Rocks, Branches, Bones and Folds: Beyond the Surface of Early Modern Drapery

Research Seminar

Public event without registration
Date: Mar 26, 2024
Time: 11:00 AM - 01:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Amanda Hilliam
Location: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome and online
Contact: mara.freiberg@biblhertz.it

Rocks, Branches, Bones and Folds: Beyond the Surface of Early Modern Drapery

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.

Reflecting on the significance of drapery in the early modern period and in the later historiography, as well as in the discipline of art history today, this seminar proposes that drapery as a textile surface is a way of knowing about how artists conceptualised the making process – particularly in relation to forms of generation in nature – as well as about the poetics of materials, visual metaphor, connections between art, science and philosophy, and the boundary between art and material culture.

Amanda Hilliam is Rush H Kress Fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies', and Associate Lecturer in History of Art at the University of York. Previously, she taught at The Courtauld and held the David and Julie Tobey Fellowship at I Tatti. She was co-curator of the exhibition ‘Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky’ at Ikon Gallery, organised in partnership with the National Gallery, London, and she held a predoctoral position in the Old Master Prints and Drawings department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

This event can be seen on our VIMEO CHANNEL through this link: https://vimeo.com/927912009?share=copy