Three Renaissance Grotesques: Holbein, Dürer, Massys
- Region: All Regions
- Type: Talk
- Cost: Free
A Public Lecture by Professor Alexander Marr (University of Cambridge)
Magdalen College, University of Oxford
27 September 2023, 5pm
Location: Grove Auditorium (entry via Longwall Street)
The Renaissance grotesque is normally thought of as an ornamental art of the margins: fantastical rather than natural, supplementary instead of central. But what if we were to approach a core subject in the rise of naturalism, the Northern Renaissance portrait, on grotesque terms? This lecture will re-assess three well-known portraits—Hans Holbein the Younger’s Derich Born, Albrecht Dürer’s St Jerome in his Study, and Quinten Massys’s so-called Ugly Duchess—in relation to some key topoi of the grotesque: hybridity, monstrosity, play, and the excesses of fecund imagination. It will suggest that the enterprise of portraiture is(and was) better understood as a facetious game than a mimetic triumph.