and analogy with the sun and the emperor. Consequently, the cosmology of resources worked out in the dedication had religious (divine providence), practical (mining and metalworking), bodily (medicine), and political dimensions (rulership and governance). In a later edition, a century after the first publication, this cosmological perspective was transmitted into a different, remarkable frontispiece, with a new dedication to the dukes of Braunschweig-Lüneburg and a new title: Aula subterranea, alias Probier Buch Herrn Lazarus Ercker (Subterranean Court, or The Assaying Book of Lazarus Ercker, 1673) (Fig. 6.7). Surprisingly, the frontispiece, while adopting the cosmological framework between the earthly and the planetary sphere from the dedication of the 1573 edition, centers on lead rather than gold. The upper third of the engraving shows a sun emblazoned with Hebrew letters spelling “Yahweh,” surrounded by a semicircle of clouds through which seven rays of sun stream to illuminate the tops of seven mountains. This chain of mountains, also arranged in a semicircle, forms the middleground of the painting. Each of the seven crests is marked by a planetary symbol, which assigns each mountain to a metal, from left to right: Sol (gold), Venus (copper), Mars (iron), Saturn (lead), Jupiter (tin), Mercury (quicksilver), and Luna (silver). Metal veins sketched as bands pass through the mountains. On the far left, the gold mountain opens toward the viewer and offers a glance into the working processes inside the mountain. The right-hand side depicts the practices and infrastructures of metal refining. A cartouche with the new title of Aula subterranea is placed between the extraction and processing scenes. Below this scene of mine work, two vignettes with workshop scenes are depicted, literally in the “underground” of the illustration. The left vignette depicts an assaying workshop and the right a smelting workshop. The engraving is therefore divided into four sections: a heavenly sphere on the top; followed by a panorama of mountains; a review of extraction 52 Ercker, Beschreibung Allerfürnemisten, fols. 2r–4v.

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Fig. 6.7: Lazarus Ercker, Frontispiece, in Aula subterranea domina dominantium subdita subditorum (Frankfurt: P. Humm, 1673). Engraving, Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Digitale Sammlungen, call no. Metall.12. Image: © Public Domain.

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and ore processing in the middleground; and a survey of the artisanal workshops of assaying and smelting in the lower part. The viewer traces the transmission of divine will and providence through the beams of light that connect natural processes with human labor and the arts of fire. The frontispiece is particularly striking with Saturn and the corresponding metal lead occupying the central place, while the precious metals silver and gold are placed on the outside of the engraving. The solar light running through the lead mountain pours directly into the cartouche’s title and metal processing vignettes in the lower part of the engraving. But there is also another reason why Saturn is placed in such a prominent position. The mining industry in the mid-fifteenth century experienced a considerable upswing due to the growing importance of lead in production. One factor for this lies in the implementation of a new smelting process, the so-called Saigerung, that separated silver from copper ore using lead as a solvent.53 Considerable quantities of lead have been transported to the main silver mining areas in the Ore Mountains, Hungary, and Tyrol.54 Without lead, the extraction of precious metal from poor ore would not have been possible. Poor ore, in other words ore with less silver content, had been the main business and major challenge for the European mining industry since the mid-sixteenth century. Lead was an ambivalent substance: an indispensable resource and associated with numerous potential uses, but also one that polluted the environment and was highly toxic to both body and mind. The relevance of lead as a resource and a commodity is not confined to the history of ore extraction and trade. The stages of production draw upon a complex web of material meanings and imaginaries that have been lost from contemporary utilitarian, economic, and chemical understandings. Saturn played a major role in the literary and visual representations of early modern mining landscapes as he was associated with lead and shared the ambivalent qualities of prosperity, bestiality, and destruction with the metal. The anonymous engraving of a mining landscape in the Vosges in Alsace from the late sixteenth century is a particularly interesting example that underscores the ambivalent nature of mineral matter and mining between ingenuity and deviance (Fig. 6.8). The artist shows all production steps—from prospecting and mineral extraction to hammering, washing, smelting, coining, and trade—with a particular emphasis on the ingenious draining machine, the so-called “Wasserkunst” (literally “water art,” meaning water machine), in the right foreground. Mining and metal production are characterized as being on the verge between the worldly benefits of a flourishing trade and the sinister dark sites represented by the openings to the underworld. The 53 Suhling, Der Seigerhüttenprozeß. 54 Bartels, “The Production of Silver”; Kraschewski, Quellen zum Goslarer Bleihandel; Kraschewski, “Zur Finanzierung des Bergbaus auf Blei.”

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Fig. 6.8: Anonymous, Mining Landscape in Markirch (Vosges), late sixteenth century. Copper engraving on laid paper, 24.8 × 36.2 cm, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Graphische Sammlung, inv. no. An 1848. Image: © Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

depiction of various scenes of human labor presents a wholistic picture of physical work and skilled craftsmanship with its manifest downsides of conflict and violence.

Conclusion Early modern texts and images reveal cosmological beliefs about the “body” of mineral resources that structured the relationship between earth and heavens, human body and the soul.55 They address the dangers that mining practice presented for the miners and smelters’ health and bodies, not to mention their financial affairs and household morality. The general inspector of mines of BraunschweigLüneburg, Georg Engelhardt von Löhneyssen, for instance, compared mining with 55 Smith, “The Codification of Vernacular Theories.”

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the courting (“Buhlerei”) of young men: “For many people, the desire to mine is comparable to the courtship of young men. People are so eager to search for ore in the earth that it leads to the fact that he who wants to have much, gets little. God does not [only] provide all people with gold and silver, but also with poverty and filth, misery and distress.”56 A few pages later he adds: “A beautiful vein and a beautiful woman can cheat fairly well.”57 Comparing the alluring potential of ore with women was a common theme in early modern mining. The physician of Annaberg, Martin Pansa was even more specific in this regard. In his medical treatise Consilium Peripneumoniacum (Advice for Peripneumonia) from 1614, Pansa draws an analogy between extracted ore specimens artistically crafted into Handsteine and female breasts: the Handsteine would entice shareholders to invest in mines and gain nothing but hope.58 For mining experts such as Löhneyssen, Pansa, and Agricola, mining was an occupation, full of promise, tempting desires, deception, and threat. Nevertheless, they all emphasized the divine blessing of mining. Following Johannes Mathesius, Löhneyssen describes how God allowed the ore to grow in his underground laboratory every day. But through Adam’s fall from grace, the entire earth became sinful, including subterranean veins of ore and all minerals. Since then, there was no more certainty, security, or safety; minerals grow and die, miners make a lucky find or get cheated.59 The economic and technological rationalities of mining resource landscapes cannot be separated from the symbolic and moral connotations of contemporary religious theories of matter.

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Suhling, Lothar. Der Seigerhüttenprozeß: Die Technologie des Kupferseigerns nach dem frühen metallurgischen Schrifttum. Stuttgart: Riederer, 1976. Swyngedouw, Erik. “Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890–1930.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 3 (1999): 443–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00157. Uekötter, Frank. Im Strudel eine Umweltgeschichte der modernen Welt. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2020. Van der Wee, Herman. “World Production and Trade in Gold, Silver, and Copper in the Low Countries, 1450–1700.” In Precious Metals in the Age of Expansion, edited by Hermann Kellenbenz, 79–86. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. Vilches, Elvira. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Welsh, Jennifer. The Cult of St. Anne in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Sanctity in Global Perspective. London: Routledge, 2017. Westermann, Ekkehard. “Silbererzeugung, Silberhandel und Wechselgeschäft im Thüringer Saigerhandel von 1460–1620. Tatsachen und Zusammenhänge, Probleme und Aufgaben der Forschung.” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 70, no. 2 (1983): 192–214. Westermann, Ekkehard. “Silberproduktion und -handel. Mittel- und Ostdeutsche Wirtschaftsverflechtungen im 15./16. Jahrhundert.” Neues Archiv für sächsische Geschichte 68 (1998): 47–65. Zorach, Rebecca. Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005.

About the Author Tina Asmussen is Assistant Professor of Early Modern Mining History at the Ruhr University of Bochum and Head of the Mining History Research Unit of the German Mining Museum Bochum. Editor of the Renaissance Studies issue, “Cultural and Material Worlds of Mining in Early Modern Europe,” her research interests lie in geo-resources as an environmental and economic history of knowledge.

Part 3 Staged Topographies

7.

Aurea Aetas Antverpiensis: Land(scapes) in the Blijde Inkomst for Ernest of Austria into Antwerp, 1594 Ivo Raband

Abstract This chapter discusses the importance assigned to agricultural land and landscape in the context of the Joyous Entry of Archduke Ernest of Austria into Antwerp in 1594. It analyzes and contextualizes the first tableau vivant of the Entry, the “Stage of Agriculture,” placing particular stress on the significance of the coming of a second Golden Age, such as that described by Virgil in his fourth Eclogue and Georgics. Antwerp’s City Council further addressed the stage’s central themes of agriculture and land(scape) with its gift for the archduke: Pieter Bruegel’s painting series of The Seasons. The chapter argues that contemporary political, economic, and climate issues led the organizers to reevaluate the role of the land outside the city. Keywords: agriculture; Antwerp; festival culture; Golden Age; Virgil; Ernest of Austria

In the sixteenth century, the land on the outskirts of Netherlandish cities served as a site of agriculture, retreat, and a source of inspiration for artists as the new genre of landscape painting emerged.1 A famous example is the 1565 panel of The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–1569) that suggests the intrinsic relationship between city and countryside (Fig. 7.1).2 Set in a wide, yellowy landscape, 1 For an overview of the genre of landscape painting and its development in the Netherlands, see: Liedtke, “Landscape Painting”; Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes. On the relations between city and land, important arguments have been made in recent years: Gibson, Pleasant Places, 1–26; Onuf, “Old Plates”; Onuf, “Small Landscapes”; Lichtert, “Port Cities and River Harbours.” On the history of agriculture in early modern Europe, see: Scott, “The Agrarian West.” 2 This painting is discussed in the context of its series, among others, in: Falkenburg, “Series of the Seasons,” esp. 272–73; Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, chap. 6, esp. 123–26; and, most recently, Oberthaler et al., Bruegel, 214–41.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch07

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Fig. 7.1: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565. Oil on panel, 119 × 162 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 19.164. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

the peasants working or resting in the right foreground are juxtaposed with a small city, painted in darker colors, in the background. The harvest they are gathering is evidently the food supply not only for the peasants themselves, but also for the city dwellers.3 In a cycle of reciprocity, the urban space acts as the socio-political entity keeping the farmers safe and ensuring a high demand for their produce. 4 In this painting, Pieter Bruegel shows how landscape can be perceived simultaneously as a site of natural scenery and agricultural produce, while being intimately connected with urban life. In 1568, shortly after The Harvesters was finished, the Dutch Revolt had brought civil war to the Low Countries with devastating consequences for Antwerp’s 3 On the reciprocal relationship between the city of Antwerp and rural Brabant, see: De Rock and Limberger, “Die städtische Elite.” 4 Larry Silver sees the work of the peasants tied to a local aristocrat. The connection to the civic authorities also seems possible given the importance of self-government for the cities of Flanders and Brabant. Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, 124. On the importance of the produce sold on Antwerp’s markets and its influence on painting, see: Honig, Painting and the Market; Wyssenbach, “Frische Fische.”

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farmland, its scenic countryside, and its economy. The city’s population fell sharply and by 1585, when Antwerp was captured by Alessandro Farnese (1545–1592) for the Spanish Crown, the number of inhabitants had declined from 100,000, at its height in 1568, to 42,000.5 In the years following the siege, the city and its economy did recover as, among other things, successful Portuguese merchants, such as the Ximenes and Rodrigues d’Evora families, as well as the Italian trading nations, returned to the city.6 However, in the f inal years of the sixteenth century, roaming armies, both Spanish and Dutch, continued to take a heavy toll on the formerly rich and fertile land surrounding Antwerp, hindering its full recovery.7 Moreover, the coldest decade of the so-called “Little Ice Age,” which lasted roughly from 1500 to 1850, occurred between 1591 and 1600, and this added to the environmental devastation of the area.8 This phase of political and ecological hardship was also reflected in visual culture, with the production of painted landscapes with fires and scenes of violence, as well as abundant wintery landscapes.9 The bitter cold of the period had already inspired Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his contemporaries to paint winter scenes, a subject which remained popular with artists throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. This heightened interest in land and landscape is also evident in the sophisticated imagery of the stately festivities held in the Netherlands. But in contrast to the growing literature on the new subject of landscape painting, the ways in which the interactions between the rural and the urban were staged in political performances have until now received no attention.

5 Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, 245–50; Gelderblom, “From Antwerp to Amsterdam,” 252–54. Numbers are taken from Limberger, “Economies of Agglomeration,” 43 (graph) and 48; Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 140. 6 On the Portuguese in Antwerp, see: Pohl, Die Portugiesen in Antwerpen, and specifically on the Ximenez family Göttler and Moran, Reading the Inventory; Göttler and Dupré, The Worlds and Possessions of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenez. On the Italian trading nations, see: Harreld, “Foreign Merchants”; De Rock, Puttevils, and Stabel, “Stranieri ad Anversa”; Subacchi, “The Italian Community”; and, in the context of the Blijde Inkomst of 1594, Raband, “Staging Genoa.” On Antwerp’s returning economic success see also Arblaster, “Antwerp and Brussels.” 7 Gelderblom, “From Antwerp to Amsterdam,” 259–64; Stensland, Habsburg Communication, 103; Cosemans, “Het uitzicht van Brabant,” 314–51; Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 180. 8 This term was first used in 1939 by F. E. Matthes, to refer to a period of 4,000 years. Today it is mostly used to describe either the time between 1500 and 1850, or the period that started immediately after the “Medieval Warm Period” that ended around 1250, accessed August 24, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/ science/Little-Ice-Age. See also Pfister, “Weather, Climate, and the Environment,” 83. The climatic change also devasted other regions, like the north of Italy, leading to famines. Alfani, “The Famine of the 1590s.” 9 As, for example, shown in fiery landscapes with scenes of brutality painted by Gillis Mostaert the Elder (1528–1598): Göttler, “Wit in Painting.” On wintery landscapes, see: Meganck and Van Sprang, Bruegel’s Winter Scenes.

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In this argument, a tableau vivant erected in Antwerp in 1594 for the arrival of the new Governor-General Archduke Ernest of Austria (1553–1595) will be central in tracing the importance assigned to agricultural land and landscape in the context of early modern festivities. This event is the Blijde Inkomst, the Joyous Entry, the traditional Netherlandish ceremony to inaugurate a new sovereign, which dated back to the fourteenth century and was of great political importance for the cities which organized them.10 For this welcome ceremony, the organizers in Antwerp conceived and constructed several temporary stages and arches for the Habsburg prince. The first one of these civic structures along the route of the Entry was a highly innovative tableau vivant, featuring a subject which had not been included in earlier entries and which will serve as the focal point of this chapter. This so-called “Stage of Agriculture” is known through the festival book published in 1595, the Descriptio publicae gratulationis spectaculorum et ludorum in adventu Sereniss. Principis Ernesti, which included a written description of it as well as a detailed engraving (Fig. 7.2).11 The stage presented the new governor-general and the wider audience with a concise visual argument on the importance of farming and the fertile land surrounding the city. This chapter will show how the organizers used this structure to illustrate their hope that the agricultural potential of the local soil would be fully restored and exploited. It will also consider the messages conveyed on this stage that were directly linked to the virtues of the archduke, who was seen as bringing in a second Golden Age, an Aurea Aetas, as described by Virgil (70–19 BCE) in his Fourth Eclogue and his Georgics.12 The city’s official gift to the new governor-general took these ideas even further: Archduke Ernest was presented with Pieter Bruegel’s series of paintings, called The Seasons, to which the aforementioned Harvesters belongs. It will be argued that the organizers of the Entry intentionally linked the theme of agriculture in the two sites—the stage and the paintings—to raise awareness of the 10 The tradition of the Blijde Inkomst, also referred to as Blijde Intocht, was established in the Duchy of Brabant in 1356 by Johanna van Brabant (1322–1406). A comprehensive introduction to the political ceremony in the fifteenth century is the recent publication Vrancken, De Blijde Inkomsten. On the entries of the sixteenth century there have been a number of publications in recent years. Thøfner, A Common Art is still a useful overview. 11 Diels, “Van opdracht tot veiling”; Raband, Vergängliche Kunst, 99–192; Raband, “Staging Genoa”; Thøfner, A Common Art, 180–97. This essay relies upon this festival book which has been translated and published in: Stevenson, Gwynne, and Liebregts, “Description.” 12 For the translation of the text, the following edition was used: Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI. On discussions of the theme of the Golden Age in Virgil’s writing: Mattingly, “Virgil’s Golden Age”; Scott Ryberg, “Vergil’s Golden Age”; Kelif, L’imaginaire de l’âge d’or, 263–65. Baldry outlines the origin of the (early) modern understanding of the “Golden Age” in classical Roman writing, where the notion of the metal gold was introduced; in Greek, the common term was “Age of Kronos/Saturnus.” Baldry, “Who Invented the Golden Age,” 91–92. A recent publication addressing the issue of the “Golden Age” in the early modern period with a focus on the Northern Netherlands is: Blanc, Dutch Golden Age(s).

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Fig. 7.2: Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Stage of Agriculture, in Descriptio publicae gratulationis spectaculorum et ludorum in adventu Serenissimi Principis Ernesti (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1595), 54–55. Engraving, 32.6 × 20.2 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. BI–1953–0546B–09. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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on-going agrarian problems. It will be suggested that the paintings served as visions of prosperous landscapes of the past and as models for an even more successful future as displayed on the “Stage of Agriculture,” the Aurea Aetas Antverpiensis.

Staging Agriculture In 1593, Archduke Ernest of Austria, younger brother of Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), was appointed Governor-General of the Netherlands by his maternal uncle, King Philip II of Spain (1527–1598).13 In January 1594, the archduke arrived in Brussels where he was welcomed with a first Blijde Inkomst honoring his dynastic lineage and his role as vanquisher of the discord among the provinces.14 He also received a memo from the privy councilor Monsieur d’Assoleville who wrote in a rather anxious tone that “it is highly required and necessary that, from the moment of his arrival, His Highness works hard to find all the good and firm remedies to all these evils and calamities which have almost ruined and overwhelmed [these lands].”15 D’Assoleville states bluntly the urgency with which the new governor-general was awaited. The second Blijde Inkomst into Antwerp, which took place in June 1594, was keen to engage with these issues.16 The Antwerp Blijde Inkomst was commemorated a year later in the official festival book, the Descriptio publicae gratulationis, which created a permanent record of the event, as opposed to the solely ephemeral art works that were used during the Entry itself, and was a means of refining the publicly presented messages.17 The Latin text was written by the City Secretary Johannes Bochius (1555–1609), who had also conceived the theme of the Entry.18 The description of the event is interspersed with intaglio engravings of the individual decorations made by Pieter van der 13 A biography of Ernest of Austria can be found in Mraz, “Erzherzog Ernst.” On King Philip’s appointment of Ernest of Austria as the Governor-General of the Netherlands: Soen, “Philip II’s Quest,” 13–15. 14 Thøfner, A Common Art, 169–80. The accompanying festival book is: Anonymous, Descriptio et Explicatio. 15 As quoted in Stensland, Habsburg Communication, 115. 16 It was common to stage multiple entries to celebrate the arrival of a new sovereign in the capital of every province. 17 In the case of the 1594 Entry, it is believed that the dismantling of the arches and stages began after Archduke Ernest left Antwerp on June 16, four weeks after his arrival. Tamar Cholcman argues that such structures were dismantled quickly after the sovereign had left the city, and they were sometimes even destroyed. Cholcman, “Views of Peace and Prosperity,” note 3. 18 Not much is known about Johannes Bochius. He was a pupil of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) in Rome and arrived in Antwerp in the entourage of Alessandro Farnese, who, most likely, installed him as the City Secretary. The contracts Bochius signed with the two artists are in the Antwerp Felixarchief: Diels, “Van opdracht tot veiling.” Bochius was not in charge of the triumphal arches built by the foreign trading nations. Raband, “Staging Genoa,” 63–66.

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Fig. 7.3: Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Arrival of Archduke Ernest outside of Antwerp, in Descriptio publicae gratulationis spectaculorum et ludorum in adventu Serenissimi Principis Ernesti (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1595), 71. Engraving, 33.1 × 43.2 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. BI–1953–0546B–03. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Borcht (ca. 1530–ca. 1611) after designs by Joos de Momper the Younger (1564–1635) and Cornelis Floris III (d. 1615).19 The first print of the Descriptio publicae gratulationis documents the interest of De Momper, an artist specializing in landscapes, in producing a detailed depiction of Antwerp’s environs (Fig. 7.3).20 The city of Antwerp, seen from the east, appears in the far distance on the horizon. In the foreground, the archduke arrives in a carriage and Antwerp’s militia guilds are drawn up in formation.21 For the first time in the history of Netherlandish festival book illustrations, the showcasing of impressive military 19 Based on the artists’ style and profession, it seems likely that Floris was chosen to draw the architectural details, while De Momper created the drawings of the larger narrative scenes at the beginning and the end of the book. The contract between the artists and the City Council did, however, not clarify any division of the work for the book. Diels, “Van opdracht tot veiling,” note 21. 20 On the innovative use of larger double-paged prints in the festival book: Raband, “Printed Narrative.” 21 Bochius, Descriptio, 56; Stevenson, Gwynne, and Liebregts, “Description,” 500–501.

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strength was juxtaposed with a seemingly endless depiction of cultivated land.22 Fields stretch from the viewer’s vantage point in the foreground to the city behind.23 Small clusters of houses surrounded by trees are dotted throughout this print and might remind the viewers of the landscapes themselves, with which they were familiar.24 The artists of the festival book indicated the potential of these lands for farming by structuring the fields into rectangular and therefore explicitly man-made units. The new emphasis on abundant arable land in this print becomes apparent when compared to its predecessor from the 1582 festival book produced for the Blijde Inkomst of François, Duke of Anjou and Alençon (1555–1584) (Fig. 7.4).25 The 1582 print, showing Antwerp from the south with the Scheldt flowing parallel to the city on the left, is dominated by soldiers and members of the militia guilds, while the river is occupied by warships transforming the site of Antwerp’s commercial successes into one of military power.26 The rule of the Duke of Anjou was short-lived and by 1594, twelve years later, Antwerp had returned to Habsburg rule. The Entry for Ernest of Austria and its commemorative publication functioned as moments of “purification” after the recapture of Antwerp in 1585, with the aim of emphasizing the old and new Habsburg supremacy, which is why the opening print of the 1594 festival book had to be refocused.27 The display of military strength was relegated to a secondary role as more attention was paid to the farmland in the city’s immediate surroundings. This was done, it is argued here, to assert a new claim about the importance of farming for Antwerp. This claim was then incorporated and further underscored in the print of the “Stage of Agriculture” (Fig. 7.2). The image of this tableau vivant and its detailed explication in the Descriptio publicae gratulationis were used to convey the allegorical message the organizers of the Entry had expressed in visual terms in the festivity itself. In the center of the stage, which features thirteen actors, the 22 Current research has focused on the produce harvested outside of Antwerp: Limberger, “Turnips, Flax, and Clover.” 23 This print recalls Joos de Momper’s “June” in his series of The Months, executed in drawing and prints, as well as several paintings of summer landscapes with harvesters and farmers. Paintings of this motif were also created in collaboration with Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625); one of them is today in the Toledo Museum of Art (object no. 2003.16) and another one was sold by Sotheby’s in 2013, accessed June 25, 2020, http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2013/old-master-british-paintings-l13030/lot.14. html. Two landscapes with hills by De Momper that are reminiscent of this theme are to be found in the “Winter Room” of Copenhagen’s Rosenborg Castle, see Michèle Seehafer’s contribution to this volume. 24 The landscape might evoke the imagery of the Small Landscapes, printed by Hieronymus Cock (1518–1570) in 1559 and 1561, where the Brabantine countryside was uninhabited. Later editions of the seventeenth century had scenes with f igures added in the foreground, enlivening the formerly calm landscapes. Onuf, “Old Plates,” 428. 25 The Entry had taken place when Antwerp was under the rule of William the Silent (1533–1584) and the Northern Provinces. On this Entry, see: Peters, “Printing Ritual”; Thøfner, A Common Art, 125–40. 26 Peters, “Printing Ritual,” 390–95. 27 Thøfner, A Common Art, 169, 182–83.

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Fig. 7.4: Abraham de Bruyn (attributed to), Arrival of the Duke of Anjou and William the Silent outside of Antwerp, in La ioyeuse et magnifique entrée de Françoys […] Duc de Brabant, d’Anjou (Antwerp: Christoffel Plantijn, 1582), after 14. Etching, 29.7 × 39.4 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. BI–B–FM–001–2. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

personif ication of Agricultura herself appears, with, as Bochius points out, a golden plow by her side (Fig. 7.5).28 To the left of Agricultura sits Natura, who is accompanied by Ceres, the goddess of harvests, plus three women representing Pales, the goddess of shepherds, Pomona, the goddess of fruits, and a forest nymph, one of the Napaeae (nymphs of the wooded valleys), with a beehive by her side. The male figure on Agricultura’s other side is Annus, the personification of the cycle of the year, who carries a cornucopia filled with fruit and vegetables and a circular object. In the print, this circlet appears to be a laurel wreath, while the text states that during the Entry this was a golden ring symbolizing the cycle 28 The personifications of Agricultura, Natura, Annus, and the four Seasons are based on Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia which had been published in Rome a year previously, in 1593, without illustrations. For example, the text describes Agricultura as a female figure with a plow by her side, a tree representing Nature, and a zodiac, representing the cycle of the year and seasons. Ripa, Iconologia, 7.

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Fig. 7.5: Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Central tableau vivant of the Stage of Agriculture, detail of Fig. 7.2.

Fig. 7.6: Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Painted frieze with agricultural tools, products, and a bucranium on the front of the Stage of Agriculture, detail of Fig. 7.2.

Fig. 7.7: Pieter van der Borcht after Joos de Momper II and Cornelis Floris III, Coat of arms on top of the Stage of Agriculture, detail of Fig. 7.2.

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of the seasons and the ages, and indeed, Annus is accompanied by four women representing the four seasons. Figures of Day and Night are shown standing on the outer corners of the stage. A painted frieze featuring agricultural tools, products, and a bucranium executed by the workshop of Frans Francken the Elder (1542–1616) is positioned at the front of the stage at the eye level of the audience (Fig. 7.6).29 On the left, a putto with a shovel, and on the right, a putto watering the soil further underscore the importance of manual labor in the production of these crops. That the site of this production was understood to be the immediate vicinity of Antwerp was made clear by the positioning of the Brabantine coat of arms, a (golden) lion against a black background, on top of the stage accompanied by the coat of arms of the Margravate (left) and of the City of Antwerp (right) (Fig. 7.7). The emphasis on the location completed this profound and lavish staging of agricultural prosperity, which, as will be shown, reflected current political, economic, and climatic developments.

The Hope for a New Golden Age At the time of the Blijde Inkomst for Ernest of Austria, the Netherlandish civil war had been troubling the region for decades. One of the most decisive moments for Antwerp during this conflict had been the siege by Alessandro Farnese in 1584–1585. In order to protect the city, Antwerp’s City Council decided to take drastic measures and dikes and embankments along the Scheldt were destroyed. This plan to flood the land and keep Farnese and his force of nearly 60,000 soldiers at bay was, however, unsuccessful, and Antwerp surrendered on August 17, 1585.30 Herman Van der Wee, in his comprehensive study of Antwerp’s economy, described the dire situation of the following years: Dikes were broken, and the polders around Antwerp, which had been so fertile, had been reduced to a desert. Most farms […] were in ruins. Cattle had practically disappeared. Most of the farmers and their families were dead. Large packs of wolves roamed over the deserted country.31

In 1593, shortly before the Blijde Inkomst for Archduke Ernest, new dikes had been completed and the government was encouraging the reconstruction of farms in order

29 On this painting, now lost, see: Peeters, Frans Francken, 188, 242–43. 30 Voet, De gouden eeuw, 224–35; Field, “Battle of Antwerp.” 31 Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, 269.

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to revive cultivation of the land outside the city after nearly a decade of penury.32 Unfortunately, agricultural recovery was negatively impacted by the “Little Ice Age” when average temperatures began to fall, and harsh, cold, and long winters were followed by dry, cool summers.33 This change in the climate resulted in bad harvests in the years 1593 and 1594, at the very time when the Blijde Inkomst was being organized and its festival book produced.34 The organizers of the Blijde Inkomst of 1594 thus seized their opportunity to stage a plea—performatively, visually, and textually—for consistent measures to revitalize the agriculture of the city and its immediate surroundings. It is therefore easy to understand why Johannes Bochius should have placed a number of figures related to the wealth created by arable land, plentiful harvests, and the cycle of the year on the “Stage of Agriculture.” However, the central placement of the golden ring held by Annus and his speech allow for further interpretation. Annus declared upon the archduke’s arrival: Behold, the leader is here for whom we Deferred an age [now] worthy of a better metal Roll on years easy for mortals, leading Time, The world pacified by the virtue of the Austrian Duke, Go on through time, flower again with talents, fruitful work Of the earth, and harvests, and inscribe the name Of Ernest in the eternal calendars.35

Here Ernest was celebrated as a new governor-general whose future rule could lead not only to the reemergence of artistic, scientific, and economic talents, but also to the cultivation of the promisingly fecund soil that would again produce abundant harvests, a motif underlined by the cornucopia that Annus held while he recited his verses. All this progress would take place in an age “worthy of a better metal,” in other words, a Golden Age. This concept of a new era, and what it would bring forth, was further developed in the stage’s inscriptions, which may originally have been recited to accentuate this interpretation. On the left, the inscription read: 32 Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, 271. 33 Blom, Nature’s Mutiny, 10; Pfister, “Weather, Climate, and the Environment.” 34 Blom, Nature’s Mutiny, 122; Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 180; Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, 271. 35 “En cui distulimus meliori digna metallo / Secula Ductor adest, faciles mottalibus anni / Currite, pacato ducentes tempora mundo / Austriaci virtute Ducis, florescite rursus / Ingenijs, telluris opum, frugumque feraces, / Nomen et aeternis Ernesti inscribite fastis.” Bochius, Descriptio, 70; Stevenson, Gwynne, and Liebregts, “Description,” 516–17. On the function of liveliness and stillness in tableaux vivants: Fehrenbach, “Unmoved Mover.”

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Ernest orders that usual labors be restored. Farmer, put your hands to the demanding fields: No hostile fury will hinder the citizens, Nor fear of dangerous soldiers the fearful farmers in the fields But dire armadas will threaten foreign peoples.36

And further on the right: Why is the golden orb thus so renewed at Ernest’s arrival? He has an appropriate name and omen. […] He will be the founder for us, with Austrian arms, Of Austrian peace with gold or treaty.37

The inscriptions make it clear that the governorship of the archduke, whose name means “determined” in German, could lead to a new cycle of the eons, commencing with a second Golden Age that would consolidate peace and prosperity.38 This is a direct reference to Virgil, who had described the cyclical nature of the Ages of Man in his writings.39 He proclaimed in his Fourth Eclogue (44–38 BCE) that after a period of decline, the birth of a new leader may lead to the coming of a second Golden Age. 40 However, he also made it clear that this could not undo everything that the Iron Age had brought forth, writing that “a few traces of old-time sin live on,” and men would still “cleave the earth with furrows,” in other words, the work of farmers would still be needed, in contrast to the first Golden Age when nature brought forth riches of its own accord. 41 This relationship between farming and the new age, tentatively described by Virgil in the Eclogue, was later thoroughly expanded in the Georgics, a four-part 36 “Ernestus solitos iubet instaurare labores. / Agricolae, conferte manus poscentibus arvis: / Non cives furor hostilis, nec militis horror / Infesti, pauidos arcebit nue colonos, / Dira sed externas terrebunt classica gentes.” Bochius, Descriptio, 69; Stevenson, Gwynne, and Liebregts, “Description,” 514–15. 37 “Aureus Ernesto veniente renascitur orbis, / Cur ita? conveniens nomen, et omen habet. / […] Austriacis armis, auróque, aut foedere pacis / Austriacae nobis aureus auctor erit.” Bochius, Descriptio, 69; Stevenson, Gwynne, and Liebregts, “Description,” 514–15. 38 The name “Ernest” comes from the Old High German word “ernust,” meaning “der Entschlossene” (“The Determined”). It should not be confused with the High German adjective “ernst,” or “serious.” Köbler, Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. “ernust.” I would like to thank Julia Slater for pointing my attention to this particular reference to the name of the archduke within the framework of the Entry. 39 Johnston, Vergil’s Agricultural Golden Age, 50. 40 Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, 48, lines 8–9. 41 Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, 51. For Virgil’s impact on Renaissance culture: Houghton and Sgarbi, Virgil and Renaissance Culture; Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance; Kelif, L’imaginaire de l’âge d’or, 265–307.

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text focusing on the different tasks of agriculture published around 29 BCE. The characters to the left of Agricultura on the “Stage of Agriculture,” Ceres, Pomona, Pales, and the representative of the Napaeae, can be traced directly to this poem. The first book focusing on harvesting relates to Ceres; the second on fruit-growing to Pomona; the third on animal husbandry to Pales; and the fourth on beekeeping to the Napaeae. 42 Virgil used this strong link between the second Golden Age and agriculture to make this new age appear more achievable and less mythical, which must have resonated very well with the organizers of the Entry. 43 Historically, the return of the Golden Age had been proclaimed by Virgil for Emperor Augustus (63–14 CE) and was closely linked to the Pax Augusta of Imperial Rome; it was therefore easily transferable to its successor, the Holy Roman Empire ruled by the Habsburgs. 44 Virgil envisioned the new Golden Age as a time of widespread peace, a theme also referenced in the inscription of the “Stage of Agriculture” which spoke of a “Pax Austriaca” under Ernest’s rule. 45 Envisioning the coming of a new Golden Age under a new ruler was a common topos in the Blijde Inkomst tradition of the sixteenth century. But prior to 1594, the organizers had visualized this new time of prosperity differently. They focused on the peaceful coming together of the three continents (1520), Virgil’s Aeneid (1549), or presentations of the planetary gods (1585). 46 Archduke Ernest was the first to be confronted with a visual and textual enactment of agricultural prosperity as the foundation of the new Golden Age. The “Stage of Agriculture” should thus be understood as a very specific structure designed to mediate between timely topics that were of great interest for the city, its inhabitants, and the archduke as 42 Ceres is mentioned in Book I, line 7; Pales in Book III, line 1; the Napaeae in Book IV, line 535. Pomona, standing for Book II, is not mentioned by name, but the allusions to her orchards appear only in this part of the Georgics. Lines taken from Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI. On the Fourth Book and the allegorical significance of beekeeping: Johnston, Vergil’s Agricultural Golden Age, 90–106. 43 Johnston, Vergil’s Agricultural Golden Age, 62–90. 44 Emperor Rudolf II commissioned multiple artworks referencing the Virgilian Golden Age around 1600, including two paintings by Bartholomeus Spranger (1546–1611) depicting the arrival of Apollo and of Astrea, the gods of the second Golden Age. Kelif, L’imaginaire de l’age d’or, 294–96. 45 Virgil’s bringer of peace was the figure of Astrea. She is, for example, shown in the Sala dei Giganti in the Venetian Palazzo Ducale with the inscription “Astrea Duce” inviting Venetians to follow their doge into a new Golden Age: Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth of Venice, 29. On Astrea, see: Yates, Astrea; Kelif, L’imaginaire de l’age d’or, 265, 294–96. 46 In 1520, for the Entry of Charles V (1500–1558), the reference to Virgil’s new Golden Age was staged through the unity of the three personified continents Europa, Asia, and Africa, which was repeated in the Entry of Charles V and Philip II in 1549 and enriched with references to Virgil’s Aeneid (29–19 BCE). In 1585, statues of the planetary gods by Jacques Jonghelinck (1530–1606), including Saturn (Golden Age), Jupiter (Silver Age) and Sol/Apollo (second Golden Age), were placed in front of the Town Hall. Neumann, “Inventing Europe,” 140; Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry, 30–34; Bussels, Spectacle, 196–200; Buchanan, “Bacchus and the Planets,” 108, 111.

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the representative of the government: the reinforcement of peace, the restoration of the local soil’s fecundity, and the support of farmers. During the festivities, this plea was then further emphasized by the official gifts from the City Council of Antwerp when they presented the archduke with the painting series of The Seasons by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 47

Past Landscapes as Future Models Pieter Bruegel’s Seasons had become available on the art market only shortly before the Entry in 1594; they were bought by the organizers for the impressive sum of 1,400 florins from the local art dealer Hane van Wijke. 48 Reasons for the purchase of the paintings probably included the fame Pieter Bruegel the Elder had accrued nearly thirty years after his death, the impressively large size of the paintings, as well as their general theme of the labors of the months, which was understood as a courtly topos relating to Burgundian Books of Hours. 49 However, it will be argued that the paintings could also have been chosen specifically to underscore the themes presented on the “Stage of Agriculture,” since in the context of this multi-faceted, ephemeral staging of hopes and desires for a fruitful future, only the theme of agriculture was carried over into the highly symbolic gift the Council had prepared for the archduke.50 When Ernest of Austria was presented with Bruegel’s originally six-piece cycle of The Seasons, he received not only examples of the artistic heritage of Antwerp, but also images of prosperous landscapes successfully utilized for farming through the year (Fig. 7.1).51 The paintings for February and March present forestry (The Gloomy Day, Vienna), for June and July haymaking (The Hay Harvest, Prague), for August 47 Nicolaes Jonghelinck (1517–1570), an Antwerp merchant-banker, commissioned the paintings for the dining room of his villa suburbana outside the city. Buchanan, “The ‘Months,’” 541. 48 Buchanan, “The ‘Months,’” 542. 49 See Borchert, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Flemish Book Illumination,” 97–99, 104–5. 50 The archduke’s account book mentions the paintings for the first time on July 5, 1594: “wie die Herrn von Antorff irer fr. dr. 6 taffeln von den 12 monnats zeitten […] verehrt haben” (as the Council Men of Antwerp presented His Serene Highness with 6 paintings of the 12 months). Haupt and Wied, “Kassabuch,” 226. Following the Entry, the archduke bought all the paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder available on the Antwerp art market, and for the first time, focused his collecting ambitions on Netherlandish landscape painting. Raband, “Collecting the Painted Netherlands,” 117–19. The archduke also received a set of tapestries; however, no account gives a description of the theme of the wall hangings. Buchanan, “The ‘Months,’” 542; Haupt and Wied, “Kassabuch,” 226, also note 243. 51 Relevant literature on Pieter Bruegel the Elder is constantly increasing, see, among others: Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder; Silver, Pieter Bruegel; Oberthaler et al., Bruegel; as well as the project website “Inside Bruegel” (accessed June 25, 2020, https://www.insidebruegel.net/).

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and September harvesting (The Harvesters, New York), for October and November animal husbandry (The Return of the Herd, Vienna), and for December and January hunting (The Hunters in the Snow, Vienna); the sixth painting that would have focused on the labors of April and May has unfortunately been recorded as lost since the seventeenth century.52 The Seasons form an important part of Pieter Bruegel’s impressive oeuvre of landscape paintings, which received widespread praise during his lifetime, as well as in the decades following his death. Research has highlighted the importance of the artist’s journey to and from Italy where he studied nature, making compelling drawings, and subsequently “regurgitated” this new-found inspiration onto and into his own paintings.53 This metaphor of taking in and heaving out earth, nature, and landscape was created by Karel van Mander (1548–1606) as Bruegel’s paintings featured ever-changing landscapes that transformed the newly emerging genre.54 Shortly after Bruegel’s death, Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), the celebrated Antwerp cartographer and friend of the artist, stated in his eulogy that Bruegel had succeeded “in following nature” in a way comparable for the first time to the painters of Antiquity, and had thus elevated his understanding of landscape to the highest level.55 Bruegel’s new and much closer relationship to the study of nature means that in his landscape paintings the central figures of the peasants can also be “conceived as ‘naturals,’ closely connected, as natives, to the land and to their produce.”56 This elevation of the figure of the peasant and the landscape means that the motif can be understood as reflecting the importance of agriculture, the nature of land ownership, and man’s duty to cultivate it. In early modern writings on rural themes, this task is stressed as an important patriarchal virtue: it was one of the main duties of the 52 The Hunters in the Snow is the only painting not representing peasants but men working for “a noble sportsman,” and as Larry Silver discusses further, The Seasons represent the farmers in a relationship to the local aristocracy. Buchanan, “The ‘Months,’” 544–46; Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, 124. 53 Ribouillault, “Regurgitating Nature,” paragraphs 6–8. 54 Karel van Mander did not include The Seasons in the description of the life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his Schilder-boeck of 1604. Nonetheless, he also emphasizes Bruegel’s mastering of landscape in drawing and painting: “[…] soo eyghentlijck con hy te desen en ander deelen de Natuere nae volghen.” Van Mander, Schilder-boeck, 233r. 55 Tine Meganck, in her discussion of the eulogy inscribed into Ortelius’s Album Amicorum on fol. 13v, also highlights the comparison of Bruegel to Eupompus made by the cartographer, Meganck, Erudite Eyes, 171–73. The album has been digitized: accessed February 16, 2021, https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/ MS-LC-00002-00113/1. A translation of the eulogy was published in Popham, “Pieter Bruegel,” 187. See also Oberthaler et al., Bruegel, 234. 56 Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, 90. Reindert Falkenburg and Bertram Kaschek argue further that Bruegel was also able to skillfully incorporate allegorical and theological meanings in the depictions of the pastoral landscapes of The Seasons. Falkenburg, “Series of the Seasons”; Kaschek, Weltzeit und Endzeit.

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ruler, like a pater familias, to care for and protect all those living in his lands.57 This becomes tangible in the juxtaposition of farmers and the city in The Harvesters and the other paintings of The Seasons, and Antwerp’s councilors might have hoped for exactly that: reminding Archduke Ernest as the new governor-general of his duty to take care of his subjects not only in terms of trade, something commonly associated with the city on the Scheldt, but also in terms of care for the surrounding countryside and its agriculture. These thematic relations between the “Stage of Agriculture” and The Seasons suggest interconnection. During the Entry, and commemorated in the subsequent print, the array of personifications and inscriptions of the “Stage of Agriculture” served as means to ennoble the theme of agriculture and the work of peasants.58 The paintings of The Seasons represent Netherlandish farmers pursuing their labors peacefully and unhindered among rich fields. The people inhabiting this painted landscape were able to do exactly what the inscription of the “Stage of Agriculture” longed for: “that usual labors be restored” and “demanding fields” be tended without “fear of dangerous soldiers” threatening the farmers.59 The Seasons gave the organizers of the Entry the chance to underscore the central messages of the “Stage of Agriculture” once again, with the paintings serving as representations of the “real” land used for agriculture outside the city, while also depicting the peaceful life of farmers described by Virgil for the second Golden Age. The paintings given to the new governor-general can therefore be understood as a continuation of a dialogue that had begun in the Blijde Inkomst at the tableau vivant, where peace was proclaimed to be the necessary foundation for abundant harvests and a golden future. With these two presentations—the stage and the paintings by Pieter Bruegel—Ernest of Austria was confronted with visions of the peace and plenty of the past that he should aspire to restore in the future, for the sake of his subjects, as well as for his own glory.

Conclusion In the Descriptio publicae gratulationis, Johannes Bochius states emphatically in his passage on the “Stage of Agriculture” that “the security of the Republic […] beyond 57 Weissert, “Zwischen Herrscher- und Bürgertugend,” 44–45. See the chapter by Michèle Seehafer in this volume on the virtue of the king as the pater familias and caretaker of his land and its people, focusing on Christian IV of Denmark (1577–1648). 58 Peasants had become a new trope in Antwerp’s art production during the sixteenth century, serving as figures of the opposition between the rural and the urban or the sinful and sinless. Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, 90. 59 Stevenson, Gwynne, and Liebregts, “Description,” 514–15.

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anything else” resides in agriculture.60 It thus seems plausible that the organizers of the Entry created this tableau vivant with its placement at the beginning of the procession as a commentary on the process of the restoration of Antwerp’s arable land. This process had been on-going since 1585 and had included the rebuilding of the dikes and embankments although it had also been confronted with the disappointment of the disastrous harvests of 1593 and 1594. The stage evoked a “dialogue between the ruler and the ruled” through the personification of Annus, the representative of the continuous cycle of the seasons, who proclaimed the archduke to be the bringer of peace and prosperity.61 Annus and the stage’s inscriptions evoked a second Golden Age for Antwerp—the Aurea Aetas Antverpiensis—which would ensue once peace and prosperity had arrived in the revitalized countryside. Reading the stage in combination with the Bruegel paintings presented to Archduke Ernest emphasizes the importance attached to the landscape enacted allegorically in the former and visualized in the latter. The Seasons, with their masterly depictions of nature and the fertility of the earth, could thus serve as visions of peaceful and prosperous land(scapes) outside the city in the near future. This new focus on the importance of farming during a Blijde Inkomst must therefore be understood as more than a ubiquitous topos for glorifying a new ruler. No other sovereign, or governor-general, ever found himself or herself in front of such a stage or as the recipient of such landscape paintings, and this fact emphasizes the topicality of this combination of festival decoration and formal exchange of presents. Yet the hopes placed in Archduke Ernest of Austria, that he would unlock the full potential of Antwerp’s farmland and establish a new Pax Austriaca, were not to be fulfilled; they were dashed only seven months after the Blijde Inkomst when the archduke died unexpectedly in February 1595. However, improvement of the arable land and farming continued when Albert of Austria (1559–1621), Ernest’s younger brother, was appointed Governor-General of the Netherlands in 1596 and focused on bringing peace to the country. In 1609, the political and economic situation finally stabilized as a result of the Twelve Years’ Truce reached by Albert and his wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain (1566–1633), who had become Regents of the Netherlands.62 After decades of hardship, in the f irst half of the seventeenth century the Southern Netherlands became famous for its successful agriculture thanks to the implementation of innovative farming methods.63 In 1644/45, the English traveler 60 “Agricultura erat scenae argumentum, in qua maxima sita sunt, et praecipua Reip. praesidia.” Bochius, Decriptio, 69; Stevenson, Gwynne, and Liebregts, “Description,” 514. 61 Strong, Art and Power, 45. 62 Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, 272. 63 On technical innovations in agriculture in Brabant: Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, 295–302.

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Sir Richard Weston praised the agrarian state of Brabant and proclaimed it to be a “pattern” for his own country.64 In his comment on the ingenious watering system around Antwerp he states that he saw a rich country “stockt with goodlie Wheat and Barlie, and excellent Meadows and Pastures.”65 Fifty years after the Blijde Inkomst of Ernest of Austria, prosperity had indeed returned to Antwerp’s countryside, fulfilling the prophesy in Annus’s speech on the “Stage of Agriculture,” in which he proclaimed that Antwerp and its farmland would “flower again with talents, fruitful work of the earth, and harvests.”

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Meganck, Tine. Erudite Eyes: Friendship, Art and Erudition in the Network of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598). Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History 14. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Meganck, Tine, and Sabine van Sprang, eds. Bruegel’s Winter Scenes: Historians and Art Historians in Dialogue. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Mraz, Gerda. “Erzherzog Ernst.” In Die Habsburger: Ein biographisches Lexikon, edited by Brigitte Hamann, 98–99. Munich: Piper, 1988. Neumann, Elisabeth. “Inventing Europe in Antwerp’s 1520 Entry for Charles V: An Erasmian Allegory in the Face of Global Empire.” In Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, edited by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, 133–46. Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800) 41. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. Oberthaler, Elke, et al. Bruegel. Exhibition catalog. London: Thames and Hudson, 2018. Onuf, Alexandra. “Old Plates, New Impressions: Local Landscape Prints in SeventeenthCentury Antwerp.” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 4 (2014): 424–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00 043079.2014.916560. Onuf, Alexandra. “Small Landscapes in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp.” The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1260 (March 2008): 190–93. Orenstein, Nadine M., ed. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. Parker, Geoffrey. Spain and the Netherlands, 1559–1659: Ten Studies. London: Fontana, 1979. Peeters, Natasja. Frans Francken de Oude (ca. 1542–1616): Leven en werken van een Antwerps historieschilder. Louvain: Peeters, 2013. Peters, Emily J. “Printing Ritual: The Performance of Community in Christopher Plantin’s La Joyeuse & Magnifique Entrée de Monseigneur Francoys … d’Anjou.” Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2008): 370–413. Pf ister, Christian. “Weather, Climate, and the Environment.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European Histor y, 1350–1750. Vol.  1, Peoples and Place, edited by Hamish Scott, 70–93. Online edition from Oxford Handbooks Online. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199597253.001.0001/ oxfordhb-9780199597253-e-2. Pohl, Hans. Die Portugiesen in Antwerpen (1567–1648): Zur Geschichte einer Minderheit. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1977. Popham, A. E. “Pieter Bruegel and Abraham Ortelius.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 59, no. 343 (1931): 184, 187–88. Raband, Ivo. “Collecting the Painted Netherlands: The Art Collection of Archduke Ernest of Austria in Brussels.” In Collecting Nature, edited by Andrea M. Gáldy and Sylvia Heudecker, 109–23. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Raband, Ivo. “Printed Narrative: The Festival Books for Archduke Ernest of Austria from Brussels and Antwerp, 1594/95.” In Aspects of the Narrative in Art History: Proceedings of the International Workshop for Young Researchers, edited by Kayo Hirakawa, 17–32. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2014.

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Raband, Ivo. “Staging Genoa in Antwerp: The Triumphal Arch of the Genoese Nation for the ‘Blijde Inkomst’ of Archduke Ernest of Austria into Antwerp, 1594.” In Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and Beyond, 1450–1650, edited by Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, and Christine Göttler, 46–70. Intersections 47. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Raband, Ivo. Vergängliche Kunst und fortwährende Macht: Die Blijde Inkomst für Erzherzog Ernst von Österreich in Brüssel und Antwerpen, 1594. Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2019. https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/arthistoricum/catalog/book/449. Ribouillault, Denis. “Regurgitating Nature: On a Celebrated Anecdote by Karel van Mander on Pieter Bruegel the Elder.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 8, no. 1 (2016). doi: 10.5092/jhna.2016.8.1.4. Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia: Overo, Descrittione di Diverse Imagini Cavate dall’Antichità, & di Propria Inventione. Rome: Giovanni Gigliotti 1593. Digital edition. https://archive.org/ details/iconologiaoverod00ripa. Scott, Tom. “The Agrarian West.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750. Vol. 1, Peoples and Place, edited by Hamish Scott, 398–427. Online edition from Oxford Handbooks Online. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199597253.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199597253-e-15. Scott Ryberg, Inez. “Vergil’s Golden Age.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 89 (1958): 112–31. Silver, Larry. Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Silver, Larry. Pieter Bruegel. New York: Abbeville Press, 2011. Soen, Violet. “Philip II’s Quest: The Appointment of Governors-General during the Dutch Revolt.” The Low Countries Historical Review/Bijdragen en Medelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 126, no. 1 (2011): 3–29. Stensland, Monica. Habsburg Communication in the Dutch Revolt. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Stevenson, Jane, Paul Gwynne, and Peter Liebregts. “Description of the Public Thanksgiving, of the Spectacles and the Games at the Entry of the Most Serene Prince Ernst Archduke of Austria […].” In Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, edited by J. Ronnie Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring, 1:496–574. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Strong, Roy. Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Subacchi, Paola. “The Italian Community in 16th-Century Antwerp.” In Majolica and Glass from Italy to Antwerp and Beyond: The Transfer of Technology in the 16th and Early 17th Century, edited by Johan Veeckman and Sarah Jennings, 23–38. Antwerp: Stad Antwerpen, 2002. Thøfner, Margit. A Common Art: Urban Ceremonials in Antwerp and Brussels. Zwolle: Waanders, 2007.

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Van der Wee, Herman. The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy (Fourteenth–Sixteenth Centuries). Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 1963. Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro). Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Online edition. https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL063/1916/ volume.xml. Voet, Léon. De gouden eeuw van Antwerpen: Bloei en uitstraling van de metropool in de zestiende eeuw. Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1973. Vrancken, Valerie. De Blijde Inkomsten van de Brabantse hertogen: Macht, opstand en privileges in de vijftiende eeuw. Standen et landen 112. Brussels: ASP, 2018. Weissert, Caecilie. “Zwischen Herrscher- und Bürgertugend: Der Herkuleszyklus von Frans Floris in der Villa des Nicolaes Jongelinck.” In Zwischen Lust und Frust: Die Kunst in den Niederlanden und am Hof Philipps II. von Spanien, edited by Caecilie Weissert, Sabine Poeschel, and Nils Büttner, 17–47. Cologne: Böhlau, 2013. Weston, Richard. A Discourse of Husbandrie used in Brabant and Flanders: Shewing the Wonderfull Improvement of Land There; and Serving as a Pattern for our Practice in this Common-Wealth. London: William Du-Gard, 1650. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/view ?docset=pamphlets&docname=pam_34. Wilson-Okamura, David Scott. Virgil in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Wyssenbach, Stefanie. “Frische Fische und prunkvolle Bankette: Handeln, Sammeln, Konsumieren und Imaginieren im Antwerpener Stillleben, 1610–1660.” Ph.D. diss., University of Bern, 2017. Yates, Frances. Astrea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

About the Author Ivo Raband received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Bern. His dissertation on the Joyous Entries of Archduke Ernest of Austria was published in 2019. Currently, he is an assistant professor (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) at the Institute of Art History at the University of Hamburg, where he is preparing a study on flying and floating in early modern sculpture.

8.

An Overlooked Landscape Installation: The Winter Room at Copenhagen’s Rosenborg Castle Michèle Seehafer 1

Abstract The chapter examines the so-called Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen completed around 1620. This primary living room of Christian IV is preserved in its original state. The walls of this unique interior are decorated with ninety-five oil paintings. The majority of the paintings present landscape and hunting scenes. Rather than focusing on individual art works, the chapter discusses how the interplay of all the paintings achieves a comprehensive spatial order and creates its own independent ecosystem. It will be shown how a multisensory experience of the room and its technical devices, such as a drawbridge and sound channels, further enhanced the connection between internal and external space, allowing the room to be perceived as a landscape installation. Keywords: Christian IV of Denmark-Norway; Winter Room; Copenhagen; landscape installation; painting collection

1 This chapter develops research conducted in the framework of my Ph.D. dissertation “Materiality, Space, Power: Spatial Conceptions at the Danish Court during the Seventeenth Century,” funded by the interdisciplinary Swiss National Science Foundation research project Materialized Identities: Objects, Affects and Effects in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1750, directed by Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, Christine Göttler, and Ulinka Rublack (2016 to 2020). I would like to thank Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki, as their comments and edits helped to improve my text enormously. In addition, this chapter has greatly benef ited from the insights and expertise of Jørgen Hein, Rikke Lyngsø Christensen, Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen, Peter Thule Kristensen, and Jørgen Wadum. Special thanks are due to Peter Kristiansen, Curator at the Royal Danish Collections, Rosenborg Castle, for providing me with some of the images of the Winter Room and to Julia Slater for her excellent editing of this essay.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch08

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Fig. 8.1: The Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © The Royal Danish Collection, Rosenborg Castle.

On his death bed, Danish-Norwegian King Christian IV (1577–1648) requested that he be taken from Frederiksborg Castle to his capital Copenhagen, some 35 kilometers away. However, the king did not want to end his life in the castle inside the city that was his official residence, but in his beloved pleasure residence of Rosenborg Castle outside the city walls. Hans Rostgaard, servant to Christian IV, wrote in his diary that the very sick king was transported through the wintry landscape to Rosenborg and then died in the “Vinter Gemak,” the “Winter Room,” on February 28, 1648 (Fig. 8.1).2 Whether he really died in this chamber or, as is assumed today, in his nearby bedroom, is of little concern.3 What is important, however, is the high esteem in which the king held these rooms in particular and the castle in general, as can be deduced from his desire to die within its walls. The emotional closeness he felt to this building is reflected not least in the unusual decoration, executed some decades earlier according to his particular wishes, that can still be experienced in some of the rooms today. When Christian IV bought a large area of farmland outside the city of Copenhagen in 1606, he ordered the construction of a pleasure residence surrounded by a sizeable garden. The king took an active part in the planning. The palace was built in several stages, with construction more or less 2 Wanscher, Rosenborgs historie 1606–1634, 129; Petersen, “Uddrag af Hans Rostgaards Tegnebog,” 259. 3 Hein and Kristiansen, Rosenborg Castle, 19.

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completed in 1624.4 It bore similarities to the fairy-tale castle described in particular detail in the French edition of the popular chivalric romance Amadis de Gaula, by Nicolas de Herberay (1543), which was widely read at the northern European courts of the time.5 Originally conceived as an addition to the Copenhagen Castle, once completed, Rosenborg Castle became the king’s preferred residence. Surrounded by water and a large garden, Rosenborg resembles Herberay’s miraculous castle of the palace of Apolidon which was standing on the Isle Ferme and had a beautiful garden court. The island itself was enclosed by a riverine landscape and some forests.6 Numerous letters written by Christian prove that he spent a lot of time at his pleasure palace.7 Rosenborg was a place where Christian IV could reside free from the ceremonies of court and at the same time receive foreign guests and diplomats. So the castle was designed to impress through its architecture, gardens, and, first and foremost, its interior decoration. When entering the castle today, the first room visitors experience is the socalled Winter Room, once the primary reception hall of Christian IV. It is one of two rooms in the castle which was left untouched during numerous phases of renovation and bears the distinction of having been preserved in its original state for almost four hundred years. The walls of this unique interior are decorated with ninety-five oil paintings set in richly carved oak paneling (Fig. 8.2).8 Rather than focusing on individual paintings in the room, this chapter will show how the interplay of the paintings works to achieve a comprehensive spatial order as its own independent ecosystem. It will be argued that the Winter Room’s paintings, multisensory experiences, and technical devices, such as a drawbridge and sound channels, created a connection between internal and external space allowing visitors to perceive the room as a virtual “landscape” in itself.

The Winter Room Landscapes The Winter Room in the north wing of the castle has so far received little attention in the art historical literature on landscape, although the room can be considered one of the first major landscape installations.9 With its almost a hundred systematically 4 Hein and Kristiansen, Rosenborg Castle, 5–7; Hein, The Treasure Collection, 1:45–47; Wanscher, Rosenborgs historie 1606–1634, 129–30. 5 De Jonge, “A Netherlandish Model?,” 224. 6 De Jonge, “A Netherlandish Model?,” 224; Chastel, The Palace of Apolidon, 10–11; Thomson, Renaissance Architecture, 85–88. 7 Bircka and Fridericia, Kong Christian den Fjerdes egenhændige Breve. 8 Wadum, “The Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle,” 82; Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room.” 9 Beckett, Kristian IV og Malerkunsten, 59, 95, 103; Bering Liisberg, Rosenborg og Lysthusene, 50–54; Ertz, Josse de Momper der Jüngere, 312–20; Gerson, Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der Holländischen Malerei,

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Fig. 8.2: The south wall of the Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © The Royal Danish Collection, Rosenborg Castle.

arranged paintings, the room was unique in Europe at the time of its construction. Scholars have pointed to only two other interior spaces with comparable features: the first can be found in France in one of the castles in Vannes dating from around 1640, the second in a northern German manor house near Eckernförde built from 1672 onwards.10 Both, however, were made later than the Winter Room and, as far as is known today, conceived independently. By creating a spatial ensemble with mainly landscape paintings during the very same years when the genre was slowly establishing itself, Christian IV presented himself in the Winter Room as 453–54; Styhr, Nederlandsk Landskabsmaleri, 8–9; Wanscher, Rosenborgs historie 1606–1634; Wadum, “Sebastian Vrancx’ værksted og Rosenborg Slot”; Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room”; Wadum, “The Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle.” 10 The “Cabinet des pères du desert” at Gaillard Castle in Vannes contains a total of fifty-seven panels on wood and eight paintings on canvas showing scenes from the life of Jesus and the Desert Fathers. Many of the depictions are based on models by Maarten de Vos (1532–1603) and Abraham Bloemaert (1564–1651). The other room is the so-called “Bunte Kammer” on Gut Ludwigsburg. The room has oak paneling in which the oil paintings have been inserted. A Flemish school of painters was responsible for the decoration, producing 174 miniature paintings, the models for which were taken from emblem books. Freytag, Harms, and Schilling, Gesprächskultur des Barock; Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chap. 4.4.

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an innovative collector and an exceptional liefhebber of Netherlandish art. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch term “liefhebber” mainly referred to a collector or an expert in the fine arts.11 It can be argued that the unique design of the room was chosen by Christian in order to consciously distinguish himself from other European rulers.12 The composition of the four walls varies according to the number of paintings and the ratios of the panels in each. The ceiling of the Winter Room was originally covered with stucco work, but this was removed during renovation in 1705. The ceiling that exists today features two mythological scenes by Pieter Isaacsz. (1569–1625), produced around 1620 for a different room.13 On each of the walls, the paintings are arranged in vertical series of three, which are framed on each side by a total of twenty-two fluted columns with ionic capitals (Fig. 8.3). This sequence is interrupted in the window niches and at the fireplace. The pilasters structuring the room have different bases carved with distinctive masks (Fig. 8.4). These impressive masks are mainly based on prints designed by Cornelis Floris II (1514–1575) and engraved by Frans Huys (1522–1562) in 1555 in Antwerp.14 Floris’s series in the grotesque style with the title Pourtraicture ingenieuse de plusieurs façons de Masque […] was remarkably successful, published in numerous editions, and repeatedly engraved.15 During the sixteenth century, Netherlandish prints of grotesques became quite popular and served various artists as a point of reference.16 This was also the case at the Danish court, as Floris’s prints had already been used under Frederik II, the father of Christian IV.17 According to Ethan Matt Kavaler, grotesques frequently served as a structural element to direct the perception of the viewer and to convey the impression of wealth and status.18 Technical studies of the Winter Room have revealed that the majority of the panels were produced by Flemish artists.19 About seventy-five of the works were 11 Keller, “The ‘Lover’ and Early Modern Fandom,” 2–3; Honig, “The Beholder as Work of Art,” especially 275–76, 279; Cook, Matters of Exchange, 72. 12 Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room”; Wadum, “The Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle,” 82, 84. 13 Heiberg, “Art and the Staging of Images of Power,” 236; Roding, “Giants Attacking Olympus/Banquet of the Gods,” 277–78. 14 Wadum, “Gravures naar Cornelis Floris.” 15 Unverfehrt, Fantastische Formen, cat. no. 79. 16 Kavaler, “Ornament and Systems of Ordering,” 1278. 17 Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chap. 4.4. For the adaption of the Floris School in Denmark, see: Meganck, “Cornelis Floris and the Floris-school.” Around 1550, King Christian III (1503–1559) hired Cornelis Floris to furnish a funeral monument for his father in the Cathedral of St. Petri, Schleswig. Some years later his son, Frederik II, engaged Floris to make a funeral monument for his father. Floris’s work is now displayed at Roskilde Cathedral. Honnens de Lichtenberg, “Some Netherlandish Artists,” 51; Larsson, “Bildhauerkunst und Plastik in Dänemark,” 25. 18 Kavaler, “Ornament and Systems of Ordering,” 1269. 19 Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room.” Jørgen Wadum based his research into the origin of the paintings on artistic style, painting techniques, panel construction and format, as well as methods of

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Fig. 8.3: Fluted column with ionic capitals in the Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © The Royal Danish Collection, Rosenborg Castle.

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Fig. 8.4: Carved column base with ornamental mask in the Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © Photo: Author.

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executed between 1610 and 1620. It has been suggested that the paintings in the window recesses, featuring twelve allegorical female figures, were ordered and installed as part of an earlier decorative concept for the room.20 In 1758, two bay windows were inserted into the north wall, while four landscapes and four allegories were added, giving the room the present number of paintings. The commission for the Winter Room was executed quite fast, as can be seen in the wet paint on some of the frames that indicates the color was not entirely dry when the pictures were framed. These tell-tale signs led Jørgen Wadum to assume that most of the enormous number of paintings were brought together from different workshops, although the fact that several paintings were stamped on the back with Antwerp’s coat of arms led him to believe they were all the result of a single commission executed in that city. The remaining paintings, he suggests, were already available in stock and were trimmed to the desired size.21 In other words, they were not initially produced for this room, but made to fit it. The walls of the Winter Room, as seen today, were finished no later than 1620. In this year, a Danish cabinet maker, Hans Jørgen Dill, is listed in the account books as receiving a payment for the final stages of work on “the large panel work.”22 The Winter Room exhibits a unique collection of Flemish art from the early seventeenth century. In addition to landscapes and hunting scenes, which account for the largest part, there are a few biblical and mythological scenes, also mainly set in landscapes; there is also one still life painting displaying the prosperous and diverse products of nature.23 None of the paintings are signed. Nevertheless, twenty works have been attributed, based on style and their Antwerp provenance, to Joos de Momper the Younger (1564–1635) and his workshop, with two of them probably even executed in cooperation with Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) (Fig. 8.5).24 Christian’s father, Frederick II of Denmark, had collected some Netherlandish art and employed a few artists from the Low Countries.25 During the reign of Chrisframing. His results led to the conclusion that the Winter Room’s paintings came from the Netherlands, probably Antwerp. Wadum, “The Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle,” 83, 86. 20 Jørgen Wadum attributes these paintings to an anonymous Danish painter ca. 1614–1615. Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chaps. 4.4 and 4.5. 21 Wadum, “The Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle,” 84–87; Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chaps. 4.4, 4.12, 4.13, and 4.14. 22 Wadum, “The Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle,” 87; Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chap. 4.14. 23 Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room”; Wadum, “The Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle.” 24 Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chap. 4.7. Other paintings have been attributed to Pieter Snayers, Hendrick van Balen I, and the studio of Louis de Caullery. Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chaps. 4.6 and 4.11. 25 Prompted by the religious and political unrest in their homeland, Dutch artists, merchants, architects, craftsmen, shipbuilders, carpet weavers, mint masters, and musicians increasingly settled in Denmark during the reign of Frederick II. Among the outstanding Dutch court artists under Frederik II were the

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Fig. 8.5: Joos de Momper II and Jan Brueghel I, Mountainous Landscape with Travelers on a Hilly Road, 1610–1615. Oil on oak panel, 43 × 66 cm, Copenhagen, Rosenborg Castle, Winter Room. Image: © Photo Collection RKD–Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, inv. no. 0001326397.

tian IV, however, this focus of the collection was greatly expanded, and from 1600 onwards, art at the Danish court was primarily influenced by Netherlandish artists and their works. Christian’s enthusiasm for Netherlandish works is also reflected in the detailed records of the Danish diplomat and agent Jonas Charisius (1571–1619).26 In 1607 and 1608, Charisius was commissioned by Christian IV to purchase paintings and recruit craftsmen, merchants, and musicians in the Netherlands. He bought at least 140 Dutch and Flemish paintings, along with numerous musical instruments, for the king.27 By collecting Netherlandish paintings and employing Netherlandish artists at the Danish court, Christian IV was cultivating a practice of patronage sculptor Johan Gregor van der Schardt (1529/30–1581) and the painters Gerrit Cornelisz van Haarlem (active 1585–1601) and Hans Knieper (d. 1587). Christensen, “Irrecoverable,” 191; Roding, “Gerson Extended,” chap. 3.2; Heiberg, “Art and Politics,” 10; Honnens de Lichtenberg, “Some Netherlandish Artists”; Christensen, “The Visual and Performing Arts,” 73. 26 Borggrefe, “Pieter Isaacsz in the Company of Hans von Aachen,” 43; Noldus, “Dealing in Politics and Art,” 223–24; Noldus, “Loyalty and Betrayal,” 61; Roding, “Gerson Extended,” chap. 3.4; Schulting, “Pieter Isaacsz, Pupil of the ‘Artistic, sensible Mr. Cornelis Ketel,’” 32–36. 27 Heiberg, “Art and Politics,” 11–12; Noldus, “Loyalty and Betrayal,” 61; Noldus, “Pieter Isaacsz’s Other Life,” 152–53; Dudok van Heel, “The Birth of an Artists’ Quarter,” 84. In 1909, Eiler Nystrøm published Charisius’s report with lists of painters, descriptions of works and objects, and their prices. Nystrøm, “Jonas Charisius’ Indkøb Af Malerier.”

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that was common to many rulers at the time. While adopting the habitus of an art-loving and art-promoting ruler he explored new modes of display by using the landscape paintings as extraordinary wall panels.

Framing the Landscape From the sixteenth century onward, depictions of landscape, in the form of frescoes or as easel paintings, decorated suburban and urban palaces all over Europe.28 These images, which enabled viewers to perceive the outside world, had more than an aesthetic purpose, as contemporaries believed that the implied sense of movement that came from intense observation of the landscape paintings improved the viewer’s health.29 In the Sala delle Prospettive (1517–1519) of the Villa Farnesina, for example, Baldassare Peruzzi resorted to trompe l’oeil effects to paint balconies with columns opening up to a perspective view (Fig. 8.6). The fresco technique allowed for large sections of the wall to be transformed into an illusionistic opening, leading the viewer into an uninterrupted landscape. The focus lay in the contrast between real and represented space that seemingly dissolves to give the spectator the opportunity for an immersive experience.30 The Winter Room denies such an experience through its division into small sections, a device encouraging a small-scale reading of the pictures. Furthermore, the individual panels are presented in multiple frames, which give the paintings the effect of additional depth. The paintings in horizontal format have three frames: the innermost frame is gilded and decorated with a black arabesque ornament; the second frame is painted black and decorated with gilded patterns; and the last frame, surrounding the two inner frames, is made of plain oak (Fig. 8.7). The paintings in vertical format each have two simple, undecorated frames, namely a gilded inner frame and an outer one made of oak wood. Daniela Wagner and Fridericke Conrad have observed that frames serve “to generate evidence, to make concepts visible and thus prove to be an instrument for communication strategies on the meta-level.”31 Transforming the different paintings in the Winter Room into a uniform and harmonized unit, the frames allowed the viewers to participate in an all-embracing visual experience of different landscapes. The gold adorning some of the frames helped distinguish the paintings from the other elements on the walls, and, depending on changes in light, gave them an additional shimmer. It also drew 28 Cantor, “The Pastoral Landscape,” 24. 29 Cantor, “The Pastoral Landscape,” 24; Gage, “Exercise for Mind and Body,” 1184–85, 1188–89. 30 Grau, Virtuelle Kunst in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 27. 31 Wagner and Conrad, “Visuelle Dispositionen,” 4.

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Fig. 8.6: Baldassare Peruzzi, Sala delle Prospettive, 1517–1519, Rome, Villa Farnesina. Image: © Wikimedia Creative Commons. Photo: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta.

Fig. 8.7: Frames used in the Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © Photo: Author.

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attention to their value since, according to Leon Battista Alberti, an accomplished painting deserved decorative elements made out of precious materials.32 Vera Beyer, in reference to Alberti, argues that a golden frame “gives the painting […] a value that exceeds its material value; it displays the immaterial added value, the aura (in both the religious and economic sense) of a painting.”33 The large number of landscape paintings and their effects in the Winter Room give viewers the impression of an outside world. They put before their eyes different scenarios: various trees, shapes, and seasons provide a complex concept of landscape. However, the very abundance of pictures in the room and its framework creates a spatial order, rather than a single immersive environment. In the Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin states that it is the “collector” who, through conscious decisions and placements, removes objects from their original functions and transfers them into a newly created system, that of the collection.34 Taking Benjamin’s notion of a collector further forward, we may thus understand the Winter Room first and foremost as a collection space created and curated by Christian IV. The individual paintings are subordinated to the overall composition; they are carefully arranged in repetitive patterns—such as similar compositions, motives, and coloring—in order to enter into the closest possible relationship with their peers. These patterns are not always immediately recognizable and obvious. The paintings in the Winter Room were intentionally hung in such a manner that would break up the overall visual impression and soften the boundaries of actual and imagined environments. Hence, the focus of the Winter Room is not on the individual works but on the interaction of all the paintings, similar to what Felix Thürlemann describes as a “hyperimage.” As he explains it, a “hyperimage” is “a compilation of selected images—pictures, drawings, photographs or sculptures—to make a new, comprehensive whole.”35 The landscapes commissioned by Christian IV (or his agent) only began to express their different meanings in the newly created context of the Winter Room.36 In the spatial arrangement, the individual works entered into a discursive connection with the other works and their singularity is modified through the dominating presence of their shared theme: the landscape in its different forms. According to Tanja Michalsky, landscape paintings were about “the world of the viewer,” his or her aesthetic perception of nature or place.37 The wealth of paintings in the Winter Room already fascinated seventeenth-century visitors. Friedrich August of Worgewitz, head of the princely household of Duke Christian of 32 Alberti, On Painting, 72–73. 33 Beyer, Rahmenbestimmungen, 16, 196. 34 Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, 271, 279. 35 Thürlemann, Mehr als ein Bild, 7. 36 Imdahl, “Großausstellung und Hyperimage,” 97. 37 Michalsky, Projektion und Imagination, 22.

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Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (1627–1698), visited Rosenborg Castle in 1668. In his travel diary, he described the Winter Room as a “royal chamber of magnificent paintings” (Königliches Gemach von herrlichen Gemählden).38 The satisfaction King Christian IV felt towards this room becomes tangible in his well-preserved correspondence, where he repeatedly refers to the Winter Room as his “splendid room at Rosenborg.”39

The Winter Room and Its Environs German cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has drawn our attention to “affective space,” where relationships are formed by the interaction of space, artifact, and human action. 40 The Winter Room can be discussed as such an affective space, whose qualities were generated through its interior decoration, especially the abundance of paintings with their different landscape scenarios, and through the social and performative practices carried out in it, such as diplomatic receptions and concerts. Additionally, the oak pilasters with their carved grotesques also help to establish a multisensory experience of the room. Some of these sixty-six grotesque masks combine floral and animal features. 41 Oak leaves, referring back to the tree from which it was carved, and also grapes, apples, shells, and different vegetables were used to create the figures’ highly imaginative headdresses. This architectural decoration adds another layer to the room’s effect on its beholders by once again alluding to nature, its ever-growing produce, and its animal inhabitants. The decorations refer not only to the nature portrayed in the painted landscapes, but also to that of the real landscape outside the castle. The furnishing of the Winter Room is therefore directly related to the location of the castle itself. From a drawing by Otto Heiden, an engineer at the court of Christian IV, executed around 1634, we can conclude that the castle was originally surrounded by trees (Fig. 8.8). When visitors entered Rosenborg, they first had to pass through a belt of trees outside the city walls of Copenhagen. The diplomat Charles Ogier, who traveled to Denmark in the entourage of the French ambassador Claude de Mesmes on the occasion of the wedding of the king’s oldest surviving son in 1634, described the royal garden of Rosenborg in his travel diary:42

38 Friedrich August of Worgewitz, as quoted in Hein, The Treasure Collection, 1:144, Appendix 8. 39 In one of Christian IV’s letters to his “Rentenmasterne” (February 19, 1633), he wrote “mijn dageliige Stue paa Rossenborrig.” As quoted in Wanscher, Rosenborgs historie 1606–1634, 53. 40 Reckwitz, “Affective Spaces.” 41 Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chap. 4.4, note 8. 42 For the royal wedding of Christian V (1603–1647): Wade, Triumphus Nuptialis Danicus, 157–278.

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Fig. 8.8: Otto Heiden, Castle of Rosenborg, seventeenth century. Drawing, 21.8 × 29.8 cm, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1868,0612.1603. Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The garden is about as extensive as the royal garden of the Tuileries in Paris, but it does not have such wide and splendid avenues, and this Danish one seems to serve more for the benefit and comfort of a sensible paterfamilias than to show off royal, that is superfluous, splendor. 43

Ogier refers here to the herb garden and the various fruit trees that were planted for the physical well-being of the royal court. However, these remarks also stress that the royal garden was not intended as a prestige garden, but rather as representative of the prosperous country and its particular food habits. Passing through this cultivated, colorful garden, which was only replaced by a baroque garden in the 1660s, put the visitor in the right mood for a meeting with the monarch.44 Moving first through the countryside with its real trees, visitors experienced a transformation as they traveled from the actual garden into the landscape paintings in the Winter 43 Cited in Schlegel, Samlung zur dänischen Geschichte, 223: “Der Garten ist ungefähr eben so weitläufig als der königliche Garten der Tuilleries zu Paris, aber er hat nicht so weite und prächtige Alleen, und dieser Dänische scheint mehr zum Nutzen und zur Bequemlichkeit eines vernünftigen Hausvaters zu dienen, als eine königliche, das ist überflüssige, Pracht zu zeigen.” 44 Hein, The Treasure Collection, 1:54.

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Room. Due to the room’s oak paneling and what was originally a wooden floor, it would have appeared quite dark, evoking associations with a forest landscape as it played with the metaphor of the forest as a place of retreat and of inexhaustible resources. 45 Christian IV had a particular aff inity for wood. Documents record that he ordered rare trees to be cut down and given to turners for further processing. 46 Since the king did some woodworking himself, he personally came into physical contact with the material, which enabled him to study it further. 47 The interplay between the outside world and the created interior is further enhanced in the Winter Room’s windows, which look out onto the royal garden, thus acting as a link between these two areas. 48 Gerd Blum has noted that the choice of windows during the (Italian) Renaissance tended to focus on a specif ic section of the surroundings, and therefore can be equated with a “constructed image,” in the sense of Leon Battista Alberti’s def inition of the finestra aperta in De Pictura (1435). 49 We may understand the Winter Room’s landscape paintings as open, albeit small, windows that allow viewers to study a variety of landscapes, just as they could do with the real landscape of the garden through the architectural windows. The window recesses are adorned with twelve paintings depicting female personifications of virtues as fictive statues (Fig. 8.9). They, too, take part in the plant and garden imagery of the interior space.50 The flowers, herbs, and grasses growing around the pedestals of the painted statues evoke associations with a horticultural landscape and their detailed rendering even makes it possible to name them. For example, two milk thistles (Silybum marianum) at different stages of flowering, from bud to full bloom, clearly identifiable from their pointed leaves, are sprouting up in front of the personification of Spes. These paintings were produced around the same time that the Hortus Floridus, illustrated by Crispijn de Passe the Younger (1594–1670), was published in Utrecht (1614), which may have been the inspiration for these paintings.51 45 Göttler, “The Art of Solitude,” especially 416–18; Göttler, “Eremitage/Einsiedelei.” 46 Hein, Ivories and Narwhal Tusks at Rosenborg Castle, 1:11. 47 Hein, Ivories and Narwhal Tusks at Rosenborg Castle, 1:11; Hein, The Treasure Collection, 1:31. 48 Forster, “Vorwort,” xv. 49 Blum, Fenestra Prospectiva, 6. On Leon Battista Alberti’s finestra aperta and the idea of the painting as a view through an open window: Alberti, On Painting, 39–41. 50 The displayed personifications are: Spes, Fides, Caritas, Prudentia, Justitia, Fortitudo, Temperantia, Pax, Claritas, Gloria, Artes, and Abundantia. Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chap. 4.5. Four personifications in the window bays added later have not yet been identified. Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chap. 4.4. 51 Crispijn de Passe’s brother, Simon de Passe (1595–1647), came to the Danish court in 1624 and was appointed royal engraver under Christian IV. Veldman, “Crispijn de Passe”; Gerard, “Woutneel, de Passe

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Fig. 8.9: Anonymous, Personification of Hope (Spes), ca. 1614–1615. Oil on oak panel, Copenhagen, Rosenborg Castle, Winter Room. Image: © Photo Collection RKD–Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, inv. no. 0001326398.

The Winter Room as a Multisensory Panorama Lastly, the connection between external and internal space in the Winter Room was also reinforced through multiple technical devices. There was a drawbridge that regulated the entrance to the castle on the north side, since the castle was surrounded by a moat. Prince Christian II of Anhalt-Bernburg (1599–1656), who visited the Winter Room on his cavalier tour in March 1623, recorded in his diary: “In the king’s room […] there is a winch with which his majesty can raise and lower the drawbridge himself.”52 The winch, which has not survived, was located next and the Anglo-Netherlandish Print Trade,” 363. 52 Christian II von Anhalt-Bernburg, Digitale Edition und Kommentierung der Tagebücher des Fürsten Christian II. von Anhalt-Bernburg (1599–1656), March 1623, 68r: “[…] Jns Königes zimmer. Jst mit kamin

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to the window niche on the eastern wall of the Winter Room.53 Although visitors and guests could not see exactly who operated the device, Anhalt-Bernburg’s description indicates that the king himself played this active role. The king could thus physically regulate the connection between his living room and the outside area. Later travel reports frequently mention this specific ability of the king, which emphasized his position as the country’s ruler.54 Landscape, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, is a medium experienced in a viscerally physical and multisensorial way; this also applies to the arrangement of landscapes and landscape motifs depicted in the Winter Room.55 Alongside the wealth of visual attractions, the visitors’ sense of smell would have been activated in the room, given that the wall paneling with its carved masks would actually smell of freshly cut and polished wood. They would have enjoyed the tactile experience of touching the wood, feeling the structure of the carved oak. The juxtaposition of the carved wooden surfaces in contrast to the smoothly varnished oil paintings would have further enhanced awareness of materials and shapes. Another sense most acutely activated in the room was that of hearing. In three corners of the Winter Room there are openings in the floor which lie above the cellar vaults (Fig. 8.10). There, the royal orchestra performed in order to fill the Winter Room with music from below.56 Music was not only intended for the enjoyment of Christian’s guests, his ability to provide music without its players visible was also intentionally designed to present the king as an innovative and learned ruler, as revealed in Charles Ogier’s travelogue. He stated that the invisible music started at the very moment the king was standing in the center of the room.57 Interestingly, Ogier mentioned in his description that when he left the castle he could still hear the invisible and “not at all

vndt mit welcher Jhre Mayestät selbsten die zugbrücke des grabens aufziehen k vndt niederlaßen können.” 53 Nils Rubinius describes in his travel diary the location of the winding mechanism: “By the furthest window there is a handle through which it is possible to raise the castle drawbridge.” Cited in Hein, The Treasure Collection, 1:143, Appendix 6. 54 Cf., for example, the travel reports of Charles Ogier and Friedrich August of Worgewitz. Ogier observed: “Das merkwürdigste ist, dass der König aus seinem Schlafgemach, vermittelst gewisser Ketten und Kloben, in einer ziemlichen Entfernung eine Zugbrücke aufheben und niederlassen kann” (The strangest thing is that the king can raise and lower a drawbridge from his bedchamber, by means of certain chains and cocks, at a considerable distance). As translated from the Latin by Schlegel, Samlung zur dänischen Geschichte, 223. Friedrich August of Worgewitz also writes “kan der König bey der / taffel daselbt di Zugbrycken aufziehen” (at the table the king / can raise the drawbridge). As quoted in Hein, The Treasure Collection, 1:144, Appendix 8. 55 Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 14. 56 Wadum, “Christian IV’s Winter Room,” chap. 4.1. 57 Spohr, “‘This Charming Invention Created by the King,’” 19.

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Fig. 8.10: Floor opening in the Winter Room leading to the musicians’ cellar, Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen. Image: © The Royal Danish Collection, Rosenborg Castle. Photo: Peter Nørby.

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unpleasant music” for some time in the garden, underscoring the space-expanding effects of the Winter Room.58 The sense of taste was most probably addressed by the act of eating. Documents attest that the room contained a large table, so it is not impossible to imagine that it was also used for dining.59 The theme of eating is prominently represented in the only still life painting in the room. Attributed to the circle of Osias Beert (ca. 1580–1623), it depicts products of nature such as berries and peaches, which could also be found in the nearby garden (Fig. 8.11).60 Right above this picture is one showing a small group enjoying a picnic in a grove. Prominently displayed among their dishes is an elaborate confection in the shape of a pheasant. This scene, along with several paintings of hunting, prompt reflections about the content of the meals served in the Winter Room. Christian IV relied upon the stimulation of all five senses in the Winter Room to present himself to his best possible advantage.

Nature and Dominion under Christian IV In 1605, a year before Christian IV ordered the construction of Rosenborg Castle, The Masque of Blackness, a play about racial power relations, was performed at the English court, where his sister, Anna of Denmark (1574–1619), was queen. Anna, who conceived the masque’s subject and also appeared in a leading role, commissioned the court masque that was written by Ben Jonson (1572–1637) and artistically directed by Inigo Jones (1573–1652).61 This ephemeral court festivity marks an early and important use of the word “landtschap,” or “landscape,” in the English language.62 This was mirrored in the unique scenery of this masque, where, for the first time, a three-dimensional landscape was displayed based on central perspective.63 In the masque, landscape was referred to not only visually, but also conceptually, where it was envisioned as defining a state and the power of the body politic.64 Anna of Denmark’s performance is not surprising when placed in the context of her family, especially in light of the actions of her younger brother Christian IV, 58 Schlegel, Samlung zur dänischen Geschichte, 131. 59 Hein, The Treasure Collection, 1:144, Appendix 5. 60 Peach trees and Spanish cherry trees are documented for the royal garden already in 1607. Christensen, Haverne – dengang, 82. For further information about the royal garden: Christensen, Haverne – dengang. 61 Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, xxvii, 40–41. 62 Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, xxix. For the history of the term “landscape” in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, see the chapter by Karin Leonhard in this volume. 63 Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, xxix. 64 Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, xxvii, xxx.

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Fig. 8.11: Section of the eastern wall of the Winter Room with Sebastiaan Vrancx (circle of), A Picnic in a Park, ca. 1617–1620, oil on oak panel, 49 × 64 cm; and Osias Beert I (circle of), Still Life with Drinking Vessels, Fruit and Pastries, ca. 1617–1620, oil on oak panel, 51.5 × 66 cm, Copenhagen, Rosenborg Castle. Image: © Photo Collection RKD–Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, inv. nos. 0000381787 and 0000381788.

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who sought to draw on artistic representations of landscape to stage himself as the embodiment of his land. Throughout his life, Christian stayed in close contact with Anna through correspondence and two visits to England in 1606 and 1614, and it is possible that this interaction shaped his efforts to create Rosenborg Castle and the Winter Room.65 The Winter Room, in its uniqueness, gave Christian IV the chance to present himself in various contexts and in various roles. More than any other Danish king before him, Christian utilized art, architecture, and court festivities to strengthen his own position and that of the Danish Crown. Denmark was at this point still an elective monarchy and most of Christian IV’s decisions had to be approved by the Council of the State. His architectural achievements and cultural patronage enabled him to assert his independence from the Council.66 His extensive art collection contained an exceptional number of Netherlandish artworks and he was well known all over Europe as a passionate collector. He was keen to establish Denmark as an artistic center and, along with art schools, he founded tapestry manufactories and silk factories whose masters often came from the Netherlands.67 In the Winter Room, the king fashioned himself as the leading landowner of the state, reflecting and confirming the fact that the Crown Estate covered almost half of Denmark.68 The Danish-Norwegian Empire stretched over the largest geographical and political area in Europe. During Christian IV’s lifetime, it included Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, parts of present-day Sweden, as well as the islands of Gotland and Saaremaa (Øsel) in the Baltic Sea, and extended as far as Hamburg on the European mainland.69 During his reign, new towns and a number of trading companies were founded. Christian thought about different ways to govern his land in the most productive and prosperous manner, applying his interest in technology and technical devices. Christian IV was not only instrumental in promoting textile production, but also opened sugar refineries, oil mills, and at

65 Heiberg, “Art and Politics,” 11–15; Murdoch, Britain, Denmark-Norway and the House of Stuart, 24–25; Wade, Triumphus Nuptialis Danicus, 48–49. 66 Heiberg, “Art and Politics,” 7; Heiberg, “Art and the Staging of Images of Power,” 231; Stein, “Christian IV,” 368. 67 Houkjaer, “Dutch Artists in the Service of Danish History,” 100. Christian IV founded the Silk Company (Silkekompagniet) in 1621. During its existence, the company never managed to become a monopoly or to become profitable. Even though attempts were made to raise the tax on imported silk, sales of locally produced silk, which was known to be of lower quality, did not increase. In 1624, private merchants bought the company. Lockhart, Denmark, 1513–1660, 136. The Anatomy House by Thomas Bartholin (1662) mentions a silk cocoon, which most likely came from the Danish Silk Company. Bartholin, The Anatomy House, 191. 68 Findeisen, Christian IV., 131. 69 Findeisen, Christian IV., 32.

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the same time, salt production commenced.70 In 1606, the king built the village of Solbjerg as a test laboratory to secure the food resource for his navy and the needs of Rosenborg Castle. The king personally oversaw his building projects and experimented with a feeding system for five hundred farm animals, as well as with an automated water supply. The king designed a feeding system in the attic of the barn so that animals could be fed automatically from above. An elaborate system of water pipes was installed to supply fresh water and make it possible to flush the stalls out easily.71 Against the backdrop of these projects, the Winter Room appears as a place that allowed the Danish king to portray himself as a universal Lutheran ruler, who took pleasure in the hands-on administration of reigning over a prosperous country. The multitude of different landscape paintings in the room together with its technical features were designed to impress selected visitors, among them foreign envoys and ambassadors, as well as the Protestant nobility. The varied functions of the Winter Room enabled it to be simultaneously space-creating and space-structuring. This promoted the leadership role of the king in matters of state, while also manifesting his ambition to cultivate and, in the broadest sense, tame nature. His aspirations to all-encompassing power were further emphasized by the addition of an alchemical laboratory to the garden in Rosenborg. This building was constructed around 1610 for the royal chymicus and distiller Peter Payngk (ca. 1575–1645), a Dane who had formerly been employed at the imperial court of Rudolf II (1552–1612) in Prague.72 Payngk’s collection of recipes has been preserved and is a testament to his paracelsian interests and research into the transformation of metals.73 Numerous experiments were conducted under his direction in the laboratory at Rosenborg, involving the search for the Philosopher’s Stone.74 Payngk’s employment in the laboratory as well as Christian IV’s involvement in the Winter Room underscore the idea of the transformation of nature, and indeed, humankind’s power over nature that was so important at the king’s court. 70 Houkjaer, “Dutch Artists in the Service of Danish History,” 100; Gamrath, “Kopenhagen als Hauptstadt während des Absolutismus ca. 1650–1850,” 36–37; Findeisen and Husum, Kleine Geschichte Kopenhagens, 47; Spohr, “‘This Charming Invention Created by the King,’” 13. 71 Findeisen, Christian IV., 133, 296; Lockhart, Denmark, 1513–1660, 140. 72 Hein, The Treasure Collection, 1:54–55; Fink-Jensen, “Alchemy in Denmark,” 13. 73 The manuscript is kept today in the Royal Danish Library, shelf number GKS 272 folio. 74 Fink-Jensen, “Alchemy in Denmark,” 13–14; Roding, “King Solomon and the Imperial Paradigm of Christian IV (1588–1648),” 237. Entries in account books show that Payngk supplied the court primarily with medicine, distilled spirits, and perfume. Fink-Jensen, “Alchemy in Denmark,” 14; Shackelford, “Paracelsianism in Denmark,” 407; Hein, The Treasure Collection, 1:54. On Paracelsianism in Denmark, see: Shackelford, “Paracelsianism in Denmark.”

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Conclusion In the Winter Room, Christian IV presented himself as an innovative collector and an exceptional liefhebber of Netherlandish art. This personal preference for the Low Countries was, however, not limited to an interest in their arts and artists. Most of Christian’s economic endeavors were stimulated by the Netherlands, as he admired their financial system.75 However, as a monarch, he despised the political system of the Dutch Republic; instead, he sought inspiration from his fellow Protestant princes of northern Germany and England.76 Christian IV’s attitude to art was comparable to that of the imperial court of Rudolf II, who employed many Netherlandish artists. One well-known example is his success in commissioning works from Adriaen de Vries (ca. 1556–1626), Rudolf’s imperial sculptor, for the Danish court.77 It can be generally observed that throughout his reign Christian aimed to maintain Denmark’s supremacy in the Nordic Region (Dominium maris baltici) as “through the arts and royal iconography the king spoke the language of prerogative rule.”78 This manifested itself especially in the royal interiors as sites of splendor and monarchical self-representation. In this chapter, the Winter Room has been examined as a multisensory and affective space created through an abundance of landscape paintings, which also represent an unparalleled collection of Netherlandish art. Furthermore, the technical devices that he had installed underlined the king’s interest in staging himself as a powerful monarch. This was highlighted by the distinctive site specificity of both the castle and the room. The Winter Room may well be the first of the few northern European court interiors in which landscape paintings created an all-encompassing room installation. The analysis of this chamber is able to shed new light not only on the emergence of the pictorial genre of the landscape but also on how such a room could be instrumentalized to accommodate political and agricultural agendas. The Winter Room is an early example of how landscape paintings were harnessed to evoke a dialog between a built interior and the real landscape at a time when European monarchs were beginning to focus more frequently on this medium to emphasize their territorial supremacy.

75 Lockhart, Denmark, 1513–1660, 134. 76 Lockhart, Denmark, 1513–1660, 134, 190; Findeisen, Christian IV., 100; Christensen, “Irrecoverable,” 191–92. 77 Neville, “Christian IV’s Italianates,” 341. De Vries created a Neptune fountain for Frederiksborg Castle, see Christensen, “Adriaen de Vries’ Neptunspringvand.” 78 Lockhart, Denmark, 1513–1660, 190.

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Works Cited Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Translated and edited by Rocco Sinisgalli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Bartholin, Thomas. The Anatomy House in Copenhagen: Briefly Described. Edited by Niels W. Bruun, introduced by Morten Fink-Jensen, translated by Peter Fisher. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015. Beckett, Francis. Kristian IV og Malerkunsten. Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2018. Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk: Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 5.1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Bering Liisberg, H. C. Rosenborg og Lysthusene i Kongens Have. Copenhagen: Vilhelm Trydes, 1914. Beyer, Vera. Rahmenbestimmungen: Funktionen von Rahmen bei Goya, Velázquez, van Eyck und Degas. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008. Bircka, Carl Frederik, and Julius Albert Fridericia, eds. Kong Christian den Fjerdes egenhændige Breve. 7 vols. Copenhagen: Forlaget af Universitetsboghandler G. E. C. Gad, 1878–1891. Blum, Gerd. Fenestra Prospectiva: Architektonisch inszenierte Ausblicke; Alberti, Palladio, Agucchi. Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus 15. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Borggrefe, Heiner. “Pieter Isaacsz in the Company of Hans von Aachen.” In Pieter Isaacsz (1568–1625): Court Painter, Art Dealer and Spy, edited by Badeloch Noldus and Juliette Roding, 43–57. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Cantor, Sarah. “The Pastoral Landscape: Politics, Poetry, and Piety in the 17th Century.” In Art and Social Change: Essays on the Collection of La Salle University Art Museum, edited by Klare Scarborough and Susan M. Dixon, 17–33. Philadelphia: La Salle University Art Museum, 2016. Chastel, André. The Palace of Apolidon. The Zaharoff Lecture 1984/85. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Christensen, Annie. Haverne – dengang. Copenhagen: Rhodos, 2000. Christensen, Charlotte. “Adriaen de Vries Neptunspringvand.” In Christian 4. og Frederiksborg, edited by Steffen Heiberg, 153–72. Exhibition catalog. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2006. Christensen, Charlotte. “Irrecoverable: King Christian IV of Denmark as Collector and Patron in Times of Peace and War.” In 1648: War and Peace in Europe, edited by Klaus Bußmann and Heinz Schilling, 2:191–99. Exhibition catalog. Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, 1998. Christensen, Charlotte. “The Visual and Performing Arts at the Danish Court 1588–1648.” In Christian IV and Europe: The 19th Art Exhibition of the Council of Europe, Denmark 1988, edited by Steffen Heiberg, 73–76. Exhibition catalog. Herning: Foundation for Christian IV Year, 1988. Christian II von Anhalt-Bernburg. Digitale Edition und Kommentierung der Tagebücher des Fürsten Christian II. von Anhalt-Bernburg (1599–1656). Edited by Arndt Schreiber,

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Alexander Zirr, Andreas Herz, and Antoine Odier. Wolfenbüttel: Editiones Electronicae Guelferbytanae, 2013. http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000228/start.htm. Cook, Harold J. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. De Jonge, Krista. “A Netherlandish Model? Reframing the Danish Royal Residences in a European Perspective.” In Reframing the Danish Renaissance: Problems and Prospects in a European Perspective, edited by Michael Andersen, Hugo Johannsen, and Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen, 219–33. Publications from the National Museum: Studies in Archaeology & History 16. Copenhagen: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2011. Dudok van Heel, S. A. C. “The Birth of an Artists’ Quarter: Pieter Isaacsz’s Amsterdam Years.” In Pieter Isaacsz (1568–1625): Court Painter, Art Dealer and Spy, edited by Badeloch Noldus and Juliette Roding, 75–91. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Ertz, Klaus. Josse de Momper der Jüngere (1564–1635): Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog. Freren: Luca, 1986. Findeisen, Jörg-Peter. Christian IV.: Zwischen Mythos und Wahrheit. Kiel: Ludwig, 2014. Findeisen, Jörg-Peter, and Poul Husum. Kleine Geschichte Kopenhagens. Regensburg: Pustet, 2008. Fink-Jensen, Morten. “Alchemy in Denmark.” In Western Esotericism in Scandinavia, edited by Henrik Bogdan and Olav Hammer, 11–17. Brill Esotericism Reference Library. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Forster, Kurt W. “Vorwort: Wie das Fenster zum Bild, der Rahmen zu Architektur wurde.” In Fenestra Prospectiva: Architektonisch inszenierte Ausblicke; Alberti, Palladio, Agucchi, xv–xx. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Freytag, Hartmut, Wolfgang Harms, and Michael Schilling. Gesprächskultur des Barock: Die Embleme der Bunten Kammer im Herrenhaus Ludwigsburg bei Eckernförde. Kiel: Ludwig, 2001. Gage, Frances. “Exercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century.” Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 1167–207. Gamrath, Helge. “Kopenhagen als Hauptstadt während des Absolutismus ca. 1650–1850.” In A Tale of Two Cities: Berlin – Kopenhagen, 1650–1930, edited by Thomas Riis and Jann M. Witt, 33–50. Byhistoriske skrifter 8. Odense: Odense University Press, 1997. Gerard, Robert A. “Woutneel, de Passe and the Anglo-Netherlandish Print Trade.” Print Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1996): 363–76. Gerson, Horst. Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der Holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts. Introduced and supplemented by B. W. Meijer. Amsterdam: Israël, 1983. Göttler, Christine. “The Art of Solitude: Environments of Prayer at the Bavarian Court of Wilhelm V.” Art History 40, Special Issue: Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe (2017): 404–29. Göttler, Christine. “Eremitage/Einsiedelei: (Innen-)Räume der Wildnis und Wüste am vormodernen Hof.” In Reading Room: Re-Lektüren des Innenraums, edited by Christine

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Göttler, Peter J. Schneemann, Norberto Gramaccini, Birgitt Borkopp-Restle, Peter W. Marx, and Bernd Nicolai, 60–71. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. Grau, Oliver. Virtuelle Kunst in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Visuelle Strategien. Berlin: Reimer, 2001. Heiberg, Steffen. “Art and Politics: Christian IV’s Dutch and Flemish Painters.” Leids kunsthistorisch jaarboek 2 (1984): 7–24. Heiberg, Steffen. “Art and the Staging of Images of Power: Christian IV and Pictorial Art.” In Pieter Isaacsz (1568–1625): Court Painter, Art Dealer and Spy, edited by Badeloch Noldus and Juliette Roding, 231–43. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Hein, Jørgen. Ivories and Narwhal Tusks at Rosenborg Castle: Catalogue of Carved and Turned Ivories and Narwhal Tusks in the Royal Danish Collection 1600–1875. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2018. Hein, Jørgen. The Treasure Collection at Rosenborg Castle: The Inventories of 1696 and 1718; Royal Heritage and Collecting in Denmark-Norway 1500–1900. 3 vols. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009. Hein, Jørgen, and Peter Kristiansen. Rosenborg Castle: A Guide to the Danish Royal Collections. Copenhagen: Rosenborg, 2005. Honig, Elizabeth. “The Beholder as Work of Art: A Study in the Location of Value in Seventeenth-Century Flemish Painting.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 46 (1995): 252–97. Honnens de Lichtenberg, Hanne. “Some Netherlandish Artists Employed by Frederik II.” Hafnia 8 (1981): 51–71. Houkjaer, Ulla. “Dutch Artists in the Service of Danish History: The Kronborg Series.” Apollo 128 (1988): 99–103. Imdahl, Georg. “Großausstellung und Hyperimage.” In Kritische Szenografie: Die Kunstausstellung im 21. Jahrhundert, edited by Kai-Uwe Hemken, 97–104. Image Transcript 64. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. Kavaler, Ethan Matt. “Ornament and Systems of Ordering in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands.” Renaissance Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2019): 1269–325. Keller, Vera. “The ‘Lover’ and Early Modern Fandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 7 (2011). https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0351. Larsson, Lars Olof. “Bildhauerkunst und Plastik in Dänemark in der Regierungszeit Christians IV.” Leids kunsthistorisch jaarboek 2 (1984): 25–36. Lockhart, Paul Douglas. Denmark, 1513–1660: The Rise and Decline of a Renaissance Monarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Meganck, Tine L. “Cornelis Floris and the Floris-school in the Baltic.” In Florissant: Bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis der Nederlanden (15de–17de eeuw); Liber Amicorum Carl van de Velde, edited by Arnout Balis, Paul Huvenne, Jeanine Lambrecht, and Christine Van Mulders, 171–84. Brussels: VUB Press, 2005.

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Michalsky, Tanja. Projektion und Imagination: Die niederländische Landschaft der Frühen Neuzeit im Diskurs von Geographie und Malerei. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Imperial Landscape.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 5–34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Murdoch, Steve. Britain, Denmark-Norway and the House of Stuart 1603–1660: A Diplomatic and Military Analysis. East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 2003. Neville, Kristoffer. “Christian IV’s Italianates: Sculpture at the Danish Court.” In Reframing the Danish Renaissance: Problems and Prospects in a European Perspective, edited by Michael Andersen, Hugo Johannsen, and Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen, 335–45. Publications from the National Museum: Studies in Archaeology & History 16. Copenhagen: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2011. Noldus, Badeloch. “Dealing in Politics and Art: Agents between Amsterdam, Stockholm and Copenhagen.” Scandinavian Journal of History 28, no. 3–4 (2003): 215–25. Noldus, Badeloch. “Loyalty and Betrayal: Artist-Agents Michel Le Blon and Pieter Isaacsz, and Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna.” In Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe, edited by Hans Cools, Marika Keblusek, and Badeloch Noldus, 51–64. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2006. Noldus, Badeloch. “Pieter Isaacsz’s Other Life: Legal and Illegal.” In Pieter Isaacsz (1568–1625): Court Painter, Art Dealer and Spy, edited by Badeloch Noldus and Juliette Roding, 151–63. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Nystrøm, Eiler. “Jonas Charisius’ Indkøb Af Malerier Og Musikinstrumenterne i Nederlandene 1607–08.” Danske Magazin 5, no. 6 (1909): 225–36. Olwig, Kenneth R. Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Petersen, R. “Uddrag af Hans Rostgaards Tegnebog.” Danske Magazin: Indeholdene Bidrag til den Danske Historie og det Danske Sprogs Oplysning 3, no. 4 (1834): 257–63. Reckwitz, Andreas. “Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook.” Rethinking History 16, no. 2 (June 2012): 241–58. Roding, Juliette. “Gerson Extended: Artists of the Low Countries in Denmark, 1500–1700.” In Gerson Digital: Denmark; Artistic Exchange between the Netherlands and Denmark, 1600–1800, edited by Rieke van Leeuwen and Juliette Roding. https://gersondenmark. rkdstudies.nl/3-gerson-extended-juliette-roding/. Roding, Juliette. “Giants Attacking Olympus/Banquet of the Gods.” In Pieter Isaacsz (1568–1625): Court Painter, Art Dealer and Spy, edited by Badeloch Noldus and Juliette Roding, 277–78. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Roding, Juliette. “King Solomon and the Imperial Paradigm of Christian IV (1588–1648).” In Reframing the Danish Renaissance: Problems and Prospects in a European Perspective, edited by Michael Andersen, Hugo Johannsen, and Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen, 235–42. Publications from the National Museum: Studies in Archaeology & History 16. Copenhagen: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2011.

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Schlegel, Johann Heinrich. Samlung zur dänischen Geschichte, Münzkenntniss, Oekonomie und Sprache. Vol. 2, no. 1. Copenhagen: Heinrich Christoph Sander, 1774. Schulting, To. “Pieter Isaacsz, Pupil of the ‘Artistic, sensible Mr Cornelis Ketel.’” In Pieter Isaacsz (1568–1625): Court Painter, Art Dealer and Spy, edited by Badeloch Noldus and Juliette Roding, 31–41. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Shackelford, Jole. “Paracelsianism in Denmark.” In Western Esotericism in Scandinavia, edited by Henrik Bogdan and Olav Hammer, 402–9. Brill Esotericism Reference Library. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Spohr, Arne. “‘This Charming Invention Created by the King’: Christian IV and His Invisible Music.” Danish Yearbook of Musicology 39 (2012): 13–33. Stein, Meir. “Christian IV: A ‘Renaissance Man.’” Apollo 120 (1984): 368–78. Styhr, Jørgen. Nederlandsk Landskabsmaleri i Danske Samlinger. Copenhagen: P. Haase & Søns, 1929. Thomson, David. Renaissance Architecture: Critics, Patrons, Luxury. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Thürlemann, Felix. Mehr als ein Bild: Für eine Kunstgeschichte des “hyperimage.” Bild und Text. Munich: Fink, 2013. Unverfehrt, Gerd. Fantastische Formen: Ornamente von Dürer bis Boucher. Exhibition catalog. Göttingen: Arkana, 1992. Veldman, Ilja M. “Crispijn de Passe.” In Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon – Internationale Künstlerdatenbank Online. https://www.degruyter.com/database/AKL/entry/_00232857/html. Wade, Mara R. Triumphus Nuptialis Danicus: German Court Culture and Denmark; The “Great Wedding” of 1634. Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 27. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996. Wadum, Jørgen. “Christian IV’s Winter Room and Studiolo.” In Gerson Digital: Denmark; Artistic Exchange between the Netherlands and Denmark, 1600–1800, edited by Rieke van Leeuwen and Juliette Roding. https://gersondenmark.rkdstudies. nl/4-christian-ivs-winter-room-and-studiolo-j%C3%B8rgen-wadum/. Wadum, Jørgen. “Gravures naar Cornelis Floris en gesculpteerde maskers in kasteel Rosenborg (Kopenhagen).” Cornelis Floris Jaarboek 1990 (1991): 41–49. Wadum, Jørgen. “Sebastian Vrancx’ værksted og Rosenborg Slot.” Iconographisk Post 4 (1987): 24–42. Wadum, Jørgen. “The Winter Room at Rosenborg Castle: A Unique Survival of Antwerp Mass-Production.” Apollo 128 (1988): 82–87. Wagner, Daniela, and Fridericke Conrad. “Visuelle Dispositionen: Zu Rahmen und frames in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte.” In Rahmen und frames: Dispositionen des visuellen in der Kunst der Vormoderne, edited by Daniela Wagner and Fridericke Conrad, 1–6. Hamburger Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte 11. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Wanscher, Vilhelm. Rosenborgs historie 1606–1634: A Short History of Rosenborg Castle. Copenhagen: P. Haase og Søn, 1930.

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About the Author Michèle Seehafer received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Bern. In her dissertation she investigated courtly collection rooms in early modern Denmark. She recently obtained a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Museum of National History of Denmark and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to conduct research on the cultural relationships between Denmark and the Low Countries with a focus on female collectors.

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9. Insidious Images: Veiled Sight and Insight in Pieter Bruegel’s Landscapes Michel Weemans

Abstract This chapter addresses an overlooked aspect of Bruegel’s art: the presence of anthropomorphic rocks hidden in some of his early Alpine landscapes. This should be related to the interest shown by Renaissance artists in the idea of nature as painter (natura pictricix) or in the ars natura emulation relationship evoked by Abraham Ortelius about his friend. But Bruegel’s unruly landscapes are also part of a tradition that goes back to Herri met de Bles. As with the latter, the visual device of indeterminate or double images, far from being a simple optical game, aims at veiling our sight to better stimulate our insight. Keywords: ambiguity; anthropomorphism; landscape; potential image; trap

After joining the Antwerp Guild of Painters in 1551, the young Pieter Bruegel undertook a trip to Italy, perhaps commissioned by the publisher Hieronymus Cock.1 Cock himself had visited Italy a few years earlier, before founding his publishing house Aux Quatre Vents in Antwerp in 1550. In its early years, his publishing program was dominated by engravings after the ancient classical and Italian Renaissance artists.2 However, contrary to the tradition of fiamminghi bringing drawings back from Italy that copied these historical models, Bruegel returned with a series of drawings of contemporary landscapes. “On his travels he drew many views from life so that it is said that when he was in the Alps he swallowed all those mountains 1 On Pieter Bruegel’s trip to Italy, see: Goldsmith, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Matter of Italy”; Allart, “Sur la piste de Bruegel en Italie”; Büttner, “Quid siculas sequeris per mille pericula terras?”; Lichtert, “New Perspectives on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Journey to Italy”; Van Grieken, Luijten, and Van der Stock, Hieronymus Cock, 380–91. For expanded versions of these arguments, see: Weemans, “L’image double, piège et révélateur du visible”; Weemans, “Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow.” 2 Cf. Van Grieken, Luijten, and Van der Stock, Hieronymus Cock, 30–35, 125–95.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch09

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and rocks which, upon returning home, he spat out again onto canvases and panels, so faithfully was he able, in this respect and others, to follow Nature,” writes Karel van Mander in his biography of the painter.3 In his series The Large Landscapes, Bruegel reformulated the panoptic vision of the Weltlandschaft, the world landscape developed by Netherlandish artists in the first half of the sixteenth century, which offers the viewer the divine privilege of embracing a portion of the globe and a multitude of minute details at the same time: farmers at work and bathers, travelers on the roads, fishermen watching their lines, boats and ships plying a river, cows grazing, houses hidden in groves, a castle overlooking a rocky peak. The series of Bruegel’s Large Landscapes engraved by the Van Doetecum brothers in Cock’s workshop evokes a journey from Italy to Flanders, which includes many views of the Alpine crossing. 4

Prospectus Tiburtinus: The Natural Image The View of Tiber at Tivoli, which opens the series, is the only landscape referring to a specific topographical location (Fig. 9.1).5 The small draftsman nestled in the rocks could be a self-portrait of the young Bruegel. But if Prospectus Tiburtinus interests us here, it is above all because we find in it the germ of Bruegel’s taste for the indeterminate and ambiguous forms that would become a hallmark of many of his “insidious” landscapes. The town of Tivoli on the outskirts of Rome was famous for its ancient Roman villas and remains, which attracted many artists and antiquarians, including fiamminghi. At the time Bruegel was there, the architect and dealer of antiquities Pirro Ligorio was conducting the first archaeological research on the site of the Villa Adriana, which led to the exhumation of numerous statues and artifacts that were to decorate the Roman palaces.6 Bruegel was not as interested in the ruins of Tivoli as he was in the impressive site of rocks and waterfalls. Away from the usual road that led artists to the Villa d’Este or the Temple of Vesta in search of 3 “In zijn reysen heft hy veel ghesichten nae t’leven gheconterfeyt, soo datter gheseyt wort, dat hy in d’Alpes wesende, al die berghen en rotsen had in gheswolgen, en t’huys ghecomen op doecken en Penneelen uytghespogen hadde, soo eyghentlijck con hy te desen en ander deelen de Natuere nae volghen.” Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, fol. 233r (“Het leven van Pieter Brueghel, uytnemende Schilder van Brueghel”). On the relationship of this anecdote to the humanist theory of innutrition, see: Ribouillault, “Regurgitating Nature.” 4 On this series, see: Nalis, The Van Doetecum Family. 5 In the lower right corner: “h. cock. excude.,” without Bruegel’s name: Van Bastelaer, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 7, no. 1; Freedberg, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 105, no. 1; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 124, cat. no. 24; Mössinger and Müller, Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. und das Theater der Welt, 76–77. 6 Coffin, Pirro Ligorio, 177–80; Loffredo and Vagenheim, Pirro Ligorio’s Worlds, 250–51.

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Fig. 9.1: Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel, View of the Tiber at Tivoli (Prospectus Tiburtinus), 1555–1556. Etching and engraving, 39.8 × 42 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–OB–7351. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

models from the ancient world, the draftsman places himself in the middle of the crash and liquid chaos. The waves biting the rocky walls, the dead trunks rising from the foam, the tumult of the clouds in the sky, the winding and rough paths, the tormented rocks: everything in the image seems to reflect the chaotic force of the torrent that rushes down the gorge before disappearing under the arches of a bridge at the bottom left. Bruegel’s The View of Tiber at Tivoli testifies to his experience in situ and affirms his ability to represent nature from life, naer het leven.7 But Bruegel associates his vivid observation of nature to his faculty of phantasia: if one pays attention, “natural images” appear in many of the rocks. To the left of the waterfall, one can see a profile with a grinning smile leaning towards the draftsman, while on the 7 On the notion of naer het leven / ad vivum, widespread in the sixteenth century before Van Mander integrated it into his theory of art, in his life of Jacques de Gheyn, see: Göttler and Meganck, “Sites of Art, Nature and the Antique in the Spanish Netherlands.” See also: Balfe, Woodall, and Zittel, Ad vivum?. On the topic of Bruegel’s studies from nature, see: Grossmann, “The Drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Museum Boymans”; Schatborn, “La naissance du paysage naturaliste aux Pays-Bas et l’influence de la topographie aux environs de 1600.”

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opposite side of the waterfall, a rock looks like a giant fish with an open mouth (Fig. 9.2). Just above it, another monstrous head is visible from three-quarters: the upper plant forms a head covering, two dark cracks suggest eyes, a white stream makes a pointed ear, and the rocky point evokes a muzzle. More heads can be seen in this landscape, where the rock undergoes a graphic treatment markedly different from the other landscapes in the series. Bruegel is dedicated here to showing the action of the sculptural erosion of water by multiplying the tormented and smooth contours that look like crumpled clothes. The artist copies nature, which itself copies art by becoming an artist. The idea that nature transforms itself into a painter (natura pictricis) fascinated Renaissance theorists and many artists have represented these games of nature (lusi naturae) in their works. Referring to a natural image discovered in a stone, Alberti wrote in his De pictura (1436) that “nature itself takes pleasure in painting.”8 In his De statua (1430), he suggested that the origin of art lies in the recognition of such natural images and in the desire to complete what he calls “inchoate resemblances” (inchoatarum similitudinum) from the imagination: “from a trunk, a clod of earth or other such raw bodies, they sometimes had to distinguish a few lines with which, with very little change, they produced something very similar to the real faces of nature.”9 Let us only briefly recall here that Bruegel’s anthropomorphic and zoomorphic rocks in his The View of Tiber at Tivoli are part of a long artistic tradition that goes from Mantegna and Dürer to Jacques de Gheyn (Fig. 9.3).10 Since Jurgis Baltrusaïtis and Horst W. Janson’s 8 “Ipsam denique naturam pingendo delectari manifestum est.” Alberti, La peinture, 112–13. 9 “Artes eorum, qui ex corporibus a natura procreatis eff igies et simulacra suum in opus promere aggrediuntur, ortas hint fuisse arbitror. Nam ex trunco glebave et huiusmodi mutis corporibus fortassis aliquando intuebantur lineamenta nonnulla, quibus paululum immutatis persimile quidpiam veris naturae vultibus redderetur. Coepere id igitur animo advertentes atque adnotantes adhibita diligentia tentare conarique possentne illie adiungere adimereve atque perfinire quod ad veram simu-lacri speciem comprehendendarn absolvendamque deesse videretur. Ergo quantum res ipsa admonebat lineal superficiesque istic emendando expoliendoque institutum adsecuti sunt, non id quidem sine voluptate. Hinc nimirum studia horninum bus efficiendis in dies exercuere quoad etiam ubi nulla inchoatarum similitudinum adiumenta in praestita materia intuerentur, ex ea tamen quam collibuisset eff igiem exprimerent.” (I think that the arts of those who set out to express in their work the figures and images that resembled the bodies created by nature were born from this: from a trunk, a clod of earth or other such raw bodies, they sometimes had to distinguish a few lines with which, with very little change, they produced something very similar to the real faces of nature. So, looking at them and lifting them up mentally, they carefully began to make attempts and efforts to see if they could add or delete something and complete what seemed to be missing so that the true aspect of the image could be gathered and detached. So long as the thing itself indicated the lines and surfaces, correcting and polishing them, they reached their goal, even enjoying it. From this point on, there is no doubt that the men, full of zeal, carrying out the same task day after day, exercised themselves without respite, so much so that, even if they did not find in the material at their disposal the assistance of any inchoate resemblance, they nonetheless expressed from it the image which pleased them.) Alberti, La statue, 62–63. 10 On this tradition, see: Weemans, Herri met de Bles, 169–203.

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Fig. 9.2: Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel, Anthropomorphic rocks, detail of Fig. 9.1.

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Fig. 9.3: Jacques de Gheyn, Anthropomorphic Rocks, early seventeenth century. Drawing, brown ink on paper, 26.6 × 17.5 cm, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, inv. no. 5094. Image: © The Fondation Custodia.

Insidious Images: Veiled Sight and Insight in Pieter Bruegel’s L andscapes 

seminal studies, many authors have shown that the interest of artists in “natural images,” both in Italy and north of the Alps, has been accompanied by a reflection on the nature of the image itself, on the categories of mimesis and phantasia, and on the emulative relationships between ars and natura.11 The wonders and games of nature demonstrated to the eyes of artists and scholars of the early modern period the inventive power of nature. This emulation of nature by man went hand in hand with the importance given to the artist’s ingenium.12 As Tine Meganck has rightly written, Bruegel’s imitation is ingenious in that “he does not merely imitate the external characteristics of nature, its completed forms (natura naturata), but its creative principles, its way of creating (natura naturans).”13 The idea that the creator of a work imitates the creative power of nature and even triumphs over it found one of its famous formulations in the epitaph dedicated by Abraham Ortelius to his friend Pieter Bruegel, where he states that the latter died young, because nature feared a rival who surpassed her.14 As there is no written evidence confirming Pieter Bruegel’s interest in double or natural images, one may therefore ask whether the viewers of his time perceived this aspect of his art. But I would like to mention here a visual testimony. At the end of the century, his son, Jan Brueghel the Elder, paid homage to his father in several drawings showing the waterfalls of Tivoli with similar “natural,” or “potential images,” to use Dario Gamboni’s expression: “inchoate images that require an active and subjective participation of the gaze in order to appear.”15 The most elaborate example is the drawing from the collection of the Cleveland Museum entitled Ponte San Rocco (Fig. 9.4). The viewpoint, situated lower than in Prospectus Tiburtinus, and the vertical composition have the effect of monumentalizing the rocks and emphasizing 11 On this vast topic, see: Baltrusaïtis, Aberrations; Caillois, L’écriture des pierres; Janson, “The ‘Image Made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought”; Kemp, “From ‘Mimesis’ to ‘Fantasia’”; Thürlemann, “L’aquarelle de Dürer ‘fenedier klawsen’”; Thürlemann, Dürers doppelter Blick; Morel, Les grottes maniéristes en Italie au xvie siècle; Gamboni, Potential Images; Martin, Une image peut en cacher une autre; Weemans, Herri met de Bles; Weemans, Gamboni, and Martin, Voir double; Melion, “The Trope of Anthropomorphosis.” 12 On this topic, see: Meganck, “Transforming Nature into Art”; Meganck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 13 Meganck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 122. 14 “Petrum Brugelium Pictorem fuisse sui seculi absolutissimum, nemo nisi invidus, emulus, aut eius artis ignarus, umquam negabit. Sed quod nobis medio etatis flore abreptus sit, an hoc Morti, quod fortasse eum ob insignem artis peritiam, quam in eo viro observaverit, etate provectiorem duxerat; an nature potius, quod eius artificiosa ingeniosaque imitatione, sui contemptum vere-batur, imputavero, non facile dixerim.” (Bruegel was the most perfect painter of his century. But whether his being snatched away from us in the flower of his age was due to Death’s mistake in thinking him older than he was on account of his extraordinary skill in art or rather to Nature’s fear that his genius for imitation would bring her into contempt, I cannot easily say.) Ortelius, Album Amicorum, fols. 12v–13r. On Ortelius’s epitaph for Pieter Bruegel, see: Popham, “Abraham Ortelius and Pieter Bruegel,” 188; Muylle, “Pieter Bruegel and Abraham Ortelius”; Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 173–82. 15 Gamboni, Potential Images, 7.

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Fig. 9.4: Jan Brueghel, Ponte San Rocco, early seventeenth century. Drawing, brown ink on paper, 38.1 × 27.2 cm, Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, inv. no. 1954–56. Image: © The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Insidious Images: Veiled Sight and Insight in Pieter Bruegel’s L andscapes 

the central motif of the bridge that gives the drawing its title. The silhouette of a traveler stands out inside the archway, perhaps here again a self-portrait of the young fiammingo in the footsteps of his father. From the Bridge of San Rocco—the patron saint of pilgrims and travelers—the tiny figure observes the impressive rocky precipice from a distance. He seems to be looking towards the rocks on the right, or perhaps we should say that he is drawing our attention to the rocky profiles hidden there. As in Pieter Bruegel’s Prospectus Tiburtinus (Fig. 9.2) or in Jacques de Gheyn’s Rocks drawing from the Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris (Fig. 9.3), natural images are rarely alone and the appearance of one face generates many others. The signature of the artist in the lower left corner is itself strategically placed on the “neck” of a face seen from three-quarters of the way up with its nose turned up and its mouth pinched and eyebrow brushed. This acts, in addition to the traveler’s gaze, as another invitation to perceive the potential images scattered in the rocks. A constellation of grotesque profiles and faces seems to gravitate around the most spectacular one visible in the center, in the axis of the church: the grimacing mouth is drawn by a dark breach, one can distinguish two devious eyes and a forehead surmounted by a vegetal tuft and adorned with horns underlining its diabolical nature. In addition to the series of glances staged in the image—the contemplative gaze of the traveler and the multiple disturbing glances of the anthropomorphic rocks—another scopic motif is the oculus window marked with a cross on the church facade, itself surmounted by a second cross that dominates the whole landscape. We should consider here the symbolic and structural value of the bridge which connects these motifs and dominates the center. Jan Brueghel’s drawing refers to the fundamental anthropological value of the bridge, which is to allow the crossing of an obstacle, in other words to overcome a danger, by connecting two opposite sides. The middle is the most intense point of their separation, and this is why, says Omar Calabrese, “the bridge is a cross between the human and the divine, the earthly and the celestial.”16 There are many stories and images about the dangerous “devil’s bridge,” which acts as a connection and separation between two areas guarded, or threatened by the devil, between our world and the afterlife. In the right wing of Hieronymus Bosch’s Haywain triptych (ca. 1512–1515, Madrid, Museo del Prado), a bridge leads humanity towards the mouth of hell.17 Let us emphasize for now that the bridge is both what separates and connects; it is a pattern of junction, both conjunction and disjunction, and this category is important to recognize the different levels at which it operates.18 Jan Brueghel’s Ponte San Rocco is a “devil’s 16 Calabrese, “The Bridge.” 17 For examples of bridges crossed by travelers relating to double images in Herri met de Bles’s landscapes, see: Weemans, Herri met de Bles, 157–60. 18 Calabrese, “The Bridge,” 12.

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bridge” that structures the polarity between the earthly and the celestial, between the rocky chaos and the geometric serenity of the church, between the demonic apparitions and the cross. But the bridge not only connects the opposite sides of the image (right and left, top and bottom), it also underscores the role of the traveler, who himself is a bridge between the outside and the inside of the image. Through his distant gaze and his central and isolated position in the middle of the tormented landscape, he is the delegate of the external beholder inside the image. By showing his interest in the rocks on the right, he also becomes the clue as to what to admire, or rather how to look at the rocks in order to perceive the games of nature. One could then further understand the function of the bridge, and of its admonitor, as connecting the outside and the inside, linking the external perception of the rocks with the internal or imaginative vision that must complete the inchoate resemblances. Jan Brueghel would have known the natural images in the famous engraving of his father, Prospectus Tiburtinus. He includes in his view of Tivoli the idea of lusus naturae, but he also complicates his interpretation by assimilating a more insidious and diabolical presence. In other words, it seems that Jan was aware of the use of double images and their frequent diabolical connotations in his father’s works. There are numerous explicit anthropomorphic rocks and constructions in the series of the Sins. In Gula (Gluttony) for instance, a man pours bags into the gulping mouth of a gigantic anthropomorphic mill that dominates the landscape. In Invidia, an anthropomorphic building once again plays a prominent role. Its roof is pierced by two windows that evoke eyes, one pupil of which coincides with the head of a demon observing us (Fig. 9.5). A thick smoke, in the form of a nose, escapes from the doorway, evoking an infernal jaw, imprisoning a crowd of characters. A demon is feeding this mouth of hell with a new victim. A formal analogy links the smoke nose of the building to the turkey’s nipple-shaped combs, whose plumage echoes the ornamental roof. At the far left of the landscape, a hive set on a post, topped by a funnel and an upside-down jug topped with a wimple, forms a starling snare which is also a visual trap: a half-hidden composite anthropomorphic figure. The hybrid tree that occupies the center of the image is another composite figure both mineral and vegetal, animal and human, artifact and nature. The monstrous tree is surrounded by demonic creatures: a gesticulating toad, a bird-beaked monster, two horned demons that turn into branches, while the tree transforms itself into an animated creature. A dark knot on the trunk evokes an eye, and a wide crack suggests a gaping mouth inside which a monster can be seen. The branches metamorphose into peacock feathers gesticulating like the arms of the toad, while the top becomes a beak spitting its slender tongue towards the sky like a sickle blade. The peacock feathers adorning the monstrous tree invite by analogy to link Invidia to another engraving in the series: Superbia

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Fig. 9.5: Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel, Invidia (Envy), 1557. Engraving, 22.5 × 29.6 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–1887–A–12303. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

(Fig. 9.6).19 Behind the feminine personification of Pride looking in a mirror, a whole series of anthropomorphic houses are staring at us from the background. Their appealing facades, imitating butterfly wings or a cat’s head, attract naked characters who find themselves imprisoned behind their gates. In each case, as we can see with these few examples, the implicit or explicit double images take various forms—anthropomorphoses, composite images, crypto-images, potential images, trap images—and challenge our ability to perceive the analogies that operate at all levels in a corrupted world. They offer marginal glosses that contribute by visual echoes and analogies to amplify the central theme, while their potential aspect submits our gaze to the deceptive appearances that define the sinful world under the grip of the devil. 19 The peacock feather pattern that adorns the tree in Invidia helps us understand why Bruegel replaced the snake, a traditional attribute of Envy, with a turkey. Bruegel offers here one of the very first images of this bird recently imported from the New World, about which Gessner wrote in his De avium natura that it is called “peacock of India” or “peacock of Wales,” because the feathers of its tail rise when it is angry. But that peacock, he adds, “is far inferior in beauty to our peacock,” which Bruegel visualizes through the link created between the envious turkey of Invidia and the peacock of Superbia. Gessner, Historiae animalium, 489.

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Fig. 9.6: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Superbia (Pride), 1557. Drawing, brown ink on paper, 22.9 × 30 cm, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, inv. no. 465. Image: © The Fondation Custodia.

The Crafty Bird Catcher: The Insidious Image Like his predecessors Hieronymus Bosch and Herri met de Bles, Pieter Bruegel often challenged the eyes of the beholders with more implicit or hidden double images associated with a world subject to the devil’s traps. This conception underlines another of his Alpine landscapes: The Crafty Bird Catcher, Insidiosus Auceps (Fig. 9.7).20 Catherine Levesque has related Bruegel’s Large Landscapes to the humanistic conception of travel, especially in Juan Luis Vives and Justus Lipsius, who emphasize the idea of prudence.21 In Insidiosus Auceps, prudence takes on particular importance with the placement of a perfidious bird catcher in the foreground. Several authors have alluded to the popular moralizing figure of the 20 In the lower right corner: “BRUEGHEL INVE/ h. cock excude.” Van Bastelaer, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 14, no. 10; Lebeer, Catalogue raisonné des estampes de Pieter Bruegel, 38–42, no. 5; Freedberg, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 109, cat. no. 1; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 126–27, cat. no. 27; Mössinger and Müller, Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. und das Theater der Welt, 76–77, no. 6. 21 Levesque, Journey through Landscape, 20–22.

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Fig. 9.7: Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, Insidiosus Auceps (The Crafty Bird Catcher), 1555–1556. Etching and engraving, 42.5 × 32.1 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–H–T–31. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

devil as a bird catcher (Fig. 9.8).22 The dead trunk associated with the fowler brings a negative connotation to this character. But another element in the image confirms this interpretation: a crypto-image, a trap image. What defines crypto-images is that they are torn between their desire to hide and their desire to let people know that they exist.23 In this case, the protagonist himself of the image, the bird catcher, is a first possible indication. A second indication is provided by the word “INSIDIOSUS” written in capital letters in the legend. The term indicates the cunning both of the character and of the image, an “insidious” image. On the left side of the vast and radiant Alpine landscape, a dark rocky area hides a gigantic profile: in the darkest corner a light circle with a black spot shows an eye, the central rocky protuberance corresponds to the nose; just to the right, precise lines draw thick 22 Levesque, Journey through Landscape, 28; Müller and Schneede, Pieter Bruegel invenit, 44; Mentzel, “Insidiosus Auceps.” On the metaphors of the trap and the devil as a fowler: Koonce, “Satan the Fowler”; Bauer, “The Winter Landscape”; Kaschek, Weltzeit und Endzeit, 273–301; Falkenburg and Weemans, Bruegel, 174. 23 Urbain, “La crypto-image.”

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Fig. 9.8: Hans Sebald Beham, The Devil as Bird Trapper, in Johann von Schwarzberg, Die Beschwerung der alten Teufelischen Schlangen mit dem Göttlichen Wort (Nuremberg: Steiner, 1525), fol. 106r. Woodcut, 9.8 × 9.7 cm, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, inv. no. Res/4 Polem. 382. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

lips, and a rounded rocky rim corresponds to the chin (Fig. 9.9). Higher on the left, the light rim overlooking a steep crevice shows raised eyebrows, and the vegetation on the left suggests hair. If we look at the engraving from a lateral angle (from right to left, at the level where the bird catcher is standing), a slight anamorphic effect accentuates the anthropomorphism and expressiveness of the grotesque profile. One could relate the anthropomorphic profile in Bruegel’s The Crafty Bird Catcher to the later tradition of the head landscapes of Matthäus Merian or Caspard Schott, a comparison which makes Bruegel’s head more obvious as the circular pattern of the eye in particular is very close (Fig. 9.10).24 But unlike the later head-landscape 24 On the tradition of anthropomorphic and head landscapes: Bentkowska, “Anthropomorphic Landscapes”; Kuretsky, “The Face in the Landscape”; Weemans, “Les origines du paysage anthropomorphe”; Melion, Rothstein, and Weemans, The Anthropomorphic Lens.

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Fig. 9.9: Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, Anthropomorphic rock, detail of Fig. 9.7.

tradition, Bruegel’s double image is defined by its cryptic nature. In the case of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century head landscape, it is difficult, if not impossible, to perceive the landscape without the composite portrait; the balance between the two levels of representation (the landscape and the portrait) makes the double image immediately visible. In the case of Insidiosus Auceps, the process of imbalance between two levels of representation—one dominant and visible (the landscape), the other weak and “invisible” (the anthropomorphic profile)—defines the double image as a crypto-image. This is what allows the disturbing profile to remain unseen, temporarily invisible, and once the face is uncovered, makes the impression of being trapped by the image all the more effective. The two tiny details of the sower throwing seeds at the side of the road and the bird spying in the sky could allude to the gospel parable of the sower, where Christ explains to his disciples that his words are like seeds: those who are thrown into the earth will bear fruit; those who are thrown into the road will be eaten by the

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Fig. 9.10: Matthäus Merian, Anthropomorphic Landscape, early seventeenth century. Engraving, 17.2 × 12.9 cm, Private Collection. Image: © Private Collection.

birds, quick as the devil to seize them.25 “The secrets of the kingdom of God have been entrusted to you,” says Christ to his chosen disciples, “but to those outside, everything is presented in parables, so that when they see with their own eyes they may not understand” (Mark 3:3–4). Erasmus commented at length on this passage in his Paraphrases of the Gospels, recalling the allegorical meaning of the sower, who is Christ, and the seed-removing birds, who represent Satan, and amplifying the themes of the multitude unable to see beyond the surface fable, or the hidden truth which is addressed to the few and invisible to the many. 26 Interrupting the vertical axis that connects the bird catcher, the sower, and the bird, a tiny cross stands out clearly on the horizon and seems to juxtapose the left side of the image, which is dominated by the dark crypto-anthropomorphosis, with the luminous right side, where the cross appears. Pieter Bruegel’s Insidiosus Auceps is a “parabolic image,” to quote the expression Paul Gauguin used to describe the ambiguous and double images in his paintings, not only for its discreet allusion to the lesson of the sower, but also because of the trap image that invites us to see this landscape with a cunning bird catcher as a figure of the peregrinatio vitae 25 Mentzel, “Insidiosus Auceps,” 76–77. 26 Erasmus, Les paraphrases d’Érasme, 160–64 (“Paraphrase de l’évangile de Marc”); Erasmus, Paraphrase on Mark, 56–60.

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and the double path that opposes the world of deceptive appearances to the path leading to Christ.27

The Rabbit Hunt: The Trap Image The Rabbit Hunt (1560) is a later work, but it is clearly related to the series of Large Landscapes (Fig. 9.11). Unlike the many engravings made by professionals after his drawings, this is the only engraving ever made by Bruegel himself.28 The fine, brief strokes of etching manage to create the impression of depth and subtle atmosphere familiar from his drawn and painted landscapes. The characteristic features of Bruegel’s Large Landscapes can be found in this exceptional work: the typical aerial vision of the Weltlandschaft, the presence of characters and scenes from everyday life, the thematization of the vision, and as in the two previous examples, the use of potential images that defy our gaze. It also reflects Bruegel’s interest in the proverbs, illustrated here in the foreground by two characters who are particularly eye-catching (Fig. 9.12). A hunter is watching for wild rabbits while, emerging from behind the tree that separates them, a soldier is himself watching for the hunter, who is too absorbed to notice this threat. The engraving features two proverbs that Bruegel may have known from one of the Antwerp editions of Erasmus’s Adages (1553), which he had used for his painting of The Flemish Proverbs (1559, oil on panel, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) a year earlier. Phillipp Fehl has identified the proverb illustrated by the main protagonist, the hunter who aims at rabbits with his crossbow: “He who hunts two hares at the same time catches none” (Duos insequeasle pores neutrum capit).29 It refers to the danger of indecision that results in missing both opportunities, and it is a warning, according to Erasmus, against those who seek to gain a double advantage at once, only to fail by losing both. Bruegel could have been content to illustrate this single proverb and imbue his serene landscape with the metaphorical meaning of this adage in the form of a familiar everyday scene. But he brings in a second character, the soldier, corresponding to another proverb, identified by Margaret Sullivan: “Hare yourself, you hunt the prey” (Tute lepus es, et pulpamentum quaeris), a formula whose strength, according to Erasmus, lies in the fact that it refers to situations where the aggression is turned against the 27 Gamboni, Paul Gauguin, 26. 28 Inscribed at lower left: “BRUEGEL”; in the sky at right: “H. cock excu.” Van Bastelaer, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, no. 1; Lebeer, Catalogue raisonné des estampes de Pieter Bruegel, no. 62; Freedberg, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, cat. no. 62; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, cat. no. 82; Mössinger and Müller, Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. und das Theater der Welt, cat. no. 15. See also: Sullivan, Bruegel and the Creative Process, 101–8; Sullivan, “Proverbs and Process.” 29 Fehl, “Peculiarities in the Relation of Text and Image,” 27.

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Fig. 9.11: Pieter Bruegel, The Rabbit Hunt, 1560. Etching, 21.3 × 19.2 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP–P–OB–2141. Image: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

aggressor, when the trapper is himself trapped.30 In the engraving, the second proverb supersedes the first: the hunter watching for his prey becomes the prey of a more insidious hunter himself. Attention must be paid to the way in which the landscape itself participates in the visual interpretation of the proverbs. Bruegel contrasts the narrow vision of the main protagonist with the view of the distant and sovereign panorama of his serene world landscape, symbolized by motifs such as the bird or the castle located in the same vertical axis of the hunter. In each of Bruegel’s Alpine landscapes, the protagonists do not simply flesh out the landscape by adding a subject to the foreground, they are part of a scopic device: a set of elements arranged to guide and involve the gaze. This set includes the rocky edge and the tree that double the frame and act as a repellent, emphasizing the depth between the dark foreground and the distance, where the white of the paper predominates. They are themselves relayed by a series of motifs that favor the effects of insien, to view into the image, and doorsien, to 30 Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 32 (Adages), 8–9, no. 7; Sullivan, “Proverbs and Process,” 32.

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Fig. 9.12: Pieter Bruegel, The hunter and the solider, detail of Fig. 9.11.

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view through or past the scene: roads traveled by journeymen coming down from the mountains, dizzying mountain passes, meandering rivers that create “corridors of vision” leading the gaze from the edges of the frame towards the center, from the foreground towards the distant horizon.31 Bruegel also multiplies the motifs of distant views that mutually amplify each other: a castle dominates at the top right, followed a little further down by a hermitage, then by a figure contemplating from a parapet. Their complement is the recurring motif present in every Large Landscape, of a bird or more often of two birds placed in the sky, embodying the vogelvlugt, the so-called “bird’s-eye view.” The characters in the foreground, here the hunter and the soldier, complete the arrangement to engage our gaze. The vertical polarity that links these protagonists to the symbolic motifs of distance (the castle and the bird in the sky) creates a tension between the two extremes of celestial and terrestrial sight that, in turn, involves the dialectical and mediating point of view, which completes the scopic device of the Bruegelian landscape: that of the external beholder. The Rabbit Hunter is exemplary in the way in which Bruegel’s landscapes thematize vision and dynamically engage the viewer in a process of speculative vision. We have stressed so far the interaction of figures and landscape, but the particular treatment of the foreground protagonists still needs to be described more precisely. A comparison of the engraving with its preparatory drawing, kept at the Fondation Custodia, proves enlightening here (Fig. 9.13).32 As Sullivan has shown, Bruegel added some minor but significant modifications in his engraving.33 The foreground sketched in the drawing becomes more precise than the engraving, with emphasis placed on the aggressive aspect of the situation. The hunter aims more precisely at his prey with his crossbow, a sword replaces his bag, the soldier’s spear is obscured to make this instrument, used by hunters to stab bears and by soldiers to kill men, more threatening. In the engraving, the eyes of the soldier and the bottom of his face are also blackened, as if he were wearing a mask to see without being seen. A dead trunk also emerges from the ground next to the dog. The major change, according to Sullivan, is the elimination of one of the three rabbits in the drawing, which makes the image more in keeping with the proverb. The emphasis on the disturbing, potentially violent aspects of the figures, the addition of the dead trunk, and a dark and menacing cloud over the city on the horizon further suggest that Bruegel may have chosen these proverbs for their particular resonance with his era, one marked by a climate of violent repression, threats, and denunciations. The 31 On these optical terms used by Karel van Mander to describe panoramic landscapes, see: Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 8. 32 Signed and dated at lower left: “BRUEGEL 1560.” Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, inv. no. 6959. Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 61, no. 53; Van Grieken, Luijten, and Van der Stock, Hieronymus Cock, 392, no. 109 a. 33 Sullivan, Bruegel and the Creative Process, 101–8.

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Fig. 9.13: Pieter Bruegel, The Rabbit Hunt, 1560. Drawing, pen, brown ink, and black chalk, 21.3 × 19.6 cm, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, inv. no. 6959. Image: © The Fondation Custodia.

hunter of wild rabbits is probably to be placed alongside Bruegel’s many images that reflect his troubled times in a veiled manner. But Sullivan’s iconographic approach, which focused on the correspondence between the image and the textual source, has overlooked a vital visual aspect that ties the indeterminacy denounced by the proverb to our previous examples of potential images. In fact, in his engraving, Bruegel did not eliminate the rabbit placed at the foreground in the drawing. Let’s take a closer look at the picture (Fig. 9.13). The two rabbits can be clearly seen in the target of the crossbow: their two ears are clearly drawn, one is seen from the back, the other from a three-quarter angle, their contours are sharp and surrounded by a shadow that gives them volume and reality. But by a sort of visual trick, the third rabbit reappears in an ambiguous form, just above and to the right of the first two: a tuft of grass, two lines marking the end of the bulge in the ground under the thrust of a tree root and a thin comma also sketch out the contours of the ear and the profile of the potential rabbit. Bruegel treats this potential image with extreme care and maintains the state of oscillation between the grassy knoll and the rabbit, which disappears or appears, evaporates or crystallizes at the whim of our imagination, requiring a kind of external and internal vision. An additional ambiguity is provided by the trunk added to the left of the dog which, far from being reduced to a repulsive function, emerges from the earth like a demonic mouth, reminiscent

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of the ruined and diabolical trunks of Bosch’s infernal scenes and the hybrid trees previously elaborated by Bruegel in his engraved series of sins (Figs. 9.5 and 9.6). The ambiguous apparitions that frame the two rabbits targeted by the hunter then lead the attentive viewer to visually experience the indeterminacy denounced by the proverb. Bruegel not only illustrates the figurative meaning of the proverb, but also offers a visual interpretation of it, which, in an ironic and paradoxical way, makes the troubled vision of the protagonist of the image coincide with that of the beholder, who is thus led to speculate on the meaning of the image. Proverbs, as formulated by Erasmus in the preface to his collection of Adages, are “gems of ancient wisdom,” precious and useful fragments for the conduct of life that should be studied “not superficially but deeply and attentively.”34 Adages, he adds, are “like precious stones, so small that they often escape the eye of the seeker. […] They only show their beauty when they are, as on a jewel, inlaid in a discourse. Separately, adages are lifeless.” By visually interpreting the two adages, by combining them in a precise and complex way, and by placing them in a contemporary landscape, Bruegel is not only attentive, in an Erasmian spirit, to the treasure of wisdom they contain, he also gives them incomparable life and brilliance. Much of this dynamism is also due to the way in which the image involves the viewer’s gaze through a form of visual disturbance that paradoxically aims to provoke his or her discernment. Bruegel knew that indeterminacy provokes curiosity and interpretation. In this respect, his insidious landscapes observe another of Erasmus’s precepts: “There are things that appear in a more pleasing way through a piece of crystal or amber than if they are looked upon alone and bare […] they possess more majesty if they are brought before the eyes under a veil than if they are seen absolutely bare.”35

Conclusion The three landscapes examined here belong to the period of intense production of landscape drawings in which Bruegel set up the compositional scheme of the large bird’s-eye view landscapes that he would paint over the following decade. “I could also praise,” writes Karel van Mander, “Bruegel’s paintings and prints that seem so natural and where he teaches us to effortlessly depict what appears in the rocky, angular landscape of the Alps: plunging views of dizzying valleys, steep rocks, pines caressing the clouds, distant horizons and roaring torrents.”36 Van Mander’s testimony 34 Erasmus, Adages, ed. Saladin, 34. 35 Erasmus, Ratio verae Theologiae, 262. 36 “Naast deze zou ik nog, als gold het een wedstrijd, kunnen roemen op de welgekleurde en kunstige compositie van de schilderijen en prenten van Brueghel, die er zo natuurlijk uitzien en waarin hij ons leert, zonder grote moeite uit te beelden, zoals (dat zich) in de hoekige, rotsachtige Alpen (voordoet), het

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fueled the modern conception of landscape, defined in terms of naturalism or purely aesthetic apprehension of nature, a landscape qualified as pure or autonomous, where the religious figures and episodes represented are only a negligible or even insignificant aspect.37 Authors have generally insisted on Bruegel’s naturalism and saw above all in his landscapes the expression of a personal and direct experience of nature, of divine greatness and harmony of man’s activities and creation. However, Bruegel’s unruly landscapes analyzed here deviate from this narrative: two guiding threads intertwine in those three examples. The first, which I have emphasized in my analysis, is Bruegel’s taste for a visual process that he is developing and that will also become a constant in his work, a process that can be described by the general term of the double image. This general expression designates an image that can be seen in two aspects, but other terms are necessary to describe this visual process more precisely: the accidental image, the natural image, the composite image, the crypto-image, the potential image. The double image encompasses these various types of images, to which we can add the “trap image”: an image that both deceives and captivates the eye. These are less categories than ways of perceiving Bruegel’s ambiguous landscapes. The second thread that runs through all three examples is a central feature of Bruegel’s art: the thematization of vision—in other words, the way in which his works constantly stage vision, distinguishing and contrasting external and internal vision, blindness and discernment. These two threads are complementary: the process of the double image is itself the reflection and agent of this dual conception of vision. Pieter Bruegel is not the only or the first artist about whom we can make this observation. In the middle of the sixteenth century, he reformulates a practice of the double image that already had a long tradition in Netherlandish art, culminating in the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Herri met de Bles. The trap images and protagonists that thematize vision in Bruegel’s landscapes are structural components of the same pictorial rhetoric that aims to veil sight in order to better stimulate insight.

Works Cited Alberti, Leon Battista. La peinture, De pictura (1436). Edited by Bertrand Prévost and Thomas Golsenne. Paris: Seuil, 2004. Alberti, Leon Battista. La statue, suivi de La Vie de LB Alberti par lui-même. Edited by Oskar Bätschmann and Dan Arbib. Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2013. diepe neerkijken en in een duizelingwekkende vallei, steile rotsen, pijnboomen die de wolken kussen, verre verschieten en ruisende stromen.” Van Mander, Den grondt, 1:210. 37 On this modern conception of the autonomous or pure landscape, see: Ribouillault and Weemans, “Paysage sacré,” 9–21.

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Allart, Dominique. “Sur la piste de Bruegel en Italie: Les pièces de l’enquête.” In Fiamminghi a Roma 1508–1608, edited by Nicole Dacos. Supplement Bollettino d’Arte 100 (1997): 93–106. Balfe, Thomas, Joanna Woodall, and Claus Zittel, eds. Ad vivum? Visual Materials and the Vocabulary of Life-Likeness in Europe before 1800. Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 61. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Baltrusaïtis, Jurgis. Aberrations: Essai sur la légende des formes: Les perspectives dépravées. Paris: Perrin, 1957. Bastelaer, René van. The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Catalogue Raisonné. Brussels: Van Oest, 1908. Bauer, Georges and Linda. “The Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.” The Art Bulletin 66 (1984): 145–50. Bentkowska, Anna. “Anthropomorphic Landscapes in 16th and 17th Century Western Art: A Question of Attribution and Interpretation.” Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 59, no. 1/2 (1997): 69–91. Büttner, Nils. “‘Quid siculas sequeris per mille pericula terras?’ Ein Beitrag zur Biographie Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. und zur Kulturgeschichte der niederländischen Italienreise.” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000): 209–42. Caillois, Roger. L’écriture des pierres. Geneva: Skira, 1979. Calabrese, Omar. “The Bridge: Suggestions about a Pictorial Motif.” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 1–14. Coffin, David R. Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect and Antiquarian. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Erasmus, Desiderius. Adages. Edited by Jean-Christophe Saladin. Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 2013. Erasmus, Desiderius. Collected Works. Vol. 32, Adages: I vi 1 to I x. Translated by R. A. B. Mynors. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Erasmus, Desiderius. Paraphrase on Mark. Edited by Robert D. Sider, translated and annotated by Erika Rummel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Erasmus, Desiderius. Les paraphrases d’Érasme, nouvellement translatées de latin en françois. Basel: Johann Froben, 1563. Erasmus, Desiderius. Ratio verae Theologiae (1518). In Erasmus: Ausgewählte Werke, edited by Hajo and Annemarie Holborn. Munich: Beck, 1933; rev. ed. 1964. Falkenburg, Reindert, and Michel Weemans. Bruegel. Paris: Hazan, 2018. Fehl, Philipp P. “Peculiarities in the Relation of Text and Image in Two Prints by Pieter Bruegel: The Rabbit Hunt and Fides.” North Carolina Museum of Art Bulletin 9 (March 1970): 25–35. Freedberg, David, ed. The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Exhibition catalog. Tokyo: Bridgestone Museum of Art, 1989. Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin: The Mysterious Center of Thought. London: Reaktion Books, 2014.

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Gamboni, Dario. Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Gessner, Conrad. Historiae animalium: Liber III qui est de avium natura. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1555. Goldsmith, Jane ten Brink. “Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Matter of Italy.” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 205–34. Göttler, Christine, and Tine Meganck. “Sites of Art, Nature and the Antique in the Spanish Netherlands.” In Embattled Territory: The Circulation of Knowledge in the Spanish Netherlands, edited by Sven Dupré, Bert De Munck, Werner Thomas, and Geert Vanpaemel, 333–69. Ghent: Academia Press, 2016. Grossmann, Fritz. “The Drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Museum Boymans.” Bulletin Museum Boymans 5 (1954): 76–85. Janson, Horst Waldemar. “The ‘Image Made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought.” In De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, 254–66. New York: New York University Press, 1961. Kaschek, Bertram. Weltzeit und Endzeit. Die “Monatsbilder” Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012. Kemp, Martin. “From ‘Mimesis’ to ‘Fantasia’: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts.” Viator 8 (1977): 347–98. Koonce, Benjamin Granade. “Satan the Fowler.” Mediaeval Studies 21 (1959): 176–84. Kuretsky, Susan Donahue. “The Face in the Landscape: A Puzzling Print by Matthäus Merian the Elder.” In In His Milieu: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias, edited by Amy Golahny, Mia M. Mochizuki, and Lisa Vergara, 219–32. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Lebeer, Louis. Catalogue raisonné des estampes de Pieter Bruegel. Brussels: Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er, 1969. Levesque, Catherine. Journey through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland: The Haarlem Print Series and Dutch Identity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Lichtert, Katrien. “New Perspectives on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Journey to Italy (c. 1552–1554/1555).” Oud Holland 128, no. 1 (2015): 39–54. Loffredo, Fernando, and Ginette Vagenheim, eds. Pirro Ligorio’s Worlds: Antiquarianism, Classical Erudition and the Visual Arts in the Late Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Mander, Karel van. Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const (1604). Edited by Hessel Miedema. 2 vols. Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1973. Mander, Karel van. Het Schilder-Boeck. Haarlem: Passier van Wesbusch, 1604. Martin, Jean-Hubert, ed. Une image peut en cacher une autre. Exhibition catalog. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2009. Meganck, Tine. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fall of the Rebel Angels: Art, Knowledge and Politics on the Eve of the Dutch Revolt. Les Cahiers des Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 16. Milan: Silvana, 2014.

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Meganck, Tine. “Transforming Nature into Art: Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) by Pieter Bruegel.” In Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, edited by Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler, 19–51. New York: Routledge, 2016. Melion, Walter. Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s “Schilder-boeck.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Melion, Walter. “The Trope of Anthropomorphosis in Hendrick Goltzius’s Venus and Cupid (1590), Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres (1593), and Portrait of Frederick de Vries (1597).” In Ut Pictura Amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500–1700, edited by Walter Melion, Michael Zell, and Joanna Woodall, 158–229. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Melion, Walter, Bret Rothstein, and Michel Weemans, eds. The Anthropomorphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and the Visual Arts. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Mentzel, Jan David. “Insidiosus Auceps. Der hinterlistige Vogelfänger.” In Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. und das Theater der Welt, edited by Ingrid Mössinger and Jürgen Müller, 76–77. Dresden: Sandstein, 2013. Mielke, Hans. Pieter Bruegel. Die Zeichnungen. Pictura Nova 2. Turnhout: Brepols, 1996. Morel, Philippe. Les grottes maniéristes en Italie au XVIème siècle: Théâtre et alchimie de la nature. Paris: Macula, 1998. Mössinger, Ingrid, and Jürgen Müller, eds. Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. und das Theater der Welt. Exhibition catalog. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2014. Müller, Jürgen, and Uwe M. Schneede, eds. Pieter Bruegel invenit: Das druckgraphische Werk. Exhibition catalog. Hamburg: Kunsthalle Hamburg, 2001. Muylle, Jan. “Pieter Bruegel en Abraham Ortelius. Bijdrage tot de literaire receptie van Pieter Bruegels werk.” Archivum artis lovaniense (1981): 319–37. Nalis, Henk. The Van Doetecum Family (1554–1606). 4 vols. Edited by Ger Luijten. The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450–1700. Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Interactive, 1998. Orenstein, Nadine M., ed. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. Exhibition catalog. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001. Ortelius, Abraham. Album Amicorum (1573–1596). Facsimile, annotated and translated by Jean Puraye and Marie Delcourt. Amsterdam: Van Gendt, 1969. Popham, Arthur E. “Abraham Ortelius and Pieter Bruegel.” The Burlington Magazine 59 (1931): 184–88. Ribouillault, Denis. “Regurgitating Nature: On a Celebrated Anecdote by Karel van Mander about Pieter Bruegel the Elder.” Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 8, no. 1 (Winter 2016). doi: 10.5092/jhna.2016.8.1.4. Ribouillault, Denis, and Michel Weemans. “Paysage sacré, livre de la nature et exégèse. Pour une reconception du paysage dans l’Europe de la première modernité.” In Le paysage sacré: Le paysage comme exégèse dans l’Europe de la première modernité / Sacred

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Landscape: Landscape as Exegesis in Early Modern Europe, edited by Denis Ribouillault and Michel Weemans, 9–21. Florence: Leo Olschki, 2011. Schatborn, Peter. “La naissance du paysage naturaliste aux Pays-Bas et l’influence de la topographie aux environs de 1600.” In Le paysage en Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Actes de Colloque, edited by Catherine Legrand and Jean-François Méjanes, 47–95. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994. Sullivan, Margareth A. Bruegel and the Creative Process, 1559–1563. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010. Sullivan, Margareth A. “Proverbs and Process in Pieter Bruegel’s Rabbit Hunt.” The Burlington Magazine 145 (2003): 30–35. Thürlemann, Felix. “L’aquarelle de Dürer ‘fenedier klawsen’: La double mimesis dans l’analyse picturale d’un lieu géographique.” Revue de l’art 137 (2003): 9–18. Thürlemann, Felix. Dürers doppelter Blick. Konstanz: Konstanzer Universitätreden, 2008. Urbain, Jean-Didier. “La crypto-image ou le palimpseste iconique.” Eidos 5 (1991): 1–16. Van Grieken, Joris, Ger Luijten, and Jan Van der Stock, eds. Hieronymus Cock: La gravure à la Renaissance. Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2013. Weemans, Michel. Herri met de Bles. Les ruses du paysage au temps de Bruegel et d’Érasme. Paris: Hazan, 2013. Weemans, Michel. “L’image double, piège et révélateur du visible.” In Voir double: Pièges et révélations du visible, edited by Michel Weemans, Dario Gamboni, and J.-H. Martin, 9–33. Paris: Hazan, 2016. Weemans, Michel. “Les origines du paysage anthropomorphe.” In L’homme-paysage: Visions artistiques du paysage anthropomorphe entre le XVIe et le XXIe siècle, edited by Alain Tapié and Jeanette Zwingenberger, 26–38. Lille and Paris: Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille and Somogy, 2006. Weemans, Michel. “Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow and Insidiosus Auceps as Trap Images.” In Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion, edited by Bertram Kaschek, Jürgen Müller, and Jessica Buskirk, 245–76. Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History 27. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Weemans, Michel, Dario Gamboni, and Jean-Hubert Martin, eds. Voir double: Pièges et révélations du visible. Paris: Hazan, 2016.

About the Author Michel Weemans is Professor of Art History at the University of Paris 1 PanthéonSorbonne. His research has focused on sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting and the hermeneutics of the Renaissance image. He has published: Le paysage extravagant (2012); Herri met de Bles. Les ruses du paysage au temps de Bruegel et d’Érasme (2013); and, with Reindert Falkenburg, Bruegel (2018).

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Part 4 Fragile Ecologies

10. “In einem Augenblick”: Leveling Landscapes in Seventeenth-Century Disaster Flap Prints Suzanne Karr Schmidt1

Abstract News traveled quickly in the early modern era, and printed accounts of the most recent international disasters fueled this fascination. Book and print collectors could experience these incidents safely at home with novel, interactive broadsheets with liftable flaps. The most famous grouping showed the 1618 rockslide that completely destroyed the Graubünden mining district of Plurs, near Switzerland. Inspired by Zurich printer Johann Hardmeyer’s 1618 publication, in 1619, Strasbourg and Nuremberg publishers Jacob van der Heyden and Johann Philipp Walch produced their own. Such tactile additions helped viewers literally grasp the extent of the wreckage while they perused the letterpress describing the newsworthy event. This article examines these unruly printed landscapes, their published afterlives, and their relationship to existing landscape modes. Keywords: interactive prints; disaster; rockslide; broadsheets; Plurs

In the early modern era, news traveled fast, fake news traveled faster, and everyone desperately wanted to hear about the most recent deadly disasters. Book and print collectors relived these incidents safely in their own homes through interactive mapping of an unforgiving and unpredictable landscape that could change in the blink of an eye (“in einem Augenblick”). A group of prints with liftable flaps showing the rockslide that destroyed the Graubünden mining district of Plurs (or Piuro) on September 4, 1618 offered several distinct advantages over paintings and other 1 Many thanks to Christine Göttler, Mia Mochizuki, Lia Markey, Jennifer Nelson, and Claudia Swan for their comments on and support of this article, which I researched and wrote during the early days of the most recent international cataclysm, the Covid-19 pandemic.

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch10

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Fig. 10.1: Anonymous, Warhaffte abbildung deß fläckens PLURS, in den Grawen Pündten gelagen (Zurich: Johann Hardmeyer, 1618). Flap broadside with etching and letterpress, 54 × 42 cm (sheet), Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. IP 18. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

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prints of the disaster (Figs. 10.1–3, 10.8–12, 10.18).2 First was their speed. Quick to produce, and illustrated with hastily sketched etchings, they alternated even more swiftly between the landscape’s normal state of being and its annihilation than a static or even a panoramic image. Reenacting the cataclysm itself, the flaps in the viewer’s hands could instantly replicate the shock of the mountain’s unexpected crash. Second was the physical interaction with the sheet. It required touching as well as looking and reading, creating a physical and visual correspondence as an empathetic response to the actual event. This materiality and physical closeness first made the viewer complicit, reinforcing the insinuations of biblical verses that permeated the printed record, and then made the viewer powerful (Figs. 10.2–3). For who but a god could swoop in from above, and with the touch of their fingers undo the devastation of an entire town? Who but a god could bring the hammer of their wrath crashing down when they lowered the flap once again? Equal parts elaborately detailed spectacle and didactic morality play, these movable landscapes encapsulated the complacency and fear of the victims and encouraged the curiosity and devotional growth of the viewers. By examining these unruly landscapes to understand their attempts at historical and geographical verisimilitude, their contextualization through biblical references, and the varied afterlives of surviving sheets, this chapter will demonstrate the emotionally rich and commercially viable response to the Plurs disaster that the most interactive form of print media made possible.

The Unruly Landscape of Print A wide variety of print media had become available throughout Europe by the early seventeenth century, with formats such as broadsides or broadsheets, pamphlets, and eventually, newspapers. These amplified the enterprising printer’s ability to alert their increasingly literate audiences of the latest battle, comet, flood, or misbirth, and to wax eloquently about the meanings each disaster portended. These single-sided, printed sheets and slim, folded pamphlets crossed international and confessional borders, were copied, translated, and sold to any available buyer. Life and death situations were sought-after topics, and along with printed indulgences, practical annual calendars, and songs, notices of current disasters were among the most popular broadsheets alongside satires often on the lingering effects of the Reformation. As fleeting as the events themselves, numerous ephemeral 2 Graubünden (Grisons), included within the ancient Roman Rhaetian territory, would not become an official canton of Switzerland until 1803, although it was closely allied with the Swiss Confederacy by the seventeenth century.

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publications about Plurs have nonetheless survived, mainly examples collected in albums. This chapter will investigate the most unexpected and unruly of these printed landscapes, their published afterlives and their relationship to existing landscape modes. Günter Kahl’s seminal 1984 article on the iconography of Plurs has exhaustively analyzed most of the images contained here stemming from the Johann Hardmeyer (fl. 1609–1640) interactive broadsheet of 1618 (Figs. 10.1–3, Appendix: Census of Destruction of Plurs Flap Broadsheets, 1).3 Jörn Münkner and Rosemarie Zeller have also touched on, respectively, the relationship of these movable prints to a pre-cinematic experience, and historical notions of disasters as prophecy, especially in conjunction with the Comets of 1618 and the incipient Thirty Years’ War. 4 The present chapter focuses all these discussions squarely on the interactive nature of the prints and their viewer’s relationship to the decimated landscape.5 Drawing heavily on the wider network of printed pamphlets about the disaster already in circulation at the time the flap prints were made, this approach creates a more complete picture of their textual and visual context in print. The interactive Plurs broadsheets survived into the modern era in the relatively high numbers of five editions and nineteen impressions for an average of nearly four per edition, a sum total that might represent cumulative printings in the low thousands (Appendix). There were at least three more illustrated broadsides without flaps (Fig. 10.5), and nearly twenty pamphlets on the topic before 1619 (Fig. 10.6).6 By adding a before-and-after flap of the devastated landscape on top of a view in its previously undisturbed state, the experience of the disaster was elevated to the level of personal spectacle. Even before, the flap maps precisely to a dotted line—a novel and innocuous-seeming footprint of the impending doom. From the evidence of the many related publications purporting to have appeared from September to December 1618, and the specificity of details they included, readers of German, French, Italian, English, and Dutch as far as London and Prague wanted to know more about Plurs. Tradesmen and merchants from rival cities with risky commerce of their own would have been riveted by the detailed account of the incident, one of which would appear in an early newspaper catering to other attendees of the annual Frankfurt Fair, such as the Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio (1619), to be discussed below, which was also illustrated (Fig. 10.14). With its historical location then near Swiss and Italian borders, Plurs was as international a crossroads as its trade in carved soapstone from locally mined stone was profitable. The pamphlet 3 Kahl, “Plurs,” 249–82. 4 Münkner, Eingreifen und Begreifen, 98–101; Zeller, “Reading Images,” 59–68. 5 For more on movable prints and books in the early modern era, see: Karr Schmidt, Interactive and Sculptural Printing. 6 On the skewed percentage of illustrated German sheets discussed in the historical literature to date, see: Pettegree, Broadsheets, 13.

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Fig. 10.2: Anonymous, Flap down, detail of Fig. 10.1.

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Fig. 10.3: Anonymous, Flap lifted, detail of Fig. 10.1.

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Fig. 10.4: Jacopo Ligozzi (after), Before and After Views of Mountain, in Lino Moroni, Descrizione del sacro monte della Vernia (Florence: [s. n.], 1612). Engraving, etching, and letterpress, with flaps, 44 x 31 cm (sheet), plate I, Chicago, Newberry Library, call no. Wing ZP 6351.12. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago.

and broadsheet readers’ goals were first and foremost to understand the scale of the loss of lives, income, and prestige of this formerly well-known district. They might also revel in their comparative good fortune, or consider their own moral shortcomings and confessional superiority. The intimate and repeatable act of raising the flap helped readers relieve their own emotional turmoil related to the incident. With an interactive broadsheet to relive the incident in detail, all such catharsis could become routine. While woodcut book illustrations and prints with moving parts date back to the fifteenth century, this particularly theatrical genre of before-and-after flaps, which could even be described as armchair disaster tourism, is almost entirely unique to depictions of Plurs. Memento mori prints in interactive formats were also produced up to and around 1618—most focusing on single female figures with skeletal legs or

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other warnings under their skirts—including one attributed to Jacob van der Heyden, himself the author of a 1619 Plurs flap broadsheet.7 While some sixteenth-century printed maps used flaps for corrections and extensions, relatively few books or broadsides produced by 1618 included flap landscapes. One notable exception is a 1612 publication reprinted several times by 1672 that was geared to armchair pilgrims about the sacred mountain of La Verna where St. Francis was said to have received his stigmata (Fig. 10.4).8 This luxurious text aimed for an elite market that may have overlapped with the audience for the Plurs sheets, but there is unfortunately no proof that any of their printers saw this book. The volume consists of over twenty-five folios the size and style of letterpress broadsheets alternating with full-page engravings with etching; each of the folios is printed on only one side. Five of these views of the holy mountain allow the viewer to shift the terrain to follow St. Francis’s steps under cliffs and inside caverns, encouraging them to meditate on the saint’s life and faith. Delving into the depths of cavernous retreats and between mountain peaks by lifting the overlays, one could effectively turn back time from the seventeenth to the thirteenth century, retracing Francis’s steps. Relatively well preserved in most copies, the flaps from the illustrations were kept safely together inside their bindings. The interactive views of Plurs, which could have been pasted on walls for display as well as bound, were not treated so kindly. Although the La Verna volume does not explicitly mention its flaps, and restricts its alphabetical legend to the saint’s life, the hands-on views of Plurs plainly describe those sheets’ extra abilities to ensure that the gravity of the disaster they depict will be understood and deeply felt.

Shocking, Swift, and Sad: Depicting the Downfall of Plurs in the News Before the disaster on September 4 (August 25 in the Julian calendar) of 1618, the fantastically wealthy district of Plurs in Graubünden (Grisons) was a prosperous mining site, with tradesmen traveling to the Frankfurt Fair, and a revenue estimated to be worth many thousands annually (60,000 kronen) and with an even higher tally of goods that would be lost (3,000,000 gold coins).9 It was full of houses, Italianate 7 Karr Schmidt, Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking, 378–91. Wilhelm Drugulin cites a 1629 impression signed by Van der Heyden, although only unsigned impressions have since come to light. Entitled Laconice or Lac Nice, it shows four love-crossed women, one with a torn slip under her liftable apron flap. The unsigned broadside is held at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, call no. IE 108; Kostümbibliothek Berlin, call no. 1001, 45; Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, call no. 121911; Halle, Moritzburg, call no. F. 7; Kunstsammlungen Waldburg-Wolfegg, call no. vol. 128, no. 447 (image only); the print was also formerly at the Antiquariat Drugulin, Leipzig, with different text. 8 Moroni, Descrizione del sacro monte della Vernia; Wilson, “Sacred and Material Conversions.” 9 On “Kronen,” see Anhorn, Erschrockenliche Zeitung, fol. A3r; on “Golde,” see Newes from Italy, fol. C[1]r.

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palaces, and ornamented churches, with an estimated population of fifteen hundred, mainly Catholics, give or take the visitors in its two inns (Fig. 10.3). The town’s seemingly sheltered placement under the very mountains its inhabitants mined led in part to its destruction. Correspondingly, its location along the main Mera River permitted its profitable soapstone trade. But it also meant that the depression from the rockslide soon filled with water to form a lake that further obliterated the traces of the town. An unlocated close Italian copy of Hardmeyer’s etching added a motto in a banderole to this area of the flap: “Fortuna est generis communis” or, “Fortune is of all kinds,” suggesting perhaps that fortune’s longstanding enhancement of the town’s riches had made it lose its way (Appendix, 2). At first hailed as a godsend by neighboring townspeople who were afraid of the ensuing floods, the new lake also helped anonymize the former location of Plurs. “Anyone who had not seen the town would have been convinced that nothing had ever stood there,” again suggesting the biblical significance of a city’s instantaneous destruction in the blink of an eye.10 What happened here? While the incident was viewed as an act of God at the time, modern studies attribute the cataclysm to human error, with over-mining of the mountains and a rainy season leading to the softening of the talc-based soapstone and under-supported channels, and to its eventual collapse.11 The earliest report survives in manuscript form, penned the day after the disaster by Fortunat Spracher, the canton’s Commissioner, stationed in neighboring Protestant Chiavenna, but his account was not immediately published.12 Creaking sounds were supposedly heard from the hill the nights before, as well as an unearthly stench of fire and brimstone, evocative of the punishment which rained on the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:24–25). The town’s bee population is said to have flown away en masse, only to be struck dead by the vapors. One report suggests the town’s Chancellor Giovanni Andria Vertema, from one of the few, but wealthy Plurs Protestant families, tried to sound a warning to evacuate, but was completely ignored.13 Perhaps this deadly oversight was another reason for the viewer to keep the fate of Plurs ever in hand and mind? When Plurs was eclipsed by its rockslide, at least three illustrated German broadsides soon showed the remains of the mountain, the toppling churches, and the keening crowd from neighboring villages.14 One that Marx van der Heyden 10 Warhafftige erschreckliche Newe Zeitung von dem plötzlichen Untergang der Stadt Plurs, fol. A2r. 11 Hauer, Der plötzliche Tod Bergstürze in Salzburg und Plurs kulturhistorisch betrachtet, 135–36. 12 Falappi, “Relazioni su Piuro dopo la frana,” 109–10. 13 Curtabat, Warhafftige und erschreckliche Newe Zeitung, Von dem plötzlichen Untergang der wolbekandten Stadt Plurs, fol. A3r. 14 Marx van der Heyden (Paas 3871), Von dem erschrocklichen und plötzlichen Untergang deβ weitberühmbten Flecken Pluers, wahrer Bericht, 1618, woodcut and letterpress, 28.4 × 17.9 cm (sheet), London, British Library, call no. 1750.c.1.(52.); Jeremias Gath (Drugulin 1346), Warhafftige und erschröckliche Newe Zeittung, Von dem plötzlichen undergang, deβ wol bekandten Flecken Plurs in Bergel, und gemeinen dreyen Bünten gelegen, Wie

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(1612–1653) published in 1618 Strasbourg, which was perhaps the first to address the disaster outside of Switzerland, bears a simple woodcut focused on the unstoppable downward trajectory of a church tower. The thrust of the tower’s diagonal movement to earth feels inevitable, and though part of a static woodcut, captures some of the motion that Hardmeyer’s added flap was meant to convey. Also included in three pamphlets, a “Klaglied,” or “musical lament,” is printed below this image, its fifteen verses based on the horrors of the incident. It is to be performed to the tune of the lugubrious-sounding “I wish the world a good night” (“Ich wunsch der Welt ein gute Nacht”). Indeed, in some accounts, the rockslide occurred at twilight (“zwischen Tag und Nacht”), and nearly all of the town’s inhabitants did not wake up. The two other illustrated sheets originated from different Augsburg printers, Jeremias Gath (fl. 1605–d. 1632) and Lucas Schultes (1593–1634). Gath’s woodcut of the disaster shows seven shaken witnesses gathering from unscathed nearby towns, while the houses of Plurs sink before them. Schultes’s sheet upgrades to a more costly engraving, which would have been printed as an addition to its letterpress sheet (Fig. 10.5). The engraver, Daniel Mannasser (fl. 1621–1637), shows the buildings “in einem Augenblick uberfallen,” as if they have been instantly swallowed up by the rockslide, a phrase used in Schultes and Gath’s nearly identical extended titles, and many other related texts (German: “in einem Augenblick”; Dutch: “in een ooghenblick” etc.). Eight figures, including a despairing child, eloquently reflect the extent of the men, women, and children lost in the destruction. Both these Augsburg broadsheets invoke scripture, referencing the wrath of God through loose references to “David’s Psalm 38” and “Isaiah 5.” Other writers, like the Swiss minister Bartholomäus Anhorn (1566–1642), would more specifically paraphrase verses about the vendetta against the merchants of Tyre by the vengeful God of Isaiah 23:1–9. Anhorn’s haunting phrases like “Heulend ihr Meerschiff, dann sie ist zerstört […]” (Howl thou sea-ship; for [Tyre] is destroyed), targeted the similarly mercantile Plurs’s misfortune as a stern reminder to the faithful to mind their daily devotions more than their profits, a theme reverberating through all these publications.15 Only one 1618 pamphlet visualized the stages of the disaster in comparable ways to Hardmeyer’s flap print, which may have used it as source material. Published in Italian ein blötzlich Ruina anderseytes deβ Berges sich herab gelassen, und den gantzen Flecken in einem Augenblick uberfallen, von grund auffgehebt, verdeckt, verworffen und hingerichtet hat, geschehen in disem 1618. Jahr, 1618, hand-colored woodcut and letterpress, 37 × 29 cm (sheet), Chur, Kantonsbibliothek, call no. KBG Be 495:18; Lucas Schultes (Paas 3872), Warhafftige und erschröckliche Newe Zeittung, Von dem plötzlichen undergang, deβ wol bekandten Flecken Plurs in Bergel, und gemeinen dreyen Bünten gelegen, Wie ein blötzlich Ruina anderseytes deβ Berges sich herab gelassen, und den gantzen Flecken in einem Augenblick uberfallen, von grund auffgehebt, verdeckt, verworffen und hingerichtet hat, geschehen in disem 1618. Jahr, 1618, engraving and letterpress, 36 × 24.9 cm (sheet), Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. 38.25 Aug. 2°, fol. 809. 15 Anhorn, Erschrockenliche Zeitung, fol. A4v.

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Fig. 10.5: Daniel Mannasser (engraver), Warhafftige und erschröckliche Newe Zeittung, Von dem plötzlichen undergang, deß wol bekandten Flecken Plurs in Bergel, und gemeinen dreyen Bünten gelegen, Wie ein blötzlich Ruina anderseytes deß Berges sich herab gelassen, und den gantzen Flecken in einem Augenblick uberfallen, von grund auffgehebt, verdeckt, verworffen und hingerichtet hat, geschehen in disem 1618. Jahr (Augsburg: Lucas Schultes, 1618). Engraving with letterpress, 37 × 31 cm (sheet), Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. 38–25–Aug–2F–809. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

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Fig. 10.6: Wilhelm Peter Zimmerman (engraver), Title Page, in Il Compassionevole Infortunio, Occurso alli 4 di Settembre del presente anno 1618 all infelice Terra di Piure; quale è restata somersa sotto parte d’una Montagna, con perdita di tutte le gente, e robbe. Descritto dall’ Orviet. Ad instanza del Verona. Beschreibung des Flecken Plurs Undergang, den vierdten Septembris 1618 (Augsburg: Sara Mang, 1618). Etched and letterpress, 9.8 × 12.2 cm (plate), Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, call no. 4 Helv. 300. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

“In einem Augenblick”: Leveling L andscapes in Seventeenth- Century Disaster Fl ap Prints 

Fig. 10.7: Wilhelm Peter Zimmerman, Before the Plurs Disaster, in Il Compassionevole Infortunio. Fold-out etching, 24.1 × 33.5 cm (plate), Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, call no. 4 Helv. 300. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

and German by Augsburg printer’s widow Sara Mang (fl. 1617–1624), it has a joint title page and legends in both languages on the prints (Figs. 10.6–7). The rough etching by Wilhelm Peter Zimmerman (1589–ca. 1630) deposits an enormous and rugged rock pile onto the title page with a visceral thump, leaving a gap in the mountain range behind. His fold-out view (with no flap) of Plurs in its previous state appears at the end. Less detailed than Hardmeyer, but more lively, with foreground men on horseback suggesting commercial bustle and a tiered sense of topography, it forecasts the extent of the future damage with its own ominous dotted line encircling Plurs.16 While static images could suggest the violent impact, Hardmeyer’s imprints with contoured flaps offering their hands-on, captivating means of describing the disaster would soon overtake the German market (Figs. 10.1–3). In these pictures, the landscape would literally move under the hands of the viewer, as the dangerous movements of the earth shifted beneath the feet of Plurs’s residents. But what separated the flap disasters from other broadsides trading in atrocities and the wrath of the Almighty? In 1619, Strasbourg and Nuremberg publishers Jacob van der Heyden (1573–1645) and Johann Philipp Walch (fl. ca. 1617–1631) simultaneously produced two more flap 16 Petta, “Wild Nature,” 199–231, esp. 212.

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broadsheets of the sudden destruction of Plurs (Figs. 10.8–12). They were copying Hardmeyer’s savvy production of the previous year. Hardmeyer, who lived in Zurich, was only about 150 miles from the disaster. He published straightforward Protestant devotional pamphlets, but seemingly only one flap print. Discontented with the narrative flow of simple consecutive before-and-after views, or the dramatic piles of rubble with distraught onlookers already published by Marx van der Heyden, Gath, Mang, and Schultes in Germany, Hardmeyer’s broadside boasted an etching of the landscape with very little staffage on the outskirts to reinforce its emotional impact. Instead, he included the liftable flap that insisted viewers participate in the destruction themselves (Figs. 10.2–3). Tucking the flap in under a separate letterpress title slip, he engineered a cut and paste option that would have allowed speedier and simultaneous printing on different printing presses. Hardmeyer’s use of etching rather than laboriously engraving copper by hand also sped up the process. Artists could freely sketch into a waxy resist layer on a copper or iron plate. Acid dissolved these lines, and the resulting grooves were inked for printing. Learning from Hardmeyer’s innovations, Walch and Jacob van der Heyden would publish their competing flap etchings in 1619 (Figs. 10.8–12), followed by Van der Heyden’s similarly interactive etched sheets of the fiery 1631 Siege of Magdeburg by Imperial troops (Figs. 10.15–17). Walch and Van der Heyden’s prints were known in the nineteenth century by the print dealer Wilhelm Eduard Drugulin (1822–1879), whose massive 1863 sale catalog of historical broadsides still forms a checklist for subject research today.17 Paying careful attention to their unusual format, he listed several prints as “Klappbilder,” or “flap images,” including two by Walch and Van der Heyden of Plurs and two Van der Heyden prints of Magdeburg. Drugulin implies that his Van der Heyden Plurs print retained its flap, and it was thought to have been purchased by the British Museum around 1863. Yet this sheet has not been rediscovered recently (Appendix, 5).18 However, in researching this article, I located an impression in the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg at Halle (Saale) corresponding to the Van der Heyden Plurs print (Fig. 10.9). Drugulin’s exacting description matches the title, the number of columns below the image, and even specifies, importantly, that it was an etching. The Halle print shows corrosion at the top, confirming the use of an iron plate, and that it was indeed an etching. Although missing its flap, it originally had one, likely secured underneath the pasted-on title in the same manner as the Hardmeyer sheet. Never published or illustrated in the literature, it appears to be the only currently known impression of the missing Heyden print. Kahl tentatively dated this broadside to 1618 in his article in absentia, giving it chronological precedence over the earliest Walch version (Fig. 10.8). Yet even in its 17 Drugulin, W. Drugulin’s Historischer Bilderatlas. 18 Kahl, “Plurs,” 261.

“In einem Augenblick”: Leveling L andscapes in Seventeenth- Century Disaster Fl ap Prints 

Fig. 10.8: Johann Philipp Walch, Warhaffte Abbildung deß Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen (Nuremberg: Hans Philip Walch, 1619). Etching and letterpress with rockslide on flap, 41.2 × 33.5 cm (sheet), Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, call no. Einblatt V, 8. Image: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

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Fig. 10.9: Jacob van der Heyden, Warhaffte abbildung deß fläckens PLURS, in den Grawen Pündten gelägen (Strasbourg: [Jacob] van der Heyden, 1619). Etching with letterpress, 48.5 × 40.1 cm (sheet), Halle an der Saale, Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt, Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, call no. F789. Image: © Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt, Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle an der Saale.

“In einem Augenblick”: Leveling L andscapes in Seventeenth- Century Disaster Fl ap Prints 

compromised state, it can now be seen that it bears the date 1619 at lower right, and so the chronology remains unresolved. Regardless of their order, both the German editions made adaptations to the Hardmeyer print to reach specific markets, as well as to drum up interest in sales by adding new information. In addition to his rediscovered sheet, which closely copied Hardmeyer’s image and text, Jacob van der Heyden produced another 1619 sheet of the disaster without a flap (Appendix, 6). Printing in bilingual Strasbourg, he shortened Hardmeyer’s prominent list of ninety-three notable locations to thirty-five highlights, and translated the German text into French, likely to attract additional local readership. He collaborated on this broadsheet with Marx van der Heyden, publisher of one of the 1618 illustrated Klaglied song sheets discussed above. Most dramatically, this static Plurs broadside exiled the image of the as-yet-unscathed town to a small box in the upper right corner of the etching, rather than supplying it with an attached rockslide flap. It further mitigated this lack of interactivity by separating the site list into two: the properties that were destroyed, and those that survived, a distinction the flap itself would have made. Perhaps Jacob van der Heyden intended the sheet to be a cheaper alternative while still relying on the appealing eyewitness-like effect of its Hardmeyer model. Johann Philipp Walch, an active Nuremberg printer, published the first version of his Plurs broadsides in 1619 as well, very closely copying the four columns of Hardmeyer’s sheet in his first version. While he retained German text throughout, he made some visual changes. The first state of his edition in Munich with a flap shows no compass rose on the lake in the flap (Fig. 10.8); it would be added later to the outer layer to help orient the viewer (Fig. 10.10, Appendix, 3–4). Subsequently, the second edition of Walch’s sheet almost doubled the length of the text at the left of the key to the ninety-three notable parts of town, adding a number of sordid details about the collapse from the newspaper circulated at the Frankfurt Fair in 1619. What did a first-time viewer learn from the interactive images by Hardmeyer, Walch, Van der Heyden, and the anonymous Italian publisher? Already expecting the worst from the title, or having heard the news in other ways, they might not have read the fine print before realizing the dual nature of these interactive images. But if they dutifully studied the text and started trying to match the numbers with buildings, they would soon realize to their horror that 90 percent of them had been eclipsed by the rockfall and subsequent formation of the lake. Hardmeyer contrasts the prior landscape of Plurs with the sudden intrusion of the sea, indicating the role of the overlying etching flap (generically described as an engraving) to demonstrate this change (Fig. 10.2): Having taken its beginning from the end [of the disaster], as the figure of the upper engraving indicates, [it shows that the] mountain has fallen with so much force, that no stone remained standing on another, with no indication that a district

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Fig. 10.10: Johann Philipp Walch, Warhafftige Abbildung deß Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen, wie solcher noch in Flor gewesen, und auch, wie solcher nach seinem schröcklichen Untergang anzusehen (Nuremberg: Hans Philip Walch, 1619). Etching and letterpress with rockslide flap, approx. 40 × 30 cm (sheet), Kunstsammlungen Waldburg-Wolfegg, call no. Album 128, 67. Image: © Kunstsammlungen Waldburg–Wolfegg. Photo: Author.

“In einem Augenblick”: Leveling L andscapes in Seventeenth- Century Disaster Fl ap Prints 

was ever there. Then instead of the district one sees a sea of a half Italian mile long, as the engraving also indicates.

Walch’s first edition copies Hardmeyer’s letterpress explicitly (Fig. 10.8), but his extended second-edition text further explains the didactic purpose of the image, and more specifically mentions that two separate prints have been attached as alternating views (Fig. 10.10): So that the favorable reader who would like to so much the better understand this account, there are two sketches in copper attached together, of which one shows how this often-remembered district was constructed before its downfall and in the other how it appears at present. In the f irst sketch of the district still in its bloom are the churches, palaces, and notable houses indicated with numbers as follows.

With these direct cues to the reader, what happens when the flaps are lacking? With surviving impressions of only a handful per edition, about a quarter endured without their flaps. The recently acquired Newberry example was not recognized as missing a flap when it was initially offered to the library. It originally had one, as a printed remnant at the upper left of the calamitous circumference shows (Figs. 10.11–12). Although the left edge is properly aligned with the dotted diagonal presaging the disaster, it seems to have been attached rather low, and would have slightly overlapped the lower margin. As a result, the rockslide would have flowed further down the landscape than it did in actuality, as an impression at the Augsburg Staats- und Stadtbibliothek attests (Appendix, 4).19 As the midsection of the flap is wider than the bottom, the Newberry copy would originally have implied that the neighboring towns had also been submerged. From a usability standpoint, it would also have made the interactive nature of the broadsheet immediately more legible. The flap would have been edging into the blank margin under the etching, though not quite so far that it would have overtaken any of the text below. An early owner may have tried to keep it from sliding further downwards or going missing by applying red wax on the opposite side of the remaining fragment, a bright dot itself bearing some residue of paper from the erstwhile appendage (Fig. 10.12). But if the left side remained glued tightly down, was the flap at some point intentionally, or even angrily ripped away? If so, perhaps the exhaustive level of detail the print contained had become overwhelming. 19 Johann Philipp Walch, Warhafftige Abbildung desz Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen, wie solcher noch in Flor gewesen…, Nuremberg: Hans Philip Walch, 1619, etching and letterpress with rockslide flap, approx. 40 × 30 cm (sheet), Augsburg Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, call no. Einblattdrucke nach 1500, 153.

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Fig. 10.11: Johann Philipp Walch, Warhafftige Abbildung deß Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen: wie solcher noch in Flor gewesen, und auch, wie solcher nach seinem schröcklichen Untergang anzusehen (Nuremberg: Hans Philip Walch, 1619). Etching and letterpress with no flap, 39.9 × 30 cm (sheet), Chicago, Newberry Library, call no. map2F G6714.P715A3 1619.W35. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago. Photo: Catherine Gass.

“In einem Augenblick”: Leveling L andscapes in Seventeenth- Century Disaster Fl ap Prints 

Fig. 10.12: Johann Philipp Walch, Etched flap remnant and red wax (in place of missing flap), detail of Fig. 11.

Verisimilitude and Accuracy: The Enumerated Landscape Following Hardmeyer’s broadside, some eighteen pamphlets appeared in the three-month spread before the end of 1618. Nearly all of them included the term Warhaffte Abbildung (“Truthful Illustration”) in the title or on the title page, an opening that strongly implied they would contain accurate information. Yet the accounts differ on important details: time of the incident (at twilight, early in the morning, or four in the afternoon), the number of inhabitants lost (between the actual 930, the likely 1,500, and the improbable 3,600), and the number of Italianate gardens destroyed.20 This terminology of “truthfulness” is a continuation of the 20 Zeller, “Reading Images,” 64.

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imago contrafacta concept that emerged with early printing, a discourse in which broadsheets and other writings automatically attained a certain authority by appearing in print.21 This effect increased with religious leaders as their authors, as with the pamphlet Hardmeyer published in 1618 by local Maienfeld preacher Anhorn, whose “short and simple” account describes the events leading up to the August 25 catastrophe.22 The attempt to create a sense of immediacy through words like “of the current year” or “today” suggests that the publication occurred between September and December 1618; none of the pamphlets or broadsides are specific enough to establish a more precise order. While not explicitly included here, the term ad vivum was used in the seventeenth century to suggest a similar life-like nature of an image, whether or not it was based on an eyewitness account.23 As in the siege representations discussed by Pieter Martens, Hardmeyer’s bird’s-eye view of Plurs represents an improbable vantage point that would have required separate sketches to complete if the area had still been extant.24 Hardmeyer’s interactive broadside was the first to furnish the list of ninety-three locations on the map of Plurs and its closer neighbors, Seilano and Rongalio (Figs. 10.1–3). Only fifteen of these sites listed escaped obliteration, including a grouping of wine cellars to the left and churches and a still-standing summer palace to the right owned by the powerful Vertema family. None of the buildings that survived were among the hills making up Plurs proper. The rest of Hardmeyer’s text sets the stage for the disaster and by giving narrative accounts of six survivors, underlines the gravity of the numbers lost. Two men were away or underground in a wine cellar when the mountain collapsed. Others were not so lucky; one mother reportedly lost her legs while attempting unsuccessfully to save her child.25 An unnamed elderly lady and two ten-year-old girls from the influential Potesta and Galisone families were found roaming the remaining mountains the next day, though they receive less notice in the dispatches and news articles than the men. In some printed accounts, including Anhorn’s, it is this lady who describes the onslaught as an almost living creature that enveloped the landscape in the blink of an eye (“in einem Augenblick”).26 As Anhorn’s account was one of the earliest and most detailed, this was likely the first time the term was used to describe the Plurs disaster. As already seen with the Schultes and Mannasser sheet (Fig. 10.5), the term frequently reappeared on related title pages and in texts thereafter. 21 Parshall, “Imago Contrafacta,” 554–79. 22 Anhorn, Erschrockenliche Zeitung. 23 Recent additions to the interdisciplinary study of the genre include the edited volumes: Balfe, Woodall, and Zittel, Ad Vivum?; Oy-Marra and Schmiedel, Zeigen—Überzeugen—Beweisen. 24 Martens, “Cities under Siege,” 193–96. 25 Newes from Italy, fol. A7v. 26 Anhorn, Erschrockenliche Zeitung, fol. A3v.

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While a topographical key to the vanished sites of Plurs was never appended to the early pamphlets, beginning with the 1618 Hardmeyer broadside (Figs. 10.1–3), it reappears through the Walch and Van der Heyden editions (Figs. 10.8–12). Whether entirely factual or not, the assemblage is a trove of information, especially in concert with the pamphlets. Even with ten people to a house and more in the palaces, one is hard pressed to account for housing for fifteen hundred people within this image. Helpfully, Walch’s second broadside text notes that the image does not show all the houses, just the most notable (“vornembste”) ones (Fig. 10.10). Many locations have family names attached, sometimes even professions and implied marital status in the case of the five presumed widows who owned their own homes. The main buildings included houses, palaces, and churches, with businesses such as two butchers, a bakery, a tailor, two mills, two inns, a “Lusthaus” (4) or gazebo attached to a palace, and although it lacked a stand-alone jail, there was a “Spinnhaus” (12), where female inmates worked looms. This building was flanked by houses owned by women, who may have sequestered them from the miners and stone craftsmen. A lone set of gallows remained untouched, just outside the rockslide’s dotted pathway to the west. The local wine cellars also survived the destruction, as they were clustered on the outskirts of the town on the left side. There were also three adjoining houses by the river for carving the soapstone into the valuable wares that had brought the town international renown. In addition to the mines, many natural resources are highlighted, such as the treasured groves of sweet chestnut trees on the mountain slopes (41). Hardmeyer, Walch, and Van der Heyden depict them as conifer-like trees with a pointed crest and triangular overall shape (Fig. 10.12), and show vineyards on the midrange hills with distinctively etched squiggles indicating the vines. There were evidently numerous decorative gardens as well. A 1618 French pamphlet from Lyon mentions an orangery enclosed in silver vases near the fountain in the square opposite the biggest palace, and later iterations of the broadsides, like a 1635 version by Matthäus Merian (1593–1650) and another in 1723 by Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733), further formalize the designs with more prominent geometric shapes, and suggest a courtly ambiance to each separate plot.27 Scheuchzer had particularly direct knowledge of Hardmeyer’s original design; while he knew Merian’s version, by 1718, Scheuchzer had already reprinted the Plurs etching plates, including its flap, in another book on the natural history of Switzerland.28 Anhorn’s pamphlet described the style of Plurs’s Italianate fruit gardens as not unlike the Posillipo area of Naples and the Genoa Riviera, while Walch’s second 27 Discours deplorable d’un estrange accident survenu le septiesme Septembre, au Bourg de Plurs, 6; Merian, Theatrum Europaeum, 115–16; Scheuchzer, Uresiphoitēs Helveticus, 106–7. 28 Scheuchzer, Helvetiae historia naturalis, after 136. Appendix 1a.

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broadside twice refers to the district as being in the flower or bloom of its life (“in Flor” and “im flor und esse”) before its downfall.29 As with the overabundance and temptation of the Garden of Eden, a climactic theft seems to have coincided with the disaster. One of the survivors, the mute young man from a neighboring area, was up a peach tree, secretly helping himself to the ripe crop of a stranger’s garden. This anecdote not only suggests an additional form of produce in this vibrant and fecund valley, but also implies that the act of stealing it coincided, perhaps meaningfully, with the disaster. Climbing back down at the moment of the rockslide’s impact, the boy was tossed in the air, and his shoes were blown off his feet during his flight.30

Disaster Landscapes of Biblical Proportions There would be many other comparisons between Plurs and biblical landscapes, but very few drew on recent events. Though Pliny the Younger’s accounts were known, the popular rediscovery of Pompeii was still to come in the eighteenth century, and it was not compared to the supposed fifteen hundred (or actual 930) deaths at Plurs. The much less devastating 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius would inspire its own broadsides and comparisons to the recent memory of Plurs, but none bore flaps.31 Likewise, the collapse of another over-mined mountain, the Mönchsberg overlooking Salzburg, would be a comparable, albeit more minor event with some 230 victims in 1669.32 With what disasters could the destruction of Plurs be compared when it happened in so much more of a historical vacuum? A French pamphlet alluded to current events such as the fire that had burned the palace on the Paris Isle de la Cité earlier in 1618, but allowed that “this is but little in respect” of the Plurs incident.33 Zeller recently alluded to the fact that Plurs was linked to the three comets that appeared later in the fall of 1618, suggesting that they were interpreted together as a foreshadowing of the Thirty Years’ War, but these references to the comets do not yet appear in the 1618 Plurs pamphlets or the 1619 Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio.34 More remotely, Mang’s German translation of an Italian pamphlet on Plurs from 1618 cites Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle discussion of a 29 Anhorn, Erschrockenliche Zeitung, fol. A3r. 30 Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio, 4. 31 Koppenleitner, Katastrophenbilder. 32 Hauer, Der plötzliche Tod Bergstürze in Salzburg und Plurs kulturhistorisch betrachtet, 15–16. While other alpine areas provided marble, this area was mined for both a sturdy stone conglomerate (“Nagelfluh”) and lime (“Kalkalpenstein”). 33 English translation in Newes from Italy, A4r–A4v. 34 Zeller, “Reading Images,” 64.

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Fig. 10.13: Michael Wolgemut and workshop, Destruction of Burgundian Mountain, in Das Buch der Chroniken und Geschichten (Nuremberg: Hartmann Schedel, 1493), fol. 212v. Woodcut and letterpress, 10 × 8 cm (block), Chicago, Newberry Library, call no. Inc.2086a. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago. Photo: Author.

Burgundian mountain that was rent asunder in the thirteenth century, supposedly killing thousands (Fig. 10.13).35 The repeated image of comets and meteorological wonders throughout the Chronicle marking portents measure at only a quarter its size, suggesting that this rockslide woodblock represented a uniquely important subject, and so, unusually, may have been used only once within the book. It shows some fifteen men and women crushed together between two collapsing mountains, their bent peaks already almost touching. Only heads and shoulders are visible, clad in a medley of pointed headdresses, turbans, and helmets. While most accept their fate, one lamenting male figure is at least partially naked and tearing his hair in a show of despair akin to Last Judgment imagery. The Chronicle claims there were five thousand casualties before the destruction miraculously ceased. Indeed, just as with Plurs, where the unthinkable happened, and an entire town of fifteen hundred souls vanished in the blink of an eye, the only way to understand the meaning of the damage was through scripture. In a moment fraught with tacit confessional leanings, the pamphlets about the Plurs disaster often went into specifics of the inhabitants’ wealth and religion. By the 1600s, the canton of Graubünden overall, as well as Chur, and Zurich, where 35 This oddly learned, though outdated bit of book historiography was omitted from the otherwise identical Italian version of the pamphlet. German translation in Il Compassionevole Infortunio, 3.

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Hardmeyer published his prints, were mostly Protestant. Except for the most influential families, including the Vertemas, however, the paper record suggests that Plurs was mainly still Catholic, and some sources imply that its faith in Rome may have caused its fall.36 The untraced 1618 pamphlet from Milan that Mang reprinted in Augsburg stated that there were “only three or four houses that were not Catholic.” An English translation of this same pamphlet tweaks the reference, saying that it was “whollie Popish” and implies that their churches were too expensively decorated, before rescinding the potential insult: “the Kirkes (well recommended for their building, rich Ornamentes, and Treasure) seemed sufficientlie to witness the pietie of that people.”37 In an allusion to the miracles worked by Catholic relics, several accounts mention that the church bells of central St. Mary’s survived being borne half a league away. Finally, the Prague pamphlet bitterly lists residents of its own who perished in Plurs, an area “so despicably destroyed that it could hardly have been more terrible at Sodom and Gomorrah.” Casting further aspersions by twice mentioning that the disaster took place on the Saturday directly after the feast day of St. Bartholomew (August 24), it may have implicitly blamed relaxation during that Catholic holiday for the lack of concern at signs of trouble in the nearby hills.38 While Hardmeyer’s 1618 broadside text makes no explicit comparison with biblical landscapes, the pamphlet he published the same year that was authored by the seeming witness Anhorn, who was a local, Reformed Protestant minister, includes both the greatest detail about the economic value per capita and the earliest printed objection to the town’s sins. The title page paraphrases Luke 13:2–6, a parable about the death of eighteen people in Jerusalem when the Siloam tower collapsed. Not assigning blame, Jesus frames it as a warning to all believers. While the many dead in Plurs greatly increased the impact of the lesson, the pamphlet went on to quote all of Isaiah 23:1–9 at the end, in an explicit comparison with the trade empire of Tyre, which the God of the Old Testament was determined to eliminate. Neither Johann Philipp Walch’s first Plurs edition, nor Jacob van der Heyden’s flap print extend Hardmeyer’s original short introduction. But an additional anecdote quoted in the second Walch edition (Figs. 10.9–10) originated in the 1619 news report from the Frankfurt Fair, the Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio (Fig. 10.14). This publication was itself well aware of the Hardmeyer print, copying the before-and-after image in two static panels, with the before image at the top including the ninety-three locations keyed to Hardmeyer’s list, which it reprinted verbatim. The entirely new section of text claims that among the wreckage a carved 36 On the Italian Reformed Church in Graubünden, see: Taplin, The Italian Reformers, 254–95; for Switzerland in general, see Head, “The Swiss Reformations.” 37 Newes from Italy, 2–3. 38 Warhafftige erschreckliche Newe Zeitung, fols. A[1]r–A2r, A3r.

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Fig. 10.14: Balthasar Schwan, Warhafftige abbildung des fleckens Plürs, in Grauenbünden gelegen, wie solcher Flecken noch in Esse und Flor gewesen Anno 1618, Warhaffte abbildung des orhts da der flecken Plurs gestanden, wie solcher nach seinem schröcklichen undergang anzusehen, in Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio (Frankfurt am Main: [Sigismundus Latomus], 1619). Etching, 40.8 × 31.6 cm (sheet), Chicago, Newberry Library, call no. map2F G6714.P715A3 1619.W37. Image: © Newberry Library, Chicago. Photo: Catherine Gass.

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stone was found with Hebrew letters spelling out a warning. An expert, named as “Doctor of Theology Huber from (Catholic) Lucerne,” provided a German translation: So speaks the Lord. Is my word not like a pickaxe that smites the rocky cliff? Fly away from Babylon, let each man save his life, let no one be silent about their sins, lest the punishment of the Lord return and reward your wickedness.39

This quotation draws on several Bible verses, especially Jeremiah 23:29, which usually starts with the phrase “Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”40 Here Walch omits the first comparison, leaving only the second that describes God’s vengeance as a hammer. Walch’s unusual use of the more specific word “Pickel,” or “pickaxe,” instead may be a conscious choice, perhaps intending to reflect the fact that mining had previously supported the lavish lifestyle of the district’s inhabitants. This was not an isolated use of the term; many of the pamphlets discuss the impact of the rockslide as the thrust of an arrow, a bolt, or even a hammer or pickaxe. Unusually, Balthasar Schwan’s dual illustration for the Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio reifies this momentum in inscribing two literal arrow signs crossed at the base (↑), into the image pointing upward on the face of the mountain at the location that was to blame for the powerful explosion. The text calls out these symbols explicitly: “Der Berg hat sich erhaben an dem Orth, so mit diesem Zeichen (↑) im Kupferstück angedeutet mit solchen Gewalt, das kein Stein auff dem anderen blieben […].” The appearance of the curious inscription and its suspiciously belated publication presents another seeming confirmation of the cursedness of the site of Plurs overall. Indeed, several writers urged that the land never be built upon again, for fear of renewed retribution. While the lake has long since receded, and no new settlement 39 Walch, Warhafftige Abbildung desz Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen, wie solcher noch in Flor gewesen: “So spricht der HErr, Ist mein Wort nicht wie ein Pickel der Felsen zerschlägt, Fliehet hinweg von Babylon, rette ein jeder sein Leben, niemand schweige zu ihrer Sünden, denn die Straffe deβ HErrn wird widerkommen, und wird ihn vergelten ihre Boβheit.” Zeller credits a text very similar to this quotation as appearing in Merian’s Theatrum Europaeum in 1635, but it appeared at least twice previously in 1619, in both the Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio and in Walch’s second edition of the Plurs broadside. Walch’s text is unique among the three in omitting the phrase about fire, emphasizing instead the Pickel or pickaxe, which suggests Merian copied the Relationis text. Merian, Theatrum Europaeum, 1:115; Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio, 4–5; Zeller, “Reading Images,” 66, note 16. 40 Translation from the King James version of the Bible.

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has moved in, the site has hosted archaeological digs since the 1960s and now has a small museum on the topic. 41 A final moralizing element of the printed Plurs landscape presents a visual puzzle: the lonely set of gallows in its remote location on the outskirts of the town, its location far to the right implying a shared justice system with neighboring Prosto (Figs. 10.1, 10.9, 10.10). In no version does the rockslide flap cover up these gallows, suggesting that it might represent a pointed moral conceit. It was omitted from the single surviving painting of pre-disaster Plurs, even though the remote area where it should be—between two tributaries and bridges, just beside the main road—is populated only with trees and shrubs. This artwork is likely still housed in the Vertema family summer palace where it was at the time of the disaster, just far enough away in Prosto to escape the damage. 42 The gallows was a common sight in early modern landscape prints, marking cityscapes as early as the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle (with a triple gibbet in front of Nuremberg), Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographiae, first printed in 1544 (including Paris, and Chur, part of the same Graubünden canton as Plurs), and more recently, in Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum of 1572–1617 (Schwabisch Hall and others). The gallows’ placement along an exterior road may allude to the apprehension and execution of highwaymen and brigands intent on entering the formerly affluent district. But perhaps the sordid aftertaste of justice is now reflected on the onceproud region itself. Indeed, Zimmerman’s Augsburg pamphlet etching for Mang increases the total to two swaying bodies in his “Luogo della forca” (Fig. 10.7).

The Flap Broadside Continued: Audiences and the 1631 Storming of Magdeburg Ephemeral publications often documented equally ephemeral events, but their paper evidence appeared in sufficiently large editions that traces remain. Andrew Pettegree has recently argued that broadsheets (or broadsides) have been sporadically and inconsistently cataloged, sometimes in the same institutions, and even within the pioneering research done by cultural historian Robert W. Scribner on popular print, and the assembly of catalogs by Max Geisberg, Wolfgang Harms, and Roger Paas on German illustrated broadsides. 43 As Pettegree notes, emphasis has been 41 “Wieder Licht über Plurs”; Presser, Von Berge verschlungen; Zala, “Sulle vestigia dell’antica Piuro,” 10–30. 42 Kahl, “Plurs,” 274–78. 43 Pettegree, Broadsheets, 4, and on news, 25–27. While Scribner integrated the broadsheets into a narrative, Geisberg, Harms, and Paas cataloged broadsheets by artist, topic, and historical event respectively. Geisberg, Der deutsche Einblatt-Holzschnitt in der ersten Hälfte des XVI. Jahrhunderts; Harms, Deutsche

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weighted toward illustrated sheets rather than purely textual ones, skewing their discoverability because the latter are more rarely published or cataloged as single items. But perhaps the pictures and even the flaps also helped the sheets survive. As Pettegree notes, the ones with illustrations, particularly with intaglio additions like the Plurs flap etchings, which required a secondary, cylindrical press, may not have been in a “popular” price bracket at all. Labor was less expensive than materials, but the additional step to print, cut out, and add flaps from another matrix also increased the publication’s overall complexity. None of the Plurs prints sought noble patronage by way of a dedication, and the shorter pamphlets aimed at a wide range of readers including the merchant class. Most of the impressions shown in this article are from seventeenth-century princely collections, including the founder of the Herzog August Bibliothek (Fig. 10.1), the princely Kunstsammlungen Waldburg-Wolfegg (Fig. 10.10), and from the Bavarian electoral core of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Fig. 10.8). Seemingly, they had an ongoing value to the elite who also maintained the best ability to preserve the prints. While the Herzog August Bibliothek sheets are now mainly kept in individual folders, a variety of disaster prints and Wunderzeichen appeared in one manuscript owned by August himself, and were likely assembled for him by Augsburg merchant and diplomat Philip Hainhofer. 44 Indeed, the Schultes and Mannasser Plurs sheet illustrated here, and another impression of Walch’s f irst edition, appeared on consecutive folios (Figs. 10.5, 10.8). In contrast, most of the Wolfegg broadsheets are still preserved in their original albums; the Walch is plate no. 67 in one volume entitled “Flugblätter” (“Fugitive Sheets”) on the spine (Fig. 10.10). Meanwhile in album 88, labeled “Landkarten und Stadtansichten” (“Maps and City Views”), plate 214 is an impression of the lower half of the etching from the 1619 Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio. The upper half containing the before image was cut away and attached earlier in the album as plate no. 212. This left only the lower half with the image from after the disaster on no. 214, while the idyllic top half of Matthäus Merian’s 1635 view was pasted onto the page in between. While the Newberry Walch impression lacks definitive provenance, it too bears a number, 480, on the right, that suggests it could have been part of a large album of similar historical views (Fig. 10.11). The fact that the Princes of Wolfegg acquired multiple views of the destruction of Plurs, and might have themselves cut them apart and reimagined their album order, speaks volumes; the elite collecting of seventeenth-century disaster flaps did not stop there. illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts; Paas, The German Political Broadsheet; Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk. 44 Dr. Petra Feuerstein-Herz (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel), email to author, March 4, 2021.

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Like the 1618 Plurs disaster, news traveled quickly when the Thirty Years’ War caught up with the ill-fated German city of Magdeburg, with a two-month siege starting on May 10 (Julian) or May 20 (Gregorian), 1631.45 No act of God, the devastation here was man-made by the Count Tilly, acting on behalf of the Catholic League and the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, who demanded long-overdue tribute. Magdeburg had allied itself with the King of Sweden, but reinforcement troops did not arrive. Tilly’s forces broached its city walls with cannons, and by the end of the ensuing sack three days later, most of the buildings had burned down, and all but five thousand of its twenty-five thousand inhabitants were dead. 46 Two broadsides of the sack with flap attachments from the orbit of Jacob van der Heyden also survive in some seven variations and nineteen impressions, only one of which he signed (in the lower left of the etching) (Figs. 10.15–17).47 The wide margin of blank space around the flap from that signed sheet unintentionally signals its physical presence amid the tumult of the battle ringing the city walls, while simultaneously depicting the post-sack city on the top of the flap (Fig. 10.16).48 But the underlying layer still depicts the attack in progress, rather than an idyllic pre-sack view (Fig. 10.17). Rather than emphasizing Magdeburg’s idealized past (which would take until the eighteenth century to restore), the emphasis is on the stages of the dramatic moment at hand. Indeed, for the haptically engaged reader who looks underneath the flap for a way inside, the letter “A” denotes four points where the walls were broached by the enemy (Fig 10.17). 49 Like the Plurs broadsheets, the letterpress below both prints estimates the number of buildings left standing (about two hundred of nineteen hundred) after the fire, and the means and number of survivors. These were mostly women and girls who had fled into the main church; the others who hid underground in cellars suffocated and burned. The final words describe the sheer force of the invasion in familiar visual terms. Its destruction happened, they say, in almost no time at all, 45 Smith, “The Destruction of Magdeburg,” 247–71. 46 Like Jacob van der Heyden, the news-savvy Daniel Mannasser would illustrate another broadsheet on this widely lamented occurrence, and went on to publish one on the Vesuvius eruption that soon followed it. 47 See Paas, The German Political Broadsheet, 1337–1340 (anonymous etching), 1341–1342, and 3957 (etching signed by Van der Heyden). According to Paas, thirteen impressions retain their flaps. 48 As the flaps attach within the image of the city, neither Magdeburg broadside had a seamlessly installed flap. In the Hardmeyer version of the Plurs sheet, the tab was more easily secured in a slit beneath the letterpress title at the top, but Van der Heyden did not adopt that technique here. At the Herzog August Bibliothek, the flap is kept as a separate piece entirely. 49 The version of the sheet that Van der Heyden signed bears a shorter letterpress text, with a historical narrative of the events leading up to the siege, and its bloody aftermath (Fig. 10.16). Further lines added to the legend in two later states identify the flap, “E,” as showing the city after its storming, and describe the combat and the city’s imperial antagonists (“M. Tyli” appears on horseback to the far right).

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Fig. 10.15: Anonymous, Eigentlicher Abriß, Auch Waarhafftiger Bericht, wie es mit Eroberung der uhralten, Weitberühmbten Stadt Magdeburg hergangen… Der 10 oder 30 Mai, 1631 ([Strasbourg: Jacob van der Heyden?], 1631). Etching with letterpress on two attached sheets: upper part 29 × 37 cm, lower part approx. 29 × 36 cm, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. 219–1–Quod-25. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

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Fig. 10.16: Jacob van der Heyden, Eigentlicher Bericht, So wol auch Abcontrafeytung, welcher gestalt die weitberühmbte unnd mächtige Hense Statt Magdeburg von dem Käyserlichen General Herrn Serclas Grafen von Tilly, a. den 20 Tag Maji dieses jetzkauffenden 1631. Jahres mit gewehrter und stürmender Hand erobert worden ([Strasbourg: Jacob van der Heyden?], 1631). Etching with letterpress on two attached sheets: 58 × 40 cm (two sheets together), Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, call no. IH 546.1. Image: © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

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Fig. 10.17: Jacob van der Heyden, Flap lifted, detail of Fig. 10.16.

yet again, “in einem Augenblick.” Magdeburg herself quickly perished, and became a ruin. While this phrase was likely a more accurate description of the time frame of the irrepressible rockslide in Plurs, the Magdeburg fire indeed caught quickly. The anonymous broadside specifically mentions that the soldiers did not have any bread, perhaps to explain why, upon entering the city, they rampaged through to steal what they could, committing atrocities along the way. While there are officers on horseback and soldiers manning the cannons at the perimeter of the walled city, all that one can see inside the fortifications and under the flap, is buildings in flame.

Conclusions Flap print landscapes were relatively uncommon throughout the seventeenth century, so the grouping of broadsheets by Hardmeyer, Van der Heyden, and Walch forms an unusual corpus in response to the unexpected landscape of devastation at Plurs. Besides Van der Heyden’s subsequent Magdeburg publication and attributed sheet on sexual mores, none of them produced anything of this interactive ilk again. From the proliferation of impressions and careful wording, it seems likely that they would have had no difficulty selling their existing stock in many markets, to Catholics and Protestants alike. The survival of at least thirty-eight

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Fig. 10.18: Anonymous, Warhaffte abbildung deß fläckens Plurs, in den Grawen Pündten gelagen (Zurich: Johann Hardmeyer, 1618). Flap broadside with etching and letterpress, hand-colored, 52 × 39.5 cm (sheet), Zurich, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, call no. LM 62228. Image: © Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, Zurich.

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total impressions of these flap prints, and their impact on subsequent prints into the eighteenth century, may point to a relatively high rate of production in a genre in which sheets rarely survive in bulk. None of the Plurs or Magdeburg flap prints included a song to elevate the pathos of the text; they simply did not need to engage any more of the viewer’s senses. While news in all formats served as a reminder of those less fortunate, the addition of a flap brought the viewers literally and figuratively closer to the incident, and would have offered an irresistible frisson of Schadenfreude, as there but for the grace of God, and a well-timed show of humility, went they. Centuries before the proverbial train or car wreck from which the witness cannot look away, these interactive broadsides provided self-paced and safely removed drama, with a you-are-there, front-row seat to the spectacle of mighty and unexpected destruction. While most are in black and white, the one hand-painted Hardmeyer impression (Fig. 10.18) would have overwhelmed users with the change in color of the decimated landscape—from vibrant greens to stony grays and browns—just as the stench that arose from the sunken pit covered the area and sickened and killed some of the first responders attempting to search for bodies, a lingering result much like that of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. The multiple impressions now lacking flaps further reinforce the prints’ inherent need to move, and confirm that users could never keep their hands off them.

Appendix: Census of Destruction of Plurs Flap Broadsheets At least five editions in nineteen surviving seventeenth-century impressions: (Figs. 10.1–3; 10.8; 10.9; 10.10–12; 10.18) 1. Johann Hardmeyer, Warhaffte abbildung deβ fläckens PLURS, in den Grawen Pündten gelagen, 1618. Original edition. Etching and letterpress, with flap (without compass rose in lake) (Harms 1:212; Paas 1874): Herzog August Bibliothek (call no. IP 18) (Figs. 10.1–3); Chur, Kantonsbibliothek Graubünden (call no. SF Piuro GF 7); St. Gallen, Kantonsbibliothek, Vadianische Sammlung (call no. Ms 233 (K45r), in album); Zurich, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum (call no. LM 62228, hand colored) (Fig. 10.18); Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, Kartensammlung (call no. 3 Ge 03: 11). 1a. Restrike from original Hardmeyer plates. Etching with flap, and letterpress broadsheet text on following pages, ca. 1718. In Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, Helvetiae historia naturalis oder Natur-Historie des Schweitzerlands …, [Zurich]: [in der Bodmerischen Truckerey], [1716–1718], Erster Teil, after 136. Numerous Swiss collections, including: Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek; Zurich, ETH-Bibliothek; Zurich, Zentralbibliothek.

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2. Italian copy after Hardmeyer. Alli Molto Illustri Signori, Il Sig. Capitanio Giacomo Martino Fabii de Prevosti, et il Sig. Ministrale Tomasino Tomasini A’ Montacio Grisoni di Bregalia. Viene cuesto mio disegno dell’infelice Terra di Piure …. Etching only, with flap, ca. 1618–1619: No impression located.50 3–4. Johann Philipp Walch: Two editions copying Hardmeyer. 3. Warhaffte Abbildung desz Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen. Etching and letterpress with flap and with nearly identical broadside text to Hardmeyer, 1619 (Drugulin 1345; Paas 3882): 3a. Early state without compass rose on lake flap: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (call no. Einblattdrucke V, 8) (Fig. 10.8); Germanisches Nationalmuseum (call no. HB 862); Halle, Universitätsund Landesbibliothek (call no. AB 153555 (2)); KB Stockholm (call no. De la Garde 121). 3b. Second state with compass rose on lake flap: Germanisches Nationalmuseum (call no. HB 24678); Herzog August Bibliothek (call nos. IP 19 and 38.25 Aug. 2°, fol. 810); Zurich, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum (call no. LM-64871). 4. Warhafftige Abbildung deβ Flecken Plurs, in Grawen Bündten gelegen, wie solcher noch in Flor gewesen …. Etching and letterpress with flap and significantly longer title and text, in part derived from 1619 Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio (Paas 3883): Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek (call no. Einblattdrucke nach 1500, 153, low-hanging flap); Frankfurt am Main, Universitätsbibliothek (call no. Einblattdrucke GFr. 51, lacking flap); Kunstsammlungen Waldburg-Wolfegg (call no. Album 250, no. 67) (Fig. 10.10); Newberry Library (call no. map2F G6714.P715A3 1619 .W35, lacking flap) (Figs. 10.11–12); Private Collection, Switzerland (lacking flap and text).51 5–6. Jacob van der Heyden: Two prints copying Hardmeyer, one with flap. 5. Warhaffte abbildung deß fläckens PLURS, in den Grawen Pündten gelägen. Etching and letterpress with flap, 1619 (Drugulin 1344): Halle an der Saale (call no. F789, damaged, flap missing) (Fig. 10.9).

50 Reproductions of the print with both views of the flap in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich are illustrated in Kahl, “Plurs,” 259–60. 51 The private collection, Switzerland, impression is illustrated in Kahl, “Plurs,” 257.

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6. Warhaffte unnd eigentliche Abbildung deß Fleckens Pluers, in den Grawen Pündten gelägen. Etching and letterpress, no flap, undated, but published in Strasbourg in conjunction with Marx van der Heyden (Paas 3875): Technische Universität Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek (call no. Q 763/525/3); Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, Kartensammlung (call no. 3 Ge 03: 17). Designed without a flap, but a small window at upper right shows predisaster Plurs. German and French translation.

Works Cited Anhorn, Bartholomäus. Erschrockenliche Zeitung, wie der schöne Hauptflecken Plurs in der Graffschafft Cleven, in der dreyen Grawen Pündten alter freyer Rhaetia Underthanen Land, inn der nacht auff den 25. Augusti diβ 1618. Jahrs, mit Leut unnd Gut, in schneller eyl undergangen sei. Zurich: Johann Hardmeyer, 1618. Balfe, Thomas, Joanna Woodall, and Claus Zittel, eds. Ad Vivum? Visual Materials and the Vocabulary of Life-Likeness in Europe before 1800. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Il Compassionevole Infortunio, Occurso alli 4 di Settembre del presente anno 1618, all infelice Terra di Piure; quale è restata somersa sotto parte una Montagna, con perdita di tutte le gente, e robbe. Descritto dall’ Orviet. Ad instanza del Verona. Beschreibung des Flecken Plurs Undergang, den vierdten Septembris 1618. Augsburg: Sara Mang and Peter Zimmerman, 1618. Curtabat, Joachim. Warhafftige und erschreckliche Newe Zeitung. Von dem plötzlichen Untergang der wolbekandten Stadt Plurs in Bergel und gemeinen dreyen Pündten gelegen. Halle (Saxony): Peter Schmidt, 1618. Discours deplorable d’un estrange accident survenu le septiesme Septembre, au Bourg de Plurs …. Lyon, 1618. Drugulin, Wilhelm Eduard. W. Drugulin’s Historischer Bilderatlas: Verzeichnis einer Sammlung von Einzelblättern zur Kultur- und Staatengeschichte vom fünfzehnten bis in das neunzehnte Jahrhundert. Leipzig: Kunst-Comptoir, 1863–1867. Falappi, Gian Primo. “Relazioni su Piuro dopo la frana.” In La frana di Piuro del 1618: Storia e immagini di una rovina, edited by Guido Scaramellini, Günther Kahl, and Gian Primo Falappi, 107–374. Piuro: Associazione italo-svizzera per gli scavi di Piuro, 1988. Geisberg, Max. Der deutsche Einblatt-Holzschnitt in der ersten Hälfte des XVI. Jahrhunderts: die Gesamtverzeichnisse. Munich: Schmidt, 1930. Harms, Wolfgang. Deutsche illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. 9 vols. Munich: Kraus International Publications, 1980–2018. Hauer, Katrin. Der plötzliche Tod Bergstürze in Salzburg und Plurs kulturhistorisch betrachtet. Kulturwissenschaft 23. Vienna: Lit-Verlag, 2009.

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Head, Randolph C. “The Swiss Reformations: Movements, Settlements, and Reimagination, 1520–1720.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations, edited by Ulinka Rublack, 167–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Kahl, Günther. “Plurs. Zur Geschichte der Darstellungen des Fleckens Plurs vor und nach dem Bergsturz von 1618.” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 41 (1984): 249–82. Karr Schmidt, Suzanne. Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Koppenleitner, Vera Fionie. Katastrophenbilder: Der Vesuvausbruch 1631 in den Bildkunsten der Frühen Neuzeit. Italienische Forschungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, I Mandorli Series 22. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2018. Martens, Pieter. “Cities under Siege Portrayed ad vivum in Early Netherlandish Prints (1520–1564). In Ad Vivum? Visual Materials and the Vocabulary of Life-Likeness in Europe before 1800, edited by Thomas Balfe, Joanna Woodall, and Claus Zittel, 151–99. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Merian, Matthäus. Theatrum Europaeum, oder, Aussführliche und Warhaffte Beschreibung aller und jeder denckwürdigen Geschichten. Frankfurt am Main: Wolffgang Hoffmann, 1635–1738. Moroni, Lino. Descrizione del sacro monte della Vernia. Florence, 1612. Münkner, Jörn. Eingreifen und Begreifen: Handhabungen und Visualisierungen in Flugblättern der Frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2008. Newes from Italy. Or, A Prodigious and most lamentable Accident lately befallen: Concerning the swallowing up of the whole Citty of Pleurs. London: Printed by N.O. for Nathaniell Newbery and John Pyper, 1618. Oy-Marra, Elisabeth, and Irina Schmiedel, eds. Zeigen—Überzeugen—Beweisen: Methoden der Wissensproduktion in Kunstliteratur, Kennerschaft und Sammlungspraxis der Frühen Neuzeit. Merzhausen: Ad Picturam, 2020. Paas, John Roger. The German Political Broadsheet, 1600–1700. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1985–2017. Parshall, Peter. “Imago Contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance.” Art History 16, no. 4 (December 1993): 554–79. Petta, Massimo, “Wild Nature and ‘Religious’ Readings of Events: Natural Disasters in Milanese Printed Reports (16th–17th Century).” In Historicizing Religion: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Concerns, edited by Bojan Borstner, Smiljana Gartner, Sabine Deschler-Erb, Charles Dalli, and Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile, 199–231. Pisa: Plus-Pisa University Press, 2010. Pettegree, Andrew, ed. Broadsheets: Single-Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Presser, Helmut. Von Berge verschlungen—in Büchern bewahrt: Plurs, ein Pompeji des 17. Jahrhunderts im Bergell. Bern: Peter Lang, 1963.

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Relationis historicae semestralis continuatio. Frankfurt am Main: [Sigismundus Latomus], 1619. Scheuchzer, Johann Jacob. Uresiphoitēs Helveticus, Sive Itinera Per Helvetiae Alpinas Regiones. Lyon: Vander Aa, 1723. Scribner, Robert W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Smith, Jeffrey Chipps. “The Destruction of Magdeburg in 1631: The Art of a Disastrous Victory.” In Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700, edited by Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika, 247–71. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Taplin, Mark. The Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, c. 1540–1620. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Warhafftige erschreckliche Newe Zeitung, von de plötzlichen Untergang der Stadt Plurs …. Prague: Paul Seffen, 1618. “Wieder Licht über Plurs.” Die Woche 14 (27 March–2 April 1961): 11–16. Wilson, Bronwen. “Sacred and Material Conversions: Jacopo Ligozzi and the Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Vernia (1612).” In Conversion Machines in Early Modern Europe: Apparatus, Artifice, Body, edited by Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2023. Zala, Romerio. “Sulle vestigia dell’antica Piuro.” Quaderni grigionitaliani 34 (1965): 10–30. Zeller, Rosemarie. “Reading Images of Natural Disaster in Printed Media of Early Modern Europe.” In Disaster as Image: Iconographies and Media Strategies across Europe and Asia, edited by Monica Juneja and Gerrit Jasper Schenk, 55–70. Regensburg: Verlag Schnell & Steiner, 2014.

About the Author Suzanne Karr Schmidt is the Newberry Library’s Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts. A Yale University Ph.D., she curated Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life as the Art Institute of Chicago’s Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, and recently published Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance.

11. Performative Landscapes: A Paradigm for Mediating the Ecological Imperative? Peter J. Schneemann

Abstract The traditional paradigm of landscape has acquired new relevance for using the arts as a tool in negotiating the current environmental crisis. This essay focuses on the ways artists have explored the body in the environment through art since the 1960s, in the process throwing the historical relationship of the landscape to the subject’s composing gaze into question. This performative aspect suggests how the body can position itself for potential actions and affects. The importance of performances and settings that offer explorations and rehearsals of possible scenarios, as well as multi-sensory experiences to the public, is discussed with select examples that mark a shift from a representational to a situational aesthetics. Keywords: Halprin; eco-criticism; display; anthropology; performance; temporalities

Documentation and Reenactment Viewers were invited to discover geological drawings and diagrams of cosmic constellations on walls. Display cases contained documentation of collective body exercises that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Carefully framed black and white photographs showed people dancing on a beach (Fig. 11.1). The monumental handpainted diagram on the back wall representing the score of a performance workshop that combined dance and ecology, however, did not fit in with the surrounding minimalistic exhibition design (Fig. 11.2). The documents on display conveyed the ideas of Anna and Lawrence Halprin who conceived of dance as integral to forming a new relationship with the environment. The faded photographs of the group were reminiscent of even older rituals familiar from the early twentieth-century

Göttler, C. & M. M. Mochizuki (eds.), Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463729437_ch11

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Fig. 11.1: Anna Halprin, Dancers at Halprin’s Driftwood Beach Summer Event Joint Workshop, 1966. Still image. Image: © Anna Halprin, courtesy of the Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco. Photo: Constance Beeson.

Fig. 11.2: Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Scores and Documentation, Installation view, documenta 14, Athens, 2017. Image: © Anna and Lawrence Halprin.

Performative L andscapes: A Par adigm for Mediating the Ecological Imper ative? 

Fig. 11.3: Anna and Lawrence Halprin, Scores and Documentation, Installation view, documenta 14, Athens, 2017. Image: © Anna and Lawrence Halprin.

Lebensreform (life reform) movement. This documentation was complemented by discolored film footage and accompanied by a display of Lawrence Halprin’s system of creative methodology, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (1969), developed in close collaboration with his partner Anna Halprin.1 I describe a display curated for the 2017 documenta, which took place in Athens and Kassel (Figs. 11.2 and 11.3).2 It was a show shaped by numerous historical positions, garnering both criticism and controversy on several occasions. These positions were invoked in a way that avoided a clear answer to the question of whether to reactivate them in order to bring historical positions into the present. Scores, schemata, and documentation served as forms of art that, in their limitation and modesty, radically questioned concepts of representation and presence (Fig. 11.4). One could speak of a demonstration of failure brought on by invoking extinct languages of utopian maxims. The aesthetics of notation are closely related to the artistic discipline of performance. It appears as if the curatorial team of the 2017 documenta recognized the potential inherent in this discipline not only to address the political and social 1 Halprin, The RSVP Cycles; Hirsch, “Scoring the Participatory City,” 127–40. For Halprin, see also: Creighton Neall, Lawrence Halprin; Foley, Space, Time, Sound; Worth and Poynor, Anna Halprin. 2 Latimer and Szymczyk, documenta 14.

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Fig. 11.4: Lawrence Halprin, Sea Ranch Ecoscore, ca. 1968, in Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 122–23. Image: © The Halprin Estate.

responsibilities of art, but also to put them to the test. The focus no longer lay on an individual artist’s body, but rather on society as a body, on the “Parliament of Bodies,” negotiating issues of urgency.3 With all its claims, insistences, failures, and shortcomings, the exhibition revealed a fundamental reflection on modes of artistic work that went far beyond the immediacy of the display. Precise axioms were at stake: questioning the ability of art to mediate urgency through documentation and reconstruction, memory and presence, process and setting, individual experience and collective action, as well as open and closed structures. In other words, I would argue that the exhibition explored forms of mediation, addressing the very act of exposing, as well as the transition from representation to a more active public engagement. The historical works of dancer Anna Halprin (born Hannah Dorothy Schuman) and urbanist and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin were prominently recalled in both the Athens and Kassel venues of the 2017 documenta. In 1955, the legendary San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop was held on an open-air stage designed by Lawrence Halprin. 4 Key players from the art scene such as Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, John Cage, and Robert Morris were at one point members of

3 The “Parliament of Bodies” is a platform conceived by Paul B. Preciado and Viktor Neumann. In its ongoing activities, it questions the relationship between the institution and the public. Koepnick, “Documenting ‘Documenta.’” 4 Lawrence Halprin worked with an interdisciplinary group of landscape architects, ecologists, and social scientists, and he advocated for the involvement of society in processes of environmental design. Hirsch, “From ‘Open Space’ to ‘Public Space,’” 173–94; Hirsch, “Facilitation and/or Manipulation?,” 117–34.

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this highly dynamic experimental community.5 Lawrence Halprin’s attention to the social impact of environmental design seems just as topical now as does the connection between the body and the environment in Anna Halprin’s teachings of modern dance, recalling the therapeutic approaches found in current debates on the phenomena and potential of embodiment (kinesthetic awareness) in neuroscience.6 The aim was to dismantle preconceptions of the environment through multi-sensory experiences, such as blindfolded walks. One might describe this as a kind of artistic research on the interaction between the physical environment and social behavior. I deliberately chose Anna Halprin’s art as an example of work currently experiencing a broad revival in order to illustrate how the ecological imperative seeks artistic paradigm shifts and questions the role of art, not only in reflection, but in the development of an ecological consciousness within a society in need of options with which to act. I use the notion of an “ecological imperative,” built upon Kantian terms, to emphasize the importance of an ethical stance toward human resource management.7 The documenta showcased Halprin’s position in a way that considers processes of production and reception. By clearly establishing historical distance, however, the exhibition highlighted the fact that we are no longer capable of direct participation; we negotiated our position as second-order observers. This phenomenon brings to mind a specific reception behavior that involves imagining the past experience of others and giving it an afterlife by reenacting it.8 Reenactment is characteristically closely negotiated together with the notion of preenactment, and it is this from which it derives its political relevance. This can likewise be seen in the most recent works by Yael Bartana that imagine alternative histories and possible futures.9 The historical perspective thus not only demonstrates the long tradition of some of the paradigms under reconsideration today, but also the topic of ecology itself, where long-term development is inherent in its narrative and consciousness. As Aleida Assmann so convincingly argued, the current ecological debate is no longer simply about the pre- or post-avant-garde, but rather about geological epochs, 5 The Halprin Workshops, which initiated “Experiments in the Environment” in 1966, took place at Sea Ranch, a coastal community for which Lawrence Halprin designed the master plan (1962–1967). 6 Land, Schorn, and Wittmann, Anna Halprin. 7 Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility; Spivak, Imperatives to Re-imagine the Planet. See further: Arons and May, Readings in Performance and Ecology, with Arden Thomas’s critical excavation of performance ecology, 113–24; Stevens, Tait, and Varney, Feminist Ecologies; Zerdy, “Review of Readings in Performance and Ecology,” 174–76. 8 Halprin was also included in the Venice Biennale of the same year; the problematic reenactment of her 1987 Planetary Dance combined rituality and spirituality, promising an unconditional participation. 9 Schweizer, Yael Bartana; Marchart, “Public Movement,” 146–50; Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, “Yael Bartana”; especially her live performance What if Women Ruled the World?, 2017.

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Fig. 11.5: Pierre Huyghe, After ALife Ahead, temporary installation for the duration of the exhibition Skulptur Projekte, Münster, 2017. Concrete floor of ice rink, logic game, ammoniac, sand, clay, phreatic water, bacteria, algae, bees, aquarium, black switchable glass, Conus textile, GloFish, incubator, human cancer cells, genetic algorithm, augmented reality, automated ceiling structure, and rain. Location: former ice rink, Münster, Steinfurterstraße 113–115. Image: © ProLitteris, Zurich, 2021.

evocations of paradise, as well as apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios.10 There are a number of impressive artistic investigations concerned with ecosystems and environmental issues that contain temporal dimensions such as these. Think, for example, of Pierre Huyghe’s installation in the 2017 Münster Sculpture Projects with the telling title After ALife Ahead (2017) (Fig. 11.5).11 The renewed interest in historical positions is complexly related to important questions regarding the mediation of contemporary environmental issues. We must recognize the potential of art to play a major role in these current discussions on two different levels. First, art acts as a mode that empowers the social imaginary by modeling scenarios, and thus, drawing upon Charles Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary,” enables social practice.12 Second, complex temporalities can be explored in these artistic and curatorial approaches, with regard to ecological phenomena as essential qualities that exist between new claims for realism and the imaginary. Landscapes, again, 10 Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen?, 25–35; see also: Assmann, “The Future of Cultural Heritage and Its Challenges.” 11 For another example, see: the performance in Lithuania’s pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Sun & Sea (Marina), by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, playwright Vaiva Grainytė, and composer Lina Lapelytė. 12 For Charles Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary,” see: Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries.

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function as settings for scenarios that need to be explored and in which to rehearse future options for action.13

The Renewed Importance of the Landscape Landscape has not only served as a motif but also as a space in which to shape conceptions of the world: in the past as a paradise, or with regard to the future, as a dystopian scenario in which the conditions for life are destroyed. The landscape is therefore a key concept for the ecological discourse in the arts. This essay discusses artistic positions that highlight the tension between a kind of melancholic nostalgia on the one hand and a call for radical change in our environmental behavior on the other. Looking into this historical development, we clearly see the far-reaching implications that were involved in the process of artists actively inscribing themselves into the landscape. I want to focus on artistic projects that readdress the landscape as a dispositive that encompasses relationships between human and non-human entities.14 In projects that combine the traditional paradigm of the landscape with bodily performance, the emphasis is on modes of art that do not regard the ecological perspective as the subject of a separate genre of art, but as a mode that exceeds the function of an uninvolved mimesis and a distanced deixis.15 Here, the notion of landscape as an aesthetic form in which the perceiving subject is integral to the conception of unity and harmony is challenged in order to overcome the “oppositional relationship of culture and nature”.16 In the 1913 essay, Philosophie der Landschaft (Philosophy of Landscape), sociologist Georg Simmel highlighted the importance of the composition as a device that created a unity out of the limitlessness of nature and that converted visual perception into a tableau. It is striking how the aesthetic model, as described by Simmel in quite anthropocentric terms, has turned out to be a key concept in the ways in which geographers, philosophers, and anthropologists discuss new perspectives driven by ecological issues.17 In doing so, one might be confronted with historical conceptualizations of the model landscape, as discussed and employed by anthropologists Christopher Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum, and Tim Ingold.18 13 Ross, The Past Is the Present. 14 Andermann, Blackmore, and Carrillo Morell, Natura. 15 For Sacha Kagan’s definitions of the principles of eco-art and Linda Weintraub’s typologies of ecocriticism, see: Kagan, “The Practice of Ecological Art,” 1, and Kagan, Art and Sustainability; Weintraub, To Life!, 3–16. 16 Welsch, “Wie kann Kunst der Wirklichkeit nicht gegenüberstehen,” 179–200. 17 Simmel, “Philosophie der Landschaft,” 141–52; Mitchell, Landscape and Power. 18 Tilley and Cameron-Daum, An Anthropology of Landscape; Ingold, Being Alive.

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Landscape has maintained its ability to serve as an imaginary space in which to negotiate and experiment, a testing site for utopian and dystopian scenarios. The environmental setting is positioned as a garden, park, “untilled” space,19 a site, an abandoned island,20 a place to experience the mountains,21 or an example of hermetic living.22 There are countless examples in which contemporary art confronts its viewers with the complexity of ecosystems. These examples seem to visualize a desire to overcome static structures of display and the limitations of purely pointing at things. With an astonishingly strong reference to social anthropology, the landscape appears as a “sensuously encountered material form” that implies reciprocal relationships.23 The ecological perspective engendered a shift in focus to documentary images of endangered environments. It furthermore brought about a rediscovery of the complex aesthetics surrounding the depiction of catastrophes.24 Photographers such as Sebastião Salgado or Edward Burtynsky create powerful images with the intention of sensitizing the public to these environmental shifts (Fig. 11.6). In contrast, spatial explorations of environments manifest fundamentally different potentials for mediating the ecological imperative.25 The use of space beyond the two-dimensional surface and its representational paradigm evidently refers back to the tradition of landscape architecture and land art. More recently, eco-criticism broadened its focus from the cultivation of site-specific explorations to include community-based interventions, among many other recent categories of artistic strategies in this field. Conditions of negotiating environmental systems have been reflected upon from the 1960s onwards. The implications of the museum as an institution tasked with collecting decontextualized objects while ensuring stable conditions have been called into question with the introduction of living entities and moments of entropy into the system of conservation.26 Dispositives of representation and display are complemented by a sensory dimension resulting in multi-sensory physical encounters. Materiality takes on a central role in these artistic explorations by claiming agency far beyond any iconographic purpose.27 By understanding 19 Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, alive entities and inanimate things, made and not made, dimensions and duration variable, Kassel, 2011–2012, dOCUMENTA (13). 20 See: To Be All Ways to Be by De Vries for the Venice Biennale 2015, where the island Lazzaretto Vecchio played an important role. De Vries et al., Herman de Vries, 77–115. 21 Doug Aitken, Mirage Gstaad, installation, 2019. 22 Gareth Moore, Utopian Village, 2012, dOCUMENTA (13). 23 Tilley and Cameron-Daum, An Anthropology of Landscape, 3. 24 For examples from the early modern period, see: Passannante, Catastrophizing. 25 Miles, Eco-Aesthetics. 26 See also: Schneemann, “Exhibiting Nature?” 27 Arns, World of Matter. See also: Bennett, Vibrant Matter.

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Fig. 11.6: Edward Burtynsky, Phosphor Tailings Pond #4, near Lakeland, Florida, 2012. Archival pigment print. Image: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

the concept of the landscape as fundamentally linked to the Anthropocene, it is fascinating to consider that the predominant mode of including materiality refers to the idea of natural materials promising access to untouched nature. However, in putting the simplistic nature-culture divide aside, the flux between pure and primary materials, contaminated substances and artificial plastic materials, of the Anthropocene is inevitably negotiated.28 The concept of the landscape is capable of addressing this very quality of transformation.

Corporality and Movement Let us now take a closer look at the relational modes that address a person’s position in, and interaction with, the environment. A fundamental shift that occurred in the 1960s is presently being reconsidered. Today, the main interest lies in concepts of involvement and engagement. The recipient, who projects a composition onto the 28 Pamela Rosenkranz, Our Product, installation, Venice 2015. See also the seminal exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materialities of 1969; Tucker and Monte, Anti-Illusion.

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world in order to claim its readability, is replaced by the participant, who questions his or her own actions in terms of their ethical implications. The transitory nature of the environment and its processes are no longer homogenized into compositions that reveal an ideal unity, as implied in Simmel’s Philosophie der Landschaft. From the perspective of the ecological discourse and related to the criticism of anthropocentric models, the idea of the landscape as a composition is replaced by an interest in the physicality, sensitiveness, and movement of one’s own body.29 Our position towards the environment is defined in a non-hierarchical way to understand its reality as independent from the human gaze.30 Explorations into this relationship, in which the agency of reality is maintained, requires the element of distance to be overcome. Certain passages in Tim Ingold’s evocative texts describe experiments that echo Anna Halprin’s instructions, focusing on modes of bodily involvement and experiences. For example, he writes: Barefoot walking reveals the ground to be composite and heterogeneous, not so much an isotropic platform for life as a coarse cloth or patchwork woven from the comings and goings of its manifold inhabitants. And it reveals, too, the extent to which our primary tactile contact with the environment is through the feet rather than the hands. The third experiment shows us how practical skill, in bringing together the resistances of materials, bodily gestures and the flows of sensory experience, rhythmically couples action and perception along paths of movement. Together, these experiments suggest that the entangled currents of thought that we might describe as “mind” are no more confined within the skull than are the flows of materials comprising corporeal life confined within what we call the body. Both spill out into the world.31

It comes as no surprise that a reader feels reminded of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion around the perception of the landscape. Merleau-Ponty uses the metaphor of flesh to describe the physicality of the encounter with the landscape, both in terms of the body as well as in terms of the world. This also served as a major reference for Ingold.32 In the 1960s, the relational actions that can be found in earlier art history reveal conflicting paradigms. Empathy and insertion are contradicted by exaggerated and powerful gestures of reshaping the environment. On the one 29 Simmel, “Philosophie der Landschaft”; Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies. 30 This approach reached a new turn with the notion of “speculative realism.” Gratton, Speculative Realism. 31 Ingold, Being Alive, 16. 32 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 142; Smith, “Gesture,” 1–10. Ingold, Being Alive, 12: “But Merleau-Ponty took a step back, and asked what kind of involvement of the perceiver in the lifeworld is necessary for there to be things in the environment to perceive, and beings to perceive them.”

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Fig. 11.7: Richard Serra, Sawing Device: Base Plate Measure, 1970, in Richard Serra, ed., Richard Serra (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1970), [14]. Image: © ProLitteris, Zurich, 2021.

hand, landscape as a resonant space is related to the body and its sensory and affective potential, on the other, it functions as an arena and space for a new kind of monumentality. These various positions, which clearly contain elements of gendering and criticism of Anthropocene modes, are strongly related to feminist policies.33 A crucial intervention was Judy Chicago’s response to the 1970 exhibition by young Richard Serra in Pasadena.34 On this occasion, Serra had cut down old redwood trees and arranged the fragmented trunks within the gallery in a sculptural way (Figs. 11.7 and 11.8). Chicago recognized this as an abhorrent gesture of power and 33 Adams and Gruetzner Robins, Gendering Landscape Art, esp. Jones, “Robert Smithson’s Technological Sublime.” 34 In her recent interviews, Chicago has repeatedly referred to this conflict with Serra during the 1960s: Judah, “Judy Chicago’s Extinction Rebellion”: “‘I remember having a huge fight with Richard Serra in the mid 1960s when he did a show at the Pasadena Museum,’ she says. ‘He had a bunch of redwood trees chopped down, and piled them up in the museum. I was horrified and I told him. The next day he pounded on my studio door, waving Artforum, and said, ‘You may hate what I do, but they like it.’ I didn’t care. I was horrified by that imposition on the landscape, that arrogance.’” See: Gotthardt, “When Judy Chicago Rejected a Male-Centric Art World.”

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Fig. 11.8: Richard Serra, Sawing Device: Base Plate Measure, 1970, in Richard Serra, ed., Richard Serra (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1970), [18]. Image: © ProLitteris, Zurich, 2021.

dominance over nature. Serra’s exhibition catalog contained pithy images of a huge lumberjack chainsaw and black and white photographs that document the process and reveal the heavy equipment used by the artist.35 Most feminist positions in this field represent an alternative approach to engagement with the landscape in which the body serves as a medium of perception.36 Anna Halprin’s dances, which even implied notions of healing, share a common environmental focus with Joan Jonas’s 1970s Nova Scotia Beach Dances,37 or with Judy Chicago’s desert performances with colored smoke.38 In these positions a rich reference system is established to the vocabulary of rituals as well as a celebration of the imprint (the traces bodies leave in the earth) in the case of Ana Mendieta’s 1973–1978 Silueta series.39 The naked body inscribes itself into the natural process through performative acts and 35 Serra, Richard Serra. 36 Merchant, Earthcare. For literature on ecofeminism, see: Gates, “Review,” 602–6. 37 Joan Jonas, Nova Scotia Beach Dance #2, 1971, printed 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. See: Aronson, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography. 38 Judy Chicago, Immolation, 1972, fireworks performance, California desert. 39 Rosenthal, Ana Mendieta, 56–57, 152–53.

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Fig. 11.9: Regina José Galindo, Tierra, 2013, Moulins, France. Video, color, and sound, 33 min 56 sec. Image: © Regina José Galindo, courtesy of Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani Milan-Lucca. Credits: Regina José Galindo, Lucy + Jorge Orta (producers), Bertrand Huet (photographer and cameraman), Didier Martial (cameraman), Pascal Pauger (driver), Studio Orta assistants: Tiziana Abretti, Sofia Cavicchini, Andrea Rinaudo, Alberto Orta. Realized during the Les Moulins Residency Program 2013, with the support of the University of the Arts London and La Maréchalerie centre d’art Versailles.

ritual transformations. Clear parallels can be found in experimental explorations of imprinting, the formation and transmutation of materials and life cycles. Staging the naked body within environments threatened by acts of destruction brings highly topical, political aspects to mind, such as in Regina José Galindo’s striking performance Tierra, which was performed and documented in 2013 (Fig. 11.9). The video shows the nude artist standing on a green pasture, threatened by the earth-moving activity of a giant excavator. The act of inscribing a vulnerable body into the landscape is contrasted with a gesture of great violence. There is an unequivocal modification in the way in which the body is positioned here and the activities of the protagonists of land art. The discourse around Michael Heizer’s monumental Earthworks is a discourse on logistics, large numbers; it is about infrastructure and performance numbers. The view of the Earth from space made possible in 1968 by groundbreaking NASA imaging technology is indeed closely connected to the Earthworks movement. Today, the narrative around Heizer’s project, which was conceived in 1968 and realized by the Los Angeles County

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Fig. 11.10: Hamish Fulton, Limmat Art Walk, Zurich, 2012. Performance art. Image: Courtesy of Häusler Contemporary. Photo: Barbora Gerny.

Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2012, suddenly seems strangely out of date. It must be mentioned that the land art movement has rightly disassociated itself from the early ecological discourse. It is nevertheless significant that Robert Smithson, who was accused of violence against nature early on, took up an old topos, namely that of the artist being nature. In Smithson’s own words, the critic “fails to recognize the possibility of a direct organic manipulation of the land, devoid of violence and ‘macho’ aggression” and “the […] artist’s treatment of the land depends on how aware he is of himself as nature.”40 The focus on the landscape as a location and space for our responsible conduct shifts from the body to an accent on its movement. While Richard Long collected objects as he wandered through nature and was interested in the traces he left behind, Hamish Fulton was keen on stressing pure movement as a basic form of expression. In the exhibition setting, the only thing that remains is the message; performative landscape presents itself as an abstract reference system (Fig. 11.10). However, the question of movement only unfolds its full potential when performances in landscapes are also 40 Smithson, “Robert Smithson on Duchamp.” See: Jones, “Robert Smithson’s Technological Sublime”; Shapiro, Earthwards.

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understood as political and social gestures. They can be about territories and borders and carry social implications; iconic images of refugees migrating through idyllic green landscapes can suggestively be juxtaposed with Fulton’s collective wanderings. As discussed in landscape ecology, social ecology examines the relationship between social and natural conditions and aims to combine perspectives of both the natural and the social sciences. 41 I would like to mention just one more aspect that speaks to the wider implications of the performative landscape. In place of the individualistic and commandeering Rückenfigur, where a figure seen from behind and through whose gaze the landscape is composed and controlled in a metaphorical unity, a social ecology implies notions of community and collectivity.

Situation, Involvement, and Roles I am proposing a reconsideration of historical developments that goes beyond the well-defined activist agenda of eco-criticism. 42 In the positions discussed in this essay, landscape appears as a highly relevant setting for approaches that negotiate art’s broader potential in the ongoing environmental crisis. In continuation and radicalization of this focus on the performative landscape, the typology of the various social roles associated with it must also be considered. Participants inscribe themselves into complex processes, treading a line between physical movement and imagination that opens up dimensions of intervention, exercise, and rehearsal. In his 1996 “The Artist as Ethnographer,” Hal Foster polemically deconstructed such a paradigm shift by revisiting Walter Benjamin’s 1934 “The Author as Producer” and critically questioning the role of art in its “return to the real.”43 This skepticism also extends to the ecological imperative—that is, the distrust of an art form that is engaged with, and realized in, reality. Foster’s argument against a continuous othering—and, more generally, the self-definitions that function via dichotomies— can also be applied to works of art in the context of environmental commitment. Action, however, does not only mean a call to action, but more generally, an awareness of being that is imbedded in negotiations. And involvement does not only imply decision, it also requires participation and communication.44 These are precisely the aspects of situational ethics described by Pascal Gielen: Ethical rules therefore can only be situational […] [artists] don’t concern themselves with measuring, quantifying, categorizing, systematizing, and representing a 41 Scott and Swenson, Critical Landscapes; Becker and Jahn, Soziale Ökologie. 42 Zapf, Handbook; McGregor, “Charting Urgency.” 43 Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” 171–204. 44 Gludovatz et al., Kunsthandeln; Feige and Siegmund, Kunst und Handlung.

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reality (as potestas) like science does, but with performatively and actively taking charge of the situation or temporal-spatial context they occupy. Situational ethics therefore implies the active formation of an environment which presumes a free interaction with social, political, and ecological circumstances. 45

The perspective on performative landscapes allows contemporary art to address developments in situational, relational, and appellative modes, and to differentiate between the aesthetics of movement, gesture, and action; it thereby contributes to the history of landscape as an aesthetic medium. It is also important for describing role models for both artists and viewers. Environmentally engaged art practices have distinguished between professional roles in a remarkably precise and explicit manner. Whether it is through observing, collecting, forming, imitating, or replacing, artistic paradigms can help renegotiate interactions with a world that has been accepted as lived reality. Daniela Hahn and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s overview of early exhibitions of works of art that were not object-based provides a clear picture of how the ecological perspective led to a complex reflection on the modes of mediation. 46 In their essay, they question the roles of exhibiting and communicating from an artistic perspective and challenge the reception of art as a collective experience. A closer look at these roles reveals both an adherence to long-standing traditions as well as the appropriation of new scripts.47 The old roles of the artist as a gardener, hermit, or wanderer, seem to have gained new relevance. Strong historical references inherent to the typologies have been developed by artists and curators since the 1990s and the revival of a variety of approaches toward the environment, such as the hermit (Gareth Moore) or the gardener (Jimmie Durham).48 Nature is not something to be displayed, but rather an environment to be partaken and curated. It becomes evident that these roles reflect the element of time inherent to the performative landscape in terms of memory, preservation, and reconstruction. In addition to these historical roles, there is also the designer who seeks to develop future-oriented technologies. All things considered, as in a training ground, the contemporary landscape is not only a space of experience, but also one of rehearsal, in which various scenarios, individual gestures, and collective actions can be tested. In closing, I arrive back at the beginning: from the perspective of art history, the ecological imperative must be viewed through an institutional lens that includes various formats of exhibition, preservation, and interpretation. It is 45 Gielen, “Situational Ethics,” 33–34. 46 Hahn and Fischer-Lichte, Ökologie und die Künste. 47 Performance and ecology are central topics in performance studies. Arons, “Introduction,” 93–94. 48 Gareth Moore, Utopian Village, 2012, dOCUMENTA (13); Jimmie Durham, Apple Tree Planting, 2012, dOCUMENTA (13).

Performative L andscapes: A Par adigm for Mediating the Ecological Imper ative? 

Fig. 11.11: Mai-Thu Perret, And Every Woman Will Be a Walking Synthesis of the Universe, 2006. Installation view. Image: © Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Photo: Tom Van Eynde.

only then that the refractions, fragmentations, and imaginations are called upon and develop their full potential. When the role of art in the ecological debate is discussed, it includes its institutions. A diachronic dimension has come to light in the tension between museum doctrines and ecological paradigms. 49 This closes the circle on the presentation of historical practices in the form of performance scores and instructions, such as those by Halprin at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. On the one hand, this is an approach to ecological issues in contemporary art that, in departure from the imaginary and the effect, formulates a clear claim to reality; on the other hand, it demonstrates a surprising continuity of narratives and patterns of imagination. I thus conclude with the landscape as a scenario in the work of Mai-Thu Perret. Her body of work, The Crystal Frontier (Fig. 11.11), which she has been developing since 1998, is based on the f ictional story of a small women’s collective that is developing a utopia in the desert of New Mexico.

49 Scott and Swenson, Critical Landscapes, 60–62.

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Fig. 11.12: Andrea Zittel, A–Z Wagon Stations: Second Generation, California, 2012–present. Powder coated steel, aluminum, plexiglass, wood, canvas, futon, pillow, hand brush, and straw hat, 91.4 × 228.6 × 228.6 cm. Image: © Andrea Zittel, courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery. Photo: Lance Brewer.

It includes installations, objects, and fictive documents of an alternative performative landscape. The work imagines a certain aesthetic that, like Andrea Zittel’s, is characterized by a strange air of nostalgia (Fig. 11.12). OXOXOXO Partially destroyed legal note pad. Date and author unknown. All cities are geological, they stink of the past. Nothing can grow there. Here in this mineral desert we have found the blank slate that will enable us to start all imagining anew. The city landscape is closed, so we sought the open plain, stretching as far as the eye can see. In this antediluvian land nothing draws us toward the past. We are starting with a tent and soon there will be a house and a village and then a city. Our bodies free to bask in the sun, to be blown about by the wind, we will comprehend our relations and renovate nature, claiming back the life that has been stolen away from us, mutilated by patriarchy and capital, our bodies no longer cut off from each other.50

50 Perret and Keller, Mai-Thu Perret, 121. For the understanding of this kind of description as an “ecoekphrasis,” see: Rippl, “Sustainability, Eco-Ekphrasis.”

Performative L andscapes: A Par adigm for Mediating the Ecological Imper ative? 

Works Cited Adams, Steven, and Anna Gruetzner Robins, eds. Gendering Landscape Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Andermann, Jens, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell, eds. Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018. Arns, Inke. World of Matter. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015. Arons, Wendy. “Introduction to Special Section on ‘Performance and Ecology.’” Theatre Topics 17, no. 2 (2007): 93–94. Arons, Wendy, and Theresa J. May, eds. Readings in Performance and Ecology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Aronson, Arnold. The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. Assmann, Aleida. “The Future of Cultural Heritage and Its Challenges.” In Cultural Sustainability, edited by Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl, 25–35. London: Routledge, 2019. Assmann, Aleida. Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne. Munich: Hanser, 2013. Becker, Egon, and Thomas Jahn, eds. Soziale Ökologie: Grundzüge einer Wissenschaft von den gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnissen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2006. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Creighton Neall, Lynne, ed. Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986. Feige, Daniel Martin, and Judith Siegmund, eds. Kunst und Handlung. Ästhetische und handlungstheoretische Perspektiven. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. Foley, Suzanne, ed. Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: The 1970s. Seattle: University of Washington, 1981. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the title: Space, Time, Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area, presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, December 21, 1979–February 10, 1980. Foster, Hal. “The Artist as Ethnographer.” In The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, edited by Hal Foster, 171–204. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Gates, Barbara T. “Review.” Signs 25, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 602–6. Gielen, Pascal. “Situational Ethics: An Artistic Ecology.” In The Ethics of Art: Ecological Turns in the Performing Arts, edited by Guy Cools and Pascal Gielen, 17–42. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2014. Gludovatz, Karin, Michael Lüthy, Bernhard Schieder, and Dorothea von Hantelmann, eds. Kunsthandeln. Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010. Gotthardt, Alexxa. “When Judy Chicago Rejected a Male-Centric Art World with a Puff of Smoke.” Artsy, July 26, 2017. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-judy-chicagorejected-male-centric-art-puff-smoke.

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Gratton, Peter. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Hahn, Daniela, and Erika Fischer-Lichte, eds. Ökologie und die Künste. Paderborn: Fink, 2015. Halprin, Lawrence. The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment. New York: George Braziller, 1969. Hirsch, Alison B. “Facilitation and/or Manipulation?: Lawrence Halprin and ‘Taking Part.’” Landscape Journal: Design, Planning, and Management of the Land 31, no. 1–2 (2012): 117–34. Hirsch, Alison B. “From ‘Open Space’ to ‘Public Space’: Activist Landscape Architects of the 1960s.” Landscape Journal: Design, Planning, and Management of the Land 33, no. 2 (2014): 173–94. Hirsch, Alison B. “Scoring the Participatory City: Lawrence (& Anna) Halprin’s Take Part Process.” Journal of Architectural Education 64, no. 2 (2011): 127–40. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011. Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: Foundations of an Ethics for the Technological Age, with an Appendix on the Impotence or Power of Subjectivity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Jones, Caroline A. “Robert Smithson’s Technological Sublime: Alterities and the ‘Female Earth.’” In Gendering Landscape Art, edited by Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins, 133–45, 216–20. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Judah, Hettie. “Judy Chicago’s Extinction Rebellion: ‘I Went Face-to-Face with a New Level of Horror.’” Interview by Hettie Judah. The Guardian, November 27, 2019. https://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/nov/27/judy-chicago-interview-extinction-rebellion. Kagan, Sacha. Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Kagan, Sacha. “The Practice of Ecological Art.” Plastik 4 (February 15, 2014): 1. Koepnick, Nicola Susanna. “Documenting ‘Documenta’: Decoding and Recoding the History of an Exhibition in 1955, 2002, and 2017.” Senior Projects Spring 2018 (2018): 253. https:// digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018/253. Land, Ronit, Ursula Schorn, and Gabriele Wittmann, eds. Anna Halprin: Tanz—Prozesse— Gestalten. Munich: Kieser, 2013. Latimer, Quinn, and Adam Szymczyk, eds. documenta 14 Daybook. Munich: Prestel, 2017. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the title: documenta 14, presented in Athens, April 8, 2017–July 16, 2017, and in Kassel, June 10, 2017–September 17, 2020. Marchart, Oliver. “Public Movement: The Art of Pre-Enactment.” In Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre Today, edited by Florian Malzacher, 146–50. Berlin: Alexander, 2015. McGregor, Jennifer. “Charting Urgency and Agency.” In Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene, edited by Julie Reiss, 65–75. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019. Merchant, Carolyn. Earthcare: Women and the Environment. New York: Routledge, 1996.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Miles, Malcolm. Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Passannante, Gerard Paul. Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Perret, Mai-Thu, and Christoph Keller. Mai-Thu Perret: Land of Crystal. Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2008. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, presented at Kunst Halle, Sankt Gallen, January 26, 2008–March 16, 2008. Rippl, Gabriele. “Sustainability, Eco-Ekphrasis and the Ethics of Literary Description.” In Cultural Sustainability, edited by Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl, 221–32. London: Routledge, 2019. Rosenthal, Stephanie, ed. Ana Mendieta: Traces. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2014. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, presented at the Hayward Gallery, London, September 24, 2013–December 15, 2013, and at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, March 29, 2014–July 6, 2014. Ross, Christine. The Past Is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art. New York: Continuum, 2012. Schneemann, Peter J. “Exhibiting Nature? Artificial Ecologies in Contemporary Art.” In Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art, edited by Hannah Baader, Gerhard Wolf, and Sugata Ray. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022, forthcoming. Schweizer, Nicole, ed. Yael Bartana. Zurich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag, 2017. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the title: Yael Bartana. Trembling Times, at the Lausanne Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, May 19, 2017–August 20, 2017. Scott, Emily Eliza, and Kirsten Swenson, eds. Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Serra, Richard, ed. Richard Serra. Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1970. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at the Pasadena Art Museum, February 26, 1970–March 1, 1970. Shapiro, Gary. Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Simmel, Georg. “Philosophie der Landschaft.” In Brücke und Tür: Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst und Gesellschaft, edited by Michael Landmann, 141–52. Stuttgart: Koehler, 1957. Smith, Stephen J. “Gesture, Landscape and Embrace: A Phenomenological Analysis of Elemental Motions.” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 6, no. 1 (2006): 1–10. Smithson, Robert. “Robert Smithson on Duchamp.” Interview by Moira Roth. Artforum International 2 (1973): 123. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Imperatives to Re-imagine the Planet. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2013.

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Stevens, Lara, Peta Tait, and Denise Varney, eds. Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Tatari, Marita. Kunstwerk als Handlung: Transformationen von Ausstellung und Teilnahme. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Tilley, Christopher, and Kate Cameron-Daum. An Anthropology of Landscape. London: University College London Press, 2017. Tucker, Marcia, and James Monte, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 19, 1969–July 6, 1969. Vries, Herman de, Jean-Hubert Martin, Cees de Boer, Colin Huizing, and Birgit Donker, eds. Herman de Vries: To Be All Ways to Be. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2015. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, presented in the Dutch Pavilion, 56. Biennale d’Arte, Venice, May 9, 2015–November 22, 2015. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2017. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Weintraub, Linda. To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Wie kann Kunst der Wirklichkeit nicht gegenüberstehen, sondern in sie verwickelt sein?” In Kunst und Wirklichkeit heute. Affirmation—Kritik—Transformation, edited by Lotte Everts, 179–200, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. Worth, Libby, and Helen Poynor. Anna Halprin. London: Routledge, 2018. “Yael Bartana Redemption Now: Werkschau.” Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin. Accessed July 15, 2021. https://www.jmberlin.de/ausstellung-yael-bartana. Zapf, Hubert. Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Zerdy, Joanne. “Review of Readings in Performance and Ecology, ed. by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May.” The Drama Review 57, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 174–76.

About the Author Peter J. Schneemann is Chair of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Bern. His research interests include American art history, ecology, display, and museology. He is the principal investigator of the collaborative project “Mediating the Ecological Imperative,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2021–2024).

Index Accademia dei Lincei 227 Accademia dell’Isola 213 Adam 30, 33, 41, 50, 52 Agricola, Georg 260 Bermannus sive de re metallica (1530) 245–46 De natura fossilium (1546) 246 De ortu et causis subterraneorum (1544, 1546) 225, 246 De re metallica (1556) 241–43, 242 Agriculture (Agricultura) 53, 61, 277, 282 agriculture (see also plantations) 41, 53, 61, 269 in landscape painting 34, 45, 269–71, 276, 283–85, 286–87 and rural-urban connections 269–71, 272, 276, 279–83, 285–87 staging of 272, 274–79, 278, 279–83, 285–87 in the Virgilian Golden Age 281–83 Aguilonius, Franciscus 146 Albert of Austria 286 Alberti, Leon Battista 139, 304 De pictura (1435) 217, 307, 326 De statua (1430) 326 alchemy 33, 45–47, 53, 58, 59, 314 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 224 Musaeum metallicum (1648) 225, 225 Altdorfer, Albrecht 128, 144, 159 St. George in the Woods (ca. 1510) 159, 161 ambiguity 338, 343–44, 345 Amico, Bernardino d’ Trattato delle piante, & immagini de sacri edifizi di Terra Santa (1620) 218 Amsterdam 79, 81, 84, 85 Andromeda 221 Anglo-Dutch School View of London from Southwark (1630) 162 Anhorn, Bartholomäus 362, 374, 375, 378 Anna of Denmark, Queen Consort of James I/ VI 311–13 Anne, St. 248–50, 249 Annus 53, 61, 277, 279, 280, 286, 287 Anthonisz., Cornelis 90, 93, 104 Caerte van die Oosterse See (1558) 96, 96 Caerte van Oostlant (1542, 1543, ca. 1560) 93, 94, 97 Onderwijsinge vander zee, om stuermanschap te leeren (1558 [1544]) 95, 96, 97 View of Amsterdam (1538) 84–85, 85, 86, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 101 anthropology 399–400 Antwerp 52, 78, 139, 253, 255, 270–71, 279–80, 285–87, 300, 323 Joyous Entry of Charles V (1520) 282 Joyous Entry of Charles V and Philip II (1549) 282 Joyous Entry of Ernest of Austria (1594) 52–53, 61, 272–73, 274–79, 275, 279–83, 285, 286, 287

Joyous Entry of François, Duke of Anjou and Alençon (1582) 276, 277 Apian, Peter. See Apianus, Petrus Apianus, Petrus Cosmographicus liber (1524) 86, 88–89, 104 Apollo 217, 282 Appadurai, Arjun 31 argument and parergon, as rhetorical figures 157, 158, 159–64, 166, 168, 169, 172, 173 Aristotle 36, 167, 165, 219, 223 distinction between particulars and universals 60, 164, 165 De Anima 164 On Generation and Corruption 248 Armenini, Giovanni Battista 139 armillary spheres 106–8, 111 Arsenius, Gualterus Armillary Sphere (1568) 106, 107 artistic sources, in drawings 125–26, 128–32, 137, 142–43 artists’ materials 57–58, 60 pen and ink 124, 126, 136–37, 139, 141–44, 146 stone 61, 211, 213, 216–18, 220–21, 223, 227, 231, 232 as unruly 32, 143 Ashmole, Elias 156 Assmann, Aleida 397 astrolabes 60, 102–3, 108, 111 Atlas 61, 209–11, 210, 212, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 226, 227, 231, 232 Augustus, Emperor 282 Auriol, Sophia 184, 185 Auriol family 184, 185 autography 129, 132, 137–41 Avicenna 223, 246 Bacci, Andrea Ordo universi et humanarum scientiarum prima momumenta (1585) 43, 44, 55 background and foreground 153, 159, 168–69 Bacon, Francis, Sir 155 Bacon, Jane, Lady 156 Bacon, Nathaniel 156 Landscape (1656) 154–56, 155 Balen, Hendrick van I 300 Baltrusaïtis, Jurgis 326 Barberini, Francesco, Cardinal 227 Barendsz., Dirck 41, 55 Mankind Awaiting the Last Judgement (1581–1583) 55 Bartana, Yael 397 Bartolini, Massimo Untitled (Wave) (2012) 29 Bartolomeo, Fra 144 Bauer, Johann Wilhelm Perseus Transforming Atlas (1641) 211, 212, 218, 223

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Beert, Osias Still Life with Drinking Vessels, Fruit and Pastries (ca. 1617–1620) 311, 312 Beham, Hans Sebald The Devil as Bird Trapper (1525) 336 Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal 274 Bengal 183, 184, 186–89, 191–92, 194, 199–201, 202 Benjamin, Walter 407 Bennet, Henry, 1st Earl of Arlington 158 Bennewitz, Peter. See Apianus, Petrus Bentinck, William 199 Bles, Herri met de 334, 345 Landscape with Lot and His Daughters (sixteenth century) 58–59, 58 Landscape with Lot and His Daughters in Front of the Burning Sodom (sixteenth century) 57 Bloemaert, Abraham 296 Blount, Thomas 157–59 Glossographia (1656) 157, 158 blue economy 84 Bochius, Johannes 274, 277, 280, 285 Boethius 164 Bol, Hans 144 Boldrini, Nicolò 126 Two Goats at the Foot of a Tree (ca. 1550–1570) 127 Bonifacio, Natale 43 Borcht, Pieter van der 274–75 Arrival of Archduke Ernest outside of Antwerp 275 Stage of Agriculture 273, 278 Borromeo, Federico, Cardinal 144, 213 Borromeo, Giberto, Cardinal 213 Borromeo, Vitaliano VI, Duke 212 Discorso particolare del lume (seventeenth century) 213 Del lume e delle ombre (seventeenth century) 213 Bosch, Hieronymus 334, 344, 345 Haywain (ca. 1512–1515) 331 Brabant, Johanna van 272 Braun, Georg 381 Bredekamp, Horst 33 “Die Erde als Lebewesen” (1981) 33 Bril, Paul 129, 131, 153, 156, 213 broadsheets 43, 61, 355–60, 360–72, 373–76, 376–81, 381–90 Brown, Trisha 396 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder 60, 61, 78, 101, 123–26, 133, 139, 142, 143, 145, 213, 271, 323–25, 344–45 drawing 123–24, 128, 129–32, 323–33, 334–38, 339–45 impact on landscape 123–24, 126, 129–32 Karel Van Mander on 124, 126, 284, 323–24, 344–45 The Flemish Proverbs (1559) 339 Forest Landscape with Wild Animals (after Bruegel) (ca. 1545–1599) 129, 130

Forest Scene with Wild Animals (after Bruegel) (ca. 1600) 131 The Gloomy Day (1565) 283 Gula (Gluttony) (1557) 332 The Harvesters (1565) 269–70, 270, 272, 284, 285 The Hay Harvest (1565) 283 The Hunters in the Snow (1565) 284 Insidiosus Auceps (The Crafty Bird Catcher) (1555–1556) 334–39, 335, 337 Invidia (Envy) (1557) 332–33, 333 Large Landscapes series 324–25, 334, 339, 342, 344 The Rabbit Hunt (sketch; 1560) 343 The Rabbit Hunt (1560) 339–44, 340, 341 The Return of the Herd (Autumn) (1565) 78, 284 Seasons series 53, 272, 283–85, 286 Sins series 332–33 Superbia (Pride) (1557) 332–33, 334 View of the Tiber at Tivoli (Prospectus Tiburtinus) (1555–1556) 324–33, 325 Wooded Landscape with Mills (1552) 124, 125 Woodland Scene with Bears (ca. 1540–1569) 131, 131 A Woodland Scene with Stags and Bears (after Bruegel) (ca. 1600) 131 Brueghel, Jan the Elder 129, 135, 144, 153, 276 Mountainous Landscape with Travelers on a Hilly Road (1610–1615) 300, 301 Ponte San Rocco (seventeenth century) 329–32, 330 Wooded Landscape with a Family of Bears, Deer, and Other Wild Animals (ca. 1595) 129, 130 Bruyn, Abraham de Arrival of the Duke of Anjou and William the Silent outside of Antwerp (1582) 277 Bunte Kammer, Gut Ludwigsburg 296 Burtynsky, Edward 400 Phosphor Tailings Pond #4 (2012) 401 Bynum, Caroline Walker 248 Cabral, Pedro Álvares 92, 95 Cage, John 396 Calabrese, Omar 331 Calcutta 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 196, 199–201, 202 Calcutta Botanic Garden 185, 186, 187, 188, 189 Calcutta International Exhibition (1883–1884) 193–94 calligraphy 140–41 Callot, Jacques “Effigia impressa de la natura a un bianco marmo dicono che sia S. Girolamo” (1591) 218 Cameron-Daum, Kate 399 Campagnola, Domenico 126 Candid, Peter Vision of St. William of Malavalle (ca. 1600) 53, 54 Cantino, Alberto 87

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Index 

Cantino Planisphere Portolan Chart (1502) 86, 87, 90–91, 92, 94, 95, 101 Cão, Diogo 95 Carracci, Annibale 153 Cartari, Vincenzo Imagini de i dei degli antichi (1571) 216 cartography (see also maps and mapping) 78 influence on landscapes 84–98, 110, 111 maritime 79, 84–98, 111 Castro, João de 97 Catanio, Francesco 87 Cathedral of St. Petri, Schleswig 297 Catholics and Catholicism 52–53, 144, 157, 361, 378, 380, 383, 386 Caullery, Louis de 300 Cecil, Robert, 1st Earl of Salisbury 155 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 155 Cellini, Benvenuto Perseus (1545–1554) 215 Ceres 277, 282 Cesi, Federico 227–28, 231 Charisius, Jonas 301 Charles I, King of England 153, 156 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 84, 85, 255, 282 Entry into Antwerp (1549) 253, 254 Charleton, Walter Spiritus gorgonicus (1650) 226 Chicago, Judy 403–4 chorography 86, 102, 110, 111 Christ. See, Jesus Christian, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-SonderburgGlücksburg 304–5 Christian II, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg 308, 309 Christian III, King of Denmark-Norway 297 Christian IV, King of Denmark-Norway 61, 285, 294–95, 304–5, 307, 309, 315 as art collector 296–302, 304, 313, 315 as monarch 311–14, 315 Christian V, King of Denmark-Norway 305 Cibo, Gherardo 145 city 410 connection to countryside 269–71, 272, 276, 280, 285–87 as unruly landscape 184, 201, 202 Claesz., Cornelis 98, 99 clouds 99–101, 104, 106, 108, 109, 139, 145, 170, 218 Cock, Hieronymus 323, 324 Small Landscapes (1559, 1561) 276 Cock, Matthijs 144 Coignet, Michiel 97, 98, 102 Collaert, Adriaen 41 Collaert, Jan II Astrolabe (1580–1605) 102, 103 Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886) 192 Columbus, Christopher 95 Conti, Natale Mythologiae (1567) 215–16, 220, 232 Copenhagen 294, 305 Cornelisz van Haarlem, Gerrit 301

cosmography 99–108, 111 cosmology 240–41, 246–47, 248–52, 253–60 creation and generation 36, 43, 52, 248, 250, 345 artificial (see also alchemy) 47 artistic 132, 137 Genesis account of 33, 36 of metals 34, 246, 247, 250, 251 of stones and minerals 34, 216, 217, 223, 225, 228, 245, 246, 250, 251 of wealth 183 Cremer, Gerard de. See Mercator, Gerardus Croquet, Jean 45, 46 cultivation. See agriculture, plantations dance 393, 397, 402, 404 Daniel, St. 243, 244 Dante Divine Comedy (1320) 57 Daoism 29 Dashwood family 184, 185 David, Gerard 78 Descriptio publicae gratulationis spectaculorum et ludorum in adventu Sereniss. Principis Ernesti (1595) 272, 273, 274–79, 275, 285 Diana 47 Dias, Bartolomeu 95 diaspora, unruliness and 191 Dill, Hans Jørgen 300 diorama 193–98, 201 display, as an exhibition and museum dispositive 393–96, 400, 408 documenta (13) (2012) 27–30, 59 14 (2017) 394, 395–96, 395, 397, 409 Doetecum, Baptista van 98 Wall Map of the World (1592) 98 Doetecum, Jan van 324 Insidiosus Auceps (The Crafty Bird Catcher) (1555–1556) 335, 337 View of the Tiber at Tivoli (Prospectus Tiburtinus) (1555–1556) 325, 327 Doetecum, Joannes van 98 Wall Map of the World (1592) 98 Doetecum, Lucas van 324 Insidiosus Auceps (The Crafty Bird Catcher) (1555–1556) 335, 337 View of the Tiber at Tivoli (Prospectus Tiburtinus) (1555–1556) 325, 327 Dolce, Ludovico Trattato delle gemme (1565) 217 drapery 60, 169–71, 172–73 drawing (see also landscape drawing) 123–41 with pen and ink 124–26, 129, 136–37, 141–46 and writing 139–41 Drugulin, Wilhelm 360, 366 , 389 Dürer, Albrecht 30, 326 Durham, Jimmie 408 Dutch East India Company 102 Dutch West India Company 102

418 

L andscape and Earth in Early Modernit y

Dutt, Michael Madhusudan 200 Dyck, Anthony van 128, 137–39, 145 Italian Sketchbook (1621–1627) 137, 138, 139, 141 Straits of Messina, Sicily, or Liguria, with Cumulus Clouds Above (ca. 1621–1627) 138, 139, 141 early modernity, definition of 32 earth 50, 55, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 188, 191, 280, 281, 287 artistic engagement with the 30–33, 41–45, 55–60, 61–62, 284, 286, 326, 331, 332, 343, 365, 404, 405 creation, shaping, and destruction of the 32, 33, 34–41, 43, 50, 52–53, 55–59, 62, 82, 93, 226, 240–47, 255, 259–60, 355, 361, 362, 365, 376–81 religious and cosmological thought and the 33, 34–41, 43, 50, 52–53, 55–59, 61, 62, 226, 240–47, 255, 259–60, 337, 355, 361, 362, 376–81 materials of the 33–45, 60, 61, 239–52, 253–60 Earth and Mother Earth 33, 47, 48 eco-criticism 397–98, 399–401, 402, 407, 409 elements 31, 32, 33, 36, 43, 59, 123, 246 air 59, 60, 135, 165, 166, 172 earth (see also earth) 32, 60, 84 fire 32, 41, 47, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 160, 168, 220, 248, 258, 271, 361, 376, 380, 383, 386 water (see also water and bodies of water) 32, 59, 60, 84, 168 Elsheimer, Adam 153, 156 enargeia 221, 222–23 English East India Company 184–87, 188, 189 environment (see also eco-criticism) interaction with 393, 397–98, 399–410 Erasmus, Desiderius, of Rotterdam 139, 338 Adages (1553) 339, 344 Paraphrases of the Gospels (1517–1524) 338 Ercker, Lazarus 256 Aula subterranea domina dominantium subdita subditorum (1673) 257 Ernest of Austria, Archduke 52–53, 61, 272, 274, 275, 275, 276, 279, 280–81, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287 Este, Ercole I d’, Duke of Ferrara 87 Euhemerus 212 Eve 33 Evelyn, John 158 Everaert, Merten 98 extraction, of resources (see also mines and mining, resource landscapes) 61, 239–47, 250, 253–60 Faber, Johann 227 Fabri de Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude 227 Farnese, Alessandro 271, 274, 279 feminism 403–4 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor 383 festival culture 271, 272, 274–83, 286 Ficino, Marsilio 255 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 408

Flood, the 55, 56 Floris, Cornelis II 297 Floris, Cornelis III 275 Arrival of Archduke Ernest outside of Antwerp 275 Stage of Agriculture 273, 278 Forbes, Alexander 199 foreground and background 153, 159, 168–69 Forlong, James 197, 199 Forti, Simone 396 Fortune 33 fossils 219–20, 223–26, 227–31 Foster, Hal 407 Francis, St. 360 Francken, Frans the Elder 279 François, Duke of Anjou and Alençon 276, 277 Frederik II, King of Denmark-Norway 297, 300 Frederiksborg Castle 294 Friedrich August of Worgewitz 304–5, 309 Frisius, Reinerus Gemma 106 De principiis astronomiae et cosmographiae (1530) 104–6, 105 Fulton, Hamish Limmat Art Walk (2012) 406–7, 406 Gaillard Castle, Vannes 296 Gainsborough, Thomas 153 Portrait of Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Aged 31 (1785–1787) 173, 175 Galindo, Regina José Tierra (2013) 405, 405 Galle, Philips 41, 50 Man Born to Toil (1572) 52 Gama, Vasco da 92, 95 Gamboni, Dario 329 Garden of Eden 33, 57, 376 gardens 28, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 305–7, 314 Gasca, Pedro de la 253 Gath, Jeremias 362, 366 Gauguin, Paul 338 geology 212, 219, 393, 397, 410 Geometry of Landskips and Paintings, The (1690) 166, 168 geomythology 212, 226, 232 Gessner, Conrad 217, 224 De avium natura (1555) 333 Gheyn II, Jacques de 326 Anthropomorphic Rocks (seventeenth century) 328, 331 Mountain Landscape (1600) 141–43, 142 Gielen, Pascal 407–8 Gimma, Giacinto Della storia naturale delle gemme, delle pietre, e di tutti minerali (1730) 226 globalization 61, 183, 201, 255 globes 60, 104–6, 108, 111 gods and goddesses 29, 36, 43, 45, 52, 56, 58, 243 planetary 34–45, 246, 251, 253, 255, 256, 258, 282

419

Index 

Golden Age 272, 280–83, 285, 286 Goltzius, Hendrick 86, 143 Cliff on a Seashore (ca. 1592–1595) 79, 80, 82, 86 Demogorgon in the Cave of Eternity (ca. 1586–1590) 47–50, 49 Dune Landscape (1603) 77, 78, 84, 110 Gorgons, the 215–16, 226 Goyen, Jan van Landscape with Two Oaks (1641) 75, 76, 76, 77, 108, 109, 111 Graeae, the 215–16 Graminaeus, Theodorus Cathena aurea Platonis (before 1593) 34–36, 35 Grant, John Peter 200 Grapheus, Cornelis De seer wonderlijcke, schoone, triumphelijcke incompst (1550) 253 Le triumphe d’Anuers, faict en la suspection du Prince Philips, Prince d’Espaigne (1550) 254 Great Exhibition (1851) 192, 194 Guevara, Felipe de Commentario de la pintura y pintores antiguos (1563) 53 Hahn, Daniela 408 Hainhofer, Philipp 220, 382 Halprin, Anna 393–97, 402, 404, 409 Dancers at Halprin’s Driftwood Beach Summer Event Joint Workshop (1966) 394 The RSVP Cycles (1969) 395 Scores and Documentation (documenta 14) (2017) 394, 395, 409 Halprin, Lawrence 393–97 Planetary Dance (1987) 397 The RSVP Cycles (1969) 395 Sea Ranch Ecoscore (ca. 1968) 396 San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop (1955) 396 Scores and Documentation (documenta 14) (2017) 394, 395, 409 Halprin Workshops Experiments in the Environment (1966) 397 Hamon, Pierre 139 Hardmeyer, Johann 354, 356, 361, 362, 365, 366, 369, 371, 373, 374, 375, 378, 383, 386, 387, 388, 389 Hastings, Warren 184 Hausmann, Daniel 245 Hay, Jonathan 31 Haydocke, Richard 160 Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge (1598) 156, 160, 170–71, 173 Heemskerck, Maarten van 41, 50 Man Born to Toil (1572) 52 Heiden, Otto Castle of Rosenborg (seventeenth century) 305, 306 Heizer, Michael Earthworks (1968/2012) 405–6 Hell 75 Hénin-Liétard, Jean de 84

Hennin, Jean de. See Hénin-Liétard, Jean de Henrique, King of Portugal 97 Herberay, Nicolas de Amadis de Gaula (1543) 295 Hesperides 211, 226 Heyden, Jacob van der 360, 361, 365, 366, 368, 369, 375, 378, 383, 384, 385, 386, 386, 389 Heyden, Marx van der 361–62, 366, 369, 390 Heyden, Pieter van der Invidia (Envy) (1557) 333 Hippocrates Airs, Waters, Places 43 Hogenberg, Frans 381 Homer 36 Hoogstraten, Samuel van 76, 108, 110, 111, 144 Hooke, Robert Discourse of Earthquakes (1705) 226, 228 Howard, Alethia, Countess of Arundel 153 Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel 156 Huber, Wolfgang 144 Landscape with Golgotha (ca. 1525–1530) 159, 160 Huybrechts, Adriaen Ordo universi et humanarum scientiarum prima momumenta (1585) 43, 44, 55 Huyghe, Pierre After ALife Ahead (2017) 398, 398 Untilled (2012) 29 Huys, Frans 297 Ibn Sina. See Avicenna Ignatius of Loyola Spiritual Exercises (1522–1524) 215 images anthropomorphic and zoomorphic 325–33, 335–37, 338 crypto-images 333, 335–39, 345 double 329, 332, 333, 334, 337, 338, 345 insidious 324, 332, 334–39, 344 potential 329, 331, 333, 339, 342, 343, 345 trap 332, 333, 335, 337, 338, 339–44, 345 imagination (see also invention) 59, 61, 165, 166, 218, 397, 407 nature and 30, 31–33, 45–50, 60, 61, 108–9, 135, 222, 231, 325–29, 332, 409, 410 indigo 60–61, 183, 184–92, 190, 197, 201–2 at exhibitions 192–94, 201, 202 factories 193, 199, 201 plantations 60–61, 183–84, 187, 188, 191–92, 194–98, 199–202 Indigo Revolt (1859) 183, 184, 197, 200 Ingold, Tim 31, 399, 402 interactive prints 353–55 Plurs landslide (1618) 360–72, 373–76, 376–81, 386–90 Siege of Magdeburg (1631) 366, 381–86, 388 unruliness of 355–60, 373–76, 381–82 invention (see also imagination) 58, 60, 95, 108, 123, 124, 126, 128–29, 132, 137, 141, 173, 215, 216

420 

L andscape and Earth in Early Modernit y

Isaacsz., Pieter 297 Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain 286 Isidore of Seville 248 Isola Bella 209, 212, 213, 232 Teatro Massimo (1667–1677) 213, 214 Janson, Horst Waldemar 326–27 Jenner, Thomas Book of Drawing (1652) 171–72 Jesus 53, 54, 217, 220, 245, 248, 249, 250, 251, 337–38, 339 João II, King of Portugal 95 Jode, Gerard de 43 Jonas, Joan Nova Scotia Beach Dances (1970s) 404 Jones, Inigo 311 Jones, William 188 Jongh, Claude de View of Old London Bridge (1630) 162, 163 Jonghelinck, Jacques 282 Jonghelinck, Nicolaes 283 Jonson, Ben The Masque of Blackness (1605) 311 Junius, Franciscus 168, 170 Jupiter 39, 41, 47, 48, 209, 246, 251, 256, 282 Karl of Hesse-Kassel, Landgrave 28 Karlsaue Park, Kassel 27–30, 28, 59 Kircher, Athanasius 224 Kirke, Diana, Countess of Oxford 173, 174 Knibbergen, François van Panoramic Dune Landscape around Kleve (ca. 1655–1665) 108, 109 Knieper, Hans 301 Krishnanagar 193, 199 Kyd, Robert 187 L.A. (artist) Metercia (1513) 248, 249 La Verna, Mt. 360 labor 27, 28, 182, 192–98 exploitation and oppression of 194–201, 202 representations of 50, 52, 192–98, 201, 202 unruliness and 181, 182, 183–84, 191, 194–98, 201, 202 Lairesse, Gerard de 99, 100 landscape artistic engagements with (see also earth: artistic engagement with the, environment: interaction with, landscape drawing, landscape installations, landscape painting, nature: artistic engagement with) 30–33, 34, 41–43, 50, 52, 53, 55–60, 62, 126–32, 133–37, 141–46, 284, 323–24, 325–33, 334–39, 340, 399–410 contemporary 61, 399–401, 408 definition and etymology of 30–31, 156–59, 311 gardens 28, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189 materials of the earth and 33–45, 61, 220–21

natural disasters and 55–60, 61–62, 353–60, 360–72, 373–76, 376–81, 386–90 reformation of 52–53 renewal of 279–83, 285–87 the sea and 79–84, 85–98, 111 taming of 181–82, 192, 314 transformation and shaping of 30, 34–43, 45–54, 55–60–62, 80–82, 133–34, 187, 226, 239–47, 248, 314, 325, 326, 400–401, 402–3 virtual 295 landscape art. See earth: artistic engagement with the, environment: interaction with, landscape: artistic engagement with, landscape drawing, landscape installations, landscape painting, nature: artistic engagement with landscape drawing 123–46, 323, 325–33 unruliness in 325–33, 334–39, 340–45 landscape installations 296–305, 315 landscape painting and agriculture 34, 45, 269–70, 276, 283–85, 286–87 collection 296–305, 314, 315 framing of 302–5 influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder on 123–24, 126, 129–32 particulars and universals in 164–68 and rural-urban connection 269–71 unruliness in 76–77, 78, 101, 104, 106, 108, 109–11, 173 Lasso, Bartolomeu 99 Last Judgment 41, 55, 56, 75 Lebensreform movement 395 Lely, Peter Portrait of Diana Kirke, later Countess of Oxford (ca. 1665) 173, 174 Levenstein, Herbert 202 Ligorio, Pirro 324 Ligozzi, Jacopo 359 Lipsius, Justus 334 Loboda, Maria The Work Is Dedicated to an Emperor (2012) 29 Löhneyssen, Georg Engelhardt 259–60 Lomazzo, Giovan Paolo 60, 170 Idea del tempio della pittura (1590) 215 Trattato dell’arte de la pittura (1598) 160, 173 Long, James 200–201 Long, Richard 406 Lorris, Guillaume de Roman de la rose (ca. 1230–1270) 45, 46 Lot 56, 57, 58–59, 58 Lot’s daughters 57, 58–59, 58 Lot’s wife 56, 57, 59 Lugt Group 129–30, 133, 137, 139 Machell, Thomas 197 Macpherson, John 187 Macrobius Somnium Scipionis 36 Magdeburg, Siege of (1631) 366, 383–86, 388

421

Index 

Magnus, Albertus 223, 226, 246 De mineralibus (thirteenth century) 217, 226 Maier, Michael Atalanta fugiens (1618) 47, 48 Majumdar, Harinath 199 Mallitte, Jean Baptiste Oscar 194, 196 Mander, Karel van 59, 77, 79, 128, 143, 144 on Pieter Bruegel the Elder 124, 126, 284, 323–24, 344–45 Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const (1604) 124 Schilder-Boeck (1604) 30, 284 Mang, Sara 364, 365, 366, 376, 378, 381 Mannasser, Daniel 362, 363, 374, 382, 383 Mantegna, Andrea 326 maps and mapping (see also cartography) 60, 79, 85–98, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111 interactive (see also interactive prints) 353, 356 maritime cartography. See cartography Mars 36, 38, 246, 251, 256 Mary 53, 54, 217, 248, 249, 250 Massys, Cornelis 125, 128 Mathesius, Johannes 247, 248, 260 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor 256 Medina, Pedro de 98 Medusa 209–11, 210, 212, 215, 216, 217, 218, 223, 224, 226, 232 Meganck, Tine 329 Meldola, Raphael 202 Mendieta, Ana Silueta series (1973–1978) 404 Mercator, Gerardus 92, 106 Merchant, Carolyn 240 Mercury 216, 246, 251, 256 Merian the Elder, Matthäus 375, 380, 382 Anthropomorphic Landscape (seventeenth century) 338 “His Nurse Is the Earth” (1618) 47, 48 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 402 Mesmes, Claude Comte d’Avaux de 305 metal 34, 36–41, 43, 50, 51, 53, 59, 61, 245, 246, 247, 250, 251, 253–60 copper 36, 246, 251, 256, 258 gold 246, 248, 250, 251, 253, 255, 256, 258, 260 iron 36, 246, 251, 256 lead 41, 246, 251, 256, 258–59 mercury 57, 246, 251 middle nature and 227, 228 silver 245–46, 248, 251, 253, 255, 256, 258, 260 tin 41, 246, 248, 250, 251, 256 unruliness of 258–60 Meung, Jean de Roman de la rose (ca. 1230–1270) 45, 46 Micker, Jan Christiaensz. 104 View of Amsterdam (ca. 1652–1660) 99–101, 100, 104, 106 Milton, John 158 L’Allegro (1632) 157

Minaggio, Dionisio Feather Book (1618) 221–22, 222 minerals (see also stone) 34, 36, 212, 219 extraction of 239–43, 247, 253–60 generation of 245–47, 250, 259 Minerva 216 mines and mining 33, 34, 36–41, 45, 56, 239–41, 242, 247, 248, 250, 253–60 at Plurs 353–55, 356, 361, 380 Mining Landscape in Markirch (Vosges) (artist unknown) (sixteenth century) 258–59, 259 Mitchell, W. J. T. Landscape and Power (1994, 2002) 31 Mitra, Dinabandhu Nil Darpan (1860) 183, 196–97, 200–201 Mitter, Rajendralal 199 Momper, Joos de, the Elder 153 Momper, Joos de, the Younger 275 Arrival of Archduke Ernest outside of Antwerp (1595) 275 The Months series (date?) 276 Mountainous Landscape with Travelers on a Hilly Road (1610–1615) 300, 301 Stage of Agriculture (1595) 273, 278 Moon 42, 246, 251 Moore, Gareth 408 Morris, Robert 396 Mostaert, Gillis the Elder 271 multi-sensoriality 308–11, 315, 400 Münster, Sebastian 381 mutability 33, 43, 82 Mutability 33 Napaeae, the 277, 282 natural hazards, disasters, and destruction (see also overthrow) 55–60, 61–62 and religious and cosmological thought 55–59, 62, 226, 355, 361, 362, 376–81 Plurs landslide (1618) 353–55, 356–60, 360–72, 373–76, 376–81, 386–90 nature 53, 59 as artist 224–25, 227–31, 326–29, 340 artistic engagement with (see also environment: interaction with) 30–33, 34, 45–50, 52–53, 59, 61, 62, 77, 126–29, 132, 133–39, 143–44, 146, 214–16, 231–32, 270, 284, 305, 323–24, 325–33, 334–39, 345, 408 exploitation and commoditization of 182–83, 184–92, 201, 239–41, 253–60 imitation of 214–15, 325–29 overthrow of 55–60 petrifying powers of 218–20, 226, 227–31 unruliness in 31–32, 47, 188, 218–20, 227–31, 325 Nature (Natura) 34, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 61, 277 navigational and nautical instruments and aids (see also astrolabes, cartography, globes, maps and mapping) 60, 85–98, 101–8, 110, 111 Neri, Antonio Il tesoro del mondo (1599) 50, 51

422 

L andscape and Earth in Early Modernit y

Neumann, Viktor 396 New World, the 41 Nicolai, Arnold 93 Nil Bidroho. See Indigo Revolt Noah 55 Norgate, Edward 144, 156 Miniatura, or the Art of Limning (1627–1628) 86, 156, 162 Nova, João da 87 Ockham, William of 164 Ogier, Charles 305–6, 309 Olwig, Kenneth Robert 30 Ortelius, Abraham 41, 284, 329 Album Amicorum (sixteenth century) 284 Ovid 41, 50, 170 Metamorphoses 79, 209, 211, 212, 226, 248 paintings, in paneling 295–305 Pal, Rakhal Chandra 193–94 Palazzo Borromeo 209, 212, 232 Pales 277, 282 Palissy, Bernard 45, 47, 219–20, 219 Pallas 216 Pansa, Martin 260 Paracelsus Liber de resurrectione et corporum glorificatione (sixteenth century) 250 parergon and argument, as rhetorical figures 157, 158, 159–64, 166, 168, 169, 172, 173 Paris Exposition (1900) 202 Parliament of Bodies 396 particulars and universals 164–68 Passe, Crispijn de, the Elder Cathena aurea Platonis (before 1593) 34–36, 35 Seven Planets (before 1593) 34–41, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40 Passe, Crispijn de, the Younger Hortus Floridus (1614) 307 Passe, Simon de 307 Patinir, Joachim 30, 78, 79, 101, 128 Landscape with St. Jerome (1516–1517) 78 Payngk, Peter 314 Peacham, Henry The Art of Drawing with the Pen and Limning in Water Colours (1606, 1612) 160–66, 169 performance art 395, 399, 404–10 Perreaux, Nicolas 245 Perret, Mai-Thu And Every Woman Will Be a Walking Synthesis of the Universe (2006) 409 The Crystal Frontier (1998–present) 409 Perseus 209–11, 210, 212, 212, 213, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226, 227, 231, 232 artist as 214–16, 231 Perseus Transforming Atlas (artist unknown) (seventeenth century) 209, 210, 212, 213, 215–18, 220, 223, 224, 227, 231–32 Personification of Spes (artist unknown) (ca. 1614–1615) 308

Peruzzi, Baldassare Sala delle Prospettive, Villa Farnesina 302, 303 Peter, St. 220 petrification 61, 218–20, 223, 225–26, 227–31, 232 Philipp II of Spain, King 53, 253, 254, 274, 282 Phillips, Edward The New World of English Words (1658) 158 pictorial style 129, 132, 137–41 Piombo, Sebastiano del (Sebastiano Luciani) Pietà (1533–1539) 211, 220 Piuro. See Plurs Plancius, Petrus 98 plantations 60–61 and commerce 181–83, 184–92, 193, 201, 202 exploitation and oppression of labor on 194–202 representations of 193–98, 201, 202 unruliness and 181–84, 191–92, 194–98, 201, 202 planters 183, 184, 187, 188, 191, 194–98, 201, 202 oppression of labor 194–201, 202 Plantin, Christophe 139 plants 28, 29, 305, 307 commoditization of 182–83, 184–92, 201, 202 and humans 182–83, 191–92, 202 indigo 60–61, 183, 184–92, 190, 193–98, 201–2 middle nature and 227, 228 unruliness and 181–82, 188, 191, 202 Plato 34, 36, 86 golden chain 34–36, 35 Pliny the Elder 41, 217, 224 Natural History 80 Plurs, landslide (1618) 56, 61–62, 353–55, 356–60, 360–73, 374–82, 386–90 Pluto 216 Poelenburgh, Cornelis van 153 Poligny, Jean de 41, 42, 43, 55, 55 Pomona 277, 282 Porcellis, Jan Shipwreck off the Coast (1631) 108, 110, 111 portolan charts 86–95, 97, 99, 101, 108, 111 Pozzo, Cassiano dal 227 Preciado, Paul B. 396 Prinsep, John 184, 185, 192 Protestants and Protestantism 85, 247, 250, 314, 315, 361, 366, 378, 386 Ptolemy 104, 106 Pyrrhus, King 217 Quintilian 168, 170 De institutione oratoria (ca. 95 CE) 222 Rainer, Yvonne 396 Rasse des Neux, François 45–47, 46 Reinerszoon, Jemme. See Frisius, Reinerus Gemma Rembrandt. See Rijn, Rembrandt Harmensz. van representation of agriculture 34, 45, 269–70, 272, 274–87 and display 395, 396, 400 of labor 50, 52, 192–98, 201, 202

423

Index 

of land, as impacted by water 79–84, 86, 111 of natural hazards, disasters, and destruction 55–60, 61–62, 353–60, 360–72, 373–76, 376–81, 386–90 of materials of the earth 33–45, 61 of nature 30, 31–33, 45–50, 52–53, 126–32, 133–37, 139, 143–44, 146, 305–7 of plantations 193–98, 201, 202 of ryots 194–98, 201, 202 resource, definition and etymology of 245 resource landscapes 240, 241–47, 255–60 Rijn, Rembrandt Harmensz. van 140 Ripa, Cesare Iconologia (1593) 36, 277 rockslides 353–55, 356–60, 360–72, 373–76, 376–81, 386–90 Romulus and Remus 47, 48 Roselli, Petrus 92 Rosenborg Castle (see also Winter Room) 61, 294–95, 311, 313, 314 Rossell, Pere. See Roselli, Petrus Rostgaard, Hans 294 Roxburgh, William 187–88, 189 Icones Roxburghianae, or Drawings of Indian Plants (1785–1791) 190 Roy, Ram Mohan 199 Rubens, Peter Paul 223 St. George and the Dragon (1630–1635) 153–54, 154 Trees Reflected in Water at Sunset (ca. 1635–1638) 145–46, 145 Rubinius, Nils 309 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor 133, 274, 282, 314, 315 Ruisdael, Jacob van View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds (ca. 1670–1675) 99, 101 Rülein von Calw, Ulrich Ein nützlich Bergbüchleyn (ca. 1500) 246, 256 ryot 183, 184 exploitation and oppression of 194–201, 202 representations of 194–98, 201, 202 Sadeler, Johannes I 41, 55 Mankind Awaiting the Last Judgement (1581–1583) 55–56, 55 Mankind before the Flood (1581–1583) 56 The Sun and Moon and Their Influence on the Provinces, Regions, and Cities (1585) 42 Sadeler, Raphael I 41 Saglier, Giovanni 213 Salgado, Sebastião 400 Sanderson, William Graphice, the Use of the Pen and Pencil, or the Most Excellent Art of Painting (1658) 166–68 Sanyal, Madhusudan 201 Satan 57, 338 Saturn 40, 41, 246, 251, 253, 255, 256, 258, 282

Savery, Roelandt 133–37, 153 Houses behind the Lobkowitz Palace in Prague (ca. 1604–1605) 136, 136, 137 Mountainous Landscape with a Draftsman (ca. 1606) 133, 134, 137 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 217 Scaramuccia, Luigi Pellegrino 213 Schardt, Johan Gregor van der 301 Schedel, Hartmann 376, 377 Scheuchzer, Johann Jakob 375, 388 Schleissheim 53 Schöner, Johann Appendices (1518) 106 Globi stelliferi (1533) 106 Schott, Caspard 336 Schultes, Lucas 362, 363, 366, 374, 382 Schuman, Hannah Dorothy. See Halprin, Anna Schurr, F. 199 Schwan, Balthasar 379, 380 Segers, Hercules 128 self-expression 132, 135–41, 143, 144, 146 Serra, Richard Sawing Device: Base Plate Measure (1970) 403– 4, 403, 404 Seversz., Jan De kaert va[n]der zee (1532) 96 Sheridan, Elizabeth Ann (Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan) 173, 175 Siberechts, Jan Wollaton Hall (ca. 1690) 166, 167 Simmel, Georg Philosophie der Landschaft (1913) 399, 402 Simonetta, Carlo Teatro Massimo (1667–1677) 214 Sinck, Lucas Jansz. 81 Sinha, Kaliprasanna 200 sky (see also clouds) 135, 144 land and 77, 103, 106 sea and 77, 101–2 Smith, Roberta 27 Smithson, Robert 406 Snayers, Pieter 300 Snyders, Frans 223 Sodom 56, 57, 57 Solbjerg 314 Song Dong Doing Nothing Garden (2010–2012) 27–29, 28, 59 space aesthetic/affective 86, 305, 315, 403 collection 59, 296, 302, 304, 308, 314 heterotopic 28, 61 imperial 191 liminal 103, 383 mapping. See cartography, maps and mapping mediating 30, 295, 302, 308, 399, 400, 406, 408 pictorial 129, 130, 133, 135, 137, 146, 169, 172, 223 plantation 61, 181, 182, 197 scientific/scenic 86, 308

424 

L andscape and Earth in Early Modernit y

social 184, 270 theories of 240, 403 time and 33, 169, 202 Spenser, Edmund “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie” 33 Spranger, Bartholomeus 282 St. Lucas Guild 102 Stage of Agriculture 272, 273, 274–79, 278, 280–83, 285–87 Stelluti, Francesco Trattato del legno fossile minerale (1637) 228– 31, 229, 230 Stephen, St. 221 Stinemolen, Jan van 143 Bird’s-Eye View of the Island of Ponza (ca. 1580) 143 Mountain Scenery: Bagnoregio, Close to Lago di Bolsena (after Van Stinemolen?) (ca. 1580) 143 Panorama of Naples (ca. 1580) 143 stone (see also minerals) 34, 36, 59 appearance of 76, 108, 223 middle nature and 227–30, 232 natural structure of 32, 133–34, 221, 227–30 painting on 61, 211, 213, 216–18, 220–21, 223, 227, 231, 232 transformation into (see also petrification) 211, 220, 223, 224–26, 227–31, 232 Stradanus, Johannes Nova Reperta (ca. 1580–1605) 102, 103 Straet, Jan van der. See Stradanus, Johannes Streeter, Robert Boscobel House and White Ladies (ca. 1670) 171–72, 172 Stürz, Martin Speculum metallorum (1575) 251–52, 252 sublunary and supralunary spheres 36 sulfur 57, 246, 256 Sullivan, Margaret 339, 342, 343 Sun (Sol) 42, 246, 251 Tagore, Debendranath Svarachita Jiban-charit (1894) 194 Tagore, Dwarkanath 199 Tagore family 199 Taylor, Charles 398 Tempesta, Antonio Boar Hunt (ca. 1609) 231 Conquest of Jerusalem (1615–1630) 221, 221, 231 Stoning of St. Stephen (seventeenth century) 221 temporalities 45, 169, 398, 408 terraqueousness 60, 104, 108, 109, 111 Teunissen, Anthonisz. See Anthonisz., Cornelis Thonisz., Anthonisz. See Anthonisz., Cornelis Tilley, Christopher 399 Tilly, Count 383 Tinari, Philip 29 Tissot, James Holyday (1876) 194

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 125, 126, 145 Ecce Homo (1547) 220 Tivoli 324, 329 Tradescant, John the Elder 155–56 Tramezzino, Michele 93 Ulich, Caspar 251 Handstein (sixteenth century) 252 universals and particulars 164–68 unpredictability, of the material world 32, 255–60, 353 unruliness (see also mutability, natural hazards, disasters, and destruction, unpredictability) artistic engagement with 27–30, 32–33, 34, 47, 60, 61, 173 of artists’ materials 32, 143 in cities 184, 201, 202 definition of 32 of diasporas 191 of interactive prints 355–60, 373–76, 381–82 and labor 181, 182, 183–84, 191, 194–98, 201, 202 in landscape drawing 143, 325–33, 334–39, 340–45 in landscape painting 76–77, 78, 101, 104, 106, 108, 109–11, 173 of metal 258–60 in nature 31–32, 47, 188, 218–20, 227–31, 325 plantations and 181–84, 191–92, 194–98, 201, 202 plants and vegetation and 32, 77, 181–82, 188, 191, 202 Urban VIII, Pope (Maffeo Barberini) 227 Varchi, Benedetto 216 Vasari, Giorgio Forge of Vulcan (1565) 216 vegetation (see also plants) 130, 139, 142, 146, 170, 305, 307 unruliness of 32, 77 Velde, Jan I van de Design for a Writing Exemplum with an Admiral Ship (1605) 140, 141 Venus 36, 37, 246, 251, 256 Vertema, Giovanni Andria 361 Vertema family 374, 378, 381 Vesconte, Pietro 87 Vespucci, Amerigo 102, 103 Vilches, Elvira 253 Villa Farnesina, Sala delle Prospettive 302, 303 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham 153 Vinci, Leonardo da 60, 83, 108, 170 Deluge (ca. 1513–1518) 83 Study of Rock Formations (ca. 1510–1515) 81, 82 Virgil 53, 61 Aeneid 220, 282 Fourth Eclogue 272, 281 Georgics 272, 281 Golden Age 272, 281–83, 285 Virgin, the. See Mary

425

Index 

Vives, Juan Luis 334 Vos, Maarten de 296 Seven Planets (before 1593) 34–41, 37, 38, 39, 40 The Sun and Moon and Their Influence on the Provinces, Regions, and Cities (1585) 42 Vrancx, Sebastiaan A Picnic in a Park (ca. 1617–1620) 312 Vries, Adriaen de 315 Vroom, Hendrick Cornelisz. Battle between Dutch and Spanish Ships on the Haarlemmermeer (26 May 1573) (ca. 1629) 83, 83 Ships in the Harbor of Dordrecht (1594) 84 Vulcan 215, 216 Waghenaer, Lucas Jansz. Spieghel der zeevaerdt (1584) 97, 98, 98, 102, 104 Thresoor der zeevaert (1592) 97, 98 Walch, Johann Philipp 365, 366, 367, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 375, 378, 380, 382, 386, 389 Walsham, Alexandra 52 wasteland, wilderness 53, 56, 57, 181, 221, 223, 226 water and bodies of water 43, 79, 170 interaction with land 32, 60, 77, 78, 79–84, 86, 90, 109–11 in landscapes 34, 43, 60, 77, 78, 79–84, 85–98, 111, 139, 144, 146 uncontrollability of 32, 86

weather (see also clouds) in landscapes 34, 84 unpredictability of 32, 77 Wells, Mordaunt 200 Weston, Richard 287 Wijke, Hane van 283 Wilhelm V of Bavaria, Duke 53 William of Malavalle, St. 53, 54 William the Silent 276, 277 Wilson, Richard 153 Winter Room, Rosenborg Castle 61, 276, 294–95, 294, 296, 298, 299, 301, 303, 308, 310 arrangement and effects of landscape paintings in 296–305, 309, 315 and its environs 305–7, 315 as multisensory environment 308–11, 315 as projection of king’s status 311–14, 315 as a virtual landscape 295 Wolgemut, Michael 377 wood 307, 309 middle nature and 227, 228 Zeus 36 Zimmerman, Wilhelm Peter 364, 365, 365, 381 Zittel, Andrea A–Z Wagon Stations: Second Generation (2012– present) 410, 410 Zoffany, Johann The Auriol and Dashwood Families (ca. 1783–1787) 184, 185