Lecture by Verity Platt , March 20th.
2018-2019 Guest Lecture Series in History of Art and Architecture presents:
Prof. Verity Platt, Cornell University
Winckelmann’s Pharmacy: Art-Historical Description and the Phantasia of Restoration
Wednesday March 20, 6 pm in CAS 132.
This paper explores the relationship between art-historical description (or “ekphrasis”) and its objects, focusing on a famously problematic example in the historiography of Classical art – Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Torso, and its revised version in his History of Ancient Art. Comparing Winckelmann’s texts to Plato’s concept of the pharmakon, it explores the historicist aspects of Winckelmann’s ekphrastic prose alongside its ambiguous potential to “restore” lost and damaged objects.