The Sorrow of Silvanus is an imaginative realism conception of nature’s fragility. Inspired by Pliny the Elder’s treatise, Naturalis Historia (Natural History), my visual depiction comments on the foreboding assessments he brought forth. During the first century CE, Pliny warned that humanity's then-current behavior towards the earth will lead to calamitour events. ‘Nature is continually tortured for her iron, her timber, stone, fire, corn and is even much more subservient to our luxuries than to our mere support…We tear out the entrails in order to extract gems with which we may load our fingers. And truly we wonder that this same Earth should have produced anything noxious!”
 
The ancient Roman god, Silvanus, is the guardian of the natural world. Most often represented by the untamed attributes of the forest. Silvanus dwells in the periphery between civilization and the wilderness. Farmers and shepherds sought protection for their lands, crops, and livestock through rituals honoring Silvanus.
 
My depiction of a tree as a single, rare, protected natural specimen, surrounded by man-made architectural ruins, symbolizes the era when it became too late to save the same nature we are presently distressing…now in the third-millenia since Pliny the Elder’s warning.