Biography

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.

Project Summary

Building on my stay at I Tatti in 2023, when I looked at animal-shaped three-dimensional grotesques and their use to disguise humans and buildings, this year I will look at the connections between the courtly behaviour of dissimulatione onesta, the notion that pictorial mimesis is a deceptive disguise of the canvas, and discussions in zoology of camouflage. The latter often start from the connections made by Aristotle and other Greek zoologists between mimesis, mime and metis or cunning, but are changed under the impact of the discovery of new species in the Americas and their arrival in Tuscany, as well as the rethinking of cunning as a trait shared by human and non-human animals.