Jérémie Koering: Drawing Art History: Art historians and Graphic Experiment

It is often ignored, but many art historians, among the most famous of the nineteenth, to the twenty-first century, have used the graphic instrument to study art in all its forms. Burckhardt, Morelli, Cavalcaselle, Justi, Wölfflin, Warburg, Panofsky, Baltrušaitis, Schapiro, Grodecki, Steinberg, Marin, or Damisch, all turned to the graphic instrument to see, understand, and explain painting, architecture, or sculpture. The purpose of this talk is to show how drawing contributes to the emergence, the production and the transmission of a specific knowledge on artistic objects, by offering a panoramic view of the epistemic potentials of the graphic tool (documenting, feeling, comparing, classifying, analyzing, exploring).

Jérémie Koering is professor of art history at the University of Fribourg (CH). His fields of study are Renaissance art, epistemology of art history, and anthropology of images. He has published Léonard de Vinci. Peintures et dessins (Hazan, 2007), Le prince en représentation (Actes Sud, 2013), Caravage, juste un détail (INHA, 2018); Andrea Mantegna: Making Art History (Wiley, 2015), with Stephen J. Campbell; Damisch/Schapiro a special issue of October (MIT, 167, 2019) with Yve-Alain Bois; and has edited an unpublished manuscript by Robert Klein, L’Esthétique de la technè. L’art selon Aristote et les théories des arts visuels au XVIe siècle (INHA, 2017). His most recent publication is Les iconophages. Une histoire de l’ingestion des images (Actes Sud, 2021), and he is now working on a new book on Meyer Schapiro’s drawing practice.

This talk is part of the KHI 2021+ Lecture Series, organized by the doctoral and postdoctoral fellows, in collaboration with scientific staff and senior scholars of the Institute. It is envisioned as a forum to reflect on the futures of Art History through conversations with innovative voices in the discipline, working in different areas but sharing methodological concerns.