Sixteenth-century Italian artist Jacopo Bassano created paintings of herdsmen and animals moving through dark and muddy landscapes. He also was an active participant in shaping the agricultural development of the region in which he lived. In Pastoral’s End, author James Pilgrim grapples with the connections between Renaissance visual culture and the environment, looking at Bassano’s career holistically. Below, read the prologue of the book, which takes a look at disastrous floods in that struck the same region—in the sixteenth and in the twenty-first century—and situates Bassano’s work within ecocritical conversations around these events that resonate between his era and ours. 

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On March 12, 2019, Italian president Sergio Mattarella spoke at a service honoring the victims of a series of extreme weather events that had devastated the mountainous region north of Venice in October of the previous year. While paying tribute to the resolve of those who live in alpine areas, Mattarella acknowledged that people’s ambitions have too often disturbed the planet’s fragile “equilibria.” Human activity, he argued, was to blame for dramatic changes in climate that had led to increasingly disastrous weather throughout the world—including the violent wind, torrential rain, and devastating floods he had come to commemorate.

The flooding in October 2018 had been particularly severe in the Valbelluna, where residents of the town of Feltre watched the surging waters of the Colmeda River from the relative safety of the Ponte delle Tezze. Up-and downstream of the bridge, the flood submerged roads and fields and inundated the ground floors of houses, offices, and schools. The forests of the Valbelluna were also badly damaged and, Mattarella noted, would need to be restored as quickly as possible to prevent further destruction; presumably he was aware of the connections between loss of tree cover, soil erosion, sedimentation of rivers, and flooding. Three days after Mattarella’s speech, students in Feltre participated in a global day of protest, which drew attention to the connection between anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation. Beginning in the Largo Castaldi and ending in Piazza Maggiore, the Feltre rally culminated in a series of speeches by student leaders who demanded that the regional government help mitigate environmental damage by committing to a carbon-neutral policy.

Whether or not Mattarella or the student protestors knew it, residents of the Valbelluna have been coping with disasters and reflecting upon their causes for centuries. On June 27, 1564, several hours of heavy rainfall caused the Colmeda River to swell. Blocked by the heavy stone arches of a previous incarnation of the Ponte delle Tezze, the current spilled over into the town, demolishing houses and drowning men, women, and children until the bridge finally collapsed, after which the water slowly receded. Addressing Feltre’s town council three days after the event, mayor Girolamo Mezzano compared himself to Aeneas narrating the sack of Troy as he described how the flooding had “devastated fields and farms, flattened houses and mills, and drowned many people.” What’s more, he noted, the destruction of the town’s agricultural infrastructure meant that the “wretched souls” who had survived the deluge now faced an uncertain future.

That two similar disasters struck the same mountainous stretch of river five centuries apart is unremarkable. What is remarkable is that, like their twenty-first-century counterparts, some sixteenth-century residents of Feltre understood that ostensibly natural disasters are often caused, or at least exacerbated, by human activity. The 1564 flood occurred during a period of aggressive agricultural expansion and industrial development on the Venetian mainland, and contemporary accounts of the disaster evince a strikingly modern understanding of the region’s ecology. Like the government officials and student protesters in 2019, the chroniclers, bureaucrats, engineers, and landowners who witnessed the 1564 flood commented again and again on the anthropogenic causes of the disaster, including the clearing of forests, expansion of cultivation, and manipulation of local waterways. But they also believed that an environment degraded by human activity could be restored and sustained by the same means.

The role that images played in the responses to the two disasters is also notable. Thanks to dramatic cellphone footage recorded by onlookers, the 2018 floods made headlines across Italy and the world. And it was photographs and videos, not the numerous meteorological and environmental analyses of the event, that mobilized protestors in Feltre the following March. Similarly, the most eloquent and powerful response to the 1564 flood appears not in the pages of a historical chronicle or government report but above an altar in the local church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Painted by the artist-engineer Jacopo Bassano in 1576, the altarpiece known as The Flood of the Colmeda is divided into two registers, with Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Crescens of Mainz, and the Madonna and Child hovering above a scene of horrific diluvial devastation that, as we shall see, is based upon both a thorough knowledge of the events of 1564 and a sophisticated understanding of the ecology of the Valbelluna. But the painting is far from mere reportage. Trapped in the muddy current, the mass of human and animal bodies, household and farmyard objects, tree branches, and other debris is evocative of the web of relations that, according to twenty-first-century thinkers, ensnares all living and nonliving things. This evocation is not coincidental. The Flood of the Colmeda was intended to give visible form to the idea that the connections between human beings, animals, and the environment are often volatile and always impossible to disentangle. The picture may even have been meant as a warning about the dangers of environmental mismanagement.

Describing the composition or meaning of an early modern work of art as “ecological” may strike some readers as historically indefensible. To interpret a painting in this way, it might be objected, is to replace the concerns of the past with those of the present. But the environmental problems addressed in this book—agricultural sustainability, relations between human beings and animals, deforestation and flooding, the susceptibility of human artifice to decay—were of as much concern to Bassano and his contemporaries as they are to us today.The artist painted The Flood of the Colmeda amid protracted discussions about the management of the Valbelluna’s forests and rivers in which the events of 1564 were of the utmost importance. Their terminology was of course different from our own, but many of the participants in those discussions recognized that residents of the area shaped and were shaped by their surroundings. Indeed, Bassano lived and worked during a period in which many Venetians were reflecting upon the dramatic social and environmental impact of the agricultural and industrial development taking place all around them. An expert in many of the disciplines that supported those processes, he produced paintings that grappled with their frequently devastating effects. The Flood of the Colmeda is, then, not an isolated example of ecologically sophisticated image-making; many of Bassano’s paintings are marked by an acute concern with the close but frequently unstable connections that bind human beings and animals to each other and to the environments in which they live.

This brief account of The Flood of the Colmeda is an example of ecocriticism. Better established in other corners of the humanities than in art history, ecocriticism maintains what literary scholar Ursula Heise has described as a “triple allegiance to the scientific study of nature, the scholarly analysis of cultural representations, and the political struggle for more sustainable ways of inhabiting the natural world.” Its practitioners hold that the results of “the scientific study of nature” are now far too clear for us to ignore any longer. As Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the most eloquent translators of the scientific into the humanistic, has written:

Scholars writing on the current climate-change crisis are indeed saying something significantly different from what environmental historians have said so far. In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honored distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force.

The opposite is also true. As Amitav Ghosh has pointed out, the climate crisis “is also a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination.” For advocates of ecocriticism, this means that we must begin to address questions that previously seemed well beyond our purview.

Of course, interpretation is always shaped by the context in which it is undertaken. It is therefore unsurprising that many scholars who have adopted ecocritical approaches have also adopted the urgency—and indeed the outrage—of the scientists and activists whose work has begun to reshape their own. It is also unsurprising that the tenets of ecocriticism that Heise identifies seem to command varying degrees of dedication from practitioners. While belief in science is a prerequisite and commitment to political change an article of faith, the level of devotion to “scholarly analysis” differs. Historicism, in its various guises, is rarely practiced and almost never invoked. This is perhaps understandable. After all, the climate and environmental crises are existential threats, and politics, not historical scholarship, is the best hope we have of addressing them. For some, art history and the rest of the historical humanities are useful only if they are working directly for change.

This is probably why scholars working in an ecocritical mode tend to draw direct connections between the past and the present; the move from 2018/19 to 1564 that I made two pages ago is a common rhetorical ploy. But it is not immune to criticism. Physical laws may be immutable, but history is not. While floods and other kinds of climatic and environmental phenomena share certain characteristics across time, the ways in which people have understood them have varied. And it is ideas about such phenomena, more than the phenomena themselves, with which ecocriticism is ultimately concerned. Heuristically, the comparison between the sixteenth- and twenty-first-century floods of Feltre is justified only by the similar responses and explanations that they generated. Its value is entirely dependent upon the quality of the evidence upon which it rests. When offered without careful, evidence-based historical analysis, these sorts of comparisons instead function as shibboleths, reassuring readers of the author’s like-mindedness and underscoring the urgency of the project in which they are engaged while at the same time shielding the interpretation they are offering from criticism. The texts, images, or objects under discussion, meanwhile, are often made to support practical lessons of a kind that their original makers and viewers could scarcely have imagined. The existential concerns of the present, it sometimes seems, leave little room for self-indulgent historicism.

While I share the sense of urgency felt by many of my colleagues, I also believe that slow-going, evidence-based approaches to art historical inquiry are not just worthwhile but essential in our current moment. And while I recognize that art history (like any other form of historical inquiry) is inherently political, that all evidence is to a certain extent called into being by the questions scholars ask, and that we all have a responsibility to work for the changes necessary to address the enormous crises that we face, I am concerned about certain intellectual developments in the field—in particular, the uncritical embrace of presentism and the sacrifice of empiricism on the altar of activism. The broader context in which these developments are taking place—a context in which evidence is devalued and history twisted for political gain—makes them all the more concerning. In what follows, I aim to disrupt long-standing art historical assumptions not simply for the sake of disruption, nor merely out of frustration at the current state of the world. I do so because the evidence of Bassano’s life and work that I have uncovered invalidates many of those assumptions. Disruption is therefore historically responsible—and indeed necessary—if we want to understand the works of art that Bassano produced.

Yet I also hope that this act of disruption will be productive in our current moment. The difficult and time-consuming work of evidence-based art history may seem like a luxury we can no longer afford as we descend deeper and deeper into a series of interconnected, humanmade catastrophes. But historical arguments, like scientific ones, should be grounded in evidence. Having acknowledged the inescapable truth of modern climate and environmental science, it would be hypocritical to hold ourselves to a lesser evidential standard. Moreover, it may not be in its easy familiarity but, rather, in its uncanny alterity that the past—and particularly the cultural work of the past—emerges as a worthy, and perhaps even necessary, object of consideration in the present.

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James Pilgrim is assistant professor of early modern art history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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