PhD in History of Art: Term 1, Year 1
Highlights from my first term at UCL
Today I am noting down some memorable moments from my first term at UCL, where I’ve started my PhD in Italian Renaissance art history and ecocriticism. It took a while to settle in at the start, but I am absolutely loving being back in an academic setting and surrounded by other art historians and researchers. It’s been great to have both this blog and my Instagram account to use as a kind of diary — and I can’t wait to see what next year has in store.
Lectures I’ve loved
John Beusterien — Reckless ‘Curiousity’ about Animals: King Philip II’s Escorial as Museum and Theater of the World (4 Oct)
In this lecture, Dr John Beusterien (Professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University) explored animals lives and representations in El Escorial, an enormous royal site built by King Philip II of Spain between 1563–84. The talk took us through the types of animals collected by King Philip II ( images and body parts of animals, as well as live ‘specimens’), some individual case studies (including two harrowing stories of an elephant and a rhino, who both suffered greatly), and the social, historical and environmental implications this may have had over time. Beusterien emphasised how practices of collecting animals in early modern Europe set a precedent for future forms of oppression, and played a role in informing the ideological scaffolding that began the Anthropocene.
Heather Pulliam — Eco-iconography: the natural world and Iona’s early medieval sculpture (11 Oct)
This lecture by Professor Heather Pulliam (Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Edinburgh) focused on the high crosses on Iona, a small island on the western coast of Scotland. In particular, Pulliam looked at St Martin’s Cross — the best-preserved of the Early Christian crosses of Iona, and thought to date from the beginning of the 9th or the late 8th century AD (although it may be earlier). Pulliam explored how we can better understand the iconography of these crosses by expanding our frame to look at the sky, earth, seasons and weather, as well as the bodies of animals and people who interacted with these monuments. Although the sun has risen over St Martin’s Cross for over 1000 years, climate change means that crosses are being damaged at a faster rate than usual weathering — forcing them to be moved inside. How will this decontextualisation change our engagement with the crosses and their histories? Yet another reason to get active in climate action groups putting pressure on our governments.
John Sabapathy — Goodbye Cockaigne! Working, eating and laughing in the Anthropocene, 1250–2023 (29 Nov)
Professor John Sabapathy’s inaugural lecture at UCL’s History Department looked at various medieval representations of Cockaigne — a mythical land of extreme luxury and ease, imagined first in medieval Europe. It is a world in which all human desires are met, and it is made entirely of food: this is a world that wants to be eaten. Sabapathy’s lecture invites us to look again at “Cockaigne in the Anthropocene” or “the Anthropocene in Cockaigne”. It might somehow imply that the Anthropocene — a world entirely for human benefit — was desired even before it existed. Although we cannot re-enter the Cockaigne fantasy, Sabapathy suggested that we can still learn from the Cockaigne impulse of imaginative thinking about other ways of living, as an antidote to our current sterility of political imaginations.
Books I’ve read
As expected, I’ve spent A LOT of time reading this term, and it has (for the most part) been wonderful. Here are some of the books and essays I’ve enjoyed most:
- Bronze: the power of life and death, edited by Martina Droth and Fritz Scholten (2005)
- The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, by Carolyn Merchant (1989)
- ‘Human-Cetacean Encounters in Two Seventeenth-Century Accounts of Whaling’, by Thomas Balfe (2002)
- The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance, by Clare Guest (2016)
- ‘Walking in the Boboli Gardens in Florence: Toward a Transdisciplinary, Visual, Cultural, and Constellational Analyses of Medieval Sensibilities in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, by James O’Neill and Maggie O’Neill (2022)
- A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, edited by Bruce Boehrer (2007)
Exhibitions I’ve seen
My favourite exhibitions this term have both been at the National Gallery in London — Frans Hals and Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden. It is a big shame that the Frans Hals show is sponsored by Credit Suisse (‘special partners’ of the National Gallery), the Swiss banking institution most involved with fossil fuels. Between 2016–2020, Credit Suisse provided more than $82 billion to top fossil fuel companies. Furthermore, its clients in recent years have included Nazis, Russian oligarchs, and human and drug traffickers. It sounds like a classic case of artwashing to me…
News items this term
The unfolding genocide in Gaza has dominated news this term, and it has been difficult to think about much else. More children have been killed in Palestine over the last two months than the total number of children killed in global conflict zones every year since 2019. Like so many, I don’t know how to make sense of it all as we watch our ‘leaders’ refuse to call for an end to the destruction. I watch in horror, and try to bear witness, to talk about it, write to my MP, go on marches, and stay informed. It is not enough, but I suppose it is something.
I would like to mark some other pieces of news from this term.
- 17th Oct: Greta Thunberg arrested at Oily Money Out protest. More importantly, while fossil fuel businessmen sat in the safe confines of their ivory tower (the Intercontinental hotel in London), activists from all across Europe came together to shut down the oil and money conference. See how cool it looked here.
- 6th Nov: Just Stop Oil activists smash the glass of Diego Velàzquez’s Rokeby Venus. As an art historian and climate activist, I felt pulled in many different directions — and although I know many others in the art world may not agree with me, I believe we can still use these actions as a starting point for discussions about longer-term art conservation in the context of climate breakdown. I explained some of my thoughts in a short video here.
- 7th Dec: the death of Benjamin Zephaniah (1958–2023). Zephaniah was one of the few left-wing political voices that I heard in my childhood in the school curriculum and in the media. Now, as an adult, listening to his poetry again, and seeing some of the clips and quotes that are circulating today, I realise even more how precious he was in this world, an artist who used his voice to stand against injustice everywhere. If you don’t know his work, I urge you to read more about him and watch some of his performances of his poetry.
I also cannot recommend Novara Media enough for providing such brilliant, truth-telling journalism at a time when we need it most — I listen to them almost every weekday.
