Vision, Touch, and Memory. Rembrandt’s Aristotle with the Bust of Homer.

Lecture by Jeanette Kohl as part of the exhibition Idols & Rivals at the Kunsthorisches Museum in Vienna.

Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653

A contextualized interpretation of Rembrandt’s famous Portrait of Aristotle with the Bust of Homer (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), this lecture discusses the importance of sculpture as a key medium of memory. A detailed analysis will show how Rembrandt transformed established thought patterns of competition (among the arts, among artists, with antiquity) and traditional art-historical dichotomies (seeing vs. feeling, materiality vs. intellect, presence vs. impermanence) into a remarkably complex play across genres creating a painted philosophy of touch.

Professor Johannes Endres recieves fellowship at the IAS (Institute for Advanced Study) at Van Mildert College, University of Durham, January-March 2023

At Durham, Professor Endres will work on his current book project on “Style” as an interdisciplinary category of the study of texts, images and music. As part of his project, he will be in close collaboration with Professor Jonathan Long from Durham’s School of Modern Languages & Cultures. Professor Long is also the co-director of the Center for Visual Arts and Culture at Durham. The collaboration is based on their mutual research interest in German Literature, literary theory, and the study of visual culture in relation to literary artefacts.

Art History Doctoral Candidate, Cambra Sklarz, presented at the Getty Graduate Symposium on February 3, 2023

The Getty Research Institute hosted the fifth annual Getty Graduate Symposium, which showcased the work of emerging scholars from art history graduate programs across California. Organized into three sessions, the symposium included nine individual presentations, panel discussions moderated by faculty mentors, and Q&A sessions with the audience. 

Congratulations to Cambra Sklarz for being recognized for her outstanding work.

Cambra’s presentations, The Artist and the Ecosystem: Strategies for the Use and Reuse of Materials in Early America can be viewed online via the Getty Research Institute’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdcw4RhcVX8s4hcliEh_DUburxDcBvo6Q

The full program can be found here.

Jeanette Kohl receives year-long fellowship at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study

Jeanette Kohl has been awarded a year-long fellowship at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS) for the 2022-2023 academic year.  The fellowship has been awarded to advance Dr. Kohl’s book project ‘Sculpture. A History in Sources and Commentaries’. The project continues and expands her scholarship on portrait sculpture and will result in a sourcebook on the discourses around the medium of sculpture in European art histories.

Department of the History of Art – 2021 Work in Progress Series

GOOD TO THINK WITH: Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer

Join us on Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 5:15 pm (PST) — via Zoom
Register at https://tinyurl.com/y4vgprbz

Dr. Jeanette Kohl
Professor of Art History, UC Riverside

In this work-in-progress talk, art historian Jeanette Kohl will discuss the historical and ‘phenomenological’ significance of bust portraits as powerful objects of individual remembrance and intimate dialogue. She will do this through the lens of a painting: Rembrandt’s “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer,” one of the most celebrated works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An introductory chapter from her upcoming book “The Life of Busts. Sculpted Portraits in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” the study also presents a novel interpretation of Rembrandt’s enigmatic painting.