Can Pre-Modern Art Tell Us About Climate Change?

Esme Garlake

As leaders from all over the world meet in Glasgow for the COP26 (the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference), it is worth thinking about what art – and especially pre-modern art – can tell us about human relationships with the natural world over the past millennia. The speed of the current ecological breakdown seems to ground any conversations in present and future tenses; art and history which predates the industrial era can therefore feel very separate and almost irrelevant. But when we use pre-modern art to learn more the history of human relationships with the natural world, we start to understand more clearly that anthropocentrism (the idea that everything revolves around humans) did not suddenly appear out of nowhere during the industrial revolution.

We can apply an ecological approach to pre-modern art, for example, to The Hunt in the Forest by Paolo Uccello, painted in Italy around 1470. A few years ago, the painting was victim of vandalism by an animal rights activist. The activist had misguidedly imposed modern morals onto a past culture, with extremely damaging consequences. On the other hand, the label and art historical texts never acknowledge the fact that this painting depicts a practice which is fundamentally based on the brutal killing of animals for the human entertainment. The focus on Paolo Uccello’s remarkable use of perspective, colour palette, or painting techniques, of course tells us much about the culture and society in which the artist lived. But an acknowledgement of the subject-matter from an animal history perspective will help to deepen our understanding of this past culture.

In early modern European courts, for example, painters depicted the animals from the menageries of their employers. In the Villa Farnesina just outside of Rome, Raphael and his workshop used images of exotic fruits, vegetables and animals to flatter their patron, Agostino Chigi. Agostino was a wealthy banker from Siena who had a vast collection of live animals, many brought over from the New World by merchants. Like many of his contemporaries, he used frescoes to visually declare and immortalise his wealth and status. If we look beyond the Farnesina frescoes as magnificent example of observational artistic skill (which they undoubtedly are), then we understand how flora and fauna was already being treated as an exploitable resource for human consumption long before the industrial era.

This dynamic also reflects the sinister history of Western subjugation of indigenous lands and peoples. People from the New World were also held captive to be ‘displayed’ in European menageries and were often depicted in early modern artworks as exotic creatures alongside parrots and other animals. For example, in Anton Domenico Gabbiani’s late seventeenth-century painting of three Medici court musicians, a young Black man – the keeper of the Medici menagerie – is shown holding a parrot. The bird (along with his pearl earring) was a typical visual trait used to signify the ‘exotic’. Just as environmental histories have been excluded from pre-modern art history until very recently, so too have the histories of people of colour.

When we treat the arts as a multifaceted tool for environmental awareness, we not only open up space for more voices and minds to engage with the climate crisis, we also confront uncomfortable nuances within the art world. The decolonisation of our art institutions, for example, brings with it the moral necessity to ensure that such institutions are environmentally responsible; climate justice cannot be separated from racial and social justice. Too many art institutions continue to accept financial aid from fossil fuel industries that endorse the destruction of indigenous peoples’ lands and the environmental plights of people living in the global south. Athena Art Foundation’s latest six-part podcast, ‘What Are Museums For?’ asks these kind of crucial questions about the social, cultural and moral obligations of museums today.

In the face of mass extinction, we must use everything we can to help us re-frame and re-imagine our place in the natural world, and art will help us do that. Art will also help give us hope when we feel overwhelmed by the climate emergency and the inaction of world leaders, by helping us to connect with what it means to be creative human beings over the ages. Imagining ecological approaches to pre-modern art history is not an easy task, but it is infinitely rewarding, and its results are still to be fully explored. Finally, we must remember that looking back on history is only valuable if we have a future. After all, there is no art on a dead planet.

The UN Climate Summit will be running from 1-12 November 2021.