Fishing for Souls: Water Technology and the Dutch Baroque

Abstract

Human supremacy over the nonhuman world is built on the premise of a knowable universe with regular laws. In early modern Europe, the environment became the machine upon which humanity could exert its domination; the exploitation of resources was (and, perhaps, still is) the ultimate goal for a species that was reordering the hierarchies of nature and culture. This article examines how water aesthetics emerged form a Judeo-Christian matrix that was reimagining the environment in the service of human progress. It will examine how water acts as an historical agent both in the the emergence of technologies and the social and cultural aesthetics of the early modern period.