Writing on Still Life

Note: This event was originally scheduled for February 15, 2023, and it has been rescheduled.

In this interactive online session, led by art history graduate students Alejandro Octavio Nodarse (Harvard University) and Sara Petrilli-Jones (Yale University and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa), we will look closely at a still-life drawing by Margaretha de Heer, called Still Life of Flowers and Small Animals on a Ledge (1642). Together, we will consider the relationship between looking, describing, and imagining. Prompted by De Heer’s drawing, we will ask a series of questions: how might such a work engage our senses? What responses—individual and collective—does it elicit? How has the artist’s gender played a role in the creation and reception of the work? All participants will be invited to share their responses through conversation and writing.

The session will conclude with a short reading and discussion of the poem “Fruits by the Hand of a Woman” (1620), by Italian author Giambattista Marino, which takes a still-life painting as its point of creative departure. Nodarse and Petrilli-Jones are translators of Marino’s poems into English.