Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor Lecture

Michael Cole, of the University of Pennsylvania and the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor, Williams College, will present "A Genealogy of Circumscription." Leon Battista Alberti referred to "circumscription," the drawing of contours, as "the first part of painting," the mark on the flat plane that also established the illusion of three-dimensionality. For the next century writers on the arts repeatedly took up this topic, though by the 1540s, circumscription had become something very different, with Michelangelo famously describing a marble that circumscribed the concept at which the hand needed to arrive. This talk will follow the transformations and competing Renaissance conceptions of the irreducible act of art-making.