ThingScapes: Landscape Change and the Making of Historical Evidence in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany

Dr. Luc Wodzicki

ThingScapes proposes an analytical framework for studying how objects and landscapes co-produce historical knowledge. Its core claim is meta-historical: when environments are engineered, the evidentiary status, plausibility, and narrative uses of “things” shift accordingly. Methodologically, the project integrates landscape history with the history of antiquarian practices to trace those shifts across media (minutes, drawings, collections, displays). The case study pursued at the Hertziana is the Val di Chiana, a Tuscan wetland reshaped by eighteenth-century drainage under the Lorraine state. In Cortona, the Accademia Etrusca di Cortona curated bones, tools, inscriptions, and images to render the transformed valley historically legible — and to negotiate authority vis-à-vis central policy. By following objects such as an allegedly “petrified” elephant bone, a Roman wine strainer, and a fabricated Polymnia image, the project (1) shows how material practices (collection, measurement, hydraulic works, exhibition) recalibrated what counted as evidence and (2) shows how object meanings were reconfigured in the making of a cultural landscape. Meta-contributions: (a) a transferable vocabulary — ThingScapes — for analysing thing–landscape intra-actions; (b) a model linking infrastructural change to regimes of historical proof; (c) a bridge between art-historical concerns with images/collections and the historical epistemology of evidence; (d) a Mediterranean perspective that situates local knowledge politics within wider circuits.