CVAT&D Presents: Jean Michel Massing

On Thursday, October 16, Professor Jean Michel Massing of the University of Cambridge will present a public lecture at 6:00 pm in Room G40 WJB:  “The Influence of the Jesuit Jerome Nadal’s Evangelicae historiae imagines (1593)  on 17th- and 18th-Century Art from Peru to China,” as part of the  College of Visual Arts, Theatre, & Dance Presents visiting scholar lecture series.  

Massing is Head of Department of History of Art and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.  He has published widely on numerous topics, including Classical art and its influence from Antiquity to the Renaissance, astrological and religious imagery, the emergence of the emblem and emblematic symbolism.  His most recent research involves African art from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and the relationships between European and non-European cultures from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

Massing’s lecture, which he will also present at the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota on October 18th, will examine the influence of the 153 large engravings illustrating the Jesuit Jerome Nadal’s Evangelicae historiae imagines (1593) on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art not only all over Europe (Rubens, Philippe de Champaigne, Zurbaran, among others), but also in Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Persia, Ethiopia, Moghul India and even China, where the book was copied twice. Massing argues that Jesuit imagery lead to a new globalisation of artistic developments after the Counter-Reformation throughout two hundred years.