Continuing our look at plants on the ground, let’s look a bit further back into art history then we usually do here at UPR. In the 17th century, Dutch painter Otto Marseus von Schrieck wasn’t exactly doing urban plant research already, but he was doing something very new, which was to take the close-up, observant approach of the still life painter and direct it outside, and downwards, to create nature studies that were carefully arranged but were set on the dark, damp stage of the forest floor, as in the above Still Life with Amphibians and Insects (Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig). The result is called sottobosco painting (after the Italian for “undergrowth”), or in German, Waldstilleben (forest still life). And it’s mesmerizing.
