keywords: forest, property, epistemology, sustainability, forestry, ethics
In the early and mid-seventeenth century, forest landscapes on the edges of habited land featuring bandits became popular in paintings and prints in the Low Countries. Technically, these forested lands in the ambit of villages belonged to regional rulers, secular or sacred; their grazing spaces, as well as their timber, had long been regulated by local authorities and typically used as a commons. However, these artists’ scenes, for example those of David Vinckboons, Sebastian Vranckx, Jan Brueghel the Elder, and Abraham Govaerts, construct a saturated, deep green world outside civilized law, a no-man’s-land in which legal property is literally suspended, lifted from one party to another. Fascinatingly, unlike in later paintings, it is not the wealthy who typically lose property in these scenes, but rather people with unremarkable attire, carrying jugs and eggs.
In sixteenth-century paintings, prints, and drawings in the Low Countries, by contrast, scenes of robbery often take place in a forest compromised or devastated—usually literally though sometimes proverbially—by the greed of humans and their (epistemological) ownership of the natural world. This theme arises, for example, in works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and prints made after them, which often juxtapose successful pastoral care of the land with foolhardy theft. These images will be discussed in connection with the well-known discussion and depiction of environmental devastation and rudimentary gestures toward sustainability in Georgius Agricola’s 1556 De re metallica, as well as relevant passages from the correspondence of Bruegel’s associate Abraham Ortelius.
(Time permitting, the crag-inhabiting bandits of Salvator Rosa’s and Jacques Caillot’s takes on the subject matter will make a foil appearance.)
This paper compares the earlier forests, whose victimhood is aligned with humanity’s own, with the later ones, fantasized as wild entrapments that dissolve property. By tracing influences from Bruegel’s Nest Robber painting and drawing (a.k.a. Beekeepers) to Vinckboons’ paintings of forest robberies, alongside a small 1582 oil painting on vellum of a devastated landsape with robbery by Hans Bol, the paper also identifies a throughline: a connection between the moral premise of humans' knowing and using the land, including the possibility of knowing it through images, and the moral premise of private property itself.
https://www.arthistory.udel.edu/people/faculty/neon
Abridged Curriculum vitae
Jennifer Nelson
Dept. of Art History • 318 Old College
Newark, DE 19716 • neon@udel.edu
EDUCATION
2013 Ph.D., Yale University, Department of History of Art.
2011 M.F.A., New York University, Department of English, Creative Writing (Poetry).
2008 M.Phil., Yale University, Department of History of Art.
2004 M.A., with Distinction, Courtauld Institute of Art, History of Art.
2003 A. B., Harvard College, Literature (Citation in Ancient Greek).
EMPLOYMENT
2023- Associate Professor, University of Delaware, Department of Art History.
2023 Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Art History.
2019-2023 Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Art History. Affiliated with the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic.
2016-2019 Assistant Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism.
2013-2016 Postdoctoral Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows.
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Department of History of Art (non-tenure track).
PUBLICATIONS
Books
Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors (Penn State University Press, 2019; paperback, 2020).
Awarded the 2021 Historians of British Art Prize for a book on a subject before 1600.
Reviewed in caa.reviews, Art News, RACAR, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, Renaissance and Reformation, Sixteenth Century Journal, and Choice.
Cranach: From German Myth to Reformation (Reaktion Books, 2024; in press).
Edited Volume / Journal Issue
The Classic, for Selva, no. 3 (online, January 2022).
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Ming Chinese and Spanish Imperial Collaboration in Sixteenth-Century Southeast Asia: The Boxer Codex,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 104 no. 4 (Dec. 2022), 20-45.
“The Feast of Toxcatl in the Florentine Codex: Ekphrasis as Etiology and Preservation,” Word & Image, vol. 37 no. 4 (2021 [Jan 2022]), 371-382.
“Keeping the Basilisk Rolling: The Holzschuher War Testament of 1558,” Art History, vol. 44 no. 2 (April 2021), 342-370.
Books in Progress
“Document × Experience: Border Arts of Early World Christendom” (under contract with Penn State University Press).
Articles in Press
“The Thick and Thin Nudes of Titian and Cranach,” for I Tatti Studies (conference proceedings).
AWARDS AND HONORS
2023-25 Vilas Early Career Investigator Award, UW-Madison (declined after 2 terms).
Vilas Associate Award, UW-Madison (superseded).
2023-24 Hilles Bush Radcliffe Fellowship, Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
(declined) Residential Fellowship (one term), Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW-Madison.
2022 NEH Summer Institute Participant, “Mapping the Early Modern World,” Newberry Library, July 18-August 12.
2021 Summer Humanities Research Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW-Madison.
The Historians of British Art Book Prize for a single-authored book with a subject up to 1600.
(Spring) Manton Fellow, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA.
In the seventeenth century, forest landscapes featuring bandits became broadly popular in the Low Countries. This paper compares late sixteenth-century depictions of forests as victims in parallel with humanity with depictions from the later subgenre, in which forests dangerously dissolve property. Linking Pieter Bruegel’s Nest Robber painting and drawing to David Vinckboons’ paintings of forest robberies, alongside a small 1582 oil painting on vellum by Hans Bol, the paper also identifies a throughline: a connection between the moral premise of humans' knowing and using the land and the moral premise of private property itself.