The green mantle of the earth! An age-old metaphor in poetry the phrase casts the greening of the earth as a marvel of divine artifice and calls upon artificers to re-fashion the greenness of nature (natura vernans) into art.  It is also the title of chapter six in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) who used it as a poetic figure for the terrestrial vegetation that we take for granted.  The topic of Verdant Earthis the representation of vegetation in the art of the Old Masters. Its ambition is to discover a visual poetics for the pictorial expression of greenery in images that are traditionally called landscapes. By what rules of art, we ask, are herbs, shrubs, trees and sylvan imagery in general envisioned and represented? What role do vegetal motifs play in the imagined woodlands of pastorals and landscapes of devotion, and how is signification structured into their depiction?

We invite papers on the visual poetics of a verdant earth. How did artists in Early Modern Europe compete with poets (and Nature!) in the fashioning of natural imagery?  How did they manage/manipulate the infinitude of irregularities that is nature’s way? What can be said of the many types of landscape painting (pastoral, sylvan, rural, wilderness, or even river views and forest clearings) in light of a poetics of vegetation? Artists, we believe, followed a kind of lyrical naturalism, which turns the phenomena of nature into the themes and motifs of visual poetry. It also links the inexhaustible treasures of the natural world to the poets whose epithets for green matter served as precepts that directed artists in the discovery of just those traits – be it the obdurancy of an oak or the pliancy of a willow- that turn vegetation into eloquent depiction.  This panel explores the representation of vegetation in word and image with the goal to shape more nuanced approach to the poetics of greenery in images that traditionally are called landscapes.

Please send a 150-word abstract and CV (max 300 words) to the organizer, Leopoldine Prosperetti (leopoldine at jhu.edu) by June 5. Please put "RSA” in the subject line of your email.