Moral Seascapes: Critical Perspectives

Throughout history, the sea has been a vast repository of cultural meaning. Whether viewed as an intractable barrier or a medium of fluid mobility; a benevolent source of sustenance or a violent, merciless force of nature; whether bearing biblical, classical or modern associations, these meanings have tended to provide insight into the human relationship with maritime space. They have also inflected the visual economy of the sea, charging representations of the maritime landscape, and of shipwreck particularly, with an excess of symbolic force.

The history of the visual tropes of seafaring and shipwreck, in the period since 1800, has commonly focused on metaphysical meanings to do with the relationship between the subject and the world, on one hand, and socio-economic meanings to do with, e.g., the transformations of capitalism, on the other. Between these two groups of meanings lies a relatively more neglected third one, that of morality. Traditionally, especially in the early modern genre of shipwreck painting, such moral meanings had held a dominant position. These meanings were always close to stating metaphysical points: the vanitas of the world, and of human works, such as states and politics, and the need for human beings to consider the end and the afterlife; and conversely the more optimistic condition of being-in-the world under the government of fortuna. This position was abandoned or just lost, over the course of modernity, or such is the general assumption.

As follow-up meeting of a workshop, which took place at the University of Vienna in 2022, and with a view to the planned anthology “Moral Seascapes” it intends to look at the moral meanings of the seascape and the shipwreck image that survived into modernity or haunted it, and those that were newly invented and added during this period. Among the latter meanings are those that concern early humanitarian movements that concerned, for instance, the saving of lives from shipwreck or the violent transportation of slaves and convicts; and, later on, technological estrangement, moral economies of various kinds, labor conditions, the perils and plights of maritime migration, and ecological disaster. The basic hypothesis is not simply that the image type, taken at face value, can be understood through this prism of moral meanings. Rather, morality provided a specific manner of setting up image spaces that, especially in the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, came to inform many non-obvious modes of representation, into and beyond visual abstraction. This parcours of modern forms, with its move away from “realist” modes of representation, is so varied that it presumably helps to better understand the question of how, in turn, the image spaces impinged on the understanding of morality, the representation of moral spaces, and their transformations.

The aim is to bring together perspectives from visual history and the cultural history of moralities, with an agenda of mutual illumination.

Workshop and meeting at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut in collaboration with the University of Vienna and the ZfL.

Please, register via email: KHI-Presse@khi.fi.it