MLA Proseminar: The Politics of Landscape: The Politics of Landscape

In the first decades of the sixteenth century, a new art form emerged in Northern Europe: the independent landscape. While perspectival views of rural settings had provided backgrounds to the religious scenes of Jan van Eyck and portraits of Hans Memling, by the 1500s artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer were making paintings, drawings and prints with no iconography other than the observed natural world. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this course proceeds by interrogating the claim that the production of landscapes—in the sense of both a stretch of terrain and a pictorial genre—has always been a political endeavor. Tracing this inquiry through the Flemish and Dutch paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jacob van Ruisdael, we will investigate works of art as political assertions made during a time when the excavation of antique ruins inspired the forging of local histories and mythologies. Simultaneously, Europeans navigated to different continents equipped with invented claims that the “natural state” of Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas legally legitimated colonization, development, enslavement, and the plundering of natural resources. Understanding how an idea of nature was instrumentalized to underwrite conceptions of occupation, appropriation, and “just war” will help us to read seemingly autonomous, “secular” artworks as rooted—and participating—in the construction of juridical, philosophical, and etiological ideologies.