GNS+ Lecture: The Last Aurochs: Zoopolitics, Memorialization, and Early Modern Extinction

From the 16th century onward, Jaktorów Forest in Mazovia, Poland, became the last refuge of the aurochs, a now-extinct species of long-horned wild cattle. Despite the Polish kings’ best efforts at conservation, the species perished in 1627 under the watchful eye of King Sigismund III. This lecture will examine objects made from aurochs horn, which sought to reanimate—or at least memorialise—these endangered and ultimately vanished animals. The most evocative among them is a hunting horn, now at Stockholm’s Livrustkammaren, fashioned from the horn of “the last aurochs,” as its inscription attests. An artistic eulogy for a lost species, the object stands at the intersection of art and environmental crisis. These and other aurochs-themed artefacts not only mediate the ecological transformations of the early Anthropocene but also invite an ecocritical reassessment of early modern art history. But what did it mean for the Polish court to lose the very species it was charged with protecting as one of the kingdom’s chief natural treasures? This lecture explores early modern ideas of scarcity, finitude, and extinction, asking how the condition of being “the last” was understood in early modern Poland—and why, despite the king’s anguish, no one else in Europe seemed to notice the loss.