[JFKI-News] The Life-Scale Revolution in European Painting – Lecture with Alexander Nagel – July 17

["JFKI Culture Department" <culture@jfki.fu-berlin.de>]

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Subject: The Life-Scale Revolution in European Painting – Lecture with Alexander Nagel – July 17
From:    "Schuff, Jochen" <jochen.schuff@fu-berlin.de>
Date:    Sun, July 7, 2024 21:50
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The research group »Reorganizing Ourselves«, led by Einstein Visiting Fellow Prof. Alva Noë, would like to invite you
to a public lecture and a workshop with
Alexander Nagel<https://www.ifa.nyu.edu/people/faculty/nagel.htm> (NYU)

The Life-Scale Revolution in European Painting

Wednesday, July 17
18:00 c. t.
Freie Universität Berlin
Seminarhaus Otto-von-Simson-Str. 26
Raum L 115

An understudied problem in the history of art, scale—not measurable size, but the sense of relation to
size—fundamentally shapes relations between people and material works of art, and thus relations between people and
spaces as mediated by visual art, ultimately making possible new configurations of social, political, and
environmental relations. During the period 1300-1600, European painting underwent a series of radical reinventions—the
emergence of new picture categories, new roles for drawing and new modes of scalable image-replication, new pictorial
techniques and supports, as well as new approaches to virtual space—developments that produced continual
experimentation with scale, as painters attempted to coordinate new modalities of painting with the viewers and real
environments they served. This talk focuses on the development and application of the principle of "life scale," in
which depicted figures are depicted to scale with the body of the viewer even as they inhabit pictorial space, a
fundamental regrounding that took hold around 1500 and changed European painting forever.
https://www.normativitaet-kritik-wandel.de/Einstein-Research-Group/Events/Vortrag-Nagel.html

Alexander Nagel is Craig Hugh Smyth Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His writing and
teaching is mostly concerned with how visual art allows humans to think through time and find orientation in the
world.