Early modern views of nature and the earth upended the depiction of land. Landscape emerged as a site of artistic exploration at a time when environments and ecologies were reshaped and transformed. This volume historicizes the contingency of an ever-changing elemental world, reframing and reimagining landscape as a mediating space in the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the real and the imaginary, the internal and the external. The lens of the “unruly” reveals the latent landscapes that undergirded their conception, the elemental resources that resurfaced from the bowels of the earth, the staged topographies that unsettled the boundaries between nature and technology, and the fragile ecologies that undermined the status quo of human environs. Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature argues for an art history attentive to the vicissitudes of circumstance and attributes the regrounding of representation during a transitional age to the unquiet landscape.

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, historical aspects of artists’ materials, and the imagery of interiority and solitude. Her current project explores Peter Paul Rubens’s engagement with the global world of seventeenth-century Antwerp.

Mia M. Mochizuki, Ph.D. (Yale University, 2001), retired as tenured Associate Professor of Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art at New York University Institute of Fine Arts and NYU Abu Dhabi. Her publications include: The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm (2008), The Nomadic Object (with Christine Göttler, ed., 2018), and Jesuit Art (2021).

Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Landscape, Mutability, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduction (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)
3. Painted Landscape before Landscape Painting in Early Modern England (Karin Leonhard)
Part 2 Elemental Resources
4. Unruly Indigo? Plants, Plantations, and Partitions (Romita Ray)
5. A Natural History in Stone: Medusa’s Unruly Gaze on bardiglio grigio (Steffen Zierholz)
6. The Cosmologies of the Early Modern Mining Landscape (Tina Asmussen)
Part 3 Staged Topographies
7. Aurea Aetas Antverpiensis: Land(scapes) in the Blijde Inkomst for Ernest of Austria into Antwerp, 1594 (Ivo Raband)
8. An Overlooked Landscape Installation: The Winter Room at Copenhagen’s Rosenborg Castle (Michèle Seehafer)
9. Insidious Images: Veiled Sight and Insight in Pieter Bruegel’s Landscapes (Michel Weemans)
Part 4 Fragile Ecologies 10. “In einem Augenblick”: Leveling Landscapes in Seventeenth-Century Disaster Flap Prints (Suzanne Karr Schmidt)
11. Performative Landscapes: A Paradigm for Mediating the Ecological Imperative? (Peter J. Schneemann)