Herri met de Bles, The Coppermine, c.1540, oil on wood, 83 x 114cm (plus detail). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Art and Extraction in the Pre-Modern World

The environmental humanities are currently paying sustained critical attention to mining, quarrying, drilling, deep-sea dredging and other ‘extractive’ economies. As this emerging body of scholarship has shown, activities like mining have not only played a crucial role in shaping human history and the fate of the planet. They are also entangled with views of nonhuman nature that demand urgent scrutiny, views often encapsulated in the term ‘extractivism’. This important new keyword for ecologically-oriented thinkers references both tangible acts of extraction – the removal from the earth and oceans of valuable fossil fuels, metals, minerals and similar assets – and a broader anthropocentric outlook, which sees the earth as a storehouse of natural resources that can be exploited for human ends.

Extractivism in this double sense is usually thought to have begun in the industrial nineteenth century. Yet extractivist ventures arguably have a longer history, one that can be traced back to the crucial period in early modernity when European powers began to expand into the Americas, Asia, Africa and, later, the Arctic. This was the moment when progress in shipbuilding, navigation, mining techniques and other forms of knowledge made possible the expropriation of precious raw materials from foreign centres to Europe, on a large scale for the first time.

Taking this longer view, our panel of short talks will offer a series of visual histories of early modern extractive enterprises. Delivered by historians of art and visual culture, the talks will engage with the visual dynamics of extraction as a material and political pursuit – one that brings to the surface previously-unseen natural materials, even as it pushes out of sight the ecological and societal costs involved in their acquisition.

Speaker biographies

Lorenzo Gatta received his PhD from the Courtauld Institute in 2024. His research examines the intersections of architecture, ecology, and colonialism in the early modern Atlantic world.

Thomas Balfe is an art historian specialising in early modern (c.1550–1750) northern European easel painting and the graphic arts. His research investigates the visual and material histories of the animal and the ‘creaturely’ human, and attempts to forge connections between art history and recent philosophical and theoretical approaches to analysing representations of nature.

Davide Martino researches and teaches environmental and water histories of the early modern world at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. Having worked on human-water interactions in cities across Europe, his current research focuses on constructions of the environment in the Dutch colonial world.

Cara Wolahan is a historian of early modern Italian art and material culture. Her research emphasizes the experiences of women and the intersections of religion, magic, and medicine. Having completed her Master’s degree at Boston University and her Bachelor’s degree at Boston College, both in art history, Cara is now a PhD student at the Warburg Institute, University of London. Her doctoral dissertation investigates the use of red coral as an amulet for women and children in 16th-century Italy using visual, literary, and archival sources. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and most recently completed a research fellowship in Rome awarded by the Fondazione Lemmermann.