Event Date
Javier Patiño Loira, UCLA
Art and technique are relational constructs. Because for much of European history art and technique were conceptualized as imitations of nature, it was common for the products of art to be judged as either successfully “natural” or unsuccessfully “unnatural.” In doing so, however, aesthetic judgments usually left the character of nature itself unexamined. In my recent book, The Age of Subtlety, I argue that shifting understandings of nature accounted for changes in taste, and that scholars in early modernity must account for the period’s scientific developments in order to understand the creations of its artists and poets. I examine the seventeenth-century obsession with so-called rhetorical conceits, convoluted tropes that permeated both writing and public speaking. I contend that during the first half of the seventeenth century, at the height of the craze for conceits, scholars and creators viewed conceits as closely mirroring nature’s behavior. By focusing on the seventeenth-century analogy between conceits and fireflies, I argue that Italian and Spanish scholars imagined conceits as human counterparts to nature as it abandons its usual course to indulge in a playful, leisurely mode of creativity.
