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Disability Matter(s): The Armored Body in the Renaissance
06 February 2025, 5:30 pm–7:30 pm
For this Research Seminar, we welcome Dr Felix Jäger (Courtauld Institute of Art) for a talk on 'Disability Matter(s): The Armored Body in the Renaissance'.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Queenie Lee – History of Art
Location
-
IAS Common Ground (G11)South WingLondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
This lecture revisits the emergence of a humanist ideal of the body through the lens of disability material culture. I investigate the double role of plate armor in shaping a normative body while at the same time causing and “compensating” for physical difference. My case study centers the fifteenth-century condottiere Federico da Montefeltro (1422–1482). While his artistic enterprises are often seen to assert a new sense of self, here they are interpreted to “fit” injury and impairment into able-bodied standards. More broadly, I aim to demonstrate how non-normative bodily experiences drove artistic innovation and how (military) technological change conditioned body cultures.
About the Speaker
Dr Felix Jäger
Lecturer in Early Modern Art and Material Cultures at Courtauld Institute of Art
Felix Jäger is a Lecturer in Early Modern European Art and Material Cultures at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Prior to joining the Courtauld, he taught as a faculty member at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich while simultaneously working as a research associate at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. Felix is a specialist in early modern material cultures of the body. His work examines how images and objects shaped the ways that bodies, behaviors, and experiences were understood, fashioned, and politicized in the global early modern. Other projects touch upon the legacy of Marxist art history in the German Democratic Republic as well as the historiographies and methodologies of the apotropaic.
More about Dr Felix Jäger