Volume 88, Issue 4

This article outlines a methodological framework for the ecocritical practice of early modern art history. First, we describe an emerging field of ecocritical studies in early modern art history and contextualize that development within recent ecocritical turns in other disciplines of early modern studies and periods of art historical research. Then, through a quartet of case studies, we demonstrate four ecocritical approaches to practicing early modern art history. We thereby offer novel perspectives on how ecocritical methods can both transform the study of early modern art history and provide essential historical insights amidst our contemporary eco-crisis.

The Sistine Madonna is an epiphany in painting. This essay posits that the two famous putti on the threshold play an operative role in the genesis of the vision, and that they also concern Raphael as an artist. The angels’ intervention in the fantastic processes that take place during the apparitions, according to the traditional doctrine on visions, was well established in the Renaissance. The theory of the angels of the imagination was developed in order to better understand the formation of icons and mental images, and served to justify the supernatural value of visions – angels were considered the true painters of the soul. The essay also considers the adaptation of Raphael’s work to the spiritual needs of the Benedictines who were its recipients.

For Alois Riegl, Kunstwollen at its very heart was a sort of impulse stimulating a continuous search for ways of representing the world as better than it actually was. This continuous process would ‘turn into’ historical time like a screw, ‘coiling’ the notions of successive worldviews and their corresponding means of artistic expression around its core, which resulted in artworks that were expressions of successive styles. By contrast, Erwin Panofsky understood Kunstwollen as the immanent sense ( Sinn ) of a work of art, meaning that what he searched for was the essence, not a process. This enabled him to juxtapose the essence of art produced in a given period with contemporaneous philosophical or psychological concepts, since all of them were sensible entities.

Clay sculptor John Mason (1927–2019) has been said to make abstract expressionist ceramics, minimalist ceramics, and conceptual ceramics. Yet by comparing Mason’s conceptually rigorous 1970s works in firebrick with superficially similar – and much more famous – firebrick sculptures by Carl Andre, I argue that Mason’s work demands to be understood within a ceramics context. No mere imitator of New York art movements, Mason actually holds an important place in their theorization: central to my argument is that the first version of Rosalind Krauss’s influential article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” ( October , 1979) was an essay on Mason’s work.