Beatrice Peria
Beatrice Peria is an art historian with a background in iconology. She has published specialist studies on the iconography of 16th-century Venetian art, but has also researched and published essays on the relationship between word and image, on 19th-century Italian painting (notably, she compiled the catalogue of the Dexia Crediop collections) and on the artist’s book, and has curated exhibitions of contemporary artists. She has collaborated with Il Trovaroma (a supplement to La Repubblica), providing reviews of the main exhibitions in Rome from 1991 to 1995; with RAI’s School and Education Department; with the ICCD (Central Institute for Catalogue and Documentation); and with the Molise Superintendence for Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape.
Since 1989, she has been a tenured lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, where she has held numerous institutional positions, including that of Deputy Director.
She was the Erasmus Project Coordinator for over 15 years. She teaches Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where she also coordinates international projects.
She is an ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research) assessor lecturer for AFAM (Higher Education Art, Music and Dance Academies).
Her current interests focus on the continuity and circulation of themes and motifs across classical, modern and contemporary art. She recently published the book La prospettiva invisibile. Forme visuali della temporalità dell’arte (The Invisible Perspective. Forme visuali della temporalità dell’arte (2022, L’Erma di Bretschneider).
The Classical Ideal: Reality, Memory and Interpretation
The course will examine the main manifestations of artistic production in Greek and Roman art, from the Geometric period to Late Antiquity, with a particular focus on the transformation of the concept of the ‘classical’ in later eras. A common thread running through art history from the Middle Ages to the present day, classical art has been the subject of periodic ‘rediscoveries’ and re-interpretations, which have often been far removed from the factual evidence provided by archaeology and have instead been the result of arbitrary inventions or the need to adhere to an ‘ideal’ that is more imagined than real, and which in turn has varied from one era to the next. With this in mind, the course will not analyse in detail all the events in the history of Greek and Roman art, assuming a certain basic knowledge, but will focus on the most significant works and stylistic changes in order to better examine their historical ‘fortune’, whether they have endured or been discarded. Our perspective will be more that of art history – viewed in reverse, i.e., starting from its ‘sources’ and its classical memory – than that of archaeology. Classical art, the fertile soil of Western culture, has become a universal model for artists, a paradigm of style and perfection against which to measure oneself. This enables us to approach it simultaneously from two perspectives: that of its history and styles, and that of its interpretations. Knowledge of classical art is therefore essential for understanding all subsequent art.
READING LIST: M. Centanni (ed.), L’originale assente. Introduzione allo studio della tradizione classica, Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 2005 (introduction); S. Settis, Futuro del classico, Einaudi, Turin, 2004; one textbook of the student’s choice. Specific reading list recommendations for the individual topics covered will be provided during lectures.
The narrative of time / the time of the narrative. Narration and temporality in images
Time is a value that is difficult to represent in two- or three-dimensional works of art, which lack the autonomous duration possessed by moving images (cinema or video) or music. Lessing’s famous essay, On Laocoön: Or Of the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), marks the beginning of the divergence between painting and poetry, which until then had been considered ‘sister arts’: poetry operates in time, whereas painting operates in space and is therefore unable to access the temporal dimension, which does not belong to it. Yet the theme of time – its perception, its representation, its inexorable passage, its use, its memory – is a constant presence in the history of art, from antiquity to the contemporary era. Engagement with time – natural time and inner time, the time of work and the time of leisure, the time of history and the time of everyday life, the time of death and the time of memory, the frenetic time of the contemporary world and the slow time of contemplation – runs through the history of art in the form of symbols, allegories, myths and narratives, but also as stylistic choices or communicative strategies. Finally, the concept of time is often the central subject of a work. Lessing’s axiomatic view dominated critical thinking until the last century, when the question of whether it is possible to embody and represent time (implicitly or explicitly) in works of art finally attracted renewed interest and became the subject of various philosophical and art-historical explorations and developments. We could also say that, in recent times, interest in this topic has gained momentum, with exhibitions and new critical contributions that also analyse the complex interplay between the time of the work and the time of the viewer in the act of viewing. However, these recent contributions focus almost exclusively on contemporary art. Therefore, over the course of the module, we will endeavour to briefly review the various methods, whether direct or indirect, that have been used to depict time in its many facets, albeit without adhering to rigid chronological boundaries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: B. Peria, La prospettiva invisibile. Forme visuali della temporalità nell’arte, L’Erma di Bretschneider, Rome–Bristol 2022. We also recommend familiarising yourself with the dossiers published in the magazine Art e Dossier – Giunti Editore, which cover the main artists that will be examined (easily available in bookshops or online on the publisher’s website: http://www.artonline.it).
The course aims to provide an overview of the main stages in the history of illustration, understood as the inseparable relationship between image and written text. Starting from the image’s subordinate role as a mere figurative transcription of the verbal code, this relationship took on new communicative meanings, particularly from the second half of the 19th century onwards, disrupting the traditional hierarchy in favour of an ongoing, equal dialogue between the two distinct expressive codes.
Today, the role of illustration draws on a wide range of expressive techniques and takes the form of a highly diverse body of work, from children’s books to magazines, from advertising to comics, from picture books to illustrated books for adults, and from record covers to artists’ books. Given that it is clearly impossible to analyse all its historical and contemporary manifestations, after a brief introductory overview of some key works in the history of illustration, we will focus on a selection of artists, aspects and key moments in contemporary illustration, chosen in part according to the specific interests of the participants.
The course will take the form of a seminar, requiring students’ active participation during lectures.
READING LIST: Pallotino, Paola, La storia dell’illustrazione italiana. Cinque secoli di immagini riprodotte, Florence, Volo Publisher, 2010; Antonio Faeti, Guardare le figure. Gli illustratori italiani dei libri per l’infanzia, Rome, Donzelli Editore, 2011; Parole disegnate, parole dipinte. La Collezione Mingardi di libri d’artista, Exhibition catalogue, Reggio Emilia, 4 February – 28 March 2005, Milan, Skira, 2005 (out of print, but available online); B. Peria, ‘Il libro d’arte’, in M. Maniaci, G. Orofino (eds.), Saper Valorizzare 2, Proceedings of the 2nd series of conferences ‘Unicittà – l’Università incontra la città’, Frosinone, January–April 2006, Cassino, 2007, pp. 121–145 (PDF). Further reading and websites of contemporary illustrators will be recommended during lectures.