Landscape, Mutability, and the Unruly Earth: An Introduction

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.