How was an aesthetics of violence constructed in early modern Naples? The seventeenth century marked a transformative and turbulent chapter in the city’s history. A Spanish territory and the second largest city in early modern Europe, Naples endured volcanic eruption, popular rebellion, and plague outbreak. Contemporary paintings chronicled these explosions of manmade and natural disaster. Violent episodes also took the form of legal expressions, which impacted the sensory environment of the city. A painting by an anonymous Neapolitan artist depicts the sights and sounds of the square outside the Tribunale della Vicaria, the main civil and criminal law court in Naples, and the site of public torture and execution. The painting stages the intersection of everyday life with extreme violence, and the collision of social classes. It offers not a literal depiction of the everyday, but an illusion of the everyday, raising the problem of the lived experiences of violence in the city. Simultaneously, the painting functions as a curiosity, with its “catalogue” of actions, activities, and miniaturized figures. This lecture will place the Vicaria painting in dialogue with contemporary images of natural disaster and human conflict. It will question the extent to which the painting articulates an aesthetics of violence, suggesting instead that it plays visual games with the viewer that culminate in a violence of aesthetics.

Edward Alan Payne, Assistant Professor, Art History, Aarhus University. His research focuses on the Mediterranean Baroque, in particular the art and visual culture of Spain and Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has engaged with a range of topics including violence, skin, sensory perception, caricature, and ugliness. Before coming to Aarhus in August 2020, Edward taught art history at Durham University, and he worked as a curator for six years in the US, UK, and Spain. He is especially interested in the violent and violated body, which he examined in his Ph.D. thesis on Ribera, and transformed into the volume and exhibition Ribera: Art of Violence, co-curated with Xavier Bray at Dulwich Picture Gallery. His research is underpinned by an object-oriented approach, privileging works of art as physical objects, and adopting the practice of “slow looking”.

• Aesthetic seminar Poster
• Aesthetic seminar Programme

Aesthetic seminar is organized by Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen and Morten Kyndrup on behalf of School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.