Rebecca Zorach
Northwestern University, Art History, Faculty Member
- Street Art, Art History, Activist Art, Art Criticism, Medieval, Renaissance, and 63 moreSocial movements and revolution, Social Practice, French art, Baroque art and architecture, Art & Science, History of Perspective in Painting, Melancholia (Art), Mobile and Locative Art, Printmaking, Public Art, Feminist Art, Psychoanalysis (Art History), Prints (Art History), Thai Cinema, Thailand, Thai Studies, Historiography (in Art History), History, Gender and Technology, Gender and Technoscience, Cultural Studies, Media and identity, Cybercultures, Gender Studies, Social Media, Self Representation, Youth, History of Technology, Gender, Identity, Social Networks, Personal Web, Bloggers, Digital Identity, Digital Identity Formation, Gender in Mediated Contexts, Digital Inequity, Social Movements, New Media, Rhetorical Criticism, Peace, Justice, Grassroots, Community Media, Gender and Development, Media Education, Democracy, Social Change, Anarchism, Anarchist Economics, Radical Political Economy, Anti Capitalist Social Movements, Participatory Democracy, Social Anthropology, Development anthropology, Political Ecology, Food Sovereignty, Human Rights, History of Art, Contemporary Art, Feminist Theory, Gender and Sexuality, and Surveillance Studiesedit
In The Passionate Triangle, Rebecca Zorach takes us on a lively hunt for the triangle’s embedded significance, from Giovanni Bellini’s mournful Madonna and Amerigo Vespucci’s hypotenuse to Jacopo Tintoretto’s love triangles. She asks why... more
In The Passionate Triangle, Rebecca Zorach takes us on a lively hunt for the triangle’s embedded significance, from Giovanni Bellini’s mournful Madonna and Amerigo Vespucci’s hypotenuse to Jacopo Tintoretto’s love triangles. She asks why Renaissance authors described the human senses—and the human soul—as a triangle. Throughout, she explores how the visual and mathematical properties of triangles allowed artists to express new ideas and to inspire surprisingly intense passions in viewers. Examining prints and paintings as well as literary, scientific, and philosophical texts, The Passionate Triangle opens up an array of new ideas, presenting unexpected stories of the irrational, passionate, melancholic, and often erotic potential of mathematical imagining before the Scientific Revolution.
Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell'Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d'ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze... more
Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell'Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d'ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un'ampia varietà di scenari "scandalosi". Particolare attenzione è stata riservata all'aspetto materiale della cultura sessuale, dalle modalità di rappresentazione erotica del corpo agli oggetti e agli strumenti associati all'attività sessuale. Ne emerge un quadro completamente nuovo della sessualità rinascimentale, che spazza via secoli di manipolazioni ed equivoci socio-culturali, svelando scenari finora trascurati o volutamente nascosti. Diciassette saggi provocatori, con incursioni nel campo dell'arte, della letteratura, della storia, e persino della filosofia, organizzati intorno a quattro assi fondamentali: la pratica, la performance, la perversione e la punizione. ...
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Research Interests: Classicism and Conquest
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Research Interests: Aesthetics and Art
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Research Interests: Psychology and Feeling
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book. A case in point involves images of putti peeing, laughing, wearing masks, wrestling about, and even playing with their genitals, which one finds in the ornamental framework at Fontainebleau and in prints. It is a stretch to read... more
book. A case in point involves images of putti peeing, laughing, wearing masks, wrestling about, and even playing with their genitals, which one finds in the ornamental framework at Fontainebleau and in prints. It is a stretch to read their actions as “sympathetic” to the pain of fallen heroes (70), registering virile potency, and alluding to “anal eroticism” (173). With their childish follies, these putti have a broader history (see Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, 2001), and more readily provide an ironic foil to scenes of education, love, sacrifice, and death, not to mention the deluded fancies of the male hero. As supplements, such ornaments distract, calling attention to artistic investment in courtly wit. Throughout the book, Zorach adduces the critical theories of a number of important writers. One might wish, however, that she had dealt with some of their ideas more extensively; her voice risks at times disappearing into the montage of authorities. Also, her claim that scholarship frequently exhibits anxiety over analyzing the courtly context of French Renaissance art might strike a discordant note with a number of experts in the field, especially given the variety of relevant exhibitions in recent years. She also has little to say about Francesco Primaticcio, who assumed control over all royal commissions from 1540 until his death in 1570. But these last remarks should not override the fact that this book provides fertile research for the field of Renaissance studies. GIANCARLO FIORENZA University of Toronto
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"Never The Same is a curatorial and educational project organized around three thematic inquiries: Grassroots Archiving, Local Art History, and Social Movement Culture." -- p. II.
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« Violent et extravagant ». C’est ce que l’historiographie a retenu de Charles IX (1550-1574). Devenu roi alors qu’il n’etait qu’un enfant, il disparut avant son quart de siecle. De ses quatorze annees de regne, on se souvient de sa... more
« Violent et extravagant ». C’est ce que l’historiographie a retenu de Charles IX (1550-1574). Devenu roi alors qu’il n’etait qu’un enfant, il disparut avant son quart de siecle. De ses quatorze annees de regne, on se souvient de sa passion pour la chasse, de son temperament colerique et… du sang de la Saint-Barthelemy. Si l’histoire a souvent fait de lui un pantin entre les mains de sa mere Catherine de Medicis, l’histoire de l’art s’est peu attachee a son regne. Et pourtant, entre 1560 et 1574, les arts visuels, les lettres et la musique ont connu un veritable epanouissement en France. « D’un esprit prompt et vif, entre doux et colere » (Ronsard) le jeune roi, melomane averti, fut ecrivain et poete a ses heures. Les superbes portraits de Clouet gardent la memoire de son visage et permettent de suivre les metamorphoses de ses traits au fil de sa breve existence. En meme temps, tout un arsenal symbolique est deploye par les thuriferaires de la cour pour faconner l’image de la royaute qu’il est cense incarner. Ses adversaires en feront autant pour la detruire ou la detourner. Les etudes reunies dans ce volume mieux qu’esquisser les contours d’un hypothetique Charles IX mecene, ou que dresser un etat des lieux des arts au temps du jeune souverain, etudient les nombreuses facettes, parfois contradictoires, de l’image du roi, reelles, symboliques ou imaginaires.
This paper takes as its broad context the evolution of the place of geometry in ways of thinking about nature and art in early modern Europe. Considering a set of questions about how Nature creates geometric forms, particularly in... more
This paper takes as its broad context the evolution of the place of geometry in ways of thinking about nature and art in early modern Europe. Considering a set of questions about how Nature creates geometric forms, particularly in minerals but also in other kinds of natural beings, the paper explores the concept of “figure” as it appears in Conrad Gessner’s De rerum fossilium, where figure appears as a broad category that cuts across abstract geometry, artifactual images, and shape appearing within natural entities. Gessner is placed within changing ideas about the role of geometry as an intellectual pursuit or, rather, a mechanical property of nature conceived as inanimate and rule-bound.
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Review of Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness, an exhibition at Sullivan Galleries of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
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In Reveries and Line Drawings, a projected video piece first shown at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's New Blood exhibition, artists Georgia Wall and Nick Bastis offer methods in which stored spatial reveries can be... more
In Reveries and Line Drawings, a projected video piece first shown at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's New Blood exhibition, artists Georgia Wall and Nick Bastis offer methods in which stored spatial reveries can be recalled and represented using both analog and digital technologies. The piece posits forms in which spaces can be visualized without being physically
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A very drafty draft of some thoughts I tried to put together last summer about art, race, medievalism, and my family history.
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Syllabus from spring 2019 class