The Image of the “Other” in Western Art (1453-1789)

The panel focalizes the Western visual construction of the Other, as an invention/construction of appearances. The essential question to which the panel wishes to answer is the following: what has been the contribution of the early modern Western art to the construction, verily the invention of the image of the Other. The question will therefore be to scan the “iconic difference” of the image of the Other, in the way Western art addresses it (in paintings, sculptures, treatises, etc.). What is the contribution of the “iconic difference” to the shaping of racial “Otherness”? The visual discourse on the Other is obviously a discourse of a “self-constructed same”. What is, in this context, the link between subjectivity and artistic inventiveness on one side, and pressure of Power on the other side? Western history of art offers in this matter a repertoire of iconographic shapes and solutions of great richness which is yet to be questioned. This questioning will have to be accomplished on the basis of a historical background, taking into account the social reality and the ideological issues at stake, without ever loosing out of sight the fact that it proposes firstly a study on “representation”.

The panel proposes to approach the image of the Other in Western art beginning with the Fall of Constantinople (1453), considered as a crucial moment in the new shaping of the physiognomy of the Muslim. The second half of the 15th century is also the moment of the rising of the Gipsy image (often get mixed up with Turks, Black people or even Jews). The Northern and the Italian art assist in the 15th century to the cristallization of the iconography of the Adoration of the Magi in which a Black king occupies an important place. The four “figures” (Jews, Moslems, Blacks, Gypsies) of the Other are submitted in the early modern period to a complex labour of iconic interpretation. This panel will follow especially the idea, that the so called alterities are always interconnected. It proposes to follow the interconnected alterity in the field of tensions between Local and Global until the French Revolution (1789). This temporal limit is justified on one side by the rise of “Les droits de l’homme” and paradoxical enough by the rise on the same time of “Orientalism” (in its Saïdian formulation).

Interventions can be lead in French, German or English
Responsabilité

Prof. Stoichita, Victor
victor.stoichitaunifr.ch
Portmann, Maria
maria.portmannunifr.ch

more informations :
http://www.journeesdhistoire.ch/panel/54/the-image-of-the-other-in-western-art-1453-1789
and
http://www.journeesdhistoire.ch/71/