Dr. Tomasz Grusiecki, Associate Professor of Art History, Boise State University

From the 16th century onward, Jaktorów Forest in Mazovia, Poland, became the last refuge of the aurochs, a now-extinct species of long-horned wild cattle. Despite the Polish kings’ best efforts at conservation, the last aurochs perished in 1627. This lecture examines objects made from aurochs horn, which sought to reanimate—or at least memorialize—these endangered and ultimately extinct animals. The most evocative among them is a hunting horn, now at Stockholm’s Livrustkammaren, fashioned from the horn of “the last aurochs,” as its inscription attests. An artistic eulogy for a lost species, the object stands at the intersection of art and environmental crisis. This and other aurochs-themed artifacts not only mediate the ecological transformations of the early Anthropocene but also invite an ecocritical reassessment of Baroque art history. Could the Baroque—originally a term marking the seventeenth century as a period of artistic decline, formal excess, and stylistic contamination—be reconfigured as a lens through which to consider European art’s response to the realities of late early modernity, accounting for both its rapid expansion—through urbanization, international trade, and protoindustrialization— and its increasingly evident consequences, such as environmental degradation and various ethical dilemmas?

This lecture series is supported with the generous support of the late Alfred Bader.