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DTSTAMP:20260317T085814Z
DESCRIPTION:Susanna Caviglia will give a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Th
 ursday\, December 5\, at\n12:15 pm. Her talk is entitled\, “Seeing Through
  Touch\, Touching with the\nEyes: The Sensorial Construction of Rome in th
 e Age of the Enlightenment.”\n\n In 1775\, the French traveler Gabriel-Fra
 nçois Coyer recounts\nhis rapture in the face of Rome’s ancient treasures 
 and how he touched a statue\nto make sure that it was only lifeless marble
 . Expressing a conventional trope\nabout the power of ancient culture\, Co
 yer’s emotionally charged touching points\nto the changing relationship be
 tween objects and emotions in the age of the\nEnlightenment. Contemporary 
 French travel accounts of Rome\, however\, reflect an\nambiguous response 
 to the physical encounter with the past. Although most\nvisitors were cult
 urally prepared to react with the proper intellectual\nintensity to indivi
 dual artistic objects\, they were disoriented by their\nhaphazard urban co
 ntext. Christian relics invaded pagan monuments\, miraculous\nvirgins comp
 eted with a vast culture of prostitution\, ramshackle structures\nclung to
  monumental architecture\, and ancient statues were made to hurl current\n
 political invectives. This spatial and temporal hybridity obstructed the\n
 elevated emotions these objects were meant to arouse. To counter this\ncon
 fusion\, French travelers deployed their sensual responses to the city as 
 a\nfoundation upon which ancient stories and myths could be overlaid. Fren
 ch\npainters\, who came to Rome to study\, developed a representational ap
 paratus\nthat transformed this visual regime through the corrective power 
 of touch.\nInstead of isolating objects for aesthetic reflection\, they im
 mersed themselves\nand their work in the material complexity of Rome\, whe
 re touching fragments\nemerged as the primary motivator of a sensual awake
 ning. Like Coyer’s hand\,\nthis emotional touching not only dispelled any 
 anxiety about the superiority of\nthe past but also brought a new understa
 nding to the meaningful way in which\nits objects continued to structure d
 aily life. In doing so\, these painters\nconstructed a new image of the ci
 ty that travelers would come to understand as modern Rome.Susanna Caviglia
  is Assistant Professor of Art\, Art History\, and Visual Studies at Duke 
 University. She is the author of Charles-Joseph Natoire\, 1700–1777 (Arthe
 na\, 2012)\, and History\, painting and the seriousness of pleasure in the
  Age of Louis XV (Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment & Liverpool Universi
 ty Press\, 2020). She has also published three edited volumes: L’événement
  “tragique” aux époques moderne et contemporaine: définition\, représentat
 ions (with Michel Cassan\, Presses Universitaires de Limoges\, 2009)\, Le 
 prince et les arts en France et en Italie\, XIVe-XVIIIe siècles (Presses U
 niversitaires de Limoges\, 2011)\, and Body Narratives: Motion and Emotion
  in the French Enlightenment (Brepols\, 2017). Before joining the Duke fac
 ulty in 2017\, Caviglia taught at the University of Limoges (France) and t
 he University of Chicago. In France\, she acquired curatorial expertise wo
 rking at the Centre Georges Pompidou\, the musée Condé in Chantilly\, and 
 the musée du Louvre\; she curated the exhibition Charles-Joseph Natoire (1
 700–1777)\, le dessin à l’origine de la création artistique at the musée d
 es Beaux-Arts in Nîmes (2012). Caviglia is the Editor-in-Chief of the seri
 es The Body in Art (Brepols\, 2017-). Her current project is entitled “Wan
 dering in Rome: French travelers and the image of the early modern city\,”
  in collaboration with Niall Atkinson (University of Chicago). Tracing the
  movements of French travelers to Rome\, the book will reinterpret the way
 s in which mobile viewers reconceived and represented an emerging sense of
  both the history and future of Rome as a modern imperial capital.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20191205T121500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20191205T131500
SUMMARY:Bard Graduate Center: Seeing Through Touch\, Touching with the Eyes
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