Event Date: 18 May 2017
Keynes Library
43 Gordon Sq
Birkbeck School of Arts
Birkbeck University of London
London WC1H 0PD
Birkbeck School of Arts Presents:
Birkbeck Arts Week 2017
The Sublime Real: painful excitements in eighteenth-century art and criticism
This talk on the slippery relations between art and reality starts from a much misunderstood paragraph on ‘real sympathy’ in Edmund Burke. Speaker Aris Sarafianos (University of Ioannina, and visiting research fellow at Birkbeck) investigates the many interpretations and transformations of real sympathy in cases as diverse as George Stubbs’s paintings, William Hunter’s anatomical lectures at the Royal Academy, Diderot’s writings, De Loutherbourg’s theatrical machines and Charles Bell’s surgical drawings. What can these tell us about the powerful, treacherous and mixed sensations associated with the ‘real’ in art?
Introduction by Dr Kate Retford (Birkbeck):
Talk:
Questions