Events
We have new events at museums in the U.S. and Italy – and online – in the works. Sign up to be notified for updates, here.
Description and Imagination: Writing on Still-Life
Wednesday, February, 15th, 12:00–1:00 PM (EST) Harvard Art Museums
In this interactive session, we will look closely at a still-life drawing in the Harvard Art Museums: Margaretha de Heer’s Still Life of Flowers and Small Animals on a Ledge. Prompted by the 1620 drawing, we will consider the relationship between looking, describing, and imagining. Together we will ask a series of questions. How might such a work engage our senses? What responses—individual and collective—does it elicit? How has the artist’s gender played a role in the creation and reception of her work? All participants will be invited to share their responses to the work through conversation, writing, and drawing.
Image: Margaretha de Heer, Still Life of Flowers and Small Animals on a Ledge, drawing, 1642. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA.
‘Difficult Pasts’ in Translation
July 19–22. A Seminar for the Society for Renaissance Studies, Annual Meeting, Liverpool, UK.
History and translation go hand-in-hand. This session offers an opportunity for historians to reflect on translation as a central, though often overlooked, element of their own working practices. It will consider, in particular, challenges of translation which arise in the context of ‘difficult pasts.’ How, for example, are historians to balance a perceived need for neutrality in relation to past actors and events with responsibilities to present readers—colleagues, students, and the public at large? If translation is a ‘carrying across’ (translatio), how should we write and teach difficult pasts in the present?
We believe that translation will prompt new reflection upon, and intervention in, moments of difficulty at every scale—from the single word or passage to the body of work. By confronting the complexities of historical language as an integral part of the writing of history today, we hope to formulate new solutions, together, for the page and the classroom alike.
Image: Leon Kossoff, The Rape of the Sabines (2), etching, 1998. The Tate, London.
Past Events
If you have questions regarding previous events, please don’t hesitate to write to us.
Poetry after Painting: Giambattista Marino on Peter Paul Rubens’s Hero and Leander
Wednesday, February 1st, 12:30–1:30 PM (EST), Yale University Art Gallery
This Gallery Talk introduces the concept of “ekphrasis” — the description of images with words — by looking closely at a poem and the painting that inspired it. We will observe and discuss Hero and Leander by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and read a poem by Italian author Giambattista Marino (1569-1625) based on his first-hand study of the canvas. Led by the translators of Marino’s poems into English, this Talk approaches looking and writing as complementary processes. Participants will be invited to contribute a new, collaborative poetic response to Rubens’ painting.
Image: Peter Paul Rubens, Hero and Leander, c. 1604, oil on canvas, Gift of Susan Morse Hilles, Yale University Art Gallery.