Events

Sensorial Encounters: Haptic and Non-Visual Access in Art is an exploratory workshop that challenges the primacy of visual perception and terminology in art and art history. Inspired by the methodological insights of authors such as Georgina Kleege, Elizabeth Bearden and Amanda Cachia, among others, this workshop que stions the traditional conflation of sight with knowledge. [more]

Stone into Stone

Research Seminar
What does it mean for an artist to transform stone into stone? How do we understand mimesis that eliminates the difference between material and its representation? This lecture examines these questions through the lens of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain (1648-51), focusing on its rocky grotto base hewn from craggy, porous travertine so as to look like the stone itself in its natural state. [more]

The Fabrication of the King: Charles Le Brun Reflecting on the Textile Medium

Semester Opening Lecture
Until recently the textile medium lacked a theory, which undermined its status as fine art in the academic discourse. However, being silent does not mean that it does not think. In early modern art, tapestry can reveal an aesthetic self-awareness of the textile medium which awaits to be fully explored and unfolded through the close reading and contextualization of works as singular phenomena with a potential of generalization. [more]

The Artificial Eye. Art Theory and Optical Revolution in Early Modern Europe.

Research Seminar
While it is well known that the optical revolution completely changed our perception of the world, thanks in particular to the invention of the telescope and the microscope, its importance for the development of art history remains largely underestimated. However, the sources at our disposal clearly reveal that art connoisseurs and theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries were quick to exploit advances in optics to improve their own protocols for reading art objects. [more]

Fabricating the City: Canaletto and 18th Century-Venice

Research Seminar
Textiles are everywhere in the modern city. Flags flutter atop buildings. Awnings stretch over sidewalks. Laundry dangles between houses. Yet the crucial role these fabrics play in urban life has not been properly understood. This research seminar looks to eighteenth-century Venice to uncover the ways in which textiles shaped politics, society, and law in the early-modern metropolis. [more]

Bernini, Materials, and Race

Research Seminar
That bronze and other black stony materials could be – but were not always – signifiers of the black body haunts the art of bronze casting through Cordier and Carpeaux and even to the work of Kehinde Wiley today. This talk looks at the traces of the beginnings of these same debates in the milieu of Gianlorenzo Bernini. [more]
Drapery – characterised by its folds and by its relationship to the human body – emerged as a distinct visual element in the practice and theory of early modern art. As this seminar demonstrates, drapery was highly malleable both in its form and in its capacity to take on meaning in the visual realm, and was thus a particular representational challenge for the artist, as well as a site of expression and virtuosity. [more]
The cosmopolitan context of the Maltese archipelago, its community and its architecture, offer privileged examples of the international circulations of knowledge, models, and ideas of architecture in early modern Europe. [more]
The seminar will examine the case of the decoration at the Château of Fontainebleau, a central episode in 16th-century artistic culture in Europe, within the framework of the international research project I cantieri in Europa nel Cinquecento: architettura e decorazione, now at its second stage after the session on Rome held in 2019. Seventy years after the exhibition Fontainebleau e la Maniera italiana (Naples 1952), it is time to return to the artistic relations between Italy and France from the point of view of this important matter, examining the transmission of techniques, languages, artists, craftsmen, and its consequences in both directions. [more]

Media Histories of Sculpture

Workshop
As Marshall McLuhan argued in his seminal Understanding Media, the “hybridizing or compounding” of media “offers an especially favorable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties.” This workshop seeks to explore sculpture’s intermedial entanglements and asks what these may reveal about the medium of sculpture. [more]

From Late Medieval to Early Modern Love Boxes

Research Seminar
They “used to have, in their rooms, great wooden chests in the form of sarcophagi. . . and there were none that did not have the said chests painted. . .” [more]
In spring 1775 Roman Architect Vincenzo Brenna (1741–1820) published his answer to a critic that can be read as a short statement of his understanding of Roman antiquity and the way it should be treated. The seminar will investigate various contexts of this publication. [more]
The ERC project CHROMOTOPE focuses on the changes that took place in attitudes to colour in the second half of the 19th century, particularly in Victorian England, then in the vanguard of the industrial revolution. [more]

'Taio dorado': On Wood and Gold in Fifteenth-Century Venice

Research Seminar
In the Hebrew bible, carved wooden form and hammered gold surface are the very stuff of skillful fabrication; wood overlaid with pure gold honoured the Holy of Holies and Solomonic rule. Thinking wood and gold together, this exploratory paper will address the many kinds of work – religious, political, economic and aesthetic – that this apparently pragmatic pairing was put to use in Quattrocento Venice, a republic in which sites, things and institutions proliferated as ‘golden’. [more]
Images of women bend over needlework were popular in the Dutch Republic of the 17th century as exemplars of obedience and housewifery duty. Hanneke Grootenboer argues that in the context of the early modern debate on women’s education (also referred to as the querelle des femmes), these images should also be understood as portrayals of female thinking—the pictorial equivalent of the melancholy male philosopher—and the act of needlework they represent, as a moment of subversion and escape. [more]
This lecture engages with relations between portraits of people and portraits of diseases. It will argue that definitions and practices of portraiture evolving around the notion of character were crucial for the development of the pathological image meant to capture the ‘characteristic traits’ of a disease. [more]
The Technical Study of Bernini’s Bronzes is a collaborative multi-disciplinary project that has begun a comprehensive technical study of all of Bernini’s complete oeuvre in bronze. In the past year, the travelling team has studied bronzes in North American and Australian museums and will continue technical studies in Europe in 2023-2026. [more]
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