Name: Barbara Wittmann: Under the Spell of the Horizon: Life Path and Economy in Claude Lorrain’s Work
Start: 2025-02-03T15:00:00+01:00
Location: Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai

$Barbara Wittmann: Under the Spell of the Horizon: Life Path and Economy in Claude Lorrain\u2019s Work$

Between 1636 and 1682, the Franco-Roman landscape painter Claude Lorrain copied a significant portion of his paintings into a sketchbook before they left his workshop. With this Liber Veritatis, he created an early form of self-archiving that went far beyond the documentation of works typically found in early modern vitae and inventories. This record was intended to secure his control over his art at a time when imitators increasingly sought to counterfeit his paintings. Nevertheless, Lorrain’s sketchbook was not a legal tool for combating illegitimate copies. Instead, it served as a symbolic reclamation of his works: through the Liber Veritatis, Lorrain detached his paintings from the dependency of his patrons’ collections and integrated them into his own system of works. The metaphor of the life path plays a crucial role in this context. The lecture examines this chronotope as well as the economy of the nearly lifelong project, demonstrating how the practice of recording fostered the emergence of the œuvre as a second-order artwork.
Barbara Wittmann is a professor of art history and theory at the Berlin University of the Arts. Previously, she held a chair in art history (17th to 19th centuries) at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and a professorship in modern and contemporary art at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research focuses include the history of art since the French Revolution and the history and theory of artistic and scientific drawing. For further information see https://www.udk-berlin.de/person/barbara-wittmann/.