What does it mean to see a landscape painting through the eyes of its original beholders? This was the question from which my project began. In the early 16th century, Netherlandish painter Joachim Patinir (c. 1485–1524) introduced a novel composition into the Antwerp art market, long regarded as the beginning of the landscape genre: the panoramic world landscape, later termed Weltlandschaft. Patinir’s landscapes, emerging from a tradition of devotional painting, contain biblical subjects such as the hermit saints Jerome and Anthony, and invite meditation on Christian concepts such as the pilgrimage through life. The landscapes within which these subjects are set, however, are far more immediate in time and space. Yet they have never been examined with an eye to the local, material realities they reflect. This project proceeded with a hypothesis: By recovering a late medieval conception of environment that is attentive to the beholder’s lived experience, we stand to access dimensions of meaning hitherto overlooked by art history. 

Patinir hailed from Dinant-Bouvignes, neighboring cities on the Meuse River in what is now southern Belgium. As I investigated this region, I came across numerous place-names and natural landmarks with legendary associations. The Bayard Rock, for example, so named since at least the 14th century, is attributed to a powerful strike from the hoof of Bayard, a magical horse from the medieval epic Les quatres fils Aymon (Four sons of Aymon). The saga follows the knight Renaud de Montauban and his three brothers, who escape to the Ardennes forest after Renaud accidently kills the nephew of the emperor Charlemagne. Unusual geological formations and ruined castles across the Ardennes were attributed to this epic clash, as inhabitants of the region came to identify with the rebel status of the four brothers. A common motif in the paintings of Patinir, the Bayard Rock summoned the legend’s themes of resistance and hardship, establishing a thematic relationship between the biblical subject and painted landscape. 

The Bayard Rock is one of many motifs that invoked the terrain and its associated lore in painting. It is also one of many natural features that were once explained with recourse to the deeds of mythical figures. An extraordinarily rich body of these geomyths dates to the Middle Ages, if not earlier, and survives into the present in territories that constitute the historical Low Countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and northern France. Geomyths contributed to a late medieval conception of environment; the characters and lessons these geomyths contain, moreover, cast light on the priorities and concerns of the society from which they originate. 

Over the course of my fellowship, I spent time in Belgium and the Netherlands, examining archives, paintings, and the terrain itself. I located mythologized landmarks through a combination of literature, oral traditions, and cartography. From these varied sources, I fashioned a historically grounded framework for connecting geomyths to the painted landscape; in doing so, I sought to recover forgotten relationships between painters and their surroundings, and between paintings and beholders. The inclusion of mythologized landmarks conjured not only the geomyths associated with them, but the various ways in which legends manifested beyond the material terrain: processions, plays, children’s games, urban architecture, street names, cartography, and geographic histories. Through these diverse media, geomyths were absorbed into regional identity and local liturgy, civic campaigns, and moral causes, all of which informed encounters with painting.

This project thus traces a new narrative arc for the genre’s development through four chronological case studies spanning the 16th 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 metalworking scenes of Lucas van Valckenborch. Across each case study, I reevaluate landscapes once dismissed as fanciful pastiches within a framework of legitimate expressions of a geomythic worldview. 

This research 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.

Columbia University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2024–2026

Beginning in September 2026, Virginia Girard will undertake a graduate curatorial internship in the Paintings Department of the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center.