Date/Time
Friday, February 6, 2026
9:15 am PST – 5:30 pm PST
Location
UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
2520 Cimarron Street
Organized by Professors Lyle Massey (University of California, Irvine), Vin Nardizzi (The University of British Columbia), Tiffany Jo Werth (University of California, Davis) and Bronwen Wilson (University of California, Los Angeles)
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Edward W. Carter Chair in European Art
Conference organizers are grateful to the Hannah & Edward Carter Endowment for 17th-Century Art History for generous programming support.
Critiquing the environmental humanities’ narrowly earth-centric focus, Carl Phelphstead asks us to look heavenward, to think “cosmocritically” and expand our awareness for how attitudes towards the heaven shape those on earth. What is sky? Both a border for land and sea, and a blank canvas for portents and celestial events, sky reflects fears and hopes for stasis in a changing and unpredictable environment.
In pre-modern Europe, the sky was rarely conceived of as empty space. From medieval notions of a realm populated with seraphim and containing an ideal mirror image of Jerusalem, to Galileo’s description of the Milky Way in Sidereus Nuncius as “nothing else than a congeries of innumerable stars distributed in clusters,” the dome of heaven posed innumerable problems of definition, representation, and clarification. In early modern natural philosophy “sky” as a category was always a puzzling entity: infinite but not geometrically measurable; filled with light and color, but itself without form or shadow; both fulsome and completely empty. While demarcated by a horizon that distinguishes it from land or water, nevertheless sky isn’t bound by that horizon. And while it contains bodies–clouds, sun, moon, stars, birds, rainbows—it is also defined by one of Aristotle’s categorical elements: air. Defining or visualizing air often depended on its effects rather than recognition of it as substance. Genesis for unpredictable currents of weather and storms, air is the veil through which hail, snow and gale force winds make themselves apparent, simultaneously making human existence itself vulnerable. Air can be manipulated to produce sound (as with Aeolian harps), convey scents, or become visible even while rendering the landscape unseeable: describing the Arctic, a sailor wrote around 1600 “The air is so darkened with continuall mistes and foges so neere the Pole, that no man can well see, either to guide his ship, or to direct his course.” “Sky” is for these reasons conceptually unstable in early modern cultural, social and scientific thought.
This conference will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore early modern concepts of sky from a variety of environmentally consequential perspectives, from the history of science and art, to poetics and literature.
Monica Azzolini, University of Bologna
David Bardeen, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Sophie Chiari, Université Clermont Auvergne, MSH de Clermont-Ferrand, IHRIM
Maria H. Loh, Institute for Advanced Study
Sarah Mallory, The Morgan Library & Museum
Craig Martin, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Kirsten Schuhmacher, University of Connecticut
Tiffany Jo Werth, University of California, Davis
Program Schedule
8:45 a.m.
Coffee and Registration
9:15 a.m.
Director’s Welcome
Bronwen Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles
9:20 a.m.
Introductory Remarks
Lyle Massey, University of California, Irvine and Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia
Panel 1: Sky Terms
Moderator: Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia
9:30 a.m.
Sarah Mallory, The Morgan Library & Museum
“Invention of Atmosphere in the Age of Air: From Aerial to Atmospheric in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Images”
9:55 a.m.
Tiffany Jo Werth, University of California, Davis
“Cosmocriticism and a Renaissance Sky Atlas”
10:20 a.m.
Q&A
10:50 a.m.
Coffee & Health Break
Panel 2: Weather Gods
Moderator: Lyle Massey, University of California, Irvine
11:10 a.m.
Monica Azzolini, University of Bologna
“Invoking Protection: Patron Saints of Thunders and Torrential Rains in Early Modern Italy”
11:35 a.m.
Craig Martin, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
“Doubting the Sky: Skepticism About Weather Prediction Among Early Modern Philosophers”
12:00 p.m.
Q&A
12:30 p.m.
Lunch
Exhibition of Clark Library materials in the North Book Room
Panel 3: Looking Skywards
Moderator: Susan Dackerman, University of California, Los Angeles
2:00 p.m.
David Bardeen, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
“Rubens, Galileo and the Cosmological Baroque: The Fall of Phaeton”
2:25 p.m.
Kirsten Schuhmacher, University of Connecticut
“Invoking the Spheres: English Poetics of Authority in Mary Sidney’s Psalmes”
2:50 p.m.
Q&A
3:20 p.m.
Coffee & Health Break
Panel 4: In the Clouds
Moderator: Bronwen Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles
3:40 p.m.
Maria H. Loh, Institute for Advanced Study
“Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as Skyscape”
4:05 p.m.
Sophie Chiari, Université Clermont Auvergne, MSH de Clermont-Ferrand, IHRIM
“Shakespeare’s Cloud Scenes: An Ecocritical Perspective”
4:30 p.m.
Q&A
5:00 p.m.
Wrap-up & Future Horizons
The conference is free to attend with advance registration, and will be held in-person at the Clark Library. Seating is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.
Image: Clouds from A discourse concerning the origine and properties of vvind, with an historicall account of hurricanes, and other tempestuous winds. By R. Bohun. Oxford, 1671. Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.