Beauty with meaning: floral framing in religious imagery and secular portraiture
What is the language of flowers? Who can speak it and what can you say with it? In the Victorian era, the language of flowers was used to secretly express feelings that could not be spoken openly. Would you like to decipher these floral mysteries and coded messages?
The St Petersburg University Representative Office in Spain cordially invites you to an online lecture «Beauty with meaning: floral framing in religious imagery and secular portraiture». The lecture will be given by Ekaterina Skvortsova, Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Russian Art at St Petersburg University.
The floral frame is a striking decorative motif often found in 17th-century religious paintings. In this lecture you will learn about the origins of this floral tradition. You will discover its artistic expression and approaches to its interpretation. We will also discuss the floral frame in secular portraiture in European and Russian art of the 17th and 18th centuries, a topic that has remained underexplored until recently.
Is it possible to decipher the symbolic meanings of flowers in framing and composition? What do the Virgin Mary and the pagan goddess Ceres have in common? How can greenhouses be a symbol of a monarch’s power? At our next meeting we will find the answers to these and many other questions.
Lecturer
Ekaterina Skvortsova’s dissertation, written in 2012, was devoted to the work of English artists John Augustus Atkinson and James Walker in the context of Russian-English artistic relations at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. After successfully defending her dissertation, Skvortsova continued her research into the 18th century from the same perspective, looking at Russian art in relation to Western European art. Today, however, her research focuses primarily on the representation in art of the state history and the monarch. Skvortsova has led three Russian Science Foundation grant projects and is a laureate of the St Petersburg Government and the St Petersburg Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences Dashkova Science Award for Young Scientists for 2020.
The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia.
The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.