happenings
talk, March 1, 2022 (Harvard, Early Sciences Working Group)
Observation at the Margin: Salvator Rosa and the Neapolitan Coast
Centered upon a single painter — Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) — and the stretch of shore along which he dwelled, this paper engages the vexed relationships between art and observation, landscape and memory, and knowledge-production and violence. Discussion will begin with comments from Paul Kosmin, Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History, Harvard. Learn more and sign up to attend (in person or over zoom) here.
article, August 1, 2021 (Harvard Library Bulletin)
The Syphilitic Image
Published in an edition of the Harvard Library Bulletin dedicated to the topic of contagion, this article features a translation and commentary of Marco Aurelio Severino’s 1632 text on syphilis. You can access the journal and article, here.
essay, June 1, 2021 (Harvard Graduate Review)
Sappho’s Anaktoria
In this essay/poem, I consider the relation between memory, violence, beauty, and (homo)eroticism in the writing of Sappho. This work was featured within the 2021 Graduate Review, edited by João Marcos Copertino and Sebastian Brass. You can read the digital edition, here.
talk, April 22, 2021 (Renaissance Society of Art)
Roldana’s Tears
Abstract: 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.
This paper will be delivered at the Renaissance Society of Art’s 2021 meeting, within a panel on carving and modelling in Southern European Baroque sculpture. To learn more, click here.
talk, February 16, 2021 (Harvard, Early Sciences Working Group)
Seven Apples: Structuring Vision in the Still Lifes of Juan Sánchez Cotán
In this paper, I considered the still life paintings of the Toledan painter-turned-friar, Juan Sánchez Cotán, in relation to contemporary theories and models of (perspectival) vision. The paper was workshopped at Harvard’s Early Sciences Working Group, based in the History of Science Department. Opening comments were delivered by Mackenzie Cooley (Assistant Professor of History, Hamilton College). To learn more about the Working Group, click here. For more information, and to read an abstract, contact me.
course, Harvard, January-Term, 2021
The Body Beyond Itself: A Visual History of the Cyborg
Co-taught by Alexandra Dennett and myself, for Harvard’s January Term, 2021.
Description: The pandemic continues to reduce our mobility and to increase our technological dependency. Given this state of precarity and isolation, we turn to a set of artistic objects which have sought to engage, extend, or otherwise alter the human body. Drawing from Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” this J-Term course proposes a visual history of the “cyborg,” of altered bodies in which nature and artifice, machine and organism, meet. The course will develop skills of visual analysis as well as tactics for speaking about art comparatively, thematically, and creatively. The first two sessions will combine a historical overview with an introduction to the study of art in isolated conditions. How can we find new meaning in art when we are unable to see it in person? The focus in the second two sessions will shift towards developing writing and presentation skills (applicable beyond the scope of the course), as students will draft short talks on individual works of art that engage the themes of the course. How do works of art operate as tools for rethinking the present?
course, Spring 2021
Figurations: Theorizing the Body as Image in Contemporary Art
Description: To “theorize” (from the Greek, theorein) is to “look at.” To theorize the body in art is observe the imaged body and to reconsider our own embodiment. This course explores the transformation of the human body as a work of art––as both subject and medium. Beginning with the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1959 exhibition, New Images of Man, this course considers the body’s manifestation in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, and performance: asking how, across each medium, the body is constructed and communicated. The first two sessions—Painterly Flesh and Photographic Skin—emphasize each medium in its expanded field, attending to their performative dimensions in relation to the (artist’s) body at the moment of creation. Sessions three, four, and five emphasize the physicality of the body in articulating itself, as a living image, in acts of Remembrance, Violation, and Transformation. The seminar revolves around critical theoretical texts which have conceived the history of art, and its neighboring disciplines, in corporeal terms. Each session pairs the texts with the words and works of seminal artists, those who have dwelled on the body as a site of profound in(ter)vention. Authors include Paul Tillich, Anne-Anlin Cheng, Donna Haraway, Kobena Mercer, José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Erika Fischer-Lichte; artists include Chaïm Soutine, Francis Bacon, Alice Neel, Jenny Saville, Josephine Baker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Wangechi Mutu, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Derek Jarman, Yoko Ono, Anna Mendieta, Lygia Clark, ORLAN, and Rebecca Horn, among others. Students are encouraged to select (and to theorize through) objects which further illuminate and challenge the provided texts and images. (This course was developed and taught for GEC Academy.)
course, Winter 2020
Scenes from the Avant-Garde: Painting in 19th-Century France
This course is an intensive introduction to nineteenth-century painting in France. We begin in 1855 with Gustave Courbet’s Pavilion of Realism and conclude with Paul Cézanne’s 1906 canvases, painted in the year of his death. Each scene sets the stage for a preliminary analysis of multiple modernism(s): realism, impressionism, divisionism or pointillism, expressionism, and post-impressionism. Initial emphasis is placed on the formal analysis of seminal works—paintings by Courbet, Millet, Manet, Bazille, Pissarro, Monet, Cassatt, Morisot, Seurat, Signac, Van Gogh, and Cézanne—set against the artist’s writings and the writings of their contemporaries. Weekly assignments assume the form of five interventions. Each intervention reframes traditional narratives of art history via analyses of class, gender, race, otherness, and temporality. (This course was developed and taught for GEC Academy.)
course, Fall 2020
Material & Metaphor in Renaissance Italy
In this intensive, five-session seminar, we will consider the Italian Renaissance (“re-birth”) as a history of materials: oil, feathers, wood, clay, wax, marble, metal. We will set objects traditionally elevated within the history of art against those (more often) confined within “cultural” studies: marginal (often, ephemeral) objects once stationed at the center of lived experience. Challenging established chronologies and geographies, material studies continue to invoke new (art) historical questions concerning the production, movement, and meaning of materials and the objects produced from them. What did, for example, Portraits of Christ created with feathers in the “New” World signify in the “Old”? Materials, too, are subject to historical formations, and, perhaps in certain cases, to “rebirths.” In this course, we will attempt to reconstruct the historical conceptions of materials at hand. We will attend, in other words, to the poetics, or metaphors, of materials: to the discourse surrounding materials as they were formed by artists and beheld by viewers long before us. Only then, for example, might we consider what “popular” conceptions of the “mystical” dimensions of marble tell us about Michelangelo’s sculptures, or the way in which they were, in his age and thereafter, praised. Each session will engage a primary text on the material at hand—from artisanal workbooks and artist’s diaries, to (an alchemical) treatise on the raising of bees and the production of wax—in additional to literature in the history of early modern art. Of course, objects will serve as our essential sources. Sessions include:
strange feathers — “It seems the most marvelous [thing].” (Marino Sanudo)
alchemic oils — “I beheld seams of color.” (Cennino Cennini)
limbs of wax — “The wax is man.” (Cornelio Musso)
prisoners in metal and marble — “I can give us long life.” (Michelangelo)
listening to Florence — “[They] sang so sweetly.” (Antonio Pucci)
course, Summer 2020
Between the Eye and Brush: Episodes in European Painting, 1512–1912
“Painting is about the impossible,” or so El Greco wrote. What is a painting, what does it do, and how does it do it? What are the conditions of its possibility, then, in the moment of its production, now, and in the interval between? Each session considers a central thematic concern within the history of European painting to begin to answer such questions. Comparisons of the artists’ concerns, as materialized in the objects themselves, will ground our study. Scholarly readings span several of art history’s methodologies—biographical, semiopoetic, material, feminist, marxist, phenomenological—while lectures and primary sources develop each week’s topos, or theme. Seminar discussion and individual assignments emphasize the practice of looking, or formal analysis. Painters covered include (in alphabetic order): Caravaggio, Chardin, El Greco, Gentileschi, Manet, Michelangelo, Morandi, Morisot, Parmigianino, Picasso, Pontormo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Sánchez-Cotán, Van Gogh, and Velazquez. We begin with Michelangelo Buonarroti’s completion of the Sistine Ceiling in 1512 and conclude with Pablo Picasso’s Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass finished four centuries later. Lectures, however, move diachronically, rippling between historical times, to foreground connections made between the eye and the brush. (This course was developed and taught for GEC Academy.)
course, Harvard, January-Term, 21
The Body as Fragment: Excursions in the History of European Art from 1550–1950
Co-taught with Alexandra Dennet, this course moves from 16th-century Italy to 20th-century Soviet Russia, from representations of the body in relics and religious art to depictions of the human figure by revolutionary avant-garde artists. Organized in four concentrated workshops across three days, this short course will begin and end with object-based visual analysis, interspersed with targeted lectures on historical themes to frame discussion. This will include: the painted icon, the printed relic, the anatomical corpse, and avant-garde imaginings of the body through film and photography. Learn more and register, here.
exhibition, February 13 – May 17
Boston’s Apollo: McKeller and Sargent
The Gardner Museum’s exhibition opens on February 13th. A catalog with new research on the life of Sargent’s esteemed model, Thomas Eugene McKeller, will be available for purchase. In addition, a film recounting the re-discovery of McKeller’s life, featuring his descendants, will be screened at the exhibit. See the recent New York Times review by Holland Cotter: "John Singer Sargent’s Drawings Bring His Model Out of the Shadows". Learn more here.
talk, February 14
(In)fertile Grounds: Viewing de Bry’s Illustrations of Las Casas’s Brevisima relación as Dutch Landscapes
This paper will be delivered at the 2020 College Art Association Conference in Chicago, as part of the Historians of Netherlandish Art panel, “Landscape through a Sociopolitical Lens: Representing the Environment in the Early Modern Netherlandish World.” Please see details here.
talk, March 14
(Re)viewing the Visionary: Margherita Colonna’s Performing Body
This paper will be delivered at the 2020 New College Conference of Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Sarasota. Please see program details here. (This program was cancelled due to the covid-19 pandemic.)
talk, July 7
Jusepe de Ribera’s San Gennaro: An Epistemological Aesthetics of Martyrdom
This paper, culled from a section of my Master’s thesis, will be delivered at the Society for Renaissance Studies conference in Norwich, England. Working against historiographic notions of the Spanish painter’s “violence” to the human form, this research provides a new framework for engaging Ribera’s martyrological images and the representation and reception of the early-modern martyr. See conference details here. (This conference has been postponed due to the covid-19 pandemic.)