Thomas Balfe

Bio

Thomas Balfe studied literature before completing an MA and PhD in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His work focuses on depictions of animals and nature produced in northern Europe between the mid-sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, their connections to cultures of knowledge, and their relationship to early modern conceptions of the human. Before coming to the Warburg, he taught Art History at Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Warwick, and City & Guilds London Art School. He also has a longstanding commitment to public engagement in the subject.

Research

Thomas’s research investigates the visual and material histories of the animal and the ‘creaturely’ human, and attempts to forge connections between Art History and recent philosophical and theoretical approaches to analysing representations of nature. His published work in this area has examined topics including human-animal inversion imagery, the beast fable, hunting still life, the role of animal imagery in representations of human violence, illustrated whaling books, and European depictions of indigenous American hunting practices in travel books.

Another strand of his research has examined written claims to lifelikeness in early modern art writing. With Joanna Woodall and Claus Zittel, he edited an essay collection titled Ad Vivum? Visual Materials and the Vocabulary of Life-likeness in Europe before 1800 (2019), which investigated the important category of images described as having been made ‘from life’. This collection brought together scholars working in History of Science, Book History, Conservation Studies and Art History.

Thomas is currently working on a long-term project about European depictions of hunting practices in the Americas, Asia and the Arctic. Drawing on theoretical work in Animal Studies that conceptualises hunting as a form of embodied knowledge, the project explores the idea that images of hunting offered European audiences ways of understanding the bodily, spiritual and intellectual potential of unfamiliar foreign peoples and the distinctive traits of European and non-European societies.

Teaching

Thomas currently convenes, and teaches on, the Term 1 core module Image to Action, which introduces all MA students to selected themes and subject matters of art in the period 1300–1700 and the methods and approaches taken to put them into context, making use of primary and secondary sources in the Warburg Library.

In Term 2, he convenes the module Curating Renaissance Art and Exhibitions, partly taught by curatorial staff at London’s National Gallery. He also offers a module called Art and Nature in Northern Europe, 1500–1700, which examines the connections between the visual image and understandings of nature in early modernity. This module concentrates on northern Europe (primarily the Netherlands, Britain, Germany and France), exploring a series of case studies that focus on depictions of land, plants, animals and insects, and on the entanglement of these phenomena with human beings.

In Term 3, Thomas supervises dissertations appropriate to his research interests and expertise.

PhD Supervision

Current PhD students:

Carlotta Gonzi, ‘The Sparkle in the Period Eye: Gemstones and their Cultural Connotations in Court Painting of the Northern Italian Renaissance’ (second supervisor).

Publications

Articles and book chapters

Balfe, T., ‘Disguise hunting and Indian otherness in Theodor de Bry’s Brief narration of what befell the French in Florida (1591)’, in Jonathan Thurston-Torres (ed.), Animals and Race (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2023; The animal turn), pp. 73–96.

Balfe, T., ‘Human-cetacean encounters in two seventeenth-century accounts of whaling’. Transpositiones 1:2 (2022), pp. 11–32; special issue: Intraconnectedness and world-making: technologies, bodies, matters.

Balfe, T., ‘Creating and unmaking the political body: the brothers De Witt at the limits of the human’. Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek 71 (2021), pp. 47–79; special issue: Humans and other animals.

Balfe, T., ‘“With a hem, call him in”: human authority and the animal gaze in the Flemish trophy piece’. Oxford art journal 44:1 (2021), pp. 1–21.

Balfe, T., ‘Learned fable, living world: artistry, knowledge and attention to nature in two Aesopic paintings by Joannes Fyt’. Journal of historians of Netherlandish art 13:1 (2021), pp. 1–27.

Balfe, T. and Woodall, J., ‘Introduction. From living presence to lively likeness: the lives of ad vivum’, in Thomas Balfe, Joanna Woodall and Claus Zittel (eds), Ad vivum? Visual materials and the vocabulary of life-likeness in Europe before 1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2019; Intersections), pp. 1–43.

Balfe, T., ‘Hunting, inversion and anthropomorphism in two scenes from the upside-down world’, in Maurice Saß (ed.), Hunting without weapons: on the pursuit of images (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017; Naturbilder), pp. 123–141.

Books

Balfe, T., Woodall, J. and Zittel, C. (eds), Ad vivum? Visual materials and the vocabulary of life-likeness in Europe before 1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2019; Intersections).

Reviews

Karin Leonhard, The fertile ground of painting: seventeenth-century still lifes & nature pieces trans. Russell Stockman (London: Harvey Miller, 2020). Historians of Netherlandish art reviews (2022).

Sheila McTighe, Representing from life in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Renaissance quarterly 75:2 (2022), pp. 616–618.