Lecture
Kress Talks with Juliet Huang and Alec Aldrich
- Date
- Wednesday 26 February 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.01 [and also online: https://smart.newrow.com/#/room/rmd-390]
Juliet Huang
Taking Pleasure in Gloves in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands
Gloves are donned and held by both female and male sitters in 17th-century Dutch portraits. Art historians have long dealt with symbolic meanings of gloves in Dutch visual culture, but in this talk I consider the multi-sensory engagement of gloves and how portraits channel the experience of gloves as affective objects. Based on first-hand examinations of surviving gloves, this paper explores how tactile, visual, and olfactory sensations are intertwined in gloves’ surfacescape (Jonathan Hay’s term), creating pleasure and a sense of wonder in the beholder/ wearer. Of special interest is Constantijn Huygens’s collection of recipes for perfuming gloves now preserved at the Royal Library in the Hague. Huygens’s recipes flesh out an understanding of the interactive and connective roles that “experience” plays in both production and perception of gloves. This paper contends that the affective-sensory experience of gloves not only establishes social relations but also links ideal and real.
Alec Aldrich
Jan Adriaensz. Leeghwater's Landscape Invention
A schematic representation of a drainage windmill towers over the suggestion of a landscape in a rare surviving drawing on parchment by the Dutch mill-maker and engineer Jan Adriaensz. Leeghwater (1575-1650). The sheet is a retrospective visualization of one of his greatest achievements, the reclamation of the Beemster Lake in North Holland, and the present talk will consider how Leeghwater deployed the practice of drawing to describe the nature of his work. As this paper will demonstrate, the sheet interacts not only with a standpoint toward drawing developed by skilled tradespeople, but also art theoretical conceptualizations of drawing. The lecture ultimately argues that Leeghwater deliberately engaged tropes and practices of artistic draftsmanship to unite his drawing of an invention with an understanding of drawing as invention. Within the semantic space of his drawing, reclaiming land and representing landscape became connected practices through their realization by a unique creative personality.
