Dutch painter-printmaker Hercules Segers (c. 1589 – c. 1638) is remembered today as a fabricator of landscapes that depict decay while also physically enacting destruction through cunning manipulations of artistic materials and techniques. This paper—part of a larger project on art, ecology, and time in the early modern Netherlands—reorients the narrative about Segers’s destructive ethos by highlighting the interconnectedness of death and life in the artist’s prints. I expose the generative dimensions of the etcher’s figurations of demise and the productive side of his destructive artistic processes in two related ways. First, I reinterpret Segers’s prints through seventeenth-century natural philosophy and its Aristotelian theories of metabolism as a mechanism of creative destruction. Second, I read the artist’s etchings in ecological terms, that is, by scrutinising how they examine and form the very concept of nature. In both the metabolic theories and proto-ecological thinking of Segers’s milieu, life was impossible without death, and creation was unthinkable without destruction. When regarded within the frameworks of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and ecosophy, Segers’s etchings emerge as more than meditations on demise. They are also metabolic, registering the destructive transformations that nourish life and, not coincidentally, art.
Speaker:
Elizabeth J. Petcu is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and a scholar of the intersections of art, science, and ecology in northern Europe and the early modern world. Her book, The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation, was published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press through a grant from the Graham Foundation. She is currently completing a second book, Dürer’s Uncertainty: From the Constraints of Measurement to the Power of the Unknown, with a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Petcu serves as Associate Editor of Renaissance Studies and the Renaissance Society of America’s Field Representative for Environment and Ecologies.
