In early modern art history, ecocriticism moves beyond the analysis of nature as a subject of representation to address the entangled relationships between art and the natural environment, climate, history, and culture. In this sense ecocritical art history is necessarily interdisciplinary in nature, involving visual and material culture studies, ethnobiology, ecology or ethics. The discipline looks beyond individual creative agency to consider artistic development on a broader planetary scale: advocating for the departure from an exclusively anthropocentric art-historical approach, and focusing on the duality of human and non-human agency on artistic creation and appreciation. This art-historical branch of enquiry is largely motivated by the pressing concerns of today’s climate and ecological change, yet, the historian of early modern art is no less required to critically align these concerns with the historical specificity of the art works at stake.

In this meeting of the OSK Early Modern Art network on 6 March 2026 they bring together several speakers, who are involved in ongoing ecocritical research projects at universities and in museums. The network meeting has been organized in cooperation with Margaux Shraiman, PhD-candidate in the NWO research project The Dutch Global Age: Worldly Images and Images of the World in Netherlandish Art at Utrecht University, and Geertje Dekkers, curator of the exhibition Drawing from Nature at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. They will meet in the auditorium of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, so that afterwards they will have the opportunity to visit the Drawing from Nature exhibition together.

Program

12:00-12:30   Arrival / opening

12:30-13:00   Margaux Shraiman, Universiteit Utrecht
‘Dese bloem word van de inwonders…genoemt’: Tracing Indigenous contributions to colonial botany at the Cape

13:00-13:30   Nur’Ain Taha, Universiteit Utrecht
Nature Contained: Tortoiseshell Smoking Boxes and Animal Materiality in Early Modern Netherlands

13:30-14:00   Marieke van den Doel, Universiteit voor Humanistiek
Early Modern Dutch Landcape Painting and Ecosensitivity: In Search of Worldviews and Mindsets

14:00-14:30   Geertje Dekkers, Centraal Museum Utrecht
The Making of the Exhibition ‘Drawing from Nature’

14:30-15:30   Break

15:30-17:00   Visit of the exhibition Drawing from Nature, Centraal Museum Utrecht

Location: Auditorium Centraal Museum, Agnietenstraat 1, 3512 XA Utrecht
Registration: via OSK
Organization and moderation: Ingrid Vermeulen