Fields of interest

Meaning, viewing and interpretation in the visual arts and architecture, more particularly the roles of rhetoric and religion in forming viewing competences and practices.

Interactions between classical rhetoric and the visual arts and architecture.

Architectural theory of the classical tradition, from its earliest surviving formulation by Vitruvius to its final transformations in the 19th century by Labrouste, Ruskin, Bötticher and Semper.

English art and architecture 1600-1715.

Research

NWO/VICI-project ‘Art, Agency and Living Presence’
Statements that works of art or buildings are so lifelike that they seem alive; that they watch the beholder, move, speak or weep are a constant and worldwide theme in reactions to the visual arts and architecture. Such responses are clearly wrong: images are not alive, and if they move, speak or bleed it is because there is a hidden mechanism at work. Yet the frequence and persistence of such statements suggest that they are not simply a matter of cognitive or psychopathological confusion, a primitive way of reacting to art or critical cliché or hyperbole.
In early modern Italy a paradoxical variety of such responses is very widespread: works of art are considered to be so lifelike that they become alive in the viewers’ experience. Viewers react as if they are in the presence of a living and acting person. What has rarely been noticed, however, is that such statements (and the corresponding instructions to artists to aim for the illusion of living presence) lead to the paradox that art, in order to be of the highest quality and at its most persuasive, must cease to look like art. The representation dissolves into what it represents. Nor have existing studies considered the role of rhetoric, which played an important role in early modern thought about the arts, in shaping such responses, whereas vividness and living presence play a central role in rhetorical thought about persuasion.
Unlike existing approaches to such responses, which consider them in terms of representation, this programme adopts a new approach based on the paradoxical nature of these responses in early modern Italy: it draws on rhetorical discussions of lifelikeness and living presence, and it uses the anthropological theory of art as agency developed by Alfred Gell. Whereas rhetoric is important as a historical source, Gell's theory of art as agency is an important heuristic instrument, and helps to articulate these responses.

Consecration Rituals in the Low Countries and Britain
Consecration rituals are a neglected, but very rich source of the meanings attributed to churches, city halls and other public buildings by their patrons, users and the public in general. To mark the important occasions of laying the first stone, consecration or completion a wide variety of textual and visual material was produced: sermons, emblems, medals, prints and even small models of the building. The inauguration of the City Hall in Amsterdam, for instance, was marked by a substantial poem by Vondel, a medal, and numerous prints. Such documents offer important clues for the ways in which those involved in the building wanted to project a public image, construct and control its meaning, and defend the use of large amounts of public funding. Consecration documents can thus be read as virtual, multi-media constructions of architectural meaning, and serve as important foundations for a history of architecture written not from the perspective of the architect, but from that of the public: the users, patrons and spectators.  In two projects, funded by the Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds of Ghent University (BOF) and the Flemish fund for scientific research FWO, and located at the Department of Architecture and Urbanism of Ghent University (Bart Verschaffel, Maarten Delbeke), a series of important 17th-century consecrations are studied, in collaboration with the Central Library of Ghent University (Sylvia Van Peteghem), which holds an important collection of primary sources.

Prehistories of the sublime 1550-1750
The history of the sublime is easy to write; but not so its prehistory, that is its development from the first editions and translations in the 16th century until its codification as an aesthetic concept by Burke and Kant after 1750. In the treatise Peri Hupsous or ‘On the Sublime’ the 1st-century orator Longinus described the experience of the sublime as one which sweeps readers or viewers along, robs them of rational control over their feelings, and opens hitherto unknown vistas of the infinite, the horrendous, or the incomprehensible. Longinus’ description continues to raise many questions, not the least being what kind of experience this is: amazement or wonder, aesthetic enjoyment, religious or mystical rapture. It seems easy to say the sublime experience is related to all these sensations at the same time, but this in itself is the very issue we seek to address. How exactly did this complex notion function in the period before its codification, with which meanings was it endowed, and what is its relationship to the ‘neighbouring’ experiences that we just mentioned?
After the codification of the sublime by Burke and Kant the term came to stand for an aesthetic concept; but before 1750, it escaped easy disciplinary classification. Contrary to widely held belief, many Greek editions and translations were made from the 1550s onwards, but very few of them have been studied.
The discipline that wrote the history of the sublime after 1750 is that of aesthetics; but that discipline itself evolved only in the course of the 18th century. As a result, aesthetics imposed a conceptual grid on the sublime as described by Longinus and others that made it very difficult to reconstruct its pre-modern genealogy. To study the history of the sublime before 1750, therefore, raises two problems: on the one hand, its meaning cannot be located in a monodisciplinary way (e.g. as an aesthetic concept, on a par with the beautiful or the ugly); on the other hand, in early modern Europe experiences that after 1750 would be characterised as ‘sublime’ did occur, but were labelled differently: as experiences of wonder and amazement, as mystical experiences of rapture, as horror or fear. As a consequence, any investigation in the pre-history of the sublime has to be multi-disciplinary, drawing on rhetoric, art history, history of philosophy and religion, literary studies and anthropology.
This programme starts at the origins of such a prehistory: to investigate early editions of Longinus. It is funded by a NWO/Internationalisation grant, and will be carried out in collaboration with the universities of York (Helen Hills, Anthony Geraghty) and Ghent (Jürgen Pieters, Maarten Delbeke), and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Lina Bolzoni).

Curriculum Vitae

Caroline van Eck studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and philosophy and classics at Leiden University. In 1994, she received her PhD (cum laude) at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam. From 1995 to 2003 she worked as a post-doc in the Department of Art History of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, first on a project studying word-image relations in Italian Renaissance architectural theory, subsequently directing a research programme on the relations between rhetoric and the arts in early modern Italy and Britain. Both projects were funded by NWO. From 2003 to 2006 she taught architectural history and theory at Groningen University. In 2005, she was awarded a VICI programme by NWO on art, agency and living presence in early modern Italy. In January 2006, she was appointed Professor of Architectural History and Theory at Leiden University.
A recipient of grants by the British Council, the Kress Foundation and the Yale Centre for British Art, she has also been a visiting professor at the Universities of Yale (2000), York (2003) and Ghent (2003-5). From 1999 to 2004 she edited two series for Ashgate: Reinterpreting Classicism (published with support of the Getty Centre) and Discourses of the Visual. In 2005 she became editor of a series published by Routledge in London: Reconsidering Classical Architecture.

Teaching activities

BA: first year survey course in architectural history; participation in theory & methodology strand in the BA programme;
MA/Mphil: the funerary chapel in Rome and Naples as a laboratory for artistic innovation; Spanish patronage in the Low Countries and Italy; topics related to research programmes such as idolatry and the agency of art.

Publications

Classical Rhetoric and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge en New York: Cambridge University Press 2007)

With Ed Winters (ed.), Dealing with the Visual. Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2004. (a Chinese translation is forthcoming) 

British Architectural Theory. An Anthology of Texts 1550-1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2003).

G. Boffrand, Book of Architecture. Translated by David Britt, introduced and edited by C.A. van Eck (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2002).

With J.W. McAllister, R. van de Vall (eds.), The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

L.B. Alberti, Over de schilderkunst [De Pictura]. Vertaling Lex Hermans, inleiding en commentaar C.A. van Eck and R. Zwijnenberg (Amsterdam: Boom, 1996).

Organicism in Nineteenth-Century Architecture: an inquiry into its theoretical and philosophical background, Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura Press 1994.

With W. van Leeuwen and J. Voorthuis (eds.), Het Schilderachtige (Amsterdam, Architectura & Natura Press, 1994).


Articles and chapters in books:

‘Longinus’ Essay on the Sublime and the ‘Most Solemn and Awfull Appearance’ of Hawksmoor’s Churches’, Georgian Group Journal 15 (2006), pp. 1-7.

‘Artisan Mannerism: 17th-century rhetorical alternatives to Sir John Summerson’s Formalist Approach’, in: Frank Salmon (ed.), Summerson and Hitchcock: Centenary Essays on Architectural Historiography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press & The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2006), pp. 85-105.

‘Modernity and the Uses of History: Understanding Classical Architecture from Bötticher to Warburg’, in: H. Christiansen and M. Hvattum (eds.), Tracing Modernity (London: Routledge, 2004).

‘Rhetorical Categories in the Academy’, in: P. Smith and C. Wilde (eds.),  A Companion to Art Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 104-16.

Review article of: V. Hart and P. Hicks (eds.), Paper Palaces: the rise of the architectural treatise in the Renaissance; A.A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: architectural invention, ornament, and literary culture; H. Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: a reconstruction of style. Art Bulletin, 83 (March 2001), pp. 146-50.

‘The Case for the Internal Spectator: Aesthetics or Art History?’ in: R. van Gerwen (ed.), Essays in Honor of Richard Wollheim (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press 2001), pp. 200-14.

‘Language, Rhetoric and Architecture in De re aedificatoria’ in: G. Clarke and P. Crossley (eds.), The Language of Architecture: Contructing Identity in European Architecture, 1000-1600 (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

‘The Retrieval of Classical Architecture in the Quattrocento: the Role of Byzantine and Humanist Observers’ in: W. Reinink et al. (red.), Memory and Oblivion.Acts of the  XXIXth International Congress for the History of Art (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 231-39.

‘"Ons doel is om de dingen te tonen zoals ze zijn, niet om te leren schilderen” Architectuurtheorie tussen wetenschap en ontwerptheorie in Italiaanse architectuurtractaten van de late 16e eeuw’, Tijdschrift voor Theoretische Geschiedenis, Spring 2000.

‘Giannozzo Manetti on Architecture: the Oratio de saecularibus et pontificalibus pompis in consecratione basilicae Florentinae of 1436’, Renaissance Studies 12 (1998), pp. 449-75.

‘The Structure of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria Reconsidered’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56 (1998), 280-97.

With P. Taylor, ‘Piero della Francesca’s Giants’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60 (1997), 243-47.

‘"Par le style on atteint au sublime": the Meaning of the Term ‘Style’ in French Architectural Theory of the late Eighteenth Century’ in: Van Eck et al. (eds.), The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, pp. 89-108.