Biography

Jérémie Koering is professor of early modern art history at the University of Fribourg. His fields of study are Renaissance Art, epistemology of art history, and anthropology of images. He has published Le prince en représentation (Actes Sud, 2013), Caravage, juste un détail (INHA, 2018); and co-edited with Stephen J. Campbell, Andrea Mantegna: Making Art History (Wiley, 2015); and Yve-Alain Bois, Damisch/Schapiro a special issue of October (MIT, 167, 2019). More recently, he has published Iconophages. A History of Ingesting Images (Actes Sud 2021 / Zone Books, 2024) for which he was awarded the Pierre Daix Price (2022) by the Pinault Collection and he co-edited with Alessandro Nova and Alina Payne Robert Klein. A Meteor in Art History and Philosophy (VIT/Harvard University Press, 2024).

Project Summary

During the Renaissance the façade was adorned with a multitude of masks. Whether forehead (frons), face (facies, faccia) or bark (cortex), the vocabulary used to designate this interface between interior and exterior is rich in both cultural and semiotic terms. But how do the substance of these metaphors fit in with the artistic inventions that unfolded in façades throughout Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries? How did artists work to organize the possibility of dialogue, of porosity, between the entity that stands back from the façade and the community that encounters it through observation of the decoration? To understand this, one must compare a number of decorations (preserved or documented by drawings and engravings) which place these effects of transparency and opacity in tension.