Ressources numériques en sciences humaines et sociales OpenEdition Nos plateformes OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypothèses Calenda Bibliothèques OpenEdition Freemium Suivez-nous

Conférence: “On Belonging: The Visual Legacies of Black Africans in Early Modern Europe, Hidden and Visible in Plain Sight”, Florence, NIKI, le 10 décembre 2025, 18h

“The past is never dead. It is not even past.” – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951)
“The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us – viewer and maker – in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury of loss.” – Kara Walker, on her drawing The moral arc of history …(2010)
Writing in his essay collection Nobody Knows My Name (1961), James Baldwin reflects:The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.

At its heart, the present talk is about being and being seen. It will pose questions about oblivion and memory; violence and survival; and embodied hauntings in the face of invisibility and silence. Reckonings inherent in crossings of racial and regional boundaries – here, those between Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic – continue to transform Renaissance studies in powerful ways, thanks to a growing body of literature and a number of formative exhibitions that confront tradition-bound perceptions of early modern history and visual culture. Aimed above all at the NIKI student community, the complicated relationships evoked by the objects to be presented here will seek to ask, more specifically: what are the promise and burden of belonging? Moreover, what might belonging mean with regard to the discipline of art history itself and how we teach it today?
Biography

Dennis Geronimus is professor and former chair of the Department of Art History at New York University. A graduate of Williams College, he earned his PhD from the University of Oxford. His research interests include artistic crosscurrents between Italy and Northern Europe, as well as between Africa and the Mediterranean; artists’ engagement with the natural world; mythological narrative and other forms of storytelling; and pictorial wit and humor. He is the author of Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange (Yale University Press, 2006). In 2015, Dennis co-curated with Gretchen Hirschauer the first-ever exhibition on Piero at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, selected as one of the best exhibitions of the year by the Wall Street Journal. More recently, he has written on the interconnections between Michelangelo, Jacopo da Pontormo, and Vittoria Colonna – and collaborated, in 2021, with Nicholas Hall in New York on Grey Matters, an exhibition conceived around the theme of monochromy and inspired by the rediscovery of Pontormo’s Adam and Evegrisaille. He is currently at work on a monograph titled Jacopo da Pontormo: Overcoming Nature. His scholarship has been supported by The Met, the Clark Art Institute, the Renaissance Society of America, the Warburg Institute, the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice – and the NIKI.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
melineegout (3 décembre 2025). Conférence: “On Belonging: The Visual Legacies of Black Africans in Early Modern Europe, Hidden and Visible in Plain Sight”, Florence, NIKI, le 10 décembre 2025, 18h. Collectif d'Historiens de l'Art de la Renaissance. Consulté le 23 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15ad0


Vous aimerez aussi...