Pastoral's End

How early modern Italian painting addressed the ways humans shape and are shaped by their environments. In the sixteenth century, Italian artist Jacopo Bassano painted pictures of herdsmen and animals moving through dark and muddy landscapes. But he also participated in the agricultural development of the region in which he lived, producing topographical maps of local mountains and forests, inventing new methods of drainage and irrigation, and studying the latest techniques of crop rotation and fertilization. The relationship between Bassano’s rustic art and his participation in environmental transformation has, however, never been explored. One of the first studies of Italian Renaissance art to grapple with the connections between visual culture and the environment, Pastoral’s End explores this crucial, formative relationship. James Pilgrim looks at Bassano’s career holistically, demonstrating how his involvement in a world marked by agricultural expansion, industrialization, resource extraction, environmental degradation, social transformation, and radical philosophical development informed his paintings of country life. Introducing new archival and visual evidence of Bassano’s knowledge of hydrology, agronomy, husbandry, and architecture, Pastoral’s End argues that he transformed the more placid rustic imagery of previous Renaissance artists into visions of dangerous ecological instability.