Taking Roelant Savery’s Das Paradies (1626) as a starting point, this talk explores the role of Western European artistic cultures and collecting practices in inciting the ecocide of the post-1492 Anthropocene Extinction. In particular, Sugata Ray explores how Savery’s celebrated painting of Adam and Eve consuming the forbidden fruit amidst a verdant landscape inhabited by animals such as the now-extinct dodo, endemic to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, became foundational for scientific and cultural perceptions of the extinction of nonhuman life in colonial worlds.
Sugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian art and architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies and Director of the South Asia Art Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is on post-1400s art and architecture with a focus on climate change and the environment. Ray’s recent books include Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019) and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (coedited; 2020). In the academic year 2013/14, he has been a Fellow of Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin.
Hannah Baader is Permanent Senior Research Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institute, and leader of the Research Group Transregional Art Histories. Spaces, Actors, Ecologies. Furthermore, she is head of the 4A_Lab in Berlin, a research and fellowship program of the Max-Planck Institute in Florence in cooperation with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Baader studied art history, law and philosophy in Berlin and Vienna and received her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin (2002). Before joining Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence in 2004, she was appointed by the Freie Universität Berlin (1995-2001) and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, Max-Planck-Institute (2002-2003). She was guest scholar at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2007), the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2014 and 2016) and Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelberg at the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context (2017) and at the University of Zurich (2017). She obtained major grants from the Getty Foundation for Art, Space and Mobility in Early Ages of Globalization, together with Avinoam Shalem and Gerhard Wolf (2010-2015). The research program Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices developed by her and Gerhard Wolf at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (2013-2019).
The lecture is part of the Workshop “Art and Conflict in Times of Climate Change” (17-18 July 2025), organized by Emily McGiffin (University of Warwick), Feng Schöneweiß (4A_Lab, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut), T Pritchard (The University of Edinburgh), Antonio Montañes Jimenez (University of Oxford), and 4A_Lab.
