Nadine Luskovec

Nadine Luskovec is a research associate at the Institute of Art History at Leipzig University. Her research addresses the relationship between climate history and pictorial art in the early modern period, in particular Dutch winter scenes of the 16th and 17th centuries and their connection to the climatic conditions of the Little Ice Age.

Within LitLIA, she brings art-historical perspectives together with the project's literary-studies questions. She regularly takes part in the colloquium „Early Modern Climate Cultures" and spoke at the 2026 conference.

The aim of the thesis is a differentiated study, grounded in both art history and climate history, of the relationships between Dutch winter images and marked cold waves during the ‚Little Ice Age'. Previous studies have concentrated on the influence of cold waves on the artworks. Largely disregarded so far have been societal reactions to the cold waves and the active role of images within societies – a gap that the doctoral project addresses by asking about the role of winter images in the perception of, and societal response to, the cold waves.

The objects of study are drawings, prints and paintings depicting winter scenes from the period 1565 to around 1700. From the beginning of the 17th century, the regional focus shifts from the Southern Netherlands (Antwerp) to the northern United Provinces (Amsterdam). Methodologically, the thesis distinguishes between topographical and imagined winter images: while imagined winter images arise primarily from artistic imagination, topographical winter images show identifiable frozen bodies of water and in some cases refer to specific historical cold waves. The latter form a main group of works for the analysis, alongside portraits of members of the House of Orange-Nassau in winter landscapes, winter scenes in Adriaen van de Venne's album (c. 1626), and depictions of ice boats (Dutch: ijsschuiten).

For the analysis, art-historical and visual-studies methods (iconography, motif analysis, reception aesthetics, discourse embedding) are combined with concepts and models from climate history research (impact order model, resilience, vulnerability, adaptation). Moral literature as well as contemporary textual sources and songs about cold waves are drawn on for comparison.