Tuesday Mar 5, 2024 4:00 pm
Emmanuel College, 119
75 Queen’s Park Cres. E.
Abstract:
This lecture explores the conditions of life writing in the pre-modern era, exploring who got to have written lives and why, as well as the practices of writing that emerged among artists and craftsmen in the 1400s. It reveals some governing preoccupations of the world in which Leonardo lived, of how people conceived personhood or “identity” in relation to groups and individuals. A key question to be confronted is why artists like Ghiberti, Alberti, Michelangelo, and Cellini could become authors of autobiographical texts – the last three with conspicuous attention to the body of the author. Leonardo seems to have pointedly refrained – except very partially and obliquely – not only from narrating his own biography, but from references to his own body in his writing. This will bring us to the question of writing and literary persona in the case of a figure like Leonardo, and the ways in which writing came to be a form of surrogate embodiment.
Stephen J. Campbell
Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Stephen Campbell’s research and publication in the field of pre-modern Italian art have dealt with the role of art in courts, cities and state formation; the Renaissance literature and theory of art; the body, sex and gender; the histories of collecting and canon formation, and more recently the geographies of art in Italy and the Mediterranean.
His recent books are The Endless Periphery: Towards a Geography of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Andrea Mantegna: Humanist Aesthetics, Faith, and the Force of Images (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020).
The Da Vinci Myth: An Anti-Biography of Leonardo will appear in 2024, as will The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art, a volume with an international team of 47 contributors which he co-edited with Stephanie Porras.
This event is cosponsored by the Department of Art History
