Ecology and Early Modern Art Theory
Sponsored “Environment and Ecologies” panel for the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Philadelphia, March 11-13, 2027
Organizers: Elizabeth J. Petcu (University of Edinburgh, RSA Field Representative for Environment and Ecologies) and James Pilgrim (University of Illinois)
This session will address a topic that has yet to garner sufficient attention from art and architectural historians working in an ecocritical mode: the manifold connections between ecology and early modern art and architectural theory. A notable effect of the ‘ecocritical turn’ has been the tendency for historians of early modern art and architecture to emphasize materials, practices, and phenomena. Yet ecology is also an idea–an idea of human, animal, and environmental interrelations–that profoundly shaped, and was formed by, art and architectural theory. This session explores that rapport.
The organizers invite proposals for papers that examine any aspect of the connection between ecology and art and architectural theory in early modernity. Possible topics include: ecology and the theorization of animal or landscape painting; environmental determinism and architectural theory; anti-/post-humanist theories of art; alternative cosmologies and hierarchies of genre; ecology and Giorgio Vasari, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Karel van Mander, Bernard Palissy, Athanasius Kircher, Federico Borromeo, Bernardino de Sahagún, Alvaro Alonso Barba, etc. We are interested in studies that examine theory not only in text, but also in objects, images, and spaces.
We welcome defined case studies on any geography, 1400-1700, from scholars of any discipline that engages visual, material, and spatial cultures.
Please send proposals for 20-minute papers to epetcu@ed.ac.uk *and* jpilgrim@illinois.edu by July 18, 2026