
Type : Appel à communication
Date limite de l’appel : 30 juin 2017
Date de l’événement : 24 – 26 mai 2018
Lieu : Belgique, Gand
Vanitas. Reconsideration of a pictorial concept
ANKK-sponsored Session
One of the most controversial pictorial concepts within the methodological debate of Netherlandish art history certainly was (and still is) the concept of the Vanitas of the mundane world. It has become quite common to view and subsume Dutch still life painting under the aspect of transience and to claim that those works include a moralizing message: The depicted objects – may it be the skull or hourglass, overturned glasses, wilted flowers, money, jewelry or instruments (used either in daily life or in art and science) – have been interpreted by art historical scholarship in rather generalizing terms as symbols of the vanity and impermanence of human life. Besides this rather cultural pessimistic interpretation there are additional readings of still life painting – for example a more sensualistic approach emphasizing the cognitive power of sense perception; or a social-historic position that links the genre to seventeenth-century European economic expansion by accentuating the importance of goods as a means to establish identity. Continuer la lecture de Appel à communication : Vanitas. Reconsideration of a pictorial concept