The Center for the Humanities is hosting an event on March 5 about two recent photo books written by writers/critics in conversation with Shelley Rice.
Join critics and writers David Deitcher and Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about their recent books, Alan B. Stone: Senses of Place; l’esprit des lieuxand Valid Until Sunset, and the role that photography plays in creating and undoing our experiences of loss, life, and lust. Moderated by Professor Shelley Rice, NYU Art History and Tisch Photography and Imaging. Co-sponsored by The Fales Library and Special Collections, NYU.
Please join us for the first Robert Branner Forum event of 2024 on Thursday, February 29th at 6:00 PM, featuring Julia Perratore. Dr. Perratore’s lecture, “
Cloister in the Wilderness: Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert,” will take place in-person in Schermerhorn Hall, room 807.
Following the lecture, attendees are invited to a reception in the Stronach Center in Schermerhorn Hall.
The construction of the cloister of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert (12th-13th centuries) corresponds to a period during which the monastic community reflected on the life and deeds of their founder. Saint Guilhem was a Carolingian warrior who, at the end of his life, left behind worldly concerns to found and join a monastery in a remote, wild gorge at the edge of the French Massif Central. The hagiography that the twelfth-century monks wrote, as well as the chansons de geste starring Guilhem that they knew and borrowed from, celebrate a particular aspect of the monastery’s foundation: the choice of a “desert” (or wilderness) location. This presentation explores the primacy of the desert in textual accounts of Saint-Guilhem’s foundation with respect to the imagery depicted in the cloister decoration, which abounds with all that grows from the ground: trunks, branches, leaves, vines, flowers, fruit, and even streams of water. As methodically composed as the plantings of a formal garden, the cloister sculptures appear, at first glance, to work counter to the monks’ careful positioning of their house within the desert—a wild place conceptually opposed to the deliberate, human-generated space of the garden.
Fields of Vision 