Free Lecture: Women, Water, and Materiality in the Early Modern Genoese Garden
October 19 2023
Picture: warburg.sas.ac.uk
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Lovers of Rubens' and Van Dyck's Italian period might find the following free lecture of great interest. In a few days time the Warburg Institute in London will be hosting a free online lecture on A Material World - 'Women, Water, and Materiality in the Early Modern Genoese Garden', which is presented by Ana Howie of Cornell University.
According to the talk's blurb:
Early Modern Genoa was renowned for its pleasure gardens, filled with fountains, scherzi d’acqua, artificial lakes, and grottoes, which celebrated the wonders of water. In the early seventeenth century, Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck sojourned in the wealthy port city and painted magnificent portraits of the city’s noblewomen embedded in garden settings. In these portraits, water splashes across the canvas and threatens to soak their sitters and beholders; this lifelike substance is at once erotic, affective, visionary, and poetic. This paper investigates the aesthetics of water in Rubens’ and van Dyck’s portraits to uncover the plurality of meanings that water, in all its forms, held for an elite Genoese audience.
The free talk will be held online on 23rd October 2024, although booking is essential.
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Although I am by no means an expert in this area, fountains appear constantly in and around Van Dyck's English period too (1) (2), and it taken on later by Sir Peter Lely also (1). A most interesting topic, it seems.
