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Das Lektüreseminar diskutiert jüngst publizierte Arbeiten oder aber weitgehend abgeschlossene Manuskripte. Die Texte werden im Voraus an die Teilnehmenden verschickt und dann gemeinsam mit den Autorinnen und Autoren diskutiert.

This discussion focuses on an under-studied corpus of images from the early modern period: reversible images. Reversibility, in the present context, refers to a figure that can equally be read right side up or upside down. In concrete terms: just as the letter V would turn into the letter lambda if one were to upend this page, reversibility here applies to ambivalent designs where, for example, the face of a bearded man starts looking like the head of a donkey if it is shown topsy turvy. Giuseppe Arcimboldo mobilized this unusual visual strategy with particular virtuosity in a select number of his paintings. One of the singular features of reversible images is that they generally call on the viewer to submit the object to a 180-degree rotation in order for the image’s latent second meaning to be revealed (in contrast to the better-known strategy of anamorphism, where it is the spectator’s point of view, rather than the image, which is expected to be moved or altered). Besides the unsolvable problems they pose to curators who attempt to display them, reversible images also raise a number of complex challenges to art-historical analysis. This paper takes on some of the most crucial of these challenges.
Through a close reading of a picture attributed to Arcimboldo (the so-called "Cook" kept in Stockholm), the paper begins by enquiring into the genealogy and valence of reversibility in pre-modern visual culture. After proposing a hypothesis regarding the performative display Arcimboldo’s picture may have been designed for, the paper situates some of the picture’s unusual properties – notably horizontal presentation and tactile manipulation – in the broader context of sixteenth-century image practices. The argument ultimately offers an opportunity to reflect on the emergence of "subversiveness" as an intellectual strategy in early modernity, and the role of images therein.

David Zagoury is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Fribourg thanks to an SNSF Ambizione grant. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2018 with a thesis devoted to the concept of "fantasia" in sixteenth-century Italian art and theory. Since then, he has been wissenschaftlicher Assistent at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute and visiting scholar at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Toronto. His current project, titled Image Revolt, deals with reversible images in early modern visual and material culture.

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Teilnahme am Lektüreseminar nur nach Anmeldung: seminar@zikg.eu.
Das Seminar findet in englischer Sprache statt.