Among the Arboreal: Herman Van Swanevelt, Trees, and the Early Modern Landscape

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Among The Arboreal: Herman Van Swanevelt, Trees, and the Early Modern Landscape

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Authors Marquis, Jonathan

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/632567 AMONG THE ARBOREAL: HERMAN VAN SWANEVELT, TREES, AND THE EARLY MODERN LANDSCAPE

Jonathan Marquis

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2019

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures …………………………………………………...……. 4 Abstract ……………………………………………………………….. 6 Introduction …………………………………………………………… 7 Encounters beneath the branches of art history……………………….. 14 Biography and literature review ……………………………………….19 Seeing landscape: a stroll in the forest of art history…………………. 33 Drawing Swanevelt’s forest ………………………………………….. 46 Extending the forest ………………………………………………….. 53 Conclusion …………………………………………………………… 64 Figures ……………………………………………………………….. 70 Notes …………………………………………………………………. 81 Bibliography …………………………………………………………. 92

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome, c. 1650, etching, 7.3 x 11.1 inches, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. Figure 2 – Herman van Swanevelt, Landscape with Ruins and Woman with a Parasol, c. 1650, etching, 7.2 x 10.9 inches, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. Figure 3 – Herman van Swanevelt, Drawing of the Palatine, ink on paper. The Hague. Figure 4 – Herman van Swanevelt, Nature Study (possibly Palatine Ruins), National Gallery, Oslo. Figure 5 – Claude Lorrain, Ruins of the Palatine, Landscape Sketch. c. 1640. Figure 6 – Albrecht Dürer, Fir, c. 1495, watercolor and gouache on paper, 29.5x19.6 cm. British Museum, London Figure 7 – Leonardo Da Vinci Tree Study, c. 1498, red chalk on paper, 19.1x15.3 cm, Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Figure 8 – Leonardo da Vinci, Tree Drawings from da Vinci’s Notebooks. Figure 9 – Matthus Merian, Panoramic Map of Rome (Detail), c 1641. Figure 10 – Herman van Swanevelt The Arch of Constantine, Oil on canvas, 89.5x116.2 cm, 1645, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Figure 11 – Herman van Swanevelt, A Roman View of the Ruins of the Temple of Venus and Rome with the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, 1634, oil on canvas, 52”x67”, The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

Figure 12 – Claude Lorrain, A Study of an Oak Tree, c. 1638, Chalk, ink, 330 x224 mm. The British Museum, London. Figure 13 – Herman van Swanevelt, Martyrdom of a Dominican (St. Peter?), Fresco, Sacristy, S. Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome. Figure 14 – Herman van Swanevelt, Jacob travels into Egypt, c. 1635 Fresco, Sala di Giuseppe, Palazzo Pamphilj, Rome. Figure 15 – Herman van Swanevelt, Jacob Hiding the Branches and The Flight of Jacob, Fresco, Palazzo Mancini, Rome Figure 16 – Charles Estienne, De dissection partium corporis humani, 1545. Figure 17 – Charles Estienne, De dissection partium corporis humani, 1545.

Figure 18 – Giustiniani medicine chest, ca. 1560-70 or early seventeenth century. The Science Museum, London. Figure 19 – Albrecht Altdorfer, Landscape with Castle or Danube Landscape, c. 1522-25, oil on parchment mounted to panel, 30.5 x22.2 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Figure 20 – Albrecht Altdorfer, Landscape with Woodcutter, c. 1522, watercolor and gouache on paper, 20.1 x 13.6 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. Figure 21 – Paul Bril, Fantastic Landscape¸ 1598, oil on copper, 21.30 x 29.20 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. Figure 22 – Herman van Swanevelt, Performance of Two Singers in a Village, 24 October 1623, Ink on paper, 173 x 247 mm, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig. Figure 23 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. (Detail). Figure 24 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. (Detail). Figure 25 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. (Detail). Figure 26 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. (Detail). Figure 27 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. (Details). Figure 28 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. (Detail of zig zag path of observation).

ABSTRACT

The lifeworlds of humans and trees entangle in an ecology of relations to give shape to

early seventeenth-century developments in landscape painting. Yet, trees are given little

academic consideration, in favor of broad, ahistorical frameworks like the pastoral and sublime,

even though the gnarled forms of trees dominate the earliest instances of the landscape genre.

This thesis considers an arboreal-turn toward art history and examines early modern trees from a

post-human, new materialism, and somatic perspective to shed light as to why trees are so profuse at a formative moment in the development of autonomous landscape pictures.

Trees are dynamic sites of encounter and exchange in the landscape, whose meaning

takes form through a range of disciplines and bodily activities that include labor, leisure,

walking, contemplation and drawing. According to Tim Ingold, it is only after this mutually

generative exchange does one get to thinking about the landscape. The landscape, it must be

remembered, is inhabited before it is painted, and inhabitation, at its root, is a sensorial and

somatic process unfolding within a landscape.

Nicknamed the “Hermit” for his predilection to solitary wanderings near Rome, Herman

van Swanevelt (1604-1655) is remembered for being one of the first to render specific

atmospheric conditions of light, free of the religious subject matter that long defined the genre.

However, trees dominate Swanevelt’s entire oeuvre. A close examination of Swanevelt’s etching

View of the Palatine in Rome reveals the therapeutic efficacy of early modern arboreal

landscapes, enacted through the activities of the print’s figures.

Among the Arboreal: Herman van Swanevelt, Trees, and the Early Modern Landscape by Jonathan Marquis

Introduction

The Landscape is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view in our surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive involvement in the landscape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioning ideas about it. For the landscape, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is not so much the object as ‘the homeland’ of our thoughts.

– Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment

Late afternoon light falls on a hill in Rome. The sun rakes a gnarled mass of trees and illuminates the walls of the ancient ruins that inhabit the hillside. The trees grow wildly and nearly overwhelm the ruins accelerating their slow journey to the ground. The processes of growth and ruination intertwine, and that which animates leaf, limb, and root transforms the ruins from a mere heap of rubble into a pleasing landscape to walk among the arboreal.1

The atmosphere is pleasant, and people are out. Small groups and a few solo wanderers gather up the day’s last light as they meander amongst the trees and remnants of antiquity. A pair of men casually relax in the shade of a large, twisted oak, pointing toward the complex of ruins before them. Two men of noble stature stroll down the dirt road with the warm sun on

their back – their long shadows cast before them. One of them gestures to the small path that

diverges from the road and leads to the slopes harboring the ruins. Further ahead a solitary

woman with a large bushel on her head moves slowly toward a gate. The wooden door propped

open grants access to the walled enclosure. A large dead snag reaches over the entry portal,

signaling the temporal threshold the figures must cross. Several people already amble about the

trees and ruins. A small figure awash in the warm light of the sun climbs a steep incline. Two

figures on the summit breathe in the sky and point beyond the cypress trees that frame a view

of the ancient city beyond. The intense afternoon light nearly engulfs the identity of a lone,

ambling figure on the edge of a great arch above the temporal chasm of trees and ancient

architecture. Another figure in the shadow of an old guard tower looks on, lost in

contemplation, and appears to have already succumbed to the ancient depths.

And so is described the scene of the seventeenth-century etching, View of the Palatine in

Rome by Herman van Swanevelt (Fig. 1). For whether in print or in life, here on this sun-

drenched hillside in the Eternal City, the terrain is to be traversed and the trees and ruins meant to be experienced and contemplated, the warmth of the sun felt in the flesh; the fresh air inhaled deeply. The hillside and pathways strengthen one’s body and offer renewal. The verdant plants extend their vigor upon the eyes, and the forces that give life to the trees and bring the ruins toward the earth are beheld. For walking among the robust growth of trees and the silent, ancient memories of ruins do the early modern artists and patron encounter the ennobling, mental health benefits and therapeutic properties of the landscape. However, the

early modern environment was not all sunshine and roses as suggested by the account of the

print. For fear that France would quite literally die for lack of wood, the French king ordained

the French Forest Ordinance of 1669.2 The ordinance prevented wood cutting, collection and

livestock foraging to preserve the forests of the king. To call forth the specter of death and

declare such a decree, the scarcity of wood and forest must have been a considerable source of

social and political anxiety, not just for the country of France, but for the individuals who inhabited and were dependent upon the landscape.

A developing autonomous landscape genre characterized by trees paralleled the apprehensions of the previous century that culminated in the royal preservation of woodland. In the tense atmospheres of growth and decay, it is of little wonder that ruins often accompanied trees in the works of art that grew forth from this new genre. Images of landscape at this time were of course not completely new and commonly featured in the sketchbooks of artists and in the backgrounds of many portraits, as well as, religious, historical and mythological paintings.

Yet, in the first half of the sixteenth century there is a liberation of landscape from these other narratives, and art historian Christopher Wood claims that the first works of autonomous landscape, painted in oil and mounted to panel were produced by the German painter, Albrecht

Altdorfer (c. 1480 – 1538) (Fig. 19). These paintings take landscape as their sole subject matter.

However, Wood writes of this tradition, “To ask the landscapes of the sixteenth century to be pictures ‘about’ nature, in general, is to impose a weighty burden on it.”3 So, if landscape

pictures are not about nature or the landscape then what are they about? Is a picture of a tree

about trees? Wood here is correct in his suggestion that early landscapes are not about the

concept of nature, certainly not as contemporary peoples have inherited it, as something

generally assumed to be separate from the lives of urban dwellers. From a sixteenth-century

perspective, such conceptual divisions were only beginning to be distinguished – a system

historians generally assign to the scientific method and the writings of Descartes (1596-1650),

who incidentally is writing precisely as Swanevelt is producing the majority of his etchings. For

Albrecht Altdorfer, nature, the landscape, trees, mountains, and water would have been an ominous, stupendous and totalizing environment in which one dwelled in continuous relation.

The forests were where people sought their livelihoods, procured fuel for keeping warm, and passed through to travel to the next city, likely with fear of wolves, marauders, and thieves, or worse yet demons, spirits or some other mythological creature awaiting to ensnare a weary traveler. Alternatively, the forest is also where one procures medicine for illness and disease, and saints go to commune with the divine. The forest is not only a place of fear, but of health and spiritual rejuvenation.

The mental, emotional, and physical struggle with mortality often takes place among the arboreal. It was under a tree that Adam and Eve first tasted death and were banished from God’s

Garden. Family genealogy and the memory of one’s ancestors is often shaped as a tree. The experience of landscape and the quality of its climes are often prescribed for a number of conditions. In the early modern period, a painting or print of landscape could suffice to induce medicinal and health benefits. The color green alone, whether in real plants or paintings, was capable of promoting healthful vigor. This optical tincture of sorts, so vividly felt, operated within the dominant conception of vision in the Renaissance, a notion known as intromission.4

Intromission was the process by which visible phenomenon appeared in one’s mind, whether in physical proximity to the visible object or through imagination. Under this conception of sight, objects were not perceived from without, as we are familiar with in modern optics, but the objects themselves emit immaterial rays through an airy medium that brings the image to the eyes of the beholder. In this sense, phenomenon in the early modern period maintain a level of agency and efficacy to convey various effects regardless of whether what is seen is the actual object, its representation on paper, or in the mind.

The concept of intromission parallels phenomenological thought-lines and theories of materiality that have recently gained scholarly traction. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, and certainly in the twenty-first, several interdisciplinary frameworks have emerged that grant various levels of agency to material things. Such discourses can be traced to the linguistic

or semiotic turn that opened language for the deployment of scholars to examine new areas of

research that also took into account the scholar’s subjective position in the production of

histories.5 The animal-turn initiated by Derrida in the 1980s, thing theory, object-oriented-

ontology (OOO), eco-criticism and the environmental humanities are but a few discourses that

began to reframe humanity’s relationship to the worlds outside an anthropocentric frame.

Anthropologist, archeologists, philosophers, historians, art historians, linguists, semioticians, all took advantage of destabilized language to yield a greater insight into the ecologic interdependence of the various things that make up the material conditions of social and cultural life. In this living network of interrelations, trees do not so much emit magical rays that impress

upon the soul of the viewer, as Renaissance intromission may suggests, but a tree is active

because it is caught up in the manifold currents of myriad lifeworlds.6 Trees are active

participants in the world’s becoming, and are not so much in time, but are the stuff of time

itself.7 And as Tim Ingold suggests, to describe the processual, emergent, relational properties of

materials and things means telling their stories.

At the heart of my research is the question: how are works of art, and even the conception

and practice of art history, entangled with our conceptions and experiences of landscape? How

have images and stories created nature, and alternatively, how has nature shaped the works of art,

stories, and scholarly discourse we produce to explain the natural world? In this thesis, I argue

that, in the early modern period, under the prevailing sense of environmental precarity, narratives

of loss, and shifting techno-socio-cultural bounds, paired with a humanist, health conscious

curiosity produced an ecology of overlapping discourses that drove the abundance of trees in

works of art and spurred a genre of artists to produce images of autonomous landscape. This

atmospheric array of discourses is traceable in the print, View of the Palatine in Rome by

Herman van Swanevelt (Fig. 1).

Before I commit further to this argument, let me first, clarify a few subjective positions of

my own and a few terms that I regularly employ. “Tree” and “Arboreal” are closely related

words. Tree, I think does not require definition here, but the myriad ways in which I deploy

“arboreal” necessitates explanation. In Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, arboreal is an adjective

that means “of, relating to, or resembling a tree,” as well as, “inhabiting or frequenting trees,” like arboreal monkeys. Regarding the first meanings, I often use arboreal interchangeably with the word tree. For example, in the paper’s title “Among the Arboreal,” I use the word as both a plural noun meaning trees or forest, and also as an adjective of all of which resembles a tree, whether that be an actual tree, a representation of a tree, or something in similar appearance like the human vascular system. Even the production of art history can unfurl in the likeness of a tree among a range of objects, peoples, conditions and time periods. In this way arboreal, or perhaps

arboreality, parallels discourses regarding materiality that consider both physical materials as

well their social and cultural conditions.

“Overlap” is another word I commonly use to describe the relational conditions in which

a range of phenomenon operate and interact. Such phenomena can be a series of disciplinary

subjects that relate and share similar social, cultural spaces with one another like art and science,

or anatomy and botany; it can be the similar relationships of the practices and works of multiple

artists; or the exchanges between a range of material and cultural conditions such as the phrase

“socio-economic” that embraces the shared terrain of the social and economic. I also understand

“overlap,” in an ecological sense that seeks to account for the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. As suggested earlier with the metaphor of the tree, I also understand the production art history as the explication of an ecology of relations that

accounts for works of art and artists within their environments.

And it must be disclosed that this thesis is less concerned with producing a hyper- focused, factual rendering of an obscure seventeenth-century print, which has already long been forgotten by most, than it is intended to orient ourselves to the layered histories and movements of trees in art so that we may direct our arboreal gaze, think- and become-with trees in the present.8 In short, this is more about you looking at, experiencing and thinking about a tree right

now, in a work of art or in actual life, and considering the ways you are caught up in the

arboreal. For only encountering trees, and the larger ecologic lifeworlds in which they and we

are bound in the present, can the behaviors and attitudes that drive our inhabitation of this little blue marble in a currently quiet corner of the cosmos, find transformation.

Encounters beneath the branches of art history

In recent years, Herman van Swanevelt (1604-1655) has re-emerged as a significant figure in the history of landscape painting. Since the late eighteenth century, he was overshadowed by his contemporary Claude Lorraine (1605 – 1682).9 Scholarship over the past few decades reveals that, of the two young painters who set out in the 1630s to develop a style of landscape painting bathed in the soft glow of Mediterranean sunlight, it was possibly Swanevelt who was the initial innovator.10 The lion’s share of scholarly attention given to Swanevelt

predominately concerns his time in Rome, biographical information, attribution, and accurate

dating of his works. Where academic investigations extend beyond such concerns, it is his

luminosity and lack of religious subject matter that establishes Swanevelt, and certainly Claude,

as significant figures in the development of the landscape genre.11 Indeed, they are the first

landscape painters to spatially unify their compositions with light that softly floods from the

distant sky at specific times of the day.

However, light is not merely a visual phenomenon. It is heat, felt on the skin. It is divine

radiance felt in the soul. It is source, and the illumination on the breezy, shimmering surface of

trees that bend toward the sun, under which, on a hot Mediterranean day makes a cool place to

rest. Light is the stickiness of sitting in the hot, mosquito-infested Campagna, sweat running

down your brow, and the lingering echo on the skin that with every itch is felt like another bug

seeking flesh. Light creeps inside the somatic and sensorial body embedding us within the

landscape that is measured, felt and understood in relation to the body’s position within it. As

Tim Ingold states, “The landscape is the homeland of our thoughts.”

Like light, trees are not just visible phenomenon; they are important geographic features

that function as landmarks and sites for social organization. Trees provide important resources

for heating, construction, and medicine, and the greatest deforestation in European history

occurred at the end of the seventeenth century leading to some of the earliest attempts at

environmental preservation.12 Trees, stones, earthworks, and ruins were a part of a network of significant places. Trees were a visible testament to the presence of antiquity in the landscape, a sort of past in the present, that gathers human memory within their limbs and roots.13 The

similarity of ruination and deforestation are enhanced as old trees are granted the status of

antiquities, and their loss a cause for lamentation. Such considerations give cause to wonder if

the disappearance of real trees constituted an atmosphere of loss that consequently propelled

arboreal preservation in works of art at the time of Swanevelt. The seductive tension between

decay and growth found fertile ground in the temporal imaginative of Seicento Rome, where

trees and plants inhabited the same spaces and often grew from the dirt amassed on the ruined

structures. Rarely are the expanded lifeworlds of trees considered in works of art, even though

trees are a dominant subject matter in art’s history, and abundant in the works of Swanevelt and

Claude. 14 The entirety of Swanevelt’s and Claude’s oeuvre is forested with trees, as are nearly

every landscape painter in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The abundance of trees in

early landscape painting cannot be mere happenstance, and this thesis makes an initial foray into

such arboreal contexts.

In Swanevelt’s work alone, there are more than a few questions of note about trees that

emerge. The most immediate consideration to drive this research is why do trees show up so

profusely at the time when landscapes were extricated from backdrops of portraiture,

mythological and religious images? What and how do trees mean in the early modern period,

and specifically in Seicento Rome where arboreal landscapes were regularly painted in palaces,

and featured in prints and paintings? What is the art historical and socio-cultural influences that gave rise to Swanevelt and his contemporaries’ emphasis on the arboreal that generated sufficient demand to generate a market for such imagery in Paris? Can an examination of trees in landscape painting open a window to the phenomenological entanglements of the landscapes in which human dwell? Can analysis of Swanevelt’s printed work produce insights into early modern views of trees, and by extension inform our contemporary relationship with trees that are one of our most crucial earthly co-inhabitants in a climactically changing world?

A thorough examination of the tree in works of art would prove valuable to understanding how works of art are caught up in the materiality and phenomenology of the landscape. However, most of these questions are rather complex, particularly for a master’s thesis, and likely will not yield specific answers, only new questions. The best one can hope for is to reveal an ecological framework of exchange between humans and other-than-human worlds, that may help us to think with trees in the present. As such, this thesis is but an initial foray into this tangled art history of trees, a first step toward an arboreal-turn.

But what would an art history of trees even resemble and how would one go about assembling such a history? Necessary is a thorough investigation of trees in works of art, perhaps even trying to locate the earliest iconographical instances – a subject that is all together vast and beyond the current scope. An arboreal art history would wander a large historical terrain and weave a story in and out of several disciplines that would include, literature, poetry, religion, mythology, plant lore, alchemy, medicine, botany, construction practices, land ownership, agriculture, trade, warfare, jurisdiction, court records, garden design, shipbuilding, papermaking, fuel usage, city planning, evolutionary biology and likely several other areas and disciplinary

fields that have yet to reveal themselves. Such a task would likely require the efforts of more

than one author and would make an enjoyable collection of essays. Regardless, it would be all

too easy to get lost in such a dense wood, and all too easy to lose sight of the tree for the forest or

vice versa. An arboreal art history is an ecology much like a tree itself, with branches leading off

to countless other branches, to limbs and trunks and leaves, down into the roots and soil and

across mycelium networks to other trees, and throughout the entire forest and indeed the entire

the planet. For an individual tree is a portal, a way for the mind and senses to enter a vast cosmos of relations, an exchange I refer to as a senseway. Like the fractal growth of a tree, there is no end, only more emergent relations. For this reason, I attend to a small corner of this much grander forest and will adhere to the immediate ecology of a seventeenth century, Netherlandish artist and print I encountered at my local art museum.

My first encounter with Herman van Swanevelt was through the etching, introduced to me as Ruins of an Amphitheater (Fig.1) in the collection at the University of Arizona Museum of

Art (UAMA) on occasion of an early modern seminar course. The etching was produced by

Swanevelt in the mid-seventeenth century, even though I later uncovered an alternative and more accurate date and title. Our task in the seminar was to select a print in the local collection and produce research that employed various methodological approaches in the fields of history and art history. The framework of the seminar encouraged both historians and art historians to explore areas of overlap between the two disciplines. At the time I arrogantly believed I was aware of all the important landscape painters, but strangely I had never heard of Swanevelt and nearly passed over his prints, chalking the etchings up to mere pastoral landscapes by a second- rate artist. However, after some casual remarks from the professor, I realized the two etchings in the UAMA collection deserved a closer look, and to my surprise this obscure Dutch painter was

more important to the developments of the landscape genre, and to myself, then I could have

ever fathomed.

In this thesis, I deploy Swanevelt’s etching as an entry point to the painter and

draughtsman’s vast oeuvre and open a window into a therapeutic landscape meant for walking

and sensorial experience. I chose this etching, because I have direct access to it, even though many works could be motivated in this fashion. Also, I chose a print because prints are largely uncommissioned and can be more widely distributed, reaching a larger audience then a singular painting. Moreover, prints share a unique functional position that overlaps with both art and scientific discourses, both of which influenced predominant views of the landscape in the early modern period, and today.15 Furthermore, according to Anne Charlotte Steland, author of

Swanevelt’s catalog raisonné, it is the artist’s prints that solidified his reputation during his lifetime, a reputation that since the late eighteenth century has receded into the shadows, only to re-emerge in the last half of the twentieth century.

Biography & literature review

Herman van Swanevelt can be historically situated within the three primary visual

cultures of the seventeenth century – Dutch Italianate, Classical, and French Baroque – a

situation that indicates Swanevelt’s awareness of and ability to adapt and move with developing

styles and tastes. 16 His idiosyncratic style, emerging in the 1630s, combines a classical

landscape formula with interest in the topography and atmosphere of the Roman Campagna.17

Overwhelmingly, art historians have assumed Swanevelt to have been a follower or pupil of the

more well-known and remembered Claude Gellée, popularly known as, Claude Lorrain, or just

Claude, an association established because of their similar use of morning and afternoon light to

saturate their Italianate compositions. However, more recent scholarship suggests, at least

initially, a reversal of these roles.18 Most likely, the two mutually developed their styles and

techniques together during their youthful years as potential friends working and wandering in the

countryside that surrounds the ancient city of Rome. The earliest works by these two important

landscapes artists that feature light from specific times of day remain undated and determining

who was first to develop the technique remains a mystery. However, both equally promoted this

new form of landscape, and their works influenced the trajectory of seventeenth-century

landscape painting.

Swanevelt was born in the small town of Woerden in the Netherlands around 1604. His great grandfather was the renowned printmaker and painter, Lucas van Leyden, although little do scholars know of his early life. It is likely he gained his initial training in nearby Utrecht. Like

many other northern artists of this period, he left the depressed, war-torn Low Countries and

headed south, first to Paris and then to Rome. Swanevelt is document briefly in Paris in 1623 as

deduced by a drawing signed, dated and inscribed with the name of the French capital – a place

he will return to later following his stay in Rome. In the 1623 drawing, a crowd gathers beneath a

large tree to listen to a proclamation or some form of oration (Fig. 22).19 The drawing establishes his arboreal interests early in his career and describes trees as sites for social gatherings in the early modern period. He arrives in Rome most certainly by 1628-29, possibly earlier. Swanevelt became a member of the unofficial Dutch and Flemish community of artists in Rome known as the Bentvueghels or “Birds of a Feather.” Joachim van Sandrart (1606-1688), a painter, biographer and 6member of the group, supposedly granted him the nickname “The Hermit” due to his enjoyment of solitary work and exploration of the Roman landscape over the rowdy gatherings of the Bentvueghels.20 It is in the Eternal City that Swanevelt first established his

reputation as a landscape painter. In 1634, as a punishment for not observing a fast, Swanevelt

painted a fresco in the Sacristy of Saint Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome. The punishment led to

commissions for other high-profile projects at the Palazzo Pamphilj and the Hôtel Lambert. Such

elite commissions indicate Swanevelt was indeed more than a mere follower of Claude.

Furthermore, and a point attended to later in more detail, his frescoes in both sacristy and palazzo

make strong arboreal references.

For several years, Swanevelt was neighbor with Italian genre painter, Michelangelo

Cerquozzi (1602-1660), and lived with Charles Audran (1594-1674) who became Swanevelt’s

first publisher.21 Swanevelt was possibly roommates with Claude Lorrain. However, scholars base the assumption on a vague entry in the Stati Delle Anima or the State of Souls – a census-

like record produced by the church – where an Enrico is listed as housemates with Claude.

Enrico is a stretched reading of Swanevelt’s Italian name of Armando or Ermano, although there

are large gaps, errors and inconsistencies in the records and their co-inhabitation remains a possibility.22

Regardless, of whether Swanevelt and Claude were housemates, the probability that they

were in direct contact is based upon several factors, including first-hand accounts of Joachim van

Sandrart.23 Resemblances between the two artists’ works alone suggest familiarity with one

another, as does Swanevelt’s association with the mainstream art community in Rome, signaled

by his 1634 membership in the Academia de San Luca and Claude’s enrollment the year prior in

1633. Furthermore, Claude served and apprenticed under Agostino Tassi (1578-1644) who possibly hired Swanevelt to produce fresco panels in the Palazzo Pamphilj after the success of

Swanevelt’s frescoes in Sacristy of Saint Maria Sopra Minerva.24 It is also worth noting that

Claude arrived in Rome likely untrained as a painter, since Tassi first hired him as a valet, and

only later became an assistant.25 It appears Swanevelt arrived in Rome previously trained, based

on the 1623 drawing produced in Paris, but it is unclear if he sought additional instruction in

Rome. His family lineage traced to Lucas van Leyden suggests he had already received training

in the arts during his youth in Woerden, and possibly during his time in Paris. Such a scenario

further supports the notion that at least early in the relationship with Claude, Swanevelt was the

advanced practitioner. Regardless, there is little doubt Swanevelt and Claude knew each other;

both wandered among the Roman countryside, each visited Tivoli to draw, and both were aware

of the patron and banker Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-1637), whose estate just beyond the Porta del Popolo was a frequent sketching location for artists. Another frequent drawing site was the

La Crescenza estate, owned by patron and Spanish royal superintendent to King Philip IV,

Giovanni Battista Crescenzi (1577-1635), who commissioned works from both Swanevelt and

Claude for the Spanish Royal Palace, Buen Retiro.26 Without a doubt, Swanevelt and Claude

moved within the same circles of artists and patrons in Seicento Rome, a scenario that indicates

the artists at the least were familiar with one another, if they did not indeed have a close

friendship and working relationship.

Swanevelt was widely collected and renowned until the 1800s. Even Goethe (1749-1832) owned some of Swanevelt’s works on paper and praised the painter in his literary works.27 The dearth of literature regarding Swanevelt is likely a result of the growth of Dutch and French nationalism. In the atmospheres of rising nationalistic interests of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a Dutch migrant artist known by his Roman years and for a vast oeuvre of

Italianate subject matter did not fit into the agenda of French or Dutch national historians and biographers fascinated with pictures of the homeland.28 During the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, when art history came unto itself as a disciplinary field, Swanevelt’s reputation had already receded into the shadows where he was relegated as a mere follower of Claude.

While Claude remained in Italy, Swanevelt left Rome for unknown reasons. He traveled for a brief time back to the Netherlands and ultimately relocated to Paris around 1644, possibly in response to the developing Parisian print market, plausible given his increased print publication in the French capital. In Paris, Swanevelt developed a favorable reputation among patrons, and his works are found in several collections. Swanevelt profited from the French taste for the curious in landscape painting and from his personal and professional networks in Paris.29

Swanevelt preferred to manage his business affairs personally including selling, distributing, and publishing his printed works.30 His inventory lists a stock of 72 plates and 2,700 books of

engravings printed from those plates. Art historian, Mickaël Szanto claims it is reasonable to

assume that Swanevelt intended to sell the stockpile himself, rather through an intermediary

publisher. His success earned him a reasonable personal fortune that allowed him to live

comfortably and to lend large sums of money. A posthumous inventory indicates his wealth was

worth 23,000 livres at the time of his death.

Swanevelt’s international reputation as a landscape painter lasted through the eighteenth

century, suggested by his inclusion in several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary

accounts.31 Sandrart and Passeri (1610-1679) give specific notes and details about Swanevelt’s stay in Rome, however both ignore his Parisian years. Sandrart even claimed his death took place in Venice in 1649, during the height of his reputation in Paris. The absence of Swanevelt in

French texts likely underscores the uncertainties of Swanevelt’s last years. André Félibien’s

Noms des pientres les plus célèbres, published in 1679, directed future biographers and fossilized

Swanevelt’s reputation as a Dutch Italianate follower and imitator of Claude.32 It is likely that

the confusion regarding the last years of Swanevelt’s life within these texts, among the rising tide

of nationalism, contributed to Swanevelt’s fall into obscurity.

Such ignorance of Swanevelt’s Parisian years is strange as he was very much part of the

French artistic elite. In 1644 he became ‘peintre ordinaire du Roi’ or Painter of the King and

became a naturalized citizen of France. Documentation also describes a proposed marriage to

Marie Laminoy, the daughter of a treasurer from Noyon, the sister of the French painter, Simon

Laminoy (1623-1683), and niece of another royal painter, Claude d’Hoey (1585-1660). The

marriage, however, never materialized for unknown reasons, possibly because Swanevelt was

Protestant and she Catholic.33 Another marriage contract, discovered and first-published by

Szanto, adds significant information to the biography of Swanevelt. On January 5th, 1650

Swanevelt married the Protestant, Suzanne Rousseau, daughter of a Parisian carpenter, sister of

Swanevelt’s pupil Jacques Rousseau (1630-1693) and sister-in-law of the architect Jean du Ry

(1640-1714). This marriage contract confirms that Swanevelt was the son of Barthelemy van

Swanevelt and Catrina de Hoey from Woerden, and reveals he was born not in 1600, but in

1604.34 Furthermore, Swanevelt was granted full acceptance at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1653. A few years later in 1655, his death is recorded in the Academy’s register. It is surprising that despite his level of success in Paris, only very few people were

aware of his death, a detail not one of his biographers accurately include.35

As can be gleaned from the preceding paragraphs, art historical scholarship on Herman

van Swanevelt is scarce – a strange occurrence given the painter’s importance in developments

of the seventeenth-century landscape genre attested to by his significant appearance in several literary accounts and in both Bartsch and Hollstein.36 In 1994, Andrew C. Blume discovered that

Swanevelt’s name appeared in much seventeenth-century literature, although no comprehensive study had yet to be conducted.37 It was only in 2010 that a monograph on Swanevelt appeared,

written by Anne Charlotte Steland, her comprehensive analysis remains untranslated into

English. Where Swanevelt does appear in Anglophone art historical literature, it is usually as a

small blip or tagged on as an example of Dutch Italianate painting.38 The academic writing

explicitly concerned with Swanevelt primarily regards attribution, the chronology of his works

and his biography. 39

Swanevelt was one of the most prolific Dutch Italianates to produce etchings, and his

mature prints exhibit mastery over the medium that arguably goes well beyond Claude’s printed

works. Quantity alone places Swanevelt’s etching in the domain of one of the most influential

landscape print series of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Small landscapes first

published in 1559 by Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570) that underwent multiple reissues.

Swanevelt’s images inspired many of the early naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, including Goethe. It is Swanevelt of who Goethe writes, not Lorrain. Goethe indeed

may have been one of the earliest to acknowledge the relevance of Swanevelt and the failure of

his biographers; when in discussion with Johann Peter Eckerman (1792-1854), Goethe deems the

biographers, “fools,” and praises Swanevelt over Claude.40 This conversation also indicates that the debate over who was more accomplished, Swanevelt or Claude, was contentious even in the eighteenth century. Such contentions may have even been the case during Swanevelt’s lifetime, and possible tensions with Claude influenced his relocation from Rome to Paris.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), a close friend and student of Goethe, likely saw

Swanevelt’s work in the German author’s collection. 41 Humboldt mentions Swanevelt in a

footnote in Cosmos as one of the painters of the great century.42 Humboldt, who had profound

effects on American landscape painters and the science of ecology, was the first to detail the

distribution of plant species according to elevation. The emphasis on plants shared by both

Swanevelt and Humboldt is a seductive parallel and opens future research into the influence of

Swanevelt’s production on nineteenth-century naturalists, ideas of nature, and even landscape

painting in America.

cum privilegio Regis The vast majority of Swanevelt’s prints were etched and printed in Paris. Of the ninety

etchings of the Parisian years, fifty-five of the original drawings are preserved, primarily in

Florence’s’ Uffizi gallery.43 The drawings reveal Swanevelt’s working process, where he used

his Roman nature studies or pre-drawings as the basis for his designs. Accurate chronology of

much of his printed works hinges on whether or not they bear the French royal privilege, and the

question remains if those royally-sanctioned prints are indeed all produced after 1650 when he

receives the special privilege, or earlier, when he received his first title of Painter of the King in

1644.

A challenge remains for chronological accuracy of the print under question in this thesis.

Steland, who is responsible for securing the chronology of Swanevelt’s etchings, does not make

explicit reference it. The print is only indicated by association with its numerical identifier

(Bartsch 84 and Hollstein 88) and its inclusion in a larger grouping titled Différents paysages ornés de fabriques (Bartsch 83-94 and Hollstein. 87-98). A specific, accurate date remains unclear for the print commonly referred to as Ancient Ruins of an Amphitheater, which, as will become clear shortly, I prefer to title View of the Palatine in Rome (Fig. 1).

There are no published sources that put forth or agree on a date for View of the Palatine in Rome. Several sites on the internet, from museums to art auction databases, conflict on a date for the etching. The most hellacious and lazy dating is usually the artist’s lifespan, circa 1600-

1655, as is noted on the print’s website-listing at The Detroit Institute of the Arts.44 Even though these dates cannot be wrong, they lend little insight into the development of the artist or interpretation of the print. The Blouin Art Sales Index website cites the date circa 1640, which is near to when the artist relocates from Rome to Paris.45 With no secured date from online sources,

from Hollstein or any other published source, a closer look at the print and a close examination

of the extant scholarship on Swanevelt is required to determine the date of the print’s execution.

The two prints attributed to Herman van Swanevelt in the collection at University of

Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA) are cataloged Ancient Ruins of an Amphitheater (1629-1641)

and Landscape with Ruins and Woman with a Parasol (1625) (Fig. 2) – two of the roughly one

hundred etchings and engravings attributed to Swanevelt.46 According to Hollstein both are part

of the same series and share a comparable style of execution, and therefore it must be assumed

that their dates are similar. However, the dates conflict in the UAMA collection. In the print

catalogued as Ancient Ruins of Amphitheater, the date conforms to when Swanevelt is in Rome

between 1629-1641, a reasonable assumption, since the subject matter is Roman ruins and

Swanevelt was indeed in the Eternal City. 47 The date for Landscape with Ruins and Woman with

a Parasol in the University’s holdings is 1625. It is possible Swanevelt was in Rome by 1625.

However, documentation places him in Paris in 1623 and only securely in Rome as early as

1628.48 Moreover, the advanced, crepuscular light techniques, developed after 1630 in

combination with Claude and visible in both prints, do not make it seem likely that the print is by an artist working early in his career, nor does the print resemble others secured to his Roman

years.49

Since the style and subject matter of the print are of little help, the only clues that remain

are two small phrases in Latin at the bottom of each print “Herman van Swanevelt Inventor fecit

et excudit” and “cum privilegio Regis.” The first phrase identifies Swanevelt as the inventor and

maker of the print, a fact already explicit, but what about the other? For unknown reasons,

Swanevelt left Rome around 1641. He established himself in Paris three years later in 1644 when

he received the formidable title of Painter of the King, according to documents procured by

Mikaël Szanto in Paris archives.50 Swanevelt received another privilege in 1650, a sort of license

to distribute and market his prints in Paris, at which point it is reasonable to believe his etchings

began to bear the phrase “cum privilegio Regis,” translated as “with the privilege of the King,” or “with royal privilege.” Both prints in the collection at UAMA bear that phrase, suggesting that

the prints’ production was in Paris after 1650. However, the possibility must not be dismissed

that Swanevelt began to include the phrase on his prints after he received the initial title in 1644.

After receiving the additional marketing license, it would seem likely that a savvy businessman

like Swanevelt would be motivated to increase his printed inventories.51 Therefore, after receiving the royal privilege in 1650, Swanevelt likely reissued older designs that were created

over a longer period and probably only in 1650 or shortly after were compiled and published.52

Regardless, the presence of the phrase on the prints securely situate both during his time in Paris,

at a date after 1644 when Swanevelt relocated to the French capital.

In the collection of the National Gallery in Oslo is a relatable, but nowhere exact, nature

study of the Palatine Hill (Fig. 4) that may have been generated in Rome prior to 1644, however

no date for the study has been secured.53 A preliminary drawing (Fig. 3) very similar to the

etching, View of the Palatine in Rome, likely produced in Paris after 1644 and owned by The

Hague, most certainly served as template for the print.54 The refinement of the drawing at The

Hague is far greater than the spontaneous and looser style generally attributed to Swanevelt’s

nature studies. The final etching was probably issued around 1650, just a few years before his

death, when Swanevelt formally received his royal permission, although an earlier date before

1650 is possible. It would seem only the nature study was produced in Rome before 1644. The completed etching seems a conglomeration of the Roman nature study currently in Oslo with

other imagery that arose either from the artist’s imagination or other nature studies or drawings

unknown or too dissimilar in appearance to adequately make the connection.

This author believes that the two prints by Herman van Swanevelt in the collection at the

University of Arizona Museum of Art are surely produced entirely in Paris sometime after 1644,

and possibly published after receiving the special marketing privilege in 1650. For the collection

at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, and other institutions that maintain the print in their

holdings, circa 1650 or the ten years between 1644-1654 seem a safe listing for the date of the

etching.

Ancient Ruins of an Amphitheater or is it?

With the approximate date of the print squared away, what about the title? There is a range of similar titles depending upon where one looks – Landscape with Ruins of an

Amphitheater, Antique Ruins of an Amphitheater, or simply Ruins of an Amphitheater as is the case at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. 55 The titles generally agree, but noticeably,

nowhere do the many ruinated structures appear like an amphitheater, at least in the classical,

Greek sense, with stadium-like seating surrounding a lower stage. In the print, there are walls

and a watchtower, a large archway, and several structures that look more like dwellings then a

place to gather around a theatrical performance. The print’s surface contains no titles or textual

markers of place, and likely many of Swanevelt’s prints were granted titles later, possibly when

accounted for in Bartsch or Hollstein. Hence, Ruins of an Amphitheatre was probably never the

original title if there ever was one.56 Bartsch titled the print Les ruines en amphithéâtre, which intriguingly translates as the ruins in amphitheater, and the associated description of the print is of ruins in an amphitheater-like shaped hillside, not of the architecture. Such confusion in translation is likely where the print’s title became associated with ruins of an amphitheater, rather than ruins in amphitheater-shaped terrain.57

If it is not a theatrical amphitheater, then what does appear in the print? Several of

Swanevelt’s prints, drawings, and paintings depict actual Roman ruins that he encountered while in the ancient city, and it is conceivable this print also pictures a recognizable locale. A 1634 painting by Swanevelt, currently located at The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo,

depicts the Temple of Venus and Roma, the Arch of Constantine and a small section of the

Colosseum (Fig. 11). These ruins are in geographic proximity to one another, and the painting

could very well depict the location accurately, even though, it is likely that the artist altered the

view in subtle ways for compositional purposes, possibly using multiple nature studies from

similar locations to construct the final composition, a tactic regularly deployed by Swanevelt.58

Several other paintings and prints also depict known locales in Rome. Therefore, the search for the print’s imagery must begin with known ruins in Rome.

For a print with such a great mass of ruins there are only a few complexes that are so extensive as to be worthy of considerations – the Baths of Caracalla, those near the Colosseum, the Forum Romana, and the Palatine Hill. The Baths of Caracalla and the Forum Romana can be swiftly ruled out as neither reside in an amphitheater-shaped hillside or resemble the architecture in other drawings and paintings by Swanevelt or Claude (Fig. 5). The iconic circular form of the

Colosseum is also not depicted. By process of elimination, the only possible site is the Palatine

Hill, if the print does indeed render a known locale. The two drawings mentioned earlier and included in Anne Charlotte Steland’s catalog raisonné support the location as the Palatine. A nature study by Claude of the Palatine Hill also resembles the architectural features in

Swanevelt’s etching. Upon their publication of Swanevelt’s work, the Stadsmuseum in Woerden does indeed title the print View of the Palatine in Rome.59 Therefore, the title of the print in the

collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art should follow that precedent, and View of

the Palatine in Rome should replace Ruins of an Amphitheater since that title is based on a faulty

translation. 60 From here on, I will refer to the print by the title View of the Palatine in Rome or

simply as View of the Palatine.

Does this alternate title and date affect the interpretation and reception of the etching?

The new title grounds the print in the atmospheres of scientific observation, topographic accuracy, history and archeology frequently associated with the early modern period.61 So grounded, the print diverges from the imagined, allegorical ruins that are regularly featured in

the works of Claude and Poussin (1594-1665). Swanevelt’s visual appreciation of nature is obvious in the print and is further visible in Swanevelt’s and Claude’s careful rendering of

individual species of trees. 62 Based on the sheer quantity of drawings, both artists surely enjoyed

their frequent outings in nature to draw the landscapes around Rome. The practice was certainly

foundational to their identities as painters and is reflected in Swanevelt’s nickname, “Hermit.”

However, the Parisian production of a print laid to paper several years after Swanevelt sat before the Palatine to draw are at odds with purposes of direct observation. Such a scenario makes it unlikely that the print was to function as a souvenir for tourist visiting Rome. Nor would

Swanevelt’s inclusion in both the Rome and Paris academies, and his status as ‘peintre ordinaire du roi’, allow his work to be sold off the street as a mere tourist souvenir at a merchant’s shop,63

although it is entirely probable that the print in some way functioned in this manner upon a

wealthy patron’s return from Rome. If the etching is not meant solely to be an accurate rendering

of a known locale than what other purpose might this print serve?

I argue the print is intended for a visually sophisticated individual aware of the theories

about viewing and experiencing landscape and art. The image is designed to enact the beholder’s imagination in the present, enabling the viewer to visually traverse the landscape of the print and receive certain ennobling mental and physical health benefits. Furthermore, the emphasis on trees and ruins in the print contextualizes pathways for the viewer to thoughtfully consider the relationships of nature and culture, growth and decay, life and death. The loose association with a known locale, perhaps at one time traversed by the print’s owner, only enhances the print’s efficacy. Moreover, Swanevelt the savvy business man and keen observer of artistic trends would have been familiar with the growing interest in prints depicting ruined landscapes, indicated by the successful Small Landscape Series that in 1640 underwent its fourth reissue and

31 featured images of treed landscapes with ruins.64 Swanevelt, having received his royal licensing privilege, would have been encouraged to look back at his stores of drawings and nature studies to produce new works for the burgeoning print market. However, none of this explains why trees and ruins began to appear so frequently in seventeenth-century works of paint and print. The subsequent sections make an initial foray into this vast ecology.

Seeing landscape: a stroll in the forest of art history

And the Lord God commanded him, “You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

– Book of Genesis

Trees reside at the cusp of life and death, and over his lifetime, Swanevelt effectively

painted an entire forest. 65 Nor was he the only one in Seicento Rome to incorporate trees as a

predominant motif in works of art.66 In all their abundance, trees surprisingly are given little explicit attention by art historical scholars even though they dominate the landscape genre – a

subject that according to the hierarchies articulated by the art academies is way down on the list.

Of course, many art historians mention trees as part of specific works, such as those regarding

the Tree of Life in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, but to this author’s knowledge, as of yet,

there is little to no art historical scholarship that explicitly attends to the extended field of trees and their considerable prevalence in early modern landscape works of art. Reasons for this may be that real trees are beyond art history’s disciplinary frame that often privileges paintings and resulting in a disciplinary blindness of prints. Even so, the ubiquity of trees in landscape prints and paintings, as well as, the daily lives of most humans make trees easily overlooked, and not

worthy of scholarly attention. Moreover, identifying specific trees in works of art is nearly

impossible to for trees grow, change appearance, die and their memory passes. Therefore, to

understand how trees are caught up in the making of landscape painting, a trip, albeit a brief one,

into the forest of art history is required. On the rapid journey more than a few trees emerge to

make a point of their omnipresence in the history of art and their significant influence in the

developments of landscape as a pictorial genre.

Trees and forests are nothing new in art and have been around since antiquity.67 The cool

room in the basement of the Villa of Livia near Primaporta (c. 30 B.C.) painted as a treed garden

brought the outside inside, as surely the emperor Augustus’s family sought to escape the hot

summer heat of the Mediterranean. For the Roman gods depicted on the walls of Villa

Boscotrecasea (c. 11 B.C.), a natural paradise was home, and a tree is given the place next to the

deity and a triumphal column. In the medieval period, trees embellish palaces to represent the

king’s royal domain and the extent of his spheres of influence as seen on the mosaic wall at

Stanza di Re Ruggero in the Palazzo, Reale, Palermo (c. 1160). Trees also inspired imaginative

fancy and poetry in the thirteenth-century illumination of the Carmina Burana (c. 1225-30). On

the wall paintings in the Room of the Deer at the Papal Palace in Avignon, (c. 1340-50) the

woodlands were a place to forage, harvest and fish, and offered respite and leisure. For a child, a

tree is meant for climbing. Trees symbolized landownership and were important resources for

fuel and timber as depicted in the fifteenth-century Woodcutter Tapestry (c. 1460). In one of the most exquisite illuminated manuscripts, the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry illustrated circa 1416, woodlands functioned as sites for social organization and labor activities, as well as marked spatial and jurisdictional boundaries. In the spring, the princely entourages would take leave of the castle and stroll among the trees in the fresh spring air. In November, livestock pastured in the forest, and in December royalty took to the woods for their hunts. As the influence of Christianity continued to spread across Europe, wilderness, forests, and trees became an often-depicted site for saintly contemplation and religious devotion. And apparently, all of humanity began in a paradisiacal garden beneath one infamous tree; a biblical story reproduced again and again by countless painters and draughtsman.

Mythological stories also found home and safety among the trees, and in the story of

Daphne painted by Antonio del Pollaiuolo between 1475 and 1480, the female protagonist

becomes a tree to avoid the sexually ravenous Apollo. Such a myth establishes a strong

correlation between the human body and the sanctuary of the arboreal. As the Renaissance is in full swing and artists seek greater mimetic representations of nature, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) depicts trees with observational accuracy. Northern artists followed in Dürer’s footstep, like

Albrecht Altdorfer, who responded to geographical writings and humanistic, patriotic odes to place. Altdorfer’s Danube Landscape, (Fig. 19) painted between 1520-1530, shows a castle near

Regensburg in a dense German forest with no figural staffage, possibly one of the first autonomous landscape paintings ever produced. However, mythological and religious subject matter still inform landscape painting, as is visible in Altdorfer’s densely forested St. George

Slaying the Dragon (1510).

After Dürer and Altdorfer, by the sixteenth century, trees made their way formidably into the foreground of painterly compositions where only figures once dominated. Pieter Bruegel the

Elder (1525-1569) uses trees in the foreground of Hunters in the Snow (before 1565) to enhance the spatial depth and emphasize the rhythms of the seasons that structure social practices and activities – ideas that originate in books of hours. In Bruegel’s The Harvesters (before 1565), the central tree gathers the entire composition and the farmers together for a mid-day lunch beneath its shade. South of the Alps, trees and landscape offer Giorgione (1478-1510) and Titian (1488-

1576) an ideal pastoral vision of Arcadian happiness in the joys of simple living with nature. The poet Jacopo Sonnazaro (1458-1530) describes his yearning to sing “to the listening trees” songs he learned from the shepherds under the shady groves of Arcadia.68 Even bucolic romances and

the three ages of man play out among the trees for Dosso Dossi (1489-1542). In Rome, Agostino

Tassi and Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) regularly feature trees in palatial frescoes.

As the seventeenth century approaches, Swanevelt and many other Northern artists –

before and after him – partook in a long-established tradition of travelling to Rome to develop their skills through drawing the many ruins and sculptures in the ancient city. The journey from

North to South to witness the ennobling sites of Italy ultimately became known as The Grand

Tour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, many artists sought the richly festooned, bustling, economically profitable tourist city and to avoid the wars and depressed economies north of the Alps. Rome offered a robust painting and print market in a wild-west sort of atmosphere with frequent scandal and an enhanced sense of artistic freedom

without control from the guilds. Even the Academy struggled to control the market. Any man,

and even some women, could learn the painter’s trade in Seicento Rome. One need not even take

on a formal apprenticeship, one could wander around the ancient city drawing its ruins and

statues and bring them to one of the many masters in the city for correction, and so by learning to

draw and paint. 69

Paul Bril (1554–1626), a northerner in Rome, is celebrated for his topographical views

that regularly feature trees and ruins. His works, along with his contemporaries’, set the trend for

further developments in the European landscape tradition. Bril is an immediate predecessor of

Swanevelt and Claude, and both were certainly aware of the painter, as Claude was his pupil for

a time.70 It is obvious that Bril’s compositional strategies and rendering of trees and landscape

influenced Swanevelt and Claude. Furthermore, in a curious painting from 1601 that

foreshadows Claude’s harbor scenes, Bril depicts a small boat loaded with trees that may

indicate something of the commercial relevance of the arboreal in the Roman and European

economies.

In the centuries preceding Swanevelt, trees, forests and the landscape, were sites where

countless discourses and dwelling practices intersected, and there was already a robust and well- established tradition of landscape that emerged in the wake of Dürer in the north and Leonardo

(1452-1519) in the south that included many painters and draughtsman.71 Returning to

Christopher Wood’s statement, “To ask the landscapes of the sixteenth century to be pictures

‘about’ nature …” does indeed put a weighty burden on the tradition because landscape paintings and drawings produced during this time cannot be extricated from nature, for they were not about nature they were nature. The experience of landscape was communication with God, divine nature was a secret to be studied and mimetically realized through the artist’s pen and brush. For it is Dürer who claims, “I consider nature as master and human fancy as a fallacy. Observe and study nature, inquire into the hidden and powerful workings of the earth. Durer continues, “For truly art is embedded in nature, and he who can extract it, has it.”72 Therefore nature, truth, is

already there, and there is no need to make art about it if one has the attentive means to bring its

ever-presence forth.

Dürer, for all his words, never produced a program of independent landscape painting, and his desire for recognition and continual progress rarely kept him restrained to a single subject matter. His watercolors and drawings go far in this direction; however, the recorded topographic landscapes and morphologies are intended for his personal uses, and they never made their way into autonomous landscape paintings intended for a broader public. As Wood emphasizes, “Dürer’s watercolor studies, even if completed, were never offered to the world as pictures.”73 However, this should not decrease their importance. For the visually hungry Dürer,

in the throes of production, a brief drawing was equally influential on the artist’s purpose. In fact, it may even be in reverse, that it is the drawing, the sketch just beyond the road, with its minimal needs for production, free from the demands of patronage, assistants and planning, that drives the artist’s spontaneous sense of joy in and connection to the natural world.

South of Europe’s great divide, the Alps, Leonardo DaVinci, takes up a similar practice of observing the landscape, and one of his earliest known drawings is of a vista overlooking a valley flanked by trees (1473).74 Leonardo believed that hands-on knowledge could illuminate

nature – its principles, dynamic processes – and it is the work of art that made such dynamics

visible. The “marvelous science of painting,” as Leonardo described it, fixed the impermanence

of nature for the beholder to contemplate more thoroughly. Such a power of imagination excited

the Italian polymath, for it is his ideal man that unites the micro and macro, and the skilled painter who produces the world as he pleases, for “whatever exists in the universe through essence, presence, or imagination, he has it first in the mind and then in the hands.”75 An

informational channel that begins with the universe, moves into the mind and emerges from the

hand to propagate new life in the work of art. Such a flow seems fathomable when from an

anatomical perspective it was believed the nerves of the spine were the pathways that transmitted

the soul from the seat of the brain into the body and ultimately out of the life-generating phallus.76

Leonardo’s interests and speculations regarding dynamics and human anatomy is

extended to his studies of trees that are visibly alike to components of the human body. The

mimetic similarity between tree and human anatomy must not be overlooked when considering

an arboreal ideology that influenced the productions of landscape painting after Leonardo,

particularly in the first half of the seventeenth century when Leonardo’s writings were carefully

considered, analyzed, and subject to debate.77 Trees in several of Swanevelt’s painted works indeed appear almost as bodies or foregrounded portraits of the arboreal that speak to the

conceptual overlap between trees and human anatomy. Such arboreal portraiture is even more

visible in Claude’s drawings that depict detailed nuances of specific trees.78

Where Dürer seems to emphasize the observation of the tree for pictorial purposes to

establish the divine genius of the artist, Leonardo seems more interested in knowledge of the

underlying dynamic process of the divine universe. For Dürer it is art that leads to science, and

for Leonardo, it is science that leads to art. An examination of their tree drawings clarifies the

intentions of these influential Renaissance men. In Dürer’s Fir (1495) (Fig. 6), a mimetic

reproduction of a fir tree floats on a white sea of paper. The tree appears almost as though it were

plucked from the background of a painting or served as a study for a tree destined for such a

background. The fir tree stands tall and erect, like Dürer’s glorified artistic personality, its colors

accurately reproduced in gauche. The thick needle-laden boughs hang heavily, while the

outstretched limbs reach out, rising slightly upward creating a perfect balance of downward

weight, heavy and rooted on the land, and an upward drive toward divine luminescence. In

Dürer’s Fir there is a tension between forces, that likely inspired his practice of close observation

of natural phenomenon attending to the inner and outer worlds of the artist.

In Leonardo, however, there are no works of trees or studies of landscapes that seem

intended for a final picture. Rather, his tree studies seem explicitly for the study of trees or as

instruction for the practice of painting.79 Kemp suggests a similar view for his study of anatomy: that it was not merely a practice intended to give him access to the body in order to make pictures, but rather it was his experience studying anatomy that led to its deployment in

pictures.80 Such a view perhaps appears forced and overly nuanced. However, at the least it. does suggest the fluidity between the disciplines of art and science according to Leonardo.

There are two drawings by Leonardo of trees that are valuable to consider. One is a drawing that examines the geometric ratios in the growth of tree limbs and branches (c. 1500)

(Fig. 8). The illustration may as well be interchangeable with an anatomical study of the fractal

relationships in the human vascular system. Leonardo’s tree drawings, and countless studies of

mechanics and anatomy are concerned with practical instruction and the underlying dynamics

and forces that make up and breathe life into the world. The second tree drawing by Leonardo is

but a mere dusting of chalk that floats in the right center of a sheet of paper (1498) (Fig. 7). The

tree with a few additional plants and sprouts growing at its base is young, and not the giant

stalwart fir of Dürer. Beneath the drawing there is a paragraph of text, that reads, “The part of a

tree which has shadow for background, is all of one tone, and wherever the trees or branches are

thickest they will be darkest because there are no little intervals of air.”81 Unlike Dürer’s

ambient, total illumination, Leonardo’s tree maintains a clear light source from the upper right,

that underlies his thoughts concerning in his invention of chiaroscuro. The tree drawing and its

text are indeed intended as a preparatory study for an eventual treatise on painting, and not to be

included in a completed work of art. It seems here Leonardo is more interested in the process and

practice of art, rather than in the production of final pictures. Furthermore, never did Leonardo

ever produce a completely autonomous landscape painting, and in general, his paintings maintain

the same conventional stories and compositions as other painters, namely portraits with

landscapes in the background. As Wood claims, “Leonardo had new ideas of how to paint, not

what to paint.”82

Color and vision were intimately related in Leonardo’s theories that factored significantly

in the production of landscape painting in Seicento Rome. Leonardo’s color theory is visible in

countless paintings by Swanevelt and must have also influenced the production of his prints with

their skillful atmospheric tonality, even though they lack color. A discussion of landscape

painting in Seicento Rome cannot overlook the structural boundaries set forth by the

predominate theories of vision. The guidelines and theoretical underpinnings that organized color

and spatial dimension in landscape paintings of the era seem to read directly from Leonardo’s

writings. The protocols and problems outlined by Leonardo and expounded by seventeenth-

century writers appear specifically to be what Swanevelt and Claude set out to answer in the

realm of landscape painting. Indeed, Swanevelt and Claude synthesize Dürer’s close

attentiveness to observation of earthly features with Leonardo’s explication on color and light,

which leads to the mimetic rendering of geographic features bathed in accurate light from

specific times of the day.

Swanevelt and Claude deploy Leonardo’s color theory to spatially unify their paintings.

The science of painting as described by Leonardo hinges on a perception of color that precedes

modern color theory. Leonardo inherited a complex theoretical ordering of light from the

Aristotelian tradition, that perceived all colors to be a mixture of black and white, or ratios of dark and light, that finds considerable attention in Leonardo’s exegesis of lustre.83 The practice of painting and theories of color were grounded in both mathematical principle and direct- observational experience. The internal organs of the body were like a mirror that was receptive to the geometric light rays emitted by the visible objects and inscribed into mental images and stored in the internal sense.84 Leonardo’s explanation of painted color merges experience of light

with optical principles into a Scientia media rooted in phenomenological perception and direct

41 experience – an on-the-ground solution that operationalizes color and perception for the needs of the landscape painter.

Leonardo instructed painters to “create strong, heightened contrasts of color according to their own ingegni, but founded on knowledge of optical principles.”85 Overwhelmingly it is

Leonardo’s writings on color, light, shadow, and atmosphere, over his writings on perspective, that influenced the landscape painters of the seventeenth century. Leonardo writes, “Objects against a bright and illuminated field display much more relief than against a dark one.”86 This strategy is nearly explicit in every landscape painting from Rome in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is common to consider Leonardo’s development of tonal range and chiaroscuro, yet it is only in combination with his discussions of colore that manifest in the realm of landscape paintings of Swanevelt and his immediate predecessors and contemporaries.

A few years before Swanevelt arrived in Rome, in 1618, Matteo Zaccolini (1574-1630) began an interpretation of Leonardo’s color theory and was completed in 1622. The sole extant copy of Zaccolini’s treatise is dated 1630 and commissioned by Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657), art patron, and secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1679), who maintained a significant collection of Swanevelt’s works, as well as, Poussin’s and Claude’s.87 Moreover, the early 1630s is precisely when Swanevelt and Claude began to develop their style of landscape awash and unified in light from specific times of the day. Cassiano intended to publish several manuscripts including Leonardo’s renowned Treatise on Painting, that was illustrated by Nicolas

Poussin, Swanevelt’s’ contemporary, of which he was undoubtedly aware. And if Swanevelt did not encounter Zaccolini’s writings or Leonardo’s treatise in Rome, then he had a second chance when Leonardo’s theory of color was hotly debated in the Paris Academy, at the same time

Poussin took his illustrated version to the French capital, and shared the document with several

influential people including his patrons.88

Zaccolini’s writings form an important source of reference, grounding the theoretical

developments in landscape art of the first quarter of the seventeenth century.89 The primary explication important to the likes of Swanevelt and those within his milieu is Zaccolini’s principles of color perspective, known today as aerial, atmospheric or tonal perspective.90 The

theoretical framework of colore is founded on an assumption that dark chromatic value seen

through an illuminated medium, such as air, produces the appearance of a blue color. This optical

phenomenon is rooted in conceptions of the cosmos dating back to the ancient Greeks, who

understood the first layer of atmosphere surrounding the Earth as catching the sun’s rays and

veiling “an infinite zone of such rareness” that it appears completely dark. The sky, hence,

looked blue because the whitish zone of air acted like a transparent medium in which the

darkness beyond appeared blue. Such conceptions originate from the whiter appearance of the sky closer to the horizon and explains why the rarified air at the summit of mountains appeared lighter than at the base. This relationship between light and dark in Zaccolini’s theories builds

upon Leonardo’s discussion of luster and formulates a scale of color in its relationship to black

or darkness.91 The color scale here, rather than following the colors of the rainbow as is common

in modern science, is based on how far a color must recede into the distance before it appears

blue. This scale from Zaccolino’s point of view is progressively ordered blue, black, green, red,

yellow, white. Blue here precedes black because with distance blue appears blue before black.92

Within this framework of color, Zaccolini lays out a chromatic scheme in the

compositional organization of landscape painting into four degrees of distance.93 Such structuring of color appears to be the dominant method of atmospheric perspective and

compositional organization in the landscape paintings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth

centuries. Such strategies are readily observant in the works of Paul Bril, particularly the

painting, Fantastic Landscape, (Fig. 21) and visible in much of Swanevelt’s oeuvre. However,

Bril’s transitions appear rather forced and abrupt compared to the dolcezza or sweetness of color

graduation for which Zaccolini preferred. Such a sweetness of color and smooth transition of

light is precisely the achievement of Swanevelt and Claude. Whether the two painters were

working out Zaccolini’s program or Zaccolini was looking at their works to inform his writing is

mired in historical uncertainty. Regardless, the painters and the theorist were operating in the

same contextual framework of vision, light, and color, and it seems these two artists took it upon

themselves to fully realize the Leonardo-inspired theories explicated by Zaccolini in the realm of

landscape painting.94

Such a detailed analysis of a color theory may seem a bit overwrought for a discussion of

a print that lacks color. However, Swanevelt’s structural constraints of color perception located

in his paintings cannot be isolated and must also inform his graphic works, which through value tonality they most certainly do. In the etching, View of the Palatine in Rome, the dark shadow of the tree in the foreground establishes the initial degree in which all the values recede until they merge with the white of the sky. In accordance with Leonardo’s and Zaccolini’s principles,

Swanevelt luminously weaves together his composition with tonal value and the dolcezza

Zaccolini most delighted. Under the dominate visual ideology of intromission and theories of vision, the print does not so much lack color, since it is called forth in the imagination of the viewer. Furthermore, this color theory exemplifies that early seventeenth-century theories of vision and painting were grounded in phenomenological, perceptual experience rather than the science of optics. The rise of landscape painting as “a new idea of what to paint,” than can be

44 explained from the painter’s position in the elucidation of perception as it appears on-the-ground and is translated to canvas or printed to paper.

Drawing Swanevelt’s forest

Drawing is the point of connection where the many practices of art and its cultural contexts converge.

– Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past. 95

Many northern individuals came to Italy, the fertile garden, to draw its landscapes, art

and ruins. The idea of Italy as a garden coalesces in the many writings penned by both locals and

foreigners who ambled about the boot-shaped peninsula.96 Virgil and Pliny both describe its

fruitfulness, temperate air and fertile valleys. English traveler Richard Lassels waxes lyrically on

the forests of olive, corke, caper, and entire hedges of orange and lemon trees.97 The cultivated and civilized version of nature that originates in Italy are found in garden designs across Europe,

even to the point of the inclusion of faux ruins inspired by the paintings of Claude.98 The

symbolic, medicinal and ennobling value of nature and a well-tended garden were so influential

that nature did not remain outside but came indoors onto the palace walls painted in fresco. This

practice in Italy stretches back to ancient Rome, where the desire to escape the heat of the

Mediterranean spurred the transformation of a cool basement into an indoor garden as seen in the

Villa of Livia. At the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century many commissions were

granted to artists to paint landscapes in fresco on the walls of villas and palaces. The practice was

so extensive that it indeed may have driven the market for easel paintings, drawings and prints of

similar subject matter. Many influential landscape painters in Seicento Rome were employed for

such endeavors, including Annibale Carracci, Agostino Tassi, Paul Bril, and Swanevelt.

Several fresco panels in Rome have been attributed to Swanevelt, mostly through

preparatory drawings.99 Currently the frescoes associated with Swanevelt are two lunettes in the

sacristy of Saint Maria sopra Minerva, of which only one survives, and two series of narrative

panels at the palaces of the Mancini and Pamphilj families. The twentieth-century attribution of

the frescos to Swanevelt was one source that established for art historians the importance of his

reputation among landscape painters in Seicento Rome. Furthermore, Swanevelt’s emphasis on

the arboreal in the frescoes indicates the social and cultural value of trees in early modern Rome

and the development of landscape painting.

Swanevelt’s first fresco commission at the sacristy arises out of a peculiar circumstance

when, according to Passeri, he was imprisoned in 1634 at the monastery and ordered to paint the

frescoes for failing to observe a fast. The surviving fresco is set in an arced lunette depicting a landscape scene along a river bank with a waterfall on the right side of the composition and a cluster of trees in an ‘X’ arrangement on the left with several figures nearby (Fig. 13). Three

groups of figures on the left of the composition walk along the river that leads to a town or

cluster of buildings in the far distance. The scene seems to take place in a wild part of the

Campagna on the outskirts of a town, an interesting setting that betrays the notion that a well-

ordered garden was the preferred arrangement of nature in the early modern period.100 It is uncertain what the story in the scene refers; some suggest it is the martyrdom of Saint Peter of

Verona, who was an important figure for the Dominican order who built Saint Maria Sopra

Minerva.101

Swanevelt was commissioned for another fresco series in 1635 by Giambattista Pamphilj

(1574-1655), who became Pope Innocent X in 1664. At the time of his accession, Innocent

implemented plans for a new palace that incorporated the old Palace Pamphilj. A high value

must have been placed on the frescoes by Swanevelt at the old palace for the new pope instructed

that several friezes by both Swanevelt and Tassi be preserved. It seems likely, that the future

pope had been aware of Swanevelt’s punitive frescoes of Saint Peter at Saint Maria Sopra

Minerva and that they led to the commission at the Palace Pamphilj. A fact supported that it was

Innocent IV, the new pope’s namesake, that initially recognized the virtue of St. Peter of Verona

and named him Inquisitor of Lombardy in 1251.

The frescoes at the Palazzo Pamphilj illustrate seven episodes from the story of Joseph.

The scenes include a multitude of foregrounded figures, predominately moving or journeying

through rich arboreal environments that reach deep into space. One of the more sophisticated

panels depicts the story of Joseph’s father, Jacob, and his departure to Egypt (Fig. 14). The great

procession emerges from an arched gate in a subtle “S” curve. The architectural buildings on the

right recede in perspective to an Egyptian Pyramid in the far distance. Whether the pyramid

indicates the final destination or is referring to the Pyramid of Cestius in Rome, or both, is

unclear. On the far left is another pair of trees in a “V” shape that with the edge of the panel frames a spacious landscape with two figures walking along a river. Storm clouds appear to develop above the figures and a bolt of lightning strikes a nearby tree.102 After leaving the city

through the gate, the entourage arrives on top of a low hill crowned with an old tree, precisely in between a wild, unpredictable nature and a refined architectural culture reaching back to ancient

Egypt and Rome.

The last fresco cycle produced by Swanevelt in Rome during the 1630s is in the palace of the Mancini Family and features additional scenes from the life of Jacob. One of the scenes depicts two narratives separated by a grouping of large trees and a blasted trunk (Fig.15). On the right of the arboreal dividers, is a journey scene, The Flight of Jacob, set before a modest country

villa surrounded by cypress, stone pine and the travelers flanked by a dead snag. On the left of

the composition is Jacob with his flock of sheep set in a wilder landscape amid a dense forest and along what appears like a small creek or wetland. Illustrated here is a peculiar tale, Jacob Hiding

the Branches. The story comes from Genesis 30: 37-39 where Jacob cuts fresh branches from three species of trees – poplar, almond, and plane. Jacob peels away some of the bark in the branches to make stripes, exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Jacob then places the branches in the watering troughs. When the flock comes to drink, and the females are in heat, the sheep mate and give birth to lambs that are streaked, speckled, or spotted, depending on the respective tree bark that was visible. The genetically modified sheep with such markings apparently sold at higher prices and encouraged Jacob to meddle in their mating practices using tree branches. Furthermore, the belief that images viewed during sex would alter the appearance of offspring was pervasive from antiquity to the eighteenth century. The dominant conception that gave trees and paintings abilities to convey medicinal or genetic virtues (a topic addressed in more detail later), to be found on display in the palace of a significant Italian family indicates the special value placed on trees in the early modern imaginative that extends well beyond geographic feature or mere resource. 103

Regardless of a painting’s efficacy to impress upon a parent’s seed, one wonders, what was the arboreal conditions on the ground in Seicento Rome? According to sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century biographers, art and nature were on full display in Seicento Rome. Karel

van Mander (1548-1606), a biographer of Netherlandish and Northern Renaissance artists,

describes Rome as “alluring and enticing. . . a city virtually created for the delight of painters and

adorned with works of art.” Joachim von Sandrart writes that the Italian Annibale Carracci, co-

founder of the Accademia del Naturale, painted landscape out of sheer recreational leisure with

no patron in mind. Swanevelt certainly engaged in such recreational tactics, as he was given the

name “Hermit,” due to his predilection to draw and wander alone around Rome and the Italian

Campagna. Swanevelt’s extensive and energetic drawings of trees and waters indicate that this

practice was not only intended as studies for future paintings, but as a habitual activity of

dwelling.

According to the biographers mentioned above, Rome is a city of nature but was it a city

of trees? Perhaps from an art historical perspective such a question matters little, as trees already

have a long tradition in works of art as a symbolic motif, and their appearance in works of art are not necessarily dependent on any in the actual landscape. However, coming to terms with an artist’s on-the-ground, phenomenological experience of dwelling within a landscape and how

such encounters may influence artistic production of trees, the presence of actual trees is an

obvious and important point of reference.

Ruins did indeed spread across Seicento Rome, offering tourists, painters, and locals

places for leisure, recreation and the contemplation of the city’s ancient atmosphere. But we

cannot be so sure about trees. Sandro Botticelli refers to a specific grove of stone pine near

Ravenna in his 1483 painting, Nastagio degli Onesti, that according to tradition is also the site

where Dante composed the Divine Commedia. Even though Botticelli was unfashionable in the

seventeenth century and this woodland is on the other side of the Italian peninsula from Rome, it

does establish specific groves of trees in works of Italian art as early as the fifteenth century.104

Back in Rome, a 1704 print by Lieven Cruyl (1634–1709) depicts a view of the Campo

Vaccino (the local name for the Roman Forum, that translates as cow field, because at the time livestock and their shepherds gathered here) with a long boulevard of trees running down the

Campo’s center.105 Interestingly, a similar view produced by Swanevelt in 1634 does not show

the boulevard of trees. Neither does Claude’s 1636 painting, nor does a 1642 map by Matthias

Marian (1593–1650). However, a 1665 drawing by Lieven Cruyl shows the boulevard as young

trees, while the 1704 print shows mature trees. In Salomon Corrodi’s 1804 painting of the same

subject the trees are even larger. If works of art can be treated as historically factual documents

than the boulevard of trees was planted sometime between 1642 and 1665. If this is indeed the

case than this reveals something of the attitudes toward trees in Seicento Rome, and it also

makes works of art a compelling source for the study of Rome’s arboreal heritage.

On the panoramic map of Rome produced in 1642 by Matthis Merian, trees fill the city in

several areas, including near the Colosseum and Palatine Hill where the ruins were most

prevalent. However, maps may not always be trustworthy indicators of topographic detail, as

perhaps the mapmaker used trees as filler material or to cover up complex areas. However, on

close inspection, Merian illustrates different species of trees, and such naturalistic detail seems

less a ploy to fill space as it is meant to be an accurate representation of the Eternal City. Merian

even depicts trees and foliage growing from the dirt that settled on ancient surfaces over the

years (Fig. 9). This reclamation of the ruins by nature is depicted in multiple drawings, prints, and paintings by Swanevelt, and suggest that nature’s overgrowth of the ruins was indeed a reality in the first half of the seventeenth century, a fact that suggests the close conceptual

proximity of trees and ruins (Fig. 10). Put another way, nature and humanity are interwoven into

the same fabric.

If any doubts remain that Seicento Rome and its outlying countryside were home to a

robust arboreal heritage, it is Swanevelt’s and Claude’s drawings produced en plein air that put

the case to rest. Claude specifically dedicates tremendous efforts to a nuanced study of trees.

Swanevelt did as well, but his drawing production is a bit more erratic than the consistent and

methodical approach of Claude. A Study of an Oak Tree (1638) (Fig. 12) is certainly one of

Claude’s most intensely observed, technically elaborate, and minutely detailed drawings of a

tree.106 The mighty oak is cast in shadow while the bright sun illuminates a grove in the distance.

The large roots reach into the earth while a tangled mess of vines crawl up the wide trunk. The

bark is so meticulously rendered that one can nearly stroke the surface of the paper and feel its

texture. The detail within the drawing alludes to Claude’s close observational presence before the oak, further supported by the notations at the bottom of the sheet – Claude’s signature and the place of its production, Villa Madama, a vineyard just outside Rome.107 Claude’s Roman trees

remain some of the most detailed and thoughtful tree drawings ever produced. Such specificity

would likely not be matched until the mid-nineteenth century in the works of Asher B. Durand.

Extending the forest

No color is more pleasing than green; it satisfies the eye without cloying it and relieves eyestrain. Gaze eagerly at young plants and leaves.

– Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia

He [Swanevelt] has an intimate love for nature and a divine peace, which communicates itself to us when we look at his pictures.

– Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Eckerman and Soret

The word “history” stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history … is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay.

– Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

The emergence in landscape painting of trees, with ruins as their temporal counterparts calls for a voyage into several shoots and boughs that emerge within a larger forest of relations.

For there was no ultimate, singular, pre-programmed, overarching theory or practice that drove ruins, trees, and landscapes into early modern works of art, but rather it is a swirling, shimmering, shadowy forest of extensive interrelationships between several natural and socio- cultural frameworks. In the following section, I will provide an overview of some of the overlapping discourses that brought trees into the forefront of landscape painting, and are trackable in Swanevelt’s print, View of the Palatine in Rome.

Seventeenth-century landscape painting and print culture figured trees and ruins as

sensorial and temporal extensions of the human body. Growing trees and decaying ruins offered

a means of coming to terms with unpredictable transience and inevitable decay. In the early

modern period that witnessed rampant warfare, migration, socio-economic advances, shifting

institutional boundaries, and the intense religiosity of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation,

the angst of ephemeral temporalities take shelter amid the growth of trees and the decay of ruins.

The interlocution between the various disciplines of archeology, anatomy, botany, the study of

medicinal therapies, natural philosophy, history and painting configurate human bodies, trees, and ruins to assuage the uneasiness of impermanence and to convey physical and mental health benefits to the early modern observer.

The overlap of these various discourses is traceable in Swanevelt’s etching. View of the

Palatine in Rome indeed functions within this expanded field, or forest rather, to resist decay,

enact calming sensory experience, and efficaciously delivering the health benefits of the

landscape through the medium of print, in the present. However, the benefits of viewing

landscape and landscape pictures do not merely begin and end as a form of health care, as

medicinal practices are understood today. Early modern medicine was considered an art, not a

science. The practice of viewing the landscape, either in print or in place, must not be segregated

to this discourse or that, and tracking such lines must take a wide view, for landscape painting

came forth in a torrent of intense sentiments amid disciplinary frameworks that sought

unification of the micro- and macrocosms. In works of seventeenth-century landscape, the body

is the link between trees and ruins, nature and culture, earth and the cosmos.

The body as the nexus for the interrelationships of nature and culture is no more obvious

than in a 1545 anatomical treatise that conflates anatomy, botany and a ruin for scientific

instruction – early modern anatomy and botany being intimately related subjects, frequently

practiced by the same individual. The author of the treatise, Charlies Estienne (1504-1564), presents the practice of dissection as akin to an archaeological excavation (Fig. 16).108 A figure sits upon a ruinated structure, pulls open his chest and invites the viewer in for a look. Just as greeneries grew on the ruins of Rome, plants spring forth from the figure’s throne. The plant life transforms, or naturalizes, the ruin from a heap of rubble, and the body from a sack of bones into objects worthy of natural inquiry and observation. The young plants reanimate the structure and deceased body with the promise of renewal and make pleasing the abject features. In the treatise, rot and decay are recontextualized into the new growth of knowledge. 109 Another peculiar image

from the treatise exposes a figure’s brain whose scalp hangs from a nearby tree limb (Fig. 17).

The pealing back of human flesh reveals the branch like growth pattern of the brain. The display

could not speak more intimately of the human body as an arboreal instance of nature.

In this anatomical treatise and Swanevelt’s prints, nature and culture are wedded through

trees, bodies, and ruins to negotiate ideas of change and decay. Preservation projects frequently

incorporate ancient structures, plant life and trees to suspend the inevitable transience of

temporality. Ruins preserve culture within their stones while trees gather memory of place within

their limbs – each a monument to the past that persists in the present. The exalted status of

antiquity, granted to the arboreal in seventeenth-century landscape imagery, endures into

the present at ancient groves in Sequoia National Park, and in the saguaros down the road

from where I write.

An interesting paradox, or rupture, lies within preservation of ruins and trees, as they are

framed in both terms of living, ecologies of the present, and as halted, ruined monuments to a

past. In effect, the paradox demands a coming to terms with time – past, present, and future –

determined by birth, growth, and ultimately, death. I argue seventeenth-century landscape

painters and theorists negotiated this temporal and existential paradox by emphasizing and

extending the landscape’s ability to heal into the realm of the image to impart physical and

mental health benefits upon the beholder in the present. For seeing an image, along with walking

and gazing at young green plants, was thought to improve one’s health.

Erasmus (1466-1536) and the ancient Roman author, Pliny the Elder, both widely read in

the early modern era, characterize a few ways of seeing and understanding the landscape.

Erasmus writes in The Godly Feast (1522) “Nature is intended for honest pleasure, to feast the

eyes, refresh the nostrils, restore the soul. Nature speaks to us everywhere and teaches the

observant many things if attentive and receptive.”110 Erasmus articulates the overlap of both the pleasurable and philosophical with the health benefits provided by experience of the landscape.

Pliny in Naturalis Historia brings health concerns specifically to the viewing of plants when he

commands his readers to “Gaze eagerly at young plants and leaves.”111 For the natural historian,

green is a color that transmits health benefits to those that behold it. Under the dominate visual

theory of intromission in the Renaissance, objects were believed to emit immaterial rays that

acted upon the eye, and therefore could induce changes upon the body – a view that rightly construed lends agency to material objects.112

The health benefits of landscape and works of art are explicit in the writings of several

Renaissance polymaths. The Anatomy of Melancholy, written by Englishman Robert Burton

(1577-1640) in 1621 prescribes picture galleries as a remedy for melancholic affliction, and as a

place to exercise by walking “back and forth” to maintain a “noble” body.113 Burton further

describes walking, as the “most pleasant of all outward pastimes,” regardless of the location, be

it in cities, towns, orchards, gardens or mountains. The Bolognese gymnast, Giocondo Baluda (b.

late sixteenth century), in a woodcut included in his 1630 Trattato del modo di volteggiare e

saltare il cavallo di legno, provides the proper technique for walking appropriate to the rank of

princes and noblemen.114 Baluda describes one must walk to match one’s elevated station with

posture erect, toes pointed forward, and neither too fast or too slow. Indeed, the pair of noble

men at the center of Swanevelt’s print maintain this erect, noble gait. Moreover, the majority of

humanistic medical practitioners in the Galenic tradition, of which both Leonardo and Estienne are a part, recommend long walks as the appropriate method of exercise.115

Giulio Mancini (1559-1630), an art theorist, and physician who attended to several

cardinals, presents guidelines for art collectors that associate health with the procurement of

works of art.116 According to Mancini, nobility required effort and was not wholly innate. One’s

noble behavior arose out of carefully performed exercises that produced a healthful body in

conjunction with the beholding of fine objects that stimulated the mind.117 As new wealth

amongst the middle and upper classes grew in the early modern period, more individuals of

“average understanding and natural judgment” would have sought the practices of walking and

cultivated learning outlined by Mancini to lay claim to noble rank.118 The increased production

of prints depicting such activities in landscapes amid ruins and trees seems to meet the demand

for this rising class of patrons.

Mancini, not only described procedures for collection and patronage, but also set forth

the proper method for viewing landscape paintings. He devised a program for actively beholding

pictures that stimulate the viewer’s imagination and passions through composition, light, and

color. The active eye is situated at a slightly elevated position that enabled visual movement

through the terrain from background to foreground. As the eye moves sequentially through the

various pictorial zones, it experiences the effects of having beheld and traversed the varied

terrain.119 This visual practice is mirrored in the medical regimen of Roman churchmen who

make daily ascents of the hills in Rome, a possible identity for one of the figures in Swanevelt’s

View of the Palatine.

The physical and mental benefits of moving through nature are rendered in the commonplace journey scenes of early seventeenth-century landscape painting.120 Individuals or

small groups often meander down a road or path surrounded by a warmly illuminated, lush,

verdant arboreal environment. One such journey scene, “The Flight to Egypt,” a biblical story featured in countless landscape paintings, tells the tale of an exodus poised between birth and

death that arrives at an ultimate destination of renewal and rejuvenation through the sacrifice of

Jesus Christ and his resurrection from the tomb.

Out from another enclosure emerges a different order of renewal and resistance against

the temporal inevitabilities of decay. Nature as a source of remedy is manifest in a portable

physician’s chest (Fig. 18) constructed sometime between 1562 and 1566 for Vincenzo

Giustiniani (d. 1570) the governor of Chios and father to another Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-

1637) – the same Giustiniani family that maintained a large art collection, frequently invited

artists to their estate to draw and commissioned works from Swanevelt, Claude, and Poussin. 121

The medical chest contained several bottles, drawers, and boxes of natural compounds like

rhubarb powder, juniper water, and mustard oil.122 Interestingly, several of the drugs in the chest

come from the New World and some can be traced to the influential and controversial Paracelsus

(1493-1541).123

The chest opens to an oil painting that depicts the female personage of medicine holding a caduceus, riding a chariot led by two birds – possibly cranes – through a classical, placid landscape of ancient trees, refreshingly-spacious blue air and green viridity.124 The style of the

painting suggests it is not as old as the chest, and dates from the seventeenth century. Some

scholars suggest that the image was painted by Herman van Swanevelt, and it certainly does

resemble his style. Swanevelt’s relationship to the Gustiniani family and the plausible

commission of the painted image in the medicine chest lends credibility to the painter’s work

within the restorative and medicinal contexts of the landscape.125 Ironically, however, damage along with subsequent restoration makes accurate attribution to the painting nearly impossible.126

Regardless, the chest was certainly produced within Swanevelt’s milieu, and the associated

benefits accorded to medicine and landscape could not be more eloquently embodied. In this

curious early modern luxury object, the landscape and its medicinal contents combine to become

a vehicle that transports the patient from illness to good health, just as Swanevelt’s print is intended.

The correlation of walking amid arboreal and ruinated landscapes as an effective mental and physical health strategy, whether in pictures or actuality, offers an alternative framework for understanding the production of Herman van Swanevelt, and by extension seventeenth-century

landscape painting more broadly. For it was said, “You may walk in Claude’s pictures and count the miles.”127 Hence, one need not go outside when one can receive a change of heart indoors

through the medium of paint and print. The image’s ability to transmit and produce calming

virtues is described by Goethe when he praises Swanevelt for his “… intimate love of nature and

divine peace, which communicates itself to us when we look at his pictures.”128 Passeri,

Swanevelt’s principal biographer, describes the artist’s placidity of colors that shine easily with a sense of immediacy, as though such images are capable of instantaneously dispensing a visual tonic.

Most often Swanevelt’s figures are consider genre figures, as though they were included

to merely decorate or populate the landscape. However, a close analysis of the etching View of

the Palatine in Rome and its ten small figures reveals the health-oriented attitudes and

mentalities granted to the early modern landscape. I argue that the inclusion of the figures, genre

or otherwise, are intended to operationalize the efficacy of the image upon the beholder, for in a

world of unified micro- and macrocosms viewing a landscape in print, that activated the

imagination and called forth past memories, is as good as experiencing a landscape in the flesh.

In general, all ten figures dispersed throughout the print are seemingly engaged in enjoying nature. In the foreground, the first pair appears like two men lounging easily in the shade amid discussion (Fig. 23). Two massive and blasted trunks erupt from the base of the tree signifying how long the tangled oak has cast its shade on the hillside.129 As the two figures

discourse among the ruined tree, it is hard not to consider a temporal reference to the transient

life course of a human compared to trees and ruins.130 One of the men looks up to his companion

and points in the opposite direction toward the open gate that leads into the complex of ruins.

Following the point leads to the next two figures walking along the road in conversation (Fig.

24). They appear likely to be wealthy elites based on the few hints in their attire and posture that

accord with Baluda’s description of a noble gait. And in case there is confusion about where to

go, Swanevelt doubles the directions, and once again, a figure looks back to his compatriot and

points in the opposite direction toward the small path that leads to the open gate of the ruin

complex. This doubling gesture suggests a narrative device or path of observation and

wayfinding through the print’s trees and structures following Mancini’s principles of viewing

landscape pictures.131

A short way up the trail, about to enter the gate, is the next figure, a working woman carrying a basket of sorts on her head (Fig. 25). The portal which the figure approaches opens directly to the base of a large dead snag. The old tree practically blocks the gate’s passage, and its proximity to the gate seems not incidental. The exhausted tree signals the transience of mortality and the deep temporal threshold the figure will soon cross as she leaves the path for the complex of ruins. The snag’s great height enhances the sense of time and place-bound history, tall enough to reach well above the gated wall and a nearby watchtower.

The sentry’s barbican conceals the fourth figure in the foreground (Fig. 26). This solitary figure appears perfectly framed in silhouette through the window of the tower. The lone figure seems immersed in an atmosphere of solitary contemplation or at least has found a lone spot to gaze at the landscape. Based on a few clues, I believe the figure is drawing. Swanevelt depicts figures drawing in several other prints and paintings – a sort of meta-gesture that signals the artist’s acute self-awareness and practice of drawing out of doors. 132 On close inspections, a rectangular shape directly below the figure’s head may be a sketchbook or drawing surface of sorts. Regardless if the figure is drawing or not, the framing of the window and the tower encloses the figure in the space of thoughtful solitude – a good place to draw or to contemplate the virtues and receive the medicinal benefits of nature.

The figures that remain wander the hillside among the complex of ruins (Fig. 27). One luminous figure ascends a sunny hill on the way to the uppermost level of ruins, possibly a robed clergyman on his daily walking regimen of the hills of Rome. A few small lines indicate two more figures already atop the hillside, dwarfed by a sunlit wall of the nearby ruinated structure.

Again, one individual points and they both gaze through a few cypress trees, possibly toward other ruins, across Rome, or into the Italian Campagna. What is seen is unknowable, but what is

clear, is that seeing is taking place and the viewer’s imagination stimulated to consider the

prospect beyond. The last figure walks alone, approaching the edge of a large arch that looks

over the canopy of trees and mass of ruins. The small figure and the great height of the arch

conveys a feeling of vertigo, and perhaps the figure is indeed thinking about mortality and the

temporal abyss of ancient trees and ruins below.

There is a myriad of ways to interpret these figures. Their diminutive size might make them insignificant and not worthy of attention, yet it is their activities that enact and activate the landscape without visually dominating the composition. Their small scale makes it easier for the observer to imagine themselves in the immersive environment – a tactic that mirrors the body’s diminutive size in relationship to the actual landscape. The print’s slightly elevated point of view aligns with Mancini’s prescription that enables the viewer to survey and traverse the prospect of land with their eyes. Moreover, each figure is engaged in some form of mental and physical activity – lounging, talking, pointing, walking, seeing, drawing, contemplating – that stimulates the beholder's imagination, bringing them into the lifeworld of the print, and enacts the health benefits of the landscape. The trees and ruins emerge out of the figure’s various practices establishing a relational sense of becoming within the printed landscape.

The print’s overall path of observation unfolds in a zig-zag across the picture’s composition, inviting the beholder of the print to imagine the same trajectory (Fig. 28). As the observer contemplates and moves with the figures, the wind blows, the green-woods thicken, the ancient architecture rises from the hillside, and the physical and mental benefits impart upon the beholder. The warm afternoon sunlight that rakes the scene, illuminates the walls, and casts the figure’s long shadows on the road makes acute the healing presence of the landscape. Here on this sunny Mediterranean afternoon, it is not so much about the artist’s rendering of a specific,

historic, beautiful, or ideal landscape, as much as it is intended to sequester time’s inevitable

decay and actualize, for the observer, in the present the sensorial and medicinal benefits of

traversing a landscape amid ruins and trees. Here in this print, nature, culture, the body, trees,

light, ruins all comingle in the production of landscape.

In this sense, the print is in an ecologic process of exchange that makes the landscape,

that makes the figures, that make the landscape. 133 Indeed, compositionally there is not one focal

point, but a multivalent tangle of interwoven moments, a forest if you will, that all vie for the

observer’s attention. Swanevelt demands visual sensitivity and attentiveness. Furthermore, these

figures are not mythological or religious characters, but individuals, much like the consumers

who would purchase the print. At its root, this print is about sensorial activity in a landscape

shaped by the land, trees, history and the dwelling practices of those inhabitants whose

lifeworlds entangle with a landscape made up of trees and ruins. From a contemporary

perspective, such an interpretation offers insight into how landscape painting emerged within health conscious, sensorially-minded activities in nature, situated within a dialectic of growth and decay, nature and culture.

Conclusion

Around 1520-30, Albrecht Altdorfer produces the first works of autonomous landscape,

where the landscape appears to stand alone for its own sake. Nils Büttner identifies this painting

as Danube Landscape (1520-1530) (Fig. 19), a small oil painting on parchment, mounted to

panel.134 Christopher Wood’s analysis of this small painting overlaps with Büttner, but he titles

the painting differently, Landscape with Castle (1522-25), and seems reluctant to state which

painting by Altdorfer was indeed the first autonomous landscape. Wood associates two other

works with this grouping Landscape with Footbridge (1516?) and a small watercolor, Landscape with Woodcutter (1522) (Fig. 20).135 In each of the works, trees and woodlands dominate the compositions and likely speak to humanistic odes to place and the Germanic forest. Regardless of which painting was chronologically first, Altdorfer pioneered landscape as a subject unto itself, devoid of explicit religious, mythological, or historical references.

Altdorfer may have been the first to mount a landscape to panel, but he seemed not at all concerned with the kind of accurate observation of nature found in Dürer and Leonardo.

According to Wood, Altdorfer left behind few nature studies, and his landscape works are entirely indoor affairs, produced in the artist’s studio. He left behind no writings on nature, and his trees generally appear to be monsters or fictive hybrids. The emphasis on emptiness, or lack of human figures, seems to be a definable characteristic of Woods term “Autonomous

Landscape.” He even asks the questions, “What does an empty landscape mean?” Apparently, emptiness means empty of humans, as though trees and forests are mere backdrops for humans and are not lives in and of themselves. In the early modern period, trees and woodlands were not only resource or abstract geographic feature but were significant sites that intertwined with the

social fabric. And whether produced indoor or with a specific place in mind, Altdorfer’s works

arise from the permeability and overlapping lifeworlds in which he inhabited. The German

landscape was likely so emblazoned in his mind from dwelling in his homeland that he required

no preliminary sketch to produce such pictures. For in the Renaissance with its prevailing view

of intromission, simply calling an object to mind equates to being there in front of it. This subtle difference of sight from our own optically oriented notion of vision reveals the entangled-ness of

the early modern beholder and the beheld. The site of the artist's imagination forms a nexus

where various discourses and shared lifeworlds intersect.

In 1559, Hieronymus Cock published the Small Landscapes, and the successful series,

unlike Altdorfer’s fictions, indeed pictured actual locations of humble rural settings around the

city of Antwerp. The simple, unembellished, and ordinary depictions of the countryside were a

radical innovation compared to the panoramic and allegorical landscapes that dominated the art

market at the time.136 The series reversed the roles of landscape as mere backdrop to heroic

human activity and made the landscape itself the primary subject matter. The figures do not

dominate the foreground but shrink and become nearly insignificant elements embedded in the

land like a tree or shrub. The sprinkling of figures that are included are just like the journey

scenes painted in Seicento Rome, where a few individuals, solitary or in small groups, go about a

dirt track in a landscape of quaint village homes, amid many trees. Interest in the topographic,

material conditions of the landscape, also allowed inclusion of a few images of Roman ruins in

the series. The dialectics of growth and decay, nature and culture are already at work in this

significant series of prints.

The positive reception to this series led to three more subsequent reissues, including a

second by Cock two years later in 1561, then again by Claes Visccher (1587-1652) in 1612, and

once again by Johannes Galle (1600-1676) in 1640, right about the time Swanevelt left Rome to

return north of the Alps. The print series was widely collected, and frequently used by painters

for instruction and to produce new paintings.137 Certainly, when View of the Palatine in Rome

was committed to plate and printed to paper, Swanevelt was aware of the very successful series,

and it is within this print tradition set forth by the Small Landscapes that Swanevelt’s prints find their genesis.

Alexandra Onuf describes the Small Landscapes emerging after the close of the Eighty

Years’ war. This period witnessed a renewed interest in the countryside as landed elites purchased property at low cost because of the rampant destruction in the war-torn rural areas.

This economic and demographic shift prompted images that visualized a nostalgic view of their new lives in rural areas. The series figures the longing for quietude and peaceful landscapes amid trees and ruins, negotiating the uncertainty of war and a new life outside of the city. Certainly, as war, subsequent rebuilding projects, and new landed elite inhabited the countryside, such humble rural life, with its quaint villages and trees would have begun to disappear, encouraging its preservation in print. Such narratives of loss and changing landscapes led to the environmental context that produced the Small Landscapes and the French Forest Ordinance of 1669.138

Moreover, documented cases found in legal records where people lament the loss of trees

cut down speak to the nostalgia of lost landscapes well before the era of environmental

conservation.139 Similar responses occurred when historic ruins were repurposed and recycled for new construction projects. A glorification of and desire to preserve the past in the present is not simply a modern project of nostalgic escapism, but a creative desire to understand,

communicate and feel whole in one’s surroundings. The artist’s painting of landscape is not just

a response to an emerging bourgeois disconnection from the landscape, but is also a process of

incorporation to understand one’s relation to an all-encompassing environment in constant flux,

using the conventions of the time, namely those of painting and drawing, that aestheticize not to isolate but to incorporate. The modern classifications of nature and culture are not so distinct in

the Renaissance as they are today and operate within a mutually generative process shaped by

the various practices of dwelling in a landscape.140 However, art is not the sole proprietor of this

domain, and there are countless discourses and somatic experiences that orient the physical

human body to the more-than-human world well before one picks up a brush and learns the tools

and trades of painting. For it cannot be forgotten that a landscape is inhabited before it is painted

or drawn.

But what of the role of trees in the development of landscape painting? As this paper has

suggested, such an examination is certainly complicated by a myriad of influences. Although a

comprehensive analysis is impossible in such a short paper, a few final suggestions may point

toward a reason why trees appear so profusely in early modern landscapes. The first and

foremost is that trees were already significant elements in art history, as is visible on the stroll

down art history’s arboreal lane. In works of art, trees function as sites for religious devotion,

contemplation, and symbols of Christian iconography. Trees and woodlands were sites of social

organization, where people gathered for a range of activities and labors. Trees articulated

landownership, royalty, and jurisdictional and spatial borders. Forested areas were sites of

mythological fantasy, visions of Arcadia and a place to play and relax. Trees and ruins were used

as a means to convey morality, particularly in the wake of violent conflicts, and gazing at theirs

limbs and walls improved physical and mental health.141 A simple, formal reason for the

inclusion of trees is that they worked well as compositional framing devices that enhanced

spatial depth, scale and naturalized the scenes into believable landscapes. Moreover, trees were

an immensely important resource in the early modern period, and the height of European

deforestation was in the 1700s.142 Cycles of warfare, destruction (ruination), and rebuilding

exacerbated environmental degradation of forests. Increased population growth and developing

agricultural practices also left visible marks upon the woodlands and trees in Swanevelt’s

lifetime. Such environmental changes indicate the rise of trees in works of art was a possible

response to their disappearance in the real world.

The close similarity of ruination and deforestation, particularly as old trees are granted

the status of antiquities, suggests their appearance together at the beginnings of an autonomous

landscape genre is not happenstance. The visible presence of trees and ruins make the past

present and human memory gathers within wood, leaf, and stone.143 Identity and connection to

place develop through encounters with such meaningful locations. Embodied, performed and

repeated practices accrue significance over time, and the sensory experience of walking and

inhabiting the landscape renders memory and meaning in the present.144 An active embodiment that reinforces what Tim Ingold describes as “attentive involvement” that shapes the way the mind gets to work thinking about the landscape.

For Swanevelt embodiment of the landscape would have been keenly felt as he repeatedly attended to the landscape through drawing and painting. Furthermore, those practices are on display in View of the Palatine in Rome where the figures walk, talk, draw and relax amid the trees and ruins. The landscape in Swanevelt’s work is not passive environments in which humans observe from a removed position. Rather the landscape and its trees and ruins are meant to be experienced and manifest in the bodily activities of the figures.

The religious, spiritual, and therapeutic associations of trees also factored into their

appearance in works of art. The spiritual view of nature as an active force is found in the words

of Leonardo when he describes the “Spirit of Growth” that permeates all of nature.145

Furthermore, Leonardo’s tree illustrations and theories examined tree growth and called for

natural observation of nature and the human body. Indeed, as artists imitated trees, trees

mimetically reappear like the human body, with veins like roots, limbs like branches. Each tree

grows uniquely, shaped by individual contexts, just like its human counterpart. Similarly, tree limbs reach for the light in creative gestures, as devote humans reached for the divine. Such human-arboreal conflations may have led some artists to see somatic parallels between the lives of trees and their process of creation.146 Trees produced health, and woodlands were a source of medicine in the early modern period, therefore trees were not so much a separate other beyond one’s notion of personal identity and physical awareness but a core site of its production.

However, none of this provides a clear explanation, and if anything, only suggests an ecology of relations and exchanges between human and nature that informed the rise of trees in early modern landscape painting. One last observation may provide a final hypothesis as to why such an arboreal abundance came to define seventeenth-century landscape paintings by Italians and Dutch alike. The early modern period was a time of increased scientific and technological mastery over nature, where artists sought to imitate the natural world,147 all of which overlapped with socio-economic advances, increased patronage, shifting institutional boundaries, and the intense spirituality of religious debate and reform. As a branch in the wind, trees were flexible enough to move with all these domains and thus could function an acceptable producer of meaning in a work of art. Since antiquity, trees had a meaningful, yet safe place in the pictorial tradition all too often defined by political and religious institutions. It is almost as if painting, like Daphne, sought the sanctuary of the forest to entangle itself among the arboreal, and escape

the raging Apollo.

Figures

Figure 1 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome, c. 1650, etching, 7.3 x 11.1 inches, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson.

Figure 2 – Herman van Swanevelt, Landscape with Ruins and Woman with a Parasol, c. 1650, etching, 7.2 x 10.9 inches, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson.

Figure 3 – Herman van Swanevelt, Drawing of the Palatine, ink on paper. The Hague.

Figure 4 – Herman van Swanevelt, Nature Study Figure 5 – Claude Lorrain, Ruins of the Palatine, (possibly Palatine Ruins), National Gallery, Oslo. Landscape Sketch. c. 1640.

Figure 6 – Albrecht Dürer, Fir, c. 1495, watercolor and gouache on paper, 29.5x19.6 cm. British Museum, London

Figure 8 – Leonardo da Vinci, Tree Drawings from da Vinci’s Notebooks.

Figure 7 – Leonardo Da Vinci Tree Study, c. 1498, red chalk on paper, 19.1x15.3 cm, Royal Library, Windsor Castle.

Figure 9 – Matthus Merian, Panoramic Map of Rome (Detail), c 1641.

Figure 10 – Herman van Swanevelt The Arch of Constantine, Oil on canvas, 89.5x116.2 cm, 1645, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Figure 12 – Claude Lorrain, A Study of an Oak Tree, c. 1638, Chalk, ink, 330 x224 mm. The British Museum, London.

Figure 13 – Herman van Swanevelt, Martyrdom of a Dominican (St. Peter?), Fresco, Sacristy, S. Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome.

Figure 14 – Herman van Swanevelt, Jacob travels into Egypt, c. 1635 Fresco, Sala di Giuseppe, Palazzo Pamphilj, Rome.

Figure 15 – Herman van Swanevelt, Jacob Hiding the Branches and The Flight of Jacob, Fresco, Palazzo Mancini, Rome

Figure 16 – Charles Estienne, De dissection Figure 17 – Charles Estienne, De dissection partium corporis humani, 1545. partium corporis humani, 1545.

Figure 18 – Giustiniani medicine chest, ca. 1560-70 or early seventeenth century. The 76 Science Museum, London.

Figure 19 – Albrecht Altdorfer, Landscape with Castle or Figure 20 – Albrecht Altdorfer, Landscape with Danube Landscape, c. 1522-25, oil on parchment mounted Woodcutter, c. 1522, watercolor and gouache on to panel, 30.5 x22.2 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. paper, 20.1 x 13.6 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.

Figure 21 – Paul Bril, Fantastic Landscape¸ 1598, oil on copper, 21.30 x 29.20 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Figure 22 – Herman van Swanevelt, Performance of Two Singers in a Village, 24 October, 1623, Ink on paper, 173 x 247 mm, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig.

Figure 23 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Figure 24 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. (Detail) Palatine in Rome. (Detail)

Figure 25 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. (Detail)

Figure 26 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. (Detail)

Figure 27 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. (Details)

Figure 28 – Herman van Swanevelt, View of the Palatine in Rome. (Detail of zig zag path of observation)

Notes

1 I would like to express sincerest thanks to my thesis chairs, Dr. Pia Cuneo, who introduced me to early modern art, and to Dr. Stacie Widdifeld. Both provided key edits, notes, and insights into the direction of this thesis. Gratitude is also extended to my other readers, Dr. Sarah Moore, without whose continual encouragement I would not have so deeply engaged with the history of landscape in art, and to Dr. Larry Busbea who always sharpened the edge of my research. A special thanks goes to Dr. Paul Ivey who first got me excited about the potential of art history as a creative means to produce knowledge and engage with the theories and histories that make the world. I am immensely indebted to the efforts of the administration in the School of Art at the University of Arizona, especially Megan Bartel, Carrie Scharf, and Colin Blakely. I am grateful for all the inspired conversations and relationships, both professional and personal, that developed during my time at UA. There are too many of you to recall here but know in your heart that with out you graduate school would have been most dreary! And of course, I am thankful to the land in which I inhabit and write within. Especially all the trees that I share this place with and that indeed drove the writing of this thesis.

2 Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1967): 491

3 Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, (London: Reaktion Books, 1993): 13

4 Ideas of intromission (objects emit rays) and extramission (eyes emit rays) are traced to Aristotle and Plato, and according to Frances Gage, by the time of the Renaissance intromission was the dominant ideology of vision. See Frances Gage, Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016): 71

5 For an overview of the implementation of semiotic theories on early modern art see, Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994.)

6 Tim Ingold, “Materials against materiality,” Archeological Dialogues. Vol 14, No. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2007): 15

7 Tim Ingold, “Toward an Ecology of Materials,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 41 (2012): 439

8 For an explication of “becoming-with” other species and life forms see Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

9 During his lifetime and until about 1800 Swanevelt’s works were well known, for more see Szanto, “Fortunes,” 199. It is likely that as fervent nationalistic ideology spread through France (where Swanevelt last lived) in the 18th and 19th centuries, the work of a foreign, Dutch artists, such as Swanevelt, would likely have been shunned in favor of French artists. Claude also remained in Rome, where he outlived Swanevelt by a number of years, which likely helped to establish his reputation. Swanevelt’s’ predilection to solitude and self-management of his business affairs likely restricted the spread of his reputation, even though his works were frequently collected during his lifetime and after. Furthermore, Claude was cited as an inspiration for many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape painters such as J.M.W turner and John Constable.

10 Malcolm R. Waddingham, 'Herman van Swanevelt in Rome', Paragone 11 (1960), 37-50.

11 The most important literature on Swanevelt includes Malcolm R. Waddingham, "Herman van Swanevelt in Rome," Paragone, 121 (1960): 37-50; Albert Blankert., et all Het zuiden tegemoet: De landschappen van Herman van Swanevelt 1603-1655. (P.S. Iyems and Stadmuseum Woerden, 2007); Susan Russell,"Frescoes by Herman van Swanevelt in the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona," Burlington Magazine, 139 (1997) pp. 171-77; Susan Russell, “A Drawing by Herman van Swanevelt for a Lost Fresco in S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 143, No. 1176 (Mar., 2001): 132-137; Mickaël Szanto. “The Fortunes of a Northern Artist in

Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Forgotten Years of Herman van Swanevelt,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 145, No. 1200, Centenary Issue (Mar., 2003): 199-205; Anne Charlotte Steland, “Herman van Swanevelt als Radierer. Zur Chronologie der Entwürfe und der Drücke,” Oud Holland, Vol 118, No. ½ (2005): 38-78; Anne Charlotte Steland, “On Four Drawings in the Villa Farnesina, Rome: Herman van Swanevelt or a Copyist?” Master Drawings, Vo. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 2005):91-101; Anne Charlotte Steland, Herman van Swanevelt: Paintings and Drawings. catalogue raisonné. (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2010). The extant scholarship on Claude Lorrain is vast, and there is far too much to cover here. With the proximity of Claude and Swanevelt it is possible to project much of what has been written about Claude onto Swanevelt. For example, the role Langerlöf gives to Claude in the development of an ideal landscapes can likely also be attributed to Swanevelt. See Margareths Rossholm Lagerlöf, Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990.)

12 Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1967): 491

13 Nikola Whyte, “An Archaeology of Natural Places: Trees in the Early Modern Landscape,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol 27, No. 4 (Winter 2013): 501.

14 Such examples of trees in art historical scholarship include Larry Silver, “Forest Primeval: Albtrecht Altdorfer and the German Wilderness Landscape,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol.13, No. 1 (1983): 4-43; and Christopher Wood, Albtrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of landscape. (London: Reaktion Books, 1993); and Pietro Piana, Charles Watkins, Ross Balzaretti, “’Saved from the Sordid Axe’: Representation and Understanding of Pine Trees by English Visitors to Italy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century,” Landscape History, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016):35-56. Yet, these scholars rarely address the role of trees in landscape painting in any comprehensive fashion.

15 See Susan Dackerman, “Introduction: Prints as Instruments,” in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Susan Dackerman (New haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011): 19-34.

16 Andrew C. Blume, “Herman van Swanevelt and His Prints,” Oud Holland, Vol. 108, No. 1 (1994): 9.

17 Ibid.,: 10.

18 Ibid.,: 1

19 See Anne Charlotte Steland, Herman van Swanevelt: Paintings and Drawings. catalogue raisonné. (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2010): 541 Cat. Nr. Z 1,9

20 Anne Charlotte Steland, “Studien zu Herman van Swanevelt: Zeichnungen zu Fresken und Gemälden,” Oud Holland, Vol. 115, No. 1 (2001/2002): 21

21 Andrew C. Blume, “Herman van Swanevelt and his Prints,” Oud Holland, Vol. 108, No. 1 (1994): 2

22 Ibid.,: 1

23 Ibid.,: 2

24 Susan Russell,"Frescoes by Herman van Swanevelt in the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona," Burlington Magazine, 139 (1997): 172.

25 Richard Rand, Claude Lorrain–The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.): 14.

26 Richard Rand, Claude Lorrain–The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.): 35 and 76 and Andrew C. Blume, “Herman van Swanevelt and His Prints,” Oud Holland, Vol. 108, No. 1 (1994): 12.

27 Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckerman, Frédéric Jacob Soret, Conversations of Goethe with Eckerman and Soret, Vol. II, trans. John Oxenford (London: Smith. Elder & Co., 1850): 412, https://archive.org/details/conversationsgo02oxengoog/page/n417

28 Anne Charlotte Steland, “Studien zu Herman van Swanevelt: Zeichnungen zu Fresken und Gemälden,” Oud Holland, Vol. 115, No. 1 (2001/2002): 19-60.

29 Mickaël Szanto, “The Fortunes of a Northern Artist in Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Forgotten Years of Herman van Swanevelt,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 145, No. 1200, Centenary Issue (Mar., 2003): 202. Works by Swanevelt were owned by the duc de Liancourt, Louis Hesselin, the Intendent des menus plaisirs du roi (Attendent to the kings pleasures), the Secretary of State, Jean Dyel des Hameaux, the Commissioner of War, Jean- Baptiste de Bretagne, Innocent Regnard, the duchesses d’Aiguillon and the financier Jacques Bordier. Several of Poussin’s collectors acquired landscapes by Swanevelt. Several landscapes were intended for the residence of President Lambert, and decorated the homes of other prominent French aristocrats.

30 Szanto “Fortunes” (2003): 203-204

31 Szanto “Fortunes” (2003) outlines several published works that include: Cornelis de Bie’s Het Gudlen Cabinet van de edele vry schilder-consts published in Antwerp, 1661; A. Houbraken in De groote schouburgh der Nedelantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, Amsterdam 1718-2; Joachim von Sandrarts Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und mahlerey-kiinste von Nuremburg, 1675; Giovanni Passeri: Vite de' pittori, scultori ed architetti, Rome, 1772.

32 Szanto “Fortunes” (2003): 199-200

33 Szanto points to the fact that Swanevelt agreed to marry his Catholic wife under Catholic ritual, and this could have produced local disapproval and therefore the union never materialized. See, Szanto (2003): 200 and footnote 18.

34 It is possible Swanevelt augmented the date of his birth to appear younger to his much younger wife. A possible scenario footnoted in Anne Charlotte Steland, “Herman van Swanevelt als Radierer. Zur Chronologie de Entwurfe und der Drucke,” Oud Holland, Vol 118, No. ½ (2005): 73

35 Szanto “Fortunes” (2003): 200-201.

36 Adam von Bartsch (1757-1821) attributes 116 etchings to Swanevelt. There are no images, only simple, et rather accurate, textual entries describe the prints. A. Bartsch, Le peintre engraver, Vol. 1-21, (A. Vienne, J. V. Degen) 1802-1821); Swanevelt: Vol. 2 (1803): 247-326. https://archive.org/details/gri_000133125001964234/page/n703

Hollstein volume are 118 prints attributed to Swanevelt. F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, c. 1450-1700, (Amsterdam 1949); Swanevelt: Vol. 29, pp. 49-106.

37 Andrew C. Blume, “Herman van Swanevelt and his Prints,” Oud Holland, Vol. 108, No. 1 (1994): 1

38 Waddingham warns that the lack of documented early works by Swanevelt is only to resolve itself in exercises of attribution. And such has his prediction unfurled – most of the scholarship concerning Swanevelt is bound in attribution, chronology and biography. See Malcolm R. Waddingham, "Herman van Swanevelt in Rome," Paragone, 121 (1960): 37-50; 39 The works of four scholars published in English primarily are responsible for attribution, biography and securing accurate dates for Swanevelt’s works. Andrew C. Blume first attempted to secure a chronology for Swanevelt’s undated etching. Susan Russell accurately attributed frescoes in the Palazzo Pamphilji to Swanevelt. Mikaël Szanto 83

produced important documents from the national archives in Paris, including a marriage certificate and a posthumous inventory. Anne Charlotte Steland, the author of Swanevelt’s catalogue raisonné, improved the chronology of Swanevelt’s etchings with help from Szanto’s findings. The most important literature on Swanevelt includes Malcolm R. Waddingham, "Herman van Swanevelt in Rome," Paragone, 121 (1960): 37-50; Albert Blankert., et all Het zuiden tegemoet: De landschappen van Herman van Swanevelt 1603-1655. (P.S. Iyems and Stadmuseum Woerden, 2007); Susan Russell,"Frescoes by Herman van Swanevelt in the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona," Burlington Magazine, 139 (1997) pp. 171-77; Susan Russell, “A Drawing by Herman van Swanevelt for a Lost Fresco in S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 143, No. 1176 (Mar., 2001): 132- 137; Mickaël Szanto. “The Fortunes of a Northern Artist in Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Forgotten Years of Herman van Swanevelt,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 145, No. 1200, Centenary Issue (Mar., 2003): 199-205; Anne Charlotte Steland, “Herman van Swanevelt als Radierer. Zur Chronologie de Entwurfe und der Drucke,” Oud Holland, Vol 118, No. ½ (2005): 38-78; Anne Charlotte Steland, “On Four Drawings in the Villa Farnesina, Rome: Herman van Swanevelt or a Copyist?” Master Drawings, Vo. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 2005):91-101; Anne Charlotte Steland, Herman van Swanevelt: Paintings and Drawings. catalogue raisonné. (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2010).

40 Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckerman, Frédéric Jacob Soret, Conversations of Goethe with Eckerman and Soret, Vol. II, trans. John Oxenford (London: Smith. Elder & Co., 1850): 412, https://archive.org/details/conversationsgo02oxengoog/page/n417

41 See Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. (New York: Vintage Books, 2015). On several occasions Wulf discusses the close relationship between Goethe and Humboldt.

42 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, Volume 2. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1850): 89. Humboldt’s writes of seventeenth-century painting: “The relations between the inner tone of feelings and the delineation of external nature became more intimate, and, by the links thus established between the two, the gentle and mild expression of the beautiful in nature was elevated, and, as a consequence of this elevation, belief in the power of the external world over the emotions of the mind was simultaneously awakened. When this excitement, in conformity with the noble aim of all art, converts the actual into an ideal object o fancy; when it arouses within our minds the feeling of harmonious repose, the enjoyment is not unaccompanied by emotion, for the heart is touched whenever we look into the depths of nature and humanity.”

43 Anne Charlotte Steland, “Herman van Swanevelt als Radierer. Zur Chronologie der Entwürfe und der Drücke,” Oud Holland, Vol 118, No. ½ (2005): 48

44 Technically, most Swanevelt Scholars believe he was most likely born in 1603 or 1604, unless he lied about his age in a marriage certificate to a younger woman, who happens to be the sister to his pupil Jacques Rousseau. For the DIA web listing visit as Dec. 12, 2018 “Ruins of an Amphitheater,” online collection https://www.dia.org/art/collection/object/ruins-amphitheatre-63094?page=1

45 Blouin Art Sales Index as of Dec. 10, 2018 “Landscape with Ruins of An Amphitheater-1640,” Lot Detail https://www.blouinartsalesindex.com/auctions/Herman-van-Swanevelt-6493589/Landscape-with-Ruins-of-an- Amphitheatre-1640

46 University of Arizona Museum of Art’s online collections listing for Ruins of an Amphitheater as of Dec. 10, 2018 https://uarizona.pastperfectonline.com/webobject/D23CBCA7-5992-4919-B5AA-931454181016 University of Arizona Museum of Art’s online collections listing for Landscape with Ruins and Woman with a Parasol https://uarizona.pastperfectonline.com/webobject/B612694C-A5CA-4878-A24A-648899482649

47 Two signed drawings place Swanevelt in Paris in 1623. Blume suggests Swanevelt was in Rome by 1624 with no evidence. Andrew C. Blume, “Herman van Swanevelt and his Prints,” Oud Holland, Vol. 108, No. 1 (1994): 1. Steland places Swanevelt as certainly in Rome by 1628-1641, Anne Charlotte Steland, “Herman van Swanevelt als Radierer. Zur Chronologie der Entwürfe und der Drücke,” Oud Holland, Vol 118, No. ½ (2005): 73

48 Steland and Szanto all agree on this date, maybe as early as 1627.

49 The print also looks far more developed in terms of lighting than the likely preliminary drawing. Could this be a sign of the younger Swanevelt executing the drawing, and the hand of the older more mature Swanevelt in the etching? Or is it just a matter of an in ‘in the field’ sketch with all its bugs and sweat and wind and changing conditions, and probably wine, versus a studio produced plate?

50 Mickaël Szanto, “The Fortunes of a Northern Artist in Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Forgotten Years of Herman van Swanevelt,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 145, No. 1200, Centenary Issue (Mar. 2003):200. Steland agrees with Santzo dates and findings. See Anne Charlotte Steland, “Herman van Swanevelt als Radierer. Zur Chronologie der Entwürfe und der Drücke,” Oud Holland, Vol 118, No. ½ (2005):38-78

51 Szanto, “Fortunes,” 203 outlines Swanevelt’s preference to handle his business on his own without intermediaries, such as dealers. Steland further develops the analysis in Anne Charlotte Steland, “Herman van Swanevelt als Radierer. Zur Chronologie der Entwürfe und der Drücke,” Oud Holland, Vol 118, No. ½ (2005): 49

52 Anne Charlotte Steland, “Herman van Swanevelt als Radierer. Zur Chronologie der Entwürfe und der Drücke,” Oud Holland, Vol 118, No. ½ (2005): 72

53 See Anne Charlotte Steland, Herman van Swanevelt: Paintings and Drawings. catalogue raisonné. (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2010): 679 (Z3,26)

54 Ibid.,: 558 (Z2, 81)

55 Ruins of an Amphitheater by Herman van Swanevelt. 7.3 x 11.1 inches as listed in the collection of The University of Arizona Museum of Art. Interestingly, the ruins in the etching appear as anything but an amphitheater.

56 Interestingly in the publication Albert, Blankert et all. Het zuiden tegemoet, p. 77. The print is titled Gezicht op de Palatijn in Rome translated as View of the Palatine in Rome. Where this alternate title came from is not clear in the publication, likely from a preliminary drawing of similar execution, but is consist with conclusion about the depicted locations of this author.

57 Full translation from French to English of Bartsch’s entry (84) on Swanevelt’s print The Ruins in Amphitheater. “This piece represents the ruins of several old buildings of vast construction. They are located on a mountain in the form of an amphitheater. On the front left two men sit in the shade of a tree. One of them beckons with his extended hand to two other men who walk in company in the middle, and one of whom reveals a woman to the other, who carrying a bundle over her head, advances towards the convenient door in the wall at the bottom of the mountain on the right of the print.” Adam von Bartsch, Le Peintre Graveur, (Vienne: J.V. Degen, 1803): 296-297

58 Steland gives multiple examples of this practice. Anne Charlotte Steland, “Herman van Swanevelt als Radierer. Zur Chronologie der Entwürfe und der Drücke,” Oud Holland, Vol 118, No. ½ (2005): 38-78

59 Where the Stadsmuseum procured this title remains unclear. See Albert Blankert., et all Het zuiden tegemoet: De landschappen van Herman van Swanevelt 1603-1655. (P.S. Iyems and Stadmuseum Woerden, 2007): 77

61 For more information on the overlapping roles of art, science and technology in the early modern period see Pamela H. Smith, “Artist as Scientists: nature and realism in early modern Europe,” Endeavor, Vol. 24 No. 1 (2000): 13 – 21; and Camilla S. Fiore, “Anthanasius Kircher (1602-1680) and Landscape between Antiquity, Science and Art in the Seventeenth Century,” Czech & Slovak Journal of Humanities: 79-95; Findlen, Paula, ed. Anthanasius Kirchner: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); and Susan Dackerman, ed. Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (New haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011); and Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); and Smith Pamela, H. and Benjamin Schmidt, eds. Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800. Chicago and London: University of Chicago press, 2007. 85

62 Pietro Piana, Charles Watkins, Ross Balzaretti, “’Saved from the Sordid Axe’: Representation and Understanding of Pine Trees by English Visitors to Italy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century,” Landscape History, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016): 41-40 describes Claude’s tree portraits and his sensitivity to different species.

63 Patrizia Cavazzini, Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome. (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008.): 54

64 For a thorough investigation of Cock’s Small Landscapes and the subsequent reissues see Alexandra Onuf, The Small Landscape Prints in Early Modern Netherlands (New York and London: Roultedge, 2018).

65 Mirella Levi D’Ancona, The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Painting. (Florence: Leo S. Olshki): 381. Levi D’Ancona, student of the formidable Erwin Panofsky, details an iconographical catalog of plant symbolism in Renaissance. According to iconographic symbolism the tree means either life or death dependent upon its appearance as healthy and strong or poorly nourished and dried out. Trees are intimately related to the garden of Eden and the Tree of Life, as well as, with Jesus Christ, particularly the oak, and according to Pliny the oak became symbolic of time for its longevity. Legend has it the Tree of Life was used to make the cross for Christ’s crucifixion. After Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Life, it withered and is symbol for dead Christ and the green tree revived after Christ’s passion and sacrifice.

66 The following sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters in Rome frequently included trees as significant subject matter and compositional elements: Paul Bril, Annaballe Carracci, Claude Lorrain, Jan Both, Pieter van Lear, Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Jan Asselijn, Jan Frans van Bloemen, Salvatore Rosa (Spain), many of their followers and students, along with likely many other unknown painters. It almost gives the impression that Seicento Rome was literally forested in and out of doors.

67 The journey through the forest of art history is a summary of selected works featured in Neils Büttner, Landscape Painting: A History. (New York and London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2000). My analysis is certainly not comprehensive but does adequately make the point of the arboreal influences in the development of landscape painting.

68 Excerpt from Sonnazaro in Neils Büttner, Landscape Painting: A History. (New York and London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2000): 75

69 For a thorough analysis of the social, economic and intuitional conditions of Seicento Rome see the wonderful book Patrizia Cavazzini, Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome. (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008.)

70 Margareths Rossholm Lagerlöf, Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990. P. 15

71 Some of the painters and draughtman in this tradition include Albrecht Altdorfer, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Roelandt Savery, Hendrick Goltzius, Jacques de Gheyn II, Paul Bril, Agostino Tassi, and Annibale Caracci among others.

72 I encountered Dürer’s quote in Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, (London: Reaktion Books, 1993): 13. Wood reveals the quote comes from a recently discovered manuscript written by one of Dürer’s friends, Willibald Pirckheimer, in 1517. The humanist catechism is currently in the British Library, London, MS Arundel 503, fol. 101r–102r.

73 Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, (London: Reaktion Books, 1993): 16

74 Ibid.,: 206. Wood makes an interesting argument, quoting Gombrich, about whether Leonardo’s drawing was produced en plein air or was entirely worked up in the studio based on a memory.

75 Again, I encounter this quote by Leonardo in Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, (London: Reaktion Books, 1993): 16. Wood quotes Leonardo DaVinci, Treatise on Painting, edited and translated by Phillip McMahon (Princeton, NJ, 1956): 35.

76 Martin Kemp, “Dissection and Divinity in Leonardo’s Late Anatomies,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 35 (1972): 201

77 See Claire J. Farago, “Leonardo’s Color and Chiaroscuro Reconsidered: The Visual Force of Painted Images,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 1 (1991) and Janis C. Bell, “Zaccolini’s Theory of Color Perspective,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 75, No. 1 (March 1993)

78 Marcel G. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1698): 36

79 Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, (London: Reaktion Books, 1993): 16

80 Martin Kemp, “Dissection and Divinity in Leonardo’s Late Anatomies,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 35 (1972)

81 Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, (London: Reaktion Books, 1993): 16-17

82 Ibid.,: 16

83 Claire J. Farago, “Leonardo’s Color and Chiaroscuro Reconsidered: The Visual Force of Painted Images,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 1 (1991): 72

84 Ibid.,: 69

85 Ibid.,: 71

86 Leonardo d’Vinci Libro A, Carta 26.38. Reprinted in Claire J. Farago, “Leonardo’s Color and Chiaroscuro Reconsidered: The Visual Force of Painted Images,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 1 (1991): 79

87 Janis C. Bell, “Zaccolini’s Theory of Color Perspective,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 75, No. 1 (March 1993): 91. Szanto also describes the common patronage between Swanevelt and Poussin, including the Barberini family, see Mickaël Szanto, “The Fortunes of a Northern Artist in Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Forgotten Years of Herman van Swanevelt,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 145, No. 1200, Centenary Issue (Mar. 2003):200

88 Ibid.,: 91

89 Ibid.,

90 Ibid.,: 92

91 See Claire J. Farago, “Leonardo’s Color and Chiaroscuro Reconsidered: The Visual Force of Painted Images,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 1 (1991)

92 Janis C. Bell, “Zaccolini’s Theory of Color Perspective,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 75, No. 1 (March 1993): 93-94

93 Zaccolini’s color zones are as follows: In the first degree, that is the foreground, pure colors, and the local colors of greens and browns establish a relational scale, comparable to the size of a figure in linear perspective. The shadows of pure colors in the first zones would often use a darker version of the local color, free of blue, for example, a yellow area of the ground used yellow ochre in the shadow, or a red drapery of vermilion in the lights and a red lake in the shadows. The pure, local colors than begin to make their transition to blue in the second zone, by the third the shadows become completely blue, and the highlights are subtly tinted with blue. In the fourth zone, everything becomes blue before it merges with the sky. 87

94 To the knowledge of this scholar, no one has explicitly associated the atmospheric developments of Swanevelt, or even Claude for that matter, within the theoretical contexts of Leonardo color theory extrapolated by Zaccolini. Steland, the author of Swanevelt’s catalogue raisonné, does not refer to Zaccolini, and at least at first glance, nor does the preeminent Claudian scholar, Roethlisberger. Regardless, a productive line of inquiry for future analysis resides in the scrutiny of Zaccolini’s texts and the works of Swanevelt, Claude and Poussin.

95 Leonard Barken, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999): 308

96 Beneš and Harris, eds., Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, (Cambridge, University of Cambridge Press, 2001): 42

97 Richard Lassels, “Description of Italy,” (1654), National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 15.2.15, reprinted in Edward Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and “The Voyage of Italy” in the Seventeenth Century (Geneva, 1985), 147-231.

98 Claudian inspired garden design is evident in Rousham Park, Oxfordshire, England. See Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, (Madison: University of Wisconsin press, 1984, 1998): 198-203

99 Susan Russel is primarily responsible for identification of the murals as by Swanevelt. See Susan Russell, "Frescoes by Herman van Swanevelt in the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona," Burlington Magazine, 139 (1997): 171-177

100 Such a view is often enumerated in studies of landscapes and gardens including Cosgrove (1984) and Claude Lazzaro’s essay “Italy is a Garden,” included in Beneš and Harris, eds., Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, (Cambridge, University of Cambridge Press, 2001): 42

101 Susan Russell, "Frescoes by Herman van Swanevelt in the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona," Burlington Magazine, 139 (1997):171

102 The bolt of lightning is difficult to discern clearly from damage without being in physical presence to the fresco, but the tonal value clearly gets darker in this area, indicating storm clouds.

103 Furthermore, the belief that images viewed during sex would alter the appearance of offspring in an interesting discussing of viewing works of art during intercourse to produce desirable offspring

104 Pietro Piana, Charles Watkins, Ross Balzaretti, “’Saved from the Sordid Axe’: Representation and Understanding of Pine Trees by English Visitors to Italy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century,” Landscape History, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016): 51

105 Peter van Kessel, and Elisja Schulte, eds., Rome * Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe. (Amsterdam University Press, 1997): 115

106 Richard Rand, Claude Lorrain–The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.): 66

107 Claude Lorrain Trees in Vigna Madama, C. 1638 “The British Museum Online Collection,” number, Oo,7.224, accessed 4/17/2109 https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=722637&partId =1&searchText=Claude+Lorrain+Drawing+of+a+Tree+in+the+Vigna+Madama&page=1

108 Charles Estienne, De dissection partium corporis humani. (Paris, Apud Simonem Colinӕm, 1545).

109 Michael S. Roth, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed¸ (Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997): 2 88

110 The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965): 48-51

111 I first encountered the quote in Walter S. Gibson, Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000): 77. Gibson cites the quote as Pliny, Natural History, vol. 10, trans. D.E. Eichholz (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962): 212- 213 (book 37, 16, 62-63).

112 Frances Gage, Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016): 71

113 Frances Gage, “Exercise of Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 2008): 1167.

114 Ibid.:1181

115 For details of Leonardo’s operation within Galenic traditions see Martin Kemp, “Dissection and Divinity in Leonardo’s Late Anatomies,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 35 (1972). For Estienne and Galenic Tradition see Konstantino Markatos, “Charles Estienne (1504–1564): His Life, Work, and Contribution to Anatomy and the First Description of the Canal in the Spinal Cord.” World Neurosurgery Vol. 100 (2017): 186-189. For walking as a prescription in Galenic traditions see Frances Gage, “Exercise of Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 2008): 1180.

116 Frances Gage, “Exercise of Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 2008): 1168-1169

117 Ibid.,: 1202.

118 Mancini dedicates his treatise to those of “mediocre ingegno et giuditio naturale.”

119 Frances Gage, Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art, ( University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) 71-72

120 See Marcel G. Roethlisberger, “The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude Lorrain,” Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 10, No. 20 (1989): 73-92. See also Richard Rand, Claude Lorrain–The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.): 41

121 Richard Rand, Claude Lorrain–The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.): 33-34

122 Genoese Medicine Chest, database entry, Science Museum London, http://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co199371/genoese-medicine-chest-1562-1566-medicine-chest

123 John Burnett, “The Giustiniani Medicine Chest,” Medical History, Vol. 26 (1982): 328

124 Frances Gage, Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016): 68

125 Ibid.,: 68

126 John Burnett, “The Giustiniani Medicine Chest,” Medical History, Vol. 26 (1982): 326-327

127 Quote by painter, Richard Wilson. Frances Gage, Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016): 57 89

128 Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, (London, Smith, Elder, 1850): 412. Interestingly, Goethe also praises Swanevelt as the better of Lorrain https://archive.org/details/conversationsgo02oxengoog/page/n417

129 The oak tree a common iconographical symbol of time and longevity. Mirella Levi D’Ancona, The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Painting. (Florence: Leo S. Olshki): 252

130 On many occasions, trees are representations of transience as in Jacob Matham’s 1599 engraving Allegory of Transience that compares a human life to the leaves that fall from a tree. As do early modern emblems, combinations of text and image that make potent commentary on the attitudes and mentalities of the early modern period. Emblems frequently depict trees to address complex moral and ethical issues, including arboreal references to the human life course. For more info on emblems visit “What is an Emblem” Emblematica online http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu/help/what-emblem Büttner also says as much, see Büttner, Neils. Landscape Painting: A History. New York and London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2000. p. 202.

131 For a compelling discussion of path of observation and wayfinding see Tim Ingold, “To Journey along a way of life: Maps, Wayfinding, and Navigation,” The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, 2011: 219-242.

132 Such works include one of Swanevelt’s most known painted works, the 1645 The Arch of Constantine in Rome as well as a print from the same series as Ruins of an Amphitheatre, aptly titled Landscape with an Artists Sketching.

133 Ingold describes this process as a taskcape where humans and nature mutually generate one another through a practice of dwelling. It is within the landscape and all its elements that humans get to work thinking about the landscape. See Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, 2011.

134 Neils Büttner, Landscape Painting: A History. (New York and London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2000): 91

135 Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, (London:Reaktion Books, 1993): 136- 138

136 Alexandra Onuf. The Small Landscape Prints in Early Modern Netherlands (New York and London: Roultedge, 2018): 1

137 Alexandra Onuf, “From print to paint and back again: painting practices and print culture in early modern Antwerp,” in Prints in Translation, 1450-1750: Imagine, Space, Materiality. (New York and London: Routledge, 2016) pp. 19-41

138 Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1967): 491

139 Nikola Whyte, “An Archaeology of Natural Places: Trees in the Early Modern Landscape,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol 27, No. 4 (Winter 2013) and for the role of ruins in the cultural imaginative see the inspired Michael S. Roth, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed¸ (Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997).

140 Anthropologist, Tim Ingold, describes this process as the “Taskscape,” “The Temporality of the Landscape,” in Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000, 2011.): 189-208

141 For ruins moral usages after violent conflict see Michael S. Roth, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed¸ (Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997): 15

142 Keith J. Kirby and Charles Watkins, eds. The Ecological History of European Forests. (Wallingford and New York: CAB International, 1998) p xii

143 Nikola Whyte, “An Archaeology of Natural Places: Trees in the Early Modern Landscape,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol 27, No. 4 (Winter 2013): 501.

144 Ibid. p. 512.

145 Pamela Smith and Larry Silver, “Splendor in the Grass: The Powers of Nature in the Age of Dürer,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, eds. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York and London: Routledge, 2002): 44.

146 Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen say as much about nature in their discussion of an “All-bearing nature” that may be imitated by art. An idea that easily translates to trees. See Pamela Smith and Larry Silver, “Splendor in the Grass: The Powers of Nature in the Age of Dürer,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, eds. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York and London: Routledge, 2002): 46.

147 Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 2002): 3

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