The Pre/Early Modern Forum: Aneta Georgievska-Shine (University of Maryland)
The Pre/Early Modern Forum is delighted to announce the upcoming talk by Dr. Aneta Georgievska-Shine from the University of Maryland. The event will take place on Zoom (https://yale.zoom.us/j/8472619307) on October 3 at 4:00 pm EST.
Dr. Georgievska-Shine’s talk is titled “Revisiting the Theme of Love in Vermeer,” an abstract of which is included below:
Though “love” is widely recognized as one of Vermeer’s central concerns, his approach to this theme is always full of self-conscious ambiguities. On the one hand, his deliberately structured, highly refined compositions convey a deep engagement with the object of representation as such. At the same time, they are often metaphors for something more universal – if not metaphysical. This double perspective allows him to draw a connection between the nourishments of physical love and those of art in works such as The Music Lesson, or between a seemingly worldly, pregnant woman holding a balance and the Virgin Mary. While this mode of thinking through analogies is part of his culture, what sets Vermeer apart is his fine balancing between various possible ways of seeing and representing these relationships between “things” observed and their culturally established symbolic meanings.
Dr. Georgievska-Shine teaches art history in the Department of Art History at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include the reception of classical art and literature in the early modern period, inter-pictorial, and inter-cultural exchanges.
She is the author of books on Rubens and Velazquez, as well as of numerous essays for academic journals and collections. Recent articles include an essay on Velazquez’s fools and jesters (Fundación Amigos del Prado, 2021), and on Rubens’s satyr-imagery (Netherlands Yearbook of Art History, 2021). Her latest book Vermeer and the Art of Love was published in September 2022.