Details
Guest presenter:
Stephanie S. Dickey, Bader Chair in Northern
Baroque Art, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Lecture Title:
The Gift of Tears: Gender and Emotion in the Art
of Rembrandt and his Contemporaries
Time and Date:
6.15pm on Wednesday 29th August
Venue:
South Lecture Theatre, Level 2 Old Arts
The University of Melbourne
Further information:
Email Jessica
Scott (jessica.scott@unimelb.edu.au)
Download Lecture
Flyer
Abstract:
Literary responses to paintings and prints by Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606-1669) and other artists of the early modern Netherlands
show
that art theorists and connoisseurs appreciated the artist's
ability to capture the emotional nuances of a subject.
This lecture explores one fundamental aspect of emotional display,
the shedding of tears, as represented in historical subjects and
portraits.
Visual and literary sources reveal patterns in the social
significance of emotion, and specifically of sorrow, as related to
gender and circumstance.
The depiction of tearful emotion constituted a key element in the
representation of human, especially female, subjectivity and
prompted
complex responses in contemporary viewers.
Stephanie S. Dickey Biography:
Stephanie Dickey received her Ph.D.in art history from
the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She taught at
Indiana University in the US before joining the faculty of Queen's
University in Kingston, Canada, as Bader Chair in Northern Baroque
Art.
Her research interests include the work of Rembrandt van Rijn,
Anthony van Dyck, and related artists; the history of prints and
print collecting; portraiture as a cultural practice; the
relationship of word and image; and the representation of
emotion.
Among her publications are Rembrandt: Portraits in Print (2004),
Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (exhibition catalogue,
Washington, National Gallery of Art, Arthur Wheelock, ed., 2008)
and The Passions in the Arts of the Early Modern Netherlands
(Netherlands Yearbook for the History of Art 2010, co-edited with
Herman Roodenburg).
She is currently working on a book-length study of early responses
to Rembrandt's prints, including a chapter on Thomas Wilson, author
of the second catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt's etchings published
in English (1836) and mayor of Adelaide, South Australia, in the
1840s.
