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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

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Prof. em. Dr. Christine Göttler

Photo: Thomas Baumann

Curriculum

Christine Göttler (Ph.D. University of Zurich, 1996; Habilitation FU Berlin, 2006) is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Bern. Prior to her appointment in Bern, she was Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle (1998–2009). Her professional awards include fellowships from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the International Research Centre for Cultural History (Vienna), the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington, D.C.), the J. Paul Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA), the Newberry Library (Chicago, IL), the Villa I Tatti (Florence), and the Herzog August Bibliothek Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel). In the spring semester of 2024 she will be the Robert Janson-La Palme *76 Visiting Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology at the University of Princeton. Her current research interests focus on collecting practices and collection spaces, the intersections between art, natural philosophy, and religious imagination, the relationship between landscape and nature, and early modern notions of materiality and immateriality in art. She has published on Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Hendrick Goltzius, and Karel van Mander, and the interactions between various arts and crafts in early modern Europe, especially Antwerp.

Publications (selection)

  • Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform, Proteus: Studies in Identity Formation in Early Modern Image-Text-Ritual-Habitat, vol. 2, Turnhout: Brepols, 2010.
  • “Die Katastrophe in der Galerie: Sodom und Gomorra in der niederländischen Malerei,” in: Naturkatastrophen: Deutungsmuster vom Altertum bis in die Neuzeit, ed. by Andreas Höfele and Beate Kellner, Paderborn: Brill / Fink, 2023, pp. 235–265.
  • “Yellow, Vermilion, and Gold: Colour in Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck,” in: Material Identities in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1750: Objects – Affects – Effects, ed. by Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, Christine Göttler, and Ulinka Rublack. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021, pp. 233–280, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50499.
  • “Tales of Transformation: Hendrick Goltzius’s Allegory of the (Alchemical) Art in the Kunstmuseum Basel,” in: Epistemic Images in: Early Modern Europe, ed. by Christopher Heuer and Alexander Marr, 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual 1 (2020), pp. 403–444, https://doi.org/10.11588/xxi.2020.2.76233
  • “The Marine Venus and Rubens’s Saltcellar: Artists’ Conversations in Antwerp, c. 1628,” in: I Tatti Studies, 26, 2 (2023), special issue: Visual Poetry: The Politics and Erotics of Seeing, ed. by Shawon Kinew and Felipe Pereda (forthcoming).

Research project: Rubens's end-of-time scenarios

In the early modern period artists would have thought of the four elements and their properties with reference to Empedocles and Aristotle as the "roots" or "principal substances" of things, or as the "matter of generation" that makes up the physical world perceived by the senses; pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles likened the elements to the few pigments used by ancient artists in ever-changing mixtures and combinations to produce seemingly living resemblances of all things. In my project, I focus on Peter Paul Rubens's preoccupation with violent elemental forces leading to catastrophes or dystopias of apocalyptic proportions. Among other things, I will bring into dialogue two works that, though created in different contexts, both engage with religious, mythological, and natural philosophical imaginaries of elemental chaos and disorder: The Fall of the Damned (Munich), generally dated to around 1620, and The Great Tempest (Vienna), begun as a small panel in the same years, but enlarged twice and repeatedly reworked and reconceived until the 1630s. Both works were painted entirely by Rubens. How did Rubens translate biblical and mythological accounts of universal floods and apocalyptic fires into his own medium of paint, or envision an accelerated apocalyptic time that also destroys the elements? Using Rubens's imagery of elemental chaos and meteorological extremes as an example, I explore the ways in which such non-material, hidden "ultimate" forces were imagined, materialized, and staged in early modern art.

Research results: Rubens's end-of-time scenarios

The research I conducted during my three-month stay in Hamburg focused primarily on Peter Paul Rubens’s Fall of the Damned, his most disturbing, but also most ambitious eschatological painting, now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. My point of departure concerned two features that have so far received little attention in the research literature: the conspicuous absence of Christ, and the unusually detailed representation of the apocalyptic fire, which I identified as the main protagonist of the painting. While the seven-headed dragon and the mass of human bodies falling toward a bottomless hell refer to the final verses of the Book of Revelation, the fiery cataclysm evokes the vivid description of the elemental meltdown at the end of times described in the Second Epistle of Peter. My interest was twofold: in the new topicality that 2 Peter 3:10 (“in which the heavens shall pass away with great violence and the elements shall be melted with heat”) acquired in the debates about the fluid and homogeneous nature of the heavens with the astronomical discoveries of the 1610s; and in Rubens’s preoccupation with both form-dissolving and form-generating processes. Focusing on the moment when time and space dissolve into eternity, he created a powerful apocalyptic narrative that responded to the eschatological anxieties of his time and a general awareness that the world had grown old. My research will form the basis of larger chapter on Rubens’s painterly engagement with meteorological and cosmological extremes in the book I am currently engaged on, Fluid Worlds: Art and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp. My fellowship at the DFG Centre for Advanced Study Imaginaria of Force has certainly been instrumental for advancing my book-in-progress, and I would also like to say that I greatly enjoyed and benefited from conversations with both senior and junior fellows, as well as from interactions with colleagues at the Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar of the Universität Hamburg.