Chloé Pluchon-Riera

Chloé Pluchon-Riera (1992, France) is an art historian. In 2023, she defended her dissertation titled “Animal Childhood. Dialogue Between Child and Animal in Italian Painting (15th–16th Centuries),” under the supervision of Prof. Guillaume Cassegrain at the University of Grenoble Alpes, where she also served as a teaching assistant. Her doctoral research examined the blurred boundaries between human and animal figures and the limits of the living in an anthropocentric humanist culture. She is now developing an ecocritical approach to art history, focusing on the relationships between human societies and living environments, which she explores through the study of representations of animal emotions and deforestation in premodern Italian art.

Her residency project offers an ecocritical reinterpretation of early modern Italian painting (15th–16th centuries) through a motif that has received little attention to date: that of damaged vegetation, such as felled trees, hewn trunks, and gaping stumps. Focusing on the Venetian Terraferma (Jacopo Bassano, Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Lotto), this research examines whether the depiction of this wounded nature, beyond traditional Christian symbolism, reveals an emerging environmental sensibility in response to the exploitation of resources. Her stay in Rome will allow her to compare this body of work with the Roman tradition and to study the iconographic circulation of landscape imagery.