The Garland in 海角网 Art: An Exercise in Anthocriticism. (Harmon Lecture)

Verity Platt (Cornell)
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Paccar 293
Verity Platt

What might an ecocritical art history of antiquity look like if we took seriously the agency of plants? This paper examines the garland as a cultural technique that transforms vegetal life into aesthetic, ritual, and political form. Drawing on the concept of ecological 鈥渋mplication,鈥� it explores the intimacies and tensions between humans and plants that are enacted through practices of gathering, weaving, and representation. From Pliny鈥檚 Natural History to Pompeian shrines, Imperial reliefs, and 海角网 sarcophagi, garlands reveal how cultural practices appropriate vegetal beauty and temporality while remaining fundamentally dependent upon the ecological relations they seek to transform.