Primate – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #031 (2009) by Daphne WrightLa Galleria Nazionale
In one of the thousands of lithographs in the 22-volume work entitled in the Tuscan translation Historia delle genti et della natura delle cose settentrionali (1555) by the Swedish cartographer Olaus Magnus, appears a scene which illustrates the 'great power of the art of magic' concerning natural phenomena. Wielding an instrument inspired by a traditional pot, a 'female' atop a promontory unleashes a storm that sweeps away oxen and pigs, sailors and sailing ships and even plants.
Senza titolo – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #122 (1991) by Pier Paolo CalzolariLa Galleria Nazionale
The woodcut is in Book 3, Chapter XV, where the "culture of demons", the power of "these evil ones to obscure the rays of the moon, to stir up storms, to uproot plants & trees, to make sheep & horses sick & weaken", lies at the crossroads between the unfathomable connection with the forces of nature and the cultural account of a superstition that the papal legate Olaus Magnus, visiting the barren Christian communities of the North, is careful to leave unexplained.
Objecto magico encontrado (Detail, Roma) – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #152 (2005/2022) by Glenda LéonLa Galleria Nazionale
The depiction is part of a genre, simultaneous to the historical period that climatologists and glaciologists call the Little Ice Age, that not only corresponds to the modern history of states and nations and their geographical units, scientific methodology and the beginning of the objectivity of the world, the consciousness of the human being and their ability to know things as they are, but also coincides between the 16th and 19th centuries, depending on the dates, with an undoubted cooling of the planet and temperatures everywhere on the globe.
Angry Birds of America - Yellow Finch – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #113 (2018) by Ida ApplebroogLa Galleria Nazionale
Another woodcut, dated 1486, reported by the historian of modernity and climate Wolfgang Behringer, also illustrates a witch hell-bent on creating a huge hailstorm.
Listening to the Stars III – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #156 (2020) by Glenda LéonLa Galleria Nazionale
While Behringer is among those who help us understand the effects of climate on the evolution of cultures, it is the German historian himself who reminds us that the idea of a link between human activity and climate is not recent.
Listening to the Light – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #006 (2020) by Glenda LéonLa Galleria Nazionale
Even witchcraft and witch-hunting can be explained by variations in the climate, to the extent that Behringer speaks of witch-hunting – at its height between the 16th and 17th centuries – as a 'scapegoat typical of the Little Ice Age'. Thus, the perception of the connection between anthropogenic activities and influence on climate is not a prerogative of the present 'Anthropocene'.
La Coturnice (1930) by Filippo de PisisLa Galleria Nazionale
For sorceresses to intercede with the forces of nature, including the power of wind and rain and other various bad weather conditions, it must be accepted that humans somehow can influence natural phenomena. It was a rationale also appropriated by the Sun King who, by making himself 'a warmth-giving star', 'epitomises the promise of a better future' during Europe's centuries-long freezing winter.
Blocked – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #137 (2021) by Alejandro PrietoLa Galleria Nazionale
The history of our ability to affect the climate and our shame about it goes back a long way: to the guilty conscience of the flood myths that traverse different civilisations from East to West, from that of Utnapishtim in the Babylonian poem Gilgameš to the Great Flood of the Old Testament, to the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha, sons of the Titans in the Uranus cycle of Greek mythology.
Habla – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #160 (2008) by Cristina LucasLa Galleria Nazionale
Human behaviour has an impact on the climate, on wrath or quiescence, and the mood of the gods of fertility, rain, storm, and bad weather. From Vertumnus, the Etruscan god of the seasons, able to regulate the waters of the Tiber, to Hadad, the ‘thundering’ Mesopotamian god of rain, wind and storm, and Chaac, the Mayan god of rain to the biblical god of bad weather, human behaviour directly affects the weather.
Gorilla n.9 – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #107 (2022) by Davide RivaltaLa Galleria Nazionale
A whole system of guilt, punishment, rewards, restitution, and debts mark the human relationship with weather permeated with the divine, though the difference in the element angered does not change the fact that it is always the human that angers it.
Lifted – HOT SPOT – Caring For a Burning World #171 (2021) by Rachel YounLa Galleria Nazionale
So it is that our responsibility for the climate, a modern-day ecological certainty, can easily be backdated by several millennia, to the times when the history of human time became separated from that of biological time.
Text by Ilaria Bussoni. Photos by Adriano Mura.
