Jan Blanc, Rembrandt and the animal issue (in French)
📍 The conference, originally scheduled for Tuesday 28 March, has been postponed to Tuesday 3 October 2023.
A history painter and portraitist, Rembrandt van Rijn, as is often forgotten, was also interested in animals throughout his career. His biblical and mythological compositions are full of domestic animals (dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, cows, goats) or rarer animals (peacocks, eagles, falcons). He also made life studies of non-European animals, such as lions, camels and elephants, which he frequently included in his paintings. These representations, however, are not purely anecdotal. As shown in his Girl with Two Peacocks (c. 1639, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) or his Flayed Ox (1655, Paris, Louvre), Rembrandt critically questioned the relationship that non-human animals have with human animals, and with himself. In the wake of these observations, and as part of a broader reflection on the place of the animal in seventeenth-century Dutch culture, this lecture proposes to shed new light on Rembrandt's work, by attempting to understand the way in which the Dutch painter looked at beings to which he attached crucial importance.
Jan Blanc (born in 1975) is a professor of modern art history at the University of Geneva. He is a specialist in the art of Northern Europe (Netherlands, France and England) of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as in the relationship between artistic theory and practice in modern Europe. He has devoted several monographs to important old masters (Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt) as well as modern masters (Vincent van Gogh). He has translated the artistic writings of a pupil of Rembrandt, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and of Sir Joshua Reynolds. More recently, he has published a study of the Dutch still life genre in the 17th century, and is preparing a new monograph on Rembrandt, focusing on the relationship between art and originality in the 17th century. For more information, click here
This series of lectures is a co-production of UCArts - Cultural Department of the Côte d'Azur University and the 20th Century National Museums of the Alpes-Maritimes. The six lectures are organised in partnership with the Friends of the Marc Chagall National Museum Association.
The programme is developed by the museum in collaboration with Josiane Rieu, professor of 16th century French literature at the Côte d'Azur University and member of the Transdisciplinary Centre for the Epistemology of Literature and the Living Arts.
To discover our series of lectures for the 2022-23 season, click here
Photo : © B. Roscot-Pleutin, Les Seuil, 2022.
The museum is open every day except Tuesdays, January 1st, May 1st and December 25th.
From November to April: from 10am to 5pm
From May to October: from 10am to 6pm
Free admission to the auditorium, depending on the number of seats available.
