On behalf of Karen Hope Goodchild:
The Verdant Earth I: Green Worlds of the Renaissance and the Baroque
Organizer: Leopoldine Prosperetti (Towson University)
RSA Boston March 31 - April 2, 2016
The green mantle of the earth! An age-old metaphor in poetry the phrase
casts the greening of the earth as a marvel of divine artifice and calls
upon artificers to re-fashion the greenness of nature (natura vernans)
into art. It is also the title of chapter six in Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring (1962) who used it as a poetic figure for the terrestrial
vegetation that we take for granted. The topic of Verdant Earthis the
representation of vegetation in the art of the Old Masters. Its ambition
is to discover a visual poetics for the pictorial expression of greenery
in images that are traditionally called landscapes. By what rules of
art, we ask, are herbs, shrubs, trees and sylvan imagery in general
envisioned and represented? What role do vegetal motifs play in the
imagined woodlands of pastorals and landscapes of devotion, and how is
signification structured into their depiction?
We invite papers on the visual poetics of a verdant earth. How did
artists in Early Modern Europe compete with poets (and Nature!) in the
fashioning of natural imagery? How did they manage/manipulate the
infinitude of irregularities that is nature’s way? What can be said of
the many types of landscape painting (pastoral, sylvan, rural,
wilderness, or even river views and forest clearings) in light of a
poetics of vegetation? Artists, we believe, followed a kind of lyrical
naturalism, which turns the phenomena of nature into the themes and
motifs of visual poetry. It also links the inexhaustible treasures of
the natural world to the poets whose epithets for green matter served as
precepts that directed artists in the discovery of just those traits –
be it the obdurancy of an oak or the pliancy of a willow- that turn
vegetation into eloquent depiction. This panel explores the
representation of vegetation in word and image with the goal to shape
more nuanced approach to the poetics of greenery in images that
traditionally are called landscapes.
Please send a 150-word abstract and CV (max 300 words) to the organizer,
Leopoldine Prosperetti ([log in to unmask] ) by May 31. Please put "RSA”
in the subject line of your email.
Karen Hope Goodchild
Chair, Department of Art and Art History
Wofford College
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