“Offering a terrific new study of the work of Jacopo Bassano, a relatively overlooked northern Italian painter of the later sixteenth century, Pastoral’s End is one of the best first books by an art historian that I’ve had the opportunity to read in a long time. Providing new ways of thinking ‘ecocritically’ about the early modern period, Pilgrim persuasively shows that Bassano was engaging with environmental issues of his time and that he and his contemporaries were well aware of how human activity caused harm to the environment. Pastoral’s End makes an important contribution in its own right and also has methodological lessons for the field at large.”

Rebecca Zorach, author of "Temporary Monuments"

“A verdant and timely rethinking of early modern art in the ‘ecological’ mode. Pilgrim’s lush and meticulously researched study offers us a Veneto constantly nourished and threatened by its unique environmental situation, and a Bassano whose paintings not only respond to such surroundings, but articulate new fears and hopes about European relationships to the nonhuman. Bracing and unexpected, the book’s interdisciplinary case studies manifest a new way of framing a ‘green’ Renaissance: one of wood-harvesting, irrigation, and animal husbandry as much as country estates and lyric poetry. Pastoral’s End reminds us that environmental anxiety—and the dark creativity it might breed—has long been with us.”

Christopher P. Heuer, author of "Into the White"

“In this lucid and timely account of Jacopo Bassano’s art within the physical and discursive environs of his native Bassano del Grappa, Pilgrim opens up provocative new prospects in art history. By attending to changes on the land in the Veneto terraferma, Pilgrim elegantly reveals Bassano’s images of human life on and in the earth—at least one of his paintings had a ground sourced from the mud of his native place—to be a subtle catalogue of deforestation, agricultural and industrial expansion, small holder impoverishment, and catastrophic flooding. Bassano’s ‘anti-pastoral’ land-, human-, and animalscapes subverted the human-focused simplicity of the bucolic genre, instead registering his perspicacious unease about the precarities of his here and now and his profound rethinking of how they could be rendered through art.”

Pamela H. Smith, author of "From Lived Experience to the Written Word"