Sottobosco: From Baroque Painting to Contemporary Art

How do we picture nature when our relationship to it begins to shift?

What is Sottobosco?

The transition into the Enlightenment offers a compelling historical parallel. Modern science was only beginning to emerge, and artists, naturalists and collectors participated in a shared culture of observation. The distinction between artist, naturalist and scientist had yet to solidify. Observation, speculation and misinterpretation coexisted, giving rise to painting practices that moved seamlessly between aesthetic inquiry and the production of knowledge. One such genre was Sottobosco—Italian for forest floor—a subgenre of Dutch still life painting that combined landscape and naturalist research. Developed by the Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck (c. 1619–1678), Sottobosco paintings crystallized this convergence, bringing together fungi, reptiles, insects and wild plants in scenes driven as much by empirical curiosity as by a fascination with grotesque beauty. As the exhibition catalogue The Menagerie of Medusa: Otto Marseus van Schrieck and the Scholars argues, these paintings “were not simply aesthetic renderings but equally early documentation of discoveries in natural history,” forcing established traditions to grapple with newly emerging knowledge of the living world. Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750) expanded the language of Dutch still life through meticulous botanical observation, combining scientific curiosity with compositions whose lush abundance borders on the theatrical.

Sottobosco in Contemporary Painting

Within contemporary painting, Sottobosco offers a compelling historical lens through which to reconsider our changing relationship with nature. As our understanding of the living world shifts, many of the questions that animated the genre return with renewed urgency. Painting has long participated in moments when systems of knowledge are reimagined. Among the contemporary painters whose work I admire, the renewed relevance of Sottobosco can be traced in very different ways. Inka Essenhigh (New York) dissolves the boundaries between plant, animal and human life, constructing hybrid ecologies that recall pre-Enlightenment ideas of an animated world. Nicole Duennebier (Boston) draws on Dutch still life and Baroque visual language through recurring motifs of grottos, dense undergrowth and the grotesque, where beauty, decay and transformation remain inseparable. Emma Webster (Los Angeles) uses virtual environments and digital image construction to reconsider the traditions of landscape painting, exploring how technology reshapes our experience of nature.

Painting the Forest Floor

My own work explores our shifting relationship with nature through the historical framework of Sottobosco (see Toad’s Eye View exhibition). My process begins with close observation of spontaneous vegetation and the overlooked ecologies of the city. Botanical watercolour, herbarium practices and the medicinal and cultural  histories of weeds form the basis of a research process that culminates in oil paintings. Pressed plant specimens from my herbarium are used as painting instruments to create nature-printed silhouettes, bringing the physical traces of plants directly into the painted surface. Plants become protagonists within landscapes in a state of metamorphosis. By revisiting the early stages of Enlightenment thought, I imagine alternative ways of picturing nature that embrace an entangled coexistence between humans and the more-than-human world.