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Dr. Nicholas Herman: “The Painted World of Books”
December 3, 2024 @ 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Dr. Nicholas Herman: “The Painted World of Books”
December 3, 5:30-7:00 pm EST.
Teleconference Lecture Hall, Alexander Library
169 College Ave. https://tinyurl.com/RutgersAHGSO
Early modern painting was the ultimate metamedium, capable of describing a vast array of objects on a two-dimensional plane. Or so it seems. Depictions of books, in particular, provide a locus for understanding painters’ nuanced relationships to tangible real-world things. This talk will investigate the verisimilitude of books in the art of Jan van Eyck and his contemporaries, relying on the newly launched Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art (BASIRA) database to compare and contrast. What is revealed is an array of approaches, ranging from archaeologically exact renditions of actual books to structurally plausible but impossibly lavish avatars imbued with fictive production histories and material biographies. In the end, the prism of the book provides a way to see beyond the conventional paradigm of symbolism disguised as reality, exposing the ability of early modern painting to imagine alternative worlds.
Dr. Herman is the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Curator at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and Medieval Studies Librarian at Penn Libraries. His teaching and research focus on manuscript illumination and its intersection with other media in fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Europe.