Abstract: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a best seller in the Renaissance, have been abundantly illustrated. I will show that illustrators excel in rendering the modes and phases of body transformation. Other examples, among different painters and sculptors, show an extreme attention to the changes of a flexible world in which species are transformed into one another. We find this same metamorphic sensitivity in poets like Petrarch and Ronsard. To conclude, I will inscribe this aesthetic of change in the context of natural philosophy, for which the universe and all living beings – man, animal, vegetable, mineral – are involved in a system of constant transformation.
Bio: Now Professor Emeritus, Michel Jeanneret was for many years Professor of French Literature at the University of Geneva, head of the French Department and Vice-dean of the Faculty of Letters. At the beginning of his career, he was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, in Cambridge. His wife, Professor Marian Hobson, CBE, FBA, lives and works there and he spends a substantial amount of his time in England.
Apart from being a Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for five years, he has held posts as Visiting Professor in Harvard, Princeton, Seattle, Irvine, as well as the College de France, Paris-Sorbonne, and the Universities of Beijing and Kyoto. He serves as an expert for different Research agencies in France. He was awarded major prizes by the Academie française, the Academie de Versailles and by the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome). He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and of Academia Europaea.
He is now co-chair of a big research project, seconded by a large digitisation program, on an exceptional collection of World Literature kept in Geneva at the Martin Bodmer Foundation. His personal work is still focused for the most part on Renaissance and XVIIth century literature and intellectual history.
Schedule of Events
Monday, March 5, 2018 at 4:15 tea, 4:30 lecture: Lecture (Emmanuel College, Room 119): Metamorphic Bodies in the Renaissance: Transforming Shapes
