Humanitas Visiting Professor in the History of Art 2012-13

The Humanitas Chair in the History of Art has been made possible by the generous support of J E Safra.

Professor Philippe de Montebello

(Philippe de Montebello (Director Emeritus, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fiske Kimball Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) will give a series of three public lectures on The Multiple Lives of the Work of Art and participate in a concluding symposium.

In his third and final lecture, Change as Constant, Philippe do Montebello will talk about how intrinsic and extrinsic factors account for the transformations in works of art over time as well as the receiver's responses.

The lectures are free to attend and no registration is required. Information about the concluding symposium on Thursday 22 November will be posted shortly.

Abstract

The lectures, constructed around a number of case studies, look at works of art from a curatorial point of view; that is, one focusing primarily on their properties as objects. They will examine how the changing contexts of works of art and their transformations over time and space affect the viewer’s response(s) to them.

A premise of these lectures is that no work appears to us today as it was originally conceived. It may undergo many transformations in the course of its life, from deliberate alterations to natural degradation, and at the same time, any response at historical distance is necessarily variable and contingent.