Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event is cancelled until further notice.
The Moment of the Fall: Some Unreasonable Solutions
A lecture by Joseph Leo Koerner
Presented as part of the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series
This event is free and open to the public.
The Fall of Adam and Eve tested Renaissance artists not only through the challenge posed by the nude, but also because of the subject’s temporal demand: the time-bound lapse from innocence to guilt. Restricted to the static medium of images, artists engineered artworks that tangled “before” and “after” into a single pregnant moment. While contrary to the principles of reason and cause, these necessary and sometimes strange and ingenious solutions nonetheless depended on reasoning both aesthetic and ethical. Condensing years of teaching Adam and Eve to undergraduates in a general studies curriculum, Koerner’s lecture will explore works by Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, and others as powerful and sometimes dangerous prompts for ethical—and unethical—reasoning on the part of us, their viewers.
Joseph Leo Koerner is the Thomas Professor of History of Art and Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is author, most recently, of Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life. His feature film The Burning Child, completed in 2018, concerns homemaking in Vienna from 1900 until the present.
