Dr Anca-Delia Moldovan (University of Warwick)

Title: Artisans and Mother Nature in Stradano’s Nova Reperta (1580s)

Abstract: In the late 1580s, the Florentine nobleman Luigi Alamanni commissioned the Flemish artist Jan van der Straet, otherwise known as Giovanni Stradano, to design the Nova Reperta, a series of nineteenth prints showcasing post-classical inventions and discoveries. In this talk, I will examine what the Nova Reperta engravings can tell one about the major sixteenth-century changes that governed the relationship between nature and human art. I will do so through the lens of the workshop, which Stradano foregrounded in many of his prints. Workshops are male-dominated spaces in which craftsmen, as alchemists, refine and bring nature to completion to the benefit of humanity: the wilderness is turned into cultivated lands; olives in oi; silkworms in silk; and plants in medicine. The engravings display the superiority of modern Europeans both over native Americans and over the ancients. It was in the post-classical Florentine and Netherlandish workshops that technologies, such as the mechanical clock, the magnet, the compass, and the astrolabe, necessary to the navigation of great distances, were developed, in the collaboration between artisans and between artisans and the learned. Stradano personified the continent America as a native Indian woman willingly surrendering herself to the rule of art, technology, and catholic religion brought to its shores by the Florentine Vespucci. In doing so, Stradano depicted men imposing the order of art upon the unruly creative forces of mother nature.

Bio: Anca-Delia Moldovan is a Marie Sklodowska Curie Eutopia-SIF COFUND Fellow at the University of Warwick. She gained a PhD in History of Art from the University of Warwick (2020) having previously studied at the Universities of Florence and Bucharest. She held fellowships at I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence; Warburg Institute; Newberry Library; and Herzog August Bibliothek. Her work investigates calendrical and agricultural representations at the intersection of art, science, intellectual, and environmental histories in Early Modern Italy. Her current project examines the environmental, artistic, and intellectual history of the olive tree in the Medici Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Moldovan published articles in the Rivista di Storia della Miniatura; Renaissance and Reformation; and Renaissance Quarterly. Her forthcoming book Illustrating the Year: The Iconography of the Calendar and Its Cultural Impact in Early Modern Northern Italy was awarded a Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award.