Elemental Forces Symposium Keynote Address: Christine Göttler

Elemental Forces Symposium: Keynote
Newberry Library, Center for Renaissance Studies
Friday, May 7, 2021
SPEAKER: Christine Göttler, University of Bern
"Fire, Sulfur, and Salt: Elemental Transformation in Depictions of the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah"
RESPONDENT: Claudia Swan (Washington University in St. Louis)
INTRODUCTIONS: Rebecca Zorach (Northwestern University) and Lia Markey (Newberry Library)
ABSTRACT:
Since antiquity, fire has been regarded as the most subtle, and also the most ambiguous of the four elements as defined in the European tradition. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, emphasized the vastness and violence of the element of fire, crediting it with both creative and destructive powers. As an agent of transformation, fire alters, destroys, and re-creates environments and ecologies, material and immaterial worlds. Divine and demonic forces often revealed or concealed themselves through smoke and fire, and, in the early modern period, an artist’s mind or soul was thought to possess an excess of fire. It is within this complex interplay between creation and destruction that I would like to explore Netherlandish painters’ interest in the rendering of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. As so vividly described in contemporaneous exegetical literature, the rain of fire and brimstone that God caused to pour down on the “sinful” cities turned the earth inside out, releasing sulfurous vapors, asphalt and salt. The once lush and paradisiacal valley, chosen by Lot (Abraham’s nephew) to graze his cattle, was thus reduced to a dystopian apocalyptic landscape. By focusing on a series of case studies I hope to explore the subtle links between social and sexual transgressions, transgressions in nature, and transgressive poetry and art. For example, were depictions of this divine judgment meant to evoke the calamities of the present age including endless war and environmental changes such as floods, storms, and rains? In what ways did they reflect the transformative potential of oil painting and open up a way to a visual language at the margins of figurative representation or even beyond it? Finally, how did the transformation of Lot’s nameless wife into a pillar of salt and a monument of curiosity punished engage with questions of elemental composition and material change?
ABOUT ELEMENTAL FORCES
This international symposium explores questions of early modern matter by focusing on the four elements (earth, air, water, and fire) and their properties, combinations, and transformations. For early modern people, how were the elements at work-not only in the subject matter of artworks, manuscripts, and books, but also in their material existence, their fabrication and their ongoing existence, and, indeed, their makers and viewers?
This program is co-organized by Thalia Allington-Wood (Oxford Brookes University), Sophie Morris (Victoria and Albert Museum), Claudia Swan (Washington University), and Rebecca Zorach (Northwestern University). The symposium is co-sponsored by Northwestern University, the Mary Jane Crowe Fund for Art History, and the Myers Foundations.
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