Visualizing Urban Resources. Iconography in Environmental History
Referent/in: Martin Knoll (Darmstadt)Abstract:
Urban iconographies are historical sources that have been produced in abundance during the early modern period. While many art historians were for decades caught in a rather dichotomous discussion stressing either the constructivist character or the realism of the genre, recent interdisciplinary research has found more comprehensive approaches to analyze the tension between “topography and topos” (Behringer). This development is of major importance for environmental history.
Urban iconography represents cities as functional nodes of social practices and materiality. But urban images were also – and still are – shaped by ideals and norms defined by city authorities or external players. The question how urban resource use and respective potentials and problems are set into scene – or ignored – in the graphical representations can help to identify the environmental agendas of early modern urbanity. Iconographic sources have to be critically assessed, predominantly taking into account the different medial contexts and artistic techniques. Applied in this way they build cornerstones for a cultural history of urban environments.
