Thursday November 16, 2023
5:15-6:45pm
Location: Emmanuel College Room 119
Hieronymus Bosch’s “alien” world of his so-called Garden of Earthly Delights is well known. Naked human figures of different races cavort around, atop, and within impossible constructions—five hallucinatory, phantasmagoric growths that seem like imaginary plants but are conglomerates of natural and artificial matter. Art historians have never found similar ‘impossible objects’ in earlier paintings or manuscript illuminations. Yet there is one early 15th-century manuscript that contains dozens of such Boschian inventions. The subject of my talk is the relationship between this manuscript and Bosch’s painting, which I prefer to call the Triptych of the Grail.
with Professor Paul Vandenbroeck (University of Leuven)
Wednesday November 15
10:00am -12:00pm
Location: Sidney Smith Hall 2120.
Professor Vandenbroeck will discuss the relationship between ritual and the various artistic media around 1500 in this seminar dedicated to intermediality in early modern Europe.
Those graduate students attending his seminar are welcome to lunch with Professor Vandenbroeck on Wednesday, November 15, at 12:30 in the common room of the Art History Department, on the 6th floor of Sidney Smith Hall, Room 6029.
Please RSVP here if you will be attending lunch.
Professor of Anthropology
University of Leuven
Paul Vandenbroeck has held the position of Scientific Researcher at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp from 1980 to 2018 and he been Professor of Anthropology at the University of Leuven since 2003.
His main research interests are the work of Hieronymus Bosch, late medieval and early modern artistic links between the Low Countries and Spain, iconological questions regarding figurative and abstract art, North African domestic textile art, the feminist psychoanalytical theory of Bracha Ettinger, and topics on the interface between art and anthropology (including the specificity of art in female religious communities, the relationship between folk and elite culture, and between therapeutic rituals and artistic creation). Currently, Vandenbroeck continues his research through fieldwork, on the semantics or ‘an-iconology’ of the nearly extinct abstract rural weaving art in Southern Tunisia and on the gender-biased construction of artistic canons.
Vandenbroeck has combined scientific research with the staging of experimental theatre. Together with choreographer/dancer Pé Vermeersch he has directed a performative exhibition on the transcultural energetics of aesthetic creation.
