Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard
Visual Representation, Materiality, and the Medium Seminar
Chair: Professor Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
March 23rd, 2022, 5pm EDT
“Making and Unmaking the Rococo Street”
Speaker: Professor Katie Scott
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
“Beauty was a major theme of the early modern discourse on the city and a prime objective of city administrations. This lecture explores the roles of ornament and line in the formulation and implementation of civic beauty in the first half of the eighteenth century. The embellishment in question—cartouche, mascaron, shell, curve, counter-curve, etc.—was, according to the architect Germain Boffrand, writing in 1745, a form that had escaped the domestic interior to spread over the exterior and across public space. What meaning attached to inside beauty turned urban out? Did it transform notions of the city and the public? How? These are some of the questions the lecture will address.”
Katie Scott is a professor in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She teaches and writes about eighteenth-century French art and design. Her currents interests include the history of intellectual property regimes, early modern artists and their things and the culture of cities.