Current Research // Lektüreseminar am ZI mit Jérémie Koering: The Back Side of Art History
Termindetails
Wann
von 14:15 bis 16:00
Art
Wo
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.
When displayed in a museum, a painting usually offers only its front side for contemplation. And for good reason: painting is traditionally associated with the conquest of color on a flat surface intended to be hung on or placed against a wall. This view of easel painting has become ingrained in our minds, but it actually conceals a more complex reality. While a painting generally has a main side, it also has a reverse side. And, as several recent exhibitions show (Abscondita. Segreti svelati della opere d’arte, Museo di Bassano del Grappa, 2018 ; Reversos, Museo del Prado, 2023; Verso: Geschichten von Rückseiten Kunstmuseum Basel, 2025…), this other side can reveal remarkable informations: painted scenes, preparatory drawings, inscriptions, signs of devotion, inventory numbers, transport labels...
By studying these traces and the way they are generally treated by specialists – whether iconologists, image anthropologists, collection and exhibition historians, or provenance researchers – this presentation will be an opportunity to reflect on what our knowledge of the reverse side teaches us about the painting as a whole, but also about the different ways of doing art history.
Jérémie Koering is professor of early modern art history at the University of Fribourg. His fields of study are Renaissance Art, epistemology of art history, and anthropology of images. He has published Le prince en représentation (Actes Sud, 2013), Caravage, juste un détail (INHA, 2018), Iconophages. A History of Ingesting Images (Actes Sud, 2021/Zone Books, 2024) and more recently Enquête sur Les Ménines. Velázquez et le regard du roi (Actes Sud 2025/Zone Books forthcoming).
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Teilnahme am Lektüreseminar nur nach Anmeldung: seminar@zikg.eu.
Das Seminar findet in englischer Sprache statt.