Tue 18 May, 2021
This talk will be devoted to the enchantments of faraway and distant backgrounds in early modern Northern paintings. Foregrounds typically tell stories; backgrounds open onto other more invisible realms. Where do vanishing points go when they vanish? What lies beyond? There has been much speculation of late about “animate” art. Might painted backgrounds contribute to this new phenomenological awareness? Works of art by Patinir, Aertsen, van Eyck, Elsheimer, and Breughel, among others, will be addressed in the attempt to give words to the allure of the painted beyond.
Michael Ann Holly is the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College and Starr Director Emeritus of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute (director from 1999-2013). Co-founder of the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester, she was also chair of the Art and Art History Department there for thirteen years. Holly is the author or co-editor of several books on the subjects of the historiography and the critical theory of the history of art – Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (1984), Visual Theory (ed. with N. Bryson and K. Moxey, 1991), Visual Culture (ed. with Bryson and Moxey), 1994), Past Looking (1996), The Subjects of Art History (ed. with M. Cheetham and Moxey, 1998), Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies (ed. with Moxey, 2002), What is Research in the Visual Arts? (ed. with M. Smith, 2008), and The Melancholy Art (2013).