In-Person and Virtual Craig Hugh Smyth Lecture*
with Amy Knight Powell.
Advance registration is required.
“A small painted wooden box, per se, would hardly be thought too promising an item in the inventory of a great collection,” Georg Swarzenski, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, admitted in 1947, before going on to declare the fifteenth century, when this object was made, in fact, “the great period of the chest.” Not only were painted wooden boxes to be found throughout Europe at that time; they were the crucible, I will argue, in which the modern easel painting was forged, and from which it has never escaped, making its every instantiation, among other things, an exercise in holding and being held.
Amy Knight Powell is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California and a 2024-2025 Member at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her first book is Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (Zone Books, 2012). Her current project is Picture Box: A Small History of the Easel Painting.
*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed to those who join us by Zoom. Zoom details will be available upon registration for virtual attendees.