Lecture | Art and Intimacy in 15th Century Italy, Professor Adrian Randolph

Art and Intimacy in 15th Century Italy

Professor Adrian Randolph, Leon E. Williams Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College

Pax, Rome, Italy (probably made in the North), c1500. Victoria and Albert Museum

The word ‘intimacy’ is attractive partly because it summons up a set of interrelated and evocative meanings that speak directly to certain types of objects we tend to call art. Intimacy suggests proximity and closeness, and is tinged with sensual and perhaps sexual possibility, and, when applied to apparel, getting right next to the skin. This epidermal intimacy is matched by a form of interiority lodged etymologically in the word itself: The Latin word, moreover, when metaphorically appended to individuals, suggests an emotional as well as spatial proximity-an intimate acquaintance, someone close to you. These meanings, and others are suggestive. The word intimate points to something essential in reactions to certain types of objects, and to modes of beholding and use that are systematically underplayed in analyses that have emerged in modernity, especially those that define art visually and, often, through the prohibition of touch. In this lecture Adrian Randolph focuses on one set of particularly intriguing and intimate pictorial objects: paxes. Small panels produced precisely to be kissed.

Date: 6:30 pm, Monday 24 June 2020

Venue: Old Arts Lecture Theatre, The University of Melbourne, Parkville

For more information: email jessica.scott@unimelb.edu.au or +61 3 8344 5152.

http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/upcoming-events/art-and-intimacy-in-15th-century-italy.aspx