Skip to main content

Lecture - The Sublime Real: Painful Excitements in Eighteenth-Century Art and Criticism

When:
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

No booking required

The Sublime Real: Painful Excitements in Eighteenth-Century Art and Criticism – Lecture by Aris Sarafianos, University of Ioannina and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck

This talk on the slippery relations between art and reality started from a much misunderstood paragraph on ‘real sympathy’ in Edmund Burke. Aris Sarafianos investigated the many interpretations and transformations of real sympathy in cases as diverse as George Stubbs’s paintings, William Hunter’s anatomical lectures at the Royal Academy, Diderot’s writings, De Loutherbourg’s theatrical machines and Charles Bell’s surgical drawings. He explored what these can tell us about the powerful, treacherous and mixed sensations associated with the ‘real’ in art.

Contact name: