Events

Narratore, poeta, critico d’arte e pittore. Drammaturgo, regista e anche attore. Giovanni Testori è stato un autore complesso e prolifico, di cui rimane ancora molto da approfondire. Il seminario offre un’occasione per indagare la connessione tra il Testori drammaturgo e il critico d’arte, partendo dalle riflessioni teoriche sul teatro contenute nel saggio del 1968 “Il ventre del teatro”. [more]

Cult/Space/Presence of Images. A Workshop on the Art and Cultural Historical Impulses of Hans Belting

Conference
The aim of this workshop, a sequel to the one held last year in Brno, is to further illuminate and classify the contribution of Hans Belting (1935–2023) to art history, visual and cultural studies and to reflect on its significance. [more]

Drapery in Italian Premodern Art, between Nature and Artifice

Research Seminar
Cloth is a highly malleable material with almost limitless expressive potential. Its soft readiness to receive form allows it to transform into any number of abstract shapes in relief, providing the human eye with pleasurable diversion from figuration and introducing volume to whichever surface it adorns. Drapery – the representation of free-falling cloth characterised by its folds – presented a unique set of challenges for artists in premodern Italy, where the imitation of nature and authorial assertion both emerged as primary artistic goals. [more]

Constantinople Modern: Avant-Garde Arts in Occupied Istanbul, 1918-1923

Research Seminar
This talk explores modernist painters, writers, and musicians active in Istanbul during the city’s occupation by British, French, and Italian forces between 1918 and 1923, asking how foreign occupation and the international cultural climate of the period contributed to the creation of an avantgarde. [more]

Domes of Byzantium under a Gallic Sky: Uses and Receptions of Neo-Byzantine Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France

Research Seminar
Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and other French cities are still today dominated by churches whose architecture recalls a long-vanished empire: Byzantium. Why mobilize such architectural imaginaries for some of the country’s most iconic buildings? [more]

Proxy Wooings and Weddings. From Shakespeare to Rubens

Henriette Hertz Lecture
Why does Rubens’s painting of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV lack a portrait of the groom? This paper explores the history of the proxy wedding and the theoretical problems raised by such ceremonies when confronted with expectations of affective bonds between spouses. [more]

Ways of Landscape: Jean Epstein’s Film Practice and Theory

Screening (April 23, 2024 at 20:00), International Workshop (April 24, 2024)
What did the eruptive landscape of Mount Etna represent for Jean Epstein – one of the most important personalities of the French avant-garde – when the film company Pathé sent him to film the lava flow in 1923? This workshop aims to reflect on the abundant and continually stimulating questions that come from the intertwining of Epstein’s film practice and visual theory. [more]
The Kupferstichkabinett Berlin owns two spectacular albums with around 160 drawings by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574), executed in Rome between 1532 and 1536/37. During these years he wandered through the city, visited collections of antiquities, made pilgrimages to the holy sites, and filled his sketchbook with drawings. [more]

Champollion before the College de France: a Micro-Historic Inquiry

Research Seminar
The statue of Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, was designed by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi for the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The Third Republic installed it in the Collège de France. As an expression of the imperial consciousness of world and knowledge, the statue is undermined by its own pictorial programme and refers to problems of French universalism that Champollion himself had already reflected on. [more]
A category of objects that exists entirely as a function of violence, the term ‘loot’ describes a relationship of possession, if not more specifically of dispossession. Neither an historically nor materially specific typology of artifacts, loot is instead primarily a legal category that cuts across place and time. And while it is also not an art-historical classification, it is one with which the discipline of art history must constantly contend, given its repercussions for what is accessible, where, and in what condition. [more]
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