M.3.1 Animals in Utopian Landscapes: Fantastic Beasts in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World and Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights

• Luba Kozak, University of Regina

My paper engages in an interdisciplinary exploration of the representation of animals in early modern utopian art and literature through an analysis of Margaret Cavendish's novel The Blazing World (1666) and Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1515). It proposes that a utopian landscape allowed for radically new ways of thinking about human-animal relations, where animals were portrayed as pseudo-humans, hybrids, and positioned in unconventional roles of power, thus challenging ideas of human exceptionalism. My paper proposes that such fictional artistic spaces may point to an early shift in attitudes towards non-human animals, reflecting the philosophical ideas and anxieties around the subject of animal equality that was debated at this time.

Building on the idea of a shared material space between humans and animals, which Karen Raber discusses in her book Animal Bodies, Renaissance Cultures (2013), my paper draws on contemporary discourses around animal studies, ecocriticism, postcolonial, and posthumanist theory to reimagine alternative meanings for fantastical beasts as more than just mystified and anthropomorphised subjects that serve as extensions of human identity and desires. I discuss how the notion of imagination is a key tool for thinking about non-human others and interspecies relations, and ask: can we imagine a real utopia without the boundaries of speciesist politics?

keywords: Renaissance, interdisplinary, imagination, non-human, fantastical

M.3.2 Girolamo Savoldo and the Ecocritical Sacred Image

• Jillian Husband, University of Toronto

Most painters in sixteenth-century Italy embraced itinerancy at some point to advance their careers, some relocating only once and others in constant motion. Despite the prevalence of the mobile artist in early modern Italy, we have yet to understand the impact of their undeniable intimacy with land demanded by long and taxing journeys across both remote and cultivated topographies. My research examines the ecocritical approach adopted by the itinerant Brescian artist, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (ca. 1480-after 1548), in his sacred painting production. I argue that Savoldo’s Christian compositions, particularly his pendant paintings Elijah Fed by the Raven and Ss. Anthony Abbott and Paul Hermit (ca. 1520), subvert the standard relative value of the human figure and the landscape to compel the viewer to contemplate a meaning beyond the iconography. Though Savoldo left Brescia over a decade before he executed these pendant paintings, his figures inhabit the pre-Alpine foothills and distant blue mountains of the Bresciano region, which he sprinkles with miniature narratives that expand and transcend the subject matter of the foreground. Savoldo’s delight in representing the natural world in his image-making, I maintain, is also supported by persuasive textual, technical, and historical evidence, and is undergirded Brescia’s communal identity, which, from its foundation, centred on a harmony between the people and Brescia’s preternaturally fertile land. Savoldo’s positioning of the Bresciano landscape as the most visually compelling compositional element of his sacred paintings is complicated by the fact that in the time since his departure from Brescia, the land was wrecked by years of siege, war, and brutal sacks. As such, I argue that Savoldo’s landscapes manifest his closeness to nature while also declaring his devotion to the land of the Bresciano, which was now absent in many ways.

keywords: landscape, nature, mobility, non-canonical art, religious art