A raptor’s-eye view in the early modern Netherlands

Abstract

Yannis Hadjinicolaou’s contribution focuses on Netherlandish landscape painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time when visual constructions of territory were often accomplished through the lens of falconry as a political tool. Depicting the falcon flying high above the territory transforms the natural landscape into a political one through substituting and extending the ruler’s sovereignty over it. A vertical perspective of power is allowed through the human-fabricated ‘bird’s-eye view’. This territorial aerial ‘view’ offers a political and privileged perspective over a vast, flat, and shapeable landscape through evoking the very etymology of land-schap in Dutch, here embodied by a ‘raptor’s eye’. Notably, an artist has to act like a falcon, sharply monitoring an area, if he or she wants to produce fine landscapes according to art theoretical works of the time. Studying the epistemic imagery of falconry can teach us much about the merging of art and nature together with their respective political implications through visual representations.