Without Nature

This essay examines two late landscape paintings by Peter Paul Rubens that are characterized by an intense engagement with the wetland in which his property Het Steen was located. On the one hand, the large Rainbow landscape from the Wallace Collection in London offers the chance to inquire about the relevance for Rubens’s landscapes of the Stoic imperative of a ‘life in accord with Nature’. On the other hand, the approximately contemporary Flat landscape with clouds from the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, which powerfully evokes the fragility of landscape painting’s bond with an understanding of Nature as an abstract quantity, makes it possible to illuminate the ecological sensibility with which Rubens approaches terrestrial interconnections even beyond prevailing orders of Nature and their implicit hierarchies. In sum, this paper proposes to sound out fresh perspectives that early modern art history can contribute to recent ecocritical discourses.