Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen

Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen is a professor of art history at the École Normale Supérieure. She has published textbooks (Lire la peinture, Larousse; Histoire de l’art pour tous, Hazan) as well as monographs (Rubens, Hazan) and thematic works (from L’invention du corps, Flammarion, 1998, to L’argent dans la peinture, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2019). A specialist of the Renaissance, she likes to work on the long term, and in particular on the art of today. She is the author of a novel, L’Étoile brisée (Gallimard, 2021, reprinted in Folio in 2023).

Her research stay at French Academy in Rome will be devoted to “hidden” paintings during the Renaissance. Double-sided paintings, and especially those with a “cover” (coperta). This was done in the context of portraiture (allegory), for reasons of moral occultation (eroticism), and probably also with playful intentions, the viewer being led to wonder what is painted on the other side of the painting or under the cover. A specific corpus of paintings, including Northern artists such as Dürer or those influenced by the North such as Jacopo dei Barbari, and especially Italians, mainly Giorgione and Lorenzo Lotto, but also Raphael, Titian and Leonard di Vinci, will be examined during this one-month residency. The research is part of the preparation of an essay, Images dangereuses (working title), to be published by Gallimard (Art and Artists series) in late 2023, which examines the conditions of visibility of works of art, over the long term and particularly at the beginning of the modern era.