episode 6 with joost keizer
In this episode
Caro Fowler speaks with Joost Keizer about the consequential environmental histories embedded within seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Moving beyond celebratory narratives of realism and national identity, the conversation explores how war, deforestation, land reclamation, and colonial expansion reshaped both the Dutch environment and artistic representations of nature. Together, Fowler and Keizer consider whether landscape painting emerged not simply from an admiration of nature, but from experiences of ecological loss, environmental control, and human concepts of making.
TRANSCRIPT
Joost Keizer is Professor of Early Modern and Modern Art at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. He is the author of The Realism of Piero della Francesca (Routledge, 2017, paperback 2019) and Leonardo’s Paradox: Word and Image in the Making of Renaissance Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Wetland: Shaping Environments in Netherlandish Art (Brill, 2024), co-edited with Ann-Sophie Lehmann and Stephanie Porras, and On Failure (Brill, 2026), co-edited with Hanneke Grootenboer, Stijn Bussels, and Natasha Seaman. Keizer has published on Italian, German, and Dutch early modern art in journals such as The Art Bulletin, The Oxford Art Journal, Art History, The Burlington Magazine, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. He is currently writing books on the repositioning of art history in the global Dutch Republic and Dutch seventeenth-century artists’ response to the rapidly changing Dutch landscape.