Imperial Landscape in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Central Europe

A Study Into the vision of Nature in Sciences and Visual Arts

Drawing from recent historiography on imperial imagery and visual sciences studies, I aim to open for inquiry through the study of the Kronprinzenwerk’s iconography, the ways landscape images ground itself in Austrian imperial artistic and scientific practices, and, to borrow the phrasing of visual historian Mitchell, in a history fundamental to our understanding not only of what images of landscape were but of what nature was meant to be in late 19^th century and early 20^th century. Convinced that images are "world-making" and not only "world mirroring", as philosopher Nelson Goodman put it, I question how images of landscape, be it picturesque, panoramic, cartographic, and topographic, are associated with the emergence in the late 19^thcentury of a visual culture of nature representation that is grounded in various and sometimes contested epistemological inquiries that bind from the 18^th century to the beginning of 20^th century natural and ethnographic sciences with aesthetic visions of nature.

Biography
Paul Bauer is historian and social geographer at the Charles University in Prague. He has been working for 10 years on the socio-geographic dimension of conflictual and shared heritages in Central Europe with a focus on the political and scientific issues of the musealization of violent pasts and its role in the (re)framing of post-war victim/perpetrator relations. His current research is on nature and landscape imagery in late 19th and early 20th century imperial and post imperial Central Europe.