Monday, June 24, 2024, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT
Dalia Judovitz
National Endowment for the Humanities Professor Emerita of French at Emory University
“Georges de La Tour: The Enigma of the Visible”
Ranked with Vermeer among those seventeenth-century painters whose “unmistakable talent is matched only by their aura of mystery” (Thuillier 2003), Georges de La Tour’s (1593–1652) works continue to solicit public interest and fascination. Having enjoyed artistic acclaim and prominence in his time, La Tour’s paintings were later misattributed and dispersed. His rediscovery in 1915 resulted in the reconstitution of his artistic corpus that is still on-going. At first sight, his paintings suggest a veritable celebration of light and the visible world, but this apparent focus on illumination and light and dark contrasts (chiaroscuro) is deceptive. The familiarity of visual experience blinds the beholder to a deeper understanding of the meanings associated with light and vision in the early modern period. Challenging the supposed transparency and immediacy of the modern idea of vision, this baroque way of seeing relies on verisimilar depictions to further allegorical ends.
La Tour’s naturalism will be in question as a reflection of a metaphysical world view where familiar objects of visible reality are regarded as emblems of an invisible, spiritual reality. Like the many books shown in his paintings asking to be read, La Tour’s paintings will be examined not just as visual depictions but also as instruments of insight, demanding to be deciphered rather than merely seen. His works explore how the attainment of faith as spiritual illumination competes with and challenges the meanings attached to the visual realm of painterly expression. By enabling the passage from sight to insight, his works also encourage today a broader meditation on the nature of painting.