The Metabolism of Landscape: Ecology and Natural Philosophy in the Prints of Hercules Segers

Dutch painter-printmaker Hercules Segers (c. 1589 – c. 1638) is remembered today as a fabricator of landscapes that depict decay while also physically enacting destruction through cunning manipulations of artistic materials and techniques. This paper—part of a larger project on art, ecology, and time in the early modern Netherlands—reorients the narrative about Segers’s destructive ethos by highlighting the interconnectedness of death and life in the artist’s prints. I expose the generative dimensions of the etcher’s figurations of demise and the productive side of his destructive artistic processes in two related ways. First, I reinterpret Segers’s prints through seventeenth-century natural philosophy and its Aristotelian theories of metabolism as a mechanism of creative destruction. Second, I read the artist’s etchings in ecological terms, that is, by scrutinising how they examine and form the very concept of nature. In both the metabolic theories and proto-ecological thinking of Segers’s milieu, life was impossible without death, and creation was unthinkable without destruction. When regarded within the frameworks of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and ecosophy, Segers’s etchings emerge as more than meditations on demise. They are also metabolic, registering the destructive transformations that nourish life and, not coincidentally, art.