Introduction

Climate change poses a formidable challenge in the 21st century, giving rise to complex issues of justice and equity within and between generations, as well as across global and economic divides (Doussa, Corkery, and Chartres 2007). Those least responsible for climate change often suffer the most from its impacts, with the world's poorest and lowest carbon-emitting countries facing heightened vulnerability. This exacerbates existing inequalities and disproportionately affects the poor, the disadvantaged, indigenous people, immigrants, and women—groups that are among the first to be impacted and the least equipped to adapt to a changing climate (Klein and Stefoff 2021; Kaur 2020).

The consequences of climate change manifest in more erratic and extreme weather patterns, resulting in chronic water, food, and financial insecurity for millions. This crisis further propels individuals into poverty, enflames conflict over depleting natural resources, forces migration, and compounds pre-existing gender discrimination (Matekair and Carey 2022).

Women, in particular, experience severe impacts on their livelihoods due to existing gender relations, including increased tensions within families and increased instances of gender-based violence. Droughts and flooding resulting from climate change contribute to food insecurity, pushing women and girls further into poverty and exposing them to transactional sex for goods, human trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation, and child and forced marriages (Njikho 2020).

Setting the Scene: Context in Snapshots from 2022, 2023, and 1900

Badin, Sindh, September 2022: She slaps her scrawny toddler across the face while she balances an infant on her frail hip. Tempers are running high in this building—sounds of shouting, slapping, screaming, and crying are recurring. It is a government school in the district of Badin, Sindh province, Pakistan. The school building serves as a shelter for flood affectees. Meals, medicines, and other aid are distributed sporadically by philanthropic initiatives, military men, political workers, religious groups, local landlords, or civil administrators. The food often arrives stale and causes illness. Approximately a thousand people seek refuge in a building whose sanitation facilities cannot keep pace. Some wish they had died instead of ending up here, while others choose to pick cotton from flooded fields, standing in toxic water for a higher wage, to try and escape this shelter.

Karachi, Sindh, August 2023: She works in the Korangi Industrial Area at a factory producing garments for a global clothing brand. She lives with her family in the Ibrahim Hyderi area of Karachi. Many of her neighbours are fisherfolk (Idrees, 2021). She also comes from a fishing community in Badin. Her family has not been fishing for over a generation. Water is either syphoned off by canals, barrages, and dams upstream, or polluted by untreated industrial waste. Fish are dying. Meanwhile, intimidation by Rangers, the Coast Guard (Shah 2005) and the Fisheries Department (Ahmad 2021) are thriving. In search of a livelihood, her family moved to Karachi years ago.

This chapter uses differences in building techniques as a springboard for considering the ways in which people in positions of, respectively, privilege and precarity imagined the future. It resists the in-built tendency of archaeological typologies to place supposedly poor material culture outside of history and instead shows how the experience of people living precariously was marked by the chronic stress of anticipating a future that demanded reaction.

The altars Vasari built in the Pieve for the Aretine lawyer Onofrio (Nofri) Camaiani and the important local confraternity known as the Fraternita dei Laici count among his least known commissions. Both altar tabernacles were destroyed, and the Camaiani Altarpiece was removed along with the other works of art in the Pieve during the church’s renovation in the nineteenth century. There was no Vasari altarpiece to relocate from the Fraternita’s chapel, for although he designed the architectural aedicule that was to hold it, Vasari failed to complete its altarpiece before he died in 1574. This chapter substantially expands our understanding of the patronage, history, precedents, original appearance, and iconography of those altars. Despite their differences, the Camaiani and Fraternita altars were important elements of Vasari’s artistic and architectural vision for the Pieve and integral parts of its Marian decorative program.

On January 9, 2013, Cesare Esposito was not happy. The sixty-five-year-old artist, a longtime resident of Rome’s Monti district, had just been evicted from his residence. The heart of Monti essentially covers Rome’s eastern hills (Quirinal, Viminal, Cispian, Esquiline, and Oppian) and the valleys formed between them as the landscape stretches downhill and westward toward the ancient Forum (Plate 0.1; Map 0.1). Esposito’s family had lived here for generations, and he had thrived in the neighborhood that had been one of the areas of Rome most associated with artists and artisans of all sorts for centuries. But Esposito’s connection to Monti has meaning beyond his family history there. He is the artist in charge of one of the highest-profile ceremonies in Monti’s annual calendar: the celebration of the Miracle of Madonna della Neve at the papal basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, which looms over the central part of Monti from the top of the Cispian hill. Every year on August 4, the ceremony recalled the miraculous snowfall that occurred on that same date in 352 CE, when a rich patrician was directed by the Virgin Mary in his dream to construct a basilica where fresh snow fell that morning. The bishop Liberius, upon being informed of this dream, said that he had had the same one, so he marked out a floor plan for the basilica on the ground of the Cispian where snow – somehow in the heat of the late summer – had indeed fallen. Esposito directs the annual reenactment of this snowfall, which entails blasting artificial snowflakes from the roof of the basilica, and he has devoted his artistic efforts from time to time to numerous other church or civic celebrations across the city for decades. But now, Esposito said, he sleeps in the archaeological ruins of the ancient imperial fora that enclosed the lowest part of Monti, forced to look upon Monti and his former residence from the street. Esposito had been fighting the city to keep his apartment and studio since 2006, but he had now suffered the final defeat. Only by selling all of his belongings could he afford to get it back.

Rigorous collection, reporting, and analysis of household artifact assemblage data in future research would make it possible to characterize differentiation of all kinds with greater confidence. The lack of regional-scale settlement research in some regions leaves demographic estimates lacking good support. The richness of ethnographic information for some places has undermined the archaeological research needed to say how organization developed before the “ethnographic present.”

This introduction establishes a foundation for the chapters that follow by providing an overview of Vasari’s work at Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo and the state of the research on the topic. It also maps out the structure of the book, identifies the methodologies and primary and secondary source material upon which it is based, and establishes its contribution to the literature on Vasari and the history of Italian Renaissance art.

Chapter 1 argues that apocalyptic images and texts from the late Romantic period onwards respond to John Milton’s poetic treatment of temporality and grief in Paradise Lost, focusing on Mary Shelley’s apocalypse novel The Last Man. Shelley’s work, a project of revivification and memorialisation, challenges more conventional public narratives by embracing fragmentation and combining personal loss and universal catastrophe. In doing so, the novel draws on Milton’s epic, especially Adam’s prophetic vision after the fall. Shelley’s writings, including her letters, journals and Frankenstein, are read alongside John Martin’s apocalypse paintings and mezzotint illustrations of Paradise Lost. The chapter begins by positioning Shelley’s novel as a shared intertext for Martin’s The Last Man and Louis Édouard Fournier’s The Funeral of Shelley, both housed in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. It argues that Martin’s Paradise Lost illustrations more closely parallel Shelley’s literary response to Milton: both recreate Milton’s prophetic temporality and express apocalyptic grief through reference to darkness and light.

Primary archaeological knowledge is produced through intensive regional specialization – the antithesis of broad comparative analysis, which demands critical and consistent expert evaluation of information across multiple areas. The availability and quality of data from different regions are spotty, requiring new and more robust analytical approaches for complete reanalysis of primary data for comparative purposes.