Nature and Labor in Early Modern Art Seminar

Catalog description

In the sixteenth century, the notion of nature as fecund spawned not only images of lushness but also analogies to the artist's mind as a fertile place. The idea of "natural law" was also appealed to as a presumably primal condition, one that established how the earth's resources were to be distributed among its people. Yet the taste for artistic objects in gold, silver, wax, and wood--materials that could be worked into shapes attesting to the owner's dominium over land--led to harvesting processes which met the awareness that nature's resources could run low or even run out. Untappable nature was a functional metaphor, but scarcity was a reality. As a collective effort to write the other side of the story of Renaissance abundance, this seminar will proceed by addressing the question of how the history of art might be told as a description of materials and their potential for the expenditure of natural and human resources. We will address this question by focusing on primary texts, theoretical interventions, and a selection of objects, images, and early books from collections near at hand. Open to graduate students only.