"Mining Images, Planetary Networks: Central Europe, Potosí, and the Imperatives of Global-Ecocritical Art History"

This talk examines the visual cultures of mining in Central Europe and Potosí during the decades around 1600 to address an urgent conundrum for early modern art history and art history writ large: how to integrate methods of global art history and ecologically-oriented art history. Using approaches from both global and ecocritical art history, I scrutinize images of mining machines and mining landscapes made by European and Andean artists, including woodcuts from Georgius Agricola's On the Art of Metals (1556) treatise and drawings from Felípe Guamán Poma de Ayala's Fist New Chronicle (c. 1615) manuscript. My study reveals a bilateral circulation of artistic techniques for picturing resource landscapes and mining technologies between Peru and the German-speaking lands during a pivotal moment for European colonial resource extraction and Andean resistance to that project. Through my analysis, I expose key challenges and opportunities for combining global and ecocritical methods of early modern art history. I also model how early modernists and art historians writ large can better integrate global and ecocritical perspectives to ensure that our discipline effectively confronts the challenges of globalization and the ongoing ecological crisis.

Elizabeth J. Petcu's research and teaching examine the intersections of visual and scientific inquiry in the artistic and architectural culture of the early modern world. Methodologically, her work interrogates how investigative practices and beliefs concerning nature are formed and mediated through images. Petcu is an expert in the art and architectural culture of northern Europe and colonial Latin America and their entanglements with the natural sciences. Petcu's book, The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation (Cambridge University Press, 2024), probes the most important architectural treatise of the German Renaissance, the Architectura (1593-1598) of Straßburg artist Wendel Dietterlin the Elder (c. 1550-1599) to establish how architectural images became platforms for modern science. Petcu's second book, Albrecht Dürer, Measurement, and Uncertainty, examines how Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer (1475-1528) transformed measurement in art from a tool for picturing knowledge into an instrument for probing uncertainty.