On Feb. 22, Claire N. Ptaschinski presented her paper, "Catastrophic Thinking: Picturing Natural Disaster in Quarant’ore Altar Design of 17th-century Rome," at the Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut Rome as part of a two-day workshop on Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism in the Early Modern Netherlands and Italy. Ptaschinski's paper formed part of a panel addressing flooding's impact on architectural design in premodern Italy and considered how printed designs for ephemeral Baroque altars reveal an ecological vision of human impermanence in the face of powerful climatic agents. Read more about the workshop here.
