Belvedere Lecture 2023 with Prof. Caroline van Eck

BELVEDERE LECTURE: New perspectives on Early Modern Studies

Caroline van Eck (University of Cambridge) on Architectural Grotesques in 16^th-century Florence

Tuesday, 26 September, 5-6 PM

Boekentoren (Rozier 9, 9000 Gent): Belvedere

Registration (before 21 Sept): https://event.ugent.be/registration/belvederelecture2023

The Belvedere Lecture is the Ghent annual lecture on early modern history and culture. It sheds light on the early modern period from a multi-disciplinary perspective. ‘Belvedere’ suggests a bird-eye view on early modern history, which is indeed one of the aims of this annual lecture: to invite international scholars in the field of early modern studies to present their research in the light of bigger questions early modernists are dealing with today.

‘Belvedere Lecture’ refers to the Belvedere of the Ghent famous Boekentoren (Book Tower), an iconic building designed in 1936 by Henry van de Velde. Belvedere is an architectural structure that was especially popular in the renaissance and baroque, but also in modern architecture. It not only refers to the idea of providing an scenic view on early modern history, but it also connects early modernity with modernity.

The Belvedere Lecture is a joint initiative of different research groups at Ghent University that have a connection with early modern history and culture: the Institute for Early Modern History, the Sarton Centre for History of Science, the Group for Early Modern Studies (GEMS), the Institute for Legal History, THALIA and RELICS

SPEAKER

Prof. Caroline van Eck (University of Cambridge)

Architectural Grotesques in 16^th-century Florence

Renaissance Florence offers a particularly rich variety of three-dimensional grotesques, appearing on doorways, windows, and façades, in fountains, pedestals and armour. They occur particularly in liminal situations, both spatial, as in window frames, but also when they cross boundaries between disciplines, as in the architectural/sculptural objects created by Michelangelo and his followers. In my talk I will start with grotesque designs by Michelangelo, to move on to grotesques in façades and window frames, as well as fountains and hybrid objects by his followers Buontalenti and Ammanati. This group of grotesques does not lend itself very well to current readings of these figurations in terms of the corpus of 16th-century theories produced by Vasari, Ligorio, Lomazzo, Paleotti or Borromeo, because these theories are mainly based on the pictorial grotesque figuration inspired by the rediscovery of the Domus Aurea, not the three-dimensional masque variety of today’s talk. But also because that body of thought is normative and aetiological: normative because it attempts to regulate grotesque design, and aetiological because of its tendency to relate contemporary grotesques to Vitruvius and Roman art. Instead, starting from patterns of visual similarities, I will consider the relation of grotesque architectural ornament to contemporary armour; and I will consider the suggestion of a second skin, as well as the duplication and sometimes triplication of masque features in one grotesque in the light of anthropological work on masks by Franz Boas and Philippe Descola.