2026 Theses Doctoral

Geomyths in Early Netherlandish Landscapes, 1500–1600

Girard, Virginia S.

In the early sixteenth century, Netherlandish painter Joachim Patinir developed a novel composition long regarded as the beginning of the landscape genre: the panoramic world landscape, later termed the Weltlandschaft. This dissertation constitutes the first history of the genre that considers the role of local mythologies, vernacular culture, and the natural environment in the production and reception of landscape painting. I advance a new interdisciplinary framework that brings these forces together: geomythology, the study of myths and legends that account for the appearance of natural phenomena.

In the late Middle Ages, anomalous natural features such as strange rock formations and unusual flora and fauna were explained with recourse to fantastic beings and supernatural forces. These explanations were inseparable from early modern experiences of environment, and the most popular legends pervaded every aspect of Netherlandish society. Geomyths were commemorated in urban topography, courtly poetry, chivalric romances, processions, and decorative arts. With this rich visual and textual material in mind, I spent two years visiting the region, examining archives, paintings, and the terrain itself. I located mythologized landmarks through a combination of late medieval literature, oral traditions, and folklore collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From these varied sources, I fashioned a historically grounded framework for connecting geomyths to painted motifs, whereby I reestablish dialogues between setting and subject, painter and beholder, painted image and the natural environment.

The dissertation traces a new narrative arc for the genre’s development through four chronological case studies spanning the sixteenth century. Patinir forms the centerpiece, but neglected insights into this geomythic worldview appear already in the paintings of his predecessors. I begin by reframing the contributions of Hieronymus Bosch and Gerard David, shedding light on aspects of their work overshadowed in previous scholarship. Following Patinir, I bring an overlooked subject and painter to the fore, investigating the mining scenes of Lucas van Valckenborch.

Across each chapter, I reevaluate landscapes once dismissed as fanciful pastiches as legitimate expressions of a geomythic worldview. In doing so, this dissertation makes a claim for treating landscape paintings as a singular form of historical evidence. In an early modern era bereft of concrete insights into what we now recognize as ecological thought, paintings preserve relationships between humankind and the natural world, offering access to otherwise irrecoverable conceptions of the landscape. Their investigation discloses an untold history of myth, image, and environment—one that challenges prevailing characterizations of the sixteenth century as an era of rationalization and demystification. Far from vanishing, the geomythic landscape acquired renewed significance at the dawn of the industrial age.