Visualizing Love and its Discontents
Dr. Mary Sheriff, W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Symposium: Southeastern American Society for 18th Century Studies Conference
Febuary 26-28, 2015
Harn Museum of Art, Chandler Auditorium
Thursday February 26, 2015
This presentation reconsiders the representation of love in eighteenth-century French painting and the graphic arts, focusing on the emotional dangers and negative consequences brought on by sexual passion. This approach leads not only to a consideration of emotional geographies and images excluded from the canon of rococo painting, but also to a reevaluation of well-known works, such as Antoine Watteau's 1717 Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera.