The Sixty-Fourth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820, Part 2: At the Service of Kings, Madrid and Paris, 1814: Aging Goya and Upstart Géricault Face Their Restorations

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820, Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this second lecture, entitled "At the Service of Kings, Madrid and Paris, 1814: Aging Goya and Upstart Géricault Face Their Restorations," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 22, 2015, Professor Crow examines how Goya and Géricault were similarly moved to transform artistic antecedents, dislodging even the primacy of the human subject as an adequate vehicle for expressing the violent uncertainties of their moment in history.