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Speaker: Caroline van Eck (I Tatti / Cambridge University)
Mimicry, the adaptive behaviour through which human and non-human animals avoid detection and recognition by their predators, was first described in Europe by Greek zoologists and philosophers. Starting a long tradition of associating animal and human behaviour, they noted that humans and animals share the capacity to hide or disguise their appearance, and also that animals possess a mimetic capacity similar to the human capacity for mimesis.
These are the elements of the evolutionist theorization of mimicry as a major variety of adaptive survival by insects and birds in Amazonia in the 1860s by Alfred Wallace. But Renaissance thinkers and artists also reflected on the connections between animal and human mimicry and cunning. They extended these reflections to the visual arts, suggesting that painting is a kind of disguise of the canvas, that mimesis and dissimulation are very closely related, and that they in their turn are closely related to animal behaviour. They would actually come very close to a statement by the artist and garden designer Ian Hamilton Finlay made in 1985: 'Every style in art is a camouflage through which, by our own reconstruction, we think we see 'real nature'. [...] Camouflage is the art to which we owe life.'
This talk will explore the connections between 16th-century theorists of dissimulazione onesta such as Torquato Accetto, the view that artistic mimesis is often dissimulation, and the role of zoology in these ideas.
Caroline van Eck is Professor of Art History at Cambridge University. Before going to Cambridge she has taught in Leiden, Ghent, and Yale, and was a visiting professor at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, the Ecole Normale in Paris, and the Zentralinstitut in Munich. In 2017 she gave the Slade Lectures in Oxford. Recent publications include Piranesi's Candelabra and the Revival of the Past. Excessive Objects and the Emergence of Style in the Age of Neoclassicism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), and 'Notes on the prehistory of camouflage as a cultural technique', W86th 30/1 (2023), pp. 3-28.
Image: Lorenzo Lippi (1606-65), Allegory of Dissimulation (?), c. 1640, Angers: Musée des Beaux-Arts
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