A close reading of Carleton Watkins’s Nugget of Gold—attending to its subject matter, production, world fair display, reproduction and circulation, and especially its minerality—reveals a profound identification in late-nineteenth-century US-American society between photography and mining. Representing a fusion of nature and culture,…

Workshop description

The approaching completion of the Corpus Rubenianum, the definitive catalogue on the work of Peter Paul Rubens, and several exciting publications and exhibitions on various aspects of his art, its reception, and its historiography, make this an opportune moment to reflect on the possibilities and challenges of a …

In 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe executed its historic flyby of Mars, capturing the first images ever sent back to Earth from another planet. The numerical image data was transmitted to teletype machines at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but it would take hours for the computers to convert the data into viewable television images. The…

This three-day international conference, to be held at Princeton University will be the first ever devoted solely to Byzantine numismatics, and it will reunite renowned scholars and specialists from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the U.S.

The acquisition of the collections of Peter Donald and Chris and Helen Theodotou, totaling over…

Several crucial archaeological excavations allow us to reach a fuller and more accurate assessment of the development of landscape painting during this period. With their precise provenance and dating, these finds help establish a new foundation for exploring issues of painting media, stylistic inventions, architectural context, and symbolism…

Combining newly available archaeological materials with transmitted scrolls, this lecture explores some broad trends in figure painting across different regions, for example, a naturalistic tendency in portraiture, integration of different genres of figure painting, and close collaborations between court painters.

By Kirstin…

This lecture redefines research evidence and approaches in studying Chinese painting during the long tenth century in order to renew the perspectives of interpretation while expanding the scope of observation both geographically and chronologically.

By Kirstin Ohrt

Professor Wu Hung of the…

Department of Religion website for registration and details

This talk introduces my current project, “The Long Today: Nineteenth Century Painting and Environmental Change,” in which I argue for a reading of nineteenth century British and American paintings that finds the ecological future in the small, everyday details that they contain – items that we may easily pass over in an artwork; items that are…

2021 marked 50 years of photography at Princeton, sparking both a reflection on the medium’s history and projection toward its future. As part of the Photo History’s Futures lecture series highlighting exciting voices in the field, the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Princeton University Art Museum welcome Emilie Boone to speak about…

In 1972, a group of Aboriginal activists planted an umbrella in the lawn of the Australian Parliament in Canberra proclaiming it the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. The establishment of this Aboriginal Tent Embassy would become one of the longest continual protests for Indigenous land rights in the world. Revisiting archival footage from the…

In collaboration with Princeton University’s Brazil LAB and Department of Anthropology, the Princeton University Art Museum presents the work of Denilson Baniwa (Baniwa, born 1984, Amazonas, Brazil). Working in various media including drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance, Baniwa grapples with legacies of colonialism in the Americas and…

April 11 - free and open to the public

April 12 - by invitation

Please click related link for details of symposium

The Radical Practice of Black Curation engages the past, present, and future of Black curation as a practice that exceeds the urgent but constraining question…

Link to schedule and abstracts

Conference description

Given the current interdisciplinary interest in the long history of the four elements, this is an opportune moment to reconsider how early modern artists thought about and imagined the “raw materials” of which they believed their surrounding world was…

Please join us for a discussion with the author of her new book, a consideration of how contemporary art can offer a deeper understanding of selfhood.
 
With Each One Another, Rachel Haidu argues that contemporary art can teach us how to understand ourselves as selves—how we come to feel oneness, to sense our…

The Humanities Council welcomes artist and designer Ghiora Aharoni as the Spring 2024 Belknap Visitor.

Artist Ghiora Aharoni grew up in a home of diverse cultures and languages. Aharoni’s work recontextualizes artifacts, ritual objects of different faiths, sacred texts as well as traditional objects, such as…

Roy Kevin Victor Andrews was born in Beijing on January 20, 1924, the nominal son of Roy Chapman Andrews, the celebrated American explorer, naturalist, and dinosaur hunter.  Educated in England and New England, Kevin Andrews entered Harvard in 1941 and graduated with an A.B. in Classics and English Literature in 1947. He won the…

This session, led by Index specialists Maria Alessia Rossi and Jessica Savage, will demonstrate how the database can be used with advanced search options, filters, and browse tools to locate works of medieval art. There will be a Q&A period at the end of the session, so please bring any questions you might have about your research!

Susanne Meurer received her PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London. She has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Houghton Library and a postdoctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max-Planck Institute), Florence and the Warburg Institute in London.  As a senior lecturer in the…

One way to understand the network of Spanish Habsburg places in the early modern period is to think about individuals experiencing architecture. Zooming out to take in the wide space of empire allows us to explore how buildings and public spaces were shaped, often with coherent messages rendered through carved heraldry and ornament. Zooming in…

In 1763, an engraving was published in Paris to advertise French colonization in Guyana. Depicting a wealthy land, rich in promises, and couples engaged in gallant conversations, the image promoted a peaceful colonization. It ephemerally reenacted a gallant aesthetic born in Louis XIV’s reign which contributed to frame the imaginary of French…

OPENING RECEPTION on January 31, 2024 from 6:00–8:00 pm

Artist Josephine Meckseper, former Belknap Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton presents an interactive multimedia installation, Scenario for a Past Future, at the Lewis Center for the Arts Hurley Gallery. Projected life-size…

The Index is pleased to serve as site host for “The Medieval Multiple,” a conference organized by Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Ryan Eisenman (University of Pennsylvania), with support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of…

Art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire (circa 330–1453), but less known are the profound artistic contributions of North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had a lasting impact on the Mediterranean world. Bringing together a range of…

2021 marked 50 years of photography at Princeton, sparking both a reflection on the medium’s history and projection toward its future. As part of the Photo History’s Futures lecture series highlighting exciting voices in the field, the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Princeton University Art Museum welcome Aglaya Glebova to speak…

The Beijing-based, internationally recognized artist Peng Wei creates artworks that reconsider and reckon with traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy. In this event, Peng will be in conversation with Zoe S. Kwok, Nancy and Peter Lee…

Imagine a portrait of a couple in which each paints the other within the same frame. Reciprocal double portraits are extremely unusual in the history of art, and virtually unheard of in the context of marriage, but a remarkable group of them were made in late nineteenth-century Denmark. These paintings were part of a broader culture…

Please join us for our second training session to learn more about the Index database! It will take place via Zoom on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 from 10:00 – 11:00 am EST.

Have you been wondering if you are getting the best results for your searches? Are you unsure about how to use…

This conference asks how the concept of “the East” has shaped perceptions of Eastern Christianity generally and Eastern Christian Art more specifically, in Euro-American scholarship as well as in the popular view. Building on or dismantling such historical divisions as Western/Eastern Roman Empire, Latin/Orthodox, or simply East/West, speakers…

To Straighten, like a diligent Housekeeper of Reality...”:  The Greek, Roman and Byzantine collections at MFA Boston re-imagined

This lecture explores Roman failure and its counterpart, resilience, in ancient Roman architecture and urbanism. Focusing on the years before the great fire of 64, it argues, perhaps surprisingly, that Romans faced constant architectural failure, which authorities carefully managed, and that even before the fire, failure analysis and resilience…

“Imperfection” and “Renaissance” are antonyms. At least that is what Giorgio Vasari’s history of Italian artistic evolution (as with other early modern European writings on art, poetry, literature, music, and theatre) tries to convince us. His construction of perfection – in the sense of completeness and as an aesthetic ideal – as a defining…

Caravaggio and the Echos of Figuration

The modern world is plagued with unprecedented levels of social, economic, and political inequalities. But these inequities did not happen overnight; in places like southeastern Europe they emerged over the course of thousands of years as the small egalitarian farming villages of the Neolithic gave way to some of the earliest hierarchical…

This talk commences by introducing the audience to the sacred bronzes created by a master sculptor around the year 1000, and suggests that his inspiration may well have been child-saint Sambandar’s opening hymn that hails god Shiva as “the thief who stole my heart.” Vidya Dehejia then moves beyond this sensuous imagery to ask questions of this…

Papers delivered by graduate students from Princeton University, the University of Ioannina, and the University of Thessaly

Respondents: Marc Domingo Gygax, Carolyn Laferrière, Leigh Lieberman

PITHOS website

For PUID holders

Papers delivered by graduate students from Princeton University, the University of Ioannina, and the University of Thessaly

Respondents: Marc Domingo Gygax, Carolyn Laferrière, Leigh Lieberman

PITHOS website

For PUID holders

Papers delivered by graduate students from Princeton University, the University of Ioannina, and the University of Thessaly

Respondents: Marc Domingo Gygax, Carolyn Laferrière, Leigh Lieberman

PITHOS website

For PUID holders

The subject of textile colors in Chinese history evokes notions of elite luxury and power: imperial yellow over commoner blue. But observers and gazetteers suggest a wider color palette began to be offered to a range of consumers in the early Qing, with new dyeing techniques being applied to both silk and cotton. An expansion of clothing…