Tag: Visual Art

River as a landscape – Nilotic landscapes

The “Palestrina Mosaic” or “Nile mosaic of Palestrina”, a town near Italy’s capital Rome, is a late Hellenistic floor mosaic depicting the Nile in its passage from the Blue Nile to the Mediterranean.

Around 100 BCE, Nile landscapes were quite a fashion in Roman art. In fact, wikipedia has a whole article on “Nilotic landscapes” as an art subgenre of its own. The allure of the Nile and it’s natural and social surrounding must have been so great across the Mediterranean world, that from Ancient Egypt to the Minoans (2.000 BCE), the Greeks (500 BCE), the Romans (until the 7. Century CE) and into the Renaissance in the 16. Century, Nile landscapes were a popular motive in painting as well as mosaics and tapestry.

The Palestrina mosaic shows beautifully how water, land, vegetation and social life were interconnected in the Egyptian societies along the Nile. It’s a fluid, constantly changing and evolving concept of landscape and of society, I find very inspirational.

medieval flood in Europe

Date and title of this wood print are unfortunately unknown to me. This is the source.

The yellow skies of New York

In June 2023 massive wildfires in Canada caused air pollution in New York to a scale not known to New Yorkers. Besides the serious health issues the smoke-filled air causes, it also tinted the whole city in a curious sepia like color. The remarkable images, the New Yorker chose to accompany this article, show that the editors clearly recognized the aesthetic qualities. For a day or more all contemporary images of New York appeared like paintings from the romantic period of the 19. Century. All photographs are by Clark Hodgin for The New Yorker.

Children of the Sea

2019 Japanese anime movie “Children of the Sea” (original title: 海獣の子供, which translates roughly as “Children of Sea Monsters”) is set in a fictitious island in the Okinawa region of Japan. The movie directed by Ayumu Watanabe puts a lot of effort into creating the image of a culture and a way of life, that is aquatic or located in a fluid continuum between dry land and water, the city and the sea. Here are screen shots from two scenes of intense tropical rainstorm that blur the distinction between land and sea.

Another noteworthy scene is the following, set on a pier that is aligned with concrete tetrapopds. These tetrapods have been used since the 1950s all over the world to protect coasts against erosion and flooding. They are particularly prominent across Okinawa and have come to define the look of the coasts there. (See the wiki article here)

Since the movie’s plot is about the meeting and friendship between two brothers born in the sea and a city girl and the girl’s eventual emergence into the underwater world, the tripods here seem to symbolize the community’s effort to maintain the separation between land and sea and protect it’s people from the forces bur also the allure of the ocean.

Breach of St. Anthony Dike in 1651

Jan Asselijn (1610–1652): “Breach of St. Anthonis-Dike near Amsterdam”, 1651.

“During the night of 4-5 March 1651 the Saint Anthony’s Dike was breached near Amsterdam. Jan Asselijn portrayed the fiercely flowing water with a strong sense of drama. The billowing cloak of the man at the left shows that the storm is not yet over, however the squalls are already moving on at the right. The vivid red contrasts sharply with the bright blue of the parting clouds.”

(from the website of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, NL)

Vesuvius – the most beautiful disaster

The erupting mount Vesuvius in Italy is one of the most popular motives in modern art history, particularly throughout the 18. and 19. Century – at least as far as disasters go. Between 1766 and 1779 the volcano erupted several times, giving artists occasions to witness the event personally. The topic and it’s visual representation have played a major role in Europe’s public imagination of natural disasters.

Here are a couple of examples, mostly taken from the 2018 exhibition “Entfesselte Natur” (Nature Unleashed) at Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany.

above: Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819): “Eruption of Vesuvius with the death of Plinius”, 1813

above: Michael Wutky (1739–1822): “Vesuvius Eruption”, around 1796

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797): “Eruption of Vesuvius”, between 1776 and 1780.

Pierre Jacques Volaire: “The Eruption of Vesuvius”, 1771

Jakob Philipp Hackert (1737 – 1807): “Vesuvius Eruption in the year 1774”, 1774

For more information and the philosophical ideas behind the eruption of mount Vesuvius in art history see my post here.

Kota Ezawa: Flood (2011)

Kota Ezawa (*1969)Flood, 2011
© Courtesy the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt a.M.

Drawing Extreme Conditions – Emma Stibbon

In an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 2023, contemporary British artist Emma Stibbon exhibited her own wood carving “Collapsed Whaling Station” alongside a selection of works from the Royal Academy collection. All art works depict extreme weather events or ruination or other kinds of disasters. In this nice video she talks about her fascination with these kind of images, referencing explicitly the current climate crisis and it’s effects.

“The Eddystone Lighthouse, during a Storm”

The image shows the painting by painter William Daniell of the Eddystone Lighthouse off Rame Head in Cornwall, England during the ‘Great Storm’ of 1824. Daniell exhibited the painting for the first time in 1825.

The Year without a Summer


The 19. Century was not only the century of industrialization, the spark that “set human civilization aflame” (Andri Snaer Magnason). Between 1800 and 1815 half a dozen large volcanic eruptions all across the globe significantly changed the climate in China as well as all across Europe and practically all continents. What followed was “the year without a summer” 1816 which did not only bring massive crop failures as well as floods and resulting famines and other hardships to societies worldwide, it also influenced European culture so profoundly that a whole new era of the arts and philosophy developed that had a lasting impact on all of modern society: Romanticism. 1816 is not such a distant past and the paintings, poems, novels and scientific treaties of that era by Caspar David Friedrich, Lord Byron or Mary Shelley remain central to our cultural canon and identity today. In fact, all these climate change stories and images have been right in front of our eyes, in museums, libraries, on t-shirts and advertisements all along. To understand better what’s ahead of us now, we should seek advise from ourselves just seven generations back.


This is an image of the first page of Lod Byron’s famous poem “Darkness” from summer 1816. The full text of the poem and more information about the impacts of “The Year without a Summer” can be found online.