CourtauldInstitute
Dr Surekha Davies delivering her paper ‘Global Encounters and Art History, 1450-1750’ as part of the 2018-19 Frank Davis Memorial Lectures, The Courtauld Institute of Art.
European artistic experience in the early modern period was a global one, increasingly filled with peoples, things, materials, and memories from worlds beyond Europe. Yet the content, chronology, and structure of art history’s European canon has barely changed for the period. Attending to the global dimensions of early modern European artistic experience requires not merely the addition of new themes – such as cultural encounters, exchange, or collecting – or of specialists of extra-European art. Rather, attending fully to Europe’s global experience requires a fundamental reconceptualization of the objects, themes, methods, and questions by which the study of early modern European art takes place. This lecture uses cartography, collecting, and Netherlandish art to articulate three bodies of questions that highlight the limits of the traditional formulation of art history. It then suggests how re-orienting art history so as to foreground such themes opens up new opportunities for the field. The larger stakes of de-centring and re-centring early modern European art are the potential to re-found the discipline in ways that make legible and relevant wider applications of art history’s tools for close looking as well as the continuing relevance of works of ‘art’.
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