Teaching
Spring 2024: For a Biography of the Work of Art: Creating, Damaging, Restoring, From the Early Modern Period to the Present Day
The seminar will study emblematic works of art of the early modern period through their peregrinations, from their creation to the present day. The aim is to analyze the material and semantic mutations that punctuate, so to speak, their very lives, between creation, deterioration, iconoclasm, censorship and restoration.
Fall 2023: Animal Issues and Representations in Early Modern Art (15th-18th centuries)
The aim of the seminar is to study the animal beyond its reduction to symbols, with a view to highlighting its singular identity and essential contribution to certain issues of artistic representation, between the 15th and 18th centuries: among others, questions of matter (color, blood), violence (hunting) and death, and the fiction of the self (signature, self-representation).
Spring 2023 : Iconoclasm and Restoration in Italy (15th-17th Centuries)
The seminar proposes to analyze the iconoclastic acts inflicted during military campaigns, such as the sack of Rome (1527). But it also intends to study the impact of religious reforms on profane and sacred images. The aim is to evaluate the effects of Savonarola's sermons, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation on works of art in Italy. Also, the restoration of damaged works and the reception of this restoration, even its political recuperation, will be analyzed. In this sense, the objective is also to question the notion of "restoration" of the art object as a prophylaxis, to prevent its destruction in an environment of political-religious reforms. The censures and additions in order to modify a work which could not survive such as it is to its interpretation participate in this questioning.
Spring 2022: The Fabrication of Antiquity in Renaissance Italy
Le séminaire interdisciplinaire – Histoire de l’art/Archéologie classique (prof. Lorenz Baumer) – a pour objectif d'étudier la redécouverte de l’Antiquité et de l’art antique durant la Renaissance, en particulier en Italie. Cela comprend les rapports des premiers voyageurs en Grèce et dans la mer Égée, la création des premières grandes collections d'antiquités aussi bien que les différentes formes de la réception de l'art antique, y compris la fabrique d'une Antiquité qui n’a jamais existé.
Academic year 2020-2022: Actualité de la recherche
Le séminaire, organisé en collaboration avec la Haute école d'art et de design de Genève (HEAD), consiste en une conférence hebdomadaire suivie d'une discussion approfondie de durée égale à celle de l'intervention. Les sujets traités vont de l'art médiéval à l'art contemporain ou au design et abordent une grande diversité de domaines géographiques et culturels. Le fil rouge est la recherche : les présentations traitent de travaux en cours et mettent l'accent sur les questions de méthode et sur le processus d'investigation, avec ses découvertes et ses difficultés. Des séances de récapitulation permettent de revenir sur les présentations passées, de les comparer et d'en tirer des leçons. Le séminaire donne accès à des recherches inédites et permet de se confronter de manière critique à une grande variété de sujets, d'approches et de styles, tout en se familiarisant avec les techniques de prise de parole et de débat.
Spring 2020: The Renaissance of Rome (15th-16th Century)
Le séminaire se propose d'étudier la Renaissance de Rome, aux XVe et XVIe siècles, selon une acception double mais difficilement séparable : la Renaissance de la cité d'une part et celle de la structure étatique que le nom de Rome désigne dans l'Antiquité d'autre part. Il s'agira d'examiner au travers de l'analyse d'oeuvres et de textes les mutations d'une cité qui, de moribonde où l'air est insalubre, recouvre son statut de caput mundi. Dans ce sens l'attention se portera sur le retour de la papauté, le renouveau du tissu urbain et architectural, le collectionnisme d'antiques et l'implantation d'un foyer artistique appelé à devenir le plus important d'Italie et d'Europe. Simultanément, la construction d'un rapport analogique direct à la Rome antique entre production artistique et agenda politique (aussi susceptible d'appropriation par des cités rivales) sera ici considérée. Un voyage d'études à Rome est prévu afin de découvrir in situ plusieurs oeuvres évoquées lors du séminaire.
Academic year 2019-2020, with prof. Jan Blanc: Historiography and Methodology
Le séminaire vise à introduire à l'histoire de l'histoire de l'art et aux enjeux actuels de la discipline, tant sur le plan théorique que pratique, et en lien étroit avec des institutions muséales, essentiellement à Genève.
Spring 2019: Politics of Restoration in Renaissance Italy
This seminar will focus on the restoration of works of art during the Renaissance in Italy. It will look at the restoration of antiques during this period and examine to what extent this practice “invents” a state of the work by fabricating its origins in order to create political legitimacy. The restoration of “modern” works—i.e. contemporary with the Renaissance—will also be explored. The seminar will examine the reasons and aims of these material and symbolic reconfigurations of works of art that were modified to varying degrees (sculpture, painting and architecture). From a semantic perspective, the meanings of the term “restoration” and its numerous uses will be analyzed by means of a comparison with other words qualifying the relation to an object or system established in a previous era (rinascita, renovatio, etc.) Our approach to the restoration of works of art during the Renaissance in Italy will be based on the history and theory of restoration as articulated and developed especially in the second half of the twentieth century.
Fall 2018: Art and Theory of Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy
This seminar will look at art and art theory in sixteenth-century Italy by following multiple thematic and methodological approaches that take into account the emergence of new discourses and artistic interactions between different Italian centers. Issues such as the imitation of nature, the reception of antiquity, the relationships to sponsors, period and style (Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque) as well as the relationship between original and copy will be explored and discussed through different artistic mediums (painting, sculpture, engraving, and architecture). By reading and analyzing various trattati d’arte and biographies (“artists’ lives”), we will be able to discuss the diversity of theoretical reflections on images during this period as manifested, for instance, in the use of stylistic concepts (maniera), the comparison between the arts (paragone) and the Counter-Reformation’s theology of the image.