Art history / Histoire de l’art - André Chastel Research Grant

Valérie Boudier

Valérie Boudier

10/04/2023 / 23/04/2023

Start of residency 10/04/2023
End of residency 23/04/2023

Professor of Modern Art History and member of the Centre d’Étude des Arts Contemporains at the University of Lille since 2010, Valérie Boudier is also an associate researcher at the Centre d’Histoire et de Théorie des Arts de l’EHESS (Paris), a member of the Collectif d’historiens de l’art de la Renaissance, and a member of the European Institute of History and Cultures of Food (Tours). Her profile as an art historian, a specialist in ancient art, working on the links between food and painting, as close as possible to contemporary creation, enables her to set up interdisciplinary and transhistorical projects. After having published La cuisine du peintre. Scène de genre et nourriture au Cinquecento (2010), she co-edited with Diane Bodart Le banquet de la Renaissance: images et usages (2014), with Anne-Elène Delavigne Viande et architecture (2019), with Elinor Kelif and Giovanni Careri, L’invention du geste amoureux à la Renaissance (2020). Valérie Boudier will make two stays to the Villa Medici, from April 10 to 23 and from July 3 to August 4.

Research project at Villa Medici:

The aim of Valérie Boudier‘s residency is to establish a substantiated iconographic corpus (paintings, engravings, playing cards, game mats, etc.) of the Pays de Cocagne produced in Italy from the 13th century to the present day, in order to propose a transnational and multidisciplinary comparative study with French versions of the utopia. Based on a serial treatment of these representations, the study of images will make it possible to identify certain iconographic motifs, their survival or disappearance. Particular attention will be paid to engravings and their re-use within this vast corpus, with a study of the text/image articulation, whether through the texts present in the images or through a comparison between the literary versions and the iconographic versions of the utopia.

On the one hand, the images will be read by focusing on the theme of the outdoor meal in order to note the continuities and changes between the 13th and 21st centuries and the possible regional adaptations of the utopia to local resources and tastes, in other words, to study the construction and circulation of the utopia between France and Italy. On the other hand, the comparison over the long term will permit an appreciation of how up-to-date the versions of Utopia are. Are the fruits and vegetables in fashion in early modern European gastronomy and our contemporary eating habits reflected in the images of Cocagne? What about the treatment of food by contemporary artists in this utopian country? Beyond the theme of the outdoor meal, this iconographic corpus will help me to appreciate the impact of the economic, religious and political situation on the vitality of this imaginary space between the two chronological limits envisaged.