Art in Context | J. M. W. Turner’s “Staffa, Fingal’s Cave”: Painting the Energy Sublime

Caterina Franciosi will argue that Staffa, Fingal’s Cave encapsulates a central paradox of the Anthropocene.

About this program
J. M. W. Turner’s Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1831–32) depicts a small steamboat battling the tumultuous waves near the remote Scottish island of Staffa, famous for its towering basaltic formations. Caterina Franciosi argues that the painting encapsulates a central paradox of the Anthropocene, the era marked by humanity’s profoundly destructive impact on the planet. Her talk explores how Turner’s canvas reinterprets basalt geology, the science of steam engines, and the sublime vocabulary of Romantic landscape painting to dramatize the altered nature of human power as modern society grapples with its ability to wreck the Earth in pursuit of progress.

About Caterina Franciosi
Caterina Franciosi is a PhD candidate in the History of Art department at Yale University. Her dissertation, Latent Light: Energy and Nineteenth-Century British Art, examines how artworks, exhibition spaces, and objects envisioned and interrogated the ecological and sociopolitical conditions of Britain’s nineteenth-century energy regimes. She holds an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and a BA from John Cabot University, Rome. In Spring 2025, she will be a Junior Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London.