Seminars, Workshops & Panel Discussions
Programs for GRADUATE STUDENTS
April 29 The Battle Over Evolution: Early Skirmishes and their Long Tails, Jessica Riskin
May 21-22 Caricature and the Grotesque: Early Modern Prints and Politics, Peter Parshall
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Graduate Student Colloquium
The Battle Over Evolution: Early Skirmishes and their Long Tails
This colloquium will feature chapters from a book about Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), Professor of Insects and Worms at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Living through the storms of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Period, he founded biology, coining the term to name a new science devoted to all and only living things, and authored the first theory of evolution. Lamarck’s science was foundational to modern biology, yet its radicalism - he usurped God’s monopoly on Creation and re-assigned it to mortal, living beings - brought him and his ideas plenty of trouble. During Lamarck’s lifetime, Napoleon and his scientific inner circle hated him and did what they could to undermine him. Charles Darwin then adopted central elements of Lamarck’s theory, but after Darwin’s death, his most influential followers re-interpreted his theory to eradicate all traces of Lamarckism, rendering organisms once again the passive objects of outside forces, allowing room for an omnipotent God working behind the scenes. This conception of living organisms as passive in the evolutionary process has remained dominant since the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, in Lamarck’s theory, living beings were active, creative, self-making and world-making. Elements of this very different conception of living organisms have recently, gradually been returning to mainstream biology in fields such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance. The parts of the book featured in the colloquium treat the period after Lamarck’s death and through the end of the 19th century and the struggle over whether and how to understand transformation in living forms from generation to generation.
Jessica Riskin teaches modern European history and the history of science. Her work examines the changing nature of scientific explanation, the relations of science, culture and politics, and the history of theories of life and mind. Her books include The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which was awarded the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society, and Science in the Age of Sensibility (2002), which received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major prize for best book in French history. She is a regular contributor to various publications including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books.
Caricature and the Grotesque: Early Modern Prints and Politics
May 21 & 22, 2025
at the Lewis Walpole Library and Yale University Art Gallery
Professor Peter Parshall, former Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art and Humanities at Reed College and Curator of Old Master Prints at the National Gallery of Art
with Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
and Freyda Spira, Robert L. Solley Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale University Art Gallery
Distortion takes many different forms and plays a role in all artistic traditions. In one sense or another the pictorial response to the world has always shown an inclination to turn things inside out. Our task will be to consider this phenomenon as it evolves in the graphic arts from the Renaissance into the early nineteenth century. In this admittedly broad setting we shall concentrate specifically on the use of distortion in political and social contexts, especially in printmaking where the wide and efficient distribution of texts and pictures first became possible. How does the use of caricature, satire, and the grotesque inflect the message of an image? What lies behind its preference for the artist and its appeal to the viewer? Does a potentially “popular” medium like printing inevitably lead to the embrace of the grotesque and a conscious degradation of pictorial rhetoric?
We shall approach these questions through a discussion of original works of art, primarily works available in the Yale University Art Gallery and the Lewis Walpole Library. The main areas of study will be: Renaissance prints and the transformation of the grotesque; the invention of modern caricature with particular attention to anti-Semitism; the flourishing of British caricature in the eighteenth century; William Hogarth and social satire as political argument; and last, Francisco Goya and the relation between realism and fantasy.
There will be short readings for each session held over two consecutive days. The emphasis will be on group discussion conducted as an open forum and inviting all manner of inquiry pertinent to the questions being addressed and the objects at hand.
This graduate student seminar is sponsored by the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
Image caption: Nathaniel Dance-Holland. The Antiquarian. Pen, ink and watercolour. c1800
Professor Peter Parshall has written and lectured widely on early modern art with special emphasis on the history of prints, the history and the organization of collecting, and Renaissance art theory. He co-authored with David Landau The Renaissance Print (1994), recipient of the Mitchell Prize. Among exhibitions curated are: The Unfinished Print (2001); Origins of European Printmaking (2005) with Rainer Schoch; and The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900 (2008). Since formal retirement he has pursued several topics of current interest and is presently writing a book on art and politics.