Chères et chers collègues,

La prochaine séance du séminaire général de VALE se tiendra le jeudi 7 novembre à 17h30 à la bibliothèque de l’UFR d’études anglophones de Sorbonne Université (Escalier G, deuxième étage). Nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir Christina Faraday dont la communication est intitulée « Lurking, Feigning, Shining, Declaring: The Life of Gold in the Early Modern English Imagination ». Vous trouverez un résumé et une biographie à la fin de ce mail.

Bien cordialement,

Aloysia Rousseau pour VALE

Christina Faraday is Director of Studies at Sidney Sussex and St John’s Colleges, and a research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College (Cambridge). She specialises in Tudor and Stuart visual and material culture, with wider interests in the art of Northern Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. She is also an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker (2019). Her book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press in 2023.

Abstract: At the Tudor royal court, gold was everywhere. Often its significance was monetary: high-status coins were composed of it, and royals boasted of their wealth through jewels and buffets packed with precious-metal vessels. But gold’s value was also aesthetic. Even as Italian artists were (pace Alberti) rejecting precious metals in painting, the English were enthusiastically applying gold paint to panel and miniature portraits, and revelling in the gold-woven arras that enveloped royal rooms. One of gold’s most significant material qualities – the shimmering impression of independent movement – was particularly attractive to artists and poets, seeming to give the metal a kind of life. This paper explores to what extent gold, as cultural artefact and as aesthetic resource, was thought to have a life, or lives, of its own in Early Modern England.