Disability Matter(s): The Armored Body in the Renaissance
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'.
Disability Matter(s): The Armored Body in the Renaissance
06 Feb 2025, 17:30 – 19:30
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.
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.
Further information
Ticketing
Open
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes