Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and an art historian.
Ale Nodarse is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and an MFA candidate at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. They received their B.A. and M.A. in the History of Art (Honors) from Yale University in 2019. Their research spans the early modern period, with an emphasis on the relationship between the history of art and the history and philosophy of science. Their dissertation explores the intersection of artistic and medical practices in Baroque Rome and Naples. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics. Their artistic practice centers on sculpture, conceptual and installation art, and printmaking.
Upcoming Events
May 22 –– “Drawing Anteriority,” Lecture at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome (View Details)
May 28 — “La tenerezza secondo Ribera” (“Tenderness According to Ribera”), Lecture at the Associazione Culturale il Palmerino, Villa Il Palmerino, Florence (View Details)
June 11 –– “Jusepe de Ribera and the Operations of Painting,” Lecture at the Harvard Center of Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence (View Details)
June 17 — “When the body is not a ship; or, towards an historical ethics of life drawing,” Invited Lecture for "Pose, Power, Practice: New Perspectives on Life Drawing hosted at the Courtauld Institute, London in collaboration with the Drawing Foundation (View Details and Watch Online)
June 21 –– “States of Care: Ribera’s Pious Women and the Restoration of Art,” Recherches actuelles d’histoire de l’art hispanique, organized by Cécile Vincent-Cassy, Cergy Paris Université, Paris (For details, contact me.)
Previous Events
The image of St. Sebastian witnessed a transformation in the seventeenth century. Attention turned from the wounded saint to his healers, the ‘Pious Women’ of late-medieval hagiography. The work of St. Irene and an Unnamed Attendant, who tended to Sebastian and restored him to health, assumed new centrality in a plague-beleaguered Europe. The scene of tending became a touchstone across religious and geographic divides. One painter, however, depicted the subject more often than any other artist. José (Jusepe) de Ribera returned to Sebastian’s healers throughout his life. This talk centers on Ribera’s 1631 Saint Sebastian Tended by the Pious Women (Bilbao Fine Arts Museum). Produced in Naples, acquired by Philip IV, and displayed in the Royal Monastery of El Escorial, the canvas prompts an engagement with the work of tending in pictorial, social, and material terms.
In the earliest description of the canvas in 1667, Francisco de los Santos likened the grasp of the piercing arrow to the steadying of a mahlstick. Following this comparison, I first consider the iconography of tending in relation to artistic practice: a precision of touch enabled by the instrument indexing Ribera’s approach to oil painting. Second, I turn to the social history of medicine in Naples, illuminating the origins of the ‘Care-Giving Women’ (‘Donne Caritative’) in the city’s largest hospital through new archival research. Here, I argue, the work of historical caregivers intersects the painter’s allegorical figurations. Third, I consider the relation between tending to a body and tending to a body of art. As Sebastian’s wounded body became a stand-in for the damaged canvas, the techniques of his care came to theorize the restoration of the artwork itself. Such a painting (as body) could assert its liability to injury—as well as its capacity, under certain conditions, for repair.
April 5th, 2024. Presentation for The Institute of Fine Arts and The Frick Collection Symposium on the History of Art. See the full list of speakers and register, for in-person and virtual attendance, here.
New essay for Rick Rubin’s art and music platform, Tetragrammaton. Read the article here.
Renaissance Society of America, 2024. Jusepe de Ribera's Saint Mary of Egypt (1641; Musée Fabre, Montpellier) pictures the fourth-century ascetic in prayer. In hagiographic narratives, Mary of Egypt's transformation appears in relationship to physical ground. Denuded in the desert, Mary's skin was itself transformed: "dark as if burned by ... the sun," Sophronius recounts. Ribera's painting foregrounds this transformation in artistic terms. Mary does not only occlude herself within igneous terrain, but becomes it. The layers of oil and pigment composing her skin are reduced to the ground of the canvas. The pictorial conceit prompts reflection upon Mary's orientation to ground and its conceptual significance for the artist. For "the painter of asceticism," as Ribera was dubbed by Elías Tormo y Monzó, the ascetic image would also be bound to questions of the aesthetic: that is, the transformative capacities of a body of art and the pictorial grounds upon which that perceived transformation is based.
Presented as part of Picturing Eremitism and Cenobitism in the Early Modern Period II: Materiality, Composition, and Art Theory, organized by Maria Gabriella Matarazzo and Katharine Stahlbuhk.
Peer-reviewed essay (2024) for the journal, Contemporary Aesthetics. The essay reconsiders Kant’s idea of beauty in relation to Winckelmann’s perception of history and Bullough’s aesthetic distance. Image Credit: J. M. W. Turner, Rough Sea, c. 1840–5, oil on canvas, Tate.
On October 20, 2023, six scholars joined together from different disciples – history of art, history of medicine, fine arts, biological sciences – to discuss the role of images in the development of comparative anatomy in Europe from Leonardo to Linnaeus. This event was sponsored by the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the research group, Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions. For the conference page, click here; for a record of the paper proceedings (abstracts), click here.
This talk considered the role of drawing in producing and articulating knowledge about the body: particularly as surgeons inspected and understood it in seventeenth-century Italy. Whereas anatomical drawings were commonly (re)produced, drawing that conceived of the body as a still-living space for intervention (i.e. surgery) faced particular aesthetic and scientific scrutiny. This presentation took place on June 28th as part of the international workshop “Observation and Thinking through Drawing,” organized by Dr. Sietske Fransen at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for the History of Art in Rome; for more information, click here.
Centering on the seventeenth-century scene of Saint Sebastian Tended By The Pious Women (a detail shown above from Jusepe de Ribera’s canvas at the Bilbao Museum of Art), this talk considered reciprocal acts of tending in art and in medicine. Who, I ask, did the work of tending – whether to an injured body or a damaged canvas? And how was this work conceptualized through painting? This presentation, open to the public, was delivered at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for the History of Art, in Rome on June 14th. Learn more, here.
Presentation at the conference, Soundscapes in Naples: From the Medieval to the Early Modern, organized by the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities “La Capraia” (a partnership between the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte) and the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin. For the full conference program, click here.
University of Edinburgh, May 19, 2023. This talk – a follow up to “Goya’s Nothings” (December 7, 2022; see below) – takes the splitting of Goya’s copper plate as its point of departure. What might we learn, I ask, from Goya’s acts of artistic destruction and material reuse? The talk will be presented at the interdisciplinary conference, Historical Fragments: Making, Breaking and Remaking, with the support of the Material and Visual Culture of the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Centuries Research Cluster. For more information, and to attend in person or online, click here.
Lecture delivered at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, for Professor Lucia Simonato’s course, Inscenare l'orrore: violenza e morte nell'arte italiana del Seicento.
Please click the image to sign up to attend the talk, streamed online, December 7th, 12:00 PM (EST).
Upcoming Seminar Announcement: “‘Difficult Pasts’ in Translation’” for the Society of Renaissance Studies, with Sara Petrilli-Jones. See here for more information.
Upcoming Conference Announcement: “Last Works, 1500–2000” with Tai Mitsuji.
Upcoming short-course at Harvard University with Alexandra Dennett. Examining nine-works in person, with technical analysis by conservators at the Harvard Museums Strauss Center, we will consider the artist’s approach to artistic and observational practices.
HAA 63 is a Harvard Course taught by Shawon Kinew and Felipe Pereda, with sections created and led Alejandro Nodarse. The poster superimposes Caravaggio’s Bacchus with a still from Derek Jarman’s film, Caravaggio.
An invited paper delivered at the RSA panel, organized by Lucia Simonato and Felipe Pereda, Languages of Southern Baroque Sculpture.
Antonio Palomino closes his Life of Luisa Roldán (1652–1706) with tears: “[Roldán] could not complete the Images of Christ without tears (sin lagrimas).” His description confers a mirrored image of artist and artwork as two sets of lagrimas emerge before Roldán’s polychromed sculpture. Tears, of sculptor and sculpture, signal the completion of Life and Image. This paper dwells upon the tear—often confined within the category of postizo or “inessential addition”— as a site of material experimentation and authorial invention. I consider a range of tears—from polychrome Ecce Homo to terracotta Entombment, from glass to resinous amber—and the painted or prosthetic eyes from which they stem. Set against paper signatures discovered within Roldán’s sculpted bodies, I contextualize the emergent tear as a signatory and enlivening gesture. The lagrima will thus be viewed as an essential form: the materialized vision of the artist transfigured before her own Image.